Weapon Skill Damage bug and game balancing.

[Afania]

Since no one dared to bring this up since the fix i figured i should do it myself, but i belive most people agree that the weapon skill damage bug was an happy accident and was wondering if the devs have just fixed it with the mind set that "it was broken" or if they spent some time actualy investigating what was going in the game for the 2 months the issue was present.

In my eyes the bug actually brought out a lot of improvements overall to a very significant number of jobs as well as making a lot of weapon skills that where not used at all ,save for increasing the number of steps an skill chain had, to an state where they are actually contributing for the damage (and yes having extra options is a good thing as stated by our fellow japanese player that helped change the pet enmity category on beastmaster).

Yes i do realize that some weapon skills got extremely powerfull due to the nature on how damage became but i still fail to see this as an issue on a pve balanced game outside the hive mind of players forming a party of meta jobs (wich was present even in the lvl 75 days so we cant say that this is exactly a new issue) and even then in my point of view what this allowed is to multiple people hitting max damage more then once on a multi step skill chain (and there we might have some issues on the tanking side of things).

Other then that i would like to call the attention to another potential benefit of the bug wich was gear progression and the acess to weapon skill damage armors, as you can get some as low as alluvion skirmish aguments (and ambuscade) and work your way to the top from there, without the need of killing something like OU to "grab the one ring that makes victory smite usefull", as this is the major issue on most of the dd jobs nowadays they all work but some require gear that are gated behind monsters that they really have not much ways to deal with by then selfs and are forced to resort to summoner astral conduit zergs in order to get what they need (again nothing wrong in having multiple jobs, and being versatile is an quality that separates a good team player from a bad one, but that should not be the only way to obtain gear and be usefull, this is not to bash summoner zergs either because this is still gated behind an one hour job ability and an fully geared DD on a meta job is actually able to pull off more damage on longer fights, but i would rather have more options to fight that does not require me to have previously beaten what i am trying to beat right now).

Lastly i would like to point out that the amount of shouts that happened for jobs that where not used at all before the bug, i at least saw an massive increase for jobs like mnk, nin , dnc, pup, drg, war, thf, rng wich was to be honest very pleasing to see, even people that previously shouted only for specific jobs started shouting for any kind of damage dealer they could find wich was honestly really awesome and welcome because people felt for once that they where able to be geared for the jobs.

So i would like to ask how the devs aproached this issue and if they are considering reveiwing the weapon skill damage change or if their decision is final and if that is the case what kind of balance they have on the table to bring back those jobs.

Thank you for your time.

There are many people asking dev keeping WSD glitch but from what I've read, most of them are based on their emotional satisfaction because it feels good to do big damage WS, and it make them kill NM faster. From game design pov, such argument isn't valid.

WSD glitch is a bad thing mainly because it trivialize harder content and made them easier than it should be. Higher level content NM has certain level of HP to keep the difficulty at certain level, since in FFXI the difficulty of a content is related to how long it takes to clear. The slower you clear a content the harder it can be since you will need to deal with more TP moves, accidents, player making mistakes and wipe, or even time out.

So the faster player power creeps, the faster content gets done, making the content life span shorter.

Another pro WSD change argument is about job balance. They argue that certain jobs like MNK gets boosted so it fixes some of the weaker jobs.

I agree that in past 1 year or so, the gear seems to favor 1-2 hit WS, so WSD change seems to "fix" this problem. However if we look into it, WSD change favors WAR, DRK as much as MNK, BLU. So it doesn't really balance anything since strongest DD got even stronger with glitch. The job that remains the same are DD using 1-2 hit WS: So jobs like SAM (Fudo) NIN (Ten) DPS didn't change much since these are 1 hits.

OP claimed "more jobs like mnk, nin , dnc, pup, drg, war, thf, rng got shouted" with WSD change, I think there are no evidence that it's because of WSD glitch. NIN (Ten), THF (rudras) does not benefit much from WSD glitch much since their strongest WS is 1 hit. PUP and RNG belongs to pet/ranged setup not melee, so WSD change or not they are not competing a DD slot with melee job to begin with, nor WSD change would do anything about community's preference on melee setup. WAR was already one of the most popular and strongest DD before change, so they don't need a fix.

The remaining jobs are MNK(VS, tornado kick), DNC (PK), DRG (stardiver) that benefit from it. That's only 3 from OP's list and it's faster/easier to fix these jobs by buffing them individually instead of doing a universal WSD boost for ALL DD jobs like WAR, DRK that's already on top AND got the benefit of WSD glitch.

Finally, OP made an argument about WSD gears being accessible to new players. This seems pretty biased to me, since many of the good WSD gears that made multi hit WS so OP actually came from newer content like Omen bosses (ammo), DM, AF+3 (Omen), Relic +3 (Dyna D), Month's of SoA quests (Ring), or pay 40m on AH (ring). You can get weaker multi hit argument on A.skirmish gears too, so WSD gear isn't more new player friendly than multi hit gear IMO. They are just as expensive/difficult to get for a brand new player.

[Afania]

weapon diversity instead of forcing a drk to go resolution because its the only ws that can dish out over 40k damage outside gimmick sneak attack/torcleaver that no one cares to use that much anyway because its gated inside an 1 minute cooldown.

It's actually the opposite. DRK's primary WS has been torcleaver for very long time, even without Sneak attack. This is because torcleaver is 1 hit and DRK is swimming in WSD, which pushes torcleaver avg somewhat higher than reso most of the time especially if you include superior SC property. It's the WSD glitch that made resolution stronger and worth using over torcleaver. Since WSD glitch fixed reso shouldn't be primary WS anymore.

The 40k reso damage that you talk about is spike and it can be done without WSD glitch. But when we talk about WS dmg, spike doesn't matter, avg does. So DRK really isn't forced to use resolution all the time.

[Smokenttp]

There are many people asking dev keeping WSD glitch but from what I've read, most of them are based on their emotional satisfaction because it feels good to do big damage WS, and it make them kill NM faster. From game design pov, such argument isn't valid.

I partialy disagree on that, player feeling is important however the part that i agree on is that it should not cloud an dev judgment as we players do not aways have acess to all information that they have, even then we also may percive things different from a player perspective and that is why i wanted to start this conversation in the first place to trade information with then and try to find the best solution.

WSD glitch is a bad thing mainly because it trivialize harder content and made them easier than it should be. Higher level content NM has certain level of HP to keep the difficulty at certain level, since in FFXI the difficulty of a content is related to how long it takes to clear. The slower you clear a content the harder it can be since you will need to deal with more TP moves, accidents, player making mistakes and wipe, or even time out.

So the faster player power creeps, the faster content gets done, making the content life span shorter.

I agree on that point of view.

Another pro WSD change argument is about job balance. They argue that certain jobs like MNK gets boosted so it fixes some of the weaker jobs.

I agree that in past 1 year or so, the gear seems to favor 1-2 hit WS, so WSD change seems to "fix" this problem. However if we look into it, WSD change favors WAR, DRK as much as MNK, BLU. So it doesn't really balance anything since strongest DD got even stronger with glitch. The job that remains the same are DD using 1-2 hit WS: So jobs like SAM (Fudo) NIN (Ten) DPS didn't change much since these are 1 hits.

OP claimed "more jobs like mnk, nin , dnc, pup, drg, war, thf, rng got shouted" with WSD change, I think there are no evidence that it's because of WSD glitch. NIN (Ten), THF (rudras) does not benefit much from WSD glitch much since their strongest WS is 1 hit. PUP and RNG belongs to pet/ranged setup not melee, so WSD change or not they are not competing a DD slot with melee job to begin with, nor WSD change would do anything about community's preference on melee setup. WAR was already one of the most popular and strongest DD before change, so they don't need a fix.

Yeah this might be my biased opinion about it, and i agree there is no garantee that the wsd glitch was the cause of the invites and even a garantee that with the bug in play the player base will still not go to the meta jobs only mentality that exists since well the begining. However as i mentioned the glitch alowed to previous unused weapon skills to be worth something, by all means they can just buff those weapon skills, change ftp values make then replicate,take outdated restrictions like requiscat attack penality off, power up the stat modfier, that is up to the devs and all valid solutions, however they also are working on a small team so that might be an easier solution to that, even tough i agree that if this breaks more things then fixes another alternative should come into play i was just asking for some answers.

The remaining jobs are MNK(VS, tornado kick), DNC (PK), DRG (stardiver) that benefit from it. That's only 3 from OP's list and it's faster/easier to fix these jobs by buffing them individually instead of doing a universal WSD boost for ALL DD jobs like WAR, DRK that's already on top AND got the benefit of WSD glitch.

Finally, OP made an argument about WSD gears being accessible to new players. This seems pretty biased to me, since many of the good WSD gears that made multi hit WS so OP actually came from newer content like Omen bosses (ammo), DM, AF+3 (Omen), Relic +3 (Dyna D), Month's of SoA quests (Ring), or pay 40m on AH (ring). You can get weaker multi hit argument on A.skirmish gears too, so WSD gear isn't more new player friendly than multi hit gear IMO. They are just as expensive/difficult to get for a brand new player.

There i belive that even those weaker aguments allow an slow climb, yes they do need some work and yes more options are aways welcome however right now those wsd aguments are only good for those 1-2 hit weapon skills mentioned before, specially talking on alluvion armor that means you can have an armor that has both triple attack and weapon skill damage on the same piece wich may be a huge boon for someone starting up (this is assuming the wsd glitch), altough the alluvion armor is a bit expensive on the cash end of the deal as much as the reisenjima armor because random is random, but right now the player can also climb pretty fast by going spark > ambuscade armor and slowly +2ing those sets, once they are ready tough they are not an garantee that this said player can take on reisenjima without more "specialized sets" so there is where the alluvion skirmish armor comes in hand in order to craft their first "specialized set", altough there might be some accuracy issues as alluvion skimish gear isnt exactly on the most accurate side off the spectrum.

It's actually the opposite. DRK's primary WS has been torcleaver for very long time, even without Sneak attack. This is because torcleaver is 1 hit and DRK is swimming in WSD, which pushes torcleaver avg somewhat higher than reso most of the time especially if you include superior SC property. It's the WSD glitch that made resolution stronger and worth using over torcleaver. Since WSD glitch fixed reso shouldn't be primary WS anymore.

The 40k reso damage that you talk about is spike and it can be done without WSD glitch. But when we talk about WS dmg, spike doesn't matter, avg does. So DRK really isn't forced to use resolution all the time.

i agree on the way the weapon skills behave here but my point still remains that its worthless going for schythe right now or even other great sword weapon skills like ground strike and spining slash both wich does have level 2 proprieties of skill chain and could be used more then "skill chain extenders", again SE could just buff schythes and call it a day.

[chiefhunglo]

Isola seriously I doubt you ever did endgame or ever will let the experts talk who knows you might actually learn something with that trap of yours shut.

[Isola]

lul (10 characters)

[chiefhunglo]

And I also have 10 characters done see how I made that up that's you.

[Shiyo]

WSD bug was very good for the game. It made a lot of weaker WS and weapon types(especially scythe!!) feel a lot stronger. The only weapon skills it made overpowered are ones that should be nerfed regardless of the bug existing or not - upheavel, reso, and last stand.

Please consider bringing it back, thank you.

[Afania]

WSD bug was very good for the game. It made a lot of weaker WS and weapon types(especially scythe!!) feel a lot stronger. The only weapon skills it made overpowered are ones that should be nerfed regardless of the bug existing or not - upheavel, reso, and last stand.

Please consider bringing it back, thank you.

- Last stand isn't OP nor benefit much from WSD glitch, it's 2 hit. Most of the big damage LS damage that we see in game are from mobs that takes extra piercing damage.

- Keeping the glitch then nerfing the stronger WS is more work for balance than just keep it as it is and fixing the weaker WS individually.

- Scythe(Anguta+CR build) was somewhat competitive to GS before Sept update. It's the lack of empy AM3 from Anguta and the lack of light SC property that made GS more useful overall. But if you seriously want to use scythe you can make it work. Anguta + CR build or R15 liberator + insurgency should still be ok post WSD fix I think.