Job/Merit points? (Idea)

[DarthVella]

Now if they could implement it like Diablo II talent trees where you actually could have different successful builds, they might be on to something.

I think the main problem with trees like that is that it is always expensive or difficult to respec; which gives people incentive to pick the "optimal" set of skills for most situations. When I first saw this thread I envisioned a skill/trait tree for each class in which you can only put so many points, and any excess points you earn (up to a cap) give you the ability to reassign a single point.

The other problem is that there's little incentive to experiment. So you could also have it such that you have to choose once per day which skills you want active, and you can't pick skills you've used in the last two days or so. That also gives you room to play your class slightly differently each time but still have your perceived "optimal" set available for whenever you schedule your raids.

[Reynhart]

So you could also have it such that you have to choose once per day which skills you want active, and you can't pick skills you've used in the last two days or so. That also gives you room to play your class slightly differently each time but still have your perceived "optimal" set available for whenever you schedule your raids.

A system like Diablo III. You could buy all of your skills in the end, but you can only pick a few of them at any given time.

I don't think "once a day" is necessary. You could just do like the cross-class skills, where everything is put on cooldown once you change a skill.

[TaleraRistain]

I think the main problem with trees like that is that it is always expensive or difficult to respec; which gives people incentive to pick the "optimal" set of skills for most situations.

Not always. It was fairly easy to change your trees around in EQ2 and you could even save different builds I think, but that game suffered from having really good and desirable skills in x tree and then total crap in the others. It's a single player (or co-op) game, but Borderlands II would be another good example. It's fairly easy IIRC to swap your skills around to try out different builds and they all have the traits of the base class but play just differently enough to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, it would require a lot of dev resources to balance everything properly and I don't think FF has the dev team they would need for it right now.