Thread: A plea for 3.0 and beyond: Job Customization

Originally Posted by Akiza

Horizontal Progression is not what most people on this forum think its is.

So it's not just multiple sources of top-end gear huh? anyone else here agree with this? I want to be sure the Black Rose Troll here is serious this time.

Originally Posted by Amelia_Pond_Behemoth

Quit fooling yourselves. XI didn't have job customization either. /nin or gtfo.

Pfft. /Sam every day. /Nin for certain fights only.

Actual XI customization began with the Merit Point system where you could enhance specific stats, traits and abilities, but could only do so to an extent. You couldn't max everything available to your job, so you had to pick which stats/skills/traits you were going to prioritize enhancing, or only give meager boosts to all if you weren't going to buff a few select ones all the way (not suggested, but possible).

Subjobs were another way to play how you wanted. In some situations /nin was needed and for some jobs was pretty much the only subjob they ever needed. But for other's /nin was only ideal in specific situations.

Still, the subjob system allowed for a variety of ways to play a job and some odd combinations worked for different things.

_________________

Story time.

Back when I first started FFXI at the NA launch I knew right away I wanted to be a Dark Knight (research an whatnot before the game was even out) and I figured out of the starting jobs available warrior would be the ideal Subjob to start out with. So I leveled warrior all the way up to 40 (because why not?) using greatsword the whole time (and nobody said a thing because we were all noobs then) to boost my greatsword skill in prep for Dark Knight since I knew I would have to raise Scythe when I finally got Dark Knight unlocked. So naturally, I leveled Monk to 20 for my Warrior subjob (When I had taken Warrior to whatever level it was Subjobs were unlocked at... 20?) and continued on.

Unlock Dark Knight and begin that journey to 75 initially using warrior for my subjob. Along the way, I realized at a point that parties wanted Dark Knights with Thief subjob for the sole reason of SA+TA weaponskills onto the tanks to solidify aggro and close skillchains. This was around the Yhoator/Yuhtunga(sp?) Jungle leveling range if I remember correctly. So I stopped leveling Drk and worked on leveling up Thief to appropriate SJ level, which lead to unlocking Ninja and leveling up Ninja to 20 for my Thief's subjob. I realized I kinda enjoyed the Thief and Ninja jobs a bit in the process, though not enough to immediately level them up any further than I needed at the time.

So I get back to leveling up Dark Knight after a good long break due to leveling subjobs and things are great and eventually I hit level 75 Drk sometime after the ToAU expansion. Yes.. it took that long. But man, as strange as it sounds, I enjoyed that. (though I don't think I could ever go through that again at this point in my life)

Eventually I would go and level up Paladin to 75 as well and well.. since I had /war already leveled and it was the only SJ needed for Pld, ever, I was good.

After that I decided to work on Samurai because it looked fun watching the level 75 Samurai I knew. Then one day I just decided to slap Sam on as my Drk subjob because I thought the skills would be pretty cool to use on Dark Knight. I tested it out in solo first, against "Easy Prey" mobs and found that if I used my skills right not only did I have a nice damage output but actually had increased survivability compared to /war and /thf. So I pretty much stayed /Sam from then on, using it in Dynamis and for Merit parties and it was awesome. It actually became a popular thing in the Dark Knight community on my server (and likely all other servers). (I did it before it was cool, man!)

Though I did end up going back to level up my Ninja more to make it an adequate subjob for my Dark Knight because there was a fight or two in CoP that I pretty much needed it for the strat to work.

Each SJ I still used, but it was depending on the situation, though I will say I pretty much never really went back to /war after getting /sam. Though /Thf I used when solo hunting NMs, and /Nin I used in specific fights where consistent damage nullification was key.

Story Over.

tl;dr - XI actually had quite a bit of customization. Not just in the form of subjobs, but more fully with the Merit Point system.

Side note: I ended up quitting some time after Wings of The Goddess in 2008 so any other systems they added, I don't know about and can't rightly use in my point.

During 1.0 before jobs came ingame the cross-class skills were more open (Every skill except the ones you bought in the guilds for guildmarks. And up to 10 skills at level 50) and you could customizate your character how you wanted. Equip this skill from this class and that skill from this class and your character would be like a RDM.
People complained about it because as soon everyone would have their character completed (all classes at level 50) everyone would be the same again with just different weapons.
And so the devs created the job system for specializations.

Originally Posted by Sholah

We had this in 1.0. Yoshi took it away because of his precious WoW holy trinity system. He wants things to be as simple as possible for new players, and that means no customization.

No
The community has spoken

1. What do you feel are currently the most significant issues with the battle system? (up to three answers)



For Question 1, we decided to list up several points of concern the dev team and I had, and allow you to select multiple responses. It looks like the end result is that you feel all of them are significant issues. We'll do our best to address them all. In particular, the lack of class uniqueness seems to be prevalent in all regions. As this relates closely to core elements such as battle strategy, party composition, and attributes, we will be giving it top priority. It is going to entail a huge overhaul, including balancing the distribution of actions across classes, but we'll be looking to see what we can do, and then doing it! The result will be less monotony of actions, and once those changes have been finished, we'll move onto reworking the Battle Regimen system.

http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com...16083b634f7678