At this point, we don’t have a full list of the phantom jobs that will be available in Final Fantasy XIV’s new field exploration area, and we’re not really going to know that until the patch with the exploration area arrives. We do know a few jobs that have been confirmed, though, as Ranger, Berserker, Chemist, Time Mage, and Cannoneer have all been some combination of shown off and name-dropped explicitly. What makes this interesting to me is in part that it provides an interesting third outcome for potential jobs.
Up until now, jobs in Final Fantasy XIV either were full jobs or limited jobs, but both represented having a wider spread of abilities than were traditionally available in the majority of the series. Phantom jobs provides a space for jobs that would otherwise overlap with an existing job for the most part with some slight deviation or jobs that just can’t fit into the traditional structure; they’re a suite of abilities that are worth exploring while avoiding a full level progression.
For example, Time Mage is already pretty close to Astrologian in concept, but not only is it hard to fit spells like Haste or Slow into the way the game is structured, Time Mages would require a lot of work to not feel like a variant on Astrologian as well as fitting into the game. Their usual abilities like Demi/Gravity don’t work well unless you change how they work so severely that they’re functionally different spells. Having Time Mage as a support, by contrast, lets you play around with the idea without being stuck making it a full job.
Chemist, meanwhile, is something that I think could absolutely work as a healer, but it does raise some problems insofar as the game does not have the item economy you’d need to just be chucking out potions – which means your “potions” are actually just spells, at which point that’s a lot of work and conceptual overhead for what is ultimately just another caster. You can kind of understand why the developers are reluctant.
So what other jobs can fit into this framework?
While I’ve talked about the developers needing to reach deep for further jobs in the main game, I think that we do actually have some jobs available here that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to use reliably. Obviously, I can’t be sure which of these jobs if any will show up, but I think there are some interesting possibilities, including from the obvious source material of Final Fantasy V. So let’s talk about those.
Thief: Rogue as it stands get most Thief abilities and it gets subsumed pretty completely into Ninja, but the thing is that in a controlled environment the game could play around with Steal and some of the other traditional Thief tricks. Maybe it’s a little thin on the ground, but I definitely think there’s space here for a potential support/DPS sort of support job.
Geomancer: In-universe, Geomancer is basically just the Far Eastern version of Conjurer, so as much as I would like to have this as an option for those who aren’t totally into the more seraphic version of White Mage, it seems unlikely to be added right now. But again, you have a more controlled environment where terrain can matter more and tricks like damage floors can be played with. Especially if we go with Geomancer as a specifically traversal-based support.
Gladiator: A job that was added to FFV in one of the later rereleases, this one was very much meant as a tank-based job with the ability to draw additional hits and inflict group-wide damage easily for no expense. That really does feel like it’d make for a good support job. I realize that “Gladiator” is technically the name of an existing class that is later wholly subsumed by Paladin, so it might need a rename, but I think the idea has some legs.
Mime: So here’s the thing about Mime as a job: It shows up pretty often in job-based games, and it can often be either super powerful or largely useless, since the whole thing is mimicry. However, in larger groups, this could actually have a practical use as a potential support job, allowing you to basically swap your support job on the fly based on the rest of the party. Making it balanced to have someone use it without it being totally useless would of course be tricky, but I do think it’s the most likely context to have the job in FFXIV past a nod in the Blue Mage line.
Viking: Another very tank-based job from Final Fantasy III this time, there’s not much to say about this one that isn’t also true of Gladiator. Might be easier to use this one just to avoid name issues, if we’re being honest.
Gambler: Rolling the slots and hoping to get something good is never going to be a great mechanic, and it’s especially not a good mechanic in a game that places a high emphasis on precision play like FFXIV. But it does have some potential as a support, especially if the mechanics are less about rolling the dice and more about improving odds. Heck, you could always just give it Gil Toss as an active ability; it’s appropriate, and if we’re not worried about Chemist using actual items, we’re not worried about using actual gil.
Caster upgrade/downgrades: In older games, most notably the original Final Fantasy and FFIII, you had some jobs that were very much just existing casters but better, like Black Mage upgrading to Magus. Similarly, FFIII had the Evoker, which was just Summoner But Worse. Using these as support jobs would give an excuse to have these jobs show up and give some of the flavor of the titles the whole concept appears keen to invoke without having to fret too much about whether or not you’re technically just subbing in Black Mage.
Having said all of this, I know it is still possible to just say that there is a Black Mage phantom job as well as the main job. Sure, the name confusion would be real, but this is all happening in pretty sectioned-off content, so there’s nothing stopping us from just getting the full FFV lineup explicitly and not worrying about the overlap. But I like to think that this particular mechanic is meant to let us explore some jobs that otherwise wouldn’t be eligible, and I look forward to seeing both our initial options as well as what’s coming around the bend.
I also wouldn’t mind if we get ones that are completely original, but I feel like that’d kind of be missing the entire point.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, obviously I am going to be talking about the patch, and as I always do we’re going to start by highlighting the content without any sort of spoilers. I can’t promise it’ll be totally devoid of them just by the very nature of the content itself, but that is the goal.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
