How on earth does it remove distinction? It means that there are many more "stereotypes" because I can play as a heavily-armoured mage, or a lightly armoured high dps warrior. Maybe it removes the ability to tell at a glance if that person is dps/tank/healer, but they don't want the trinity anyway.
It removes the distinction because in TES, you have no "tier" system for abilities/skills.
In TES if you have 100 Restoration then you are the best Restoration Mage ever, especially if you include Perks. Now... what exactly separates someone going full Restoration/full Destruction from someone who goes full Restoration/full Heavy Armor in the area of healing?
Nothing.
There's no specialized role there, there's no team dynamic when everyone can be as good as everyone else at over lapping skills.
What would be the point of speccing a full Mage, 100% Mage, if a Warrior can do some or half of your job
as well as you can?There's a reason that in games like Final Fantasy, that use an actual class system, that White Mages can heal better than Red Mages... because they are more specialized in healing. Sure, a Red Mage can throw out some heals if needed, but they can't touch a White Mage in terms of healing.
I fail to see how it would be hard to balance when everyone has access to everything. As for distinction between players, I think it would add another deeper layer to RvR if you could not tell who is healing because of their armour or mana bar. I would welcome the additional challenge and the additional layer of strategy. It would also work much better for PvE as well, those that want to tank will take tank skills, those that want to heal will take heal skills and many players might even take a mix of them all so they can fill a role as required. The Elder Scrolls skill system is what many MMO players have been waiting many years to see returned. Darkfall Online tried and nearly succeeded but they were a small company with big ambitions, what could a large company with an already established rule system do? I know I wont even look at another MMO that follows the same dreary template of Everquest/WoW/Rift. The next big titles are going to be the ones that change to genre, Guild Wars 2, Pathfinder Online, and possibly Elder Scrolls Online. They dare to be different, not to create a niche, but to lead the online gaming industry out of the dark ages created by Blizzard and their copycat shareholders.
Read above.
The Skill based system, for an MMO, is not a fun process for the developers or for the players' team dynamics or balancing.