[DEV1049] New Weapon Skills: Potency Bonuses

Here's a brainstorm I came up with concerning upgrading Weapon Skills, involving upgrading them beyond the 5-upgrade cap:

Out of three choices you can have, at a maximum of 15 upgrades each, depending on which Weapon Skills you can put either one at full merits, one weapon skill at 150% bonus, with any others with partial bonus. One Weapon Skill being merited further than 10 points that would restrict you to just that Weapon Skill. For example, a Ranger main job is putting focus into this setup for Weapon Skills:

Phase one:
Ruinator: 0/15
Apex Arrow: 0/15
Last Stand: 5/15, 100% AGI Bonus

Your choice of 3 weapon skills to max out to 5 upgrades still stands.

Phase two:
Ruinator: 0/15
Apex Arrow: 0/15
Last Stand: 10/15 125% AGI Bonus.

You can put partial focus into multiple weapon skills split apart, or put one weapon skill toward 5/15 upgrades.

Phase Three could go two or three ways:

Plan A: Player wants to use Apex Arrow and Last Stand, in case they have SAM on hand to use Apex Arrow for ranged damage strategies.
Ruinator: 0/15
Apex Arrow: 5/15 100% AGI Bonus
Last Stand: 10/15 125% AGI Bonus

Plan B: Player wants to put their full power into Last Stand.
Ruinator: 0/15, locked
Apex Arrow: 0/15, locked
Last Stand: 15/15, 150% AGI Bonus*

Plan C: Player ends up deciding they want to upgrade Ruinator for the jobs that can use it and removes the extra 5 points they put into Last Stand.
Ruinator: 5/15
Apex Arrow: 5/15
Last Stand: 5/15

*Every other Weapon Skill listed for upgrading will be locked after the 11th point put into the bonus

This could further specialty and customization by choosing which Weapon Skill selection you could have, or you can push the limits of one certain Weapon Skill of your choice. We have people complaining about nerfing several of these new weapon skills past the point of usage, especially myself, so why not consider a solution like this instead? There would have to be some tweaking required so they do not surpass the power of Empyrean Weapon Skills, but not to extreme points.

edit: moderators feel free to put this thread into the appropriate section if this is not the place to post, because even I'm not sure if I posted it in the right subforum lol.

Don't think this really solves the complaints people have of the new WSs, and to be honest if we are putting all of our merits into a single merit WS, it should be stronger than any other WS of the weapon category including Empy, Relic and Mythic. A single player could own several Relic weapons and switch them as easily as changing jobs, but a Merit WS, based on your proposal, requires at multiple merit party runs. Not a huge investment if you only pick 1, but if you decide to pick another means clearing all your effort and starting again from scratch, or at most 30 merits. Every time. Unless you expect to having the merits for each level to be surprisingly low like 1>1>1>1>1>2>2>2>2>2>3>3>3>3>3. That would hardly be an effort.

I can see this being plausible if we had it done by job, i.e. SAM gets its 3 choices, RNG gets its 3 choices, and have to merit Apex Arrow for every job that wants to get access to it.

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Originally Posted by Koren

Don't think this really solves the complaints people have of the new WSs, and to be honest if we are putting all of our merits into a single merit WS, it should be stronger than any other WS of the weapon category including Empy, Relic and Mythic.

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I'm not fond of the idea of devaluing Relic/Mythic/Empyrean WS myself, but certain Merit WS should pick up slack where specific weapons aren't utilized. Realmrazer should fill a DD niche for Club users, for instance. This even works for R/M/E users to exploit their aftermaths for DD during TP, and then use the merit WS afterwards.

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A single player could own several Relic weapons and switch them as easily as changing jobs, but a Merit WS, based on your proposal, requires at multiple merit party runs. Not a huge investment if you only pick 1, but if you decide to pick another means clearing all your effort and starting again from scratch, or at most 30 merits. Every time. Unless you expect to having the merits for each level to be surprisingly low like 1>1>1>1>1>2>2>2>2>2>3>3>3>3>3. That would hardly be an effort.

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Good point, actually- 30 points past the first phase would take a grueling amount of work to obtain. The spending pattern for upgrading a single WS, instead of 10/15/20/25/30 and spending 30 points for the next two phases, could be more spread out to work like this:

first phase: 10/10/10/15/20
second phase: 20/20/20/20/25
third phase: 30/30/30/30/30

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I can see this being plausible if we had it done by job, i.e. SAM gets its 3 choices, RNG gets its 3 choices, and have to merit Apex Arrow for every job that wants to get access to it.

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That's the beauty of it: For WARs and multi-job players, they can still choose to upgrade 3 of their weapon skills to 100% bonus and still utilize those weapon skills on their odd-weapons on the secondary jobs they have on hand. Or, if they're just a WS fanatic they can just upgrade partial bonuses to their choice of Weapon Skills, for the sake of having a more varied selection, but weaker strength.

However, if someone likes playing their select specific jobs, they can focus their efforts into furthering the few jobs they have with access to their choice of Merit WS. It does come with the price of locking out access to just 3 weapon skills after one Weapon Skill has been upgraded a 6th time out of the 15 times you can upgrade. Sure, most will aim for specialization rather than utility, but still having the choice to have utility isn't something to scoff at either.

Honestly, I think your idea takes an already bad system and makes it worse by over-complicating it unnecessarily. While I agree that the R/M/E WS shouldn't be easily replaced (the ones that don't suck outright, anyway), this idea doesn't do that (150% stat mods? that would throw every other ws out of the window outside of triggering aftermath, lol), and it does absolutely nothing (unless I misread/misunderstood) for the biggest problem these weapons have; being limited to only 3 if you actually want to use any of the ws in situations other than skilling up or screwing around with friends. I realize people are bawing over how merits should be about specialization, but in the years since they've been implemented, they've only been further improving your jobs through the same set of merits, because all the other options weren't worth meriting, and baring when rdm merits were relevant, had no real "specialization" to them. at all.

Sure, a mage could "specialize" by using full MP merits instead of HP, and you could "specialize" by using 1 stat merit over another (str or int, everything else was crap that only idiots merited because the increase to other stats did absolutely nothing noticeable), or 1 weapon skill over another (How many mages don't have 8/8 enfeebling/elemental that used those skills, or had other mages that did? I've never met a whm who merited healing/enhancing skill that had any other mage job, before they raised the merit cap, anyway.). Merits have never been about "specialization".

Honestly, the best way to implement this, if they're dead set on using merits (which is stupid to begin with) and having a 15 merit cap, would be to do 3/3 instead of 5/5. At least that way, people would have a little more room to work :/

Theytak is right in that this idea makes the entire thing worse, because people only want the best for the job they need you. Thus they will take a 15/15 WS over someone who wanted to diversify their skills. This just bottlenecks us even more from only 3 useful WS, to 1. If merits are the way to go (which they will be regardless) then they need to be expanded to having 5 fully meritable WS, as opposed to 3.

Three 5/5 weaponskill merit cap just leaves way too many other very useful weapon skill merits unmerited. They should just give us an increase in the cap.

I personally want 2 more capped merit WSs...

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Originally Posted by Saiken253

I personally want 2 more capped merit WSs...

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Maybe if we behave nicely and don't complain about VW anymore, Santanaka (not to be mistaken with Tanaka-san) will grant your wish! ;D

hehe if only the JPs were so merciful~!- i mean, Yes yes~! We'll be very good boys, girls and galkas~!(because galka's are people too[i guess] and should be involved in these things too~!)