Alisaie on green Red Mage...Could we do that too? (Aka Specs for Final Fantasy!)

[TheSweetestTart]

I know it's a whole can of worms, but as the game gets more complex, adding new sets of gear and new jobs to balance exponentially increases the amount of work the dev team has to do. I'd love if we could get specs ala WoW where some classes could have the option to do different roles! I think it'd be cool to breathe some life back into older jobs that way, and it could also be a way to provide for FF11 players whose job came back a little different (i.e. DRK having a DPS spec and SAM having a tank spec?)

It's always struck me as a little weird that arcanist (SMN/SCH) is the only job that breaks into two different roles to speak of, and it's a fun little thing about them. Being able to play a ranged DPS AST or a healer RDM would be neat to me. Dunno. Might also help with the horrible imbalance of roles for queues if someone who levels and plays primarily DPS had the option to play a tank or a healer spec of that same job.

Would love to hear other thoughts on this. I know WoW's balancing has a reputation for being kind of crazy whereas FFXIV is (imo) balanced to the point of sometimes feeling stale. I would hope there's some kind of happy medium in between these two extremes where stuff is never as unviable as classes in WoW can be, but never as universally good-but-samey as FFXIV.

[Magikazam]

They can barely make different class look unique as time go on. I don't think the job design team can handle specs.

[Ramiee]

They tried it with Arcanist.
Didn't go to well.

[Warlyx]

for SE jobs are "specs" so outside of changing the whole job system ...i dont see that happening

[Chyro]

I mean.. Bozja pretty much demonstrated how little it takes for any class to fill the heal or tank role. With just two extra buttons and a passive effect dps can heal or tank, tanks can heal and heals can tank (and heal/tank can dps, but that's just a numbers thing anyways). It would certainly be possible to implement something like that for other content to allow more flexibility in roles. Though the bigger question is what impact it would have on the overall balance and how the community would interact with it. I imagine it fairly likely that if not done well, it could lead to less and less actual healer players if you can just play dps instead with a few heal buttons to fill the role. Dps-tanks and Dps-heals may end up more popular than actual tanks or heals if they can fill the same role (and faster queues that come with it) with more fun rotations.

[Valence]

for SE jobs are "specs" so outside of changing the whole job system ...i dont see that happening

The idea of job specs (or subjobs) makes sense to me, because you end up with the same job sharing the same aesthetics and the core of their abilities, which is night and day in terms of development resources for animating, visuals, glams, weapons, etc.

[Connor]

I like the idea, but it’d take a rework of literally the entire battle system and every job in existence for this to even be remotely possible. Which means we’d have to give up like 2+ expansions worth of content because SE is a small indie dev apparently lol

[Ayalu]

If they stick to "Level 100 is the max level, we dont want to increase it further" they probably have to do major overhauls anyway.

[Priddy]

I think this is a great idea, I'd happily go without 2 new jobs for one expansion if we instead focused on getting alternative role specs for 3 or 4 jobs it makes sense for. This would also save the devs some work since they would be able to re-use some abilities and animations and wouldn't have to create new gear for the new jobs.

[Eloah]

I think Alphinaud and Alisaie being a DPS and Healer in some duties is mostly a meta nod to how SCH/SGE/RDM are usually proficient as both casters and healers in other FF games. I don't think there is anything more to it. Alphinaud still uses shielding skills, and Alisaie still attacks like crazy. Alisaie is literally the player, lol.