Classes vs. Jobs; are the former *supposed* to be kind of redundant?

[Terin]

Maybe I've just not experienced quite enough, but it seems to be that Jobs are basically just "better Classes", with little to no real distinction. There's no real choice in playing a Pugilist or a Monk; you're *going* to play a Monk, because it's simply better.

I'm curious; is this intentional? Perhaps the base Classes will feel more prominent in the future, or given more individual personality? (ie. Gladiators becoming Spartan-like warriors, as opposed to the "Squire" it currently feels to the Paladin's "Knight")

[lololink]

Base classe means what weapon you will wield, Job give specialization, although now with only one job by class, except ACN, there is no real choice, in the future there might be more jobs for each class so jobs will specialize you. The devs don't want you to use classes, it's just a basic class while jobs are advanced, it's also a good way to have multiple jobs based on the same lvl.

Also MRD are used a lot in pvp since all their job skills are to be used under defiance and you never use defiance in PVP.

[Exstal]

There *may* be a rework of them in 3.0. It's currently speculation right now. You are correct in your assumption that classes are basically worthless. It was supposed to be that you do solo content on classes and group content on jobs. But jobs give good stats and, in some cases, better skill sets.

[Lusavari]

In PVP, often the Classes are better than the jobs, dependingly. You see TONS of people going Marauder over Warrior in Front Lines, occasionally you see people going Archer over Bard, and Gladiator over Paladin. The point of classes is that they have more cross class abilities, and so the more jobs you level, the stronger classes become, similar to how Freelancer and Mime work in older Final Fantasies. Classes were also originally intended to be more for soloing and pvp while jobs were intended for PvE content and everything requiring a party.

[Amarathval]

the only real advantage classes give is the ability to cross-class (number and types) skills for example I can use Straight shot from archer on my gladiator, but I can't if I go into a paladin, the thing is the cross-class skills that are available generally aren't worth the loss of...

1. Stats from the item that makes you a specific job
2. Job specific skills
3. higher level gear that is Job specific and can't be used by the base class if its the best that you own (example Job Myth gear like Valor Surcoat/Cleric's Robe)

there are some excepts though like in PvP since most of the Warrior job specific skills require you to use Defiance (which lowers your damage while increasing hp) alot of people opt to go Marauder instead so they can use class abilities the Warrior normally wouldn't like Blood for Blood or Raging Strikes and Invigorate.

[Arkine]

The armory system is a leftover from 1.0 and didn't have jobs. When Yoshi took over he tried to intruduce classic FF jobs w/o resetting everyone's levels to 1. (And with as little effort as possible) so jobs were introduced as specializations for classes.

Some people are still holding on to the "Classes are for solo, Jobs are for parties" myth, but that isn't the case. As it stands now, once you equip a job crystal, you might as well never take it off.

All classes do are create problems when trying to introduce new jobs, and I believe the game would be better if they were scrapped.

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Extra Rambling
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Personally, I'd like the system to work like this.

You start as lets say a lancer. You go to your guild, you do your quests, you get Lv30.

Now your EXP bar is greyed out. you cant go on any further, so you go back to your guild and unlock Dragoon. Now you can go back to leveling up to 50.

While this isn't a perfect system, it makes it so when adding new jobs to existing classes you only have to worry about class abilities up to Lv30, and from that point onward its just job skills, and it makes it so when adding a new job to a new class you start at lv30 instead of 50.

It can also solve the weapon = job junk we have now. For example after Lv30, when the LNC unlock DRG, he gains access to new lv30+ weapons like staves, halberds, spades. Just like shields are split into types, so can weapons.

Staff: Low damage, low delay.
Spear: Medium Damage, medium delay.
Halberds: High damage, low delay.

Ideally I'd tie TP generation to auto attacks to make this work.

Rambling is now over.

[Fue]

snip

Why would you ever pvp as gld over pld.
You loose so much useful abilities.

[Renik]

They messed a lot with the 1.0 armory system, things were said during the alpha-beta, "classes are better to solo", solo what? not to mention jobs are too superior in stats, "more jobs will branch for every class" i don't see it working, just like SE, so they are working on a rework or a fix, we will have to wait.

[lololink]

Why would you ever pvp as gld over pld.
You loose so much useful abilities.

I guess some PLD almost completely forget about cover since you almost never use it in PVE.

[Gardes]

The armory system is a leftover from 1.0 and didn't have jobs. When Yoshi took over he tried to intruduce classic FF jobs w/o resetting everyone's levels to 1. (And with as little effort as possible) so jobs were introduced as specializations for classes.

I still find it baffling how when people said they dont want to lose their exp progress, yoship equated it to keeping the classes and tacking on jobs at 1.17 instead of just turning classes into jobs and adding the job skills into classes. It would have been problem solved from the get go and been as simple as relabeling mrds into wars, cnjs into whms, etc etc. Retconning the lore wouldnt even matter when they already retconned some classes already. Even more baffling how people blame legacy players on this mess.