Possible removal of Classes

[Connor]

I think the main problems with class / job interactions is that it causes programming nightmares for developers.

Scholar and Summoner are a good example of this; because they both come from the same class, it's difficult for them to make adjustments on one job without having an effect on the other. And then there's more minor issues like having to constantly reset attributes.
And because Summoner comes from Arcanist, they cannot ever move it from being a DoT-spammer to a more 'traditional'-type of FF Summoner, nor can they do anything to Summon I / II because it would affect Scholar.


The same goes for a job like Bard. Because it comes from the Archer class, it can't have its own unique identity as a 'Bard'. And personally I think they squished these two jobs together just because they couldn't think of a way to balance a Ranger job that was full-on dd.

Existing classes also restrict future job options. For as long as Bard exists as an Archer class there cannot ever be a Ranger class in FFXIV, despite 'Ranger' being one of the iconic FF jobs (and not remotely related to Bard). The same goes for, say, Ninja; as long as Ninja comes from Rogue there cannot ever be a 'Thief' job in FFXIV.

There are potential opportunities for many things (job adjustments, future jobs, creating a unique identity) that would happen if the class system was done away with.

[bass9020]

The same goes for a job like Bard. Because it comes from the Archer class, it can't have its own unique identity as a 'Bard'. And personally I think they squished these two jobs together just because they couldn't think of a way to balance a Ranger job that was full-on dd.

Existing classes also restrict future job options. For as long as Bard exists as an Archer class there cannot ever be a Ranger class in FFXIV, despite 'Ranger' being one of the iconic FF jobs (and not remotely related to Bard). The same goes for, say, Ninja; as long as Ninja comes from Rogue there cannot ever be a 'Thief' job in FFXIV.

There are potential opportunities for many things (job adjustments, future jobs, creating a unique identity) that would happen if the class system was done away with.

They should have never added Bard in 1.0 unless they added a new class. It was an odd decision honestly. They could have changed things for 2.0 like beaucse of the calamity Bards became this so and so class and now Rangers stepped out of the wood work but they didn't do that.

Yoshi specifically said they didn't want to add thief so the rogue thing isn't because of the classes. But I agree that summoner and scholar is a mess with the base class sharing.

[Wilan]

Classes are so strictly woven into the world's lore that it'd be hard to just pretend they never existed. But what they can do is just remove them from the game's system. One of the things people ask about the most in the Novice Network is jobs, where is the Black Mage guild, how can they unlock a Dragoon and so on. It would really be such a stretch to have the game call you a Dragoon from level one but have the quests send you to the lancer's guild to learn the ropes? It's just another level of complexity that nobody really needs, and I'm glad to see Yoshi and the team are considering removing it.

The same goes for a job like Bard. Because it comes from the Archer class, it can't have its own unique identity as a 'Bard'. And personally I think they squished these two jobs together just because they couldn't think of a way to balance a Ranger job that was full-on dd.

Classes/jobs aside, many of the FF classic jobs come from simpler systems, where most times they were carbon copies of each other but with different stat allocation, different equips and a gimmick command. FFXIV often rolls various similar iterations of the same concept into a single Job, and this is how we have a bard that's also a ranger, a warrior that's also a berserker, a rogue that's also a ninja, a white mage that's also a geomancer and so on. I feel like a Thief and a Ninja would be too similar to each other to need two different jobs, or that a bard's songs alone wouldn't have been enough to make it its own job, even though they were back in SNES era. I'm not going to be surprised if RDM will turn out to have Rune Fencer elements in its mechanics too.