Quote Originally Posted by _slowpoke_ View Post
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.