Almost every complaint about the ShB job changes could be solved with talents

[Ardox]

But that was a bad idea, not only did not offer anything to most clasess other than surviavility (maybe), but it became mandatory.

For example MNK, MNK could use B4B from DRG, Bloodbath and fracture from WAR. B4B was needed to actually put decent damage or at least enough to actually make MNK the selfish DPS at the time, fracture was a 1-2% dps increase at best and was directly draining TP making it kind of pointless to master and use (and i did had it on my crossbar), bloodbath was the only one that you have a use for.

The old cross-class system was poorly designed, but it doesn't negate the main point here: There is no customization what so ever. If we had a snapshot of all the character right before ShB's release, we'd see every player's main job to have the exact same gear, with the exact same melds.

For better or for worst, this stem from the dev's desire to make every job extremely balanced. Therefore, they need to account for every variables and the most you put in your equation, the harder it gets to forecast how it's going to turn out. You can see it by how dummed down the stats are now: Healers care only for mind, caster for intel, physical dps for strength.. That's why since HW, the gear you get is always maxed out in their job's respective stat (making the corresponding materia useless).

I feel the equations they use to compute the difficulty of their encounter is getting more and more rigid an that's why they keep taking out stuff

[GrenGarm]

See? i gave a reason, its pointless to have this system in this game since it will make some skills almost mandatory even in casual content, cool how you decide to ignore that.

Not if they are balanced properly. They don't have to be perfect, just close enough for casual content, which is honestly pretty easy to pull off.

Ofcourse you would say things like "but you dont need perfect uptime or the biggest dmg to clear causal content, this system could allow players to play in the manner they see fit" etc, etc. Ignoring the fact that customization wont work for every class, since some jobs will benefit more than others from it, i.e SMN, wheras MNK simply has to remove TK, SSS from the hot bar and it will virtually be the same (using your example of course), so there you have customization for MNK remove your skill from your crossbar. Yes i know that those were some ideas, but the point remains all things being equal customization will make either A) a class basically become OP and another useless, B) be so irrelevant and pointless that what for or Z) It will make no difference because customization doesnt fix a problem that has to do withe core mechanics of a class making it a waste of resources and time, instead more viable simple fixes are preferable than some deluded notion that the implementation of a "brand new" system will "fix" a problem by adding things to it.

This game issues wont go away if you add more player choice, this game is in itself too rigid (again for better or worse) to mesh well with that.

You're arguing from the assumption that the devs can't do a good job with it. That's really more of an opinion. Sure they could screw it up royally, but I have faith that they can pull it off. (Again, an opinion.) But I still haven't heard anything that convinces me that talents won't fix the complaints about most jobs at present.

I agree that customization can't fix core job mechanics, but I really don't think there are any jobs right now that are so broken that their core mechanics need to be revisited, except maybe egis.

Just because some jobs would benefit more doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

[GrenGarm]

The problem with the idea of Talents is that the game would be designed around the optimal ones, just as in the case in every other game that uses a talent system.

Which means you bring those talents period, making the talent system itself a joke. As is the case in most other game that uses a talent system. To use your NIN example... if the pDPS boost from not using trick attack put NIN in line with the 2nd lowest melee DPS then Trick Attack would never be used ever again due to it being a rDPS deficit to use it. At which point you may as well remove trick attack and make the talent standard because trick attack becomes a noob trap. Why? Because Trick Attack would never make up the 2k DPS difference caused by NIN going from a support DPS to a selfish DPS.

A strawman argument. You give an example that assumes the devs would be stupid enough to design the talents that way and then reject the entire system as a result.

For NIN, all they have to do is design talents that make Trick Attack a net DPS gain over the other choices with a group of a certain size. This is basic math. I'm pretty sure the devs can manage to figure that out.

[reyre]

The old cross-class system was poorly designed, but it doesn't negate the main point here: There is no customization what so ever. If we had a snapshot of all the character right before ShB's release, we'd see every player's main job to have the exact same gear, with the exact same melds.

For better or for worst, this stem from the dev's desire to make every job extremely balanced. Therefore, they need to account for every variables and the most you put in your equation, the harder it gets to forecast how it's going to turn out. You can see it by how dummed down the stats are now: Healers care only for mind, caster for intel, physical dps for strength.. That's why since HW, the gear you get is always maxed out in their job's respective stat (making the corresponding materia useless).

I feel the equations they use to compute the difficulty of their encounter is getting more and more rigid an that's why they keep taking out stuff

If i understood correctly the main point is that customization, will either make the game better (or more interesting) or fix some issues, both of those notions are deluded, however the mian point that i was trying to make is that customization simply doesnt work well on this game for the reasons you are stating.

Besides that everything looked the same gear wise and materia wise for every player, its kind of a lie at least for MNK, since you could have some variance in SkS, going from 900-1200, that implied that everything in that spectrum was viable (and there was no need for customization) so, for MNK at least, you could see a huge diference (in materia and gear) between one player and another both being perfectly viable for end game (and casual content), to certain degree at the end of ARR was the same because of SCH speed boost so there was some diversity gear and melds wise (not taking into account accuracy at the time).

[ColaSama]

The thing is : talent trees are rarely balanced, and therefore, as shown by WoW, they become pointless.

Pre-MoP talent tree (the classic one) gave you a false sense of freedom, because most of them were utterly useless. Nearly everyone was using the same optimized builds. Also also, it was a source of toxicity, even at low level : people could see you talent trees, and judged you for any bad decision. Don't think that FF14 community is perfect : if you give to the player a way to compare themselves, elitism WILL be a thing, always.

MoP new talent tree (the actual one) is a huge mess. Some talents are mandatory to make some classes work... or worse, to make them function. Some talents were so broken that it took 1 entier expansion of nerfs to bring them down, destroying them at the same time. People were kicking even for low content dungeons players with bad talents, and for raids ? Come on, be serious for a minute.

And last point : it's clear that adding a talent tree is dead last of the priority list of SE. They didn't implemente it in nearly a decade, so why now ? Because mister GrenGarn is sad because no trees ?

Anyway, OP doesn't really want to discuss. He wants talent trees, "devs can balance them I'm sure", "it will fix everything"... great.

[GrenGarm]

The thing is : talent trees are rarely balanced, and therefore, as shown by WoW, they become pointless.

Pre-MoP talent tree (the classic one) gave you a false sense of freedom, because most of them were utterly useless. Nearly everyone was using the same optimized builds. Also also, it was a source of toxicity, even at low level : people could see you talent trees, and judged you for any bad decision. Don't think that FF14 community is perfect : if you give to the player a way to compare themselves, elitism WILL be a thing, always.

MoP new talent tree (the actual one) is a huge mess. Some talents are mandatory to make some classes work... or worse, to make them function. Some talents were so broken that it took 1 entier expansion of nerfs to bring them down, destroying them at the same time. People were kicking even for low content dungeons players with bad talents, and for raids ? Come on, be serious for a minute.

And last point : it's clear that adding a talent tree is dead last of the priority list of SE. They didn't implemente it in nearly a decade, so why now ? Because mister GrenGarn is sad because no trees ?

Anyway, OP doesn't really want to discuss. He wants talent trees, "devs can balance them I'm sure", "it will fix everything"... great.

WoW isn't a good model, since the classes are so utterly boring and barren with their baseline kits that most talents ARE mandatory. 14's jobs have way more depth to their baseline rotations. You can add options to expand that depth without stripping down the jobs to the bone like Blizzard did.

Balance isn't the goal for a game like this where most players are casual. The goal is options and preference. Not everyone is doing savage raids or even wants to. Some of us just want to run around and have fun. FFXIV is a great game because it caters to many different levels of play.

Personally, I did the hardcore raiding thing in many other games and I'm done with it. Most MMO players don't even start that path. Talents would increase the diversity of play and enjoyment of jobs for everyone who isn't a hardcore raider, which is most of us.

[reyre]

Not if they are balanced properly. They don't have to be perfect, just close enough for casual content, which is honestly pretty easy to pull off.



You're arguing from the assumption that the devs can't do a good job with it. That's really more of an opinion. Sure they could screw it up royally, but I have faith that they can pull it off. (Again, an opinion.) But I still haven't heard anything that convinces me that talents won't fix the complaints about most jobs at present.

I agree that customization can't fix core job mechanics, but I really don't think there are any jobs right now that are so broken that their core mechanics need to be revisited, except maybe egis.

Just because some jobs would benefit more doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

You are making a pletora of assumptions (opinions) and yet you yourself have giving no real reason why talents would work. So why are you asking for a reasonable argument when you dont have one yourself?

Every change that you call a "talent" would work as well as a trait, so why customization?

"Not if they are balanced properly..." that is an assumption, you have no way to tell if they are going to do such, you hope so, here is the thing you ask for somenthing to convince you, fair enough there is nothing to convince me that talents are going to do any good. Is this really a reasonable argument?

So what you are saying is that, you have no idea if customization can or will work, instead you think it will because it will be cool to have options

"Just because some jobs would benefit more doesn't mean it's a bad idea." Are you joking you literaly just proved my point, because some jobs would benefit more it will make the game unbalanced in their direction, making other jobs feel worse. How is that a good idea? so instead of making a customization system that affecst every job, just make some jobs have that as traits. Like for example SMN.

[reyre]

WoW isn't a good model, since the classes are so utterly boring and barren with their baseline kits that most talents ARE mandatory. 14's jobs have way more depth to their baseline rotations. You can add options to expand that depth without stripping down the jobs to the bone like Blizzard did.

Balance isn't the goal for a game like this where most players are casual. The goal is options and preference. Not everyone is doing savage raids or even wants to. Some of us just want to run around and have fun. FFXIV is a great game because it caters to many different levels of play.

Personally, I did the hardcore raiding thing in many other games and I'm done with it. Most MMO players don't even start that path. Talents would increase the diversity of play and enjoyment of jobs for everyone who isn't a hardcore raider, which is most of us.

What is a good MMo that has talents? How many good MMO with talents are there?

Blance is not the goal? really? i cant even begin to imagine what would it be like for me to do a dng where a sch cant heal because balance its not the goal.

[Dyvid]

Honestly talent tree seem like a dead idea in terms of MMO design. It's a wonderful concept but ends up being one spec to rule them all. Look at WoW, every xpac the devs try and change it only to players find the best spec and make all other obsolete. Even in it's current form they have to balance 3 different spec within the same job so one isn't superior. We have 17 job and if they only added two talent spec that would require 34 specs to balance. It's a lot of work.

Now look at our materia system and what is the most prized of the bunch for dps.

[reyre]

A strawman argument. You give an example that assumes the devs would be stupid enough to design the talents that way and then reject the entire system as a result.

For NIN, all they have to do is design talents that make Trick Attack a net DPS gain over the other choices with a group of a certain size. This is basic math. I'm pretty sure the devs can manage to figure that out.

So what if they want to do story 8 man missions they have to put that trait? that doesnt seem to be much like an option to me? or are you saying that you forgot about the story quest and trials. how about roulet?