Hello, long time XI and smalltime XIV player who just rejoined after the welcome back campaign, with probably a different question than most people would ask...

In XI, smithing covered weapons as well as armor as long as they were involved in hard ores and metals in the synth process. This was pretty simple and worked out rather well for the most part, only needing sub crafts leveled up to make better quality items here and there then with just the plain smithing leveled.

In XIV, they have it branched out into two jobs that handle the same type of materials for the most part, but specialize in two different types of outputs as far as synths go. They can both make ingots and a few other things using the basically the same recipes, just that one makes weapons, while the other makes shields and armor.

I'm mostly just curious if there's been any consideration to condense them into a single job like XI and many other MMOs out on the market tend to do, since I'm under the impression that 2.0 is going to completely overhaul the game and how things work. Dunno, just tossing a random suggestion out there to see what happens with it. Please don't bite my head off!