Give us all job abilities by lvl 50

[ShinShimon]

Think about it logically. What do we gain from unlocking new abilities past level 50?
1. The joy of unlocking new abilities as the level number goes up.
This joy is only ever experienced once per job.

What problems does this cause?
1. Being forced to play an incomplete, dumbed-down version of our job every day in roulettes.
2. At lower levels, losing basic quality-of-life improvements which were only ever gated behind higher levels so that each new expansion could have 5 staggered ability unlocks.

To put it another way, the joy of unlocking Umbral Soul at lvl 76 is nothing compared to the pain of not having Umbral Soul before lvl 76. So why don't we just get Umbral Soul by level 50?

Really, why not? Nothing meaningful in this game is gated behind level. You complete the story to unlock more story (and gain enough EXP as you go to make level-gating irrelevant). You complete the story to unlock side content. You raise your ilvl and beat progressively harder fights to unlock even harder fights. So why is the completion of our basic job rotation tied behind level progression? The only reason I can see is to have something to look forward to as we level.

Does that justify the pain and hardship of not having TBN until level 70? Of not having Verraise in cursed Dun Scaith runs? Of having to play Black Mage without Fire IV, or without Umbral Soul, or without Triple Cast, or without...

Nay, I say. Let us have two charges of our gap closer in UCOB. Let Dark Knight have an AoE rotation before level 72. Let Scholar Expediently rush us even faster through the first pulls of Praetorium. Throw wide the gates, and give us all of our job abilities by level 50.

[ShinShimon]

Part 2: Pre-empting some counter-arguments

BUT WHAT ABOUT JOB QUESTS?
Many ability unlocks are not narratively tied to the quests that unlock them. Job reworks have already decoupled some abilities from quests that actually were tied to them, and nobody really cared. So just do it to the rest of the quests.

BUT WHAT ABOUT POTENCY BLOAT?
Old fights have already been rebalanced to account for the stat squish. They can be rebalanced again to account for higher-level potency bloat. Potency bloat is already a problem even with the current down-leveled toolkits, and this would fix that as well.

HOW WILL PLAYERS HANDLE GETTING SO MANY ABILITIES AT ONCE?
The new jobs already start at level 70, with a toolkit more advanced than many jobs once were at end-game. Nobody cared. Getting their full rotation sooner will actually help players get used to new jobs. Instead of having to relearn their rotation every 10 levels, players will start learning how to play the complete version of their job from level 50. This will be an especially big deal for Dragoon and Black Mage, which don't even begin to resemble their final form until level 60-70.

BUT WHY LEVEL NEW JOBS?
To unlock them in higher-level content. This change will actually make leveling those jobs less of a pain, because you won't be playing with a gimped toolkit for your entire leveling experience.

If this last point is really such a stickler for some people: It's possible for us to have the best of both worlds. If unlocks are limited to every 10 levels, and restricted to abilities or upgrades that don't affect our core rotation and toolkit (such as upgrading Edge of Darkness > Edge of Shadow), that would still give us something to look forward to, but without butchering the lvl 50 version of your job. Personally, I would still prefer getting everything at once, but I wouldn't mind a more toned-down unlock system like this, and I'm the crazy guy who made this thread.

[kaynide]

I've mentioned about this, and hard agree;

You should have your entire kit in entirely by 50. Post 50 should really just be reskinning abilities (Stone -> Glare), increased charges of certain abilities (like Samurai getting addition Meikyo) for more oGCD weaving or potency/skill speed increases.

For new jobs, they should just unlock fully ready to go (assuming 50+ at start), but perhaps have 2-3 job quests where you gradually unlock everything and get a tutorial on how their rotation is intended to work. I'd much prefer a "ok this is specifically how the job is meant to work" instead of bloated story and vague information.

As you've said, this is a particularly troublesome issue for Black Mage, which takes a few seconds each roulette to remember "ok which rotation am I doing here", as it is wildly different at varied points.

I would also add, none of the 3.0+ jobs play so wildly different that a new player would be lost, assuming they have experience playing the same role before... so I don't think there is an "overload" of abilities. Again this could be mitigated by a 2-3 quest tutorial line.

[Bacent]

Personally I've always enjoyed getting skills as I level up, one at a time. I don't like getting a whole bunch at once and then having to spend a bit of time just focusing on that. It's why I enjoyed the lower unlock levels than the higher ones we got in later expacs.

I do agree that Black Mage could be much better with skills level wise though, it's the one class I hated leveling up at all, and never touch it until a new expac comes out. Only class that made me have to hyper focus, which would only cause my own death (Partially due to bad memory loss issues). Only reason I level it is because titles.

[SeiyaSoiya]

GW2 has had this since the release of the game
Why can't xiv have a dynamic level sync that reduces the potency of our skills but allows us to use our full kit regardless of what level we got synced down to?

[Floortank]

Mathematicians have already proved that the powers would break earlier content or have to be nerfed and rebalanced every ten levels. You'd be doing more work to do the same damage you're doing now at 50. It wouldn't be more fun, it would cost them a lot of development overhead, and it would make more people who are bad at the game even worse because now they'd be that much worse in 50 content.

[AnnRam]

Mathematicians have already proved that the powers would break earlier content or have to be nerfed and rebalanced every ten levels. You'd be doing more work to do the same damage you're doing now at 50. It wouldn't be more fun, it would cost them a lot of development overhead, and it would make more people who are bad at the game even worse because now they'd be that much worse in 50 content.

Implying most people are already bad.

Using 2 skills because roulettes it's insufferable.

[Kandraxx]

I just stopped doing roulettes because honestly, depending on the role/class it’s going to be below NES gameplay from the 80s.

[Kemiko]

If you get all your skills at 50, why have levels after 50? Getting all your skills by 50 won't solve the issue of losing skills prior to that due to level sync. We're literally 1 expansion away - assuming they maintain the +10 level addition per expansion - from 50 being the midway point of a characters overall power.

While the mechanics behind level sync hasn't changed since ARR, the way they handled skill gains did starting in Stormblood. Back in both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward you had broader selection - generally - in your "role skills" (cross-class skills) that required you to level up other classes (not jobs). You also had more skills as a character overall. You felt far less bare bones when sync'd down back then in comparison to now, but the complaints were still there. In Heavensward, everyone got 5 additional skills added to the package they already had. This was the beginnings of button bloat. While this was the era I had the most fun tanking - there were legitimate concerns about how to handle things in the future because we had a lot of buttons to place on the hotbar as is, and, if they added 5 buttons every expansion it'd get out of hand rather easily.

By Stormblood they laid out the method by which they would be handling this bloat for future expansions: Consolidation. They'd be retooling your jobs to try and maintain the jobs identity (whatever flavor that may be at the time) and giving it a few new toys for the expansion but staying within that 30-33 (thereabouts) hotbar buttons.

A much simpler task if there were only 50 levels. Or, hell, only 30 levels (if anyone remembers character level, class rank and xp fatigue). But - and I can't speak for anyone but myself - with each new expansion/chapter in the story, I want new capabilities for my character to acquire. I want to maintain that feeling of growth and something to look forward to as I progress through the story, which those 10 levels and new stuff in them does help to achieve.

Is this the best way to handle it? Trim, consolidate worsen the early level experience in order to combat button bloat as the game grows? Probably not. But alternatives placed on the table thus far have also not been better solutions that I've seen. No one wants 50 buttons by the time you hit LV90 and yes, it does feel awful to be in lower level content with only a handful of buttons to press, some jobs getting it worse than others (DRG doesn't even have an aoe attack in Haukke Manor for example) but there's definitely a method to the madness and there's more angles to look at than just low-level content in a vacuum when brainstorming a solution.

[kaynide]

If you get all your skills at 50, why have levels after 50?

There is a difference in, say, a Samurai at base level 50 (where the focus is getting 3 Sen) and one that can gain Kenki much faster and use Meikyo Shusui 2 or 3 times interwoven with their Sen abilities. Just as an example.

It's not that you don't get anything post 50, it would be that you can use your abilities more often have less "waiting for stuff to recharge".