Linear, linear, linear

[Shurrikhan]

I'll be honest with you. I've never heard of this before. From what I've seen in other games, the addition of a talent system usually results in quite the opposite. It's to add more buttons and to add versatility and utility to a set of skills that a class already has. Allocating talent points in wow usually led to more active and passive skills being added to the player’s repertoire.

So, if you started with X and then added the tree atop it, then sure, customization systems like Talent Trees will appear "additive".

But, what does the tree actually do? It tells you to pick X of Y, with which to then populate your bar. The alternative, was to have all of Y, and then to just use what you see fit to use (akin to Monk and Dragoon, too, having a greater number of and integration with significant non-DPS tools).

Those are ultimately the two choices decided between through taking either out-of-combat skill selection (pick outside of combat so you don't feel 'bloated' with as many in-combat decisions) or in-combat skill selection (greater number of actions, not all of which every player is expected to make great use of).

If there's limited button-count and button-efficiency, then customization trades breadth for depth. If there's no such hard limit, though, it's just pushing portions of would-be breadth out of sight and out of mind (like nearly all matters of gameplay outside of one's role, all while --if affecting capacities-- pigeonholing builds towards this encounter or that one).


:: Whether some means of providing actions is additive or not will depend on your frame of reference. If you compare it against simply not having that means of actions, then yeah, it'll look additive; but if you compare it against what could have taken its place, or against not having any such limitations (not forced to give up A and B to take C but can instead take all three), then it won't.