Hear me out: Should 14 have talent trees?

The devs can't even balance the jobs we have now?

I like the idea of talent trees but not for this game. It works in single player games because you're free to choose

In an MMO setting, it's next to impossible especially if there's raiding involved. You're griefing your party if you choose the wrong talents.

Maybe FFXVI will have a talent tree but it has no place in XIV

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

So lately there’s been a bunch of talk about people being really unhappy about job changes and general direction. The devs clearly want to keep the skill gap as small as possible and most of us hate their current approach. I think there may be a solution: talent trees.

I don’t mean anything as in depth as other games. Just maybe a few talents per job that slightly change how a few skills operate. For example, warrior has a talent that changes overpower from a circle to a cone. Sage has a talent that changes physis from a regen to a shield. Dark knight could have a talent that makes plunge deal no damage but applies soul survivor. Samurai has a talent choice where A: you lose kaiten but midare, kaeshi, and tsubame are guaranteed crits or B: you have hissatsu kaiten but the related skills deal less damage.
I didn’t completely think out the numbers or functionality, these are just examples.

In other words, those of us who preferred the gameplay of previous patches/expacs can have our cake and eat it and players who like the direction of job design can have and eat their cake. Would this happen? Probably not. But it could be fun to think about.

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How about we add skill trees from Ragnarok Online instead? :P

Back to WoW and SWTOR with you please.

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Originally Posted by BokoToloko

After reading post from TalesFromDF subreddit, I completely disagree. Outside of savage, people wants to clear stuff as far as possible, so anything that slows the run down can and will be noticed and shunned by other players. People in this community seem to want the optimal both in challenging and non-challenging content.

And, in WoW, there are PUGs that do take issue with builds but, though I've seen some people kicked out instantly for it, most cases the "wrong talent build" is asked first to change their talent before entering. And it's also worth mentioning there are a lot of people who mess around with builds while farming raids.

Only place where this applies are Bozja/Eureka and mostly because they can't track each and everyone.

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I feel like one of the contributing things to the endgame issue of FFXIV you mentioned is the simplification of the game. People that want to stare at a spreadsheet only need to figure out 1 meta to apply to every bit of content. Where as in FFXI they wouldn't have been able to do this because of the amount of classic RPG mechanics in the game that creates differences in enemies and the larger variety of gear options since gear wasn't limited to only being a source of stat/substat numbers and could contain passives, added effects, and skill enhancements.

They tried this it did not work. The system was essentially the extra ability system in ARR AND HW. If u didn't pick VERY specific things from your sub classes you basically were playing with 50% of your tool-kit which anyone who does anything EX or above will say is BAD.

They can't fully balance what we already have and you want them to add talent trees?

Static jobs that can be leveled/changed at will are actually a strong point of the game. Removing that would be a mistake. Not to mention a logistical nightmare.

What OP proposes sounds more like a aesthetic change, tbh.

It'd be cool but I don't trust SE to balance them well. They'd end up just being a formality and a waste of resources.

Job trees are that thing you spitball with your friends and gets you all giddy about how exciting and fun it could be. You often compare it to single player rpgs as well.

Then the reality of an online game hits and you realize five out 16 job trees are never used because devs couldn't balance those, the next five are mediocre and/or gimmicky and the last six are in the bag of viable and/or op and they're the meta.

I'm sorry but job trees are an ancient relic, typically adorned with nostalgia roses and occasional brought to the surface because people are bored with that they currently have and they want something exciting in their gaming lives.

Lots of people in this thread who have never played a game with talent trees.

BUH ALSO You really expect SE to balance talent trees when their go-to balancing act is homogenizing?

I guess I don't hate the idea of talent trees inherently, but there aren't a lot of cases where they're introduced and there's not a meta-set up for everything that sort of defeats the point of "to play it in the style you want". Like, mathematically when you're dealing with potencies, ability effects, etc... there's almost always going to be a: "This is the best set up, period" and it's not a theory, it just factually is. So anything outside of that set up is, by definition, sub-optimal and by extension, sub-par.

A small part of me wouldn't entirely hate the concept of specializations, that WoW does for instance, but the Devs already express regret over essentially doing that with Scholar + SMN and it has caused a lot of headaches between those two classes and their balancing in the past. While I think, if done right (which, to be fair, is an extremely tall ask) a lot of classes could have alternate class-fantasies tied into them and would be kind of cool from a creative aspect... but historically, and realistically speaking... I feel like the work itself wouldn't amount to anything more than general headaches from everyone.

Which, the last line kind of also ties in with the idea of talent trees.

Ah yes the illusion of choice.

We usually get some type of borrowed power character enhancement stuff when we do relics. Eureka, Bozja, etc I think that’s fine for that content. I don’t really want talents or anything like that in the main part of the game though.

I do think we need some kind of uniqueness honestly the game gets so booring seeing everyone do the EXACT SAME ROTATIONS on the jobs...

Now a Talent tree doesnt have to be special powers as people think...

For example a blm tree could switch their thunder dot to be a fire dot or blizzard dot, it would allow a type of style with the skill (this styles are on the game already) Could be ancient magic useage, or dark magic or void or the ronka style of magic...

I do feel like we need something im not saying it has to be anything major either to show the difference between you, me and some random joe in the same class

Only in side contents.


I much prefer a talent tree where you grind points to level up, instead of popping consumables like in Eureka/Bozja. Leveling up a talent trees give you a sense of growth much better than just buy off some essences/logograms from the market board.


For normal contents. No. It will break more than fixing anything, and will be even more painful to balance around. It will also promote the "You don't pay my sub" attitude even further cuz you want to play the build you want, instead of being optimal to save other people's times.

talent trees are useless look at lost ark everyone has the same build

Normally, I'd say yes, but these people can barely design a cup of water without screwing up the balance, so.

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Originally Posted by HisShadowX

That's correct the Cross Class System, which required you as a tank to level other jobs and classes just to get an ability. Once they removed that system more people ended up joining or coming back. That system was awful.

I can only imagine being in the first RAID and one of the Hardcore Players who is playing a Bard whining why the tank does not have an ability that a White Mage and Archer has and they need to come back once they leveled those classes lol

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Did a Bard shove you into a locker and steal your lunch money or something? You have a very weird vendetta going there.

I think it would be cool be super cool to have more job expression and the ability to make the way you play jobs unique, but at this point in the games lifespan it would be completely impossible to implement, unless they completely overhauled the game, which I don't think they would do, and I don't think is necessary, because the job system we have now is serviceable. I could see them doing something like this for a limited job though! That would be cool.

I believe the benefit of not doing talent trees is that they can do more jobs. Maybe I'm totally wrong on that but as long as I get geomancer I don't really care.

It's funny, but I think tab-target MMOs are actually the worst genre to have talent trees in (WoW is weird). Because 1) people spend incredibly amounts of time on one MMO, 2) it's co-operative so you rely on other people to do their jobs well, and 3) the combat is very rigid and math-y, so it's fairly inevitable, as other people have said, that players will discover and enforce one optimal build to the detriment of creativity or personal preference. In other games, even co-op ones, I think you have more room for that kind of experimentation because success and failure isn't based so heavily on mathematical optimizations.

If you add a little bit of action or open-endedness, I think you greatly increase the chances that different people with have different levels of success with different builds. But FFXIV is very much about tackling well-defined dance-fights, and executing a rigid plan to perfection (or trying to at least). Talent trees just add a bunch of math for someone (not everyone, just a few people really) to solve before the rigid plan gets made.

A talent tree in this game would flop. Why? Like someone else said, players are already going to go after their class's strongest talent. While a talent tree could create some diversity among the classes, with everyone running after their strongest talents, then there would literally be no reason for a talent tree

Also, Denji had the right of it. Raiding is already "meta central". When you jump into a raid party (if talent trees existed in XIV), you'd be expected to have the absolute best your class has to offer. If you dont? Well, you can expect to be booted from the party

No, XIV should not have talent trees. They'd balloon the design and balancing budget way out of proportion to any benefit.

WoW needs talent trees because you are stuck playing only one class. In FF14 you can simply change jobs if you want to have a different playstyle or fill another role.

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Originally Posted by dustdjinn

I believe the benefit of not doing talent trees is that they can do more jobs. Maybe I'm totally wrong on that but as long as I get geomancer I don't really care.

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How is that a benfit when every caster basically plays the same, all healers same all tanks same all mele same ... Ur abilitys may be worded or said differently

But at the end of the day they all play the same this days so that might have been true in stormblood but its not anymore

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Originally Posted by Adeacia

The jobs themselves are the talent trees.

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This right here is how I choose to view it. Each and every job is locked to their own sort of gimmick, but the choice of which job to play is what I equate to the variety you would see in a talent tree.

Talent trees could work for some fancy side content. We've already had all kind of stuff with Eureka and Bozja.

So i'm going to break down why we honesty need talents or some form of it

The answer is both players and DEVS using exisiting jobs as an excuse to not add another in that style.

Example Corsair: everyone is like well mch covers it so if u want it just glamor it and still look at the ugly toolbox
example 2: geomancer : well so and so is a geomancer in lore (which its not ur just helping a conjurer around) so no geomancer for you
example 3: theif same deal
and then there are
I want a berserker: well this guy has a berserk ability so no berserker for you.

Theres also a fact you may like theme of the job but hate the weapon or vice versa

Also there is a fact the devs strip abilitys or style of play from some people who enjoyed it for other people (which admitly pisses me off like they did with ast) so it could be used to keep the style of play we enjoyed

It has talent trees.
You just have the capability of maxing them all out.

If you wanna tank, swap over to a tank role, if you wanna deal more damage you pick up a DD role.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

It has talent trees.
You just have the capability of maxing them all out.

If you wanna tank, swap over to a tank role, if you wanna deal more damage you pick up a DD role.

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talent trees arent just about role its about changing ur style of play or your entire theme

instend of being some weeb ninja you could be a pure blood theif with one

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

So lately there’s been a bunch of talk about people being really unhappy about job changes and general direction. The devs clearly want to keep the skill gap as small as possible and most of us hate their current approach. I think there may be a solution: talent trees.

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Talents and borrowed power is why WoW has up to a 200% DPS discrepancy between various builds. Therefore every single player just goes to Wowhead, follows the guide and all end up playing the optimum spec. Therefore tonnes of dev time wasted for no outcome.

Yeah no thanks. Talent trees are completely worthless in multiplayer games, causing a bunch of problems that aren't worth the illusion of player choice. Player choice which most people just look up anyway.

If it wanted to be a RPG, yes (not necessarily a talent tree, but anything in the same vein that gives some agency to players)

If more of the content were designed for solo, I think this would absolutely be preferable, balance be damned. But because almost all of the content in the game is designed around parties, it presents a substantial likelihood of the meta problems others are describing. Yes, I can imagine a game where the devs are constantly shuffling up the meta to encourage players to frequently job swap, but even though that appeals to *me* ( I think "gearing up" is bad, exploitative game design), I think many players would quit.

Jobs first need to be differentiated from each other before we try differentiating two players who play the same job from each other.

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Originally Posted by MoofiaBossVal

Jobs first need to be differentiated from each other before we try differentiating two players who play the same job from each other.

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Yet all we get is homogenization

Talent materia would be cooler. Make materia that is craftable that do buffs to specific skills would be fun. It would also be very FF.

No.

People who suggest this type of thing rarely if ever make a comment on how horrible things can go because they're thinking of this stuff as a magical solution to some specific thing they don't like about the game and it's always viewed with rose tinted glasses.

I would only support such a system if it was completely relegated to some kind of solo content.

What always happens with talent trees in multiplayer games is that a few players start mathing out the best possible combination of talents, and then every player is expected to use that exact same set of talents, or else you're excluded from everything.
At best it's just an illusion of choice which is quickly broken.
You also open up the door for random PF peeps to grief their groups by not picking any talents, or for clueless people to randomly pick a set of talents which are completely nonviable.
This is especially bad in WoW where the balance is so bad that the damage variance between sets of talents can be anywhere between 5-50% due to how talents can interact with each other and all the countless borrowed power systems.
The only way to prevent that would be to make the effects of talents so minuscule and unnoticeable that there wouldn't even be a point in them existing anyway.

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

So lately there’s been a bunch of talk about people being really unhappy about job changes and general direction. The devs clearly want to keep the skill gap as small as possible and most of us hate their current approach. I think there may be a solution: talent trees.

I don’t mean anything as in depth as other games. Just maybe a few talents per job that slightly change how a few skills operate. For example, warrior has a talent that changes overpower from a circle to a cone. Sage has a talent that changes physis from a regen to a shield. Dark knight could have a talent that makes plunge deal no damage but applies soul survivor. Samurai has a talent choice where A: you lose kaiten but midare, kaeshi, and tsubame are guaranteed crits or B: you have hissatsu kaiten but the related skills deal less damage.
I didn’t completely think out the numbers or functionality, these are just examples.

In other words, those of us who preferred the gameplay of previous patches/expacs can have our cake and eat it and players who like the direction of job design can have and eat their cake. Would this happen? Probably not. But it could be fun to think about.

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I will love it but SE got no talent to do good ones.