Tanking feels unimportant

[testname]

Unless made incredibly well (as in, there are next to no functional examples available across all MMORPGs, even per a particular tier of a particular expansion for a particular class) where multiple builds are optimal. Even then, a talent tree on its own only gives you the choice of what you want to prune from yourself, and limits your options to, typically, the most exciting choices. You can have exciting choices 1 and 2 of the 8, or 3 and 6, or... so on. Isn't it better generally to just have more intelligent button usage designs in the first place, pick a theme and build, and make the most of it instead of spreading the class thin in attempting to support for the sake of choice?

To be clear, I am generally an advocate of things like talent trees... as tools of character progression, world-building, and character-world interactions. But, they are among the poorest solutions for combating bloat, which is the only way it'd be able to replace pruning anyways.

Check Path of Exile

[Quor]

Check Path of Exile

That's not an MMO, that's an ARPG. Even then, there are meta builds. Melee builds have always been severely underadvantaged compared anything else with the only viable ones having stupid amounts of range or else so much survivability that it takes an hour to kill anything at end game.

Talent trees, as nice as they can be in theory, don't work in terms of maintaining any kind of balance. There is always a "best" build. While that build may change on a per-encounter basis, that just means people will clamor for a way to change their builds so they will always be at their "best" when playing, or else complain endlessly about how they aren't "best" at every encounter, how it removes skill from the equation etc. Which defeats the entire point of having choices. If choices aren't meaningful, then they're worthless. If choices are meaningful, then it means by definition that there is a "good" choice and a "bad" choice, which brings us back to the "best" build problem. People have crapped on others for not having the "best" talent build in a variety of games. FF14 wouldn't be an exception, despite people such as myself existing to advocate against that kind of thing.

tl;dr turning this game into WoW won't make anything better, it'll just make it worse.

[Shurrikhan]

Check Path of Exile

The game that devolves into 90% theorycrafting, 10% hitting two buttons?

That's hardly a point in the idea's favor. Nor an MMO, for that matter.

I suppose we could say PoE's sphere-grid-like system does a... kind of decent job(?) of exploring its world's undermechanics and finding crafty and/or practical solutions through that system, but in terms of gameplay it's just a weirdly convoluted system of limitation. Rather than having many abilities to play around with, the way builds work in that game funnels you into a very narrow skill focus and rather few near-optimal choices. Only a sliver of its complexity even affects gameplay; the rest is "menu-play".

Let's take another game with similarly few action choices, Overwatch. To be more fair, let's also take the least FPS-like DPS we can from that game, Doomfist. He has only 3 abilities and an ultimate. But because the design of each of those abilities lends each deliberately different uses, be it escape, setup positioning, punishing, displacing, or pure damage, the character has many ways he can be played -- the "Batman" assassin (solo-kill DPS), the vanguard (psuedo maintank), the enforcer (psuedo offtank), the besieger (initiator), etc., etc. -- even if one manner might be more effective than others in a given match-up. Now, that last bit is always going to happen -- there will always be a more effective solution -- which is why it's fun to learn or to gamble on which strategy will be the most effective. The difference is, Doomfist can be designed to have more flexibility in his kit, which is the opposite of the goal of min-maxing in anything like PoE, where all capacity should be focused on a very particular goal, usually pure damage simultaneous with some manner of soft CC to ease mass slaughter. Heavily system/menu-derived games like PoE don't allow the player to change how they play so much as solely what they play. If you want to change with the circumstances, you must leave combat, possible even go to town, possibly even spend a bunch of gold, and change how you're allowed to play through a menu.

Now, do I think customization can work? Yes, but they must be designed...

1. in a game with numerous and balanced undermechanics to allow for a diverse desirable effects and flexibility in how skills are used,
   
   
2. enough short-term gameplay goals (via things like Stagger or suppression by damage, etc), and enough long-term tension (via things like Enrage) to make both burst and sustained outputs feel powerful and necessary,
   
   
3. with a priority on the gameplay they provide, rather than merely being a sandbox on which to build a higher-throughput build than the next guy until he copies your build anyways, and therefore a relatively tight balance between choices to allow for many builds within close performance of each other in the context of a given fight, and changes in fights to bring new builds into the lead without obliging them, and
   
   
4. via a system in which players are not obliged to spend time in menu, even if that means denying them optimal choices at certain times (e.g. they must build their spec around the entire raid, rather than on a per-boss or per-hallway basis).

And that is a very tall order (though points 1 and 2 really should happen regardless), to the point that unless the system is highly lucrative in terms of character-building, world-building, and player-world interactions, I would sooner recommend just making flexible classes/jobs without customization.

[Kabooa]

Check Path of Exile

"how can I stack enough eHP to not be one shot while also stacking enough damage to one shot everything that isn't the current end game boss?"