Worth Leveling Base Jobs?Follow

What I mean is..
My goal is to unlock White Mage. I have Arcanist to 15.. and my Conjurer is getting close to 30. But.. is it worth it taking Conjurer beyond 30? Like leveling it to 50? Are there advantages for the White Mage job if I do that, like the cross actions and such?

With the exception of the 3 Jobs coming out with the expansion. Each Job is intrinsicely tied to a Class.

For example, you don't earn "White Mage" experience points. You earn Conjurer experience points. That means if Conjurer has a second job attached to it, according to our current system, that job will automatically be the level of everyone else's conjurer.

People who level Arcanist to 50, will automatically have a level 50 Summoner and Scholar. A Dragoon can never be below level 30 outside of Level sync, because the level of Lancer you need to unlock it, is 30.

Dark Knight, Astrologian, and Machinist are stand alone jobs. You can never be something outside that Job. But Jobs attached to classes are specializations of that Class. Classes are more flexiable in what support skills they can gather from other classes. Jobs only are allowed to partake of skills from 2 pre-designated classes for skills.

In your case, as an up-and-coming White Mage, you'll want to level Arcanist and Thaumaturge, as the skills from them will be of great assistance to your White Mage. (Swift Cast in particular form Thaumaturge comes to mind.)

Something IMO they need to address. I feel as if they bolloxed up the Class design when switching to ARR. Lancer was far tankier in 1.23 than it is now, which makes it just slightly less fragile than Dragoon.

If they had followed through with the same concept of Arcanist to the other classes when they designed ARR's class system, it would be far less restrictive. It was the going idea that each class served as the foundation of possibly two Jobs. But with the release of 3 jobs independent of classes, that concept has now been put into significant doubt.

At this point I think they don't know what to do with the class system. And in their indecision they released these 3 jobs in a bid for time to figure it out. Lore wise, they're married to it for the classes that exist. However, many players are hanging on to the idea of secondary Jobs for their chosen classes, myself included. However, even I recognize though that if they do that, they're going to have to do some pretty heavy changes to how the base classes work.

Either way, the system can't stand and antiquate the way it is now. They'll have to do something about it sooner or later.

The dead stop on that, of course is the Lore and story that's dug so deep into the class system that there's no way really to just pluck the classes away.

As far as Yoshi P stating that he did not like how Arcanist turned out, please site source. Saw nothing of the sort and I've been following closely. The complaint I heard was that the class system of existing jobs felt restrictive to them on making secondary jobs, and that they were thinking of perhaps hybrid jobs that combine Classes together more seamlessly. That was before the release of info about Dark Knight, going on about a year as far as last peep on that.

Other droplets of info referred to the idea that each class/job was supposed to preform two roles, one that was easy, and one that was more difficult to execute. But the wording on this wasn't clear - were they referring to the Jobs performing two roles, in which case, where does that work in practicality? It certainly does not display itself in the current Class/Job mechanics unless you're referring to the healers and tanks that can support DPS at times. The DPS classes certainly don't have much for auxiliary functions. A couple defensive cooldowns does not a secondary role make.

If they're referring to Class/Jobs in the sense of how Arcanist works with Scholar and Summoner, then they need to make some pretty heavy base class changes to Thaumaturge, Archer and Gladiator to enable them to encompass a secondary role. That's more difficult for Thaumaturege than the other two, however. (Gladiator's class can have a trait that turns eminity into damage, Archer can be converted to a Pet-based tank, as was brainstormed by other players in various communities including this one.)

Either way, I feel as if this system is caught in a rut. To remove it, you're talking majror lore revisions and the tearing apart of Arcanist. To keep it, they're going to have to make a lot of mechanical changes to accommodate the 'two role' concept they were talking about.

(brain, why you no work today?)

Edited, Jan 5th 2015 3:06pm by Hyrist

I think the branching jobs need some tweaking from a mechanical standpoint. Specifically, the bonus points should probably be assigned per job, instead of per class. Ultimately, it doesn't make much of a difference, but it makes some.

I don't think keeping one of the stat reallocation scrolls around is the right answer, even if they dropped the GC seal price on them.

One thing the classes could be used for down the road 2 or more expansions later. Introduce new branching jobs and assuming you have the class leveled, you are at end game basically. Like maybe Red Mage job off the Gladiator class w/THM and ACN as the sub class.

Although it does seem the game development is moving away from the classes.