Please DON'T remove the Armoury system

[Velhart]

Do you disagree with or dislike anything the current dev team has planned or has done?

Is being cynical and pessimistic a requirement to be part of the FFXIV community?

[NotoriousZow]

I love the changes they have made, and I like the direction they are going. I don't know how people can truely even judge the whole class/job relationship right now when jobs aren't even here yet. I hope they keep the classes around. I like the whole system. =)

[darkstarpoet1]

I really hate pulling from other MMOs to give/make a point but I suggest looking up some of the melee WHMs in XI, equipped properly they could out DPS some of the highest DPS-able jobs in that game...its not impossible.

And to make reference within the game, duo'd Toto-Rak (LNC and CNJ) from levels 25 (each) to 35, CNJ did engage (melee) on the monsters and made it A LOT faster (since you are under a 1hr time limit) and was worth it. Granted this was during 1.19 but I don't see why CNJ still couldn't do it now.

remember mages still had their darts and tp moves in 1.19. they no longer have either. the only tp move a mage can use now is second wind.

[Eva]

I would also be heartbroken if this system was removed. This is one of the things about FFXIV i love the most.

Frankly, I am questioning whether the job system is the most awesome system that could be implemented here, but without being able to see it in practice, I cannot come to a proper solution.

Might be too late to mention this here, but what I had envisioned was an unlockable class tree. Levelling up one basic class to 50 would unlock advanced classes in that area. Levelling up an advanced class would unlock a master class. You could even eventually implement secret classes that would involve finishing multiple master classes. I feel like making it 50 rather than say 30 would make the unlockable classes more gratifying to obtain and add a hardcore element to the system.

For example, if you ranked up Pugilist to 50 it would unlock, say, Monk, Thief and Soldier as advanced classes. Monk 50 would unlock Bishop. Bishop 50 and another master class would unlock Templar. I shouldn't have to mention the plethora of classes that have been used in previous FF's.

The possibilities are truly endless and only limited to how many unique abilities could be thought up and that is where the creativity of the developers would come in. You could have over 50 classes to choose from. Combine this with the armoury system and you could create a truly unique character build with so many abilities to choose from.

I truly believe this is an everybody wins solution here. Casual players can be satisfied with having a basic class at rank 50 and be able to participate in endgame activities. Hardcore players can aim to complete multiple master classes for a specialized powerful character build of abilities. For the ultra hardcore, complete all classes.

If the time it took to level a class to 50 was, say, 1-3 months, this would allow new players to jump right in, get a class to 50, and play with their friends. If there was a problem with coming up with so many abilities, abilities could be learned every 5 levels.

Anyway, just what I had envisioned for the armoury system. I remain, for the time being, to have faith in the development team to come up with a system that is just as awesome or more so. ^^

[Jynx]

The classes as they are are doomed to either languish in obscurity or flat out be removed from the game. The "Armoury" system is allready giving off it's own death throws.

Class specific skills, bonuses on specific classes, ect.

Personally I hope the jobs do such a good job at defining our roles as players that the class system eventually dissapears and the developers focus on keeping us unique but usefull. Jack of all trades for all jobs ends up with everyone doing the same thing only slighty different way and ends up a boring homogonized mess as we seen at XIV launch.

[darkstarpoet1]

The classes as they are are doomed to either languish in obscurity or flat out be removed from the game. The "Armoury" system is allready giving off it's own death throws.

Class specific skills, bonuses on specific classes, ect.

Personally I hope the jobs do such a good job at defining our roles as players that the class system eventually dissapears and the developers focus on keeping us unique but usefull. Jack of all trades for all jobs ends up with everyone doing the same thing only slighty different way and ends up a boring homogonized mess as we seen at XIV launch.

this is where you are wrong. with the new system you have the exact thing you complained about with the old system. everyone will not only do the same things, but have the very same setups of skills as everyone else on that class. that is under the system that you support now.

under the old system there were many more options on what skills and abilities you could use along with point allotments. that was tons of extra ways in which people could make their character different and set them up however they enjoyed to play.

no matter how bad you claim the classes were they were exactly the same grouping as there is now. there was a tank/mage/dd then just as well as there is now. the good thing the armory system did was allow many more ways in which you could get a party. if you are on a big server it may not matter much, but on a small server like i am trying to find a party at 9pm eastern when there is a total of 50 na players 1-50 on isn't very easy.

the original way allowed another class to fill the role in the party that was needed whenever they needed to. i'll use thm for example. it was the dot/nuker, but if there was no con online to party with the thm could fill that role and heal. if a gladiator wasn't available a marauder could fill his role. it allowed diversity and flexibility within the party for people to cover another party members role if there was not enough of that class to fill it.

at least under the old system we could have classes with completely different gear/stats/abilities. the new way you see a class and they are completely the same as the next one you see.

i enjoyed the freedom and that is why i got the game in the first place and stayed for a year and the reason i left xi after only 2 weeks.

[Jynx]

this is where you are wrong. with the new system you have the exact thing you complained about with the old system.

Wait...your serious.

Under the "Old" system every class could litteraly do everything.

Pug, Marauder, Glad, Lancer could all tank like pros, do damage, spike hate, nothing any of them could do was special in any single way.

Con and Thaum might as well have had the same name as there spells were almost interchangable a person playing the game would have no idea what the difference between the two classes was.

Sure it was "Freedom" but for what? Letting every single class fill every single spot in a party was a good idea on paper, but as we have seen it was terrible in execution. I'm sorry but if you get upset when you need to use a variaty of people and classes to play the game you need to re-think why you are playing a MMO.

"The holy trinity" will always exist, go check out Star Wars I hear it's rather loose with it's class system. Then again it looks like a single player game wrapped in a MMOskin to me, but who am I to judge. Just giving you a suggestion sense you don't seem pleased with the game current direction.

Not that I'm saying "GTFO" either, I just think it's odd that someone actually found the class system in it's earliest state enjoyable at all. The freedom just led to me being bored and forced to level other jobs just so I could be good at my main class. Hell at least XI only made you level the other job half the way, FFXIV vanilla you had to level it to 50 to get any of the damn good skills.

Leveling Lancer felt just like leveling marauder, hell even more so when I had all my marauder skills on my Lancers hot-bar...ugh.

[ViperGrendal]

Have to say I totally agree with Poet on this. The old armory system allowed much better customization of your character. The more you worked on the other the classes the more options you had to customize the way you used different classes. How anyone could think Lancer and Marauder felt the same in the old system is beyond me. In the 1.20 system there's hardly any point in leveling up another class if you're content with the one you're playing as. Not to mention if a class is practically useless like THM, there's no hope in ever using it for anything other than messing around. Previously, especially pre 1.18, you could run THM as nuker/debuffer, healer/buffer, or a straight DD. If you had a good enough party you could almost run some fights without a mage if the party had the right abilities in place and the players were good enough. After 1.20 it doesn't take much skill at all other than being able to pay attention to a health bar, and if your healers can't keep up you have little hope of being able to manage yourself enough to keep the fight going since you can't build TP fast enough or throw a cure on yourself that's worth half a crud.

In summation, old system = lots of variety and always a way to better yourself, new system = little variety and little hope to better yourself. Unless you want to play a different class because you really like it, there's little reason to play it other than saying you have it.


BTW, I kinda like the idea of unlockable classes. Then have the "master classes" require a certain subset of R50's to unlock them. Maybe a game will come up with a system like that some day. Lord knows FFXIV is going the complete opposite direction, so it's not gonna happen here.

[ViperGrendal]

Under the "Old" system every class could litteraly do everything.

Pug, Marauder, Glad, Lancer could all tank like pros, do damage, spike hate, nothing any of them could do was special in any single way.

Con and Thaum might as well have had the same name as there spells were almost interchangable a person playing the game would have no idea what the difference between the two classes was.

I just had to quote this. Are we even playing the same game? Or do I need to do I need to start doing drugs? Sorry about the sarcasm, but I can't understand how anyone that really played the old system effectively could think this way.

[Maea]

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So at this point you have two choices:

Settle for a convoluted class/job system with a lot of meaningless complexity and inconveniences, or

Ask for the abolishment of the class system so you can exist as a more well-rounded character in the game world free of fetters.

Personally I think that the class/job system is much more "well-rounded" and "free of fetters" than things would be if we only had jobs (at least, the way jobs have been envisioned so far). Rather than being meaninglessly complex, I feel like having both classes and jobs adds a level of interesting depth to the ways we can use our characters. Since jobs can sort of be considered advanced versions of current classes, I'm not sure what about it would be confusing once we see the whole picture. Whether or not it's confusingly complex is probably something best left to be determined once jobs actually come out, though.

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The job system on the other hand is just giving up cross-classing skills to make your current class more effective....which makes me think that they're going to completely override the armory system anyways (since 8 people highly effective at their role > 4 jack-of-all-trades...8-job parties are going to be more popular than 8 persons using the armory system).

What about the times when players want to solo or low-man something? Not every role is well-equipped to stand alone or in a small group, so in these settings classes will really shine.

That's one of the two things about it that I didn't like, that and being able to use any WS regardless of weapon.

I always felt they should redefine class from "Sword user" or "Spear user" or whatever, and choose independently what classes can use what weapons (a long with linking WS's/combos to each weapon), such as in FFXI, while giving each class abilities exclusive to them and abilities that can be cross classed.

But here's what I don't understand. Jobs are supposed to be more defined roles, but classes are VERY defined as it is. Gladiators most damaging attack doesn't let them deal much damage as they would need to, in order for them to ever be anything but a tank. LNC and THM are in the same situation as a Damage Dealers. There is currently no way that Lnc could really do anything other than deal damage. They can't be a primary healer or be a primary tank, all they can do is deal damage, and THM crush the enemies with nukes. How are jobs supposed to be more defined than that?

In order to have classes and jobs coexist in this game, they'd have to make all classes excel at nothing, and be the jack-of-all-trades, while having jobs the specialists. Or possibly have classes as being base templates for jobs, but there would be no point for that unless each class has multiple jobs tied to it.

I agree that having classes defined by their weapons may not have been the ideal way to go about things, though it was an interesting concept. This fact may be part of the reason why Conjurer is a fairly poor melee fighter while FFXI's White Mage was relatively competent; White Mage could use hammers, which were good for smacking things, while Conjurers can only use canes and wands.

I think it's very likely that classes will eventually branch off into multiple jobs. It worked really well in games like Ragnarok Online (old MMO, I know, but still a job system people love) and Final Fantasy Tactics. They might instead go the route of adding new classes to become new jobs, but even in that case the path from generalized class to more specific job becomes an interesting measure of character progression, at least to me.

Because a system which is suppose to give you absolute freedom can not coexist with a system that restricts you, both are mutually exclusive and should be common sense to you. What we have today isn't even the original concept of the armoury system, it's a shell of its former self, so the new development team proved me right by their slow destruction of it in preparation for the new Job System.

Once again I disagree, and I think Jennestia put it well. Even in your own post you hinted to it: they can coexist nicely because they ARE mutually exclusive, so the fact that they differ so much doesn't mean they have to work against each other. Each one has its appropriate time and place. The Armoury system has been drastically altered from its original beginnings, but I think it's evolving rather than being destroyed. I agree that trying to saddle the job system on top of the old class system would've been chaos, but I think recent class changes have made it so that the two can work together quite nicely. Like the guy above you said, maybe by the time jobs are released, current restrictions on classes can be eased somewhat, since jobs will present a clear direction for those who desire it.

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Might be too late to mention this here, but what I had envisioned was an unlockable class tree.
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This system sounds really awesome to me It would be great if they considered something like that!

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Personally I hope the jobs do such a good job at defining our roles as players that the class system eventually dissapears and the developers focus on keeping us unique but usefull. Jack of all trades for all jobs ends up with everyone doing the same thing only slighty different way and ends up a boring homogonized mess as we seen at XIV launch.

As I said earlier in this post, what about cases where you need more flexibility? I'm happy to see jobs being added, but I don't think classes need to be removed just to make room for them. I agree with the people below you who are saying that flexibility doesn't have to lead to homogeneity. However, I think I'll take the middle ground in this argument, since I feel that classes were in need of reform, but those reforms seem a bit too stringent for my tastes. Perhaps as more classes/jobs are added to the Armoury, the need for cross-classing will decline, since players will have more options as to the roles they can assume. However, such additions will be a long time coming, and until then being able to build our own skill-set from the five DoW and two DoM is the best shot we have.