Overall Battle System Adjustments for the Future

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* The Elemental Magic changes are huge and I don't think we'll fully appreciate their implications until after they're implemented, but this may revive magic as a damage source.

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Almost. I think these changes plus the advent of Magic Attack Bonus foods (top tier being on par with Red Curry Buns) and buffs, will make great strides towards evening the playing field. I'm excited at the prospect of magic damage actually being acceptable again. Time to move those dex merits to int.

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Originally Posted by Fermion

Almost. I think these changes plus the advent of Magic Attack Bonus foods (top tier being on par with Red Curry Buns) and buffs, will make great strides towards evening the playing field. I'm excited at the prospect of magic damage actually being acceptable again. Time to move those dex merits to int.

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Magic Damage still won't hold a candle to melee damage, but at least it'll be useful. This is more in line with other MMO's were magic DD stands back and acts as artillery.

Now I'd like to see a spell that inflicts the target with Magic Defense Down (negative MDB) / Magic Evasion Down, has a fast casting time (1s) semi-short duration (30s) and low recast (5s). Give it to RDM, they can then act as a form of support for the magic line.

All these ideas are really good. Was hoping for uncapped merits so I could finally party more and do stuff with my merit points but 65% modifiers with 1 merit point is pretty solid too. As for walk of echoes, I never see anyone there on cerberus server except early morning with Japanese players. I hope there will be more adjustments that give players more drive to attend WoE, though non-Ex coins and Die/Residue sacks are tempting. Well see how things go. Keep up the good work Devs. /like

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Originally Posted by Byrth

* The Elemental Magic changes are huge and I don't think we'll fully appreciate their implications until after they're implemented, but this may revive magic as a damage source.

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What struck me most was seeing this tiny sentence at the bottom of the huge table:

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Please note that we will be making additional adjustments on elemental magic using this change as the foundation.

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Realistically, this is probably just SE's super-roundabout way of saying that specific numbers aren't set in stone yet even though the concept has been decided or that they can always change more stuff in the future if they feel like it. This is a big change alone, so I can't imagine what would come with it.

Optimistically, though, the statement could mean that this huge change to elemental magic's fundaments will also set the framework for more specific changes that only affect certain jobs or only benefit bros in specific situations. Given the scale of this change alone, that's like saying, "I threw out that rubber dingy full of encephalitic badgers and built an ark filled with every breed of kitten just so they'll let me in when I sail to Kitten-Utopia next weekend".

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Balance between two-handed and single-handed weapons
This is a topic that has been discussed in several threads, particularly one about making adjustments to single-handed weapons, and we would like to perform adjustments.
As has been mentioned, food and other choices are quite limited due to the fact that status modifiers are far greater for two-handed weapons and there is a higher need for accuracy when using single-handed weapons.
For example, we are currently looking into the possibility of adding some form of merit that would enhance the modifiers for the single-handed weapon main weapon slot.

JA haste on last resort

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I don't want to be the guy that destroys the good mood on the thread but /drk offers nothing. All it does is allow you to remove some haste on your gear and only when LR is up, which ends up to equal to a couple of DA or attack. Comparatively, /war will have agressor, as well Double attack 100% of the time, so in practice it's going to be preferred. It would be MUCH better to make subjob ajustement to ninja. For instance focus on acc buff when /nin.

Secondly, almost nothing requires accuracy in the game, so your analyse about the 2 handed DD being 'supposedely" inferior due to accuracy is wrong. Jobs like nin or thf suck VS all DD (not only 2 handed, but mnks too) because their weapon has a too low base damage. You need to bring them to a level that makes them equal to monk. For instance a MNK with good gear has a damage split between 70% melee/ 30% weapon skill. Therefore to reduce the gap you need to increase their melee performance. Suggestions :

more crit rate or crit damage
increase the usefullness of STR (higher weapon rank on weapons)
give /nin a new JA as powerful as hasso ( acc buff or crit buff or DA buff)


I understand the good will to reduce the gap between various jobs but your current suggestions are necessarily going to fail due to what I explained. Buffing last resort to give some haste will likely fail because you can't FULL TIME it unlike hasso.


The only good part I see is dex and str buff but it's fairly limited because attack is not a problem for any DD, and acc is only situationally useful. Like I suggested, try to consider a better conversion of STR to DMG for 1 handed DD instead.

For instance with spharai I have 52 damage. With max str I end up with 52+14=66 DMG. 2h anded weapons get much more because the bonus is dependent on the base damage. Since dual wielding users have a weapon split between 2 hands, the bonus is counted per hand and it ends up to being much more limited. So I'll suggest to double the bonus of STR on melee damage for 1 handed melees.

If you're going to make all elements of elemental magic useful, can you add a way to merge magian staves and sea obis while you're at it?

A few things.

Weaponskill change - just raise the cap, it breaks nothing, stop taking simple solutions and making them difficult.
Elemental change - make sure you look at puppetmaster. Being that you can't really adjust the int on your puppet you may destroy the blm puppet. (bet that didn't even cross your mind)
1hand adjustment. So, 2hand is considered strong, so adjust 1 hand. There is also h2h that keeps getting forgotten about. Is it 1 hand or 2 hand. If 2 hand it does not share those buffs. If one hand, then why can't equip grips. Lets not forget 2 jobs use h2h as main source of dmg, unless because it is only 2 its not warranted to care about.

I agree that when adjusting elemental magic, things like magical blue magic, puppets, magical blood pacts and ninjutsu must be taken into consideration. A lot of these are already quite weak in their current form and if they don't get adjustments accordingly alongside the BLM nukes they will fade even more into obscurity.

Furthermore I think it should be considered evening out the MP costs of the same tier a bit (I don't see any issue with making them equal the same way the cast time/recast is planned to be made). If you look at the MP cost of Stone V VS Thunder V, at high levels of INT you are spending twice the amount of MP for the same amount of damage out of Thunder V. I think this would just reverse the situation we have now, with people preferring to spam Stone/Water IV and V over people spamming Blizzard/Thunder IV and V, etc.

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Originally Posted by xbobx

Elemental change - make sure you look at puppetmaster. Being that you can't really adjust the int on your puppet you may destroy the blm puppet. (bet that didn't even cross your mind)

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This is a good point, which ties into another thing the new Elemental Magic system will affect if monsters and pets also receive the 2.0 versions of spells. The high INT some monsters have could suck for way more bros than just the puppet.

There's the obvious fact that tier IV and lower spells would become harder to Stun. Beyond that, however, does anybody know how much Magic Attack Bonus and INT the average casting monster has? Do most monsters who cast have very high INT but the base level of Magic Attack Bonus for their job, which would make their single-target magic damage sky-rocket after this update?

I think the latter is the case, but my memory is terrible and I've never had a reason to look for any testing on monster Magic Attack Bonus in the past.

This might suck, because the highest level monsters already destroy people with TP moves and super-spells like Kaustra and Meteor. On the other hand, this could actually add an element of danger that isn't a ridiculous AoE something-or-other and might make Rune Fencer more useful.

Big change might be big, basically.

I believe Absolute Virtue was calculated as having around 100 INT, but they made up for this relatively low number by giving him a large MAB. Most bosses seem to be this way- lower INT than you'd expect for how difficult they are (presumably so they're not immune to BLMs), but a sizeable MAB (so their magic is still threatening). However, some areas of the game seem to thrive on giving the enemies ridiculously high attributes, such as Dynamis.

Magic is already pretty much the most threatening thing any normal enemy can use against us... if that thundaga III being cast on us by the trash blm gets even stronger, we're going to need more methods for decreasing magic damage.