Hear me out: Should 14 have talent trees?

[TheMightyMollusk]

Talent trees end up being either entirely cosmetic, and thus not terribly meaningful, or they affect combat, and thus become an illusion of choice. If there's an optimal choice, then anyone not using it will be shunned and ridiculed for it. So no, none of that for me.

[RitsukoSonoda]

They used to have actual cross class skills instead of role actions to encourage players to play multiple jobs. However because of the players that wanted to play 1 job only complaining that ppl viewed them as "gimped" they removed cross class skills and made the role actions system which basically cost us a sizable amount of job customization. They also used to have an assignable stat point you could place the first time you reached a specific level with any job. This also got removed.

Then jobs started losing more of their diversity as people essentially kept making job threads that sound like this old TV clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfvR4hl-Gzw

[TaleraRistain]

Talent trees are just an illusion of choice because there will always be a meta that dictates one build is objectively better than the others, even if the changes are borderline cosmetic. At best, they'd be comparable to the SB version of role actions where you switch back and forth depending on fight encounter/content, and you can see how 'meh' that was



Ngl, I hated that I needed to unlock other classes to upgrade to a job/get my full skill set. I really wish one could unlearn jobs, and I'm envious of those who started playing after that system was abolished

Agreed on both points. There were Talent Trees back in Diablo and in anything MP there was the meta. There were alternate advancement in EQ and EQII. I remember flaming rows especially on the EQII Ranger boards (I was a froglok ranger) about which were "correct". And that was actually a system where there was a bit of leeway depending on your playstyle. I took certain AAs that were more useful as a soloer and sometimes grouper than a raider.

And then the horrible cookie cutter cross-class system here. I've been a WHM main since 2014 and had a 26 THM until like...Shadowbringers...that I leveled for the amaro that was only that high after being forced to level that class for Swiftcast. I greatly enjoy it now but I wasn't able to find that joy on my own back then like I have now, and being forced into leveling it or being harassed and excluded for not having the skill made me avoid THM/BLM like the plague for years.

[BokoToloko]

Unfortunately, it's about 10 years too late to think about implementing a talent system here and the content played really doesn't give much room for customisation. The closest we had to that were the cross-class abilities in terms of customisation but that system was rubbish back then.

I would love more flexibility within each class, though.

[LittleImp]

They used to have actual cross class skills instead of role actions to encourage players to play multiple jobs. However because of the players that wanted to play 1 job only complaining that ppl viewed them as "gimped" they removed cross class skills and made the role actions system which basically cost us a sizable amount of job customization.

They were removed because core skills that were vital to executing certain content were locked behind an extremely arbitrary grind, potentially tied to jobs you weren't even interested in. People would get to endgame, excited to do EX content, only to have a terrible experience when they joined a party and were told they needed to go grind a job they didn't want to play up from level 1 to get provoke. There also wasn't a 'sizable amount of job customization' tied to cross-class. Many of the skills were outright useless, and some jobs had more cross-class slots than there were useful skills. People just used the same copy paste loadouts because there weren't decisions worth making.

They also used to have an assignable stat point you could place the first time you reached a specific level with any job. This also got removed.

Then jobs started losing more of their diversity as people essentially kept making job threads that sound like this old TV clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfvR4hl-Gzw

Stat points were removed because there was no actual choice. 99% of the time people just dumped all of their points into one stat. When it comes to systems like Cross-class and attributes, there was basically a right choice and a wrong choice. Anyone who thought those systems had depth were probably making the wrong choices.

[Illmaeran]

Ngl, I hated that I needed to unlock other classes to upgrade to a job/get my full skill set. I really wish one could unlearn jobs, and I'm envious of those who started playing after that system was abolished

Color me strange, but I loved it. Tactics was hands-down my favorite FF game until 14 came along and the mechanic of leveling different classes to unlock others was something I really liked about it. I was stoked to find out XIV had it when I started playing. I agree that having meta cross-class skills was a bummer, the sub-class system hit my like of talent trees in an FF-appropriate way that I really appreciated. That's one reason I have so many jobs at 15/30 on this guy. If it hadn't been for that, I probably would never have touched them at all.

[Xirean]

I'd prefer not. One of the things that endlessly bothers me about other mmo's is the possibility to ruin a character because of the availability of choice. If every option isn't viable then I don't want to have a choice. Whether its about stats or abilities, I don't want the character/class/job that I spent a large amount of time leveling to become useless or really even slightly impaired.

[Minarisweet]

No, our great community btw can't handle different playstyles, even less designed by this dev team that decides to have the worst implementations ever then just remove them instead of improving said implementations.

[Ritsuka-55]

What this game did was make all the popular classes Tanks so there won't be as much of a Tank shortage. When Heavenward came out years ago people were pissed because Dark Knights were put into a tank class, even though Dark Knights are known for being mainly a Damage Job.

So much true lmao, hits home hard, i'm guilty of this, if it wasn't because they are stuck in the tank role, I wouldn't tank at all.

Anyway DRK and GNB being tanks is simply weird as heck to be honest, it's the only game that has done this.

[Adamantini]

no. In the end it's always the same story: Make the tree one way, or suffer the consequences.