Shared Classes Are Not Failures (ie SCH/SMN)

[Shurrikhan]

Was it the original intention?
I only started playing in 4.4, but I thought back in 1.0 and 2.0 the purpose was so to use skills from the other classes you levelled a la FF5.

Yes and no.

Honestly, a large part of the confusion comes simply from the fact that 1.x intended one thing but did it so poorly that it trended in a different direction.

The original idea was to build up skills. Your character had one level, rather than one for each job/class. Your weapon proficiency ranks (quite purposely not called levels) which were secondary to character level, merely offering you additional skills.

You could thereby take various traits and skills from different weapon proficiencies (classes) in order to build your own job. Want to be an elemental gladiator? Go for it. The problem was that the intersections between the weapon styles were poorly thought out. Each class had its own themes, but they were neither impactful or modular enough to source a build-your-own job system in a meaningful way. The vision was there, but the implementation -- along with any depth via undermechanics to create space for that vision -- fell painfully short.

Had ARR gone the other way -- fixing what failed rather than abandoning it for only the barest parts of a WoW or XI experience -- you'd likely see a far more RPG-ish take on the game today, with a longer but more cohesive leveling experience, rather than what often feels like a way just to extend time played metrics. 'This shade of pre-packaged playstyle might be more to your liking than the others' becomes a carrot for which you repeat the same leveling experience over and over and over, just with slightly different combat spins of which none may particularly fit what you want, rather than having one that is distinctly your own.