The Illusion of Choice

[FoxyAreku]

Personally, I don't want anything approaching WoW's level of customization in Vanilla/BC. But you can still have a controlled amount of customization without introducing grievous imbalance. WoW's current talent model (or FFXI's merit points) are examples of the sorts of things that I think could work here.

The big problem in early WoW's case was an over-emphasis on talents that increased general effectiveess (DPS, HPS, or mitigation) and that's definitely not what I'm looking for in FFXIV when it comes to customization.

I wasn't even talking about early WoW. My experience is late wrath and all through cata and pandaria.

[Alahra]

However, if it's possible for two BRDs to have entirely the exact same gear set that you can see, but have a totally different set of skills at their disposal... and if I present that to you and say, 'Okay, one has a fantastic build with great skills and the other's build is complete crap, but I'm not telling you which'... well, are you just going to pick one at random and pray you get the best one?

I would never advocate for any level of customization that allowed skills to be completely different. That would be madness and a nightmare to balance. It is incredibly frustrating that when one proposes the addition of modest customization, the counter-argument is always against a straw-man of heavy customization.

If Route 1, 2 and 3 are all essentially the same in the end... why add on the complexity of tree that only leads you to the same destination in the end? Your choice in that is an illusion... it's an aesthetic and it is artificial in its complexity because it is ultimately meaningless. If you don't make the ends equal, then one end will always be chosen and then you also really have no choice. When all routes are equal, it is just as unfulfilling as if there was only one route.

But again, this argument applies just as much against classes within the same role as it does against being able to customize to some degree within a specific class. If DRG, NIN, and MNK are all balanced (which, they pretty much are, when you factor the raid DPS gained by the utility DRG and NIN bring), the choice between them is "aesthetic and it is artificial in its complexity." There are numerous reasons a player might prefer various options over another, ranging from playstyle comfort, to aesthetic preferences (including sound, visuals, and thematic elements), or to performance value (i.e., optimization).

As an example, I would gladly choose a variant Shukuchi that had a slightly longer cooldown if it meant I didn't have to ground-target it. I'm just not quick enough with the mouse to get much mileage out of that skill. Even if the end result is the same ("I have a gap closer"), the flexibility provided by ground-targeting Shukuchi is not valuable to me as a player. As I alluded to earlier, I think the best areas to introduce customization options are usually going to be in places that don't directly impact "numbers" performance but instead focus on adjustments to utility, flexibility, and the like.

I wasn't even talking about early WoW. My experience is late wrath and all through cata and pandaria.

I shouldn't have mentioned BC specifically I suppose—it was still on my mind from my earlier post I guess. Wrath had the same issues with its talents, as did Cata (since it still pretty much kept the old trees, but just flattened them). However, in general, decrying the imbalance between Discipline/Holy is again similar to decrying the balance between BRD and MCH in FFXIV—and so the question is really one of how much imbalance is acceptable in pursuit of additional customization.

Personally I think we can stand to have just a little more imbalance without greatly upsetting things (and you, obviously don't). The classes in FFXIV are actually far more tightly balanced than anything in WoW ever was, which is why I have faith in the ability of the developers to craft some customization options for us that wouldn't cause disparate balance issues like those seen throughout WoW (the developers of which couldn't even get the Specializations balanced with one another).

[Reynhart]

Rotations are a bit different from builds, though. A build is something you set up before a fight and you have to adhere to within a fight and it sets the very basic structure of how your character plays. A rotation is different in that what it is intended to do is maximize the capability of the skills you have available to you at any given point in time.

What's the point of having 3 tanks, 3 healers, 2 ranged DPS, 2 Casters and 3 Melee ?
And probably more jobs incoming in the next expansion...

I've gotten called out and kicked from Fractal for not pulling the whole damned first room because the healer was undergeared and I was worried about heals, so don't go telling me it's not something that doesn't happen outside of World First Prog.

Boo hoo...let me cry on the 15 seconds it took for you to get a new group with less stupid people...without even mentionning that is has absolutely nothing to do with how you may have built your character...
I've been kicked out of Syrcus for staying in Sword Oath...as an OT...when no add was there. Will you tell me that they should remove stances ?
And I'm pretty sure you could tell more stupid stories about being kicked such as "I've been kicked out of an english group because I spoke german, so don't tell me that elitism is just in endgame..."

'Okay, one has a fantastic build with great skills and the other's build is complete crap, but I'm not telling you which'...

Again...why ? Why do you automatically thinks that one build will be great and the others complete crap ?
The game is far too simple in its design to be impossible to balance almost properly. You can't make a valid point with such a blatant overstatement.

[Ibi]

After thinking about it last night, I realized SE has done this before in FFXI. This is what choice looks like though.....

<snip skillchain chart>

This is not what choice looked like at all.

Almost every party tried to set up a Distortion skillchain from the Dunes until the mid-60s and a Light or Dark skillchain from the mid-60s until skillchains went out of fashion with TP spam merit parties.

The skillchain chart is actually a far better example, once again, of illusion of choice. It looks like you can do a ton of different things, but one or two options were so much better than any alternatives that you effectively never used them. How often did you have a party go to a camp and start intentionally making Gravitation skillchains, for example?

Which included massive amounts of macro gear swaps for abilities due to stat modifiers

Again, not an example of choice. If you had a piece of gear in FFXI that enhanced an ability, you equipped that piece of gear for that ability every single time.

hours upon hours of increasing weapon skills(picture desynth leveling, but your whacking rabbits and/or crabs)

Not a choice. No one intentionally chose to have an under leveled weapon skill.

studying the above chart so you're prepared no matter what your class composition is in any party, and hoping your party members have done the same.

Almost no one actually memorized the full chart. Most people just learned if they could open/close Distortion and what jobs they could make Light/Dark with. Or they had a copy printed out or saved to their hard drive and pulled it up if they ever needed it.

Regardless, once again, you're not choosing between different options here, it's just Hobson's choice; either you learned parts of the chart or you didn't.

However, in the vein of the title of this thread it comes down to this... in order for a true skill-tree system to be effective and viable it has to be created along with content that makes any choice you make in how you distribute your skills just as effective as any other.

No, it doesn't. A distribution can be less effective, as long as you gain something in the trade off.

That means that if you have 3 routes you can go down, in order to make it work so no one route is favored all routes must be equal. Route 1 must be as good as Route 2, which must be as good as Route 3. If Route 1, 2 and 3 are all essentially the same in the end... why add on the complexity of tree that only leads you to the same destination in the end? If you don't make the ends equal, then one end will always be chosen and then you also really have no choice.

See the example of the three WoW druid talents that I mentioned in post #120 of this thread, back on page 12, for an example of why this is incorrect.

You do not need different options to be equal in order to have a meaningful choice.

[Alahra]

Almost every party tried to set up a Distortion skillchain from the Dunes until the mid-60s and a Light or Dark skillchain from the mid-60s until skillchains went out of fashion with TP spam merit parties.

Fusion was fairly common depending on the XP camp and the party setup, too, though yes, Distortion was far and away the preferred choice.

[Bashum]

Hell, in Vanilla WoW, warriors had FOUR viable build options in my opinion.

Fury
Arms
Protection
and what I used myself, which was a hybrid arms/protection. 31/5/15, just enough in Protection to be a decent tank, but still have mortal strike from arms, and the 5% crit from the fury tree.

[Aethaeryn]

First few pages of this thread were so painful to read... I never realized so many people respond to threads without actually reading or comprehending the original post.

Anyway, I really don't understand how people are content with the current bland system we have in place. I understand not wanting to have to worry about some massive talent tree where you need to allocate 60 points or whatever, but there are so many other less extreme possibilities. Lots of ideas were already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, so I'm not going to bother listing my own.

Going a little off topic here but kind of related: The way things are currently, they might as well get rid of STR/DEX/VIT etc. and just have "Power" and "Hit Points" on all gear too. Once you have enough accuracy, all that really matters anymore is item level except for a few cases (like needing a certain amount of skill speed to fit three geirskogul per minute, enough spell speed for BLM opener...). Speaking of which, accuracy requirements are just a pointless penalty that even WoW (since that's the game example of choice in this thread) got rid of it a long time ago.

I get that FFXIV is basically just a gear treadmill and that I'm probably going to be disappointed in hoping for more interesting gear, customization options, etc... but I still find myself feeling underwhelmed and like they could do so much more.

[FinalWolf]

Did someone say illusion?

[Reynhart]

Little test, if I may.
Let's say you can chose only one of those three upgrades:

• Increase Fast Blade's potency by 10
• Increase Savage Blade's potency by 15
• Increase Rage Of Halone's potency by 30

Which one would you chose ?

[Alahra]

Speaking of which, accuracy requirements are just a pointless penalty that even WoW (since that's the game example of choice in this thread) got rid of it a long time ago.

WoW at least has more stat variety on its gear. Removing Accuracy in FFXIV, at least right now, would make gearing up even more bland than it already is. :/

Little test, if I may.
Let's say you can chose only one of those three upgrades:

• Increase Fast Blade's potency by 10
• Increase Savage Blade's potency by 15
• Increase Rage Of Halone's potency by 30

Which one would you chose ?

The "best" option here is probably Rage of Halone, since it has a higher enmity modifier than Savage Blade (at least, as far as I recall, it does). This would allow you more Royal Authority combos while tanking since you wouldn't need as many Rage combos to hold hate. The best option for OT is probably the Fast Blade one.

But that's not really a very interesting choice (in terms of raw potency, they're all identical over a full 9-GCD rotation, and none of them would significantly make you different from the next PLD).