What has the job team been doing this whole time?

[NegativeS]

I don't think it's any surprise that the WoW class dev brains are light years ahead of FFXIV's job dev brains. Of all the problems with WoW that people complain about, I don't think their class design philosophy (read: separate from balance, which is an issue in every game ever) has ever been a very prominent one. It's why the game still has such a strong endgame scene despite the story, leveling, and metagame being kind of middling.

Except for that one time when they butchered Survival Hunter. The brains must have been on holiday.

[Souljacker]

I don't think it's any surprise that the WoW class dev brains are light years ahead of FFXIV's job dev brains. Of all the problems with WoW that people complain about, I don't think their class design philosophy (read: separate from balance, which is an issue in every game ever) has ever been a very prominent one. It's why the game still has such a strong endgame scene despite the story, leveling, and metagame being kind of middling.

Except for that one time when they butchered Survival Hunter. The brains must have been on holiday.

I renewed my sub there (I really dislike this xpac THAT much) and you're right. On my paladin, not only does it "feel" like a paladin with all the things I'd expect a paladin to be able to do (heal wounds, smite the wicked, protect the allies), the abilities and skill tree are well thought out, flow together, and there's no buttons for the sake of having more buttons. Everything fits neatly into my two main hotbars and I have plenty of spaces for "Extras" I might want to use.

Contrast that with Paladin in XIV. There's no class fantasy. No identity beyond "tank with sword and board". No versatility. My bars are littered with a bunch of buttons, some of which are just "press once every ~30 second cooldown" because that's supposedly engaging game play. Just more buttons.

In XIV I find myself looking FAR too much at the hotbars and timers and far too little at the encounters themselves. This design is laughably bad.

[AlucaDragonheart]

Contrast that with Paladin in XIV. There's no class fantasy. No identity beyond "tank with sword and board". No versatility

The sad thing is, Paladin DID sort of have an identity in ARR when you could actually use some White Magic.

[Souljacker]

The sad thing is, Paladin DID sort of have an identity in ARR when you could actually use some White Magic.

It did in XI as well - the whole point was it was this warrior who could use white magic and did so to protect the realm. Paladin was FUN there, it 'felt' like you were there to smite the wicked, pass judgement on evil and slap around some undead. I don't even know what I'm doing here, and every time I see "gains xyz gladiator points" or whatever the verbiage is I just seethe at how generic all these jobs were\are, all in the name of being as 'different' from XI as possible since at the time they were trying to get us to pay 2 subs.

Nothing short of completely scrapping the system would fix it though, they backed themselves into a corner with the Class -> Job foolishness and then tying the job itself to a weapon type instead of just... selecting the job you wanted to play and then the types of weapons you wanted at varying degrees of skill, complete with its own set of weaponskill abilities.

In many ways, XI is the superior design. These folks really should have spent some time learning at the feet of those folks. And the higher ups should have never given Tanaka the directive to make it as unlike XI as possible. They did him a disservice - he was a good producer and for every "Ps2 Limitation" - his team eventually came up with a brilliant idea to work around or otherwise inject life into content. A lot of the systems we have here, as watered down as they are, are thanks to the ideas over in XI.