How can they add more classes and make them unique and have their own flavor?

[Zied]

I remember I read somewhere that Yoshi P said that they will add more jobs instead of giving jobs more specializations (IE DPS Paladin, Heal Paladin).

Dancer I can understand being different because I heard it is a melee healer(?)

How can they make the new jobs unique enough to make them not be copy and pastes/combination of the other jobs we have now?

[Slappah]

The same way dark Knight, ast, machinist and ninja feel unique compared to the other jobs in their role

[Lambdafish]

Different playstyles and good game design. New DPS are easy and will just DPS using a new mechanic (mudra for example). It's tanks and healers that are more difficult, as they need to be balanced the same, and there arent many new niches to be filled (tank has room for another main OT, but I'm not sure what function that would take).

Of course SE could be really ballsy and do things like tank pet, and melee healing, but I really don't know how those will work.

examples off the top of my head (not balanced or thought too hard about):

RDM: melee dps - acts as a magic counterpart to ninja, with elemental INT attacks, and lots of magic utility like reflect, virus type effects and vunerability ups

CHM: healer - think of mix as healing ninjitsu

SAM: melee dps - TP management. Having a stacking buff (like wrath or aetherflow) that is increased by paying a large amount of TP, these can then be expended to perform hard hitting attacks (or restore TP). The idea is that SAM would hit hard, but slow.

[Zied]

snip

I think you have some decent ideas, however it seems you are incorporating some already used aspect of jobs into the new jobs. AST is basically a WHM/SCH + RNG buffs. All melee classes have the same sort of 1 2 3 combo and some mechanic that slightly varies them, ie chakra, mudra, jumps. I just want Square to take a risk and make jobs have completely new mechanics and combos.

Does anyone want to share their ideas as to how make jobs different and have their own unique flavor?

[RiceisNice]

I remember I read somewhere that Yoshi P said that they will add more jobs instead of giving jobs more specializations (IE DPS Paladin, Heal Paladin).

The primary reason they can't do this is because even if you try to change the role of a job, it doesn't change the fact that they're drawing from the same level 1-50 class abilties, which is hwere the foundation of their gameplay is built upon. Take a DPSing SCH and SMN for example, back in 2.x they shared identical dps rotations minus fester (in which case they'd just use energy drain instead). Even if you had put a dps warrior, they'd still have the same BB and maim combos, not to mention deliverance makes it sort of a redundant concept.

The same way dark Knight, ast, machinist and ninja feel unique compared to the other jobs in their role

My sides.

But on a serious note though, they just have to take the idea and run with it, not play it safe. If a job ends being undertuned or overpowered numerically, you can always adjust the numbers. Mechanics on the other hand you can't really cut corners around (much like how they scrapped the idea of attachments and ammunition on MCH). You have unused concepts like a swinging TP resource, spellblade, stance dancing for dps (not tank/healing), or even a stationary melee that moves with abilities.

[Joe_Schmoe]

Can't really think of any that hasn't been done before, unless you want to make a bartender class, or a barber class, or a librarian class etc. but I doubt anyone would want to play those, at least not seriously. You can mix n' match class mechanics, but I'm pretty sure in this day and age we'd all go "Hey, this is a mix n' match class!" so that wouldn't help much. I'm out of ideas otherwise.

[Khalithar]

Now granted I know people take issue with borrowing from other games, but I'm going to cite a few examples of things they could still do off the top of my head.


Tank types: Reflect/Counter tanking or tanking built around damage absorption (think a class that creates a lot of mini-stoneskins with certain moves.

Healer types: Healer that focuses mostly on HoT's or a healer that focuses on damage absorption (similar to my example above) with a few heals for large chunks of burst.

DPS types: A melee class that focuses on DoTs could be magic based or physical based, either variation is something we don't have as a melee. A ranged dps that focuses on building up stacks of a debuff and then using various finishers that consume the stacks. A melee or ranged class that builds up stacks of a buff on itself then uses a portion of those stacks to use certain moves.

That's just a few ideas off the top of my head that haven't really been done in this game, I'm sure I could come up with more if I needed to but you get the idea.

[RocheKat]

WoW has lots of classes with 3/4 specializations each that all play very different. Part of what makes each job different is their story, the weapons they use... there are lots of options still. For example right now the three melee don't really deal with procs so a melee could be added that works more like MCH or BRD. We also don't have a melee magic user or a support melee... I am honestly expecting RDM to be a melee magic user with support.

Making dps different isn't very hard really, Healing is a little harder and tanking is probably the worst. The reason for tanking being tricky is because you cant have a lot of RNG in tanks. You can't have a tank threat/mitigation level changes randomly because they would either not be able to do their job or be too powerful.

[Zied]

Here is an interesting idea for geomancer that was said on my gamefaqs thread:

"basically the idea was that a geomancer drops elemental fields around the battlefield; when standing in those fields, the properties of their attacks change. so in a way it's like positionals, but rather than their positionals being dependent on where they're standing in relation to the mob they're hitting, they're dependent on which of their elemental fields they're standing in"

[Lambdafish]

I think you have some decent ideas, however it seems you are incorporating some already used aspect of jobs into the new jobs.

You are half correct in that these ideas took 2 minutes to come up with, so referencing other classes seemed easiest. Concept in classes can be similar with implementation completely different. I can guarantee that healing mudras would be a lot different than ninjitsu (multiple ingredients, mixing and matching for different effects, adding more for enhanced effects).

My SAM idea though is completely unique, sure on the surface it looks like Wrath/aetherflow/ammunition, but these systems are completely different from each other. Lets call the mechanic Zanshin, and say it is activated by using the ability of the same name that has a 30 second cooldown (each use will grant an addition stack, up to 5). While under the effect of Zanshin, your TP drains slightly faster (depending on the number of stacks), and you get a skillspeed or damage buff (depending on the number of stacks). Certain abilities consume Zanshin stacks, or you can consume all Zanshin stacks to restore an amount of TP (if you mess up and your TP hits the floor). Like darkside, while you have zanshin stacks, paeon doesn't work.

This idea is in no way balanced, tested or even viable as I really didn't think much about it, but it's a unique idea for SAM.