Ragar looks at how to add progression to the Disciples of the Hand

Hello and welcome to the eighth edition of the Eorzea Examiner, ZAM’s column on Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. At the end of last week's column, I teased that I'd be talking about crafting again. Before anyone runs from another mountain of text on "here's what changes need to be made", this one's actually closer to last week's column where we brainstormed new classes for FFXIV. For this week's column we're going to talk about something that I think the Disciples of the Hand should have to be considered a true path for player progression: Jobs.

Where's My Crafting Soul Crystal?!

For those unfamiliar with the Job portion of FFXIV's Armoury System, I'll give you the quick summary. For Disciples of War and Disciples of Magic classes (i.e. the combat classes) there are specializations at higher levels called Jobs. Each class currently has one (except for Arcanists with Summoner and Scholar) Job they can unlock with a quest chain after hitting 30 in their primary class and 15 in an associated secondary class (e.g. Gladiator/Conjurer for Paladin, Marauder/Gladiator for Warrior, etc). These new Jobs and their associated quests give the classes a wide variety of new skills and options to specialize in their role, though they do limit some options for multitasking by blocking numerous cross-class skills.

Now that we've laid out what Jobs are in FFXIV, some of you are probably wondering why Disciples of the Hand (or Land, though we're not talking about them for now) would even need Jobs. After all, combat classes have reasons to specialize in a role, be it for dungeons, PvP, etc. A crafter, on the other hand, has no need to fill a specific role in a group and would prefer to have as many options available to him for recipes as possible, so what's the point of giving them Jobs? There are two fairly major ones that come to mind immediately: progression and differentiation.

Many of the PvE players in FFXIV probably don't even consider Jobs as "progression"; they're just this second branch of class quests that give you new skills and starter class armor before you go into Hard Mode dungeons and Binding Coil runs with your guild. Regardless of whether it's something you would do anyway, Jobs are still a form of progression. In theory, when your class has multiple Job options after future patches/expansions, a player would choose one to focus on and consider that their specialization. Ideally this would mean that two players who chose the same base class initially could level to 50, choosing different Job paths, and be unique from one another in the end. That doesn't show quite as well currently since most classes only have the one Job choice, but that's the idea and that's something I'd like to see crafters have.

Right now if someone leveled a crafting class to 50, there would be very little to differentiate them from someone who did it at launch. They may have worse gear or lack some cross-class skills, but looking at it from purely the class/recipe list perspective, there is no difference. Compare this to other MMO crafting professions where new content brings new recipes, including some that's only from completing specific content. While the new player always has the potential to run the same content and gain all of the recipes you've already picked up, it still provides that initial difference to not only reward the players that did things first, but also to give the crafters something to work towards other than making enough Gil to buy their Free Company's house.

So if new recipes are a major reason for advocating crafting Jobs, why not just add unique recipes as reputation unlocks, FATE drops or quest rewards? While those are all things I'd like to see added, that ignores the other major aspect of Jobs: the new skills. Part of the fun of progression is adjusting your actions based on what's now available, whether it’s adjusting your rotation to account for new gear or figuring out how to fit in a new skill. Crafters have that first kind of progression with gear upgrades, but right now their main source of the second is cross-class skills. Technically this one works, but there's something off when the key to being the server's best Weaver is by leveling up Alchemist, Carpenter and whatever other classes are on the "100% HQ, 0 RNG, 2 Stars" rotations you find on Reddit. If we want to involve the other crafting classes in making a better crafter, there must be a better way to do it.

The Path of the Crafter

So let's look at what we need to add crafting Jobs to FFXIV: skills, story and quests. Crafting Job skills should be able to follow the same general model the combat Jobs use—supplemental skills that build on the strengths of the base class, while restricting the cross-class skill list to keep the player focused. Applying this to crafting would fit two purposes: it would give players the chance to have a full bar of abilities built around their class and, by restricting the cross-class lists, it would require the developers to give each class/Job combination enough tools to properly do their job rather than players following a craft-by-numbers guide telling them which class has each skill they need.

Adding story for the new Jobs would take a little bit of work, but no more so than for additional combat Jobs. Considering we wouldn't likely see anything like this until an expansion came out, the new crafting Jobs could be tied to whatever new land we're sent off to or new faction we're fighting/working with. In addition to providing crafters with an extension to their storylines like all of the combat-focused players already have, it also gives the crafting/item designers central themes to focus on for their recipes.

While leveling the base crafting classes, your quests were useful simply because they gave you new equipment while you leveled. Combat classes were similar up until they unlocked Jobs and started getting a skill every five levels. With crafting Job quests, I think something extra should be tied in: recipes. A new skill is high incentive to push through to that next Job quest, but crafters are more focused on when that next tier of recipes is going to unlock. The quests for crafting Jobs could have an unlock tied to them in addition to their normal skill/gear rewards, be it through an automatic unlock (recipes just auto-populate in your list based on level/quest progression) or they could be something you have to learn from a trainer/vendor once you've proven yourself worthy.

Conclusion

When I was discussing this with some of my fellow writers, one of them asked me if this was necessary. Would differentiation add to the crafter experience or would it merely add the management hassle of swapping in soul crystals? Personally I think the "hassle" of swapping out a soul crystal to change Jobs is pretty negligible, especially with equipment sets, and that crafters should have something like this. FFXIV has been trying to push the idea that crafting is a valid form of progression for economic-minded players. Debates about the usefulness of crafted goods versus Tombstone purchased gear aside, the system generally works now, but giving crafters Jobs would only help them feel more included as a real progression path. Giving them Job options would even work for future expansions down the road: it would give the players a new questline to enjoy and goods to make, while the Job quest gating would slow down how quickly players get access to the top-level gear.

That's it for this week's edition of the Eorzea Examiner. What do the rest of you think about giving crafters Jobs? Do you have a better idea on how to implement it or perhaps a rationale for keeping things the way they are? Are there any requests for topics other than crafting? Let us know in the comments below! Until next time, see you in Eorzea.

Michael "Ragar" Branham