So I have had alot of discussion lately with friends and players about the continued use of the armory system and this has come up a few times:
Why do we still have both the Armory AND Jobs?
So that we have a balance between solo play and choice vs. party play and tradition
I really just want to get people's viable opinions about the continued existance of both.
To start. I love classes. I love being able to set abilities freely that I've already learned. I love mixing and matching abilities. I loved the subjob system in XI but I like the class system more. Those are my opinions which are viable enough for me.- I know that they are not going to remove Armory and that it's existance is a forgone conclusion
- I know that the current opinion is that, for the most part, Armory is solo and Job is party
- Currently most of the discussion has been about how we can differentiate between them to make them more individual
What I would like to see is if people think it is even smart to keep around.
I think it's in their best interest to keep them around. I think they could provide more incentives in some instances for both systems, i.e. higher stat bonuses / penalties for equipping a job stone, make GLA a bit more effective solo and make BLM a bit more effective party wise, create more class specific gear that focuses on stat boost, create more job specific gear that focuses on ability enhancement / cooldown. I personally think they should open up job weapons though. Classes should be defined by their weapon while Jobs are specialized by their role.
for posterity:
My Opinion
I think they should get rid of classes. Then they said they were bringing out jobs, I thought they would be a kind of "Job Change" like in FF1 where you were what you were before, but with more. I know people wanted to ability to have situationally specific jobs, but I have never liked the restrictions on selectable abilities. The arguement that it was necessary to make the jobs more play-specific in parties is kind of moot because if you chose to equip the party-specific abilities, those would inherantly take up slots and, therefore, lower the other abilities you could equip. As it stands, I see no reason why you should NEED to make Gladiator a seperate class than Paladin to just give Paladins the option to select different abilities. I found it very limiting in comparison to previous Job-based final fantasy games (XI not withstanding).
I actually agree with you here. I'll post reasoning below.
I should also note that I realize 2.0 is supposedly totally different and how they will approach abilities really isnt known yet. I just want to see where the discussion will go.
DISCUSS!