The Illusion of Choice

[Ibi]

Figured this was relevant. Source

It's relevant, sure, but it's also a bit contradictory.

He claims that they can't add different modes to each jobs because people would only ever play the strongest one and they'd have to design content around it, but how is that any different to the existing situation with regards to the different jobs in each role?

Part of the issue is that they're not clear (or are undecided) on how much imbalance they want to allow. They've been saying for months that paladin was in a good place and didn't need adjustments, it's just that Gordias' encounters weren't well-suited for their design intent. Even if that premise had been correct, they've now told us that paladin will be seeing significant adjustments in 3.2.

Is that because it wasn't being played enough? Is it because the perception is that it wasn't being played enough? Is it a change in their design concept for paladin? Is it because they found that theorycrafters were coming up with things they hadn't considered? We don't know, and we likely never will, but it shows that they a) don't actually have a problem with things being imbalanced between two ways to play for an entire tier of raiding and b) don't have a problem with making adjustments somewhere down the line to try to bring things back into alignment.

If they can do all of that for different jobs, it's not impossible to do it for different roles.

And the answer to "but if you can already play all the jobs in role, why do you need specs?" is "because I don't need to acquire a whole set of new equipment from weekly-limited sources in order to play to different specs of the same job, but I do need to do so to play different jobs of the same role."

Even if you have 100% freedom on stats and skills, people will find the most "optimal" or most used builds, so in the end it's an illusion too; everybody will use the exact same build on the exact same content.

Only if you limit all the "choices" to being throughput-based. You can make people vary builds by adding utility or flexibility. WellFooled has the right of 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.

If you make the choices things that either don't have a mathematical best answer or that have a mathematical best answer on paper that's more difficult to achieve in practice, you can have actual choices.

Actually while WoW has 3 specs per class, they removed almost all the customization per spec. The term "Illusion of Choice" COMES from blizzard for crying out loud.

You do know that the term "Illusion of Choice" very specifically referred to the old talent trees, and was the entire reason they got rid of them in favor of the current ones, right?

Unless you're doing mythic progression raiding, you can bring whatever specs you like, using more-or-less whatever talents you like, to any encounter in the game and be completely viable.

That's a complete turn-around from something like Wrath, where the talent trees had way more buttons to push but almost all came down to "Here's where you'll want to put the first 61 points, and the last 10 can be option A or option B."