Job balancing?

[Camate]

Greetings, everyone!

Last week involved a lot of hustle and bustle due to E3, so apologies that I couldn’t get this out to you all sooner, but I have a comment from Director Fujito in regard to the current status of melees.

Thank you for all the feedback.

As mentioned during a previous Freshly Picked Vana’diel, we view the difficulties melee jobs are experiencing at high content levels as problematic. Though pointed out by many already, I too am concerned about the following points for melee jobs:

• Melee attacks are difficult to land.
• There is a large risk due to AoE damage from enemies.

Before we get into the one-hand and two-hand weapon discussion, these two points are a much bigger problem and we understand that something needs to be done to address them.

With that said, the development team has already begun testing out adjustments in stages, and they are in the process of implementing them. At the moment we are supplementing the game with various content to offer variations in equipment that will allow you to secure the needed accuracy, and we don’t plan on stopping after doing this once.

Now then, I would like to go ahead and let you all know what kind of plans we have for the future to address this.

With the current battle formulas, there are aspects between the relationship of accuracy and evasion that create more differences in level status as compared to magic accuracy and magic evasion. This is the result of giving consideration towards that fact that melees are continuously dealing damage with auto-attacks for consistent damage as well as dealing damage through weapon skills and skillchains through TP accumulation.

However, one of the main reasons that players are unable to hit monsters is due to the fact that the gap between monsters’ levels and stats and the players’ item level 119 is extremely large. We’re currently trying to make balance adjustments to the calculations so that it becomes possible to land hits more than now with support and without being at the accuracy cap by gradually reducing the effects of the level status gap in content level 119 and above content. Naturally, however, content level 119 and content level 145 are by no means the same, and when it comes to content level 145 encounters it will still be difficult to land consistent hits without the proper support.

This adjustment is a part of the core game system, so its effects will be on an extremely large scale. Due to this, it will require a lot of testing to employ properly, and as such, it will not be possible to implement in a near version update. However, please know that this is a task that the development team is actively working on at the moment.

Next up: two-hand and hand-to-hand weapon adjustments.

In the February version update, the damage cap was increased; however, with the necessity to focus on accuracy, it’s difficult to select elements to boost damage even higher, which makes it hard to feel the boons from this adjustment.

As a next step for adjustments, we’re looking into implementing job traits that apply damage bonuses when attacking with two-hand weapons and hand-to-hand weapons to jobs that have a heavy emphasis on auto-attacking with these weapons.

Finally, in regard to the risk associated with melees due to AoE attacks, this is largely a problem with the monster design and it’s not simply a case where boosting defense would help, especially since it’s not only the AoE damage, it’s the status ailments that often come with them. We’re currently looking into nerfing these problems, but the starting point is extremely difficult. I just wanted to let you all know that we haven’t forgot about this and will be working on it.

While it has been this way up until now, rest assured that we will be making changes as we move forward. We’ll either be making it possible to deal with the strong effects or one-shot mechanics through some method or scaling back on extremeness when it comes to new monsters added in the future.

We’re proceeding with discussions and measures for various things such as equipment supplementation as well as plans that are still in the planning phases, but please continue to provide your feedback!

[Chipmunkys]

Although I am excited to see SE finally looking at Hand-to-Hand users.... what they are considering is still just laughable. The issues with Hand-to-Hand users and mainly the job sets MNK/PUP/SAM/NIN totally lack any kind of Accuracy. To obtain the accuracy you have to sacrifice equipment bonus vital to the jobs to compete with other Melee, such as Blue Mage or Warrior etc, Like STP, Double Attack, Triple Attack, Dual Wield. But SE just said above they are working on that so we'll see...
Currently MNK already DPS's much slower due to having to equip for High end Accuracy (which btw if you want to obtain, cost so much gil in first place) that its not even worth inviting the job to take the place of a Melee that can run 20 circles around it before it can do 1. Also this Damage Boost to Auto-Attacks offers nothing... Monk can already push out decent auto-attack DPS as with other forgotten Melee Jobs, it's their Weapon Skills that hender them. When a decent geared Blue Mage can CDC on Average for 20k and spam that pretty much non stop, to the Best gear options available MNK/PUPs Weapon Skill avg of maybe 5~10k, and other Melee prolly around the same figure, becomes the problem. That may seem like a close gap, but most BLU's have a set standard to get into high lvl content, so averages for them are 30~50k CDC's all day every day, which just makes that Voodoo/Perfect Reisenjima Augmented MNK/Melee gear look like Sparks gear.
Until all Melee jobs can perform at or very close to (with Support) to a Blue Mage no implement SE can do will ever make them relevant again.
One thing comes to mind when they boosted Victory Smite the first time, they need to do that again. Monk was close/as powerful as a BLU currently is now. At that time could do 20~30k Victory Smites, but SE nerfed it few weeks later to the current 5~10k. With current content that first boost isn't overly powerful anymore and it should be the norm compared to BLU.
As for SE addressing the High End content and nerfing the AoE damage / Status Aliments will open the door to future Melee friendly content and helping players get into groups for Clears, that is still a long way off. Until SE truly balances the jobs evenly across the playing field there will still be no place for them even with a nerf to Monsters. The whole point of Escha/Reisenjima NMs is to kill them as efficiently and quickly as possible, before they kill you and even killing 1 sec quicker is the difference between possible wipe or win. This nerf just benefits currently play styles/groups only, doesn't help forgotten Melee all that much.
So for now, even with these notes we are only left with leveling WHM, BLU, PLD, BLM, SCH, GEO as the core jobs or SMN, RDM etc etc with situational... But no MNK/SAM/DRG/WAR/DRK/DNC/PUP (exception being R/E/M/A Users / Users with Hundreds of Millions of Gil to make it great) having any place.

[Sapphires]

It would be great if you didn't add more vertical gear progression to this game to patch fix your horribly overtuned iLevel 140+ content that has absurd melee accuracy requirements.

Even if we could pull off 1800+ melee accuracy in a 6-9 person alliance, noone in their right mind wants to do that because the encounters are just easier to throw sch,geo,blm,bst,pup at.

Unless you have an idris geo (or two!) and a yagrush whm, noones going to risk doing a melee oriented strategy on 140+ content when there are easier mage+pet ways to cheese your way to victory with 1hr abilitys.

Your battle content is badly designed. Not everyone wants to play another new job that needs inventory space they dont have, and then grind 1200-2100 jobpoints just to do Tier 3+ Reisenjima content. Some will just unsubscribe.

There also isn't any need to add more vertical gear progression when people are quite happy with the time+enormous amounts of gil they have poured into alluvion skirmish/reforged /escha/119 abjuration gear. FFXI should continue to be about sidegrade or situational gearsets instead of adding another tier of higher gear that could make huge amounts of current content and loot itemization obsolete.

[Kensagaku]

Snipping this in pieces to address specific points.

Although I am excited to see SE finally looking at Hand-to-Hand users.... what they are considering is still just laughable. The issues with Hand-to-Hand users and mainly the job sets MNK/PUP/SAM/NIN totally lack any kind of Accuracy. To obtain the accuracy you have to sacrifice equipment bonus vital to the jobs to compete with other Melee, such as Blue Mage or Warrior etc, Like STP, Double Attack, Triple Attack, Dual Wield. But SE just said above they are working on that so we'll see...

That's not entirely true at all. Looking at MNK, NIN, and PUP, you can use Herculean gear with a good Acc augment and Triple Attack. SAM has Valorous for the same thing with Store TP. All but the body are T1 Reisenjima, so you can't argue accuracy issues here for gear, and until you get the bodies from T3s, you can use things like Rawhide for PUP and MNK (Still a middling chunk of accuracy, as well as a total of TA+4), certain AF job pieces (NIN RF2/+1 has acc, racc, and DW), and abjuration gear (like Ryou Domaru Path D for SAM; 27 Accuracy, 5 STP, 2 DA, -4% PDT or Adhemar body for the light armor jobs besides PUP with TA and DW along with Acc). All of these are entirely viable to include Accuracy AND the "vital equipment bonuses" that other jobs have. As a side note: even those jobs that have them natively have to give up most of their similar gear for accuracy. If I'm going to take my BLU to T3 Reisenjima (and I assure you, I'm not, because it'd still get slammed in a heartbeat), I'm going to be wearing nothing but pure accuracy gear, so unless something has incidental side stats on it like Herculean, I will only have the less-than-standard traits that I have set. Our DA and TA are lower than WAR and THF's respectively, and we can only set one, not both. Admittedly, the Accuracy Bonus we get gives us a notable advantage of about 70 extra acc (though at the cost of 6/20 spell slots and about 36% of our set points, reducing our utility spells considerably if we want to keep DW and STP), so I do get the point there, but I'm hoping with the upcoming changes as they listed above, this will become less necessary and allow other melee to close the gap.

Currently MNK already DPS's much slower due to having to equip for High end Accuracy (which btw if you want to obtain, cost so much gil in first place) that its not even worth inviting the job to take the place of a Melee that can run 20 circles around it before it can do 1. Also this Damage Boost to Auto-Attacks offers nothing... Monk can already push out decent auto-attack DPS as with other forgotten Melee Jobs, it's their Weapon Skills that hender them. When a decent geared Blue Mage can CDC on Average for 20k and spam that pretty much non stop, to the Best gear options available MNK/PUPs Weapon Skill avg of maybe 5~10k, and other Melee prolly around the same figure, becomes the problem. That may seem like a close gap, but most BLU's have a set standard to get into high lvl content, so averages for them are 30~50k CDC's all day every day, which just makes that Voodoo/Perfect Reisenjima Augmented MNK/Melee gear look like Sparks gear. Until all Melee jobs can perform at or very close to (with Support) to a Blue Mage no implement SE can do will ever make them relevant again.

This one is a bit more on base, and H2H Weaponskills definitely need an overhaul, something I've seen as I've played on my PUP and been working on JP. While I don't agree that BLUs are throwing 30-50k CDCs without the top of the top gear, extensive buffs bolstering them, and lower-level content going squish at a touch, BLU does have a consistently higher WS rate AND WS damage compared to most others thanks to a highly-modified WS that can crit, so I certainly agree that H2H WS need a buff to improve their viability. Increasing white damage is nice, but it won't do enough in the long run when a single bursted nuke does far more overall.

As for SE addressing the High End content and nerfing the AoE damage / Status Aliments will open the door to future Melee friendly content and helping players get into groups for Clears, that is still a long way off. Until SE truly balances the jobs evenly across the playing field there will still be no place for them even with a nerf to Monsters. The whole point of Escha/Reisenjima NMs is to kill them as efficiently and quickly as possible, before they kill you and even killing 1 sec quicker is the difference between possible wipe or win. This nerf just benefits currently play styles/groups only, doesn't help forgotten Melee all that much.
So for now, even with these notes we are only left with leveling WHM, BLU, PLD, BLM, SCH, GEO as the core jobs or SMN, RDM etc etc with situational... But no MNK/SAM/DRG/WAR/DRK/DNC/PUP (exception being R/E/M/A Users / Users with Hundreds of Millions of Gil to make it great) having any place.

That last little bit is where I'm going to make a point. Yes, it takes a lot of gil to really make a job great, but that's just how it functions. Your mages don't get good gear by just tossing together whatever gear they find, they're going to be buying and upgrading their own gear with the same "hundreds of millions of gil" that others do. HQ Amalric is a fantastic set for most nukers, as an example, in slots where you don't need Magic Burst Damage to cap. Not all of them ofc (head is more of an macc/buffing piece) but in general. With mages, you're working on maximizing your damage output while increasing your MP recovery, meaning you need good refresh sets to idle in, you need good macc to avoid your nukes resisting even on MBs (or a really good Geo-Languor, so they require buff help too), etc etc.

Spending gil to make a job great to include it in content is part of the norm, and it should completely be a reasonable benchmark to getting into endgame content. I'm not necessarily saying you have to have all HQ adjurations, etc and the like to be good, but you should still invest in some abjuration gear, good rings for WS damage, etc. You'd be surprised at how little you have to spend outside of abjuration gear, food, medicine, and augmentation items though; most of our equipment these days are ra/ex and directly dropped, rather than sold.

As it is, this next major update may definitely open the door for melee, especially if status ailments are toned back. Status ailments and accuracy are the two most crippling issues preventing melee, and both seem to be being toned back now. We'll have to see what happens.

[Raydeus]

The way I see it the 2 core problems are the absurdly high accuracy requirements and the AoE ability spam that results from hitting the thing.

So as an starting point, rather than adjusting the formulas why not just add an Accuracy bonus status effect while fighting these monsters and add a cooldown for their abilities so spamming them back to back isn't such a huge issue. They can be as powerful as you want, even one-shot you if you aren't paying attention and don't get away, but to get spammed with abilities faster than auto attacks is just ridiculous.

[Smokenttp]

Snipping this in pieces to address specific points.

This one is a bit more on base, and H2H Weaponskills definitely need an overhaul, something I've seen as I've played on my PUP and been working on JP. While I don't agree that BLUs are throwing 30-50k CDCs without the top of the top gear, extensive buffs bolstering them, and lower-level content going squish at a touch, BLU does have a consistently higher WS rate AND WS damage compared to most others thanks to a highly-modified WS that can crit, so I certainly agree that H2H WS need a buff to improve their viability. Increasing white damage is nice, but it won't do enough in the long run when a single bursted nuke does far more overall.

i pretty much agree with this , powering white damage wont solve anything, i would rather that weapon skills that can produce radiance/umbra(this includes merit , empyreal and relic wses and would be mostly welcome since everyone can grab empy and merit wses on all jobs) gets revamped overall then an white damage buff (wich would need to be pretty high to compensate and would break the game in other ways if that was the case) and also that acc issues get resolved (i sugest powering up acc buffs and adding new acc foods) in order to help keep/make more existant armor relevant (but an revamp on the acc/evasion calculations might work as well i will just wait and see how se will solve this one).

As for the aoe situation it needs to be checked pretty carefully but maybe the acc situation opens up for more gear option that can allow better surviveability? really curious on how se will tackle this one (specially with status effects)

[Ataraxia]

I guess Camate and the rest of the dev team do understand and they listen. =) I am very please, I hope many weapon skill get a tune up like Exenterator and shijin spiral. Their are other weapon skill that are weak but I'm sure the dev team will figure this out and address it.

I like to fight along side my pet as a puppet master but their are times when NM will turn to me and than turn back to my pet and the hate will just go back and fourth. This can be annoying at times even when I am using Ventriloquy. However, when playing beast master i can just use snarl and everything will be fine for awhile but not for puppet master. If their is anything can be done about this please make adjustment so it's more fun to fight along side our pet. I'm not just speaking for puppet master but other DD too like warrior, samurai, and dark knight etc.