I really don't understand the use of the word "Warrior" in this world

[YukikoKurosawa]

So doing the Warrior job story, we learn that Warriors, the job, originated from a tribe of Roegaedan who specialized specifically in the use of greataxes and harnessed the power of their "inner beast", and called themselves Warriors.

So Warrior in this setting is a person who wields an axe and uses their anger as fuel for their attacks. Specifically this is what constitutes a "Warrior" in Eorzea. Except......that's not true. Warrior is used in the literal dictionary definition by many characters to refer to combatants. Because that's what a real-world warrior is. Lets look at the dictionary definition:

"Warrior: (especially in former times) a brave or experienced soldier or fighter.
"the warrior heroes of ancient Greece""

Warrior, the term, is used in what is obviously the proper meaning of the word colloquially throughout this game. And, of course, our characters are called Warriors of light.

So we have the actual dictionary definition of what a warrior is (what anyone would assume one means when they say "warrior")......and we have a unique class of people who specifically wield axes and use their anger in battle....who call themselves "Warriors". So we have ordinary warriors.....and then we have warriors (the job). So a Warrior player is Warrior Warrior of Light. It's kinda silly.

Now I understand every game has to have a warrior class. But in most games, warriors are just people who can wield a wide variety of weapons and just don't have any special powers, just basically some dude who picked up a sword or whatever. But in this game, Warriors, the class, are their own unique class, who wield a specific weapon and nothing else. Like a Red Mage, or a Monk, or an Astrologian. It makes sense with these classes because they're literally a class with their own unique field of training. Warriors are just supposed to be ordinary dudes who picked up any weapon and go to battle. They're the "vanilla" class of any game, they're not really a class.

It's just ......wierd to me that Warrior in this setting is both the literal definition of the word warrior and also a unique class with it's own unique powers. Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way though.

[Nafreyu]

Is this important to you?

[Enkidoh]

It's like the Bard situation, where there is the minstrel type who are travelling musicians earning coin by singing in taverns and the like... and the actual Discipline of War (Job class) that are Archers who started singing songs in battle to inspire their comrades - two seperate concepts which also are similar.

The confusion with the WAR Job and the Warrior of Light term goes back to the original FFI where the concepts first originated, (FFXIV owes a lot to the original FF game), and the two ideas from then on became reoccurring elements throughout the FF series, WAR as a reoccurring Job, usually a physical damage dealer that specializes in most weapon types but tended to favour axes or swords, and the Warriors of Light which was usually the term given to the player characters in the earlier FF games (the term kind of dropped out of favour by FFVI, only to be 'rediscovered' later on when Square started rereleasing touched up versions of the early FF games on modern consoles), and it's use here in FFXIV is part of Yoshi's desire to have FFXIV honour and reference the FF series in general.

Interestingly there was little confusion in the original NES version of FFI between these terms as they were translated slightly differently - the WAR Job was actually known as Fighter in the original NES FFI, and the 'Warriors of Light' were written actually as the 'Light Warriors', so the confusion is more a modern thing, ironically.

[YukikoKurosawa]

It's like the Bard situation, where there is the minstrel type who are travelling musicians earning coin by singing in taverns and the like... and the actual Discipline of War (Job class) that are Archers who started singing songs in battle to inspire their comrades - two seperate concepts which also are similar.

I really don't understand why they didn't just make Archer transition to Ranger and instead made them become Bards. Though, could this be like the Paladin class fantasy problem (They're just Gladiators with holy-themed abilities) where it's simply an issue of Japan not having or understand the concept of a Bard because it's a western thing like Paladin? By that I mean they fundamentally did not understand what constitutes a "Bard" and thought making a bowman who also plays music made sense. Sad that thanks to the way jobs are designed we'll never get a proper bowman class because we can't have two classes who use the same weapon.

Unless they go the route of Arcanist and have Archer branch into Ranger as an alternative and still use the same weapon/animations.

[MistakeNot]

I really don't understand why they didn't just make Archer transition to Ranger and instead made them become Bards.

Why would Ranger be any better? The archetypal fantasy-Ranger is Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He never uses a bow.

[Rongway]

Why would Ranger be any better? The archetypal fantasy-Ranger is Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He never uses a bow.

But this is a Final Fantasy, and Final Fantasy rangers typically use bows.



Doubling jobs on another class, though, please no. If anything they need to separate SCH From ACN already.

[TeemoTeemosson]

Why would Ranger be any better? The archetypal fantasy-Ranger is Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He never uses a bow.

WRONG. Aragorn uses a bow in Balin's tomb alongside Boromir and Legolas to hold off goblins from breaking down the door and he uses his bow at the Bridge of Khazadum to fend off goblin archers.

[MistakeNot]

WRONG. Aragorn uses a bow in Balin's tomb alongside Boromir and Legolas to hold off goblins from breaking down the door and he uses his bow at the Bridge of Khazadum to fend off goblin archers.

You must be referring to the movies. They are wrong about many things - that is just one of them.
In fact when they are leaving Rivendell it is explicit that "Aragorn had Anduril, but no other weapon"
Legolas was the only one of the Fellowship to carry a bow.

[SeverianLyonesse]

I really don't understand why they didn't just make Archer transition to Ranger and instead made them become Bards. Though, could this be like the Paladin class fantasy problem (They're just Gladiators with holy-themed abilities) where it's simply an issue of Japan not having or understand the concept of a Bard because it's a western thing like Paladin? By that I mean they fundamentally did not understand what constitutes a "Bard" and thought making a bowman who also plays music made sense. Sad that thanks to the way jobs are designed we'll never get a proper bowman class because we can't have two classes who use the same weapon.

It's not an issue of Japan not understanding the difference. For many reasons, but it also is demonstrably not the case when XI clearly knew the difference between a ranger and a bard.

It's an issue of archer being a pretty boring job concept without any additional gimmicks. In a game where every other job has some sort of magical element on top of a weapon style, the "archer job" needed something like songs or an animal companion on top of it so as not to be totally underwhelming. Obviously they went with melding archer with bard rather than beastmaster, probably because it had better overall synergy and didn't trod too much on the companion system's toes. I also suspect a huge justification for it was because XIV is a more dynamic, weapon- and attack-focused game than XI, and they needed to give bard *some* sort of actual weapon. Either way, I think it was the right choice because I consider "harp-bows" to be perhaps one of the most innovative takes on classic FF jobs in the entire game (alongside AST and SGE).

I wouldn't have looked twice at a boring ranger bow job, frankly, and I don't know why people keep pushing for that idea without proposing something more to actually make the concept, yaknow, interesting. Something that exceeds just using a weapon and moves into fantasy heroism. Even warrior, perhaps the most "basic" job design in XIV, has some elements of berserker and geomancer in it to give it some additional magical flavor and better carve out a job fantasy niche. A bow-wielder by itself is not much of a job fantasy.

[Cleretic]

I wouldn't have looked twice at a boring ranger bow job, frankly, and I don't know why people keep pushing for that idea without proposing something more to actually make the concept, yaknow, interesting. Something that exceeds just using a weapon and moves into fantasy heroism. Even warrior, perhaps the most "basic" job design in XIV, has some elements of berserker and geomancer in it to give it some additional magical flavor and better carve out a job fantasy niche. A bow-wielder by itself is not much of a job fantasy.

I get the complaint, because... well, some people's favorite Avenger is Hawkeye or Black Widow. There is genuine appeal to the guy that can keep up with crazy superpowers because he's Just That Good. I have a friend who actually hates the Shadowbringers Machinist rework not because of playstyle, but because it moved so much of Machinist away from 'good at guns' and into 'has Batman's utility belt'. I'm not even sure what I'd want to recommend to someone who wants to play a 'naturally good and that's it' character in this game. Monk, maybe, if you ignore the outright Hadokens? Samurai, but basically only if you love Kurosawa enough to accept the theatrics as theatrics instead of magic?

I think the main problem comes from the fact that, in games like this, it's actually really hard to stretch the concept of 'just that good' into the entire skillset. Samurai only barely gets there, Monk falls short, and those two actually have the easiest job since it's just a melee skillset, and there's been a lot of media that's found ways to stretch those. You go into something like a range toolkit? Every FFXIV job has to have thirty-something powers and animations over its lifetime, how many things can you give someone with just a gun before you run out of ideas? Hell, way back I used to play City of Heroes; they only had nine powers per moveset, no required mechanic gimmicks, and all of comic books to borrow from, and their Archery and Assault Rifle powersets still had to get wacky. (Specifically Archery had to pack some Green Arrow-style trick arrows, and Assault Rifle had to make its default model a 'Frankengun' with multiple barrels, a flamethrower, and a grenade launcher.)