Comments from the Devs

[Gokulo]

Which drawings are you referring to? I haven't seen them but anything by Yoshi gives me a raging art-on.

http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/103...IV-(02-28-2011)

[mightyg]

With how XI handled it, it encouraged some things which kinda went against the idea of "play any job on one character". Gear-swapping in fights promoted niche equipment sets, which has an obvious impact on your inventory, so obviously has an impact on how many jobs you can play - unless you have an army of mules and spend 30 minutes character hopping for gear whenever you job change. It also practically forced people to use Windower macros or Spellcast because of in-game macro limits, and I think any system which encourages (however unintentionally) people to use third party tools is bad. And yes, it led to gear stagnation; up until very recently, the best armors for most jobs came from an expansion from 2003. Whether these are flaws of execution or concept seems kinda blah to me, as I think they'll always be linked.



How would this be handled for 2-handed weapons?

You'd start with your main hand out, and if you used an ability in line with your "off hand" (which would be on your back or wherever), you'd make a quick switch to it for the animation. For auto attack, if the monster happened to go out of melee range, it would automatically switch to your ranged weapon if you had one. That would also help solve the whole, back and forth enmity issue where the monster goes out of range of all the melee when a mage or ranged player gets hate. Maybe a flat 10-20% potency penalty for the off-hand to preserve some balance.

[Hyan]

Which drawings are you referring to? I haven't seen them but anything by Yoshi gives me a raging art-on.

I hadn't heard about them planning AF yet, and semi-related, if the new job system implements ye olde FF staples I kinda hope they don't go all the way as far as gear design (ie: bright purple DRGs) since the gear we've seen so far has a very "real" look and texture that I like a lot. I was kinda hoping they'd keep with the trend of brand new classes, as nice as the old FF jobs are I like the new ones and kinda hoped they'd expand on that without them simply evolving into PLD/DRK/RDM/etc.

But but but

Teh FF feeling

While I had the same fears as you do, it doesn't sound like there will be evolving the way you prolly think there would be.

It'd be nice if classes got their own themed equipment too. They already have something like it, but not exactly.

[CrstyCptSteveWitherspoon]

I don't think we'll be seeing AF/jobs this patch. I hope I'm wrong but it kinda sounded like that was for 1.19 last we were given any info about it(though that was 3 weeks ago). Playing conj yesterday I actually made the attempt(it was just 3 of us so not the usual zerg) to equip spells for each leve to target monster weakness and it made a big difference. Hitting 700-800 with stone II on gnats(profun. II, bloodrite II) was pretty sweet and I almost enjoyed the class. Then next leve again I had to replace stone II with thunder II for slugs. Having them all available would make the class a lot more fun, and slowing down the kill time of monsters, possibly throwing in some kinda SC > MB thing, would make conj something I would possibly enjoy playing.

[Dooom]

Without gear swapping, most of the content in XI is utterly pointless. For DDs, you would have exactly two gearsets: haste/ATK/STR and ACC/ATK/STR. Almost all AF/relic (read: Dynamis) gear is useless, Nyzul is pointless, etc.

That's because XI gear and events were/are based around gear swapping. Whether it was originally intended or not, by the time of RoZ gear was already being designed that screamed "I am a macro piece" (most obvious example: Hecatomb gear). So of course most content would be pointless without gear swapping, because it was designed for that very purpose.

I'm not a big fan of opening the can of worms that is in-fight gear swaps, but nor is it a make-or-break deal for me. As pointed out earlier, it's some of the consequences of gear-swapping that, in the hands of a so-so developer, I don't like. I don't want 8 year old content to still be "best in show" because gear progression has become more and more niche, but nor do I like the idea of everything being obsoleted within 3 months; and spending as much time writing macros on a third party tool to optimise your gear swaps than you do fighting is very boring indeed.

[Niiro]

Without gear swapping, most of the content in XI is utterly pointless. For DDs, you would have exactly two gearsets: haste/ATK/STR and ACC/ATK/STR. Almost all AF/relic (read: Dynamis) gear is useless, Nyzul is pointless, etc.

Believe it or not, gear swapping (combined with, you know, the release of gear that matters) would help a great deal towards increasing the content of this game. Without swapping, the amount of gear that you are incentivized to acquire is significantly reduced.

I'm hoping they accomplish this with the materia system they mentioned. Swapping materia for a given situation sounds much more appealing than blinking like a Christmas tree and more importantly it better either not take up inv at all or have it's own like crystals/currency. My inv is already fucked as it is and I can't even store items on mules because of no delivery system and it's so hard to sell shit because with no proper AH or price history you're playing a guessing game on an item's worth more often than not.

[Hyan]

I don't think we'll be seeing AF/jobs this patch. I hope I'm wrong but it kinda sounded like that was for 1.19 last we were given any info about it(though that was 3 weeks ago).

It did indeed. But I think they'll still start their Armory adjustments in 1.18. Limiting abilities and spells use cross-class, switching them up between classes, changing their effects etc.

But it won't probably make too much sense before the jobs are in.

[Alderaan]

Without gear swapping, most of the content in XI is utterly pointless. For DDs, you would have exactly two gearsets: haste/ATK/STR and ACC/ATK/STR. Almost all AF/relic (read: Dynamis) gear is useless, Nyzul is pointless, etc.

Which is exactly what we're saying about itemization and how horrible it was/is. Expansions shouldn't come out with side grades. "Hey more shit i have to go farm to throw in my dps macro" or "woot new gear that blows what i have out of the water". I'll take the second option as long as it's handled properly. I don't agree with how it's handled in WoW when new quest gear is better than epic gear from the last expansion. Leave the actual look of gear to a wardrobe feature while slowly progressing and improving stats is the way to go.

[Kurokikaze]

Expect Auto Attack and thats it. That way you're not disappointed.

[Hyan]

Which is exactly what we're saying about itemization and how horrible it was/is. Expansions shouldn't come out with side grades. "Hey more shit i have to go farm to throw in my dps macro" or "woot new gear that blows what i have out of the water". I'll take the second option as long as it's handled properly. I don't agree with how it's handled in WoW when new quest gear is better than epic gear from the last expansion. Leave the actual look of gear to a wardrobe feature while slowly progressing and improving stats is the way to go.

And expansions do not need to come with sidegrades. Many jobs had it that way, some others did not. Itemization was horrible, it was fucked from the very beginning when they should have been most careful. It doesn't make it any worse when done properly, something they can still do here.

All the naysayers are doing is making them go for the "replace everything every 3 months" route. If you think XI was the pinnacle of sidegrade systems, you're wrong. It must be made clear that XI's shortcomings need to be addressed, but otherwise they would do well to use the same concept here.

[Kurokikaze]

I want them to take a happy medium between sidegrades in XI and OP upgrades in WoW. My gear shouldn't be completely outclassed with every new expansion/dungeon.

[Hyan]

And unless someone has a revolutionary idea that will shake the foundation of MMO's, sidegrades are necessary in that kind of structure. Dumb or not.

[Crizto]

Expect Auto Attack and thats it. That way you're not disappointed.

Even better is just to expect them to fix grammatical and spelling errors in NPC chat! :D

[Draylo]

Anything new ?

[CrstyCptSteveWitherspoon]

I think they'll remove the stamina bar as well and put everything on cooldowns. I think that's kinda hand and hand with auto attack since that sets the system up for tweaks in the next few patches as they roll out class balancing(due to new cooldowns) and the job system.

[Kurokikaze]

I think they'll remove the stamina bar as well and put everything on cooldowns. I think that's kinda hand and hand with auto attack since that sets the system up for tweaks in the next few patches as they roll out class balancing(due to new cooldowns) and the job system.

They said for a fact that Stamina is gone.

[Lucavi]

Expect Auto Attack and thats it. That way you're not disappointed.

That's all I expect. Bring it on, already.

[Meko]

I'm really hoping 'cool down' doesn't mean 3 minutes.

[Takiwaki]

I think there will be more information than just the auto attack, you really don't need a video to just show they added auto attack. maybe to show the new battle interface etc. Not expecting much but yea we are all hoping.

[Grey Jorildyn]

If there was ever a video and its sole purpose was to highlight auto-attack, SE would get laughed at so bad...

Auto-attack: totally new concept!