The Illusion of Choice

[_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.