[Cactuar]

The upcoming version update will see an increase to maximum limit for point allocation in certain merit point categories.

• Maximum Total Ability Increase by Category
  
  • HP/MP: Increased from 8 to 12
    
  • Attributes: Increased from 5 to 8
    
  • Combat Skills: Increased from 20 to 32
    
  • Magic Skills: Increased from 16 to 24
    
  • Others: Increased from 8 to 10
  
  
• Maximum Number of Upgrades by Ability
  
  • HP/MP: Increased from 8 to 12
    
  • Attributes: Increased from 5 to 8
    
  • Others: Increased from 4 to 5

[via [dev1006] Merit Point Adjustments]

[MrReinhardt]

and here I thought I had STR finished....

[wigglestyx]

Cactuar, on 06 April 2011 - 07:59 AM, said:

Combat Skills: Increased from 20 to 32

With the number of jobs people have leveled, 32 still seems kinda low. I really wish you could cap out everything in skills if you wanted.

[Gropitou]

This is an improvement but removing all Category Limits and allow players to cap all skills and abilities would have been the best fix. People have so many HL jobs that have opposite needs and are earning so many merits in abyssea now that keeping category limits is ridiculous.

[fillerbunny9]

I don't terribly mind the new limits myself. Capping four weapons at maximum along with three magic skills, I think is more than sufficient. Capping things like Strength in an age where everything is already being pushed to its limits thanks to Atma, what are those additional 3 points over what we had before really going to accomplish? I'm sitting on five 90s now, with an additional five I was planning to cap out. Scholar/Red Mage/Black Mage I don't need to worry about weapons for, Paladin/Blue Mage/lolmelee Red Mage all share swords. Puppetmaster and Monk both share H2H, and those are my oldest merits right there. So I'm left deciding who gets some remaining love out of Warrior's Great Axe, Beastmaster's Axe, Samurai's Great Katana, and 2.5 jobs on Sword. So I can fully cap 3 more of those four weapon choices I mentioned outside hand to hand. Damn, a planned 10 jobs at 90, but only one weapon set likely to be shunned? Seems one can manage pretty OK.

The real kicker is I was debating how to draw my Magic Merit lines because I've always wanted to push BLU to cap, but then Elemental and Enfeebling suffered; now I can have all three.

Now then SE, announce some worthwhile Cat. 3 merits for each job!

[pathwriter]

Down with merit points. They're an intensely grindy stopgap that was introduced to cover the lack of a level cap increase. We have a level cap increase now and people still obsess over this stuff even though most of the options can be glossed over with negligible losses (Hand-to-Hand is the only weapon skill merit that makes a meaningful difference, magic skills are a wash, and Critical Hit Rate is the only other worth mentioning... HP/MP rebalancing doesn't hurt, though). I promise you, take a freshly-minted level 90 Warrior and one who has his full array of Great Axe merits and the like, the difference between the two will be very narrow indeed. And all the job-specific merits should simply be job abilities and traits natively. Is there a good reason Red Mage has to pick and choose which of its high-level debuffs it gets access to, especially knowing they'll be exclusive to the job forever? The whole "customization" argument tends to go out the window, too, when everyone ends up choosing the same merit traits and abilities with only a few outliers picking up weird stuff. It's like WoW's talent trees: like it or not, everyone is going to end up within 1-3 points of the same spec and, thus, personalization is a bugaboo.