The Illusion of Choice

[RiceisNice]

They could do something like a Blm that primarily uses blizzard to deal their damage via mechanics and ability synergy, fire for raw, nuke and crit oriented, or thunder for DoT or something . But in its current state, Blm is not designed around that, but instead you see what we have with umbral/astral being the primary gimmick.

For example, at level 50 you could choose to pick up an ability that replaces enochian with something like rolling thunder; it gives you a stack of Rt for every thunder I you cast, and it stacks a thunder debuff for every hit ( but does not refresh with each use). Each stack of Rt increases cast speed of thunders, the initial overall potency, and mana cost. You can use thunder in detonate the stacks into an aoe explosion, or thunder iii to implode the stack on the single target. Using any other ability will remove Rt, and using Rt removes your current astral/umbral.

[RiceisNice]

1000 chars and no ability to edit on phone...

You keep the mana regen gimmick of astral/umbral intact, but you focus on something different to deal your damage, how many stacks can you afford to get on a single target without running yourself dry to cast a blizzard 3 afterwards or dropping rolling thunder, versus enochian where you do a similiar mechanic in small bursts while maintaining astral.

[FinalWolf]

You can play how you want but in some groups you will be kicked if your "build" isn't the standard.

[RiceisNice]

You can play how you want but in some groups you will be kicked if your "build" isn't the standard.

In cutting edge progression, sure but that's in an environment where it's a group decision to perform at max capability anyway. What you're saying isn't any different from people who kick you from a3n farm parties because you don't have a i200 weapon. If they're kicking you for having a different build or even job, it's probably not a group that shares the same mindset with you to begin with.

[Zetsumei_Tsunarashi]

We got several posts from players who wanted to be able to customize not only their character's appearance but also their skills and equipment for a particular job so that they could show some more individuality. This is a topic we've seen come up since the initial release of A Realm Reborn.

Yoshida: Right. So, if we did something like add mode A and mode B for dragoon, eventually people on the internet would examine them and choose which one was stronger. Then, when we created new content, the content would have to be based on whatever was strongest. There would be a lot of discussion about the job states like "that job is too strong" or "that job is too weak" and people would always choose what they felt was best. That's not to say a skill system like that would be negative, but the armoury system itself already allows you to play all of the different jobs. Since we already have that system in place, I'm not expecting that we'll make branches for jobs for the time being.

Figured this was relevant. Source

[Kaurie]

Figured this was relevant. Source

Indeed, I read that interview and felt his answer was very unjust and short sighted, as argued against in my original post.

[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.

[EdwinLi]

As much as I original expected multiple ways to play a Job. We are most likely not going to have that due to the Jobs being set and stone now.

One of the major issues now preventing multiple roles for current Jobs or specialization with Jobs now is that the system been made into set one each Job having 1 type of role and function. While it makes it simple for players to know what they are expected with playing that Job it also limits them on what they can do.

Best players can do now is just pick a job they find to suit them the most.