Focus Classes amongst their respective Jobs

[Orophin]

I demand Black Mage be clearly superior to Thaumturge, not situationally.

That position bassically negates Thaumaturge's existence in it's entirety.

Couldn't the same be said for every other job/class combo? How many people do you see running around as their class counterparts in content of any relevance? (or at all, really)

And that if they want to keep classes nearly identical to their jobs, they might as well just eliminate them. Though in doing so, we will lose out on 7+ possible playstyles.

The problem (for lack of a better term) with classes was everyone could equip the exact same abilities. Some people liked that freedom of choice, but at the end of the day, there's nothing that set apart what each class did apart from what equipment they wore and their base stats.

This essentially created the issue like in GW2 where people could do everything, but nobody really specialized, so you see PvE fights where everything was complete chaos. There were other underlying problems with the game, such as how the SP system was utilized to where you fight things 20 levels over you to get max skillgain per fight and whoever was curing was essentially your tank.

I think if they really want to set apart classes from jobs they need to:

a) Once you reach level 30, all abilities learned on a class going forward are class specific.
b) Jobs have their own abilities they learn level 30 onwards.
c) To promote the idea of multiple jobs coming from each class, make certain abilities available only to the class and to one or the other job. ex. Gladiator learns several shield skills, so they should be exclusive to Gladiator and Paladin and Dark Knight cannot use them. Likewise, Gladiator also learns other abilities that only it and Dark Knight can use and Paladin has no access to them.

My ideas may not be the best, but something drastic has to be done with classes, else they're going to continue to be overshadowed by their job counterparts in ARR.