30/30 Merits & Capped XP what now SE ?

[Kriegsgott]

Your "Camate" effect has increased by 1 point.

[Yes Please!]

[Dudelsack]

Yes, that's cool, but we should still be able to put even more merits into existing categories. combat skill cap should be increased to 10 or 12 per skill, and the combo limit should be increased so that we can max out 3 more combat skills. Same for magic, except maybe just enough to cap 2 more magic skills, as there are fewer magic skills in total than combat skills.

It's also time to let us merit attributes to 15 or 16, and give us a high enough combo limit to max out a third base stat too.

Also guys, wouldn't it be neat if we could merit elemental resistances? 3-6-9-12-15-15-20-20-25-30 merits for each elemental resistance attribute, each merit giving us 2 or 3 resistance to the element, and we could max out something like 3 of the elements.

SE can you hear me?
nice ideas shouldn get ignored !

[Byrth]

Eventually, everyone will be, yes. While it might not be a problem that a few are capped, it kind of is if half the player base is....

The real problem is that except a very small selection of merits, all merits were made for a game where 30-40k/h was the most awesome exp anyone could ever hope to get, and most would rarely be seeing more 25-30. In this game, the current merit caps were hard to reach for almost everyone. In the current game, the merit caps, including the few that were increased, they are extremely easy to cap for almost anyone.

According to my ffxiah profile, I have spent 1646 merit points and am capped for all my currently leveled jobs and not job specific merits. It was no difficult task, as I am sure most people would agree with me on. However, if I still had 8000 merit points I could spend, on merits with increasingly diminishing returns, I might very well eventually reach the point where I do not find it worthwhile to go out of my way to keep getting merits, and simply let the last merits slowly but surely build up from doing other stuff.

This way, exp gained will never be worthless, as you would almost always have something to use it on

For example, if we got to a point where we could unlock a third and fourth base stat to merit, in addition to the two we have (probably) already maxed, but these two additional base stats started at 30 merit points for a single upgrade, that would be 720 merit points (7.2 million exp) just to boost two more attributes to +12. Do the same with combat stats, allow us to level 4 more combat skills to 8, but require 30 merits for each single upgrade, and that's another 9.6 million exp to cap out those. Do the same for two magic skills, 4.8 M EXP.

In total, this is 21.6 million exp to cap out, and I haven't even started on job specific merits. While some people would grind their tits off to max these out as fast as they could, I am pretty sure that there would be a significant amount of people who would not. These merit additions are not very hard to implement, as few (maybe even none) of them would make an big impact on how strong one job is compared to another, and would mostly let us perform better on several different jobs, not make one job even stronger.

While we were busy with these merits, the dev team would have time to plan the merits that would actually require some balancing and substantial amount of testing, and that would of course be group three (maybe even four) job specific merits, where we would see perhaps as much as 30 merit points to buy the first level, and 50 or more merits to buy the highest level. Going by an average cost of 40 merits per upgrade, and being able to max 2 merits per group, that would be 160 million exp to max out all 20 jobs.

At 300k exp per hour, that's 533 hours of nothing but merit grinding! Now that is a lot, but remember that if you are just a casual player and really just want to focus on a couple of jobs, and have the rest of your jobs stay "all right for non-hardcore purpose", you would only need 26.6 hours of meriting to max out one single job.

This is pretty much the same argument I proposed in Point B1 of the thread Arcon linked, but it was met with this response:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...l=1#post333736

SE is so blind somet.... all the time.

[Nineball]

With 30/30 merits and capped EXP (ie all jobs 99), kinda surprised no one brings up making more than 3 WS cappable... Some jobs just can't function properly without their WS. Right how I have Exenterator, Resolution and Stardiver 5/5. In the past I've had Shijin Spiral, Ruinator, Shoha etc 5/5 at one point.

With all job 99... it would be fantastic to be able to cap out more of these WS, instead of de-meriting and re-meriting and de-meriting etc just to play 3 jobs at a time.

[Demon6324236]

Its been said in countless threads, I have lost hope of them listening...

[Kriegsgott]

Its been said in countless threads, I have lost hope of them listening...

lol sorry but anyhow you just reminded me about a song
"Never give up - it's such a wonderful life."

[MiriOhki]

That's really the only thing i've been wanting to spend merits on personally. I've got Resolution, Shoha and Resquiscat, but I've had to drop Shujin Spiral, Exenterator, Last Stand and Stardiver. Giving a couple extra WSs would be nice, and I can't see how it'd be broken, particularly as expensive as the WSs are to cap anyway.

[Collavoce]

I don't see this happening until Seekers is out or at least until ARR is out simply because they don't know how many new/returning player both of those things may bring in to the game.

The problem with implementing something like this is that it affects the balance of the game. Though we may not agree with the balancing of the current content, it may very well be that the devs feel that the difficulty is just right. If they were to give additional abilities, then they would need to rebalance around that. What then ends up happening is that everyone is expected to have certain abilities before they can tackle content, increasing the gap for returning and new players to catch up and keep playing. That being said, I do agree with the argument that it would be a good way to rebalance current content by making the players stronger without gimping the mobs.

But if you want an example of too many merits, try EQ. They've added AA with each expansion, and it is now very much a deterrent to starting in the game (though they were smart and added progression servers and the like to compensate). At this point, if you don't know anyone who can powerlevel you, earning the AA to actually be able to tackle content (other than solo) will take you a long, long time. Even with the changes they made to exp, it is very grindy to get the thousands of AA needed to perform at the bare minimum standard.

However, if SoA doesn't bring back new/returning people in a decent amount, I think this is a quality of life improvement that would be appreciated by the playerbase. In the end, I think it becomes a matter of analysing the situation from a business standpoint and figuring out the playerbase you need to please.

[Mirage]

Yes, but that's the thing. The merits I suggested they added first are merits that do not have a tremendous effect on maximum performance for a single job. Instead, they let players perform better on multiple jobs, by being able to have more combat skills and base stats leveled. A new player who wants to play mainly samurai and warrior won't have to go to the new expensive merits and max mnd and int, they can just go to the regular base stats category and get str and dex there without bothering with two additional base stats. They also wouldn't have to merit any other weapons than greataxe and great katana either, so the extremely expensive merit category where you would be allowed to max 5 additional combat skills wouldn't need to be touched by this player either.

The jobs that would benefit the most from this, I guess, would be tanks. They would probably benefit a decent amount from defensive base stats in addition to the mandatory offensive stats. However, I wouldn't exactly call a ninja tank "useless" if they had just str and dex merited, and hadn't spent a million limit points on agi yet. Do remember that the catching up process of new players today is pretty darn easy.

I guess it would also benefit career melee mages, and I don't think both having maxed magic and physical base stats would make any of them dangerously overpowered.

[MarkovChain]

Hiya Question does anyone besides me think its time for another Merit Upgrade ?

maybe break the 8/8 combat cap ?
or allow additional 8 merits in there ?

a 8/8 magic break cap would help all the smn to reach the 600 SMN cap for PD btw!

or maybe another 12 merit cap for Attribute or a enhancement to 15 or 20 or more ?

and no i'm not crazy just asking for stuff

And you will be done 2 hours after the VU goes live ? Nope. I suggest SE to add content and a new type of merit that you can only get while doing said content, little by little. Abyssea is ruining everything merit-based. Merits are supposed to create a hierarchy between players, it's not really the case atm. You could imagine somthing like : clear neo salvage boss Y times and get +1 to some stats or -1 to some JA recast ? idk plenty of possibilities. I mean let's face it, even the level caps were not level caps, as people were getting them instantaneously. We need more variance (they call it balance) between players.