What do you feel is your job identity in flavour and gameplay?

[purgatori]

I'm a lore hound who favours casual/solo completion gameplay, so I would personally be quite happy if they sacrificed balance for the sake of matching the 'feel' of a job to its established lore. But I think that the homogenisation is an inevitable consequence of having such a finely-tuned balance for high-end content (which I don't do), and even then we end up with patches where different jobs are 'in' or 'out' of the current meta.

If there was a greater variety of solo and/or more-freeform content on offer, then having a huge amount of variation between jobs could make for some interesting gameplay. For better or worse, though, the game is focused on endgame raiding and I don't see that changing. Most of us who don't care about savage raids, Ex trials, etc. just content ourselves with dungeons, normal/24-man raids, beast tribes, hunts, etc. for our glam & other trinkets, and while we occasionally make some noise about wanting richer open-world content and the like, the raiding contingent of the community would be out there with torches and pitchforks if anything were taken away from raiding—and I don't really blame them, even if I don't sympathise.

All of that said, I'm pretty happy with the feel and 'flavour' of my MCH and GNB. They fit very well with my machina-obsessed kitty in allowing her to fulfil both DPS and Tanking roles. SCH suits her less well, except that she's a) a bookish sort, and b) she really hates primals, and so SCH sort of came along with the whole primal-slayin' SMN package. She'd still prefer some sort of machinistry-based healing though (E.g., something like a healing specced bounty hunter in SWtOR).

[Iscah]

Summoner as "dreadwyrm mage" with the focus around Bahamut, building trances and eventually summoning it felt good lore-wise to me. Maybe it's not what people expect "a summoner" to be, but it works as its own concept, and (combined with the job story's tendency to sit close to the MSQ) seems appropriate to be the class for my main character. A powerful mage with a special link to dragons, an important force in the overall story - it particularly made the climax of Heavensward and Dragonsong feel very significant.

I don't like how the core focus on Bahamut been pushed aside to make way for Phoenix - I know that has its own significance but it divides the previous focus of the job and what made it main-character-ideal to me, while creating a big new aspect with no direct story explanation. It's been over two expansions since we saw Phoenix; why are we suddenly summoning it now?

[purgatori]

Summoner as "dreadwyrm mage" with the focus around Bahamut, building trances and eventually summoning it felt good lore-wise to me. Maybe it's not what people expect "a summoner" to be, but it works as it's own concept, and (combined with the job story's tendency to sit close to the MSQ) seems appropriate to be the class for my main character. A powerful mage with a special link to dragons, an important force in the overall story - it particularly made the climax of Heavensward and Dragonsong feel very significant.

I don't like how the core focus on Bahamut been pushed aside to make way for Phoenix - I know that has its own significance but it divides the previous focus of the job and what made it main-character-ideal to me, while creating a big new aspect with no direct story explanation. It's been over two expansions since we saw Phoenix; why are we suddenly summoning it now?

A fate which has befallen many of the jobs, I fear. All these shiny new ultimate abilities, and not a lick of lore to account for them.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Demi-Phoenix makes even less sense if you've never completed the Binding Coils and never saw Phoenix in the first place. Bahamut at least got the explanation of causing a planet-wide Calamity to explain how everyone got washed in his aether.

[Saefinn]

Scholar was my main. But I feel much of what I loved about being one has been stripped from it. I was a Scholar main in Final Fantasy XI too, where they were considered military tacticians and their gameplay was versatile and adaptable to match a strategic feel. When I saw this identity port over into FFXIV's version, I was hyped. Once I got to play Scholar, it was very different to FFXI Scholar and to any healer role I played before and I loved it. It was a well designed job that felt good to play on and I like what they did with it and the fact it's nothing like FFXI's SCH was no issue what-so-ever, because it still managed to convey a tactician but in a wholly different way.

Scholar was a calculated and planned healer in that much of the time you had to be proactive and given its overall healing output was low you had to find ways to make up for it. Not only that, but faeries and damage mitigation became a part of this iteration of Scholar's identity. In order to make up for my lack of overall healing I had to learn to micromanage and better utilise my faeries and that felt good.

And my faerie choice would change depending on the fight or dungeon, so it felt meaningful on who I'd pick. And mitigation back then wasn't just about shielding allies, but in things like trash pulls the Scholar DPS rotation applied status effects that somewhat impaired foes (kinda like Blue Mage has now, though Blue Mage obvious has more) and that helped, even if it could have been better. And the way Scholar felt to DPS was that it was more about weaving DoT's than nuking (WHM was more about the nukes). The weaving of DoT's was a nice throwback to the gameplay of FFXI's SCH in that when I healed I'd weave in my helix spells, which were strong elemental DoT's. Though these DoT's in XIV weren't elemental and is not like-for-like (and I wouldn't expect it to be because they're 2 completely different games) but how it was done felt complimentary to the role and it flowed.

Heavensward threw in a couple of extra niceties to add to its tactical aesthetic through Emergency Tactics and Deployment Tactics and in Stormblood through Excogitation.

But due to the bloat of healer spells and how well healers are healing, a lot of what Scholar offered as a healer feels meaningless.
Faerie choice is now meaningless.
Seraph would be better if there was less healing bloat.
Damage mitigation from DPS spells is long gone. And would be meaningless due to healer bloat.
The DoT Mage Element is gone.
And whilst the DPS rotation was somewhat of a saving grace in SB, that's now gone.
The job feels like a husk of what it was like to play when I started, despite having a plethora of nice healing skills.


BLU, ticks more of those boxes than SCH now:
Its healing spells are minimum. No bloat really, probably could do with 1 or 2 more healing spells if anything (it isn't an issue for me, but it might be for somebody else). I have more of a healing focus with a fraction of the spells. Though I am more planned than I am on SCH, it sits in the middle of old WHM and old SCH in this respect.
It has damage mitigation through the enfeeblements it applies, and is better at it than SCH was.
It has more DoT's available than Scholar currently does. So it does the DoT Mage element better.
It has a more varied downtime, which SCH used to have, which I am able to work in as a weave (as opposed to creating downtime to spam DPS moves)
My AoE's feel more impactful than Art of War ever will and I don't even mean in numbers.


As a result, I'm enjoying healing as a Blue Mage way more. And I think there are a few lessons to be learned from it.
- Less can be more when it comes to healing spells when the content isn't pushing you for it.
- More to do in your down time is better
- There's no harm in putting status effects on trash mobs again or even improving on it.
- Art of War needs to feel better to use

I get they've probably lowered the skill floor to make it more accessible, so just give me a higher skill ceiling so I'm not bored and I figure that can be done with our downtime.

However, I feel the better option for accessibility is to create a healer job that's more accessible not by gutting the existing ones. They've not done this to DPS jobs, RDM is very accessible because it's a small, simple and straight forward rotation, but SMN has a long and complicated rotation that makes it less accessible to less experienced players. So adding jobs that are more accessible works because they've already done it.

But as I've put in the healer forums before. I'm willing to compromise at: make our down time interesting.

[LalaRu]

Sadly, today we have in forum this behavior for <insert any job>:
if (doesn't dps enough) then (is trash-talked because low dps) else (is trash-talked because made up just for raiders)

[Aurturia]

I remember during storm blood I would hear yoshi p talking about a "pure healer" fantasy a lot in live letters, I would just shrug and say well that's white mage and they can do whatever they want i guess. But for me, my scholar was a combat medic, and my dot's were a big part of that. Eos was never important to me in that fantasy i could leave her on auto and know she would generally be helpful at least, a good assistant, but keeping my people alive was my job. That all ended in shadow bringers, there was such a disconnect I just couldn't enjoy my main job anymore. All my dot's gone, a bumbling fairy of an assistant who wont take initiative and drags her wings when given an order, then seraph... where the hell did you even come from and why are you in my toolkit?
Now i dont think its unfair to have to take more direct control of the fairies but its current form I'd frankly lose the passive embrace to just let them pop in and out of existence as part of a spell animation and work as i need them to. But these are the primary reasons i fell out of love with scholar.

[Saefinn]

I remember during storm blood I would hear yoshi p talking about a "pure healer" fantasy a lot in live letters, I would just shrug and say well that's white mage and they can do whatever they want i guess. But for me, my scholar was a combat medic, and my dot's were a big part of that. Eos was never important to me in that fantasy i could leave her on auto and know she would generally be helpful at least, a good assistant, but keeping my people alive was my job. That all ended in shadow bringers, there was such a disconnect I just couldn't enjoy my main job anymore. All my dot's gone, a bumbling fairy of an assistant who wont take initiative and drags her wings when given an order, then seraph... where the hell did you even come from and why are you in my toolkit?
Now i dont think its unfair to have to take more direct control of the fairies but its current form I'd frankly lose the passive embrace to just let them pop in and out of existence as part of a spell animation and work as i need them to. But these are the primary reasons i fell out of love with scholar.

As far as I understood, WHM's hated that. They're a "pure" healer, but the game's mechanics and how healers are designed makes such a role meaningless. WHM's pure healing has no advantage over SCH's or AST's pure healing, although WHM can technically do more pure healing.

They designed the game around healers contributing via healing and DPS (and support with AST) and I've always found is appropriate because I don't recall any Final Fantasy where "pure healer" was ever a concept, even in Final Fantasy titles where you had job systems, your White Mage would still have other ways to contribute. You had stuff more heal orientated, say if you were to compare WHM and RDM. But this concept works in XIV and now that the DPS/Support aspect is dull and the healing spells bloated it's really noticeable.

And in fairness, all healer jobs are now well equipped to be pure healers. I think the healing kits for all 3 are great. I just don't think they're appropriate for the content we've got and how the game's encounters are designed.

It's really frustrating because healers in this game used to be well designed and appropriate for the game's content and really fun to play.

[Anienai]

Warrior - I break big rocks.

[MOZZYSTAR]

I joined sometime around 2.x as well. And back then, this is how people categorised the classes at the time:
SCH - The DPS/saboteur/shield healer type. For players who wanted more of a challenge, they would play this class. There was pet management, dot management, and basically a need-to-know the content or be a darn good guesser. (They also started to earn a rep as lazy healers at some point because a lot of SCHs stopped healing and mostly let their fairy do the work while they DPSd XDD But that was a short period)

WHM - The BIG reactive healer, and also the more newb-friendly healer. Reactive healing is generally easier than preventive (shielding) healing because you don't need to know the content. Back then WHM also actually used repose during dungeons to help crowd control a little bit while DPS and tank focused on one monster at a time.

DRG - Was still known as "LOL Dragoon" back then (don't know if it still is) thanks to FFXI, I think? But even still, if it was "played right," it was a really good class but supposedly it was often not played well and considered one of the more difficult DPS classes at the time. it was unofficially regarded as an off-tank because it was among the least squishiest of the DPS. If the tank went down, the DRG could actually use an aggro skill to attract the mobs to him (I think they had some cross skills with MRD because back then you needed to level a secondary class to to 15 to get your job crystal; DRG was comprised of LNC (30) and MRD (15)), hold his own for a few seconds, until the tank went back up, but they definitely weren't as beefy as an actual tank so doing that could be a bit of a challenge. Back then, the pulls (except in DD) were small. If it was a big pull, they definitely wouldn't have lasted, I don't think.

PLD Was considered the "defence/shield" tank. I never played it so I don't know much about it, tbh. I think it might have actually been considered the harder of the two (at the time) tanks because keeping aggro could be difficult if you didn't play the class well. If played well, they could totally survive an ultimate attack from a primal thanks to their defence prowess. I saw it a couple times and was blown away.

WAR Was considered the "BIG HP" tank. They would pretty much drop all (or most) of their distribution in the VIT slot. So, they were generally good at damage absorption cuz they had so much HP. This one had a much easier time getting aggro and keeping aggro. So, it might have been more newb-friendly in terms of learning to tank but I honestly don't know. But I generally liked healing these guys cuz I never... stole aggro from them as either DPS or healer. They were great.

That's about all I remember (I was in an FC full of tanks and healers. XD I was the only DPS(DRG)/Healer at the time until uhm... Ninja came out, then we had a ninja.)

For current classes and a more up-to-date view on them:
AST The synergist and adaptive healer. It was meant to be the most flexible healer and that's why we had RNG and two sects. I think it was originally intended to be another DPS healer to counterpart DRK, the newly released DPS tank. Originally, the diurnal sect had weaker heals in favour of speed spell (primarily DPS spells, I think) + regen, and nocturnal sect had slower spell speed in favour of bigger heals with shields. But the cards were virtually always the same. I'm pretty sure they fixed them up a couple times to make them more useful in the beginning, but after that I'm pretty sure they didn't touch them again. AST never had a great healing or DPS rotation. But what made it not boring was the fact that its cards were very easy to use, you could use them often, and they all had different effects, and it had other support skills like time dilation, and celestial opposition (stun version), etc. (Why WHM got to keep their stun but not us, I will never know.) Sure, a Balance might've been good for a DPS check, but so was Arrow (i.e. swift/haste), or spear (for critical hits), or virtually anything. Pretty much everything was usable. :| That, and, using the enhanced versions were great as well. I would classify SCH as possibly the hardest, AST as the middle ground, and WHM as the easiest of the healers and I thinkt hey should've stayed that way.

BRD Was the support (and was surprisingly strategic, like AST). It not only supported fellow DPS through some songs, but it also helped healers with at least one particular song combo, and tanks with other support skills like Palisade. So, depending on CD, you could totally use BRD strategically. (In fact, one time in a level 70 dng, we had a tank who wasn't using any of his cooldowns and the party mistook my CD [palisade] as his own. XD) I also liked that I could help with MP regeneration and TP regeneration (though I will never like really bad healers who spam Holy over and over, lose all their MP, get themselves in a bind and go "HELLO, BRD, MP SONG PLZ." "Sorry, bro, but I'm still on CD /using it obsessively because someone keeps running out of MP every few seconds." XD It kind of feels that DNC took away some of its identity, but at the same time I think 4.0 BRD and DNC are different enough.

I do play DRK (solo and with friends), but I don't know it and current PLD or WAR well enough to comment on how it is.

CONCLUSION In most MMOs, they had star ratings from one class to the next showing how difficult they were. Players could opt for the easier class(es) or the harder one(s). I easily think SE could have done that with all the classes here to keep their integrity instead of homogenising them. If a newb feels uncomfortable biting off more than they can chew, they can start off with an intentionally easier class and move on to try harder ones later if they wanted to (the class system in this game is really friendly for that).