Quote Originally Posted by Alestorm View Post
I recall 1.0 not having any jobs and anyone could learn any ability. Sounds nice right?

Now think about balancing any sort content around this anarchy. WHM that can spam flare? sure. PLD with a DRG jump? Go for it! It would be effectively impossible in the long run. I've heard some say this system was one of the big things that hurt 1.0 outside of the terrible story and clunky menus.
Not completely true. In 1.0 before and after jobs were introduced, you could mix and match abilities from classes but not jobs. The small handful of abilities learned from jobs were locked to the job itself. And if you equipped a job stone, you were limited to the abilities from one of the two classes required to unlock the job stone.

There was some use in going without a job stone. I remember people doing Ifrit as thaumaturge instead of black mage for some specific reason. Other than access to all class abilities I think it increased your HP? But you would lose access to the 5 or so job abilities.

But yeah, Yoshi-P has already said that he doesn’t like the job system but it’s too late to get rid of it now without a second reboot of the game. It’s also completely ingrained in the lore and you’d need to rewrite a lot of the job quests and redo cutscenes at this point.