[dev1210] Why Not Merit Weaponskills ??

[Alhanelem]

You know why scientists and football players do not have many shared abilities? It's a combination of natural, dog-given talent and amount of time you can devote to become more skilled and knowledgeable in your craft.

Which was my point. Your statement about the actual amount of skill required to play the game is irrelevant to the topic. Also, it isn't just developing skill and knowledge in a craft- There is also the physical capability factor.

Saying you don't need X in order to clear content is a pretty lazy argument that can be applied to anything. I suppose we can't complain about job points either. They're just a bonus after all.

It's not "lazy." It's a reasonable argument. Declaring an argument "lazy" doesn't invalidate it. Your personal standard may be that everyone has to be as perfect as possible, but not everyone has that standard, and those people will still be able to play content in the game just fine, which disproves the argument that XYZ merits are a necessity for ABC job. Man, what the hell did we do before the merit WS were introduced! The game was impossible before that!

And job points are a different system from merit points:

-Merit points are easy to obtain but have category limits that require decisions to be made about where you want to go with them. You decide you don't like what you chose, it's not unfeasible to unmerit something and remerit something else. Merits are so easy now that it's gotten to a point where they started using them as a currency....
-Job points are much harder to obtain and are effectively limited by the comparative difficulty of obtaining them. Also, they were designed from the beginning to cater to the job system and fact that many people are leveling every job. You can get job points for every job, but it will take you an eternity or three.

Players have a choice only when:
1. All of the options suck and it doesn't matter what you pick (NIN merits)
2. All (or most) of the options are useful (COR merits)
3. Your choice is actually about what job you are willing to gimp

In other words, you always have a choice.

It is pretty difficult to make any choices that render a job entirely unusable in content. In fact, I'd argue that's not possible. I don't believe any merit category that goes cross job renders any job unplayable; nor does your choices within any job category have any potential to render that job unplayable.

And that's what matters. Your choices do not prevent you from using any job in the game. Therefore, it is customization without cripplization.

Yay, let's keep limits on merits so that way it's even harder to find people to do things with.

Merit limits do not make it harder to find people to do things with. The choice to level (and gear up) or not level a job alone does that. You overstate the impact of the system immensely. I have not merited a WS for my DRK. I guarantee you if I joined a party as DRK, I'd still be able to do my job and unless I screwed something up, I wouldn't be getting kicked (same as anybody else).

YOU. DO. NOT. NEED. EVERY. MERIT. ON. EVERY. JOB. to be able to use that job in content. It is completely possible and doable. The only problem here is the demand of the people in this thread to be PERFECT at everything.

Limits are part of good game design. Or maybe we should just forget limits, start everyone with all 99 jobs and give them full sets of i119 gear, that way everyone can play all content without any effort! That EXP getting progress limits my gameplay way too much! oh, don't forget gil, that limits my gameplay too, lets get rid of that.

...... Anyway, this thread was about the WS limits specifically. My argument is that the absense of any of these weaponskills on any job doesn't make you suddenly unable to play that job. The job doesn't lock out, you don't suddenly do zero damage, it's still fully playable in every way. As long as that holds true, there is no significant problem with the merit system. Being a little better / worse at an individual job != not being able to play it if it's needed and nobody else can do it.