Personally, I'd like to see Classes made into "alternate-jobs"

[Reinfeld]

I want a true supporter class

I second this. I loved bard in FFXI, but the rendition in this game is kinda....meh.
The only thing Is I don't know how they could make it work with how this game is balanced.

[Terin]

For that matter, perhaps some 1.0 players could chime-in here, and delve a bit more into how the Classes were different back then? The Thaumaturge, for example, I'm told was more about the whole "Astral and Umbral" themes, whereas Black Mage is a much more traditional Elemental-Caster, which is true, could at least wind up being thematically more unique, perhaps having Astral spells do more damage during the Day (server-time), sort of reversing your rotation depending on the time of day.

Like I said, they may not be "classic Final Fantasy jobs", but I think the base Classes are still plenty interesting in their own right. I'd like to see them played-up a bit more, instead of just falling by the wayside.

[OMEGA_HACK]

Archer was OP OP OP OP.
Lancer was OP but couldn't survive any magic also had enmity transferring abilities
Thaumaturge had lots of debuffing potential
Conjurer had way more damage output
Gladiator was a tank and had some pretty cool party healing moves
Marauder was all about hate control and also had more damage output
Pugilist was kind of like a melee magic damage dealer (it could en-spell its attacks)

That being said NONE of them resembled any of the classic FF jobs. Which was one of the big problems with the game when it launched, you didn't feel special, because you didn't really specialize, you had to sample from all the classes in order to do anything productive endgame.

[Noelzzz]

For that matter, perhaps some 1.0 players could chime-in here, and delve a bit more into how the Classes were different back then? The Thaumaturge, for example, I'm told was more about the whole "Astral and Umbral" themes, whereas Black Mage is a much more traditional Elemental-Caster, which is true, could at least wind up being thematically more unique, perhaps having Astral spells do more damage during the Day (server-time), sort of reversing your rotation depending on the time of day.

Like I said, they may not be "classic Final Fantasy jobs", but I think the base Classes are still plenty interesting in their own right. I'd like to see them played-up a bit more, instead of just falling by the wayside.

while i agree with you about make classes jobs, i think not all of them could be reworked as a job. The blm is a thaumaturge with flare, it doesnt really adds any mechanic to the class.

[Bishop81]

Like I said, they may not be "classic Final Fantasy jobs", but I think the base Classes are still plenty interesting in their own right. I'd like to see them played-up a bit more, instead of just falling by the wayside.

It's quite a mess.

The current Jobs were brought in to appease players after FFXIV 1.0's failure. Scrapping the existing classes quests and redoing everything from scratch was probably too much to take on for the FFXIV 2.0 reboot - pure speculation on my part here though. So they tacked on the Jobs to the Classes.

Like "classic FF jobs" or not, the writing and lore behind the Classes are pretty good.

To be blunt, the current Jobs were probably a "political expediency". IMHO there wasn't anything wrong with the Classes lore-wise. For every well-known Job/Class, there is always a "first time" when it was introduced and not considered a "classic FF jobs".

PS:

Not to mention that "classic FF jobs" weren't really that good a fit for the type of game ARR is. Look at BLM, it's nothing like an old-school BLM - no "elemental wheel". Dark Knight lost it's HP-for-damage characteristics. SMN ... ya, I think we have heard enough complains about that.

[Havenae]

We need tanks from 15 to 30.

And you would have them.

You're reworking 'classes' into jobs. That means jobs will extend from 1-50/60/70 because there essentially wouldn't be classes anymore... so you could have paladins and warriors from 1-30 as your tanks if SE did it right.

This really wouldnt even be an issue if SE would just stick to their own system, but it doesnt appear they feel like it at this point in time so now we'll have two different systems apparently. one with classes and jobs and one with just jobs. I guess because they didnt 'feel' like creating 3 new classes to go along with the 3 new jobs. It's a pretty bad design decision if you ask me as consistency is a huge deal from my point of view, but eh well.

while i agree with you about make classes jobs, i think not all of them could be reworked as a job. The blm is a thaumaturge with flare, it doesnt really adds any mechanic to the class.

You'd have to consider that some classes would need to be scrapped all together, but the bonus would be that you could rework some jobs to make them feel more like that classic FF job.

Bards for instance could maybe lose the bow, give it all to archer and let bards focus on being purely a support class keep archer let them be pure dps.

Split rogue and Ninja let ninja focus more on mudras and other aspects of what makes a ninja a ninja (or even bring back ninja tanking) while rogues go more thief-ish. Or keep ninjas and just drop rogues all together. (this one kind of bothers me though because it's a relatively new class/job and SE was more than willing to do the combo here and in a patch none-the-less, but not the expansion? why?)

Gladiator- dps class, give them a different weapon or two shortswords (seems a little too similar to ninjas that way though, maybe mix some weapons? axe and a sword? sword and a trident?)

Marauders could be like the berserkers mentioned above with dual axes

You could probably drop conjurer, thaumaturge, pugilist and lancer.

I'd personally give aero and stone to blms, bring some new light based damage spells to the table for whms

Scholar and Summoner need to be two distinctly different classes. The shared concept of pet 'classes' is fine, but yeah Summoners do need some love, they really do.

Basic thought here is some things would need to go, but then you can also open new possibilities with a little give and take on both sides from classes and jobs.

[RiceisNice]

...

This needs to come with an complete overhaul of level 1-50 to the classes. Like I mentioned before, even if you were to split rogue to ninja and thief the way it is, they'd still fundamentally play the same. Same deal if you tried to do a berserker/warrior split off marauder, only one is gonna be taking damage and the other won't. The other problem that comes with this is that you can't really balance one without changing the other (see SCH/SMN). This is where they kind of shot themselves in the leg when it came to making diverse job routes for each class.

Honestly, the best way to see it is that the "jobs" are sort of "promotions" toward the class. Sort of like a Squire -> Knight sort of thing in a hierarchy. It doesn't FF theming because classes like PLD and BRD are drastically different from gladiator and archers, but that's how they presented it.

The whole "job and classes" thing seems really convoluted the more you try to connect it to traditional FF sense versus how it is presented in the game.

[Terin]

I'm not saying it's a super simple fix, but I think it's worth considering reworking way the Job and Class system are handled. Personally? I would treat them ALL as "Jobs", complete with Crystals, focusing more on having them as "alternate-specs", in WoW terms. Maybe make the Bard a full-on Support, with Archer taking over the Damage role, Pugilist could get Enmity and Damage-mitigation bonuses for attacking his opponent from the front, and so on. Really, Thurmaturge and Arcanist are the only ones I'm not sure how you would handle.

For terminology, just call them "Base Jobs" (those you start at level 1) and "Advanced Jobs" (those you unlock via story, at higher level), but they would ALL fall under the term "Jobs".

[OMEGA_HACK]

Making Gladiator a dps and marauder into a berserker type class (sounds like DPS) then how do you find a tank in DF from 15-30? Or are you saying that PLD be a job available at lv1? If that is the case then they might as well redo the game again because you'd had to create abilities for those jobs/classes as well as balance. Its more feasible to just drop the Classes from the game and pretend they never existed for the playable characters and it only a NPC thing.

[Terin]

My thinking? Make Pugilist a Tank, and possibly Lancer. Obviously, these are far bigger changes than "just add Enmity bonuses to everything", but by utilizing the structures already in place, I think they could probably make *something* work. The Pugilist's Guild seems more about fighting guys head-to-head anyways (like I said, very similar to Boxers), so I could see it working. Like I said, I just don't know what you would do with Arcanist or Thurmaturge to make them more unique, unless you gave them more supportive roles, akin to Bard?