Theory crafting skill trees

I gave it some thought about what skill trees would be like if SE decided to implement.

To me monk comes to mind when I think about skill trees. I would have two trees to choose from while each tree is different and unique to the class being played.

Tree 1: Floating Leaf
This tree focuses on Fists of Wind and you have to stay in this stance to take advantage of the bonuses you choose. Major passives granted are Skill Speed+, Direct Hit+. The tree mainly hinges on Tornado Kick being utilized. Spec points into Tornado Kick to have it altered to only use 1 GL stack when executed. TK cooldown is changed to 60sec to prevent spamming. And the Capstone skill at the top of the tree would be One Hundred Fists which puts down a "leylines" type area that you have to stay in while channeling One Hundred Fists, this has a 6 sec channel time, with 3 min cooldown. While channeling you may use forbidden chakra or enlightenment only weaved in with one hundred fists.

Tree 2: Meteor Strike
This tree focuses on Fists of Fire and you have to stay in this stance to take advantage of the bonuses you choose. Major passives granted are Crit rating+, Str+. The tree mainly hinges on opening as many chakra as possible. Forbidden Chackra procs SSS with slighty higher potency, and Enlightenment Procs SSS as an AOE with average potency. SSS GCD gimp is removed as it now is a proc skill. Capstone ability is Final Heaven which ALWAYS crits with 600 potency, and resets your twin snakes buff and DOTS on the target.

I just wanted to throw out some ideas of what I thought could be done with skill trees to move FFXIV in a different direction rather then just adding a crap load of skills, and removing ones we love. Also put the skill points to use for the trees behind difficult solo class quests and a handful behind more difficult group oriented quests to give the player a sense of accomplishment.

I don't know. Just thinking out loud. What do you think could be done with this type of system?

skill trees are hard to balance. they don't want to do branching type classes anymore after the way SCH/SMN worked out.

I am reminded of LoTRO which implemented skill trees, balanced poorly and hemorrhaged players like a bloody park fountain. In 2013 with the conversion to skill trees Warden got dumpster tiered for tanking which was its main role (still is in the dumpster) and still has broken traits across all sections of the trees.

The problem with a skill tree is the illusion of choice; there always is an upper end optimal configuration that content and job balance is measured by. Does the skill tree have "filler" talents? Do they scale with level? How do you gate the capstones, ie are there any garbage filler talents to get to them?

Do you allow traiting across the skill trees? You balanced it around this level cap right? What happens when several expansions go by and you start having more impactful dual/hybrid specs that might even get two capstones? (sometimes encountered fairly early on like SWTOR Shadow tank/DPS hybrids on its launch that ignored capstones and got hammered).

The only way I could imagine any sort of "customization" like this would be in an extremely controlled form, i.e. a collection of five slots where you could choose either one talent or another. And then each choice would be constructed to make either choice better depending on the content, the group composition, or perhaps in some cases execution difficulty. And then make them change-able on the fly outside of duties.

For instance, if Bard had a talent slot where they could choose between a second Bloodletter charge and a second Empyreal Arrow charge, the former might be better in a full-uptime scenario while the latter might be better if there are a bunch of breaks in a fight, or if you're newer to the job. (not saying that exact assessment is accurate, it's just a hypothetical)

But they would have to be super isolated like that I think. Doing whole "trees" or similar would be way too difficult to balance in a way that legitimately leads to options. And even then, we still wouldn't really have options so much as a bunch of book-keeping to do before going into a piece of content.

SE is already pretty allergic to allowing player skill to matter, so I can't imagine they'd want to also add a knowledge gap where some players know how to arrange their traits for each fight and some don't.

I think there's merit to having a few things you can pick.

Like Leylines.

A: 30/90 15% action speed while in the circle.
B: GCD to place down, permanent, 5% action speed while in the circle
C: 30/90 8% action speed for you and ally, ally is the target for BTL.

I can think of scenarios where I'd want to use each of them.

As fun as such speculation might be, I don't ever expect anything like the OP's idea regarding skill trees will implemented in this game. There is really no mechanism currently that emulates skill trees, so it would have to be a complete rework of the underlying game to make it work, with absolutely no practical gain for doing so.

After that, I can see the One True Website recommendations becoming meta for each job, so ... what's the point? Glamour is more varied than any skill tree will ever get.

Won't work with this game's gameplay design and would make game balang just massively more difficult, time consuming and needing alot more effort for absolutely gaining no improvement of the game in resulting that the game will make more fun, in fact skill trees just do the total opposite, it reduces the potential of possible fun due to stupid unneccessary limits for the player that are just there to produce an illusion of progression and/or character specialization


If you want that kind of gameplay, go play Guild Wars 2 for example, there you can change builds n switch skill effects to your heart's content

PS the only form of skill trees that would work here is the kind of skill progression skill trees thats just there to help visualizing the progression of your character, to show the player what needs to be done to learn something new or to improve a learned spell/skill to its next level/form of mastery

Like a blackmage improving

Fire > Fira > Firaga > Firaja ect

But this games character progression is way too shallow n simple minded for this, just not to say dumbed down to lowest simplistic mechanism of requiring only leveling to number x to make things not complex, so that even dumbest people can understand it easily, as if there would make adding on top of that skill trees any sense.

Skill Trees are more a good thing for Offline RPGs to give the player variious ways for customizable character progression, cause thats easier to handle and kept balanced for offline games, than for MMORPG's with pvp gameplay n general multiplayer content thats designed around 15+ different classes that are required to get balanced around this

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Originally Posted by WhimsicalPacifist

The problem with a skill tree is the illusion of choice; there always is an upper end optimal configuration that content and job balance is measured by.

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That's only the case in a bad system. A good one will provide with an actual meaningful choice between balanced alternatives. I think something like skill specs (not trees, there would not be any customization) would be good for FF14 in allowing more diversity while making the game easier to balance. Instead of making completely new classes, we could have alternative forms of existing classes. This can be used to solve issues like those with AST where some people prefer the old card system. One spec of AST could use the old cards while another could use a completely different system.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

That's only the case in a bad system. A good one will provide with an actual meaningful choice between balanced alternatives. I think something like skill specs (not trees, there would not be any customization) would be good for FF14 in allowing more diversity while making the game easier to balance. Instead of making completely new classes, we could have alternative forms of existing classes. This can be used to solve issues like those with AST where some people prefer the old card system. One spec of AST could use the old cards while another could use a completely different system.

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every battle is just a dps race though. there is no incentive to make a skill-spec system available.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

every battle is just a dps race though. there is no incentive to make a skill-spec system available.

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It's true that FF14 is DPS centric, but the AST debate isn't so much about DPS as class flavor. Specs could cater to that while leaving DPS pretty even.

There is a bit of a DPS balancing issue with regard to support classes though. "Raise tax" comes up a lot in RDM and SMN discussions. We could let these classes have their res abilities by allocating them via spec. Those who don't value res and want a DPS boost could choose the DPS spec and vice versa. The DPS spec will obviously be better in situations where you don't need a raise but res value is going to vary with content and player skill. If you're farming with your savage static late in a raid tier, go DPS. If you're joining a newly released Alliance through DF, go res spec.