A talent system

[Shurrikhan]

Although you refer to the current system, the fact that choice is an illusion in this regard just as easily applies to anything that offers choice in regards to character development, including talents.

And jobs. Balance is crucial to all choice, not just choice-within-choice... I can think of far more times when an entire job was subtly unlisted from PF openings for their given roll in XIV (and not due to one already being present) or party members asked why I was playing a given job than, say, a different build thereof was in WoW/GW2/Rift.

The weird thing is XIV is in a place where they could actually embrace a different (more lenient) sense of balance, because people could swap to any enjoy any various job in a given role quite nearly at will due to the all-in-one structure of the game, so that jobs could perform equally on a general level, but aren't destined to be homogenized over time due to fight-specific imbalances; variance can be partly forced (by players being wholly able to swap), rather than invariance (by reduced accessibility making players entirely unwilling to swap). Unless fights are designed to someone advantage different jobs at equal efficiency despite different compositions, strategies, and gear levels, that is your spectrum for "perfect play". Variance or homogeneity forced upon players.

As it is currently implemented, calling the job system an analog to horizontal progression from a talent/spec system is foolish. Jobs are a continuation of a class, and nothing more. Cross role skills are somewhat comparable to a talent system, or could be. The problem with the cross role skills is that they are a band-aid solution to inexplicably poor design choices in base classes (i.e. Provoke).

Additionally, I am not sure how specs wound up in this discussion. Those serve a very different role in WoW from the talent system, and would frankly be better emulated by more effective use of the Class/Job system.

Sadly all the ideas as to how to make classes viable or allowing for a second job option for most classes mostly fell on deaf ears, having been allegedly covered already by the "cross-class" system. And since then classes have just been left as "jobs in diapers".

The primary argument against talent builds as a cookie-cutter is a patsy. Right now, every class is played at an identical manner at cap. A talent system would not necessarily change that (though it might, if it was done exceptionally well. I have no hope of that tbh though). What it would do is give variety and steady change during the levelling process, which nearly every class in the game desperately needs.

I feel like people forget that even in the cases where a choice set (e.g. a class, or a specialization therein) has a further level of choice forced on it at a particular gear level of a particular form of content, that's still all gear levels and class levels prior for which the customization does have at least some effect. That can't be said, however, for an entire class falling out of optimal play.