If there is a job that can do anything

[Shurrikhan]

Pretty much my thoughts on the matter. As fun as it is to solo a lot of stuff on my tank jobs, each one of them has their own limits on that, and that just means I'm required to make friends, which is a good thing.

But let's say you were only capable, by your largely your own choice from among those that make sense for your class, out of categories A-Z, of only A D E J R, while your party members may cover the gist of the remainder as necessary for a style of encounter and to synergize with their surrounding party members. Would that more myriad specialization be inherently be worse than the A-C of the trinity, around which any truly unique class factors are presented as second thoughts or, at best, least common multiples or modular efficiencies?

I like having noticeable specialization towards self-mitigating, cross-mitigating, undoing, or dealing damage, but just not to the point that they blanket the more unique identities of any given class or encourage players to tunnel-vision within their own "role" rather than work as a team, still aware and calculating for all necessary tasks or goals at once even if choosing one to focus upon.

[Kazrah]

Would that more myriad specialization be inherently be worse than the A-C of the trinity, around which any truly unique class factors are presented as second thoughts or, at best, least common multiples or modular efficiencies?

I think it would be worse, and it's definitely important to find that balance between every job in a role looking alike and the class-based cluster#@$& that was FFXI.

Take the shapeshifter job in my forum sig (I know, shameless plug, but needed a crafted example). I knew every tank job in this game followed a template of what skills and abilities they learned at certain levels, and I mapped out that template to make that shapeshifter while trying to provide some sort of deviation through the wild card spots in the tank template to make the job unique. Whether such a concept could work or not is another story, but the skills and abilities listed in it follow the same leveling path as every other tank.

Trying to keep jobs simple yet diversified is tough task, and something I think devs have to grapple with everyday for both current and future jobs.

[Shurrikhan]

I think it would be worse, and it's definitely important to find that balance between every job in a role looking alike and the class-based cluster#@$& that was FFXI.

Take the shapeshifter job in my forum sig (I know, shameless plug, but needed a crafted example). I knew every tank job in this game followed a template of what skills and abilities they learned at certain levels, and I mapped out that template to make that shapeshifter while trying to provide some sort of deviation through the wild card spots in the tank template to make the job unique. Whether such a concept could work or not is another story, but the skills and abilities listed in it follow the same leveling path as every other tank.

Trying to keep jobs simple yet diversified is tough task, and something I think devs have to grapple with everyday for both current and future jobs.

Very true. I'd just wager that the present trajectory will likely fetter the game's potential designs in the long run, sacrificing job identity and the available variety of encounters if it continues as is. "Role" has had a bit too strong a grip on design, to the point that future jobs feel like they're likely just to feel like faint redistributions or outright carbon copies.

It feels like there are just too many unnecessary design constraints assumed necessary. A lot of them have since shed their weight in precedent, such as by classes/jobs no longer necessarily having an equal amount of skill keys or skills, but the way we acquire skills are unchanged, or the fact that skills are always given in an assigned order or solely through quests or levels. Take your Blue Mage ideas, for instance. You've clearly put effort into matching its previously unique form of skill acquisition into XIV's system by giving them a assigned order and timings, but why should that be necessary? It will almost certainly be a "hero class", one impossible to level without having first reached the level at which one starts its expansion on another class. It can afford inefficiencies or overefficiencies over particular levels. (And it's not as if the current classes aren't already imbalanced over various level spreads before reaching level cap.) Why should it be limited to only x abilities ever learnable, rather than x usable at a time from a more traditionally (i.e. larger) sized bank of abilities? Such would necessarily disallow a would-be hybrid from ever having a satisfyingly full and cohesive toolkit for any role or mix thereof, whatever it may be.

[basketofseals]

I would like to just chime in that I hate roleless multiplayer games. You feel less like you're working together and more so just working on the same thing and happen to be in the same room.

[Shurrikhan]

I would like to just chime in that I hate roleless multiplayer games. You feel less like you're working together and more so just working on the same thing and happen to be in the same room.

This is actually how I feel more often in MMOs with tight roles than ones without them, so long as the combat isn't overly lenient. When playing 4-man dungeons in Blade&Soul at or below the recommended gear levels, for instance, I'm dead unless I play my part, and the others play theirs. That requires me to be placing myself so that I can get my CC off on x target at a particular time, be distant enough but not too far to charge-stun y, AoE burn group z before they get their non-interruptable cast off, etc, and for any of that to happen, I need the path between cleared, things baited away from where we'll be AoEing, the cleaving mob drawn and kited, etc., etc., and at any decent difficulty those kinds of things can take a huge amount spontaneous assignment of tasks and nonvocal communication, the very things that make you feel like more than just yourself.

It's also exactly what strict roles remove, allowing you to play as if you were just striking a dummy that merely directed your movement here or there periodically; only the interaction between healers and tanks, or very rarely in timing raid debuffs or timing ones' skills down to those debuffs, remains interdependent from what could have been just about anything and everything.

[Enjuden]

With how job balance is, I'm going to say no. Until SE can figure out what they're doing, I would never trust an Onion Knight to be remotely balanced in any content. And no, having them (or any class) balanced after six to nine months is not okay.

[Canadane]

Cast off your soul stone.
Go 1.0 style all over again.

[Reinha]

I would not like a job that doesn't have a role, because I like the design of having 3 roles in a party. However a job which can become all roles, one at a time, would be very fun. Summoner and Scholar are like this.

[Fhaerron]

WoW has specialisation.

For example: Paladin
Retribution = DPS
Holy = Heal
Protection = Tank

Of course you can only have 1 class in there so if you take Paladin, you can only choose from those 3 specs. In this game you have multiple classes / jobs on 1 character so you can do everything with 1 toon instead of having to make a million of characters.

[Heatmind]

I read the comment of the person who responded.
As I said earlier, I am Japanese, so I'm not good at English.
However, I realized that everyone has various ideas.

I am sorry for bad english, but I thank you for commenting.