What Happened to Customization & Specialization?

[ElHeggunte]

I don't think I've ever played an MMO that has so many well balanced choices that no two players are the same unless someone goes out of the way to build themselves like a clown just for the sake of being "unique". Most of the time there are clear superior choices, or at least choices that are marginally better in more situations, so everyone just tends to gravitate towards using those and leaves everything else to rot.

Not even XI had much more in the way of customization. Every class had certain subjobs that were "the best" and were more or less required for you to have (and you were sometimes denied groups if you didn't). The rest had mediocre or down right terrible synergy with your class so they weren't used. The same thing goes for the Merit system; you had "options", but nine times out of ten some were clearly better than others and it was silly to go out of your way and intentionally pick the inferior ones.

Don't be one of those people who gets taken in by the illusion of choice.

And don't compare MMOs to single player RPGs.

[BillyKaplan]

Everyone will be the same cookie-cutter job at this point. Its really disappointing.

Setting aside the fact that, as pointed out before, customization in this game is an illusion, it's the sort of customization that's either meaningless or outright detrimental. A best case scenario is that you picked a skill that won't contribute at all in the content you're running, and all alternatives are equally useless. The worst case scenario is that what skills you didn't pick benefit you or are even mandatory to your content. Your healer picked Esuna? You don't need it in this dungeon and they're doing less damage than in Cleric Stance, also getting knocked back all the time. Your healer picked the reverse? You're stuck with Paralysis that eats at your dps and survivability.
But hey. At least you're special.

My one curiosity now is why not remove the limitation outright, but I guess they're keeping open the option to add more in the future (please don't). Alternatively, it is truly a bandaid fix, and the limit will be properly removed in 5.0.

[Hasrat]

Specialization is great when you have the freedom to experiment and all the pros and cons together form its own sort of challenge.

Specialization in an MMO? That's how you get ice mages. Technically works, but not as intended, and incredibly impractical.

[Jandor]

Role actions are terrible anyway, cross-class was superior in almost every way.

[BillyKaplan]

Role actions are terrible anyway, cross-class was superior in almost every way.

Except the part where you had to stop whatever you were doing and level a class you had absolutely no interest in ever touching again. Oh, the many THMs in leveling roulette who wanted to get to 26...

[Wiccan026]

With the extension of being able to 10 role actions, Square has practically removed every aspect of character customization from the game. Every Summoner is the same as every other Summoner, every Paladin is the same as every other Paladin. Your character has no uniqueness - aside from glamour, of course.

I suppose one could argue that the Job System is the customization, but that seems like a cop-out to me. One of the best things about all FF games has always been building your character into unique and specialized roles through specialization trees such as the sphere grid - or the materia system - but in FFXIV - there is no specialization. Every RMD runs the same gear, and even gear variance really only SLIGHTLY effects DPS - every RDM runs the same materia, and now every RDM will run the same role actions. Even FFXI has infinitely more customization possibilities because of the sub-job system.

Everyone will be the same cookie-cutter job at this point. Its really disappointing.

Anyone doing savage for the most part is probably already using the same cookie-cutter job style at this point regardless of us only having five role actions.

Also, this game had more customization prior to Stormblood, which they originally overhauled to try to streamline things and stop hotbar bloat.... which sure their kind of adding to this but I don't know how many people are going to really utilize all the extra role actions.

[Jandor]

Except the part where you had to stop whatever you were doing and level a class you had absolutely no interest in ever touching again. Oh, the many THMs in leveling roulette who wanted to get to 26...

Leveling other classes to get extra skills was part of what made it superior.

Absolutely essential skills like provoke being a part of the system was a mistake, but the underlying system was better than role actions.

[BillyKaplan]

Leveling other classes to get extra skills was part of what made it superior.

Absolutely essential skills like provoke being a part of the system was a mistake

Superior in what way? It was a hassle. Also these two statements feel contradictory. No one is going to level a class they don't like for a skill that's just flavor, so the system only had a reason to exist at all if the skills were important.

but the underlying system was better than role actions.

The underlying system was about the same, though. The only time in which it was really different was if you ran things as a class, and there are some mighty fine urban legends about such instances. But those are the niche of niches and nothing to judge the overall system based on.

[Ameela]

Except the part where you had to stop whatever you were doing and level a class you had absolutely no interest in ever touching again. Oh, the many THMs in leveling roulette who wanted to get to 26...

To be fair it was at least a way of incentivising you to try out different classes, which could have lead to you finding something you liked that you may have never tried otherwise.
That's what happened to me anyway, had absolutely no interest in Monk until I had to level it for Warrior cross-classes and now it's my go-to DPS.

[BillyKaplan]

To be fair it was at least a way of incentivising you to try out different classes, which could have lead to you finding something you liked that you may have never tried otherwise.

I'm certain that was at least part of the logic behind it. Since we can run all battle classes on a single character, why not give us a reason to at least try them all out? But there's a catch to that, too, because a class plays v. differently at 15 compared to 50, 60, and oh boy, 70. It was all the more so the case in HW where BRD and MCH were bow and gun mages. So in a sense, the itty bitty tiny bit you get to experience is nothing but false advertisement. It's one thing to try a job based on what you see in end-game, and then power through the leveling process, it's another to go through the leveling process only to see the end result is nothing like what you thought it would be.