Ability Points, Skill Trees & Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

[Reinha]

Talent trees would be a great way to reduce button bloat without deleting skills people like. This would also give room to introduce more mechanically interesting new abilities instead of finishers on top of finishers that replace a button on the hotbar. I don't think we need specializations, just a way to phase out skills to make sure that jobs don't become too powerful.

Leveling, however, should stay as it is: a gateway to playing a job at endgame. Unlocking the job/role quests and grinding the meta achievement are very enjoyable parts of the game.

[TaleraRistain]

I say no thanks.

I have played several games who used skill points/talent trees. In the end you always end up with exactly ONE viable build that everyone has to use. No thanks.

Pretty much this. We even saw it here with cross-class skills.

Some games can start out with some flexibility. I played a ranger back in EverQuest II and there were some choices to make along the way and there was some variability that didn't completely lock you out of certain content. But even that eventually degraded down into the one true build.

I think it will be very challenging for them to have true balance and not make this something that is only superficial or cosmetic.

[Fawkes]

I don't think replacing leveling is a viable option, unless they'd be rebuilding the whole game or something. Maybe they could add talents or ability points as a replacement for getting new skills, but I don't see how it would replace leveling without them inventing a whole new type of sync and potentially ruining aspects of the game.

[CidHeiral]

No thanks. Talents only create the illusion of choice at the cost of making balancing a nightmare. You also can't design class abilities from talents to have the same interconnected synergy abilities often do in this game because you don't know what talents each player has. WoW classes are very dull to play for this reason.

Personally I would just do a level squish and continue as they have up to this point.

[Tunda]

There is only 1 way to taggle talent system currectly:
If they one way will change how job has been played completely

Example ninja can have another spect that focus more to manage poisoning enemy but if we have a system like that.
We will have to do much effort of adding another job

[Ayalu]

Damn so much negativity.

I look foreward to what ever they cooked up the more it breaks thre streamlined design the better!!
Break the shackles that bound us, unleash creativity!

Anyway its long known that they dont want to go over level 100 and i think its good that they dont consider sudo level ups.
Something i saw in a other game which could be nice is that you can select a few abilities and determin it to be your specialisation.
Those abilties had there own talent tree in diverse direction....given the rather flat design that exist in FF14 at the moment...i dont know how "diverse" it actualy could be but that would finally allow some customise gameplay.

[KisaiTenshi]

Ability Points, Skill Trees or Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

https://youtu.be/6PIxQPKBf0E?t=1012

I'm sure the developers will be interested to know what players think about these things before they do them.

Well if you think about it, we have a proof of concept in Blue Mage.

That would just lead to power creep in the same way it breaks other games.

What happens in other games is that if you use the "Ability point" system to decide what you want, that means nobody EVER does anything because they want the skill, only because it lets them make bigger booms. So nobody will ever Tank or Heal. Everyone will just make themselves glass cannons.

Like to give an example from one other game, nobody, ever, heals. It's too expensive in MP to do it. It's more cost effective to spam 100 pots than it is to have one person heal, and you can't heal yourself because you have to switch to a healing wand that does single digit damage if you fight with it.

No the Armory system in FFXIV is mutually incompatible with an Ability point system. Unless they seriously are going to break apart the system so that you can do everything with every weapon, and mix and match skills from every job, and then the consequences will be that players will will not tank or heal in parties. Players will be berated for trying to heal when they should DPS like ... ooh what's been happening ever since launch.

The end result is everyone plays exactly the same meta, and essentially instead of having a dozen jobs, you have exactly one, the glass-cannon.

[Ayalu]

I am completlyfor somekind of system that allows us to not all be the same. In the past i thought of split classes into two routes depening on there theme, White would have a Nature Path and a Light Path. Machinist a Gunplay and a Machinery etc.
Heck Scholar could be split in Seraph-Scholar and Battle Tacitician.

But i also wouldnt take Blue Mage as example as its by its very nature more a fun whack class.

[Jeeqbit]

I don't think replacing leveling is a viable option, unless they'd be rebuilding the whole game or something. Maybe they could add talents or ability points as a replacement for getting new skills, but I don't see how it would replace leveling without them inventing a whole new type of sync and potentially ruining aspects of the game.

It might be too difficult to undo the previous 100 levels, but I think they want to stop progressing beyond level 100 as well.

However, I think there are ways they can remove the 100 levels. The value of levels isn't so much the level itself as much as the internal variables associated with it which dilute the stats (for example, 1000 crit means less at level 90 than it does at level 70), which they could still sync in the content (or just rebalance all the content somehow). For quests, they could just remove level from them entirely and remove level from players the same way they do in PvP.

For gear, I'm not sure. Item level could still exist but it might cause problems if the stat dilution doesn't happen every so often. They could condense the item level of old gear, or just make it all item level 5 gear since it's all glamour now anyway.

That would make you wonder what creates the concept of progression at all. There could just be ways to gain ability points and then an overall cap on them per expansion. Or if dungeons need a level still, the level could be the level of the MSQ quest rather than of the class/job, and ability points could be given based on MSQ progress.

This concept could make it possible to hand out some extra ability appoints for doing raids, or something like that.

[Ayalu]

Its long known that they didnt want to progress past level 100 so if they didnt paddle back and from the looks of it they dont it was bound to happen that the progression post level 100 will be very different.
As we alll know no leveling is a big thing in FF14 but im sure its doable but it will break with what is established.