"Perks" would do soooo much for this game

[NovaLevossida]

I would support the following two things:

1. Merit points from FFXI / Alternate Advancement from EverQuest: customize your character by giving them unique traits and abilities. You can't have everything either; you have to pick and choose.

2. Special abilities and bonuses on gear in an ability slot. Let it be ability materia with a chance to drop in any content. Make it extremely rare. Other players cannot view the ability on your gear or see the slot for it at all. This keeps the elitism in check.

[Antanias]

I would support the following two things:

1. Merit points from FFXI / Alternate Advancement from EverQuest: customize your character by giving them unique traits and abilities. You can't have everything either; you have to pick and choose.

2. Special abilities and bonuses on gear in an ability slot. Let it be ability materia with a chance to drop in any content. Make it extremely rare. Other players cannot view the ability on your gear or see the slot for it at all. This keeps the elitism in check.

To be honest, I'd rather have ff11's capacity/job point system so that everyone can aim for the same bonuses by putting in the work.

[Roth_Trailfinder]

I would support the following two things:

1. Merit points from FFXI / Alternate Advancement from EverQuest: customize your character by giving them unique traits and abilities. You can't have everything either; you have to pick and choose.

2. Special abilities and bonuses on gear in an ability slot. Let it be ability materia with a chance to drop in any content. Make it extremely rare. Other players cannot view the ability on your gear or see the slot for it at all. This keeps the elitism in check.

EQ's AA's are a decent system. One nice thing about that system is that once you assign an AA point, that AA is gone, there is no re-spec'ing. Another is the bonus system they have implemented a while back - if you have less than a certain number of AA points assigned, then you get bonus experience, and the bonus decreases linearly as you assign AA points, until you no longer get that bonus and just get AA's at the base rate. You also cannot lock one line of AA's out by buying another; you can (and should) get everything for your class.

However, EQ has been around a LONG time. So has the AA system. There are AA's that the developers wish they had never put into the game (such as Endless Quiver). Eventually, with age, you wind up having things to spend AA's on that require a lot of AA's to buy but do not offer all that much over the previous rank. You also wind up with many abilities farmed out among the classes, just due to pressure on the devs to provide X number of AA's worth of stuff to buy, but running out of imagination to make new stuff.

The main probem I see, however, with bringing that system here, is longevity. Are the AA's class/job specific, the way that stat points are? Or are they character specific, where I earn 10 AA's as a Monk but then can choose to spend them on my Dark Knight stuff? If they are class specific, I can see a time a few years from now where a long-neglected class will be completely undesirable even in DF because that class lacks some "must have" AA. If it is for the character and not the class, I can see many little things that will provide tremendous benefit to, say, Healers but little benefit to a Warrior. Unfortunately, because I can see them not wanting to give one class' abilities to another (or we'd already have them as part of the cross class abilities) I cannot see a character-based system providing anything fun or interesting.

All in all, while I would not mind something brought here from EQ, I would not particularly care for the AA system to be brought over here. (Its off topic, but the thing I'd like to see coming here from EQ is the Buyer mode, where people want to buy stuff in that game's equivalent to the Marketboard, as opposed to being limited to simply selling stuff on the Marketboard here.)