Skill Branching: "Everyone Wins" Concept

[Shurrikhan]

Who am I kidding everyone and their mum's gonna go on IcyVeins and ask 'what is best HighMateria Reaper K3S Savage Ultimate Savage 2024' and what little 'player choice' will be instantly removed by optimizers, and by people who parrot about the meta things but don't actually know why something is meta.

Aye. True. But...

People already play jobs that aren't necessarily the best in role, sometimes with GCD speeds that don't have the theoretical best output just because they prefer how the job plays at that other speed. That's 2 out of the 2 forms of gameplay-affecting customization we have now, with both seeing actual choice.

Yes, the actual portion of players the "best" option tends to possess decreases with however many other options are competitive*, so ensuring that the choices we have already aren't fundamentally hamstrung or the like (see Skill Speed outside of SAM or especially MNK, and Spell Speed outside of BLM) is definitely worthwhile, but that there is a best means nothing; it's the portion of all else that's near enough to it that matters.

* (Increasingly tightly, with the content's stringency... not that even Ultimate is really enough to sacrifice a player not getting bored and whiffing a mechanic over a that player doing 2% more DPS, since a single extra death would outweigh it even if it doesn't cascade into a wipe.)

Would be cool to have materia on your main weapon apply a skill buff but considering how often SE changes skills and introduce more jobs I'm sure while it's doable, it's probably a lot more resource intensive to replace old skills. I can see at most skills like sprint duration/cd or role skills like Bloodbath/Second Wind get a buff, but then materia can be applied to every gear rather than just the weapon and modify the skills in different ways. In that case, we have a decent breadth of selection on what kind of effect the materia can provide other than substats itself. I figure a lot of these are either applicable to most battle content or will be designed for specific exploratory content / solo mode.

<Examples of buffs to Role Actions>

That being said, I'd honestly prefer more RPG elements that puts less emphasis on parsing and more emphasis on individuality considering this is a RPG, but I guess people will try to find meta in everything even though all choices can be really good when designed well enough.

I'm not sure that buffing a skill causes it to be replaced. I could have sworn the old pre-traited version of actions (e.g., 9s Venomous Bite) shared a skill ID with their later traited versions (e.g., 18s Venomous Bite).

All that being said, I am not a big fan of having a ton of minutial options over just having fewer, more impactful, and more thematic ones. I'd much rather just have, say, 1 or 2 slots that, when filled, provide dynamic changes/additions to one's kit.

And I wouldn't want a single one of those options to lack a tangeable gameplay effect (and perhaps utility without a direct impact on rDPS). If it's just bonus damage and/or a visual rehaul, that should just come from item level or skill/aura glamours, respectively.