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View Full Version : If i had the wheel (The long game) Part 1



Delgear
08-12-2025, 04:00 AM
So i know i have been putting a lot of quick fix suggestions out there but i want to tackle a different type of problem. I think in general FFXI has a lot to give and it could certainly have a rebirth much like classic wow did. The main problem that i see is that there are a lot of old jobs in the game that need some love to be on par with popular or frequently loved jobs. I think also A lot of jobs sort of lose thier usefullness when you look at the "prefered" community part composition. I talked about this in my short fixes but a serious problem here in the game is that there is one slot in a party for a tank or 1/6th of a standard party contains a tank. Also, lots of endgame is actually favoring not bringing a tank at all as the time limits make so many fights or progression levels ... DPS races and movement speed races.

Currently in the meta there are 3 accepted tank classes out of 22 or 13-14% of the classes are classically accepted tanks.

thats not enough and in a lot of ways it makes the game more stagnant and less job inclusive. since both tanks for all intents and purposes just build big stats and get hammere din the face, they dont really need to position in specific ways around teamates or move, or sometimes they are even disincentivized from engaging and thier gameplay is being removed, no tp building, no actively using abilities on swarms of monsters, and abusing the "Supertanking" mechanics that if a monster doesnt have a hate table yet it ignores the other non aggroed party members.

To start this process im going to pick an "Odd duck" just to show how far one could go to make these improvements.

Lets take thief as a job at present it is pretty much relegated to a DD only
(current META) but lets really think about what we know about thieves and how they operate and see if we cant liven the party up. Almost everyone wanting to play thief is thinking either of the Dungeons and Dragons thief who is a sneaky one. or assassin type characters from other mmo's. Also if they come from the final fantasy series as a new recruit to vanadiel maybe they know about SE's obsession with steal only items or steal making it far easier to obtain rare items.

Lets start at step one What do we want to be ICONIC to thief both as a main job and then also as a subjob. While we are doing this maybe we should think about how many roles we could make the thief take on in a party depending on thier subjob // equipment and tactical decisions(buffs, stances, etc.) character choices.

If it was me and i wanted to make a much more durable to META changes thief the first thing i would want to do is isolate the gameplay styles from each other so that as a developer i could easily tweak them individually rather than when i tune an ability it nerfs the class as a whole or buffs the class as a whole across all its potential roles. Additionally we want more jobs to be able to fill more roles .. it just makes it easier for people to play the jobs and use the abilities they want to to form a winning strategy.

I went over in the quick fix to thief i i think you should develop a stance for thief that allows them to do increased damage from behind, this is already kind of how the thief plays presently, in a lot of fights Trick attack is way too risky and hard to implement with characters being pushed, just general miscommunication, or constant repositioning required to prevent enemy AI that is constantly walking and wandering all over if you have alot of mobs in one spot. by using my previous "Quick fix" to give thief a constant buff via a stance to backside damage instead of only when the current version of Sneak attack is off cooldown, we've allowed the thf to move more dynamically and not lose so much dps either holding tp for Sneak attack or holding sneak attack waiting for the monster to turn back around, or not weaponskilling at all to maximize autoattack hits for treasure hunter .... all things subtracting from the fun of playing thief through forced Idle player behavior. this also opens up THF as a subjob whenever ANY melee DD is going to be behind the monster all the time, it allows them to help control threat and capitalize on good positioning.

But lets not just do whats already been done lets embellish on this idea.
Treasure hunter: remove this feature, its pasive and promotes incredibly boring gameplay of standing near things not attacking or participating to wait for SATA and feint for high chance to stick innitial treasurehunter upgrade.
You should replace this with a line of abilities that already exist in the game:
each type of Steal effect can each only change drop slots once per monster.
Steal(LVL1)(Cooldown 30 seconds): when successful adds another drop slot for the 2 most common items on the monster drop chart Steal's accuracy is increased by the amount of debuffs the monster has on them. (weapons that can be broken as well as horns on those types of NMS can be triggered to be lost or broken by steal)
Despoil(LvL 30)(Cooldown 45 seconds): When successful adds an additional gaurunteed drop slot for the rarest item the monster has in its drop table or allows steal only items to be placed in the drops pool Despoils' accuracy is increased by how many debuffs are on the monster.
Mug(lvl 49)(Cooldown 50 seconds): inflicts a critical hit with bonus damage based on the monsters amount of Gil then steals some of that Gil
Aurasteal Lvl 75(Cooldown 3 minutes)(Duration 2 minutes): While Aurasteal is on Steal, Despoil, and Mug will steal buffs from the targeted enemy, or if they cannot be stolen dispel them (option to merit the cooldown down to 2 minutes if 5 merits are spent).

So if you noticed, i placed a little hook in there to let thief's function as dispellers. wouldn't be a bad idea to have a thrown slot item for thiefs called (Conterfeit coins) for each ranged attack it throws three coins and each hit increases the damage of MUG by making the monster "count" as having more gil than they really do.
Additionally since the thiefs success at obtaining items is no longer passive or attached to its gear specifically other jobs you might want to play while farming items can simply sub thief and steal from thier enemies.

So ide like to talk about the next idea that rubs against NIN. I think its good to have evasion tanks in the game, as long as the way they gain that evasion through good gameplay, NIN presently in the game have been booted away from tanking by numerous game mechanic reliance on lots of shadow wiping Aoe's. like i suggested in the quick fix there should be a stance for THF that relies on evading hits, we also touched on Blind potentially being a stackable debuff and both main jobs should have a way to handle or compensate for having all thier shadows wiped ... maybe this is how thief could evasion tank, if you give them a thrown weapon type of smoke bomb that they share with ninja, whenever you throw a smoke bomb it inflicts AOE Blind and high enmity, each time a monster attacks they remove a certain number of blind stacks, if there are still blind stacks left they miss, while the tank stance thief will want to use this all the time, the high enmity on it ensures that the DD rogue is only using it as a last resort or at key critical moments because they will drop thier damage bonus and they won't have increased evasion abilities from the evasion stance.

Have wasp sting stack poison with party members maybe even make it the highest stack cap in the game so it can stand out as the best poisoner to have on a team.

Creating a sleep bomb thrown weapon could be good

Kunai much like the coins could be throwing three of them but designed for short ranged but not melee fighting

and make boomerang the AOE thrown weapon for damage.

They need valid archetypes of more thrown weapons, muskets, and crossbows at endgame, might want to add on the theme to all these weapons that they apply debuff stacks of some sort to work on that theme of wanting to stack debuffs successfully to steal better.

Lastly lets see if we cant help thief work better in a scenario where Physical Damage is not viable due to high resitance.
Make a stance for rogue that just increases attack speed and applies poison stacks on every hit ("Envenom" if you will), couldn't hurt to have an entetro ability that delivers enparalyze.

add some job abilities weapon skills changes:
Hamstring(lvl20)(costs tp): your next attack or weapon skill will severely hamper your enemies evasion and magic evasion to the next spell cast on them or weaponskill used.

Nerve strike (Lvl 30)(costs tp): inflicts paralysis stacks.

Shadowstitch: applies slow stacks and gravity stacks.

Extenerator: creates utsusemi style shadows, after a few seconds each shadow still remaining attacks for a critical hit and then dissapears

This way a job that previously had one role it wasnt particularly sought after can instead fill 3 roles or provide assistance to another role that might be less optimally geared in a task they need help with. we can get rid of how much of the class is just random number generation and idle non active play moments, and create more skill expression. Thf should dodge, it should crit, it should take cheap shots, and debilitate its enemies, but it should do it with skill expression.

Zenion
08-12-2025, 04:34 AM
Treasure hunter: remove this feature, its pasive and promotes incredibly boring gameplay of standing near things not attacking or participating to wait for SATA and feint for high chance to stick innitial treasurehunter upgrade.

So, make random drops incredibly frustrating to obtain, and remove the one thing that makes thief preferable over a dancer, samurai, warrior, or dragoon for damage dealing or a red mage for dispelling and debuffing (and buffing and damage dealing on the side.)

Delgear
08-12-2025, 06:06 AM
Im confused it seems like you didnt read the part where steal provides the benefits of treasure hunter and steal.

Delgear
08-12-2025, 06:16 AM
So to explain how the system works that you are debating lets look at a drop that currently exists in the game that old treasure hunter doesnt even help, Behemoth, presently treasure hunter doesnt help you because there is a 100% chance that the slot that drops defending ring drops its just that the moajority of the time that slot goes to Pixie earring, no matter how much treasure hunter it applies it will never help you get defending ring because the reason you arent getting defending ring is because pixie rearring keeps dropping.

With my system instead of standing around spammin treasure hunter autos, sneak attacks and trick attacks with feint, and trying desperately to not damage it too much (low level weapons). you would instead:
Debuff the monster, and then steal every 30 seconds until you succeed providing an additional behemoth hide, and a behemoth meat.

Along with the fact that i advocated for higher percentage and more numerous standard drops for all crafting mats. No in no way would my system make anything harder it in general doubles drop chance across the board but requires players to skill express to do it (quickly debuff the monster and land thier steal before debuffs wear off)
you despoil him as well giving you another drop slot for defendin ring or pixie ring doubling your chances of getting the drop .....

so no it would not make rare drops less likely it would in many cases double the likelhood they drop by providing another like drop slot i also mentioned that that special thf drop slot was a gaurunteed drop slot. so on mobs that have a 5% drop rate the extra slot forces the item to drop once and gives you a 5% drop rate for a second one. This sounds INCREDIBLY better than the current system of tomywhacking things for hours with autoattacks for a 2-7% increase in drop chance.

Delgear
08-12-2025, 06:23 AM
On the comment of other jobs, most of those jobs provide plenty of other assets to a party, many of them either can slot in in more than one role, or are very close and would require very small tweaks to be able to cover multiple roles. Id'e like to point out that summoner can dispel at nearly the same speed and has a guarunteed unresistable dispell or even faster with SP spamming atomos but they are not prefered for debuffing due to the other things RDM bring to a party such as refresh 3 and Haste 2 and debuffs, and melee damage. if another job being able to dispel makes you no longer ever want a rdm you dont really understand the job and what is capable of. THF isnt prefered for ANYTHING right now except solo farming MATS and rare drops or statue crusher.... no one is chomping at the bit to include them in Odyssea, Sortie, Helms, or HTMB because every other damage dealer brings more to the table than damage, and most of those fights treasure hunter and steal do nothing for unless you merit aura steal in its current state.


If instea dof poison being a static number the thF ws adds 100 poison, and the poison 2 spell adds like 60 per cast and the cap is like 1000 poison stacks from skill they work in symbiosis to pump that poison up together then move on to paralysis or slow or distract or whatever. You wouldnt have to choose one or the other you could have both in the party working together towards the same goal.

So if a boss has high resist and you absolutely HAVE to stick distract on it instead of the games math coimpletely denying the rdm any chance of landing it without sp , it instead resist most of the distract stacks and the rdm would have to cast distract more times to build up the potency of the distract, the thf could do the same with thier effect that contributes to the same effect.

It literally allows all these jobs to work together with dispelling and debuffing. Dancer provides healing, and debuff purging something neither rdm or THF are particularly good at.


So YES !!!! as someone who plays red mage as one of my top and favorite jobs, i would LOVE to see other people able to dispel so that RDM isnt the only mandatory job for so many encounters, it also helps if a party member has a less geared or under geared RDM the thief can help out with dispelling. if the debuffs are stackable the thf and rdm are working together and through teamwork debuffing better and faster. Rathe than making the thf stand there trying not to hurt the monster or feed tp and only auto, and the red mage spam dispels that get resisted. it would be much better if both could contribute and be teamates instead of competitors.
DNC can already operate as a tank or a DD because it is better designed
it is a similar class that gets to play 2 roles and your mad i would want the same for thief if i reworked dancer i would try to make them capable of main healing, damage dealing and tanking for the same reason.

Delgear
08-12-2025, 06:37 AM
More options to obtain the same thing doesnt eliminate the previous options that already work, they only add to the possible successful combinations, if thief can dispel RDM doesnt suddenly lose the ability to dispel .... they can just both do it now, this isnt a 0 sum game where one class has to be worthless at something just because another class can do it too. Scholar can heal and cast nukes but theres still plenty of people playing BLM and WHM out there ... its just scholar can also slot into those roles most times.

This is no different you are just kind of being hyperbolic.

Warrior and DRK can both do slashing damage ? which of them is now useless because the other can also do that ?

Zenion
08-12-2025, 09:25 AM
You don't seem to understand. I'm not saying that thief being able to dispel debuff a little is going to suddenly make everyone choose it over red mage. Far from it. If the special thing that thief can do is dispel and debuff a little, then people are going to look at the thief, look at the spot they have in their party, and say "you know what, no, a red mage is better for this."

It's the same reason that warrior, samurai, and dragoon get picked over thief when a fight calls for piercing damage. They can all do it, but the other jobs do it better. The only reason to take a thief - or a dancer, ninja, bard, or corsair for that matter - to an event is for the things they do that aren't piercing damage: magic damage, buffs, party movement speed, evasion down.

What thief does is make things more likely to drop. That's it, that's why you bring one along. Once upon a time, sneak attack and trick attack might have been relevant, but these days they're just not a factor. Aura steal and larceny are great, but they're too slow and too situational to be the reason you fill one of your precious party slots. So hey, let's see if your ideas for changing the one and only reason anyone would ever take a thief to a party event help things along.

Here's how things work with treasure hunter: You touch a monster just once, with anything, and it instantly has 8 tiers of "it's more likely to drop things". Single target, area, damage, no damage... you can have a thief sub bard and drop horde lullaby, and do whole crowds in one fell swoop. There's a chart somewhere that shows how much of an impact that has, and after 8 there's already a steep dropoff. Anyone who's pushing for 14 is either after an incredibly rare drop, or just wasting time. But let's go ahead and assume that there's a good reason for it, because...

Your modified steal affects things that are already pretty likely to drop: 24% chance for very common, 15% chance for common, 10% for uncommon. Treasure Hunter at tier 8 makes that 70.5%, 55%, and 22.5%. (TH14 is 80%, 70%, 32.5% - diminishing returns.) Let's go ahead and assume you can add two drop slots this way, even though normally steal only works once on a target. That's going to be a 56% chance of a very drop (.76 * .76 * .76 = .438976, 43.8976% chance of not receiving the drop in three rolls.) Common is going to be a 39% chance to drop. Now, if your most common drop is uncommon, that does see a slight improvement at 27% chance to drop... and all it costs you is successfully using a job ability with a high failure rate twice, on a single target whereas treasure hunter can be applied to anything you can hit with an area effect. (For curiosity's sake, rare at base 5% is around 14% with two extra slots, better than TH10 but less than TH11. Very rare at 1% base hits 3%, matching TH5. Super rare's 0.5% chance translates to a roughly 1.5% chance, between TH4 and TH5. 0.1% ultra rare drops would get boosted all the way up to 0.3%, or the equivalent of treasure hunter tier two. This change would be helpful at the early middle of the rarity curve but super detrimental at the high end. Yes, fine, multiple drops... 1.4% chance of three and... I want to say 4.4% chance of two for very common, but I could easily be wrong there. Negligible at the most generous tier.)

So, steal's going to require the same gameplay you say you're trying to avoid, to get worse results, on less targets. But what about despoil?

Well, guaranteed drop on the rarest item sounds great, but consider how ludicrously powerful that is. It's going to completely break the drop rate table. Which means despoil's never going to work. Let's be wildly optimistic and say that SE says "okay, let's give it a success rate five times the base drop rate." You have a 5% chance of making a 1% very rare drop into a 100% chance. Wanna know how many times you need to use despoil for that to statistically give you a better than 50% chance of success? Fourteen. 9 minutes and 45 seconds of everybody standing around waiting on the despoil timer, on average. And they'll do it. Oh, for a chance to guarantee the rarest drops, parties will stand there waiting for a thief to throw despoil however many times it takes to hit that lucky .5% for the rarest loot.

So now you've turned thief from the job that stands there swinging for a few extra minutes in its treasure hunter gear for a 0.8% to 9.5% increase in drop rates, to the job that holds up a fight for... wow, an hour and 42 minutes average for ultra rare... to roll the dice on a drop until it happens.

So... is any of that better than treasure hunter? Well, I mean, despoil would kind of be in a sense, since it's rerolling the drop until you get it, but the time cost to make that pay off would be monumental unless the ability was so overpowered that it got the modus veritas treatment and just stopped working on anything you'd ever want to use it on. Steal would be trading out a significant chance of getting even a single drop, for the tiniest glimmer of hope for two or three - on the items you don't really care that much about anyway. (And that's putting aside a mechanical issue which I suspect you'd hit - I can recall seeing monsters in Dynamis - Divergence dropping eight items, but never more, and I have a feeling that's a hard limit. More slots for common items could prevent rarer items from dropping at all, if that's the case.) And none of it fixes the gameplay concern of thief being the job everyone waits around for - quite the opposite.

Delgear
08-17-2025, 08:41 AM
Yeah i think your math is off ..... like i said particualarly for the more common drop slots it is awarding 2 commondrops at 100% and providing a normal chance in addition for those items to drop. there is for the common items 2 100% drop chances .... they just get added to the pool when you land steal, so no not 39% 100%, and 100% plus the two original drop slots.

With the rare drops(generally lvl 99+), they may require higher accuracy, and landing more debuffs to successfully steal, but they are awarding a 100% for sure drop from the rare category and the original drop chance is still there. So items that you could only presently get once on an enemy would still have thier original drop chance.

So in the original example i fielded which isnt even presently affected by treasurehunter .... because of the slot mechanic already in existence if you steal on king behemoth you get a 100% for sure pixie ring // defending ring, then the original 100% chance at a pixxie // defending ring.

doubling the drop chance for defending ring.
But if you apply it to ANY OTHER presently Treasure hunted rare, it still gives you a 100% drop of one of the "Rarest items" then leaves the existing chance to get another there. it literally mathematically CANNOT perform worse than treasurehunter.

Honestly what Final fantasy game outside ffxi has steal EVER been this incredibly weak ? It can stil lbe hard to land steal on 99+ mobs but at least trying to get that loot requires interactive gameplay like working together to stick debuffs or making magic burst windows to stick hard to stick debuffs. If you are geared way past the strength of a mob going back and stealing items for someone else becomes a valued commodity in the game since it puts it in pool, and the Steal chance is higher since you scaled bast its evasion.

I haven't often sat in the game and thought you know whats unfair .... people who have rare items, it just ruins the experience for everyone. There are SO many items that need to be collected int his game, they claim they want to respect our time.... well im tired of running thousands of lillith and only have 2 armors, I'm tired of running thousands of King behemoths for new players i bring to the game, It would be fine if i was treasure hunting relevant end game content for them, but people spend so much time backfarming ancient content that poses no threat and isnt compelling, instead of experiencing the game, its story its fun challenging encounters at end game.

This strategy would allow them to curve steal efficiency and control it better, low level no relevant content can be easy to grab old items from .... its not going to hurt anything, and then on end game mobs, giving thief more contribution to the group makes them less of a sidelined pick without just scaling damage numbers rawr number bigger go brrr. adding additional debuffing may help. I recommended a scaling system of defuff and debuff removal as well, so thief can also help red mage apply poison, probably slow and paralyze with say job abilities that cause the thief to apply enpoison, enslow, or enparalyze. The reason now you would choose red mage onry is because debuffs either fail or succeed there is no nuance, but with the other system i provided where debuffs stack up, and thier level of spell or abilitiy creates the cap, instead of THF and red mage competing to be able to debuff they can COLLABORATE and both commit assistance to increasing multiple debuffs potency, it doesn't matter which of them is better equipped as the better equiped or more powerful effecf simply sets the maximum stacks they can work together to stack to. This also removes the unfun gameplay on rdm of spamming a single debuff and watching it get resisted over and over untilt he one time it sticks.

So instead of thief not being picked because a debuff is needed, and a rdm is either forced to use only stymie to even effect a monster, they both almost always apply "some" of the debuff but need to work together to quickly stack it to capped stacks. The thief never fully fails the red mage never fully fails and they don't compete for that effect they enable and enhance each others effectiveness. Could the red mage just spam the spell the same amount of times and just apply some stacks to get to the same place via failing repeatedly then finally sticking it, yes but one FEELS a lot better to both parties from a gameplay perspective.

I get it that moving away from treasure hunter is scary but its a terribly boring mechanic, it needs a more gameplay and active implementation. its root idea is great ... make more stuff drop, but its implementation is stale and bad game design.