No More Classes?

[Shurrikhan]

I am brand new to the game, and upon further research, I'm a little bummed to find that my Rogue will be forced into turning into a generic Ninja late game. I would have much rather stuck to a more Thief archtype who could function as a DPS/Supporting class (perhaps mugging enemies of Potions, and throwing them at allies to heal them).

I really feel like SE need to give some incentive for those who would rather stick to the core classes as opposed to being pigeonholed into a job. A Marauder being forced to drop his DPS in favor of a more tanky Warrior kind of sucks, and it would be nice for a Marauder to choose either Warrior for Tanking, or Berserker (who is more in line with the wild savage fighter theme of a Marauder) as a DPS option. Not only is it a little dishonest for new players who don't know how the system even works (Because someone wanting to be a Sword/Board Gladiator having to run into a holy soldier?), but it kills a lot of the charm of building your ideal FF to life.

More interesting (mechanical) class traits + the ability to cross-class traits would probably do the trick (rather than just having Internal Release and Mantra, and Haymaker and Featherfoot from Pugilist, give us some fitting undermechanics from which those abilities would reasonably stem (Chi and Footwork, for instance), and allow us to use those as well on other classes, even if only proportional to the abilities we've taken as well). Other than that, just more job from each class (Thief/Outlander/Assassin vs. Ninja) would give more options at least, even if the class itself still wouldn't be especially viable. They'd just have to be less rigid than the class-->job system is currently, to allow for more variance (likely allowing the base/class abilities to be adjusted with change in job crystal). In general, as I see it, each class should be able to go in an interesting direction via its cross classes, and the job skills ought to just be some additional, and fairly insular/packaged options that the other classes don't have and therefore can't transfer from. Shouldn't have to be the only thing actually used. That's in theory/preference, anyways, but, naturally, I'm not about to go and use a class until it's balanced in at least some respect, either. /shrug