The Illusion of Choice

[Duuude007]

The way the hierarchy is, differs from game to game.


Take WoW Paladin, for example.
3 trees, Apart from hybridizing abilities (potentially gimping your overall potential) you are going to get unique abilities taking any path.

Take FFXIV Tank, for example.
2 trees (WAR, PLD) plus a hybrid 3rd tree (DRK). Apart from crossclass abilities you are going to get unique abilities taking any path.

If you base the lowest level of the hierarchy at the abilities you earn and work up from there, you can see that they are named differently, are leveled differently but have the same core division of features.

[WellFooled]

The way the hierarchy is, differs from game to game.

I see what you're saying, but even if the options in FFXIV's job system can be compared with the options in WoW's job/tree system it's still only that one choice. WoW (and many other MMORPG) offers choices upon choices upon choices that all lead to many thousands of branching builds that differentiate characters from one another. FFXIV just offers the one choice, with no other additional layers.

[Alahra]

-snip-

What you're basically saying is that FFXIV still has far fewer ways to make choices for its players than other MMOs, though. Let's continue with the WoW example so I can demonstrate:

During its first expansion (which is a fair point of comparison since FFXIV is in its first expansion as well), WoW had 8 classes (Warrior, Paladin, Priest, Druid, Rogue, Hunter, Mage, Warlock). Each of those classes had three Specializations, for a basic total of 24 "options" for your character to be. Let's break them down into roles the way you did for FFXIV's classes:

• 3 Tanks (Protection Warrior, Protection Paladin, Feral Druid)
• 7 Melee DPS (Arms Warrior, Fury Warrior, Retribution Paladin, Assassination Rogue, Combat Rogue, Subtlety Rogue, Feral Druid)
• 3 Physical Ranged DPS (Beastmastery Hunter, Marksmanship Hunter, Survival Hunter)
• 8 Magical Ranged DPS (Arcane Mage, Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Affliction Warlock, Demonology Warlock, Shadow Warlock, Shadow Priest, Balance Druid)
• 4 Healers (Holy Priest, Discipline Priest, Holy Paladin, Restoration Druid)

That's a far more varied spread of options to answer the question "what kind of character am I?" than is presently available in FFXIV—more than twice the options in fact. Even within various specializations, players had some choices—Arms Warriors could focus on a particular type of Two-Handed Weapon, for instance, or Subtlety Rogues (in this era, at least) had a choice between Swords or Daggers, which changed their playstyle. There were other options as well (most Specializations had 2 or 3 Talent Choice that were "free," that came down to player preference). Hybrid specializations were also possible for some classes (usually the classes that were confined to one single role, like Rogue and Mage). All of this isn't even taking into mind PvP Specializations, which were often different in noticeable ways from PvE Specializations. All in all, the wealth of customization options available to WoW players is far greater than that available to FFXIV players.

Yes, you can play multiple jobs on one character here, but you could also play multiple specs or roll alts in WoW. Switching specializations does have a gold cost, but it was not so prohibitive as to make doing so impossible—it was somewhat comparable to the original cost of Keeper's Hymns for Scholar/Summoner. Even if you remove alts from the equation, WoW characters had at least three Specialization options, which is comparable to an FFXIV character gearing three jobs (which is what you can generally do if you get all your lockout gear for a job every week, before the next raid tier comes out). But when you factor in the customization in the Specializations, WoW characters generally had room to be more unique—that is, they had more opportunities to differentiate themselves from other characters.

In FFXIV, a typical player probably has 3 jobs/roles that they gear up. For jobs that aren't melee DPS, they also get to decide which job in that "role" they want to use, though that does depend somewhat on available gear (which is sometimes job-locked and sometimes not). A WoW character by default has 3 "styles" they choose from as well, and depending on their class, those styles might be in the same or different roles. Within those styles, though, a WoW character makes probably 4 or 5 additional decisions that may not be the same as everyone else's, potentially choosing from a variety of things including weapon type, PvE or PvP focus, survivability, or utility. It's this last part that FFXIV characters don't have any parallel too, and it's this last part that players looking for more customization options are looking for. Being able to play multiple jobs/styles on one character just simply isn't enough when every Ninja (say) is essentially exactly like every other ninja).

WoW would later expand player flexibility when it came to player choices (with the ease of leveling alts, the addition of Dual Specializations, Glyphs, and so on). But right now we're just focusing on Burning Crusade, since it's not particularly fair to compare FFXIV's options to options that were added in WoW's later expansions. It is also relevant to note, however, that the developers of WoW did scale back customization beginning in Cataclysm, as the number of customization options had grown too large.

Because of that, I don't believe it would be a good idea for FFXIV to have an amount of customization comparable to what WoW had during Burning Crusade (or even Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion). I do think, however, that the game would benefit from some customization additions. It would need to be something small: probably not unlike the Merit Point system for FFXI, but that's for another post.

Post Cap Edit Response
I alluded to this already, but it's correct that many of the Specializations in WoW were far from balanced, and that's ultimately why Blizzard pared down the number of options considerably starting in Cataclysm (personally, I thought they had hit a good point with balance in WotLK, but they disagreed because of PvP, I feel). I don't advocate for FFXIV to have anything approaching that level of choice, and I only brought up WoW to clarify the apparent misconception that the customization options for FFXIV are comparable to other games. They really aren't, and we could stand to have some more. There's absolutely no need to go as far as BC-Era WoW did, but being able to choose 3-5 unique things for each job would go a long way, I think, toward allowing people to feel different from others of the same class while not creating a horrible quagmire for balance.

[_slowpoke_]

for a basic total of 24 "options" for your character to be.

Of which about a third were unplayable, broken, or clearly inferior to another choice within the same class. Take Discipline Priests. Those became playable as an actual healer in WotLK, the second expansion. Before that, they were the tree you could take some talents from for PVP, and almost no one fully specced Discipline. Plus, as others have pointed out, the constant necessary rebalancing in WoW eventually lead to a FoTM meta because there was always at least one spec that was broken and overpowered, at least back when I played. Compared to that, FFXIV is actually fairly well balanced.

[Belhi]

Of which about a third were unplayable, broken, or clearly inferior to another choice within the same class. Take Discipline Priests. Those became playable as an actual healer in WotLK, the second expansion. Before that, they were the tree you could take some talents from for PVP, and almost no one fully specced Discipline. Plus, as others have pointed out, the constant necessary rebalancing in WoW eventually lead to a FoTM meta because there was always at least one spec that was broken and overpowered, at least back when I played. Compared to that, FFXIV is actually fairly well balanced.

Yeah I was going to say back then the class balance in WoW was pretty broken and frankly a number of those specs didn't have particularly noteworthy differences. The Rogue specs were very similar. More over back then it was quite a pain to switch between specs. At the very least you had to head back to the class trainer every time you wanted to do it.

Even now the class balance is kind dodgy. There is an interview from last yeah where a dev actually said about the warlock specs 'now its Demonology's turn to be underpowered'.

I also wonder how much additional work in QA extra specs would add to the game. Yoshi P seems to suggest it would basically be like adding another Job. If that's the case either balance or production time could be adversely effected.

Personally I'm not a fan of specs. Item based customisation I'm cool with and perhaps content based sideways progression but I've generally found 'builds' more trouble than they are worth and rarely offer much functional customisation.

[WellFooled]

Of which about a third were unplayable, broken, or clearly inferior to another choice within the same class. Take Discipline Priests. Those became playable as an actual healer in WotLK, the second expansion. Before that, they were the tree you could take some talents from for PVP, and almost no one fully specced Discipline.

Imbalance happens no matter what system an MMO uses. Even FFXIV, who has less to balance out of any MMO I've ever seen, can't get balance right (but we Paladins live in hope for the 3.2 changes). So since imbalance will always be there, wouldn't you prefer it come with fun choices?

But I see what you're saying, the more layers that get added the more chances there are for something to go massively out of whack like your examples from WoW, but adding choices to FFXIV wouldn't need to be as complex as what WoW uses. It could be something as simple as gear with some unique effect to it.

Imagine end game as a choice of three weapons and for one melee dps it could look like this: One weapon gives you 10% more movement speed constantly, one makes your sprint not cost any TP but increases its cool down, one has a built in cooldown ability that teleports you to the location of your selected target.

That's just one choice (Which weapon do I use?) and yet that one choice could greatly change how you go about playing your job. Imagine if there was just one or two gear slots in every patch that had a choice like this. It wouldn't change things much, but it would be miles ahead of what we have now. And if they're not balanced? The gear will be replaced in the standard patch cycle that increases the ilvl. At best that imbalance would be around for a couple patches or the Devs could change things earlier if they choose.