FFXIV is in a Prime Position to Make Some Drastic Changes

[Shurrikhan]

I want to use an example of why I think this topic is important: Red Mage.

We all want it. Yoshida even teased us with the idea this past Rising. After thinking about it though, I wonder how it could even function in this current system...

Now, I've thought long and hard about how it *could* work, but I want to focus on one point, that Red Mage is really supposed to be a swiss-army knife class, say like Druid in WoW, and such like it. But such a class only works in a system with horizontal progression, where you can modify/self-personalize your job's path. We don't currently have that...how's that going to work?!

To be honest, I don't see why horizontal progression would be required beyond the obvious--different (healer, tank, and DPS) gear sets. Naturally, if it could do everything with the same set of gear (tank, heal, and DPS), then it would give it an overwhelming advantage in flexibly gearing up compared to gearing one job of each type. But being gear-locked into a particular role is as close as horizontal progression really has to being relevant here. (At best that gear-locking occurs more subtly, such as for ideal secondary stats for a particular role or two, while the primary stats are already shared among all roles.)

To take the druid example further, a druid has only ever really been, in practice, as much a swiss army knife as a (Wrath) Blood Death Knight or Retribution Paladin. Once gear- and talent-locked, they perform a particular role very clearly, and the hybrid flavor of the class only shows through off-role procs, be it Predatory Swiftness (for Healing Touch) or Art of War / Eternal Flame (on Ret). (Feral previously being mostly shared gear- and especially talent-wise was the closest they've gotten to being truly hybrid (particularly with its self-healing benefits and caster/cat/bear synergy), though again almost identical in that aspect to Blood DK.) Horizontal progression really has surprisingly little to do with "hybrid" functionality. And of course, it doesn't help that talents do not progress beyond the level cap, where you will undoubtedly spend the majority of your time anyways... Doesn't really warrant the term "progression", when it doesn't progress. (Gear did, but mostly vertically. Key stats, mixed with tier artifact gear bonuses allowed for new rotations and priorities, but not that they were scarcely more multi-stated even back in Wrath than we are here in XIV. They simply had far more rotational matters dependant on secondary stats and managed each tier to get enough of said stats to slightly adjust gameplay, capping crit chance (75%) with their crit specs by the end of the expansion, while we'll likely never exceed 45%. A vertical difference, not horizontal. And a difference in ability/passives design.)

Edit: Don't get me wrong; I like the idea of horizontal progression. I just don't like seeing the idea of it misplaced / mis-attributed.