More Customize Skill

[SundayTrash]

There was a huge [skill] difference between tanks that were raiding and actively trying to clear versus tanks that were not raiding, were not as good, but followed the meta and caused issues as a whole.

As a healer doing that era, it was an ill-begotten nightmare.

Not really even if they use vit accessories, that extra health is not necessary outside of savage since its not gonna increase ur overall CD stuff don't hit hard outside of EX and Savage, from my experience I can still heal and dps. Maybe the faults lays in the healers.

[Zojha]

Well, we should put it this way: Customization can work to some degree.

We see that with jobs already. After all, our jobs are a form of customization already, and for the most part, the devs do a good job making sure that you don't get shunned for picking or not picking any particular job. On the flip side, cross class skills are an utter failure in that regard. So it's safe to say: As long as the performance of two or more options remains within a certain delta value, customization can work.

The issue is that in practice, devs are only humans too and they probably aren't theorycrafting fight by fight. In fact, considering they didn't even see healers dealing damage becoming meta, they probably aren't theorycrafting at all. It is likely to assume that the more complex their game becomes, the more likely they are to lose track and control of that performance delta. And once they do, deciding which job to take might end up a decision much like deciding which cross class skill to take. That is what we don't want to happen.

So the real issue is: How do we ensure performance differences stay within a certain value without doing very complicated math every time we want to introduce or change anything?

[CookieMonsta]

Well, we should put it this way: Customization can work to some degree.
?

Thats exactly the problem. The only games that get away with radical customization have to relax their grip completely on balance and pretty much hand it to the community + meta to deal with. The FFXIV devs work really hard to ensure their fights can be cleared more or less as intended with a wide variety of jobs. I would argue take a game like DOTA 2, with its formidable resources and zero money-making pressure, cannot attain perfect balance so instead they tweak and shape the existing meta (but unlike FFXIV, they don't dictate it).

Its two differing philosophies of designing content. Either design content around the existing classes/systems or release content as is and shape the meta instead that naturally forms around your content.

[Altena]

It would have to be exceptionally balanced in the sense that putting points in skill A = the same (or similar) amount of damage/mitigation/special effect as skill B.

Blade & Soul did this reasonably well.

Unfortunately most games don't do it well, and you end up having a standard skill build that is optimal which equates to the illusion that there is customization but really there isn't.. It also can't be insanely impactful - otherwise becomes far too difficult to balance.

The closest thing to skill customization I can ever see working in this game is something we already have - equip a different weapon and boom! suddenly you have a completely different skill tree.

[SundayTrash]

Thats what I miss about old school mmo like ragnorak, even WoW and Diablo 2, they did the skills tree really well like having to spec into it even access the skill and passive and investing points into it to increase its effectiveness.
Also the one stats per class is getting very stale, I miss the wide range skill per class that work off of different stats point.

[dragonseth07]

Thats what I miss about old school mmo like ragnorak, even WoW and Diablo 2, they did the skills tree really well like having to spec into it even access the skill and passive and investing points into it to increase its effectiveness.
Also the one stats per class is getting very stale, I miss the wide range skill per class that work off of different stats point.

I remember WoW's old skill trees fondly. I also remember the day I graduated from the baby levels and realized my build was shit, and if I wanted to be competitive, I needed to use one that I hated.

[Malzian]

...they did the skills tree really well...

Ugh... Those two words... "skill trees". Nope, in my opinion... no thank you. I've played enough games with skill trees that have a choice path for you to follow like this and I've quit them all for two reasons:

1) The trees make you choose specific a specific build that best fits the content you're currently doing, but if you go to do something else you need to respec which usually takes time and has a cost associated with it. That means if you're going from one fight in a raid to another you may have to stop and adjust because: "the last boss required a lot of AoE to deal with adds, but this boss needs high-damage single target skills to meet the DPS check".
2) Skill tree adjustments can cause point resets in MMOs which, depending on the size of the tree and how it's set up, means that patch days you could end up spending a whole hour trying to rebuild your skills to what they were. Even if you manage that, the likelihood is that your bars will never end up the same and your character doesn't play the way your used to making it a learning curve to play your character again on each patch.

[Stormfur]

ESO did this (I only played the beta). The idea was you could be any class and equip any equipment and put your points into anything as long as they matched a certain theme (like Dragon Knight). Before too long, even in beta, people were shouting that you needed to have X skill build or don't bother entering the dungeon.

You think "skip soar or disband" is salt. Just imagine what it would be if there were many different customizable skill trees!

Although I agree, something needs to be done to break up the monotony.

[Jonnycbad]

Remember Merit Points in FFXI? Same concept but there was an optimal choice. You were given 5-8 options to spend merit points with a cap of 10 total, and each category had a cap of 5, so you could max out 2 skills or put points in all 8. Ultimately the best option for most jobs was to max out 2 skills because a few were amazing. DRG had Angon for example, an ability that when used reduced the target's defense by 20% for 90 seconds. It was excruciatingly useful because most similar skills were much weaker (5-10%) and could be resisted or miss, but Angon was guaranteed to land. This made DRG's other merit skills pointless to spend points in (mostly because they were crappy though). Other jobs had good skills, like RDM, which had 5 higher tier spells to choose from. They could max out 2 spells to 5/5, or spend 10 merits points and unlock all 5 spells, putting 2 points in each, etc...Ultimately 5/5 was the way to go because some were more effective than others.

[SundayTrash]

Think of this way, instead of best build and most optimal choice, what if u can spec a dps into a off tank instead of using 2 tank, or u can spec a OT more into a dps, same goes for Heal into more dps oriented.