Skill trees and Alternate Advancement

[Antipika]

a few concerns: SE tried this to an extent with customizing stats. it ended miserably as stats had relatively little meaning in order to prevent certain builds from being OP.


Also, didn't Rift try this? dont they have less players than we do now?

and finally, dont people just end up gravitating toward cookie cutter builds?

Rift have way more than XIV... Rift NA alone is beating XIV. They sure lost a lot of customers post-launch (like all MMO now anyway...)

Now the Rift tree system is not a big issue because it works somehow like XIV Armoury system, you can swap at any time (just need to be out of combat). You can have 6 template as well, allowing you to have specs for all type of content (Raiding, Solo/Low man PvE, PvP) but also different roles.

Off course players come up with templates and "cookie cutter builds". But maximizing DPS requires to keep up a perfect skill rotation (while managing to focus on your encounter) and it can be really hard. So there are drawbacks. Some specs are superior for AoE, while some are superior for Single target encounters with little movement. Some are better when constant movement is necessary. While some are very good for damage spike. So it's not as easy as "this build is the best".

Having more jobs would exactly work the same way. It would be like linking a template to each specific job. Having a tree is only good to make really minor changes.