Quote Originally Posted by Bahati View Post
Not to be controversial, but can anyone familiar with WoW explain how they manage class customization yet the same would not work in FFXIV? Or do WoW players push meta and all run the same specs anyway? Are the dungeons/encounters very different than FFXIV so that is why it works? I hear these two games compared constantly and wondered if I might have some perspective as to why FFXIV is so limited when apparently every other MMO has more class diversity.
WoW managed it eventually by vastly oversimplifying the talent trees.

Originally you got one point per level (starting at level 10) and had longer trees with varying skills, and you could freely put points into any of your class's three trees as long as you were high enough level to unlock it (and had any prerequisite talents unlocked already). However, this led to cookie cutter builds for each spec, and a lot of talents that were functionally useless. And cross-spec talents weren't always useful, because you'd still have to invest most of your points in your main spec to get the most out of it.

The trees got pruned in Cataclysm, and then later (I want to say in Mists of Pandaria, but I could be wrong) simplified again to just give you most of your chosen spec's main stuff right at level 10 and only have a few abilities to choose from every ten to fifteen levels. Which still led to a lot of cookie cutter builds, because a lot of those skills are still highly situational or redundant.

Even hunter pets got massively simplified. Pets used to have their own talent trees, and each family had their own special skills, with a few overlaps. Then they lost the talents, and each of the three pet specs shared their skills, with exotic pets usually having an extra (since exotics were only usable by beast master hunters, they got the extra perk), but losing a lot of the unique skills in the bargain. Really crippled my beloved devilsaur. (This is also ignoring quality of life changes to pets, such as having to feed them or level them up.)

So basically, they didn't manage it. They tried, it didn't really work out, so they backpedaled on it a few times and eventually more or less gave up. They try again every so often, such as Legion's artifact weapons with their own skill unlocks, but it just leads to more of the same.