Jobvolution: Does it exist?

[Skyblade]

I don't think that solves the problems at all. The main thing is that I don't want to have to think about how what moves I am using in battle relate back to a higher meta-game of how they affect my overall characters development.

Exactly this.

Your suggestion of making it "per action" does nothing to address the amount of grinding, or the restrictions on how battles are fought.

In order to change classes, you still need to fight a lot in a particular way. Whether it's "per action" or "per battle" honestly won't matter. Heck, you won't even be able to take the Final Fantasy Tactics route of optimizing battles to grind Job Points, because if you're playing as any class that attacks, you'll need to kill things when you take your actions anyway.

To avoid Job Classes shifting right when you've got them, the point counters will reset upon reaching a class, and a priority system measuring your overall use of skills (percentage rather than grand total) will prevent shifting to a job class you weren't even shooting for. As a helper for those wanting to boost their summon attacks, you can use more affordable black magic and it will also increase the power of your summons for when you're ready to use them. However, using Summons doesn't add points to Black Magic and there is no berserker-style risk to spamming summons.

Again, this doesn't really help. You're fighting through a dungeon. Halfway through the dungeon, you get a class that you want for the boss. Point totals now reset, so you're safe with that for a time. But long enough to last the rest of the dungeon?

Or, let's take it further. You have the class you want, and you beat the boss. Yay. Now you want to change to a different class. Only you've built up a ton of points with those actions, and it's going to be an annoying grind, again with restrictions on the playstyle, before you can swap back.

You always have access to any command and every magic spell as your job class only dictates how potent those abilities are. As you upgrade from Mage to Wizard, your spells will automatically shift to Ra and Ga spells, the MP cost shifting with the change. But your Class change would adjust your MP's percentage not just the maximum so really the only moment a class change would affect your ability to cast is if you were already next to zero.

If you have an ability, but it is useless, you might as well not even have it. Heck, this is going to make switching from Magic users to Physical attack users even more annoying, since you'll be spamming 1 damage hits until you change.

Balancing points would not only lead to the creation of Red Mages and Paladins but to other job combinations like Samurai Knights, Assassin (Ninja + Ranger), Dragoon (Ninja + Gladiator), etc.

The more variety of jobs you have, the more likely that an errant actions spent is going to change someone to a job they don't want, or the longer it is going to take to switch jobs in general.

For example, we have two jobs: Fighter and White Mage. Using White Magic while you're a Fighter builds JP towards the White Mage job. After you gain 10 JP, you switch. Woohoo.

Now we have three jobs: Fighter, Paladin, and White Mage. Using White Magic as a Fighter builds JP towards Paladin and White Mage. Either you switch to Paladin after 10 JP, as before (which means you'd need 20 to reach White Mage), or you switch to Paladin at 5 JP (so you reach White Mage at 10 still), which means that you are more likely to reach the Paladin class accidentally.

And this still doesn't address the issue that's running through my head the entire time, which is "why am I having to spend these 5/10 turns just to switch jobs?"

Being able to shift to any class at any time, you can equip any and all items you find, however, Heavy Armor will slow down classes not meant for it and certain weapons will be all but useless unless you're the proper class (i.e. Bows and Arrows, Bells, Books, etc.)

How can you shift at any time? Using even an action point system, it will take a bare minimum of three turns to shift from one job to another, and that's assuming that the jobs are actually linked (such as from going from White Mage to a White Mage hybrid class, like Paladin). Switching clear across the board to an unrelated class will probably take even longer. This, again, cuts into customization and experimentation.



What benefit does this give the player over the standard job system? The ability to change jobs mid-fight? I'll just point you to Final Fantasy X-2.