Jobs Are Not An Upgrade?

[NoctisCaelus]

You have 5 extra skills as your job and 5 cross class skills you can still use.. so .. Yeah it's an upgrade.

[Arcturius]

The only class I heard that is good at it is Thaumaturge. Once they cap certain stats with ilvl 90 gear they can revert back and grab more CD skills that make them hit harder.

[Tzain]

It's a bit unfair to judge considering not all the options are on the table yet.

I am a 39 thaumaturge. I don't say I'm a Black Mage due to the simple fact that I haven't changed anything about my playstyle with the addition of Convert and Freeze. If I had any gem BESIDES Black Mage I'd likely be using it.

I am also a 40 White mage. I don't say conjurer because I'm clearly using the White Magic abilities on a VERY regular basis. Especially Regen.

And that's the joy of the job system. It lets you tweak the base classes in a particular direction. For instance, whatever other jobs Thaumaturges get, they will always be cycling between fire burn phases and ice regen phases. They will always be sleeping targets. So if you're going to analyze the job system, you should look specifically at the job abilities and see if you really use them all that often.

[Welsper59]

Some classes find solo benefits to be better/noticeable as the class, rather than the job. So yeah, you're more or less correct on that. At some point though, namely as you approach the level cap, you'll notice that the abilities you pick up as the job start to outshine whatever survival spells/abilities you can cross-use as the class. Not to mention the boost in stats that the job gets over the class become more noticeable as you near cap.

[Anakhu]

I have not ran as a CNJ in a long long long time, it just doesn't seem logical to me with the bonus stats and abilities I get to ever remove my crystal

[Zantetsuken]

Cross-class skills have greatly been curtailed since 1.0. As such, there isn't much to be gained by staying as a Class.

Here is the fix

Give Classes:

• Exclusive abilities & traits that broaden their abilities and usefulness for soloing. (ie. THM gains damage-mitigation skill, GLD gains damage-boosting skill)
• Their own crafted AF and exclusive weapons (similar to DoH, DoL)

Give Jobs:

• Traits that fundamentally change class abilities to more focus their roles. (ie, 'Cleric Stance' for WHM should reduce enmity while active, rather than increasing damage)
• Traits that radically shift stats towards their specialty roles (ie, When MRD changes to WAR, it loses 20% STR and gains 20% VIT)

[Conradus]

Nope, classes die at level 30.

Speak for yourself, chum, I use THM a great deal when I solo.

[Conradus]

You have 5 extra skills as your job and 5 cross class skills you can still use.. so .. Yeah it's an upgrade.

You lose five cross class skills and your choices for the five you have left have severely restricted options...so..yeah, it's a tradeoff.

[Joshhoowah]

Most people only seem interested in leveling one class to 50 and couple others to ~15. There's no reason for them to take off the gem... or, from what I've gathered from some posts, play after running CM a dozen times .