Why the class system isn't bad, feat. Ranger

[Raggnar_Rokk]

My final words
I love the Final Fantasy series, I love Final Fantasy XIV, and because I do I can't stay silent anymore. 'Cause when you love something, or someone, you want it to become the very best it could be. I've said my final word on this topic, and should I have any factual errors about this, feel free to point it out to me. And if you have any other questions, feel free to ask. Hopefully we can have a word from Square Enix in response to this!

So long, friend, and see you at Moogle

[Raggnar_Rokk]

Oh I didn't know you could bypass the limit, thanks for pointing that out. Happy reading ^^

[dragonseth07]

The playerbase has shown it's too stupid to handle a system as complicated as what we have now. The number of times I see a level 50 Lancer or a DRK without Provoke make me agree with the dev team on this.

[Raggnar_Rokk]

The playerbase has shown it's too stupid to handle a system as complicated as what we have now. The number of times I see a level 50 Lancer or a DRK without Provoke make me agree with the dev team on this.

Interesting. From my own experience I've never seen any base class at lv50, or seen a DRK without provoke etc. Maybe I'm just lucky.
In any case I don't want the game to suffer just so that a selected few players get carried without actually learning the game. For all I know the community in this game is more than willing to help newcomers git gud.

[Myrian]

While I'm not strictly opposed to the idea of branching jobs, I don't think keeping the current system does more good than harm. Apart from the stats issue of Arcanist and misconceptions on jobs, the team seems hesitant to add jobs that will feel too similar to each other. While Bard still uses a bow, Ranger is likely not an option. Balancing is also an issue, as a change to anything *but* the shared class skills risks an imbalance.

Conceptually, some of these things may seem like easy fixes, but keep in mind that the current game is using a bedrock of spaghetti code inherited from 1.0 that causes oddities and issues that linger to this day. This makes everything the programmers do more of a hassle than it otherwise might be.

[Shurrikhan]

The playerbase has shown it's too stupid to handle a system as complicated as what we have now. The number of times I see a level 50 Lancer or a DRK without Provoke make me agree with the dev team on this.

There's a difference, though, between being "stupid" and being expectant that when an entire system has been purposely made obsolete, that it would be stated as such and its bypass be facilitated. Let's say from an initial road there's a straight path and an off-shoot. The straight is flooded, washed out, and eventually scarcely paved, but by all appearances at its start appears to be the main highway. The off-shoot is newer, but, being an off-shoot, doesn't necessarily seem to be going in the same route as the road you've been taking for the whole first half of your journey. Would anyone who stays to the same road automatically be an idiot?

This is no Monty Hall issue, nor is it necessarily an issue of laziness. Whereas most MMOs already show in greyed out tooltips nonetheless able to be expanded on mouseover every ability to come, and will frequently highlight later stages upon unlocking a dependency (e.g. a job skill for you level, to be gained from its quest), or puts ability acquisition into the hands of the players alongside supportive strategies for prioritization, this game does little to reveal what a player stands to gain. One would normally also suppose that if a class is given as an option, rather than being stuck at level 30 until acquiring X job, that the class itself is a balanced and viable option, even if niche. Even in the Yoshi era of 1.x, I could main-tank Ifrit Ex as a Pugilist, trading dps for added evasion and enmity, while Monk capped out at approximately Darkhold tanking. But now? The last time there was any reason to use a class in ARR+ was Garuda Ex farms, to handle the spiny plume. It makes little sense to leave something so inviable. So why would one intuit that?

Uncommunicative? Certainly. Misinformed? Absolutely. But stupid?

While I'm not strictly opposed to the idea of branching jobs, I don't think keeping the current system does more good than harm. Apart from the stats issue of Arcanist and misconceptions on jobs, the team seems hesitant to add jobs that will feel too similar to each other. While Bard still uses a bow, Ranger is likely not an option. Balancing is also an issue, as a change to anything *but* the shared class skills risks an imbalance.

And yet we already have ways of varying effects based on whether the character is PvPing. Why would it then be so impossible to vary a class skill based on its job? Maybe, somehow, the code is an issue—maybe even enough to explain why we still don't have job bonus stats to override class stat bonuses, to SMN and SCH's detriment even today—but the design philosophy cannot be the reason.

And wouldn't the shared class skills, unless adjusted differently per branch job, be the worst culprit? By adjusting the utilities of effectiveness of one Arcanist skill to balance SCH generally or among heals, they may in turn create a new imbalance in favor of SMN among dps. Even if the effectiveness remains the same, one job may utilize the shared skills differently, leading to a higher effective output.

Conceptually, some of these things may seem like easy fixes, but keep in mind that the current game is using a bedrock of spaghetti code inherited from 1.0 that causes oddities and issues that linger to this day. This makes everything the programmers do more of a hassle than it otherwise might be.

It isn't, though. Yoshida already consumed that excuse in explaining why ARR had to be as barebone as it was — they were rewriting all that "spaghetti" code. The only debilitating or antiquated code to remain was what he introduced in 1.2, when adding combos.

[SyzzleSpark]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOHZBr4u7yk - look at these morons. Go do your lvl 30 quest scrubs. /s

[Acidblood]

The Bard is a relatively easy example (and would Ranger really feel that different to a Bard?), but there are plenty of harder ones... Monk and Black Mage for example both have their primary mechanics built into their class (Stances / Greased Lightning and Astral Fire / Umbra Ice respectively), and as such it would be very hard to create new jobs from these classes and make them feel different without outright breaking these mechanics (or stripping the mechanics out of the classes and giving them only to the Jobs, which would make the classes painfully boring.. like Lancer).

And then there is the issue of balance; it is one thing to create 22 abilities, it is another to create 22 abilities that are well balanced and designed for 2 (or more) jobs to build on them... Summoner and Scholar being a good example of some issues; e.g. you can't just increase a Summoner’s basic DoT damage (even though they may need it as a pure DPS class) without also giving that increase to Scholar (who, being a healer, probably doesn’t), and Scholar has to wait a long time for their basic healing utilities, like an AoE heal (lvl35) and debuff remover (lv40), so that Summoner doesn't also get them (White Mage and Astro get similar abilities at level 10 and 18 for comparison).

So yes, while the class / job system is a nice romantic notion, practically it is just easier, more flexible, and allows for better design (from level 1 to cap) if each job stands alone without the shackles of a shared base class (which may have been designed years earlier) dictating what it can and cannot possibly be.

All that said, could FFXIV use more roles than just Tank, Healer and DPS? Possibly, but that is a design decision separate from classes / jobs and a whole other discussion.

[Shurrikhan]

I feel like a Bard and Ranger easily could be distinct from each other. I just feel like XIV's current, very strict armory system -- applying a specific number of nonadjustable (except by being in PvP) abilities to a class, and then job skills atop them and beyond them with no meaningful expansive or synergistic passives being added by the job to alter or really play on what the class provides -- doesn't suit those potential distinctions. In part that's because the class is so bare-bone, though, not because it already lends itself so much towards Bard, nor because Bard already does or should fill every function or aesthetic that a Ranger might. In short, the ARR class was never really designed to be compelling in itself, and that's the real mistake. Not that it's holding Bard and Ranger back, but because it was only ever a non-entity, or a mere step in another's aesthetic. Had it been a fulfilling class from the start, which Bard then provides its own spin on, we could in turn see Ranger provide yet another.

The same is true of Rogue, Ninja, and any possibility of a Thief stemming from the same class. Rogue in its own right looks ridiculous. All of the gaudy wind-streaked spinning makes no sense until the advent of Huton, which, sadly, still makes little of the aesthetic. The later-added Armor Crush looks far more practical and sounds more the saboteur than Ninja feels—it seems a ready fit for a Thief more so than NIN. And yet, rather than all the wind-themed abilities that Rogue excuses through its later attachment to Ninja, it alone affects Huton.

I can understand the dislike of classes as they've been deployed in ARR. Their only fit to the game is that, frankly, a novice adventurer probably shouldn't wake up one day, grab a sword from a local coliseum trainer and think "I'm a level 1 in a lost art I don't yet know exists". It's a restriction to better suit lore, at best.

But it doesn't have to be. The concept itself is solid. So long as there are diverse ways to use a particular set of techniques, whether in bowmanship or hand-to-hand combat, the division between class and job, and any other jobs branching from the same class, can be a powerful tool for customization. But the class needs to then be the majority of the gameplay, at least at first (say, level 50), and the job shouldn't be purely additional strengths. Though that doesn't mean it needs to introduce weaknesses, there needs at least to be other meaningful, viable, and enjoyable benefits that the player is restricting himself from by choosing to specialize in the job. The job should allow an advanced and distinct path for additional skills, but the many combinations of borrowed aspects from other classes, focusing on x portion of gameplay, should be at least as interesting collectively and nearly as interesting individually.

To reiterate, the issue is the implementation and priorities, both, in how XIV's class-job system was designed. You absolutely CAN increase a Summoner's basic DoT damage without increasing a Scholar's by the same amount. We already adjust potencies, adjust stat multiplies, and even remove entire effects and add new conditionals by a check made to every ability from simply entering a PvP situation. Why should variance by job then be a necessary impossibility? It may not be possible with their current coding, but that's an issue of the code — not the concept itself. It's the implementation, and the fact that the class is being treated as a lore-based preliminary period rather than as a center or central node for customization.

By the time you allow for dynamic animations (even if as simple as adding particle effects, changing anchor points, or adjusting the animation's speed based on attack rate), for instance, there's really nothing to hold back a Pugilist from sourcing a Dancer, nothing to force the Rogue to be as gaudy as a Ninja, nor any undermechanic a Ranger can't play off of differently from a Bard.

[RopeDrink]

Jobs are just an extention, and I'm fine with that. I come from a long-line of MMORPGs where playing any class requires creating and levelling a new character from scratch. Lately some have adopted the 'one character for all classes' approach (eg. Skyforge), but here it goes deeper (not much). I have no problem with it, even if I do agree that a Rogue shouldn't anything like a Ninja, for example, but hey, I don't see them widening the rabbit hole anytime soon.