What Happened to Customization & Specialization?

[Jandor]

Role actions are terrible anyway, cross-class was superior in almost every way.

[BillyKaplan]

Role actions are terrible anyway, cross-class was superior in almost every way.

Except the part where you had to stop whatever you were doing and level a class you had absolutely no interest in ever touching again. Oh, the many THMs in leveling roulette who wanted to get to 26...

[Ameela]

Except the part where you had to stop whatever you were doing and level a class you had absolutely no interest in ever touching again. Oh, the many THMs in leveling roulette who wanted to get to 26...

To be fair it was at least a way of incentivising you to try out different classes, which could have lead to you finding something you liked that you may have never tried otherwise.
That's what happened to me anyway, had absolutely no interest in Monk until I had to level it for Warrior cross-classes and now it's my go-to DPS.

[BillyKaplan]

To be fair it was at least a way of incentivising you to try out different classes, which could have lead to you finding something you liked that you may have never tried otherwise.

I'm certain that was at least part of the logic behind it. Since we can run all battle classes on a single character, why not give us a reason to at least try them all out? But there's a catch to that, too, because a class plays v. differently at 15 compared to 50, 60, and oh boy, 70. It was all the more so the case in HW where BRD and MCH were bow and gun mages. So in a sense, the itty bitty tiny bit you get to experience is nothing but false advertisement. It's one thing to try a job based on what you see in end-game, and then power through the leveling process, it's another to go through the leveling process only to see the end result is nothing like what you thought it would be.

[Ameela]

I'm certain that was at least part of the logic behind it. Since we can run all battle classes on a single character, why not give us a reason to at least try them all out? But there's a catch to that, too, because a class plays v. differently at 15 compared to 50, 60, and oh boy, 70. It was all the more so the case in HW where BRD and MCH were bow and gun mages. So in a sense, the itty bitty tiny bit you get to experience is nothing but false advertisement. It's one thing to try a job based on what you see in end-game, and then power through the leveling process, it's another to go through the leveling process only to see the end result is nothing like what you thought it would be.

That's more the result of Heavensward severely altering the way certain classes play at end-game.
Back when level 50 was the cap there wasn't really much of a difference between a level 20-30 class or a level 50 job, as you got most of your core skills early on and everything after was extra stuff to make those early skills stronger, the only exception to this was White Mage, whose later skills significantly alter the way the job is played and even then you could make the argument that was just the players using the skills in ways the devs didn't anticipate them to.
I never said the cross-class skill system didn't need to be changed, just that it wasn't as bad as it's made out to be because it actually made sense in the context of when it was first introduced.