The armory system may have more diversity as far as selecting functional skills go, but as far as I'm concerned it's a much simpler design than FFXI's job system.
You could change skillsets by switching subjobs, use more than one weapon etc. Of course you couldn't pick and choose individual skills like you can now.

The current system, as much as I'd like it to, just isn't designed for multiple weapons. In FFXI weaponskills were tied to the weapon, so you could stay the same job, keep your fundamental job abilities, but change weaponskills. IN XIV, weaponskills were axed, and everything was just lumped into the "ability" category. Some are job specific while most can be mixed and matched at will. Switching weapons would be meaningless because you'd pretty much end up with the same ability set anyway.

I completely lost where I was going with any of that lol :/ Meh, with the system we have now, many people end up with the same or near-same ability sets anyway, since in anything theres typically only a couple extremely optimal/efficient ways to play the class. If you want to be effective at holding hate you need this, this, this and this. If you want to do damage, these abilitie are the most effective. If you want to heal you need these etc. You can make changes by swapping certain buffs for others etc but it all ends up the same in the end for anyone who wants to be efficient at what they do. People who don't care so much have much more freedom in that respect.

Anyway, way off topic mass of incoherently strung together thoughts and non-points with no overall goal. Sorry for that lol. Guess I'm just bored.



Anyway: Here's hoping FFXIV's advanced job system makes things more interesting.