Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain View Post
These would just be akin the old talent tree system (beside not being a tree), people will figure out what is the most optimal thing to do and that's it. So it won't achieve anything.
Also, on a more personal note, such traits are plain boring like the current materia system. You just shove what's numerically best for you.
Sure, unless they were designed to be kind of close in power. It's difficult to design, but there can be a lot of different aspects to go from.

Such as mathematically certain stats might end up being close to each other. There might be things to consider such as perhaps movement speed gives your melee character more uptime which translates to better DPS than a stat boost.

Perhaps some of the things can be designed as trade offs. Such as "Convert X% of stat A into Y value of stat B"

Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain View Post
Why bother implementing a whole system if it has "low impact"? I mean, they don't change your gameplay, they just change your default value for some stats from 0 to X%.
Why bother releasing new gear with expansions? I mean, they don't change your gameplay, they just change your stats from 0 to X.

Feedback is why. It feels good to earn things. It feels good to feel like you have a choice about how to design your character (Unless you just copy/paste from what a website tells you to put).

Unlocking a new slot and getting to put in a new trait would feel cool, even if it was relatively low impact. Also, the low impact is to counteract the higher impact other traits suggested. It puts perspective on the strength so you neither feel like it's optimal to use only global traits nor do you feel like you can't opt for more global traits than is necessary.

Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain View Post
And no matter how many you put the end result will be the same, people will figure out the most optimal set
Not everyone will play meta.

If they did, we wouldn't see half the classes in the game would we?

Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain View Post
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "o if you had 10 slots, you wouldn't be able to just slot 10 of these "Stronger" traits and would have to still pick some of the less potent general ones." because this is exactly what would happen if you just let people decide among a list without restriction.
This is literally me explaining the restriction.

Let me compare to Triple Triad decks. A deck has 5 card slots available. At maximum progression, you're allowed a single 4 or 5 star card and any number of 3 or lower star cards. This means you can have 5 1 star cards or could also have 1 5 star card and 4 3 star cards.

The same would be in place here. You'd get a total of for example 10 trait slots to fill with traits. But you'd only be able to have say, 2 Role Traits equipped at once and 1 Job Trait equipped. Meaning you'd fill in the remaining 7 spots with the Global traits.

Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain View Post
Most system just give an illusion of choice (like talent tree, because really, you didn't have any, there was 1-2 builds and that's it). Same thing for most game, same thing for FF14 cross-role system. Picking Provoke as a Tank wasn't a choice....
People often claim this, but I recall several iterations of talent trees that had multiple different builds that would work. Classic to WotLK WoW had many times where there was deviations possible. Rift has had pretty diverse talent systems (Outside Tanking which often had core tanking talents in specific trees... Such as "Don't get critted by enemies" and that kind of garbage that shouldn't exist in the first place)

Quote Originally Posted by Sylvain View Post
WoW Talent system is somehow like this, and while it isn't perfectly balanced, it still is imo the best talent system designed so far.
Ehh... I find the post-Pandaria WoW talents pretty lacking. My experience with them are that they're very much catagorized by the worst of Talent designs. Where there will be some talents that are obvious best picks and others that are "The choice doesn't matter, they all suck"

With only one specific talent choice that I can recall though all the expansions that was actually GOOD. Which was when Death Knights could pick between Blood Rune, Runic Empowerment and Runic Corruption during Pandaria.

Statistically Blood Runes > Runic Empowerment > Runic Corruption. However, they were so close as to be marginal at best (Like talking 0.01% DPS variance) and so the option was heavily driven by personal preference for the style of resource regeneration.

Blood Runes meant you had to manually control your generation, using an action to turn fully depleted runes into Death Runes (The best kind as they worked as any type). It would provide the most Death Runes for you over time but the cost is you having to constantly manage them.

Runic Empowerment was passive and it would randomly proc one of your fully depleted runes to become available again. This would grant the second highest amount of overall runes, but could be awkward due to trying to game them (I.e. Not spending a certain type of rune so you get more of the type(s) you want) as well as de-syncing your 2 rune cost abilities.

Runic Corruption was another passive and it would proc temporarily increased regeneration. It gave the lowest number of runes on average, but it would keep all your runes in sync as well as boost up all 3 types of runes. This meant it gave you the most consistent rotations as you'd keep just regenerating them in the same groupings you spent them.

Outside of this specific scenario, much of the new school WoW talents have been pretty poorly designed.

While their old more sophisticated talent trees were a lot better, they just needed some extra attention. I.e. To stop certain talents from being just flat out superior to other options. As well as reducing the whole "I need to put 5 points into this otherwise it sucks" thing. But they had quite a lot of variations. Like, beyond the builds where you just took most (If not all) the talents in a particular tree and splashed out remaining points into the best out of the remaining 2 trees, you had things like PoM Pyro (Mage that went Arcane to get some boosts to spell damage and access to Presence of Mind (Essentially Swiftcast) and then went Fire to get damage and Pyroblast (10 second cast massive damage nuke)) Frostfire (Mage going into both Fire and Frost trees and using Frostfire Bolt to benefit from both), WotLK DK's that could do anything in any build (Tanking, 2h DPS and DW DPS as either Blood/Frost/Unholy), Rogues that would go down a tree for a specific skill and then fill out a different one for the main focus (Such as grabbing Cold Blood but then getting utility from Combat. Or grabbing Haemorrhage and then focusing on Combat for damage), Warlocks mixing Affliction or Destruction to boost their personal damage while Demonology focused etc.)

But I digress.

If the options are well made, then they would be good additions to the game. There exists some good examples of talent systems that offer decent choices. Some that are close but have some "Must have" options that need a bit more balancing.

I feel as though FFXIV could come up with a good iteration with decently designed traits.