What Happened to Customization & Specialization?

[Sacred_Nym]

No matter what, there will ALWAYS be a BIS that everyone uses... the concept of "uniqueness" in an MMO is fake.

This. Customizable abilities in multiplayer games are either mandatory or worthless. There is no middle ground, and if you aren't using the agreed upon ideal set up, you are essentially harassing everyone you play with by holding them back.

[Jandor]

Playing a GLA at 15 gives you very little insight into the job at 70. Maybe in the past it was more useful, but as the level cap increases, what little benefits that used to have only continue to dwindle.

It's not about giving you an understanding of the all of a jobs various intricacies at max level, it's about giving a basic impression of them so the party can function better.

I started as a Gladiator with no prior experience at all of trinity MMO gameplay, being encouraged to level other classes to get various bits of kit made me a better tank and a better player.
Trying Conjurer to get Cure and Raise made me more aware of what healers were putting up with when I was tanking, moving to Thaumaturge to get swiftcast for my Conjurer made me more considerate of stances, timers, etc. etc. as I flitted around through most of the basic classes.
A lot of the things I picked up doing this are so obvious to me now of course that it's hard for me to believe I ever didn't know them, but I didn't.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying cross-class was perfect, but IMHO it was far superior to role actions. It should have been tweaked, not replaced. I mean, they didn't even do a good job replacing it, it still exists essentially unchanged for crafting classes, where are my crafting role actions?

[BillyKaplan]

It's not about giving you an understanding of the all of a jobs various intricacies at max level, it's about giving a basic impression of them so the party can function better.

How much is someone going to learn about party function when they can level up a thing completely outside of dungeons? Or perform subpar for the sole sake of leveling up because they couldn't care less about their performance on that class?
If people should learn those things, they can be added to Hall of the Novice, along with half the game's mechanics and core concepts. Just because something had some positive added value doesn't mean that's where it belonged, or that people actually benefited from it in that context.

Where are my crafting role actions?

While really far from ideal, they actually did try to address this by introducing specializations in HW, and giving everyone roughly the same skills in SB. It being crafters they simply didn't bother with overhauling the core system as it wouldn't have been worth it. Throw in how most of us level up all crafters anyway if only to make our own sub-mats and there really wasn't any need for that.

[Hamada]

Considering how much 2.0 changed from 1.0, especially in terms of abilities, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be quick to remove the cross-class system if it didn't fit the new direction they wanted the game to go in.

I know, and they tried to fit the stat thing too in ARR+, we all know how that went, they got rid of it after admitting it was not working. As far as I know people disliked it in ARR+ especially if you played SMN and SCH. Just because it worked well and made sense in 1.0, does not mean it would fit the new game's direction for ARR+

[Kacho_Nacho]

The last time we had any uniqueness was 1.0.
The dream is dead. Every job is the same as the one standing next to it.

I wouldn't go that far. There is room for some customization by one's choices of cross-class abilities and materia. In addition, the way an individual plays their character puts their personal stamp on that toon.

[Dzian]

This. Customizable abilities in multiplayer games are either mandatory or worthless. There is no middle ground, and if you aren't using the agreed upon ideal set up, you are essentially harassing everyone you play with by holding them back.

That varies largely by how well the game is designed. And the content within said game works..

the easiest example would perhaps be your typical first person shooter or something. Where a simple change in environment can have a massive impact on your skills and choices.... your sniper rifle specced marksman character might not be to hot in an office block raid or something. But if that spills out onto the streets or rooftops suddenly he's in his element. Same can be said for the guy with the smg spec build might not be to great in the streets but the minute he gets indoors or in an enclosed area.

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.

The same would be true in mmos if you built more diverse and varied environments you would again make it incredibly difficult to define must have skill sets or best in slot builds..

Ffxi for example the merit systems biggest fault wasn't in the customisation but the fact most mobs shared the same properties. 90% of mobs in the game for example were weak to either lightning or ice. That's the only reason those were the only 2 elements people put there merit points into. Had they done a better job with the environment then a bigger more choices for those merits would have been viable decisions.

The biggest problem xiv has in this regard is everything is dumbed down and over simplified. To the point where the only tactic is ever round it all up and aoe it down... And they're also very little variety in the environments themselves. Its incredibly one dimensional

[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.

[Ameela]

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.

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.
You can't NOT take those role skills when doing those fights because they're the only way to achieve optimal play and you'll be laughed at if you don't even try to do so. Back when it was relevant if you insisted that you'd rather take Convalescence instead of Awareness into O3S to hopefully off set the Crit damage with more potent healing because it's part of your playstyle you'd probably be kicked on the spot.

[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.

[KisaiTenshi]

I know, and they tried to fit the stat thing too in ARR+, we all know how that went, they got rid of it after admitting it was not working. As far as I know people disliked it in ARR+ especially if you played SMN and SCH. Just because it worked well and made sense in 1.0, does not mean it would fit the new game's direction for ARR+

The original 1.0 skills were thrown away or reassigned. The ability to cross-class then and the limited cross-class we got in 2.0 felt like there was no plan for it.

Like, if it was designed like Wizardry, you would have to max-level every job in order to get every valuable cross-classable skill. That just makes for a lot of meaningless grinding just to get that one skill. It complicates expansion packs as well, because you'd have to max level every job in order to have all the 'meta' required skills, and just makes players feel like they are required to grind out these jobs as easily as possible by playing notoriously easy content rather than play them.

The Role actions solved one problem but gave two more. By removing the "everyone must have X skill" meta, players weren't forced to level jobs they didn't want to play just to get those skills. However this came at a ridiculous expense to tanks and healers, where necessary skills like Esuna and Lucid Dreaming became optional. Even though there is content that clearly requires Esuna. This was because clearly the developers tried to give healers something, but healers never took anything other than surecast from thm, or protect from whm, or swiftcast from thm. In fact taking any combat skill was often useless, like taking Blizzard 2 on whm, gave you an AOE that did basically no damage, and was used just to tag monsters in FATES.


Getting rid of Cleric Stance and the bonus points solved a bunch of problems that hobbled healers. So now everyone is essentially "BiS" configured regardless of job. There's no badly configured tanks or healers who dumped their points into stats that aren't helpful. However this remains in Materia. It's still possible to meld useless things to gear, or have no materia at all. But all content can be played with no materia.

The correct thing to do would be to just remove the "role actions" entirely, and make those part of the base class, give each class back it's own unique abilities and extend skills and actions all the way up to level 70, where the job stone only unlocks the skills/abilities with no cast time. This leads us back to the ACN/SMN/SCH problem. SE just needs to rip the bandaid off here and explicitly allow the classes without a job crystal be usable at level 70 instead of being useless after level 32.

The ACN/SMN and SCH remain a problem with designing anything since the base class needs to have the same skills as smn and scholar, but smn and scholar, doesn't need to have the same traits that upgrade those skills to others.