Implement a talent-tree of some kind, like the License Board from FF12...

[Rhianu]

The armory system IS a variant of the license board system.

Instead of having to gain enough points to unlock an ability to use whenever you want, you rank up the class in which it belongs and eventually unlock the ability.

And that right there is the fundamental problem with customization within the Armory System: you have to do an inordinate amount of grinding and level multiple jobs before you can even begin to get any real level of customization. The amount of customization you have within a single job is extremely limited.

Plus, by allowing players to mix and match abilities from all jobs, you eventually end up with just one big conglomerate job that has all the abilities and everyone is the same. Yoshi-P has said that he and the dev team want to establish job uniqueness in FFXIV, but that's going to be impossible to do as long as jobs can all share abilities with each other.

So my idea is that we remove the feature for jobs to share abilities with each other, but keep the existing class names for the current jobs, and then add classic FF job names for sub-jobs. So like say you've got a Thaumaturge, but then within the Thaumaturge class structure there are different paths and branches you can take, and you have to ask yourself what kind of Thaumaturge do you want to be? For example, do you want to be a White Mage Thaumaturge, a Black Mage Thaumaturge, or a Red Mage Thaumaturge? And there would be three different Thaumaturge License Boards (one for WHM, one for BLM, and one for RDM), and you could choose to level up in just one, or mix and match abilities from all three License Boards.

This is where ability customization would come in, and so a Thaumaturge could no longer use abilities from a Marauder or a Lancer like they can now, thus providing unique job distinctions, and would instead customize their job abilities by selecting combinations from the abilities provided by the different WHM, BLM, and RDM branches on their License Board.