Future Battle Balance AdjustmentsFollow

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/39497-Future-Battle-Balance-Adjustments?p=488069#post488069

Almost sounds like there is a nerfbat coming to damage output...

Could he be any more vague? "We're thinking about making some adjustments." Thanks, Matsui!

See that's what worries me. They may as well have said, "We have no idea how to fix this."

Bolded part concerns me. Instead of fixing the system in general, they are yet again adding another thing based on the item level of your weapon. Which leaves it pointless for any mob with Emcumberance and also potentially pigeon-holing you into weapons you have to use just to keep hate as a tank.

The problem with FFXI is the current game doesn't revolve around tanks.

* Every goal is kill X in X amount of minutes, essentially zerg all the things.
* Even post defense boosts/nerfs (which really only horribly affected DRK), the only reason PLD is used for content is to learn the tricks. Then they are obsoleted.
* SE is so concerned with making every job be some unique snowflake in a party that no one else can do. So it puts them in a box. 22 jobs, can only 18 man an alliance. Furthered by well what jobs is better than what. Equals these few jobs are useful in endgame, rest are crap/won't take it unless I'm desperate.

SE, and also the playerbase, needs to let go of being desired for their job. It's too late to go back to that, there's too many classes and the game doesn't cater to it. Not sure if it ever really did.

What makes a job unique needs to be focused on that job's play style and stick to 6 basic roles. Front line DoT, Back line DoT, Tanks, Healers, Enhancers and Debuffers. Every job in FFXI should fit somewhere in that and be just as effective as another. Regarding Tanks, they should be able to manage enmity on their own. Boosting is one thing but if everyone can boost, then you give them the ability to decrease enmity and provide area of effect damage reduction.

Jobs with unique abilities will mix and match, and will likely have debates of optimum setups for certain battles and that's fine. It should be a discussion versus plain fact. FFXI needs classes that cannot be compared by their necessity in a group. Let them just fulfill the same role while providing the user a unique playing experience and learning curve. Trying to make 22 jobs be unique to a group when it's not even possible for 97% of the game (sans Reives, Campaign and Walk of Echoes) is asinine.

edit: additions and grammar


Edited, Jan 16th 2014 8:47pm by Rwolf

RUN was introduced as a magic-focused tank, so it's not as big a surprise. I'm also under the impression what they had going into Adoulin was basically a roadmap Tanaka left for them before he stepped down. Out of the two, Geomancer was the easier to adjust, which is why they went with that, then Matsui chose to focus on adding content.

I'm curious to see how they'd adjust RUN, seeing that PLD functions under ye olde on/off switch via Aegis/Ochain, and you can't change RUN to be comparable to that mess without doing something like special grips.

It feels that way because chances are they designed RUN/GEO back when this game was community and large party based. Geomancer for example would have been amazing back in the CoP-ToAU days.

I agree with Kodo, I find it hilarious they didn't see this coming. All those pics of RUN fighting Naakauls. Someone had to do it (in God mode obviously back then because that was not happening on RUN). RUN was horrible from the start. Light armor, no shields, no damage mitigation. Single element magic mitigation just to get to Aegis levels. If you look on the official forums, they had no idea what they were doing. The player base asked for better magic reduction and they stated they didn't want RUN to dethrone PLD and Aegis. The devs had in their head a system that doesn't even exist in FFXI. That a evasion/magic evasion tank works as well as a defense/magic defense tank. Except evasion, parrying and magic evasion doesn't work like that in the game, especially on bosses which is the only reason you'd want a tank. Which is what I find hilarious they didn't know it wouldn't and took them almost a year after release to say "Oh... I guess it doesn't work like that."

The concept of GEO would have be great for 6 man parties, but the only spot it could really compete with back then is BRD. Compared to BRD, it would have been left in the cold. COR is another DoT/Debuffer and it wasn't very popular either during ToAU. The only good thing GEO has is it's debuffs cannot be resisted, which puts them right where they are now. Use Frailty/Torpor/Focus/Langour on alliance fights. GEO's buffs scale horribly and can't compare to BRD and times were tough for any mage damage dealers being invited to anything back then, especially during ToAU due to all the magic ***** you enemies like Colibri and Puk that everyone loved to EXP on.

Both points just make me fall back on how sad it is how clear it is what jobs you should be using and not. SE can boost and nerf all they want. Until they let go of the snowflake of the party mentality. Most of the jobs will be left out to the handful that are currently relevant.

TL;DR: I see nothing proposed at what you think the real problem is. The entire post is just ranting/attacking about "leave my system alone" and I like job exclusion and enmity is fine as long as you hold back/pin hate. Good for you, but it does the game no good.


Skimmed over that whole thing you just wrote and don't see you proposing what you believe the root of the problem is so I wonder what is the point of countering with that statement if you aren't going to stand behind it. It's easy to say no to anything, especially when it might break the reason why you play this game.


I didn't say you wouldn't be using non-ilvl weapons in modern content, you would obviously because of the damage output. It's not reaching. Tethering a fix to a weapon is not a good way to fix the game. It wasn't for magic accuracy, Utsusemi shadows and all the other issues with the game that are being piled on tethering it to a weapon. Doing that pigeonholes them into how content is created in the future. I'm reaching for things to complain about that enmity is not an issue right now? Well it seems that both SE and most of the playerbase who has been going on and on about the enmity issue for years, would beg to differ.


Using a 6 man BC that is brand new and any time a PLD would super tank is not a reference. Of course PLD is used right now, it's used every time content is new. Just because PLD can take their hits has nothing to do with enmity issues. It forces players to adhere to the current issues with enmity to survive. You bring low enmity DD, pin hate and hold back. Meanwhile jobs that aren't low enmity DD, can't pin hate are less desirable. Get back to me when you can easily put a RUN in there or when a PLD can actually get hate back and keep it from teeter-totting from me if I decided to throw out enough damage to get hate.


If you think exclusion for most of the classes in the game is what MMO's should be about, you have a sort of Stockholm syndrome to being comfortable in this box that SE set and don't want it to be disturbed. How is it not SE that forced it on us if other jobs cannot fulfill roles? They created them. I think you're missing the whole point of basic game mechanics. Irregardless of the game you have, if your player can clearly see A and B and see A is better for everything, the job isn't done right.


If uniqueness has to be defined with exclusion of most of the classes in content, there is an issue. Which it has been. People are still playing because they find other things to be happy about in the game. In-game friends, fans of the series, devoted to the time already invested in their character, and the plethora of other things to do in the game that doesn't have anything to do with battle content.

You are saying identical not me, incomparible is what I stated. If you can compare something and clearly A is always better than B, then what's the point of B? Which is exactly what the playerbase does. I won't challenge that you like that system, however, a lot of players don't like it and SE doesn't like it. Had this been before they added all these jobs, I could see the merit in an argument that every job should be special and wanted/excluded, but the game doesn't cater to it.


Edited, Jan 17th 2014 12:10pm by Rwolf

The root of the problem is too many jobs. How insanely hard is it to balance 22 jobs?

Sorry for not making this clear. I'm defending SE's position. I feel they have a good grasp on how to address it. The enmity system was build for Lv75 content and very meekly adjusted for Lv99 content, whereas we're now doing Lv119 content. Things just need a bit of a tweak, that's all. I think that overall, the system is working as it should.


You're acting like it's a DDs job to just wreck sh*t, and a PLDs job to keep hate off them while they do so. While I feel that's how a lot of people these days see the game, it's not how I see it. What I see is much more dynamic: in difficult content, hate control becomes teamwork. I applaud DDs who, in these fights, do something most DDs would never consider in a million years: turn away from the mob. The game doesn't have to be as simple as you make it. My group last night that beat VD MR with no COR and no 2-handed DDs or MNKs proves that. We won in 17 minutes, comparable to the times we'd do with more conventional setups. This to me indicates a smashing success on SE's part, that you can take out a MNK (the "best" DD right now) and replace it with a NIN or THF, with almost no impact to the results on the fight, sings praise of the balance of these new fights.

Which brings me to my next point: difficulty of content. For a long time it was the fact that there was no truly difficult content (the casual era of Abyssea/Voidwatch) that led to the exclusion of tank jobs and other jobs. The parser became the only measure for almost every job. Difficult content is what drives the dynamics between jobs and creates a balance. The easier the content is, the less everything else matters except raw damage. A lot of people these days seem to see it as a good thing when it doesn't matter. I whole-heartedly disagree, I enjoy this reliance on someone being absolutely badass at fulfilling a specific duty and fulfilling it the best way that it can be done.


I never said that. However, I do feel that because an MMO caters to such a wide variety of players, there needs to be varying content. Easier content with fewer players is easier tackled with jack-of-all-trades jobs. Those jobs are necessary for people who like this type of casual content. Harder content, on the other hand, requires specialist jobs. Those jobs are necessary for the more hardcore content. I respect this balance, but of course if you throw out the casual content and start talking about how some jobs are excluded from all the hardcore content, then yes it will look much more bleak than it really is.

Edited, Jan 17th 2014 5:02pm by Pergatory

They see it because in a game with a properly tuned threat system that is what they do: wreck ****. DDs having to turn around until half of their threat decays because of a terrible system isn't a sign of a good player. That's a big neon sign that something is wrong with your threat system. No, the threat system wasn't 'tuned' for level 75 content. It was implemented back when the game was at a level 50 cap and wasn't touched at all until recently.

You can defend them all you want, but hate's always been faulty and terrible in this game. When the playerbase kept coming out with alternative tanks (/RDM, /DRK) because the established tank was inferior in every single way due to being hit = lost threat (the most moronic piece of their entire enmity system) and then completely abandoned the idea of a tank entirely and just cured whoever had highest hate you can't deny there's a problem. The minor adjustment at level 99 content didn't even do anything to change the status quo.I

It's a bad system that started to show flaws in 75 endgame and exploded past then,

Meh, I don't think the number of jobs is what hurts demand, but SE being too shy about actually giving out more unique and potent abilities to make decisions on who to pick actual decisions instead of the current assumptions. Add a dash of player conflict on what should or shouldn't hit the game when you did get more creative feedback threads going to further muddy that stalemate.

The various private servers floating around could actually be a good field of demonstration here, but those who maintain them seem to be more of the, "Remember when the game didn't suck before <X Expansion I Hate>?" camp with the glory days they're shooting for never being possible by virtue of a miniscule population.