Quote Originally Posted by Hyrist View Post
While Gilthas puts on a good point, I wish to add onto the social aspect of such options.

Diversity is neigh on impossible to maintain in a game culture that worships gleaning efficiency and uniformity in every conceivable aspect.

Take the Subjob system. A Job was expected to have a specific set of sub classes it was to use, and woe onto the player that experimented beyond the experienced norm. Same went for equipment or weapon usage. The use of Red Mage alone was a perpetual debate on even the smallest of party trash mobs.

Here, the roles, the flexibility and usefulness are clearly defined. The game gives you limits and bounds with a bit of flexibility of use but primarily maintaining a clear focus. The trade off is that every player can still play every class on a single character- a level of diversity and depth that is still lacking in most MMOs to date - something I feel players overlook.
I understand your and his points. But even in XI's subjob system, you usually have a few options, even if it's just 2~5, and more if you solo. Rather than everything being ironclad, and the only thing that really changes from fight to fight is when you strafe left or right to dodge mechanics while doing your rotation. Yes, some builds will be shunned, but even a couple options and configurations is better than none, IMO. And if it's something you can tinker with while solo or in the open world for nontraditional builds, that's something I think will be pretty neat as well.