Suggestion: Rework ARR and HW jobs onboarding

[Alicie]

Has anyone tried recently to pick up a new ARR job? Not only you have to grind first 15 levels on mobs, but you are also literally locked into one roulette until level 50, esseitnally being locked into either same ARR duty grind over and over or having to stretch levelling over literally months. And in addition, you have to do insane amount of quests and solo duties just to unlock new key abilities that are essential to play the job?

Here are my suggestions regarding jobs:

- Completely detach ALL job skills from story. Have story be entirely optional, for people that care about it. Let others just enjoy the gameplay without having to spend few hours to this slog.

- Heavensward jobs: have an Ishgardian Representative in Coerthas central highlands that will allow players of level 30 or higher to pick up HW jobs immediately without reaching Heavensward. Later they can do story quests if they wish so.

- Experience redirection mode: allow to queue roulettes as one job and receive it's exp as another job.

- Boost exp gain before level 50: for example +400%. Nobody enjoys jobs before at least that level, most of them just do not even work properly.

- Remove job stones. At level 30, class auto upgrades to job and that's it.

[Supersnow845]

At this point I’m convinced people just don’t want to play the game

Why should you get rewards for a class for completing a roulette if you aren’t playing it? We already don’t have enough healers and tanks why should you be able to play BLM to level your AST just so you can dump yourself in a high level roulette and have no idea how the job works

If anything the newer jobs should be pulled down to lower levels so it at least forces people to play them before high levels. Dealing with first time SGE’s who hadn’t even read their tooltips on holminster switch at EW launch still gives me nightmares

[Asari5]

i agree on jobstones, remove them... or at least make them mandatory for any content with randoms over lvl 40 (or even sooner).


i prefer getting skills from jobquests though. it feels more like you spend time on your job and your character getting better on it.

[VeyaAkemi]

- Remove job stones. At level 30, class auto upgrades to job and that's it.

Absolutely not, there is people who enjoy doing themed runs of current content, raids alliance raids, so on, as Disciplines rather than Jobs, it is an extremely niche thing? absolutely, but we shouldn't be narrowing down further how you are even allowed to play the game.

Why should you get rewards for a class for completing a roulette if you aren’t playing it? We already don’t have enough healers and tanks why should you be able to play BLM to level your AST just so you can dump yourself in a high level roulette and have no idea how the job works

If you allow me to take a poke at this... you can already do that, you can use Frontlines to level your job, play the Job in CC and other PvP modes which play radically different from PvE anyway, you can use Society dailies, you can use Khloe books, there is actually a very substantial amount of XP you can get by never touching a given Job. You could very well argue that shouldn't be the case, but it is possible. You could also argue that because it is so possible, that it doesn't need to be changed further. Either way, I am just pointing out that it is possible.

[Jeeqbit]

Well firstly I would say that getting to level 30 is extremely quick. You can get to level 7-8 by killing enemies. Then you can:

• Rotate class quests every 5 levels.
• Queue for the next 2 guildhest bonuses every 5 levels.
• Do hunt log while waiting for the guildhest queue.
• When you run out of these things to do, probably around level 30 or after, you can finally do Leveling Roulette and Guildhest Roulette, then repeat the above to around 50.
• Do all roulettes at 50.

However, after getting close to 50 it really does start getting slow, because now you only have your dailies and weeklies and they are not going to get you anywhere near level 100 without probably weeks of effort unless you farm leveling dungeons or deep dungeons.

So to me, it is the gap between 50 and 100 that has increasingly become the problem due to the game's growth over time, compounded by us having more than double the amount of jobs we used to have. If I make an alt character, there is no way that I level ARR, HW or SB jobs. I have to endure the meme of being a Gunbreaker, Sage or Pictomancer/Viper and everyone knowing that new players or alts pick them due to them being the least leveling effort.

Completely detach ALL job skills from story.

They probably will eventually, at least important ones, because they already stopped bothering adding them to job quests much due to noticing people put them off on alt jobs. Then they stopped making quests altogether for existing jobs.

have an Ishgardian Representative in Coerthas central highlands that will allow players of level 30 or higher to pick up HW jobs immediately without reaching Heavensward.

They might do this eventually, and the reason is because they know it was a mistake. They instantly regretted having AST, DRK and MCH story-gated and never did it again, because it meant new players never picked them; it was always existing mains of those roles simply using them as an alt role. They still have to level up a lot to use new jobs but given they overlevel so much now, they can pick them up a lot earlier in their journey and they do. Given how long the game has been around though, they may have a different mindset now, because playing multiple jobs has been the accepted norm for many years now to the point relic quests have been designed to reflect that since Shadowbringers.

Experience redirection mode: allow to queue roulettes as one job and receive it's exp as another job.

That just wouldn't make sense and there are alternatives if you really do not want to play the job, which is to level via society quests and daily hunt bills, which are so effortless that you don't have to play your job at all to do them. You can press absolutely any attack button to beat these in a few hits, and sometimes won't need any at all.

Boost exp gain before level 50: for example +400%. Nobody enjoys jobs before at least that level, most of them just do not even work properly.

It would make more sense to boost it after 50 because leveling to 50 is pretty quick and likely going to take only a day, compared to the rest that is either a dungeon farm for 50 levels or weeks of dailies.

At level 30, class auto upgrades to job and that's it.

Incoming quality of life sometime in the next 20 years. They only do 3-5 QoL updates per patch so it may take up to a few decades.

[CaptainLagbeard]

I fully agree with detaching skills from quests, not for making the story optional but because you can outpace the quests pretty easily on a new a character... You'll probably be a bit over 50 by the time you reach Heavensward, and even then you have to reach the different zones in the story to fully go do the quests to unlock everything.
And leveling other jobs later, you have to take a break every 5 levels in ARR and every 2 in HW to go do your quest for a new skill.

I don't know if they can get rid of the base classes... But one of the more reasonable suggestions that's been floated around on the forums is just forcing any duties above 30 to require a job stone to be equipped.

[hydralus]

If anything the newer jobs should be pulled down to lower levels so it at least forces people to play them before high levels. Dealing with first time SGE’s who hadn’t even read their tooltips on holminster switch at EW launch still gives me nightmares

Let's say they start at level 50. PCT doesn't even get a second button to press until level 25 and that's just AoE.

[Valence]

Solutions to skip everything aren't solutions.

Actual solutions would be to actually rework the leveling parts of the game and make them engaging again. By nature of skill pruning and constant changes, it's in its current state for a reason.
Back in HW you had two full hotbars at lvl35. Crossclass skills, while a flawed system, also allowed to have even more on hotbars. The whole battle system also meant that mowing down mobs that die in 3 shots today by spamming the same two buttons wasn't the only thing that happened in there.

[Aidorouge]

As someone who got fast-tracked to level 80 back in the day due to the huge XP bonus on Dynamis (and then leveled 81-100 the same as anyone else), I admit I'm going to have a skewed view on lot of these things.

Completely detach ALL job skills from story. Have story be entirely optional, for people that care about it. Let others just enjoy the gameplay without having to spend few hours to this slog.

No to making the story optional (because we know damn well everyone would just skip it all to hurry up making the game into a roulette simulator) unless the character is an alt, but yes to removing skills being tied to job quests because it was rather annoying being 80+ before I had even stepped foot into Heavensward proper and yet it felt like 1/3 of my kit wasn't accessible, doubly so if you needed one skill to unlock other skills in the chain.

It would make more sense to let all skills be gained by leveling BUT change the job quests to actually MAKE people use the skills they gain to understand them, even if they have to fail and redo a solo duty because they botched it. Despite what I said earlier about missing skills, as someone who went through the MSQ as a Paladin, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single moment in the PLD questline OR the MSQ where I needed to use things like Cover, Intervention, Passage of Arms, or hell even Clemency and Shield Bash.

As much as I like PLD, it feels like the one job I never really get to use the job gauge outside of Sheltron/Holy Sheltron, and I have so many OTHER defensive skills that the Sheltrons feel unnecessary at times. I'm sure there's other examples of "we put this on your hotbar, but we won't make you use it for anything" across other job quests, and even role quests, that it doesn't surprise me at all that so many people jump into group content having literally no idea what they're doing because the game taught them nothing.
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Heavensward jobs: have an Ishgardian Representative in Coerthas central highlands that will allow players of level 30 or higher to pick up HW jobs immediately without reaching Heavensward. Later they can do story quests if they wish so.

I'm down for letting DRK/MCH/AST be available sooner because there was a point in time where I actually had all jobs at 90 but those 3 because I hadn't progressed far enough in the MSQ yet, but I was still doing roulettes/PVP with so much XP going to waste.

I'm still not keen with letting people skip out on the actual stories though (if they're a new player anyway), least of all DRK's because it's genuinely interesting.
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Experience redirection mode: allow to queue roulettes as one job and receive it's exp as another job.

I don't think that's really necessary given all the other ways you can funnel XP into a job you're not actively playing in other content. I mean, hell, I have every tank and healer at 100 and I have never once used them in a dungeon (with other players), trial, or raid, and even in PVP they were more like "blue and green DPS" because I didn't play them like their role at all, lol.
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Boost exp gain before level 50: for example +400%. Nobody enjoys jobs before at least that level, most of them just do not even work properly.

I'd rather they just overhauled when we got certain skills. VPR and PCT being the worst examples so far of "please god don't sync me".
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Remove job stones. At level 30, class auto upgrades to job and that's it.

I would prefer if classes were just locked out of doing 31+ content to avoid any issues of people wandering into content they shouldn't be doing yet/purposefully trolling the rest of their party.

[ReynTime]

Leveling from 1~50 is already fast and easy even without the exp-boosting accessories.

The only suggestion I like there is removing job stones.

I already don't like how every new job is limited to having its unlock and starting quest being in one of the starting cities, specially considering the level requirements get so high the majority of players wouldn't have any problem whatsoever having at the very least Heavensward and Stormblood cities unlocked at that point. Adding even more jobs to the lame design decision of putting everything in Ul'dah, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa is a big no no IMO.

If anything the newer jobs should be pulled down to lower levels so it at least forces people to play them before high levels. Dealing with first time SGE’s who hadn’t even read their tooltips on holminster switch at EW launch still gives me nightmares

Normally I'd agree with this. I feel more attached to the older jobs because I had a whole journey from 1 to current with them. But it's hard to veto when their action sets and rotations are only balanced for the last 20 levels of content. They have way fewer actions to use for much longer than the older jobs and that feels incredibly miserable during the 15~20 minutes of duties alone. Imagine having to LEVEL like that.