A talent system

[Ametrine]

To clarify, I feel like the current jobs we have within each category of roles (tank, healer, ranger, mage, melee) don't differentiate from each other to justify adding talent trees within them, and the current jobs in some of these categories have one job standing above the other. IE, how Bard fulfills the role of a support ranger better than Machinist by having more support abilities despite both supposedly being the same type of job.

I also feel if SE developed new playstyles within the confines of current jobs, such as, say, giving SCH or AST the option to focus on their mitigation heals over their other skills, you would be better suited just adding a new job with that focus and building a new kit for it instead.

I feel like talent trees as a concept is better suited for single player games when you don't need to deal with other player's expectations and needs. Then, even if you opt for a less optimal skill set for fun factor, it doesn't bother anyone.

[Age_of_Oblivion]

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

2) Lack of faith in SE devs ability to balance such a system is frankly fair. But that should not be an argument against a possible solution, especially when it leaves the original problem still in place.

[Daralii]

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

So the options are every member of every class being identical, or every member of every class being identical with extra micromanagement between fights.

[Umbeliel]

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

2) Lack of faith in SE devs ability to balance such a system is frankly fair. But that should not be an argument against a possible solution, especially when it leaves the original problem still in place.

+1, basically everything that needs saying. Hypothetically a flexible system could be better, easily, but people saying no just don't think it could happen due to dev failings or having poor examples stuck in their head.

[Nezia]

A couple of points:

1) The inability of players to come up with solid design and balance suggestions should not be seen as making balance impossible. If you play Legion endgame content right now, many classes have great examples of a talent system which offers true choice in playstyle. Will there always be an optimal setup for a given fight? Absolutely. But that's a strawman argument, especially when right now every class is the spitting image of every other player in the same class.

Let me explain the illusion of choice right now in Legion, It's true that now there are players of the same spec picking different talents and pulling simillar numbers, but players are not actually choosing these talents on their own free will:


Let's say there is trinket A and trinket B, trinket A synergizes better with talent X and is usually the better option, trinket B synergizes better with trinket Y and is usually a worse option. That is assuming that both A and B are on the same ilvl but thanks to the rng fieast that wow has become it is possible for someone to have a trinket B 40 or 50 ilvls higher than trinket A, and thanks to that the player will end up performing better with the (B,Y) build than the otherwise better (A,X).

But ffxiv has very poor itemization, items are just flat out dmg increase at the end of the day, so we probably would end up with talents that are better 100% of the time or like happened in MoP/WoD and still happens to some degree in legion "pick this talent for single target, this other one for aoe, and this last one for cleave". In ffxiv the only way the talent system could be balanced would be if each talent had a completely different objective(which is what Blizzard was aiming for when they first anounced the new talent tree), for example: put Vercure and Impact on the same tier of talents for RDM, the healers are struggling to keep people alive during certain mechanics? Take Vercure. Heal is not a problem? Take Impact for the extra damage.

On another note, I will say that a big issue if the class design right now is that they are trying sooooo hard to make every classes have a similar number of buttons to press to the point that it is hurting the game. Like... There are many skills that look like they are there simply because they needed something to remove in 5.0(looking at you heavy trust and hot shot), I think they should not worry about the number of spells as long as it does not go beyond the range of 10 buttons from one class to another, in which point they should take a look at the class to see if it needs some tweeks here and there.

[Ilyrian]

In WoW, characters learn all of their skills about midway through the levelling process. They then can refine their playstyle through selection of (for the most part) passive abilities which drastically alter how certain actions function. This lends a sense of progression and development to each class archetype, while avoiding the problem of overwhelming players with buttons to press.

I agree with your first point OP, running synced dungeons and pressing 2-3 buttons (finding this particularly tanking on a Pally) is horrendously tedious.

Your WoW example – however, is a bit hyperbolic. Even going back to the original talent trees before the revamp they provided little to no true progression as the cookie-cutter builds locked you into a certain play style with the majority of 'bridging' talents being a flat damage increase or similar.
The current talent selection again suffers from the same 'non-choice' with 2 normally useless or sub-optimal choices next to a third mandatory one. The numbers will always be crunched and an optimal path will always be there.
One of the biggest moans in WoW is how the talents really don't add anything beyond the initial illusion of progress and the occasional switch for a very specific instance. SE has, in essence, avoided an even more stressful time of balancing the classes by avoiding them all together.

I believe WoW works as they seem to have a more top-down approach to their class balance and systems, building around high-end group content and working back from there. For as much crap as WoW gets it doesn't seem to be going through the extreme class imbalances as it did in the Golden Age (Vanilla-Wrath imo) - but it's had a lot longer to get it together when compared to ARR which by comparison is relatively new.

I think it's a massive shame they did away with the cross-class system: I'm glad I caught the end of it but it's a shame that it couldn't have been developed more.

[Remedi]

If you want a talent system to be added DO NOT use wow as a reference

[GDFletcher]

Totally in agreement with the whole Talent Tree system, the Vanilla WoW and TOR gave amazing options to customise the character and what they could and could not do well. I would be in total favour of it happening on FF14 too and would break open the meta completely.

A talent tree system could also play into the new resource bar, IE make Lillies useful for WHM

[loreleidiangelo]

I like the idea of talent choices in a general sense, but...I feel like they work in WoW because of a variety of factors that don't really exist in XIV. I suppose the biggest one would be tier/gear sets - in WoW you'll actually alter your current talent choices based around whether or not you have the full T20 set from Tomb of Sargeras, because gearsets in that game amplify certain abilities or resources that can have an impact on your build and rotation. It's not EXACTLY this super liberating perfect freedom scenario, but it does at least give some "if p then q" type variety which wouldn't be present in FFXIV. XIV would basically be, "am I doing a dungeon (AOE) or a raid (single target)? set talent appropriately" and move on.

I guess another factor would be that WoW raid bosses are actually frequently an AOE or two-target (what they call "cleave") scenario, whereas in XIV there might be one token fight every raid tier that is a bunch of trash mobs but no real opportunities for non-single target builds to shine.

And frankly, without big sweeping changes to how this game is designed, tanks and healers are gonna be pigeonholed into taking DPS-boosting talents every time.

[Raim]

People minmaxing out a best choice of talent doesn't mean you shouldn't have talents. Its not the same as putting things like Swiftcast or Dispel into role skills.