New Weaponskills - Not what was expected

[Unleashhell]

The point is that If you merit the skills then you are better than the people who didn't bother.

One of FFXI's biggest selling points is the ability to play multiple jobs / classes on one character. Merits in jobs specific categories are somewhat understandable because they don't limit you to just being good at one job, and rarely even force you to decide how to play the specific job that they are for, due to the fact that many of the categories are not something people would want to boost. Being limited to the number of merits that you can put into non job specific merits limits your ability to use the job change feature at all.

Unlocking them doesn't mean that people will just automatically have all the same crap.

So again why even have a combat skill merit category? Why not just cap the skill for all weapons at a certain point? Maybe I'm not wording things correctly, but for instance if you cap at sword at 424 then add your 8/8 merits you will have 440 skill. Why not just raise the skill level to cap out at 440 to begin with and eliminate the combat skill merit category all together? Being everyone wants to fully merit every single combat skill to its fullest it totally makes the combat merit system pointless. Once you fully merit every skill to its cap there is no diversity between people in the combat skill category if they all have capped combat skill merits.