[dev1006] Merit Point Adjustments!

[Arcon]

The point of the merit system is to force people to specialize, while the point of the job system is that you don't have to specialize. They've always been at odds, this is just taking one more step towards rectifying the issue. Shared categories shouldn't have a category cap.

Very true, this has always bothered me about the whole merit system in general. It was designed to specialize in some category, offensive mage, buffing mage, defense tank, shadow tank, melee, etc., however the very job system was one of the main reasons that put FFXI above games like WoW (or pretty much all other MMORPGs) in that you didn't have to specify, you didn't have to resort to just one class. You could play whichever way you wanted, and excel at everything, that was until the merit system. Now you can't even excel at everything within one job due to job specific merits, let alone the excel at everything overall.

That has always bugged me, I hate trade offs, same with gear, at least it's possible to gear swap when you need it, so that made it a lot better. However that doesn't work with merits, admittedly, with current EXP gain it's not hard to change merits, but it's still not a flexible system. And I know it was designed to be that way, I just don't think that way is the best. Of course this is a matter of opinion, but as I said, this principle of being able to do everything at once was one of the things that set this game apart from its competition, and was one of the things that attracted me the most. I really appreciate this step forward in what I consider the right direction, and hope SE continues down this road.

Edit:

As it is now, you can specialize in and perfect one job and still be absolutely drop-dead awesome at other ones.

No, you can be perfect at one aspect of one job, there's plenty of jobs that can't be perfect in all their roles with the options we currently have. Actually that holds true for all jobs, if you consider job specific merits, since they force you to choose between what your job should be capable of. Sure, many jobs have rather useless merits in their respective categories, which makes it easy to choose, others however have many useful merits in each category. Those jobs are forced to give up certain capabilities for others, so they can't even excel at even one particular job.