Idea to fix the lack of Char Customization and Horizontal Progression: Action Glamour

[Kaurie]

I mean professional game designers have spoken on the matter several years ago. Which is why most mmos today don't use the huge build design anymore where you pick a bunch of talents/abilities. They didn't want people to handicap themselves by making the incorrect choices. It was like well they have other options to pick but they were all bad once the math has been figured out, and thus picking them leads people into a trap of being ineffective or handicapped cause they didn't pick the talent build which has already been mathematically proven to be the optimal best.

Which other modern MMO has done away with all build design? Every single one I play has some.

Guild Wars 2
has trait paths you can do with major traits that affect the way your skills work - as well as having gear builds, and customized skill sets (you can choose to bring a limited number of utility and have a wide selection. It has a bit more, but point made there I think.

World of Warcraft
still has trait paths that you can choose, specializations that you can choose, interesting stats that you can pick and choose from and has glyphs as well as crafting stuff that augments how you play (like enchanting).

Wildstar
has customized action bar sets where you choose which skills you want and can add limited action points to skills to change how they operate as well as AMPs which unlock certain abilities or change how your abilities may work.

Blade and Soul
has a pie chart thing - I only played briefly in Closed Beta, but there was some customization there. There was also a trait/skill tree to unlock your desired path.

Tera
has a system, i think called glyphs, but it's been awhile. You can purchase these to unlock them and then apply a limited number of points to each skill to modify how they work.

Onto a couple of successful recent single player RPGs.

Fallout 4
has multiple paths, where you can choose to buff up your strength or focus on things like lockpicking, persuasion or toughness.

Witcher 3
has skills that you unlock via investing in as you level up and then a system to modify them via Mutagens

The closest thing this game has is the system where you can change jobs on one class. While cool, it's not really the same thing.
Despite all of this, I personally found Vanilla WoWs the most fun system. It's too bad they scrapped it.