Zero Job Customization in this Game

[Slambo]

Also, it seems a complete waste that they gave conjurer/white mage total attack damage but still expect you to just be a healer. It seems set up that you could DD with a WHM, but then it kinda cuts that out from under you.

With your own FC party anything is possible. Went through AK as dps whm since our 8man got split up during Relic Reborn with pt setup of GLD/SMN/WHM/WHM and we went faster than most pugs.

The DF isn't amazing but the limitations can be bypassed completely.

[GilbertLapine]

I think the job customization comes from choosing your job.

You're confusing job customization with job variety. Cross-skill 'customization' is a joke, unless, for instance, you're hell bent on using Ruin as a BLM for reasons unknown.

"WAR is tank." You don't have the option to play it as a DD even though it totally could be!

Bard really stumped me too, they have basically made it into a Ranger with hardly any party support skills. "Bards are DD and you cant play them as anything else."

Also, it seems a complete waste that they gave conjurer/white mage total attack damage but still expect you to just be a healer. It seems set up that you could DD with a WHM, but then it kinda cuts that out from under you.

I'm feeling this, but not quite in the same way. I think they've tried to keep the trinity system pretty set for the casuals (lest you get a giant population of players that can do everything but suck constantly). It makes sense they'd want certain jobs to be defined as certain roles, but what rubs me wrong is how the nature which they fulfill that roll is overly rigid.

However, I think a case could be made for some multi-faceted jobs like say, SMN, that could function as either a DPS or a tank if given the choice. That said, they should really make you decide what route you want to take, and the only paltry efforts made towards skill and stat trees are the extra stat allocations from your base class... which is probably the dumbest idea SE has had thus far. Let us craft our jobs to how we want them to be, don't exclude us from playing jobs because stats are tied to our base class. This very idea goes against the whole point of the armory system, and is rather disappointing.

[Hawklaser]

I am actually quite fine with well defined Jobs with little customization. Yes I do like having a lot of customization as well.

Problem with having more customization is very quickly only cookie cutter builds become the only accepted builds. Then eventually to balance things the shortcut of homogenizing everything tends to happen as well.

So I would rather have well defined classes that are kept unique instead of lots of customization that quickly becomes essentially non-existent.

[aswedishtiger]

i actually dont mind what theyve done.

I was on your side with the whole "i wanna be what i wanna be!" BUT I thought about it a while and yes.

I would be one of those guys doing /shout WHATS THE BEST PALADIN BUILD?

then i felt very embarrassed i had argued all those weeks that i wanted to be an individual. So in the end I don't mind what they've done with it

I will say though, that items are GENERIC and they need to make items more epic and appealing

/rant

[mraz_syah]

they said, they create this game simple so that its attract new and old FF fans

[Chek]

I'm fine with defined and pre-determined classes, but the additional/sub skills feel like a trick to me. They imply some sort of choice, but the options are so few and far between that there is little in reality. In beta it felt like the sub skill options were less restricted, and I'd like to go back to that.

Although that problem might work itself out later as the game gets new jobs. So I guess we'll see.

[Iskander]

In beta it felt like the sub skill options were less restricted, and I'd like to go back to that.

I wonder why? Hmm.....*looks back to previous post* Oh yea. REMOVE YOUR JOB TOKEN.


In beta, you had so many cross class skills because there were no jobs. Does no one remember what was said during live letters regarding classes and jobs?

Classes are meant to be jack of all trades. You have access to all the cross skills in your class, which is easy by just de-equipping that nice little soul crystal you are so attached to. Jobs are meant to be specific to their role, so you were never expected to have a lot of customization with jobs.

As a BLM, there are but a few skills that I can bring over from ACN and ARC. Of those, I probably only really use 1. Raging Strikes. However, when I'm a BLM I'm not looking to do all kinds of wonderful customized things.

Now, when I'm out and about, I tend to remove the BLM crystal. Why? Because in exchange for not using 5 relatively useless skills, I can put in a whole bunch of the other classes' skills. Yes I say relatively useless because they are. Freeze is rarely used by me since I have Bliz2 and that doesn't require me to set a marker. Have yet to use Apocatastasis. Manawall I use mainly to help with big hits from bosses. Flare is used mostly for add clusters, and convert is best used with Flare. I can do without those most often.

While right now I don't have many classes up, I had more in BP3 to experiment. I could go running around as a THM with stone 2, blood for blood, raging strikes...Customization in the game is dealt with classes not jobs. Jobs are specific to what they need to do.

[TheRac25]

Not every game needs to have a lot of class customization. That's usually thing that smaller budget F2P MMO's have in order to to justify not having to plan out classes.

The dirty secret is that "customization" is usually just a disguise for lazy design. Most MMO's with "customization" just give a class a few abilities and stats that can be leveled up, and that's it. They let the community figure out the correct builds and do their job for them.

wut? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEkWH8DB7b0

[WellFooled]

You're confusing job customization with job variety. Cross-skill 'customization' is a joke, unless, for instance, you're hell bent on using Ruin as a BLM for reasons unknown.

My choice of words wasn't the best. What I'm saying is that you don't need job customization because we have job variety. At least not the sort of job customization that is suggested in this thread. If someone is saying they want to play as a warrior who's main job is to deal damage, what they're saying is they want to be a lancer. The option is already there.

[Flarestar]

In a game that revolves entirely around vertical progression, simplistic AI, and trinity roles, customization brings precisely two things to the table: min-maxing with the elitism that goes along with it, and what I like to refer to as Special Snowflake builds.

The former makes the community even more toxic than MMO communities usually are already, and necessitates extremely tight tuning in order to prevent min-max builds from trivializing content, further reinforcing the social need to min-max with a code-based need to min-max. The latter basically just makes people useless and annoys people from having to carry them through content.

If you want deep customization that doesn't cause those problems, the first two have to go or be minimal factors in design. The third doesn't HAVE to go but it certainly helps.