Almost every complaint about the ShB job changes could be solved with talents

[Proxanna]

To address a few points:

--Players will do what hardcore raiders do. DPS is all that matters.
--Offering a choice will turn the community against you if you make the wrong choice.

The thing is, even if you're right for MOST players (and I'm not saying you are -- far from it), you're still generalizing. You're painting every player with the same brush. That's not how MMOs work. There are players in this game, and in every MMO, that play the game in ways that you never would or could even understand.

[EDIT: Typo]

So let's say that yes, MOST players will go with the optimal build and there's maybe 5% of the player base that wants to be a special snowflake and do their own wacky build. That's a lot of time, effort, and resources going into designing and balancing talent trees for 17 different jobs to cater to those 5% that want to feel unique. Every MMO that's started out with a cool and spanning talent tree system has simplified them and made them a lot more rigid over the years because it's too hard for them to balance. Now I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool to have more customization choices. I mean that's a big part of why we play MMOs is because of the customization right? I'm just saying I don't see them doing it because of the above mentioned issues.

That being said, instead of having unique talent trees for each job they could do talent trees based on role. So for example, there could be a Ranged DPS talent tree where you could spec to be more support oriented versus damage oriented, sort of similar to how they did role actions but with a bit more depth. That might be at least a LITTLE bit easier to balance. But again, I just don't see them doing it because of the work required.