Quote Originally Posted by Avarghaladion View Post
TBH, that would be fine. XI merits are a grind but they're a grind that involves no RNG whatsoever and for which you see consistent, incremental games. Additionally, if properly implemented, they add an effective long term goal and moderate degrees of customizability for different classes. SE straight up isn't gonna do anything like this for XIV though because "omg what about the poor, poor casuals!" and "lolbalance."
Only issue with that is that they would end falling into a cookie cutter build such as when the cap was still 75 pretty much if you ran a rdm you were expected to put your merits into stuff like Slow II, Paralyze II and other debuffs. I think people are wanting horizontal progression mainly to add variety of gears. I'm not sure how XI's merits hold up anymore with level cap increased to 99 but it felt like when first implemented it was to keep people from really wanting a level cap increase with the expansions.