Giving each job a second spec: would it work?

[Reynhart]

What happens when the potency of Ruin is boosted by 20%? SCH is already on par with WHM for healing, and now they're doing significantly more damage. Guess what job people will start playing and asking for?

If only you could boost SMN's DPS without affecting SCH...oh, wait...

[Fendred]

A better idea would be to give them utility abilities, designing dungeons and encounters around the varying abilities of each job. The reason this would be a good idea is that it would allow them to break the rules for how much damage a class can do. For instance, if a damage dealer is defined as a character who trades heavy armor for mobility, thus reaching places that a tank cannot, that could fundamentally alter the encounter design. Dragoons could jump to high places in a dungeon, dropping a rope so that the party can take a less obstructive path, a bard can shoot a switch to open a gate using a trick shot ability, or a ninja could stealth past some opponents to open a trap door. Black mage's sleep spell would suddenly have a utility benefit once again, and tanks would be more of a pure combat class than a utility hybrid.

I guess what I'm saying is it would be more interesting to have the dungeons and encounters designed so they can be tackled in different ways depending on party makeup than giving people variant specs for existing jobs.

[Delily]

If only you could boost SMN's DPS without affecting SCH...oh, wait...

Seriously, you need to think a bit; to prevent skill bloat, all jobs got 5 new abilities in 3.0. It's not as if the class skills are unused. No matter how many expansions they release, no matter how many new jobs skills we get, SCH and SMN will share, at the least, Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II, and Shadowflare. Those skills will always form a part of the core rotation of both classes, not to mention the utility spells like Virus and Eye for an Eye. Unless both specs are in the class role, one spec will always make balancing the other spec harder than is necessary, and if both specs are the same role, they will flip flop as to which is better. This is not some theory or speculation, this has been the trend in every MMO that has offered specialization. It's challenging enough balancing the skills between jobs, adding specializations would just added more work that ultimately will not pay off. We get specializations in that we can switch our jobs at any time, that's more than enough.

[Delily]

A better idea would be to give them utility abilities, designing dungeons and encounters around the varying abilities of each job. The reason this would be a good idea is that it would allow them to break the rules for how much damage a class can do. For instance, if a damage dealer is defined as a character who trades heavy armor for mobility, thus reaching places that a tank cannot, that could fundamentally alter the encounter design. Dragoons could jump to high places in a dungeon, dropping a rope so that the party can take a less obstructive path, a bard can shoot a switch to open a gate using a trick shot ability, or a ninja could stealth past some opponents to open a trap door. Black mage's sleep spell would suddenly have a utility benefit once again, and tanks would be more of a pure combat class than a utility hybrid.

I guess what I'm saying is it would be more interesting to have the dungeons and encounters designed so they can be tackled in different ways depending on party makeup than giving people variant specs for existing jobs.

Let me tell you a little bit about Funus, a boss in the game Dark Age of Camelot. He was a part of the Caer Sidi encounter, and had to be defeated before the final boss, Apocalypse, would spawn. He was designed so only clerics, a healing class, could hurt him. As a healing class, clerics were not widely played. You could sit and work on forming a Sidi party for hours, only to fall through because you didn't have enough clerics present to beat this one boss mob. Tying an encounter to single class's abilities effectively locks out any group that does not have said class. That's fine in a premade situation, but in the random parties thrown together for a DF, it doesn't work out so well.

On the flip side, making it so an encounter uses the skills of the group present isn't much different than the current situation. It might be fun at first, but eventually, the novelty will wear off, and people won't even notice. What value does that bring to the game? FFXIV does need some variety, I'll grant that, the problem is most of the ideas players are offering up have been tried before with predictable results.

The reality is that the FFXIV is the Wendy's of the MMO genre (WoW is McDonald's). It's different enough to attract players who are tired of WoW, but it's similar enough to attract a significant number of players. If you want a really exciting, stimulating experience, ingle player or network games (like Diablo 3) are where you will find them.

[Xairos]

In the realm of card games like Magic and Hearthstone, a lot of ideas and interactions get labeled as "Christmas Morning". This term is meant to bring light to an interaction or a setup that seems perfect on paper, but in reality would happen so infrequently that it becomes more of a liability to assume and ultimately a waste of time to theorycraft around it.

When thinking about new specs and new abilities (especially in light of players ALREADY ignoring abilities that the high level players deem as necessary: "I don't think that Swiftcast is all that important and I dont want to level THM" and the thread below this one at the time of my comment is about Bad DPS and playing with no knowledge of rotations), take a note from the post above and really, really, really, flesh out every interaction with the game, not just your own. This game is formed that people can pick it up and get somewhat of an idea as to how it works, and people still have trouble. That trouble at the low level creates headaches for many who visit this forum. I am all for theorycrafting, but if you give an example, throw in how your idea can work for a new mmo player and/or a player coming over from WoW or GW2. Ask the question "Not how fun this seems to me, but how intuitive is this for a person with no knowledge whatsoever of how to play?"

This is good game design, and one could argue that Specs and such are Mini-games within a larger game.

[Reynhart]

Seriously, you need to think a bit

It's not like one of the jobs is a Summoner, and like every pet skills is unique to the job so that you could boost them 1) to better fit the lore and 2) to adjust SMN without changing anything to SCH.

And, if you want to be technical, at lvl 50, SMN had 17 (By combining the 3 types ef Enkidle) unique skills and SCH 12 (Not counting Embrace twice).
At level 60, it becomes 22 for SMN 17 for SCH.
And Arcanist gives 18 skills. So they have almost more unique skills than shared ones, and they don't cross class the same skills, too.

So, in fact, Arcanist was the perfect example of how the system can work well.

EDIT : But, I admit that withtout the pet, if would require more thought to do the same for other classes, but it's far from impossible

[Ashkendor]

So if Devs decide they don't like something - even if players request more of it because it's successful from a functional and practical use standpoint (SCH/SMN) - they shouldn't consider it?

Nope. If they don't like it, they're under no obligation to do it no matter how many players want it.

No I meant Scholar. Not Arcanist. Scholar is the healing spec, Summoner the DPS spec. The same Job otherwise - they share gear and levels, other than the weapon.

You said "Scholar has two specs", though. It doesn't. Arcanist has two specs, Scholar and Summoner.

[Duelle]

As shown with Arcanist, it just creates a restriction to how unique you can make each job as a seperate entity.

This is only because of how poorly jobs were implemented.

Imagine, if you will, the following:

- Classes cap at lv30
- Job crystals retroactively change certain class abilities and how they scale

Using ACN/SMN/SCH as an example, ACN would cap at lv30 and go no further. What we know as the ACN lv31+ abilities can only be learned and used by SMN. Equipping the SCH job crystals changes Bio, Miasma and so on to Helix spells (the spells SCH had access to in FFXI), which mechanically are similar to their original counterparts but with different potency and scaling. Post-30 SCH would gain either different attacks, more utility, or more stuff related to their fairy. This way both jobs effectively split at 30 and become very different from each other. This deals with the identity thing, the "we can't buff SMN without buffing SCH" thing and allows for classes to split into jobs.

[Delily]

EDIT : But, I admit that withtout the pet, if would require more thought to do the same for other classes, but it's far from impossible

Right, the thing is, the design team does not want to make the pets themselves become the focus of the job ala FFXI summoner. The lore of the job is that it's becoming more like Allagan high summoners who took on the likeness of said primal like Ysayle.

[Reynhart]

One of my friend SMN told me that the pet only count for 30% of the overall SMN's damage.
They could improve it fairly without doing the same as FFXI, where the SMN himself basically did no damage.

As I said, you could easily adjust jobs separately just by removing traits from classes and give them to jobs. Because, let's be honest, traits don't have any real impact before lvl30.