What happend to variety and options.

[IzumiRaito]

Variety is cool, but it dies as soon as someone discovers that something works best. Then players that dont have the "best" build / job will have VERY hard time finding a party. See warriors and dragoons.

At the moment if someone wants build variety, then path of exile is the game they want to play. It even has TRUE materia system and sphere grid.

[Steeled]

I've said it before, but I agree completely with this.

Yes it's true that cookie cutter builds happen, and always will, but there's usually a few points to play with, a few points to differentiate yourself, not here though.. I saw a 6500 hp paladin hit 100 hp on Titan tonight, once, because one healer had died and the other healer was trying to balance raid and tank healing and sneak in a raise, so of course he's always going to choose vit. A dps appropriately geared for the content he's doing is going to choose his dps stat. The only class that makes a choice is ACN and that's due to bad design.

I would love to feel like we have some lateral movement. there's very little mystery to me what most jobs are wearing.

To those that say it's for the sake of balance, that's not really true. Because cookie cutter builds will always happen, balance will always be achieved, but the few points to spend elsewhere can give you a little individuality.

[Xenobius]

Variety is cool, but it dies as soon as someone discovers that something works best.

In case you never noticed, everything about MMOs is fleeting at best.
Top gear is cool until players get access to the next tier, dungeons are challenging until optimal ways to run them with the best possible effort/result coefficient are found (read: farm), rare stuff is rare until everyone and their cat has it.

There is nothing wrong with talent/stat/gear customization novelty factor lasting a short while before optimal builds are discovered. It still provides some freedom of choice, and with every balancing patch it starts anew. It's good, and it works - proven by WoW, at the very least, where you could alter gear stats, play around with sockets, skills, skill inscriptions and whatnot. It's just noticeably harder to balance, and SE doesn't seem to have the time/manpower to pull this off. Which is a pity.

[Tupsi]

Balance...

Why would it be so hard to create options for a Crit DPS

Go play Ragnarok Online. "Builds" are illusion of choice, you can build how you want but I guarantee no one will want your Tank Bard and instead, want a Bard that builds towards it class Design. No one will want a pure nuke WHM either.

In your example you forgot to mention FFVII was broken - Stats weren't all functioning and some were even reversed, so yes experimenting was mostly to see what actually worked.

[Jonny_Tapas]

Cookie cutters can be chopped down...

Each piece of content itself could be designed to be strong against 1 style, yet weak against others.... If worked properly you can have a world where there's no perfect build and it's entirely situational.

To those who can't wait to say: "Go play [insert game name here]". You must understand... we don't want to go play another game. We want to play this game, and use this forum to give SE feedback and opinions so that they can improve the game. This is what the forum is for.

Not everyone will be happy with everything... and this forum gives them a voice. If they didn't care, or wanted to go play another game, I seriously doubt they'd take the time to post.

Why would you think you're helping the cause by chasing off the caring community and advertising other games?

[Tupsi]

To those who can't wait to say: "Go play [insert game name here]". You must understand... we don't want to go play another game. We want to play this game, and use this forum to give SE feedback and opinions so that they can improve the game. This is what the forum is for

It's the perfect example - Go play Ragnarok Online, see how 'builds' turn out and what ultimate happens with builds since RO is a much closer example to what you suggest than say WoW. We've all seen that each branch ultimately ends up with a 'best' build, most famously Shura/CritX builds. FF games are much more defined by the jobs than 1 baseless class you custom build which is why even in the first version people wanted actual defined Jobs back because Thaumaturge? Conjurer? Gladiator? They were basically nothing - The core system was fine (mix and match..sure why not) but the problem SE did:

Named it Final Fantasy and went a route of other MMOs for the class system. It's not advertisement, but in a sense, isn't trying to basically incorporate every idea from other MMOs (that did it better 99% of the time) a large advertiser? ARR is already a cook pot of MMO concepts, there's variety and options but the Job system in itself is one of the things FF games usually did to set itself apart from other RPGs and later MMOs. Balance is a fine mistress but builds do nothing but end up hurting people who wants to play "freely" compared to the preferred route.

[FinagleABagel]

There is an utter lack of customization in this game, or even the potential to have customization. Yes, even sand box games have a central tendency to certain "pro" builds. However, this game legitimately railroads you. The cross classes are limited, same stats are near meaningless which further railroad you into certain stats.

Take the PLD, dexterity does near nothing for parry so they go VIT.

For a FF game, this game shows a shocking lack of consideration for customization right from the onset. Here's to hoping this improves down the road.

[Zantetsuken]

Dark Souls and Monster Hunter had the best gear systems by far. They both had an incredible variety of gear sets that could be tailored to meet individual playstyles. And player skill was equally important as gear.


The design approach of 'single-lane hyper-linear gear-progression' is ARR's biggest shortfall IMO.

[Daenerys_Sedai]

no one will want your Tank Bard

true, but for it's fun to have the option for the hell of it! :P
Mazurka enmity ftw!

this bard (not me) did Suzaku (FFXI):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgz34-fv9jE

I only ever tried Genbu.

[Tupsi]

true, but for it's fun to have the option for the hell of it! :P
Mazurka enmity ftw!

this bard (not me) did Suzaku (FFXI):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgz34-fv9jE

I only ever tried Genbu.

That's sadly one of the things I liked best about XI, it was defined and you could go outside of the box but it really, really depended on the player's skill/utilization of the class given to them much more the game doing it for you.