Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
That said, I don't think a Talent system (unless you're imagining it rather differently from the likes of WoW, GW2, Rift, etc.) would be a remotely efficient investment. I would suspect instead that a "All Jobs on One Character" game ought to leverage that for its customization, rather than creating a ton of sub-jobs (via those different builds) in isolation from each other.
It doesn't have to be a talent system, necessarily. It could be anything that lets the player play their class differently from someone else of the same class.

Take wow for example. Around 2005-2011 I played a warlock and I could choose from three different specializations: destruction, affliction, and demonology. All three specs had somewhat different means of dealing damage. Destro was direct damage, affliction was damage over time, and demo's damage was heavily augmented by summoned demons. Yes, there are optimal specs to choose that deal the most damage, but choosing the current meta spec/build matters little when playing in a non-competitive guild or a casual pick-up group.

Once again, it doesn't have to be a full-on talent system like wow's, but it would be cool if FFXIV had some sort of way of giving the player a choice in how they can play their class. In FFXIV, the way I play my class, BLM, is pretty much the same as any other BLM minus small differences in rotation.