Quote Originally Posted by chococo View Post
Even though the armory system promotes versatility and cross classing, SE is clearly not playing that way as they take balancing a very high priority in this game. More options means more difficult to balance content and they are steering away from it.
Basically this. Your choices are the freedom to jump into whichever class you want, less variance within each class.

Variance in how to develop each class sounds nice, but the reality is that generally speaking, there's just a 'right' answer and a 'wrong' answer when choices are given like that. Consider Monk, which has Fists of Fire, Earth, and Wind, only one of which you can be in at any given moment. Being a class oriented around dealing damage, you shouldn't actually ever be in Earth or Wind except for a few moments where you, for whatever reason, can't be doing DPS (or are too low level to have Fire).

The more variables there are on players, the more ways they have to screw it up and the more balance concerns there are to take into account over the grander scope of class vs class balance.