What Happened to Customization & Specialization?

[PyurBlue]

Then that just means you pick the best spec for the environment/raid you're going to.
It's just like how O3S has tanks being required to use Awareness (and Interject depending on the party) or they're going to have a harder time, or in O4S everyone is advised to take knockback immunity abilities, same with O5S and to a lesser extent O8S.

FF14 as it is now would work out this way, but I think Dzian was speaking in a more general sense. Say if Savage wasn't the exact same fight every time, but could the encounters could vary. Assuming that everything was correctly balanced, there wouldn't be a best skill/skills. You might choose them based on what mechanics you feel the least confident in, which would vary from player to player.

I'm not sure how to best make customization relevant in FF14 but as a general concept I don't think it's all that hard to implement.

[SendohJin]

If you design the enviroments within the game well then it becomes incredibly difficult to have that one mandatory skill set or build set.. And then the choice is real it's not an illusion.

Every instance where the "choice is real" in an MMO that i've experienced, the playerbase ends up making the choice with the players. Many FFXI choices were real, so many guilds end up choosing to NOT bring X jobs to Y content.

[LalaRu]

With the extension of being able to 10 role actions, Square has practically removed every aspect of character customization from the game.

Don't agree.

With more role action slots it was removed the annoyance of swapping things every time I have to, and it is a good thing.

Almost every job had at least one or two role actions they had to swap for this or that content, and now with all those actions ready we can play more effectively than before.

[Eloah]

I personally always thought the system was going to be, "once you reach a certain level you can use that role skill" no slotting needed. When I saw it was only 5 slots I was like, "well that seems dumb"

[Eloah]

Also as stated, the illusion of choice is exactly what is needed, illusions. Like give spells and abilities a new coat of paint. Like make WHM cast Water spells instead of stone, use Blizzard for you big damage, something to that effect. Basically, expand on the Egi-glamour system... no seriously we need more Egi skins, lol.

[Dzian]

Every instance where the "choice is real" in an MMO that i've experienced, the playerbase ends up making the choice with the players. Many FFXI choices were real, so many guilds end up choosing to NOT bring X jobs to Y content.

As much as I loved XI it had some major environmental issues that meant many of its choices simply weren't real or even considered an option..

My earlier example of elements again comes to mind. A SMN, BLM or RDM putting merits into fire or water for example just wasn't an option simply because if you ever looked at the bestiary you'd note that virtually nothing was weak to those elements. 90 maybe 95% of mobs were weak to either ice or thunder thus those were the only choices for merits.

This was also true with damage types such as piercing, slashing and blunt. Virtually everything shared the exact same resistances and weaknesses which then meant jobs that didn't utilise them were considered inferior..

Another was TP. The primary reason many pet classes were shunned and undesirable was because of the massive amounts of TP pets fed to the monsters you were fighting which in turn made those fights harder. You could see this with Dragoon. Piercing damage which was ideal for many mobs in the toau areas. But the TP issue from there pet made them a lot less desirable. And groups would rather take a samurai with a lower polearm skill instead.

Another issue casters faced was the amount of mobs that would either throw your magic back in your face or silence you every 2 seconds made them a undesirable choice at the higher levels. Because the reflected damage made it even harder for the party and the endless silence was crippling.

The jobs them selves though were generally fine and you could do some amazing things with many of them. Monk made a pretty solid tank at 55 when you got counter stance. Samurai was in many cases a better tank than ninja with seigan anticipate an attack that would strip all your shadows..

Many Sub jobs combinations could have been great if they simply scaled properly.. especially the caster ones... cure 1 or even cure 2 on a level 75 player was a joke... some decent scaling of such would have many many more sub choices actually work... the same with subs like thief SATA would have been more viable if it worked with a greater variety of skills for example.

It was the game environment and world mechanics that created many of the problems not so much the jobs themselves..

There were however genuinely questionable skills and abilities. Such as zanashin and the merits to increase zanashin rate.... an ability that offered a chance to attack again if you missed. But there was no logic there because no one would ever build around missing attacks enough to benefit from enhancing zanashin.

But yeah many of XIs choices could have been better simply with some environmental changes.. If you stopped pets feeding mobs so much TP for example drgs would have almost instantly become a lot more popular and viable choice.. So would SMN PUP and hell even BST all from a simple environmental change.

Same goes for for casters. If bestiary was better balanced and more diverse in terms of weaknesses. Casters would have had a legitimate choice to put merits into water potency or wind potency... another environmental change..

A good environment would make his or must haves almost impossible

[LineageRazor]

There were however genuinely questionable skills and abilities. Such as zanashin and the merits to increase zanashin rate.... an ability that offered a chance to attack again if you missed. But there was no logic there because no one would ever build around missing attacks enough to benefit from enhancing zanashin.

Zanashin's value was in the fact that FFXI put a cap on accuracy. No matter how you built your character, the best accuracy you could manage was 95%. Zanashin was the only way to BREAK that 95% blockade, since a percentage of those inevitable missed attacks would get a second chance. Additionally, certain mobs in the game could use evasion buffs that were pretty serious - Zanashin helped with additional attack chances in those cases, too.

I'm not saying that this necessarily made it worth the resource investment, but unlike in this game misses were unavoidable, and therefore had to be taken into consideration. Zanashin helped mitigate that.

[Freyt]

I mean I've played MMO's where BIS isn't really a thing. There are good choices and bad choices. Things that work and things that don't work.

And I'm sure a number of people here have played those same MMO's and have forgotten what that's like. Or maybe these people have simply followed the "meta" without ever thinking of challenging it or being challenged with it.

[Odstarva]

It does seem rather... redundant that role actions should exist at all anymore then, isn't it so? I mean, if we can select them all why would we keep them separate from all the other skills?

While I appreciate and welcome the change, I'd rather they just abolished role actions altogether at this point, ahah.

[ElHeggunte]

It does seem rather... redundant that role actions should exist at all anymore then, isn't it so? I mean, if we can select them all why would we keep them separate from all the other skills?

While I appreciate and welcome the change, I'd rather they just abolished role actions altogether at this point, ahah.

They probably will, but this isn’t generally the kind of thing you make such a sweeping change to in the middle of an expansion. It’s better to go halfway with the slot increase and overhaul it later in 5.0.