PLD vs WAR: testing

[Andrien]

Niche gameplay sucks in the long run. I'd like to see Final Fantasy break out of that bad habit and give us multiple tank and healer classes so that everyone isn't crammed into PLD or WHM or WAR.

I disagree because PLD isn't good at anything else but tanking, and WHM isn't good at anything else but healing to keep the party alive. They should be first choice on the list for what they do best.

[Enfarious]

Niche gameplay sucks in the long run. I'd like to see Final Fantasy break out of that bad habit and give us multiple tank and healer classes so that everyone isn't crammed into PLD or WHM or WAR.

Agreed, but they gave us more than one tank capable class and more than one heal capable class in XI. This game is far to young to start comparing it to games that have 15+ different classes/jobs. I don't want 5 jobs that all heal the same way and equally well, carbon copies just provide the illusion of choice.

I disagree because PLD isn't good at anything else but tanking, and WHM isn't good at anything else but healing to keep the party alive. They should be first choice on the list for what they do best.

If a class/job can only fulfill one role then they should absolutely outshine any other class/job in that role. The alternative would be to give them the capacity to fill more than one role equally well. In the case of PLD that means making it able to DD, WHM can to a point already.

Once upon a time it was my understanding that jobs were meant to be specializations of a class, implying that they'd do one thing extremely well at the cost of not doing others so well. That would have meant that PLD, DRG, MNK, BLM were actually the ones that work as they should. WHM, WAR and BRD all trying to fill 2 roles, would actually be the ones that are currently wrong, as they all have job abilities that spread across more than a single focus.

[Duelle]

Agreed, but they gave us more than one tank capable class and more than one heal capable class in XI. This game is far to young to start comparing it to games that have 15+ different classes/jobs. I don't want 5 jobs that all heal the same way and equally well, carbon copies just provide the illusion of choice.

No, they didn't. Final Fantasy XI had WHM and that was it. RDM was forced into healing (and haste/refresh spam) and SMN was shoehorned into healing. That's very different from having multiple healing classes.

That being said, I don't understand where this allergy to jobs being interchangeable comes from. Something has to give in order to avoid the crap from XI where you had the "ace" jobs that were used for events and everyone else was just fodder. Not to mention in order to kill off what we're currently seeing right now where people go for certain set ups and just lol at others. What some don't seem to realize is that asking for niche jobs will only recreate that once people figure out what's useful, what isn't and then we have FFXI all over again.

And I never said anything about healing jobs that heal the same way. I'd point to WoW and even Rift (though Rift for a while was iffy because of how people loved healing on Chloromancer) to show how different healing classes can work. In FF's case all we need is decide whcih job should do what. I'd personally suggest Geomancer (Half burst, half smart heals), Green Mage (75% HoTs, 25% burst heals) and Mystic/Oracle (single-target heals with additional effects granted by keeping debuffs on the mob). Then you have real choice as far as healers, and it may even introduce FF players to the concept of "tank heals" and "raid heals" assignments, which I hope are kept in mind by the developers for future content.