
Originally Posted by
Theodric_Thorne
I think talent trees if done right would be a great boon to resolving a lot of these issues with people saying aspects of a job are too complex or not rewarding enough, because a player might be able to drop an ability they don't like or enhance one that they do like. However I think it would create a slippery slope that would risk starting to dilute the identity of jobs. I might be really annoyed with the direction that SE has taken its job design lately, but I think one of FFXIV's strengths is that each job has only one role. There are no specs, no talent points, no trinkets, no enchantments, no armor set bonuses, no legendary items. Maybe we shouldn't mess with that formula.
WoW was built for talent trees, FFXIV was not. WoW has greatly altered its talent system throughout the history of the game, but for the most part the system has always had the same function and purpose. I don't know if such a system would be as good in practice as we'd all love it to be in theory.
Another important thing to note is that most of WoW's classes have at least two group roles covered. There are a few "pure DPS" classes like the mage, rogue, and warlock. But no "pure healer" or "pure tank" classes. Whereas every job in FFXIV is purely devoted to one group role. If we start letting jobs branch out into multiple group roles, that will effectively create more jobs for SE to balance. Each spec in WoW is almost a class unto itself, which is frankly why I'm shocked that Blizzard is adding Evokers. I'm looking forward to trying one, but I don't envy their balance team having to juggle roughly 40 different specs at this point.