[dev1210] Why Not Merit Weaponskills ??

[Alhanelem]

huge pile of sarcasm

If you can't reply in a serious / civil tone, don't reply at all. I'm really sick of your rude behaivor.

For reals though, you even relented and said "oh, make em easily switchable so we can have whatever we want/need on any given job!" Not an attack, but do you really not see the terribly annoying flaw present with that idea?

I would consider uncapping all categories a much more significant flaw.

Most people - that is, everyone outside of the hardcore elitists- aren't going to feel the need to constantly change their merits around. They'll only bother to change them in cases where it really makes a difference (though I have argued that it usually doesn't matter much very often). For those of you who feel the need to min-max everything you do, I can see how it would be annoying, but it's still far better than having to farm tens of thousands of XP over again- and I consider making merits easier to change a far more likely thing to actually happen than a total unrestriction of all merit point categories. If they thought that was a good idea they would have done that a long time ago. Heck, actually, the Job Point system was meant to cater to the minmaxers- it lets you get everything, assuming you have the time and patience to do so.

Thus we have:

Merit Points - Customization system- doesn't let you have everything at once, moderate time investment
Job Points - Pure progression system - lets you get everything, extensive time investment

Yes, that's a difference. Maxing out every skill, Other, or WS, means nothing however. Why? Name me a situation in which a player needs more than 7 capped Combat Skills

I mentioned how this favors certain jobs more than others-This is because certain jobs can use more of the WS. The heavy melees, which can use a number of different weapons and the skills for them, benefit notably more from an uncapping than light melee/ranged/support/mages. The latter jobs might only ever use one or two of the WS, so they gain less advantage out of such a change versus say warrior or DRK. (as an aside, this general discrepanacy is one of the things that annoyed me about voidwatch- something that was intended to include more jobs failed to do so). I suppose you can argue that this is more a flaw in the combat system itself than the merit system, however uncapping merits would certainly not help that situation.

except it hurts jobs more by restricting abilities in the Job Specific category like RDM whose spells are locked behind a stupid system meant for customization that provides next to none

They most indeed do provide customization. It's not my fault if a lot of people copy eachother and ignore it. In some cases it's SE's fault for not balancing the different merit options well- Something I would agree they should address if they want these categories to serve their intended purpose. That said, you still don't have 100% of all people picking the same Job merit combinations.