Hear me out: Should 14 have talent trees?

[Zaniel]

So lately there’s been a bunch of talk about people being really unhappy about job changes and general direction. The devs clearly want to keep the skill gap as small as possible and most of us hate their current approach. I think there may be a solution: talent trees.

Talents and borrowed power is why WoW has up to a 200% DPS discrepancy between various builds. Therefore every single player just goes to Wowhead, follows the guide and all end up playing the optimum spec. Therefore tonnes of dev time wasted for no outcome.

[Arkdra]

Yeah no thanks. Talent trees are completely worthless in multiplayer games, causing a bunch of problems that aren't worth the illusion of player choice. Player choice which most people just look up anyway.

[Genz]

If it wanted to be a RPG, yes (not necessarily a talent tree, but anything in the same vein that gives some agency to players)

[SeverianLyonesse]

If more of the content were designed for solo, I think this would absolutely be preferable, balance be damned. But because almost all of the content in the game is designed around parties, it presents a substantial likelihood of the meta problems others are describing. Yes, I can imagine a game where the devs are constantly shuffling up the meta to encourage players to frequently job swap, but even though that appeals to *me* ( I think "gearing up" is bad, exploitative game design), I think many players would quit.

[MoofiaBossVal]

Jobs first need to be differentiated from each other before we try differentiating two players who play the same job from each other.

[Minarisweet]

Jobs first need to be differentiated from each other before we try differentiating two players who play the same job from each other.

Yet all we get is homogenization

[JTWrenn]

Talent materia would be cooler. Make materia that is craftable that do buffs to specific skills would be fun. It would also be very FF.

[DiaDeem]

No.

People who suggest this type of thing rarely if ever make a comment on how horrible things can go because they're thinking of this stuff as a magical solution to some specific thing they don't like about the game and it's always viewed with rose tinted glasses.

[DontReadThis]

I would only support such a system if it was completely relegated to some kind of solo content.

What always happens with talent trees in multiplayer games is that a few players start mathing out the best possible combination of talents, and then every player is expected to use that exact same set of talents, or else you're excluded from everything.
At best it's just an illusion of choice which is quickly broken.
You also open up the door for random PF peeps to grief their groups by not picking any talents, or for clueless people to randomly pick a set of talents which are completely nonviable.
This is especially bad in WoW where the balance is so bad that the damage variance between sets of talents can be anywhere between 5-50% due to how talents can interact with each other and all the countless borrowed power systems.
The only way to prevent that would be to make the effects of talents so minuscule and unnoticeable that there wouldn't even be a point in them existing anyway.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

So lately there’s been a bunch of talk about people being really unhappy about job changes and general direction. The devs clearly want to keep the skill gap as small as possible and most of us hate their current approach. I think there may be a solution: talent trees.

I don’t mean anything as in depth as other games. Just maybe a few talents per job that slightly change how a few skills operate. For example, warrior has a talent that changes overpower from a circle to a cone. Sage has a talent that changes physis from a regen to a shield. Dark knight could have a talent that makes plunge deal no damage but applies soul survivor. Samurai has a talent choice where A: you lose kaiten but midare, kaeshi, and tsubame are guaranteed crits or B: you have hissatsu kaiten but the related skills deal less damage.
I didn’t completely think out the numbers or functionality, these are just examples.

In other words, those of us who preferred the gameplay of previous patches/expacs can have our cake and eat it and players who like the direction of job design can have and eat their cake. Would this happen? Probably not. But it could be fun to think about.

I will love it but SE got no talent to do good ones.