Something is missing.

[Kosmos992k]

While I enjoy skill trees and customization, in the end it always just devolves to "if you don't have THIS EXACT SETUP you aren't worth taking in the party".

I don't see how that can be the case outside of raiding groups.

I'd rather forget about that here and leave customization like that in my single player games.

I kinda thought customization was one of the main draws to MMORPGs?

[Yeldir]

I don't see how that can be the case outside of raiding groups.

I kinda thought customization was one of the main draws to MMORPGs?

The claim that it degenerated to every player with the exact same build is bullshit, anyway - one of the excuses developers use to avoid balancing an intricate talent system, and one of the excuses players have to justify their anger at not understanding their own class well enough for their experiments with it to yield anything but disadvantages.

It led to builds revolving around a certain goal, but even in hallmark games like WoW which were notorious for this very kind of thing, you'd see plenty of, say, fury warriors with different talent distributions depending on whether or not they had access to a shaman or a paladin, whether they got lucky with 2h drops or 1h ones, and so on.