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

[Saccharin]

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

Well DRK begins very similar to GLD and AST is essentially WHM until 50, or was it 40. I've not tried MCH yet.

[Morningstar1337]

Melee Healer: Sorta tricky to implement, but possible
Magic Tank: Not DRK, but a Tank that exclusively has spells
Counter Tank: already mentioned before. But the foundation is already there with WAR's Vengance and the mob exclusive Reflect and Directional Parry

Now for the Nitty-Gritty of DPS. This is simple to add, they find a concept and base the Job around it. Like a Debuffing class with plenty of CC abilities (And high DPS to compensate for the fact that CC ability are useless), Or like the aforementioned Geomancer idea (Again, groundwork for that has been done since Wanderer's Palace HM and Ley Lines/Sacred Soil/Asylum/Collective Unconscious/Sacred Prism).

[Ultimatecalibur]

Well DRK begins very similar to GLD and AST is essentially WHM until 50, or was it 40. I've not tried MCH yet.

Dark Knight may start out similar to Gladiator, but it ends up in a very different place once it gets Dark Arts. Much of its high level play is built around proper management of MP consumption/generation.
Much of the Astrologian's play is built around proper use of its cards.
Machinist uses a fairly unique proc based combo system.

[Laerune]

They have to not play safe, right now I am seeing alot of new features, which to me shows off that Yoshi and the developers want to experiment. But lets be honest, AST is WHM+SCH, DRK is WAR but magic based and BRD is MCH minus the songs and RNG dmg playstyle.

What SE needs to do is make those classes unique, but not so unique that makes players dump their own class and only play the new ones.

EDIT: I remember Warhammer Online having a melee healer, basicly the more dps the healer does, the more heals the group gets.

[Saccharin]

EDIT: I remember Warhammer Online having a melee healer, basicly the more dps the healer does, the more heals the group gets.

And what healer would every raid take...

[LadyVal]

What SE needs to do is make those classes unique, but not so unique that makes players dump their own class and only play the new ones.

And on the opposite side of the coin, they have to make all classes simple enough that nobody is going to go "That is too obscure/complicated, I'm not going to touch it."

I would love to see a chemist-style healer, where your "moves" are basic ingredients or tools, and you mix and match them for different effects. I think along the lines of, your basic heal would be "Salve" and shortly after you get "Salve II." You also get a basic AoE, "Healing Rain," and an esuna, "Remedy." So you get the option to mix every 15s. You use mix, and you mix your "Salve" and "Remedy," and then you have an esuna that also heals a slight amount. Likewise, you use "Healing Rain" with "Remedy" and your AoE heal might not be as strong, but it esunas everybody in range. And then obviously as you level up you learn different recipes, effectively unlocking new moves, but keeps the amount of combinations specific enough that you don't have to memorize a huge list of abilities.

I also like the idea of a dancer controlling the positions on a battlefield somewhat. They could have styles, so that everyone within range of them gets a tp or mp regen. The range would be smaller than normal but more effective than most buffs we have. They could even create static AoEs, so make a bubble that lasts 20 sec and everyone inside of it gets a spell speed/skill speed boost. I also would like them to make a system where, if a dancer successfully dodges an attack, they get strength boost for 10 sec. Or even thinking along the lines of an AST, if they got a move that required them to become stationary but while in that stance, all heals on them spread to those around them, at a lowered potency. Just a class that can do DPS but is overall involved with other party members more, not so much like the design we have now where everyone is essentially a lone wolf in design, partied with other lone wolves. (And I mean this in a way where a dancer would be optimized and flourish in a party but would not struggle with solo quests and content.)

I think we can all agree on one thing though: I hope they never add more jobs based off of current classes, because they just won't diversify the jobs enough, and I worry that more jobs will become like SCH and SMN were in 2.x.

[Yasuhiro]

I'd like to see jobs like Blue Mage and Time Mage but knowing this game follows the holy trinity down to a T then they'd either have make them watered down versions of their other game counterparts wouldn't it be nice to have a raid like this?
- hmmm this boss attacks pretty fast, let's bring a Time Mage so they can cast haste on the healers so they can keep up.
- This boss is vulnerable to status effects maybe a Blue Mage can cast bad breath on it
Then again XIV is a special snowflake game can't have interesting things.

[Shurrikhan]

How?

Honestly, by not being so stingy about putting in truly new mechanics, and by building the job as they feel it should be first, and balancing it after. Identity, fun, and balance, in that order. Well, the first two interchangeably, I suppose. Whatever feels like the job, in a fun way. Then finally balance.

Mechanically-speaking all we got with 3.0 were literally proc guarantee, RNG combo-finishers, RNG buffs, sacrifice-able RNG buffs, buffable RNG buffs, duration-consuming abilities, and a player-created doom state. That's mechanically all it had to offer. Which is why I have to assume a quizzical face briefly when people call DRK and MCH "different" from their lineup. They have their differences, and after mastery may come to feel very different, but on paper (and almost certainly in code) they are really quite similar to their precedent jobs... and the same, precedent design philosophy that would rather copy-paste their way to parity than focus on balancing after having fully developed more original identities. It's also why I can't understand why the coding of all things would be an issue, despite that being the alleged reason tossed about on these forums. The art resources seem costly enough, or perhaps even the (often none too well received) job quests, but to say that the coding itself would take up that much time, when almost every bit of it already exists in game... I can't really fathom the idea.

[Veerne]

The question is, does every job have to be unique? Is it not enough to just have different flavors of the same idea so each player can pick the one they like? You could have to extremely similar classes but by tweaking the animations and overall look of the jobs you can make two completely different flavors. Player A may prefer the one that casts fire spells and wields a mace while Player B may prefer the other flavor with ice spells and an axe.

[Alahra]

The current class design framework suggests a certain theoretical design space in which they can create new classes that are unique even before you get into particularly unique mechanics (like Mudra for instance).

• We don't have a melee casting class, which is a role that could be filled by Red Mage, Rune Fencer/Knight, or Blue Mage.
• We don't have a ranged physical class in the same "DPS tier" as Black Mage and Summoner. Something like this could work for Ranger or Gunner—these two may be unlikely given the existence of Bard and Machinist though).
• On the flip side, we also don't have a caster in the BRD/MCH "support DPS" role, though one could argue that the two of them now do themselves since they have cast times of their own. Geomancer might fill this role following their FFXI implementation, which was mostly about party buffs.
• Something like Dancer might work as a melee "support DPS," too.
• We don't have a Weaponskill class whose combos are completely freeform, by which I mean they can do their basic combo abilities in any order, producing different effects (think something like Mudra but with Weaponskills instead). This would be a way to differentiate Samurai from the other three melee.
• As others have mentioned, there's currently no class that manipulates TP the way that Black Mage manipulates MP (it wouldn't need to be an exact replica, of course, and shouldn't be, but the idea of a physical class with unlimited resources would still be somewhat unique). This might also be something for Samurai, given their focus on TP manipulation in FFXI.

Now, those are just ideas that fill some basic concepts that should be theoretically possible given the present design space. Some of them could be seen as reshuffling existing concepts (melee+caster, for instance) but that's generally what class design in RPGs is anyway. I would honestly say that they've covered a lot of mechanical ground in the present classes, though so in terms of innovative mechanics, I'm not sure where they might go.

We've seen defensive reactionary procs (Shield Swipe, Low Blow/Reprisal), offensive reactionary procs (Bloodletter, Firestarter/Thundercloud), resource manipulation (BLM and DRK), elemental cycling (Black Mage again), pets (SMN/SCH), limited "stack" resources (Aetherflow/Ammunition), slow-stack build to unleash something powerful (Wrath/Abandon), multiple "maintenance buffs" (Greased Lightning, Huton, Blood of the Dragon), high output healing (WHM) vs. barrier healing (SCH), and so on. Most of these sorts of things have analogues in other GCD-based themepark MMOs.

There are a few things we haven't really seen, such as a healer more focused on HoTs (such as WoW's restoration druid) or a healer focused on "spreads" (such as WoW's mistweaver monk). We've also not seen a healer that has "healing combos," though we have seen some healing procs.

So I would say that, in general, we're probably going to see most new classes be made unique through flavor and novel combinations of various party roles more than anything else. But the developers are also surely creative (I never would have predicted something like the Mudra system, for instance), so they could surprise us.