Ability Points, Skill Trees & Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

[Dzian]

In conclusion. For a system that lets players change their strengths and weaknesses to work, the content needs to present different areas to be strong and weak in. And currently the game has a very narrow playing field. So unless this expansion's "Enhanced Combat Design" opens it up, I don't think a customization system in 8.0 will work.

Nail on the head here. They've taken away every system players could interact with that adds depth to the game and in order to diversify they'd effectively have to 180 and put a lot of those systems back in..

There are thousands of games out there where choices work and work very well. Hell even games like call of duty with endless weapon choices loadout choices etc etc. You can still pick what you want and dominate the game.. there's a meta sure but it's also very easy to absolutely own the meta..

Or racers with an endless choice of cars. The fastest one isn't necessarily the best especially if it can't get round a corner

The key to balance is not in jobs but in content design..

Elemental weaknesses and things would be fine as long as they didn't repeat the mistakes of ffxi and end up in a situation where almost 90% of monsters shared the same weaknesses. Thus they were the only 2 players would typically sync merit points into..

Xivs big problem is every encounter is the exact same thing. The only thing that changes is boss HP. Every boss has the same speed, same defence stats, takes the same evasion the same resistances.. a level 90 boss takes the exact same damage from a resultant arrow as a level 1 bug.. because it has the exact same defence and mitigation.

Said it before but you can't create fun diverse and interesting jobs and choices without having diverse and interesting systems and mechanics in the game to play around with.