Phantom Jobs are a step in the right direction but need iteration.

[Supersnow845]

The problem with phantom jobs is that they aren’t actually a “system” per se. They are a few collections of vaguely related lost actions with the interaction carefully stripped out of them and called a system

None of the jobs really even synergise with themselves let alone synergise with your actual job or other phantom jobs. A few have semi interesting “core loops”; namely monks kick buff upkeep, oracles prediction and excog heal, beserkers big hit being linked to damage taken during rage or time mage using haste to remove the cast time on meteor. But even those jobs have other pointless skills thrown in there that really don’t do anything. Monks counter stance like oGCD has nothing to do with its buff, the doom or invuln on oracle have nothing to do with the prediction loop, the dispel, slow and addle have nothing to do with meteor on time mage etc

And that’s the jobs that I’d consider good. There are others that are just dumping grounds for pointless utility like bard or knight, jobs that are functionally fodder for forked tower like chemist ranger or thief and the remaining few like canoneer is just a few damage spells on CD, geo is basically a class only the MT can use and samurai may as well not even exist

So with this system you basically have only the most useful jobs actually doing anything and the rest being a collection of vaguely related utility you mostly don’t use and almost none of the jobs; again with the slight exception of the well designed ones; actually change how you play your actual job and most of the ones that do basically amount to “put yourself in damages to do a lot of damage” which really only benefits the tanks

[Yamadronis]

None of the jobs really even synergise with themselves let alone synergise with your actual job or other phantom jobs. A few have semi interesting “core loops”; namely monks kick buff upkeep, oracles prediction and excog heal, beserkers big hit being linked to damage taken during rage or time mage using haste to remove the cast time on meteor. But even those jobs have other pointless skills thrown in there that really don’t do anything. Monks counter stance like oGCD has nothing to do with its buff, the doom or invuln on oracle have nothing to do with the prediction loop, the dispel, slow and addle have nothing to do with meteor on time mage etc

And that’s the jobs that I’d consider good. There are others that are just dumping grounds for pointless utility like bard or knight, jobs that are functionally fodder for forked tower like chemist ranger or thief and the remaining few like canoneer is just a few damage spells on CD, geo is basically a class only the MT can use and samurai may as well not even exist

So with this system you basically have only the most useful jobs actually doing anything and the rest being a collection of vaguely related utility you mostly don’t use and almost none of the jobs; again with the slight exception of the well designed ones; actually change how you play your actual job and most of the ones that do basically amount to “put yourself in damages to do a lot of damage” which really only benefits the tanks

This is, very much a critical problem with them. One of the big reasons for this seems to be that they are afraid to give these jobs that synergy or uniqueness for balance reasons. Some of the jobs could be made pretty amazing just by tweaking some durations, values or targets. The jobs really feel like they wanted to put in a bunch of quirky ideas that they didn't feel would fit in the main game, balance wise, but then decided it all had to be balanced anyway, so there aren't any ridiculous in job synergies outside of Geomancer, and, as you mentioned, that job certainly has skills that primarily benefit tanks because two of them require you to be hit regularly to do anything. They legitimately added an invulnerability skill to a class with a self-damage nuke and made it not self targeting. It's blatantly obvious that they're avoiding it on purpose. If you are adding a system to standalone content, if should first and foremost be "fun" and "interesting" before it is "balanced".