I posted this in the New weapon skills thread, but since this place seems more relevant for it, here goes:

One of the worst mistakes SE has ever pulled (even the dev team is human) is making job abilities and spells that are unlocked with merits. Yes, having effects improved by merits may have great potential, but it was always a bad idea to have the base version unlocked by merits when that means that players have to choose between being able to perform each one with mediocrity or being able to perform one or two the way they were made to be used.

While I could explain the things that were wrong with the merit system at length, it basically boils down to a few basic points. This is a very different MMO from others. Part of this is because we have a job system that allows people to do everything with one job given enough time and effort. This is very unlike many other MMOs where you are locked to your class from day one, and have to get a new character in order to perform a different role. The uniqueness and intelligent design of the jobs system in FFXI should not be beaten on its face any more then it already has.

While the "Other" category merits were a nice boost to characters, and stat boosts (STR/DEX/VIT/AGI/INT/MND/CHR/MP/HP) are acceptable and even neat like race selections were, and even Skill Boosts are still in the range of okay, the individual class merits at times pushed past this boundary. Still, class choices were at least restricted to classes, so at least if you liked to play as a more offensive version of one class and a more defensive version of another, you could tailor to this.

Basically, bringing merits into this to compare is wrong, because previous merit categories have been widely different - even when they strongly enforced differing play styles, they were at least limited to their individual jobs.

When it comes to Weapon Skills, few people if any really want to sacrifice the potential they should be at in order to be able to use them all. And I'm sure the dev team worked and toiled very hard on each and every animation... which makes me wonder - why would they deliberately decide to implement a system that encourages players to never use 11 of the 14 animations that they designed? This would be like making players decide between being able to go to Sea or Sky exclusively, unless they payed a non-refundable deposit of one million experience points!

Further, this especially punishes niche weapon skills and weapons, especially on unpopular jobs. You basically have to start choosing between weapons altogether, rather then letting the situation let you choose your job then your weapon. Like to solo on one class that is widely different from the ones you party with? Too bad because you can't get the WS you want without being gimp in parties!

All of this is a terrible price to pay for an artificial limitation on being able to enjoy all of the new content to its fullest. Players will already be paying one million merit points per weapon skill, which while this may be a fair price, is a steep one. But it is not as steep as the price of gimping your ability to get into parties and events with jobs you've leveled and geared just because you couldn't justify making that job's weapon skill your third weapon skill over another.

Basically, I see no reason to cap out this particular merit category. But I know that sometimes the dev team is stubborn about certain things, so I'll just list a few ideas that would be better then the current plans for this. This list goes in order of the best option to the worst. Hopefully SE finds at least one of these better then the extremely limiting limit they have now.
  • No point limits - the players earned their merit points, let them spend them!
  • Increased point costs for increased point limits - having more then three weapon skills capped will cost progressively more to do then the first choices.
  • Individual choices per job - each job has to unlock the weapon skills individually, but each job can unlock up to three.
  • Twenty Point limit, with the first point in any category not counting towards maximum allocation.
  • Thirty-four point limit - have an uneven amount that makes it clear that the intent is that players unlock all weapon skills and cap out five.

Basically, I really hope SE at least implements a higher cap, or even caps for each job, but my ideal (aside from no limits) would to be to have an excessively high cost to merit more and more of them - basically you have to pay merits for more maximum allocation points, and getting the ability to get all of the weapon skills costs something like ten times the amount it did to get the first three. Or something like that.