A QoL/Balance Shortlist for DPS (Tanks/Healers only as additional context)

[Cetonis]

I don't remotely consider this a backdoor approach to talents. I don't like talents. I just one stat that I've been willing to test at every amount possible under i390 despite some throughput loss as having genuine gameplay appeal and find it more than a little disappointing that it's only permitted to two jobs.

This seems like a contradiction to me. What you want, effectively, is to have an alternate gameplay dynamic available to each job (in this case, faster GCDs in particular, but I presume you wouldn't hate other gameplay-impactful options). If that is the goal, then a talent-like system is the better way to achieve it. It's direct, it's clear, and it's flexible from a design and balancing perspective.

I'm actually not very familiar with other games' models, but one could imagine something as simple as selectable traits a la PvP (but more impactful). The number of slots could be flat, it could be something you gain over the course of the endgame, it could be on gear, whatever. Or it could be trees, or sets of talents, or some other model. And balancing such traits need not be all that difficult, depending on how they're designed. It's really a wide open space, there's no reason at all to limit one's thinking to the way talents have been done in this game or that game in the past.

[Shurrikhan]

This seems like a contradiction to me. What you want, effectively, is to have an alternate gameplay dynamic available to each job (in this case, faster GCDs in particular, but I presume you wouldn't hate other gameplay-impactful options). If that is the goal, then a talent-like system is the better way to achieve it. It's direct, it's clear, and it's flexible from a design and balancing perspective.

I'm actually not very familiar with other games' models, but one could imagine something as simple as selectable traits a la PvP (but more impactful). The number of slots could be flat, it could be something you gain over the course of the endgame, it could be on gear, whatever. Or it could be trees, or sets of talents, or some other model. And balancing such traits need not be all that difficult, depending on how they're designed. It's really a wide open space, there's no reason at all to limit one's thinking to the way talents have been done in this game or that game in the past.

Wait. So if stats affect gameplay even in the most obvious spectrum their supposed to control, to some real effect, that's somehow harmful and convoluted? All I'm asking for is that the one gameplay-affecting choice dangled in front of us, but with a pit of spikes beneath it for all but two jobs, become a viable choice. That's it. There are many cases where a job or class or profession in whatever game can feel great or disgusting just based on the rate of action available to it. Allowing Speed as an option allows control over that. But that's not asking for talent choices. It's already a stat. It's already in the game. This alternate gameplay dynamic has been here since the start. It just happens to be a trap in the majority of cases.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to something that simply allows you to select a breakpoint for your playstyle and be done with it, but at that point... what merit exists in stats? They then would be nothing more than a global damage bump, with no discussion except to stack A or avoid D. One wouldn't need to keep a balance with anything. They just... float around, and create items that are equivalently a couple ilvls higher or lower than others of their same nominal ilvl, with Power being all there is to any of it.

Again, I'm not homogenizing gameplay by balancing the stats. The diversifying components of Speed isn't in its damage. But when balanced its permitted to diversify gameplay as intended, rather than merely gear value.

I've played through about 7 different talent systems of some sort. WoW from vanilla to now, SWTOR, GW, GW2, BDO, ESO, Rift, and PoE. I'm familiar to some degree also with SWG, RO, and AA. My issue with them is a mix of a consistent four issues, with only PoE creating any real outlier:

1. They have too few real choices, especially compared to what all is presented as such or how many opportunities seem like they ought to have been allowed.

   This is most often due to raid content being too shallow to make use of anything but the dullest skills at maximal efficiency; skills related to survival, out-world activities, PvP, or almost anything but script-fit burst of speed and striking-dummy-damage, tend to be dismissed. (Admittedly, not a failing of talent systems so much as a lack of commitment to making them a real part of the game through maintaining the value of all parts and sectors of combat in the much fewer core content areas actually rewarded.)

2. Choice is merely several clicks of a menu.

   Any real decisions are forfeited in favor of cash shop or market items to allow you to swap over those choices before any given fight, leading simply to gold sinks, gameplay time wasted in menus, and conflict among parties. At the worst, imagine the whole "skip cutscene" fiasco with each pull. At the minimum, expect all choices to just feel like a begrudging choice between spending the time and money to properly equip oneself again for each different scenario, from pull to pull, vs. taking a build simply mediocre at everything.

3. The choices are based more on capacity and things that sound different from their competing choices rather than on ways to actually diversify play.

   Far too often they apply no real change in gameplay, be it by the buttons pressed or the tactical considerations raised. Instead, you just get different trade-offs between AoE and cleave and single-target (to swap between fights) or between dealing the same 123 spam with lightning element or with wind (for the preferred graphics at best, if balanced, or according to elemental resistances on a fight-by-fight or instance-by-instance basis at worst).

4. The system isn't grounded in the elements of the game or the needs of the jobs/classes they're applied to.

   This one, though the most subtle, is also the most integral; all other derive from this, or at least show symptoms, where failing, of this disease. There are only two real goals possible to customization: to expand your world through its interactions with the player or to increase the breadth of attraction of the game's existing (class) designs without sacrificing their depth -- in other words, to allow more people to like what you've made without betraying those who already like those (class) designs. (Though, this can apply also to content mutations or whatever else.) The second goal is difficult to manage, but far less so than the first. When the first is truly accomplished, all player interactions are born organically from a very real basis of content interaction and thus have no choice but to be relevant to what players already enjoy doing, but such systems also tend to naturally tunnel players into what they like to do among those with similar interests, separated by the zones of content they've pursued and progressed in. Think of the first like meeting someone at work or on an adventure, though limited therein, while the second --if accomplished alone-- is more like online dating, choosing according to your preferences where those preferences might not much be tested or formed by the application of or experiences within those preferences.

That's not to say that a great customization system can't exist. But there are no comprehensive examples of one. And I do not at all expect one to be born so late in a game. A world-grounded one certainly cannot. And given our typical community-development miscommunications, in what little occurs at all, a needs-grounded one is unlikely as well. 1.x's was in some ways the closest to a viable trajectory, but it failed from the start too because it skimped pitifully, and largely through the way stats work. Grounded talent systems tie very, very closely to precise and interconnected stat systems, especially those we're often eager to streamline out once gameplay is packaged up for ease (things more like our Primary Stats, so to speak, than our Secondary ones).