Weapon Skill Damage bug and game balancing.

[Smokenttp]

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.

[chiefhunglo]

I would like to here from the devs why they fixed the weapon skill damage maybe you guys might have been hitting too hard or that they are afraid the bug might get worse and you guys could end up one shooting mega bosses witch I wouldn't mind doing buuuut i'm sure other players would scream bloody murder if that happened.

[Smokenttp]

I would like to here from the devs why they fixed the weapon skill damage maybe you guys might have been hitting too hard or that they are afraid the bug might get worse and you guys could end up one shooting mega bosses witch I wouldn't mind doing buuuut i'm sure other players would scream bloody murder if that happened.

considering the 99.999 damage cap and how much of then summoners can do per second during astral conduit that shouldnt be an issue at all.

[Smokenttp]

Also while still on game balance topic i would like to propose a couple more things. First off to reverse the order of the capacity point bonus the job points gifts are given to us, right now this value starts on a low 5% and the last bonus at 1355 jp give us over 30% i belive reversing the order of those would be much more welcome in the long run because it can be kinda unfair for people that have low jp on a job, to ilustrate yesterday i had a party with a friend that we stoped once i had obtained 110 jp , i had already the 1355 gift while he was an fresh corsair at the same amount of time he obtained only 20 jp wich is an extremely low number for the time we went in there i feel that reversing the gifts bonus order would help to aliviate this issue alot (and i belive i am not the first person sugesting this as well).

While still talking about gifts i belive that some gear progression issues on the game can be solved by then as well, right now the diference from a job master rune fencer and a fresh one is only 46 acc, if i take into account that rune fencer has around 1000 acc this means that the same rune fencer leveling on apex mobs in sih gates canot hit at all apex monsters in inner rakznar court wich by comparision need over 1300 acc even when he reaches master, this also means that it canot hit nms with around the same level of evasion to farm for better gear, so i belive that all those gifts should recive a boost so that the total extra acc (and you can also include attack, evasion , pet buffs and magic buffs as well (exept magic attack and magic defense)) should be at least somewhere in between 150 and 200 on a job master. This way the job point progression is more meaningfull while also keeping the current gear relevant enough to ease the both the job point and the gear progression.

Changing subject a bit the next big one would be the ultimate weapon update, i feel a lot of people have been disapointed with those and i have a simple fix for then, the way i see all the ultimate weapons had an proupose in mind since their release in the game (mythics are the job specialization weapon (altough the new superior 5 weapons are fighting for that spot) , aeonics the skillchain / magic burst weapon, relic where originaly the lvl 3 skill chainer finisher untill empyreal came to be and outclassed it) and the aguments should reflect that. With that being said the +30 acc on aeonics could be changed to +30 skill chain bonus / magic burst bonus (and yes i know that the aftermath also improves on that but this extra should help it even further), the +30 acc on mythics should be changed to acomodate one powerfull effect of the superior 5 path c weapons with an extra % on then (for exemple the pupetmaster mythic should have automaton special attack +30%,sam should have sekkanoki:weapon skill damage +110% and so forth), wich would help it solidify their niche as well as not completly outperforming the superior 5, As for the empyreal weapons i would keep the same aguments exept that on the last one i would add an extra weapon skill damage +15% together with the status boost. And last but not least the relic weapons i think it would be more interesting that if instead of changing their aguments you gave then an really powerfull afterglow effect (something like -25% Damage taken to all party or + 50% fast cast something really impactfull), this way they would fill a new role and became more atractive.

As for job adjustments here i have some personal requests, first one is for beastmaster, please allow reward range to increase to at least repair range, reason is that if i run from an meteor that leaves my pet at very low hp i might not be able to get close enough to heal him before the monster auto attacks him to death and this is very frustating, and while in the range topic(and i know this one is most likely to be denied but...) is there also a possibility that the range of the ready/sic gets improved only while under the effect of unleash? specially since summoner astral conduit does exactly the same thing i think it shouldnt hurt too much throwing this out for bst specially since they tend to do only half the summoners damage.

Next one is probably for monk, i see alot of complains in regard to boost, focus and dodge new effects, the last two is about their duration being too short and the first one is about it completly breaking the auto attacks maybe if boost was changed to only affect weapon skills (its effects wear off after 1 min or the first weapon skill) and the duration on focus and dodge gets improved should be a good call.

Well that is all for now,i belive that those adjustments togheter with an reversal of the weapon skill damage to their bugged state would probably make the game more healthy on the long run (altough this might mean that the enmity generation mechanics would need to be adjusted once more to acomodate the new damage output from the DDs).

Once again thank you for your time.

[CrAZYVIC]

Post content:

A) Weapon Skills FTP adjustments 1H, H2H and 2H
B) Reducing power creep
C) Huge buff to RMEAD weapons to give motivation playerbase and small MNK buff.
D) Some Weapon skills will have chan~ to adapt to this: Example Resolution will be 4 hits instead 5 etc. Empy weapons will have 80 Stats instead 50.

The point of this post is try reduce the distance between all the physical DDs. Not more lolDDs.

FTP adjustments:

Relic 1H~WS: 6~8~10
Relic 2H~WS: 3~4~5
Relic H2H~WS: 4.5~6~7.5

Empy 1H~WS: 6~10~15
Empy 2H~WS: 3~5~7.5
Empy H2H~WS: 5~7.5~10

Mythic 1H~WS: 7~9~11
Mythic 2H~WS: 3.5~4.5~5.5
Mythic H2H~WS: 5~6.5~8

Aeonic 1H~WS: 6~10~15
Aeonic 2H~WS: 3~5~7.5
Aeonic H2H~WS: 5~7.5~10

Weaponskills has its fTP transferred across all hits will not exist anymore. Offhand, DA procs will be 1.0. Fotia will act as 10% WSD instead of +1 on FTP. To avoid power creep RMEA weapon-skills stat mods will be reduced 80% to 40%. To take care even more the damage power creep maximun physical limit will be changed to: 1H 2.9~H2H 3.15~2H 3.40~Marksmanship 3.15 and archery 3.05.

Equiping a RMEAD weapon will allow weapon skill damage gear transfer across all the hits on all your weapon-skills similar to the recent ws bug. Non REMAD weapons will not have this effect avaliable. MNk will be allowed to equip grips and Spharai will have 60 accuracy instead 60 attack.

[chiefhunglo]

I never seen a character hit close to 99999.

[Isola]

I never seen a character hit close to 99999.

You play with scrubs then, lol. Pretty simple to do given proper buffs and/or 2hours

[Sirmarki]

I never seen a character hit close to 99999.

There is actually a RoE quest 'to do 99,999 damage'.

[DarkValefor]

If I'm not wrong that RoE includes skillchain damage or magic bursts.

With just a GEO tho you can reach 99999 damage easily with critical damage WSes like Rudra's Storm.

[Nyarlko]

I never seen a character hit close to 99999.

You must never play with BLM or SMN then... Both can pretty easily hit 99999.