Some may read the thread title and think a crazy person, so let me try and explain. TL;DR - the job system in FFXIV is hella simple and straightforward. But why?
When FFXIV relaunched as A Realm Reborn, it had a very specific Job/Class system. Essentially ever character starts out with a class which, after leveling to 30, can be promoted into a grown-up Job (basically a class, but stronger).
This mirrored the original Final Fantasy to a tee. The one exception was the Arcanist class, which can evolve into two different Jobs: Summoner and Scholar.
And that is as sophisticated as the system has ever gotten.
There is no alternative jobs/classes (i.e. a Tank version of a Dragoon, or a Healer version of a Paladin, for instance). There are no jobs that require having multiple classes leveled up. There are no jobs--besides Arcanist--that have more than one path forward. In fact, most new additions (except 1) to the game since it originally released completely discard the Class -> Job progression of the originals. They just start out as a Job, right out of the gate.
There's not even really any cross-job skills to speak of!
This seems strange to me in light of the history of Final Fantasy being known for Job systems: FF1, 3, 5, Tactics, 11, and 12 all dug into this and added their own twist to the idea. It can be argued that games like FF6, 7, 9, 10 and 13 had shades of the Job system in their DNA as well.
For context: I originally played A Realm Reborn in 2013 and am returning just now. Unlocking some of the newer Jobs has reminded me of how much I was looking forward to jobs being added, but back then I expected it to something more interesting than "do quest, unlock Job". I feel like WoW has a more interesting class system, which is frankly bizarre to type.
So why does FFXIV have such a vanilla approach to Classes and Jobs? Have the developers ever talked about it?
When FFXIV relaunched as A Realm Reborn, it had a very specific Job/Class system. Essentially ever character starts out with a class which, after leveling to 30, can be promoted into a grown-up Job (basically a class, but stronger).
This mirrored the original Final Fantasy to a tee. The one exception was the Arcanist class, which can evolve into two different Jobs: Summoner and Scholar.
And that is as sophisticated as the system has ever gotten.
There is no alternative jobs/classes (i.e. a Tank version of a Dragoon, or a Healer version of a Paladin, for instance). There are no jobs that require having multiple classes leveled up. There are no jobs--besides Arcanist--that have more than one path forward. In fact, most new additions (except 1) to the game since it originally released completely discard the Class -> Job progression of the originals. They just start out as a Job, right out of the gate.
There's not even really any cross-job skills to speak of!
This seems strange to me in light of the history of Final Fantasy being known for Job systems: FF1, 3, 5, Tactics, 11, and 12 all dug into this and added their own twist to the idea. It can be argued that games like FF6, 7, 9, 10 and 13 had shades of the Job system in their DNA as well.
For context: I originally played A Realm Reborn in 2013 and am returning just now. Unlocking some of the newer Jobs has reminded me of how much I was looking forward to jobs being added, but back then I expected it to something more interesting than "do quest, unlock Job". I feel like WoW has a more interesting class system, which is frankly bizarre to type.
So why does FFXIV have such a vanilla approach to Classes and Jobs? Have the developers ever talked about it?