Dev Tracker: Discussion

[Byrthnoth]

Prohibitive mob design (AoE damage / status / dispel) is what keeps melee out of the vast majority of fights, but it's certainly not the only disadvantage to melees at the moment.

A few other reasons:
* I know of only two people on Lakshmi who have geared their melee to the accuracy level required for Reisejima Tier 3 monsters.
* Skillchains scale poorly with multiple melee due to the minimum time between WS and WS+skillchain.
* Single melee DPS is low enough that it can be overtaken by SC+MB, if not just free nuking with a few BLMs.
* Melee still require more buffers than mages, particularly with current accuracy requirements. Unfortunately, those accuracy requirements are basically how SE justifies the balance between GEO, BRD, and RDM.

[Damane]

Prohibitive mob design (AoE damage / status / dispel) is what keeps melee out of the vast majority of fights, but it's certainly not the only disadvantage to melees at the moment.

A few other reasons:
* I know of only two people on Lakshmi who have geared their melee to the accuracy level required for Reisejima Tier 3 monsters.
* Skillchains scale poorly with multiple melee due to the minimum time between WS and WS+skillchain.
* Single melee DPS is low enough that it can be overtaken by SC+MB, if not just free nuking with a few BLMs.
* Melee still require more buffers than mages, particularly with current accuracy requirements. Unfortunately, those accuracy requirements are basically how SE justifies the balance between GEO, BRD, and RDM.

to be fair tough. Half of that is our own made mess. Cor + BRD rotations... which did send a wrong message to the devs

[wipers]

to be fair tough. Half of that is our own made mess. Cor + BRD rotations... which did send a wrong message to the devs

I found a pic of the devs:

http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/7-28-2014/AnSME7.gif

[Ophannus]

It's true. We only have ourselves to blame. For 12 years we blamed the devs, but in retrospect, endgame has looked like this:


Devs: Here's some new really hard content
Players: Cool, it was too easy, we beat it by chainspell stunning, give us some hard content.
Devs: Ok so we made new content, shit is immune to stun.
Players: Cool, it was too easy, we kill it with RNGs
Devs: Ok, we so we made new content, shit is immune to stun, and takes a lot less damage from ranged attacks.
Players: Cool, it was too easy, we just threw MNKs and SAMs at it and buffed the shit out of them with 8 songs and 4 rolls.

Then the alternative was, when they created content that was extremely hard but had a convoluted gimmick that needed effortless execution to pull off, given how dangerous the mob was...such as AV. I'm still convinced PW had some gimmick as well to be beaten by 18 people at 75, but we'll never know until the servers go down and they tell us (if at that).

Basically, they need to keep making content challenging for players who resort to extremely powerful tactics, but in the meanwhile, the content becomes literally impossible for players who DON'T use those tactics. Like Delve was impossible for players who used a regular Tank, DD, healer, BLM tactic, vs parties that exploited formless strike MNKs at it for days. Etc...

This is why FFXIV seems difficult but easier to balance, because content is developed around parties with only X number of tanks, Y number of DPS and Z number of healers, with a bit of wiggle room to account for Tank and Healer DPS, and variance of job performance and item level disparity. Balancing in FFXI is and always will be a nightmare.

[Byrthnoth]

FFXI is a more complicated system, but it's not unmanageable.

Even without changing any mechanics it wouldn't be impossible to make a melee friendly Tier 3 monster. Where is the mob with a shitton of HP that badly resists magic damage and only has potent, single-target / conal WSs?

[Draylo]

I'd much rather flavor of the month strategies and changing job spotlights than what boring system FFXIV has in place tbh. It isn't perfect but all jobs had their spotlight at one time lol.

[arus2001]

Prohibitive mob design (AoE damage / status / dispel) is what keeps melee out of the vast majority of fights, but it's certainly not the only disadvantage to melees at the moment.

A few other reasons:
* I know of only two people on Lakshmi who have geared their melee to the accuracy level required for Reisejima Tier 3 monsters.
* Skillchains scale poorly with multiple melee due to the minimum time between WS and WS+skillchain.
* Single melee DPS is low enough that it can be overtaken by SC+MB, if not just free nuking with a few BLMs.
* Melee still require more buffers than mages, particularly with current accuracy requirements. Unfortunately, those accuracy requirements are basically how SE justifies the balance between GEO, BRD, and RDM.

Won't really disagree, even if part of the equation still involves monsters themselves like with high EVA values.

The chain reaction of SE's balancing, as noted later, is also a thing. Including shit as simple as rage timers to fuck soloing RDMs. I'll probably be in the minority in this one, but BRD/COR buffs really should've dropped if the respective player left the party. I say that both as someone concerned with how SE perceived it to play over time, but also simply hating playing the invite/kick game as a party leader where someone winds up being slow and shit drops in efficacy. The alternative would be to simply have the buffs go alliance-wide, which technically winds up being true for GEO at the moment, despite positional requirements.

Yeah, we could probably go through all the jobs and nitpick individually about what works, doesn't, can be salvaged, or ignored, but I'd still say priority should be given to making the fights "fair" first, even if the resulting elitist backlash may dub them too easy.

[Spira]

Xiv battle is boring as. Basically knowing how to avoid lines on the floor and pressing random buttons. You don't ever feel special playing your job and contributing cos you know ultimately what you bring to the table is "expected" already.
Healing in that game on the other hand is about the only fun thing there to me cos you're not bogged down by a rotation and actually get some freedom to explore the job

[Viar]

I'll probably be in the minority in this one, but BRD/COR buffs really should've dropped if the respective player left the party.

Unless SE greatly increase the potency of BRD/COR buff this just makes the job even less valuable than it is, as buff jobs at least. BRD/COR can do multiple buffs for multiple party using 1 pt slot, but GEO can't. IMO that's one of the greatest strength of BRD/COR as buff jobs. You can do defense buffs for tank pt, mage buffs for mage pt, you only need 1 COR instead of 2. If you can't rotate pt for buffs like that then only 1 pt gets BRD/COR buffs, and that makes the job less valuable in pt.

Not that it matters though. I've yet to find a real "need" to rotate buff jobs nowadays anyways, and there are one million ways to invite/kick pt members faster with macros/3rd pt tools.

[Sechs]

to be fair tough. Half of that is our own made mess. Cor + BRD rotations... which did send a wrong message to the devs

Not sure what you meant here.
If you meant that players "abused" of the buffs overstacking to make DD meaningful/powerful and to make some fights easier which led to the conclusion of Devs progressively increasing the difficulty of fights... then I'm not sure I agree with that.

If Devs really didn't like the overstacking of buffs they could've simply made so it wasn't possible anymore. So I'm not really sure, in this very circumstance, we should blame the players for any "wrong" message sent to the devs.

[Fwahm]

I seem to remember a dev post a couple years ago where they said that they couldn't program it so that buffs dropped if the bard or corsair dropped party with the way buffs are currently set up, and they didn't have the programming manpower to make changing it so that was possible feasible.

[Jem]

I think the solution would have been to just hard cap the number of rolls or songs you could receive so that rotating was far less beneficial. They could have tried to make it so you can't drop parties after the NM was popped or zone entered or whatever too but would have screwed players who lost connection.

But really the problem was that their fight designs started getting stupid and heavily encouraged a zerging mentality. So the players acted accordingly.

[Ophannus]

You don't ever feel special playing your job and contributing cos you know ultimately what you bring to the table is "expected" already.

Yeah but FFXI gives you pretty much no way to avoid most special attacks, except for punishing ones like Spike Flail. The best you can hope for is to stun them, but certain AoEs are extremely high damage with no way to avoid them except by throwing Rangers at them. There are plenty of mobs that are unmeleeable because the outgoing AoE spam is extremely high that even with Scherzo/DT gear, it's a pain. At least in FFXIV you can avoid them with gapclosers or quick reflexes, even if they are usually telegraphed/scripted. Plenty of times in XI, I would die from completely unavoidable bullshit...trying to melee AA EV even on Normal/Hard and eating her aoe Spirits Within that ignores shadows. There's countless other examples of extremely fast, unavoidable AoE damage that can 1-shot melees even fully buffed, if they aren't DPSing in DT gear. I think that's really lame endgame design. Strong attacks should have a way to be avoided somehow without just throwing Rangers at it, and that's been a problem with FFXI for a decade in almost every endgame scenario. Stun locking a mob while throwing extremely over-buffed DD jobs at it, or cheesing a fight with Rangers using Decoy shot and Paladin.

[Jem]

I think the worst case of that, purely because of the lockout and farming involved, was ADL. Instant death procs on a conal TP move to butcher melees through PD. Really potent AoE terror which barring good luck was a run destroyer thanks to buffs wearing and not having enough time to down adds before splitting again.

Granted over time the kill rate rapidly improved, it was still a horrible fight where the RNG could just say fuck you.

[dasva]

So apparently too many tentacles in your moghouse can crash servers. I am disappoint Japan

First of all, I’d be terrified if I walked into someone's house and saw a ton of Yovras!

But my personal fears aside, the reason why furnishings such as the Yovra Statue have the “rare” attribute is to prevent any unwanted server issues. Opening up the ability to add a lot of furnishings that easily stress the server can potentially cause crashes, and we’re concerned that it wouldn’t be possible to log in for a while afterwards if this occurs.

When it comes to cosmetic equipment that has the “rare” attribute, in many of the cases is due to the enchantments and other stats that is found on this gear

[Sechs]

@Fwham
Not sure if I want to buy their "too hard!" excuse.
I mean, maybe this is the one time where it's true, but considering how many things they judged "impossible" and then realized very simply over the last 1+ year, I'm not sure if I can believe their justifications or not.
Maybe, but please leave me the benefit of the doubt.

I think the solution would have been to just hard cap the number of rolls or songs you could receive

That's a good solution and has been suggested many times already.
Songs+Rolls already do share a cap and that's 12 slots.
Reducing that cap to 8 would've made things much better.
Altough I guess ultimately it wouldn't have been a complete solution to the problem, but quite a much better compromise.


Despite this, with a game such as FFXI I reckon it's hard to find a good balancing point between the "swings into extremes" we've been seeing and that Ophannus described.
I'm sure they could've done much better, but completely avoiding those swings in a game who has a model closer to that of a sandbox (compared to the modern themepark MMO paradigm, with extreme homogeneization of roles and classes) is quite a difficult feat.
Possible as may be, I don't think any MMO developer managed to completely reach it.


It's hard to get the best of both worlds.
On one hand you have too much of variation in the combat balance, but a much more satisfying depth and variety for players.
On the other hand you have much better balanced content, but boring/plain stuff for players, who tend to consume through content even faster than they would otherwise.

[Spira]

I think I have to agree that the ridiculous state of endgame has a lot to do with the strategies we come up with, but it's not exactly fair to blame us for trying to clear content with tried-and-tested strats that generally work until they specifically cannot. The problem is really that when much of these strats work well, people complain it's too easy?

It's probably something akin to the antithesis of power creep. Because gear generally hasn't improved that much, they need to find more.. innovative.. ways to make content challenging?

Whatever it is I think they kinda dropped the ball with SoA. For 1, it lacked real open world content like a proper popped NM system (which I feel have always given players more freedom in tuning their own fights due to flexibility and time limit, which is a good thing), which is strange coming from Abyssea where they pretty much perfected that sort of mechanic into a self-sustaining system altogether

[Draylo]

Whatever it is I think they kinda dropped the ball with SoA. For 1, it lacked real open world content like a proper popped NM system (which I feel have always given players more freedom in tuning their own fights due to flexibility and time limit, which is a good thing), which is strange coming from Abyssea where they pretty much perfected that sort of mechanic into a self-sustaining system altogether

Are you kidding? Escha is all force popped NMs for the most part lol. They also have certain force popped NMs in gates zones along with the force popped Delve version NMs. Force popped Nms via Unity, which you use their drops to force pop Escha NMs. I don't get what you mean.

[Spira]

Only the gates NMs are SoA content tho. My point was that they're not truly open world force pops unlike before. I believe all of them are confrontations. I.e open world battlefields, with designated battlefield areas and time limits. I'm not necessarily saying those are bad things, but it is a restriction nonetheless. In the Long run, being able to exploit terrain as part of your battle strategy seems more sensible that what we have now. I'll not comment on Escha - stopped playing by then

[dasva]

Only the gates NMs are SoA content tho. My point was that they're not truly open world force pops unlike before. I believe all of them are confrontations. I.e open world battlefields, with designated battlefield areas and time limits. I'm not necessarily saying those are bad things, but it is a restriction nonetheless. In the Long run, being able to exploit terrain as part of your battle strategy seems more sensible that what we have now. I'll not comment on Escha - stopped playing by then

I do miss being able to drag an nm anywhere and poke it for however long I can survive trying stuff out