Ability Points, Skill Trees & Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

My thoughts are "na, it's stupid" They'd be about as meaningful of a choice as stats were in Diablo 2.

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

My thoughts are "na, it's stupid" They'd be about as meaningful of a choice as stats were in Diablo 2.

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say that to my sorceress with ungodly amount of mp that regens constantly even without insight just standing in everything taking 0 damage forever

avarage d2 build get w/e stat and dex u need for gear and max vitality

me: never spent any on vitality just maxed out my energy dont need health if u cant ever be touched

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

I really like the idea of them but I'm afraid it would only lead to what everyone else is saying - the community deciding one way is better because it does 0.5% more DPS or something stupid like that. We already see this when people lock certain jobs out of PF because they perform ever so slightly worse, despite being perfectly viable. Unless we can somehow make people stop doing it, I don't see a way it would work.

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I might argue that Bozja shows that people can look past the meta. Outside of DRS and 5-person speed-runs of DRN (and the occasional cranky person in CLL who gets upset over saving only 5 prisoners), I've really not seen people care all that much about exactly what essences and lost actions others use. The needs of DRS don't seem to be forcing everyone who's not running it into the same builds.

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Originally Posted by Frodnoxx

Here's a thought experiment. Think of a game (any game) where customizability worked really well - it made you different than your peers, it let you play differently, and still let you excel in the content. What was it about that game that let that happen and why could it not happen in this game?

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It never really works in any multiplayer game. There is literately no way to make a game fair if the differences are too far apart that the meta becomes "use this exact build or you will be excluded from all content harder than facerolls." Which, guess what, was the case for most of 2.0 and 3.0 when the jobs were the most different. Right now it's like 'use WAR, or don't bother raiding as a tank'.

Like if you think about why the game does what it does, it comes down to fight choreography. If you have 3 different tanks and one is weak to piercing, one is weak to blunt, and one is weak to slashing, but you design the fight around each boss having this kind of combat, then you get painted into a corner where players will demand the content be nerfed.

Likewise with the elemental strength/weaknesses. It only works well when players can have that ahead of time. So as far as tanks and healers go, you can't design this. Since you can't have 6 DPS players, you can't have one player with each element, nor can you have each melee DPS with slash, stab and blunt.

I understand why they removed these elements, because it makes the PUG duty finding impossible. You'd have to make it so that duties have 1 of each which means you'd end up with 6 element casters (DPS, or healer if it calls for "Light",) 3 melee or ranged DPS, and with so many DPS you'd have to nerf everyones DPS down.

Unfortunately that means re-designing things in a way that would require changing everything. It's far too late in the game's life to do that. Never try to turn a game into something it was not. This is why FFXIV should never have had PvP, and should never have had the Deep Dungeon. The former because they had to effectively create a second game on top of the first one for it to work. And the latter had to be an alternate dungeon system. Sure the Deep Dungeon, is fun once or twice, but it's basically just "easy mode leveling" instead of playing the DF content.

So if you change things to be ability points, what are you going to do with the PvP? Pretend it doesn't exist like normal? What are you going to do with the Deep Dungeons?

It's just that I don't see what they want to do here. Unless they are going to basically add yet another dungeon mode, and basically go "Hey we're sending you back in time before the world was sundered, and also you have amnesia and don't remember any of your skills." Before the time of the ancients. I don't see how they can logically do this.

Maybe they could get away with having the player have to solve a solution to rejoinings, which involves going into each reflection and each reflection has a different combat system that has levels independent from the source.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

This is why FFXIV should never have had PvP

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lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

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I don't care for PVP myself but I am unbothered if it exists as a separate mode that doesn't encroach on the core gameplay.

Getting back on topic, any redesign or overhaul of character ability progression is forced to take PVP, Deep Dungeon, etc. into account.

Because of that, I wouldn't expect a talent tree system to be easily implemented. Every new expansion adds more content to the game that can be negatively impacted by such a sweeping change.

PvP is like the only remaining fun content in the game currently aside from maybe RP.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

The question is always going to be whether it can stand to the test of actually being meaningful and not just something that gets diluted by there ultimately being an optimal build.

Even bringing up the Blue Mage example of that being a system to 'strive for' - It still has a pretty rigid rotation that you follow.

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The thing is you could have a skill tree where everyone picks the same skills for Savage raids, but then someone might notice that "hey, actually this skill is super useful in solo PotD", and then someone might find another skill very fun to use in Eureka/Bozja.

You then have a job where it feels different in various different content types. I think that's worth it even if you have a strict meta for each content type, because then there will still be diversity across the whole game.

Something needs to be done to break up combat. This will be three expansions on a row with the same general feel for combat.

To the people objecting and saying “it’ll be unbalanced”, there will always be some measure of imbalance in any game. Imperfection is not a good enough excuse to not try.

And “there will only be one meta spec”. Of course there will be one meta spec, that's how min/maxing players and meta works. Nearly every single game has some mathematical “perfect” spec, but that doesn’t stop multitudes of people playing the game how they want. Heck, we see it now. There’s the best job within a role, but people play “weaker” jobs because they like them. Whether it’s because they prefer the different gameplay, the glams, the lore, whatever.

Live service games need change. Change or stagnate and die.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

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Every time I tried frontlines it was like 50% bots by volume and I was like "these are just powerleveling bots, I don't want to be carried by this nonsense." Again though, I don't play it, so if you say it's good now, I'm assuming you like the PVP itself and not the easy EXP or grinding till you get the rewards and then dropping it entirely.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

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I said in my post that elemental and pierce/slash/etc weaknesses and resistances is not the way to go because of the reasons you described. I also said there are other ways to have situations where players get to stand out without doing it with explicit weaknesses and resistances (see my bullet points). It can also be done without people being excluded by having enough areas in a fight where different builds can shine. Again I am not advocating for elemental weaknesses, but the analogy would be to have a fight that cycles through all the elements over its course. That way no one build is definitively better than another and people still get to be different.

But I also did say (as you are saying) that the game is what it is and the re-design would be too big, and the devs have made it all too clear how averse to change they are.

I think I'd much rather if jobs just got to have a dual role they can queue for with the flip of a button. Let that Dragoon feel vindicated when they turn on their stance, let that White Mage remind the Black Mages why there was a War of the Magi, let that Warrior shake is green heart out.

We already know it's possible for skills to have alternate functions/effects via PVP, and Duty Support/Trust NPCs have been double-dipping for years. Maybe instead of ever upwards advancement we just do some side-stepping.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

I think I'd much rather if jobs just got to have a dual role they can queue for with the flip of a button. Let that Dragoon feel vindicated when they turn on their stance, let that White Mage remind the Black Mages why there was a War of the Magi, let that Warrior shake is green heart out.

We already know it's possible for skills to have alternate functions/effects via PVP, and Duty Support/Trust NPCs have been double-dipping for years. Maybe instead of ever upwards advancement we just do some side-stepping.

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That could potentially work. Balance new trees around the roles that aren't the base roles for a given class. Then have those skills utilized if they join as their off role. Kind of like how we can take our chocobos down different role paths.

There would probably still be some that on paper someone thinks are better than others but I think we'd be fine because everything isn't perfectly balanced now. So if the design was of a similar level of balance where things may not be ideal but are viable, then that should satisfy the balance concern.

Levels are just a number, it doesn't matter if it's 50 or 500, reworking levels like WoW did to cut them in half isn't actually about game design or efficiency, its a placebo to placate players who struggle counting without using their toes.

On another level what many people are asking for when they ask for "ability points" is a grind, they want to grind power so there is a functional disparity between the people who play 23 hours a day and other players. It doesn't matter whether this is grinding levels or grinding points its just a desire for grind. If you want to see how this pans out you can look at Everquest and Black Desert. EQ introduced ability points on top of levels and it became an absolutely MASSIVE gatekeeping system. Want to join a top guild? Sorry, you don't have 300+ AP so no. Want to do top shelf content? Sorry no, need to grind mindlessly for months for sufficient AP. The system also runs away with itself with the required AP becoming more and more absurd with new players never able to participate with veterans and even veterans quitting because they can't keep up with the need to fuel an endless appetite for grind. It's a guaranteed way to crucify your game. Black Desert has an exponential XP system where grinding for higher levels requires progressively more XP but if you live in the game and never visit the toilet you are rewarded with an enormous power advantage because levels mean a lot because they are so hard to get. Same problem.

Also, meta builds make the game unbalance-able - cf: WoW. Also these people who say FF14 isn't perfectly balanced now are COMPLETELY mentally insane. Have they even played an unbalanced game like WoW before? Where DPS log differences between classes and builds could reach +200% (not the 1-5% in FF14).

No thanks.

As fun as seeing numbers go up is, just endlessly raising the max level with each expansion isn't really a solution.

But at the same time, they could go prune away some levels from ARR... Since it doesn't really need 50 levels to be honest.

No thanks;

It’s not the same, but they did have something kinda-sorta like this with optional abilities you could get in 2.x.

(Aka play warrior to get the provoke skill for tanks)

It just resulted in “you have to get all the things”, and wasn’t really designed for experimentation.

Bottom line in FF, if I get into a dungeon with any tank, I need to expect they can do xyz, and not have it be a mystery whether they can do xy or z.

Similarly they allowed putting points into attributes, but it boiled down to “just do this or be suboptimal”, and they had materia for similar purposes. It’s all been removed, mostly.

Yeah no thanks. Talent trees are just an illusion of choice and everyone ends up running the same builds anyway. So what's the point?

Okay, im curios let's say leveling and sudo leveling is not a Option. As this seems to be the case and they dont want a new number crunch demanding situation.
For the nay sayers what would you to for a Progression system.

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Originally Posted by Ayalu

Okay, im curios let's say leveling and sudo leveling is not a Option. As this seems to be the case and they dont want a new number crunch demanding situation.
For the nay sayers what would you to for a Progression system.

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The thing is, anything that isn't levelling, is pseudo levelling. Grind out AP for a tree, you are still 'levelling', but getting AP instead of levels to get your strength. This applies to pretty much anything you can think of for getting stronger. Job mastery levels? At 100, you start getting job levels, at levels 2,4,6,8 and 10, you get something new. Everything is pseudo levelling.

If they want to prevent another number crunch, they need to stop players getting stronger. The problem is, players want to feel stronger as they progress. Why have I got this flashy new toy, when it doesn't increase my damage, and this even goes down to more utility things like gap closers or things like Triple Cast.

Even during an expansion as we go through raid tiers and consequently gear increases (which can also be seen as a form of pseudo levelling), you want to feel stronger. Imagine beating the first raid tier, getting the best gear, the next tier comes out, but you already out gear it, that challenge is lost.

All this to say, everything is levelling in one form or another, and you cannot prevent numbers getting too high. Players always want to get stronger, it is inevitable.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Ability Points, Skill Trees or Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

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...do it....

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Originally Posted by Myrany

I say no thanks.

I have played several games who used skill points/talent trees. In the end you always end up with exactly ONE viable build that everyone has to use. No thanks.

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Yeah, that. despite all the "praise" dragonflight gets, every spec i played came down to the single target build, or aoe build. No choice at all.

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Originally Posted by Frodnoxx

In conclusion. For a system that lets players change their strengths and weaknesses to work, the content needs to present different areas to be strong and weak in. And currently the game has a very narrow playing field. So unless this expansion's "Enhanced Combat Design" opens it up, I don't think a customization system in 8.0 will work.

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Nail on the head here. They've taken away every system players could interact with that adds depth to the game and in order to diversify they'd effectively have to 180 and put a lot of those systems back in..

There are thousands of games out there where choices work and work very well. Hell even games like call of duty with endless weapon choices loadout choices etc etc. You can still pick what you want and dominate the game.. there's a meta sure but it's also very easy to absolutely own the meta..

Or racers with an endless choice of cars. The fastest one isn't necessarily the best especially if it can't get round a corner

The key to balance is not in jobs but in content design..

Elemental weaknesses and things would be fine as long as they didn't repeat the mistakes of ffxi and end up in a situation where almost 90% of monsters shared the same weaknesses. Thus they were the only 2 players would typically sync merit points into..

Xivs big problem is every encounter is the exact same thing. The only thing that changes is boss HP. Every boss has the same speed, same defence stats, takes the same evasion the same resistances.. a level 90 boss takes the exact same damage from a resultant arrow as a level 1 bug.. because it has the exact same defence and mitigation.

Said it before but you can't create fun diverse and interesting jobs and choices without having diverse and interesting systems and mechanics in the game to play around with.

Calling it now we will have "Quick and Easy Sprout Guides" up on day 2, explaining sprouts "the ideal build* for their job so they don't have to "worry about this confusing system".

(* "ideal" by the standards of what the endgame raiders planned in a rapid effort of min maxing with a lot of calculations and spreadsheets)

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Elemental weaknesses and things would be fine as long as they didn't repeat the mistakes of ffxi and end up in a situation where almost 90% of monsters shared the same weaknesses. Thus they were the only 2 players would typically sync merit points into.

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The problem is, FFXIV isn't built around such a system. Just as an example, Black Mage now has most of its damage coming from Fire aspected damage. This is fine if an enemy is weak to it, but what if it is neutral or worse, resists/absorbs the fire damage. Going with weak vs neutral, which one would you balance the BLM's DPS around?

Now, to get around elemental weaknesses/strengths, you would need to allow BLM the ability to swap which of it's spells actually do damage. A couple of ways this could be done is a stance that swaps Fire and Ice functionality, with all Fire spells being replaced with an Ice equivalent and vice versa or, if you want to go down the talent tree route, have one for fire, one for ice. The first option is essentially a palette swap. The second on has issues in being able to swap to a different element when you are randomly placed in an instance. Imagine you are set up for a fire weak enemy, then you go into the next encounter, and they resist/absorb fire, but you have no chance to change. You have been neutered due to no fault of your own.

This then leads back to encounter design, you have to have an enemy that is either weak to Fire/Ice or Lightning (assuming we can have Lighting as another option to use for the main damage spells). That in itself restricts what you can do. Unless you also want to give BLM access to Wind, Earth and Water spells as more, what is essentially, spell glamour options.

If we then extrapolate this to other casters, RDM and SMN and soon PCT, where they use a variety of elements for their damage, it can cause issues there as well.

Take this and expand to slashing/piercing/blunt resistances for melee.

To solve all of this, the easiest thing would be to have the benefits/downsides be small but at that point, you could argue what the point of it is. Bearing in mind, this is only scratching the surface of potential pitfalls. Yes, encounter design is important however, designing enemies that have certain weaknesses where you have no time to prepare is not good design. You are better off making the boss do mechanics that can potentially force you to use your utility. Yes, you could Triplecast at that point where you are standing still, but the next mechanic is movement heavy, so you are better off planning it around that. Make the boss hinder your rotation so the player has to have more forethought in to what they might need tools for. Something to break up the rotation you just mindlessly repeat.

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Originally Posted by Minali

Calling it now we will have "Quick and Easy Sprout Guides" up on day 2, explaining sprouts "the ideal build* for their job so they don't have to worry about this confusing system".

(* "ideal" by the standards of what the endgame raiders planned in a rapid effort of min maxing with a lot of calculations and spreadsheets)

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Sadly I agree we will just see people promoting the "cookie cutter" or "meta builds" which defeats the objective of having a skill tree. Would be interesting to see what happens in 8.0, meanwhile I am excited to play with friends in DT and go on another adventure.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

The problem is, FFXIV isn't built around such a system. Just as an example, Black Mage now has most of its damage coming from Fire aspected damage. This is fine if an enemy is weak to it, but what if it is neutral or worse, resists/absorbs the fire damage. Going with weak vs neutral, which one would you balance the BLM's DPS around?

Now, to get around elemental weaknesses/strengths, you would need to allow BLM the ability to swap which of it's spells actually do damage. A couple of ways this could be done is a stance that swaps Fire and Ice functionality, with all Fire spells being replaced with an Ice equivalent and vice versa or, if you want to go down the talent tree route, have one for fire, one for ice. The first option is essentially a palette swap. The second on has issues in being able to swap to a different element when you are randomly placed in an instance. Imagine you are set up for a fire weak enemy, then you go into the next encounter, and they resist/absorb fire, but you have no chance to change. You have been neutered due to no fault of your own.

This then leads back to encounter design, you have to have an enemy that is either weak to Fire/Ice or Lightning (assuming we can have Lighting as another option to use for the main damage spells). That in itself restricts what you can do. Unless you also want to give BLM access to Wind, Earth and Water spells as more, what is essentially, spell glamour options.

If we then extrapolate this to other casters, RDM and SMN and soon PCT, where they use a variety of elements for their damage, it can cause issues there as well.

Take this and expand to slashing/piercing/blunt resistances for melee.

To solve all of this, the easiest thing would be to have the benefits/downsides be small but at that point, you could argue what the point of it is. Bearing in mind, this is only scratching the surface of potential pitfalls. Yes, encounter design is important however, designing enemies that have certain weaknesses where you have no time to prepare is not good design. You are better off making the boss do mechanics that can potentially force you to use your utility. Yes, you could Triplecast at that point where you are standing still, but the next mechanic is movement heavy, so you are better off planning it around that. Make the boss hinder your rotation so the player has to have more forethought in to what they might need tools for. Something to break up the rotation you just mindlessly repeat.

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adding such a system if it is done correctly you will reach to 2 points:

- there is a job synergy if there is a warrior there should also scholar and monk for example
- some jobs will suffer in some fights

Depends how it's implemented on "builds" I doubt they would go as far as to have some builds change role types (like a DPS becoming a tank or a tank becoming a healer)


I personally can see how some builds could work without a "clear meta" maybe some builds would be a better "off tank" build, or some builds would focus healers on more mitigation, I think the issue may come when you put DPS numbers and damage into the build.

Sounds better than what they have currently.

The focus on balance and homogenization is anti fun.

Depending on what they opt to, they're going to have to change the endgame gearing cycle, because as is you don't have much flexibility in job swapping in time to keep up.
"Some jobs not being very good for certain fights" has always been completely normal in any video game with multiple characters, builds, weapon styles and classes. It's only a problem in XIV now (leveling doesn't take anywhere near as long as it did back in pre StB days) because with a lot of effort you can get 2 archetypes geared up in 2nd to best in slot in a matter of months. Which discourages the idea of flexing whichever job is best for a given fight in the same expansion cycle.

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Originally Posted by Myrany

In the end you always end up with exactly ONE viable build that everyone has to use.

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This seems to be the thing always hiding behind innocuous looking idea of "skill trees" and "freedom and choice".

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Originally Posted by Oizen

I'm for it, and I'm even fine if theres a "meta". Meta parse centric players are always miserable, will always be miserable, and frankly deserve to be miserable, dont make the game suck for them.

As long as its easy to redistribute points, save loadouts, and its not the same meta for every single piece of content, sure why not. I'd love jobs to be more flexible.

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I agree. Just because some people have a calculator lodged into their brain everybody else must have boring jobs?
We've been seeing this line of thinking ever since ShB where jobs started to become homogeneous. Miss me with that stuff. lol

funny thing is if we use diablo 2 for example with skill tree, you want to know what is really one of the most op things you can do in the game its something hardly anyone in the game ever uses its making an amazon a spear user and maxing out your dodges do it correctly and nothing can touch you, more so if you get the ability that slows range and magic attacks lol..

There are a way to throw in hidden traits and builds that a meta will never go for that can wipe the floor with meta builds

which honestly i enjoy doing looking at the meta ppl are doing and defying it to destory them with a non metabuild

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Originally Posted by Tunda

adding such a system if it is done correctly you will reach to 2 points:

- there is a job synergy if there is a warrior there should also scholar and monk for example
- some jobs will suffer in some fights

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This would be fine if the content was diversified. If raids were like alliance raids for example. It would balance it self out if let say a blm was weak against boss 1 because it resisted fire.
But excel at boss 2 because it was weak to fire. May then be somewhat neutral on boss 3 which has no affinity to either of those elements..

It's only a problem when all content is essentially 1 boss and done. Content design is the biggest problem.

no talent trees are not really that good.
first off, there is always a preceded meta that you are shoehorned in to using.
second, all it means is your toolkit will be taken away so you can choose to get half of it back at the cost of the other half. (enjoy the wow life of having to swap between single target or aoe build between every pull)
third, it creates a very toxic attitude towards anyone not existing within the meta.

I like player choice, but theses trees never end up being that, and at the cost of loosing the leveling experience its not even a question, its a resounding "NO" from me.

No, definitely not.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

This would be fine if the content was diversified. If raids were like alliance raids for example. It would balance it self out if let say a blm was weak against boss 1 because it resisted fire.
But excel at boss 2 because it was weak to fire. May then be somewhat neutral on boss 3 which has no affinity to either of those elements..

It's only a problem when all content is essentially 1 boss and done. Content design is the biggest problem.

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The most interesting design boss I have seen in FFXIV is garuda&ifrit level 80 shadowbringers raid.. man this fight gives me chill even when i watch it again the idea that we have 2 boss that we have to maintain as a team.. AOE abilities have to shine again in raids.

I like to see 4 Raids split into 4 type of bosses:
- boss that is very generic
- boss that split into 2+ bosses that we have to maintain.
- boss focus more into mechanic with less care about dps
- boss have mix of 3 and extra gemics

in this way we can have every play style possible to be shine