Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
Don't forget that this is subjective and that classes themselves, aside from the dealings of their guild, don't have any particular identity besides that particular weapon proficiency. To use your example, a pugilist (fist-fighter) becoming an engineer is only strange if you hold the subjective link that there is a necessary correlation between pugilism and becoming a monk.

Who is to say that engineer would not prefer to fight with his fists while he's not fixing things?

And, I'll keep saying this as long as it keeps coming up - who is to say it makes less sense for a minstrel who wants to do combat to use a bow than a dagger? If your method of contributing to a battle is keeping morale high through song, my guess is that you don't like being all that close to the danger. Never-the-less, storywise, if I'm bringing a bard on a mission to do battle, he better be helping out with more than just morale - and if he's not curing, he better be fighting. If he prefers to be far from the actual danger, I suppose he better pick up a bow.

Barcher.
Its not about it making sense in terms of, one person only doing one thing, or a bard using a bow and arrow. It doesnt make sense in terms of a game with job progression. Bard like abilities, singing, making music, playing instruments, and their possible effects have nothing to do with archer at all. Its all good for bard to use a bow, but its pretty bad for someone who played archer for 1 year to be told that they are supposed to sing or play an instrument, because it has no skill, playstyle, or lore connection.

It also sucks for a person who wanted to be a musician type charachter who wants to do support in parties, to have to level up a class that does no support at all for 20 levels.

Like i said, its not that bard itself if a horrible class, its more about what it means for the future of archer, the future of musician support, and what jobs mean.

If jobs are just like different classes, that use a bit of the skills of some other classes, why tie them to jobs at all? why not just unlock a job, and start leveling it again, or allow people to use skills from any class on any job. What connects bard to a bow? why not a hand to hand bard? or a sword using bard.

This is the other problem with these big leaps, with this they are locking the bard skills, to the archer job. While i can use pug lnc con etc abilities on any class, the bard abilities which arent really a part of archery, (support class we have been missing) is only available to one job. It makes perfect sense for dragoon abilities that are really specific to polearm use, and the dragoon job to be exclusive to lancer because they are connected, it doesnt make as much sense to lock support/bard type skills to an archer, because they have little to do with each other.

When you consider that bard was already a planned job, and in fact has some spells available in the dats, its kind of sad that what once could have been skills for the armory that all could have used, are likely to be archer exclusives, playing instruments and singing, archer only, who d have thought it.