Professor Shock Vlorsutes wrote:
It's not that Steal and Despoil need an overhaul as far as how they function, so much as a lot of the mobs nowadays just don't have anything that can be stolen. Abyssea mobs don't, Voidwatch NMs don't, etc. I don't know how it could necessarily be overhauled to resemble the offline Final Fantasy games since in those games you could obtain extremely rare gear from bosses using the Steal ability, which would be a bit hard to translate to XI very well.
This is the very reason that steal and despoil need a functional overhaul though.
Aside from the fact that every single item that CAN be stolen is purposefully irrelevant to the game because the developers don't want to give us valuable items to steal...
- Even Dynamis currency, the steal rate for which is so low that it is not unheard of to go entire runs without a successful steal. You could do nothing but farm curency yourself to build a relic (no buying), ride your steal timer every 5 minutes of every single dynamis run, and it would have no impact on how many runs it takes you to farm your relic. ...The amount of unreasonable things attached to steal (and despoil) are staggering:
-Doesn't work on 99.98% of Endgame content
-Doesn't work on 99.99% of NMs
-No Valuable Items Worth Stealing
-Very Low Success Rate (lol)
-Ridiculous 5 Minute (Shared) Timer
-Interferes with Aurasteal
Why, if the developers do not want us to be stealing things, do they add Despoil - ANOTHER ability that steals worthless crap as a post level cap ability?
They could do a variety of useful things provide useful funcionality to Steal, Despoil, and Mug as well.
They could adjust and expand on steal abilities that are useful for combat They could adjust Steal to take temp items that are useful in battle.
They could lower Mug recast and have it deal Damage+Stun
They could adjust despoil so that it does not atempt to steal, but rather inflicts a debuff on the target, and grants a corresponding buff to the THF.
They could create a DD boost based on TH level and then adjust Steal and Mug to attempt to Raise treasure hunter effectiveness level by 1 and 2 respectively. There are really a lot of interesting, useful and balanced things they could do to adjust these abilities that SHOULD define Thief. It's pretty clear that the ability to steal powerful armor/items (as in previous FF titles) would be unbalanced and would not translate well to FFXI.
They've already started to ATTEMPT to give us more battle related stealy type things....I just suggest they don't half ass it anymore. Take out the useless garbage items/crap steal funcionality with aurasteal and despoil, and focus on the battle related elements: Stealing temp items, Status effects, or involve them in the treasure hunter upgrade system in some way.
Edited, Sep 19th 2012 10:50pm by Nebo1 
