This all ties back to something I have noticed about Yoshi-P as a director. I love basically everything that they have done in the last year, and while I'm not the type of person to get overly excited about things, I am very much interested in seeing how ARR turns out. That being said, for better or worse, Yoshi-P very, very much loves patterns. I'm not positive what his background is, but I'm tempted to guess he has at the very least had a lot of exposure to computer science principles, because they come out in spades in his game direction.

Everything they've done in the last year has been about encapsulation and re usability. Every class gets abilities at the same level, of the same category. Job quests are structured the same, and story aside, play out almost identically from a purely game-play perspective. Primals follow the same progression (okay, sample size is small here, but still); same with dungeons.

Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it certainly makes producing large amounts of content quickly much easier. In addition, it also makes things easier to understand for new players, it's formulaic. By the same token, that very formulaic nature makes it stagnant. This is just another example of that formulaic nature coming through. I very much hope that we will see the dev team take more chances in ARR.

As many people have said: it's the big things that draw you in, but it's the little things that keep you around. Little racial/class qwirks are part of what make a good MMO great. Similarly, you can't say that it would take too many resources. It would take the same resources they are already using to produce more race specific emotes. You don't need 7 different animations for every WS, but at least a different idle stance, a slightly different style of Auto-attack.