A talent system

As long as they make certain ones not mandatory picks for content like what we have now with role skills. Choices like:

-Level 15: Make Unleash cost 10% less MP / Make Unleash have a larger radius / Make Unleash slow targets
-Level 30: Shield lob potency increased to 200 / Shield lob bounces to 2 nearby targets for 25% damage / shield lob has further increased enmity

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Originally Posted by Raim

-Level 15: Make Unleash cost 10% less MP / Make Unleash have a larger radius / Make Unleash slow targets

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Everyone would pick option 1 because more MP=more abilities before going oom=MOAR DEEPS. Maybe option 2 in certain niche situations where they have to pick up mobs spread over a wide area (though 1 would probably still be better here because they could just spam it more often while running around.) No one would probably ever use 3 as it looks pretty useless.

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Originally Posted by Raim

-Level 30: Shield lob potency increased to 200 / Shield lob bounces to 2 nearby targets for 25% damage / shield lob has further increased enmity

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Everyone would pick option 1 for trials/raids because MOAR DEEPS. Option 2 would be reserved for OTs in fights with lots of adds and maybe dungeons. Option 3 would again be soundly ignored because the tank community has already pretty much decided dps>tank stats and enmity really isn't an issue for most.

I'm not trying to pick on you, Raim, or say your ideas or bad, just demonstrate how hard it actually is to create talents that are both balanced and different in meaningful ways. Especially after theorycrafters disect them. 99.9999999% of the time the "better" talent will always be the one that offers you more dps, no matter how small the increase. For 'utility' talents to actually be viable they have to be extremely niche and only viable in certain situations or overpowered enough that people would rather have them over dps talents, which would just make everyone flock to them instead.

I agree that having a talent system would only cause more problems than good. From what I remember of Legion (for the month that I played it sparingly), the talent system they have now isn't as cookie cutter as it was in the early days and from what I heard it was pretty. . .fair? I still think the best talent tree system was. . .rift I believe it was but it has been far to long for me to remember.

So having something that wouldn't increase/decrease damage, mana, hp, etc, but instead be more along the lines of things like increased duration, radius, etc, would be better if they ever went this route.

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Originally Posted by Raim

As long as they make certain ones not mandatory picks for content like what we have now with role skills. Choices like:

-Level 15: Make Unleash cost 10% less MP / Make Unleash have a larger radius / Make Unleash slow targets
-Level 30: Shield lob potency increased to 200 / Shield lob bounces to 2 nearby targets for 25% damage / shield lob has further increased enmity

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These would probably end up being mandatory picks, albeit perhaps on a fight-by-fight basis. Because Unleash already has a low mana cost but incredibly low potency, it shouldn't be used for more than an opening enmity grab. The larger radius can convenience this in certain fights. If you mean slow as an actual attack speed decrease, rather than a heavy effect, it'd at least double as some minor form of mitigation similar to Flash. That would be your go-to unless mobs are immune (as they so often are) or are unable to be safely (for your healer, most likely), i.e. simultaneously, grabbed without the enlarged radius.

At 120 potency base, the added 50% bounce damage (60 potency) would never outperform the added 80 potency available on single target. The former would also be wasted unless there were multiple targets. If the enmity modifier were high enough, it could see use, especially without Diversion, Shirk, and/or a Ninja. But the first is probably your go-to.

See, even if these were generally balanced these are what we might call "Legion" talents—obvious choices for particular scenarios, meant to be swapped constantly (meaning a lot of time in menus), or coordinated between party members to have sufficient capacity in various roles. My advice would be to move about as far away from that as possible. Try to go for approximately equal situations and outputs, but through different flavors. The whole purpose of these talents will be, essentially, to increase the 'strike zone' of the job. You want to grab as many people as possible; right now, some are finding a way to play it they like and others are missing it; you want to make as many people hit, find a reason they really enjoy the job, as possible. Otherwise, there's no point. Customization for customization's sake is simply a love for clicking things in UI menus. You either like the result or you don't. It doesn't matter that it's unique, or that you outsmarted someone with your unique formulation. It just needs to be satisfying. And yes, the numbers will be a part of that, which means for there to be multiple satisfying options, they need to really damn well balanced.

To clarify, I feel like the current jobs we have within each category of roles (tank, healer, ranger, mage, melee) don't differentiate from each other to justify adding talent trees within them, and the current jobs in some of these categories have one job standing above the other. IE, how Bard fulfills the role of a support ranger better than Machinist by having more support abilities despite both supposedly being the same type of job.

I also feel if SE developed new playstyles within the confines of current jobs, such as, say, giving SCH or AST the option to focus on their mitigation heals over their other skills, you would be better suited just adding a new job with that focus and building a new kit for it instead.

I feel like talent trees as a concept is better suited for single player games when you don't need to deal with other player's expectations and needs. Then, even if you opt for a less optimal skill set for fun factor, it doesn't bother anyone.

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

2) Lack of faith in SE devs ability to balance such a system is frankly fair. But that should not be an argument against a possible solution, especially when it leaves the original problem still in place.

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Originally Posted by Age_of_Oblivion

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

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So the options are every member of every class being identical, or every member of every class being identical with extra micromanagement between fights.

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Originally Posted by Age_of_Oblivion

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

2) Lack of faith in SE devs ability to balance such a system is frankly fair. But that should not be an argument against a possible solution, especially when it leaves the original problem still in place.

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+1, basically everything that needs saying. Hypothetically a flexible system could be better, easily, but people saying no just don't think it could happen due to dev failings or having poor examples stuck in their head.

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Originally Posted by Age_of_Oblivion

In WoW, characters learn all of their skills about midway through the levelling process. They then can refine their playstyle through selection of (for the most part) passive abilities which drastically alter how certain actions function. This lends a sense of progression and development to each class archetype, while avoiding the problem of overwhelming players with buttons to press.

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I agree with your first point OP, running synced dungeons and pressing 2-3 buttons (finding this particularly tanking on a Pally) is horrendously tedious.

Your WoW example – however, is a bit hyperbolic. Even going back to the original talent trees before the revamp they provided little to no true progression as the cookie-cutter builds locked you into a certain play style with the majority of 'bridging' talents being a flat damage increase or similar.
The current talent selection again suffers from the same 'non-choice' with 2 normally useless or sub-optimal choices next to a third mandatory one. The numbers will always be crunched and an optimal path will always be there.
One of the biggest moans in WoW is how the talents really don't add anything beyond the initial illusion of progress and the occasional switch for a very specific instance. SE has, in essence, avoided an even more stressful time of balancing the classes by avoiding them all together.

I believe WoW works as they seem to have a more top-down approach to their class balance and systems, building around high-end group content and working back from there. For as much crap as WoW gets it doesn't seem to be going through the extreme class imbalances as it did in the Golden Age (Vanilla-Wrath imo) - but it's had a lot longer to get it together when compared to ARR which by comparison is relatively new.

I think it's a massive shame they did away with the cross-class system: I'm glad I caught the end of it but it's a shame that it couldn't have been developed more.

If you want a talent system to be added DO NOT use wow as a reference