Remove or decrease race penalties

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

So if you don't need to change races (meaning the change provides negligible to non-existent bonuses), then therefore reducing or eliminating race differences is equally unnecessary.

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Or we just don't need to have them at all. The real question is not whether or not the racial stats make a difference. The question is whether or not they enhance the enjoyment of the game. A few people think they are a good thing because they think that it somehow makes them a more unique and special snowflake. While others (myself included) find them to be a nuisance which causes a lot of problems without any real tangible benefit.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

I was responding to the suggestion that players chose a race for the job they wanted to play, only to have SE change that job and force the player(s) to chose a different job. Don't take my response as an original idea to make it sound less credible. The original suggestion wasn't credible and that was the point of my response.

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You were insinuating that it was the players responsibility to pick a race based on the jobs they want to play, which in a game that never changes would still be a difficult task because a person can't really know what they like until they have tried it and at that point it is too late to change.

In reality though, the devs keep adding jobs and events which means that a players taste is highly subject to change. It is virtually impossible to choose the correct race if you play for any reasonable amount of time.

For example: Joey picks his race based on his desire to play red mage. The devs continuously make red mage suck (true story. You can check on this). Joey decides that even though he loves red mage, he must become a monk to be successful in end game and contribute to events with his friends. Didn't joey get shit on enough already by having his job become weak and undesired? do you really need him to have to re-roll his character and waste months / years redoing everything now too? Why are you so sadistic?

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

So you've never played a game like, oh, I don't know, WoW, or DND? You've never played a game where you select race -and- job and they're frozen (aside from sub/secondaries)?

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This game has 20(22) jobs that you can change to at any time. It has nothing to do with WoW's job system and that is one of it's biggest selling points.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

"11" was an example, but the fact remains that the argument to lower (or reduce) race differences is fundamentally so that DDs aren't "gimped" my something so trivial.

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And why should they be?

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

Or we just don't need to have them at all. The real question is not whether or not the racial stats make a difference. The question is whether or not they enhance the enjoyment of the game. A few people think they are a good thing because they think that it somehow makes them a more unique and special snowflake. While others (myself included) find them to be a nuisance which causes a lot of problems without any real tangible benefit.



You were insinuating that it was the players responsibility to pick a race based on the jobs they want to play, which in a game that never changes would still be a difficult task because a person can't really know what they like until they have tried it and at that point it is too late to change.

In reality though, the devs keep adding jobs and events which means that a players taste is highly subject to change. It is virtually impossible to choose the correct race if you play for any reasonable amount of time.

For example: Joey picks his race based on his desire to play red mage. The devs continuously make red mage suck (true story. You can check on this). Joey decides that even though he loves red mage, he must become a monk to be successful in end game and contribute to events with his friends. Didn't joey get shit on enough already by having his job become weak and undesired? do you really need him to have to re-roll his character and waste months / years redoing everything now too? Why are you so sadistic?



This game has 20(22) jobs that you can change to at any time. It has nothing to do with WoW's job system and that is one of it's biggest selling points.



And why should they be?

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So the major crux is, "reducing race differences serves no purpose, so therefore, its valid and should be done."

Because if you think you're "gimped" by being on a certain race, yet you think its playstyle, not race choice, that determines a players' mettle, then you're running down your own argument.

Either race differences matter, and therefore should remain in place because they are designed to matter, or race differences don't matter and therefore should not remain in place because of a non-existent way that they do matter while not mattering.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

Either race differences matter, and therefore should remain in place because they are designed to matter, or race differences don't matter and therefore should not remain in place because of a non-existent way that they do matter while not mattering.

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Or races matter because they give much more HP than one another so certain races get 1shotted in any roll as a front line job while others can take a couple hits, and thus should be removed.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

Either race differences matter, and therefore should remain in place because they are designed to matter, or race differences don't matter and therefore should not remain in place because of a non-existent way that they do matter while not mattering.

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It's already been shown in this thread that there are differences in damage output (albeit small, they are still there) and that the differences in HP and to a far lesser extent MP can be game changing. These things create an advantage / disadvantage. Stop saying they don't exist. The differences have been spelled out.

These advantages should be removed because they are outdated. Everyone has their own opinion as to why the were placed in the game in the first place. I contend that that reason no longer exists and that they have become detrimental to the game (if they were ever good in the first place) and should therefore be removed.

Here's the bottom line. If they release a job that uses <insert stat here> as the basis for damage calculation or as the basis for damage reduction etc., I shouldn't get screwed out of being good at that job because I picked a race 8 years before they created the job. That's not how you treat long time customers. Anyone who says otherwise is full of crap.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

Here's the bottom line. If they release a job that uses <insert stat here> as the basis for damage calculation or as the basis for damage reduction etc., I shouldn't get screwed out of being good at that job because I picked a race 8 years before they created the job. That's not how you treat long time customers. Anyone who says otherwise is full of crap.

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And if you think that your difference in STR, or MP, or even HP between one race and another, is the difference between being good or not at a given job, then you have bigger problems.

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Originally Posted by saevel

Except mobs under your level don't get LCF yet they won't hit you for 0 without phalanx / stoneskin up (negative fSTR zeroing out their base damage notwithstanding)

Go fight a level 38 goblin as a BLU/WAR with defender + cocoon / harden shell up. It's ratio should be way under .5 and thus pDiffmin should be 0. You should see 0's yet you'll see low numbers but not 0's. You see this with brews inside abyssea, go brew Itzpapalotl and let it hit you. You have 9999 defense, its a level 92~95 NM so without a doubt Decent Challenge and absolutely no LCF. It also does not have 1000+ attack, very few NMs have that much. It should be hitting you for straight 0's (50% of time), yet it doesn't.

Monsters have a ratio floor just like we do, except in their case pDiffmin can never hit 0. There is a point at which adding more defense will not do anything, and it's something that easy to hit provided the monster isn't 5+ levels above you.

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This does not indicate that there is a non-0 ratio floor. Ratio has a minimum of 0 as long as monster attack is a positive number, and monster pDIF is different from Player pDIF. Similarly, player pDIF doesn't have a non-0 "floor."

In order to show that their Ratio is floored to a non-0 value, you'd have to:
1) Set yourself up with a certain VIT
2) Let them hit you enough that you're pretty sure you've seen their entire damage range
3) Increase your Defense without affecting your VIT
4) Show that their damage range is unchanged

Then you will have shown that they are Ratio floored. As a side-note, you'd need a monster with high enough base damage that you can detect small changes in their upper damage/swing limit even when you have very high defense.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

And if you think that your difference in STR, or MP, or even HP between one race and another, is the difference between being good or not at a given job, then you have bigger problems.

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BRB, re-rolling as an Elvaan DD with NQ gear because stats other than HP don't matter.

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Originally Posted by Byrth

BRB, re-rolling as an Elvaan DD with NQ gear because stats other than HP don't matter.

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If they didn't matter you wouldn't be re-rolling.

Just because they do matter, and it works against you, doesn't mean it should be changed.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

If they didn't matter you wouldn't be re-rolling.

Just because they do matter, and it works against you, doesn't mean it should be changed.

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Yes, it does. He pays the bills. Who do you think they keep this game going for? The martians?

They are probably reading these forums to see:

A) Are there lot of people who want this changed ?

and

B) Do they have a good reason?

So far our reasons seem to be:

A) Current game mechanics make this a major issue for some races. Tarus in particular.
B) Re-rolling sucks
C) Being held back by something you cannot change sucks
D) Every other aspect of your character can be modified after the fact and we enjoy that about this game.

You don't seem to have the majority vote. Most people agree that they should be balanced out in one way or another although not everyone agrees on how, so you better come up with a more convincing argument than what you have so far.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

And if you think that your difference in STR, or MP, or even HP between one race and another, is the difference between being good or not at a given job, then you have bigger problems.

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I assure you, you can be the greatest Taru WAR ever, if mobs still kill you in 1~2 attack rounds because of your HP while an equally badass Galka takes 2~4 hits, there is a problem.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

Yes, it does. He pays the bills. Who do you think they keep this game going for? The martians?

They are probably reading these forums to see:

A) Are there lot of people who want this changed ?

and

B) Do they have a good reason?

So far our reasons seem to be:

A) Current game mechanics make this a major issue for some races. Tarus in particular.
B) Re-rolling sucks
C) Being held back by something you cannot change sucks
D) Every other aspect of your character can be modified after the fact and we enjoy that about this game.

You don't seem to have the majority vote. Most people agree that they should be balanced out in one way or another although not everyone agrees on how, so you better come up with a more convincing argument than what you have so far.

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Unfortunately this isn't a democracy, so regardless of who here gets the most support we're still at the mercy of SE and their "infinite wisdom" in creating balance.

Nevertheless:
A) If the argument is about HP, then I whole-heartedly aggree that players should have more. But we shouldn't give Tarutaru all the props of other races (read as: more HP, more STR) just to blandify the race differences.
All players should get at least 5-10% more HP, purely because the ratio of "DMG Taken:Max HP" is broken beyond Lv75 for players.

B) Re-rolling does suck, and my original argument was that SE should have made it not suck.

C) Whole-heartedly agree. However, just because it sucks doesn't mean it needs to be fixed. It sucks that I had to wait for Lightsday to do Arka trials... but that's just how some things are.

D) This is not entirely true. Take merits for example. You "can" invest these merits in other locations, however it doesn't happen. Why? Because those changes aren't realistic. If you need the extra STR that you normally wouldn't get as a Taru, you're certainly not going to change your STR merits to say... CHR. So while you "can" change your character after the fact, they aren't realistic or responsible adjustments for a serious player and shouldn't be used as a "model" for a "successful end-game character development system".

I have and I continue to cede that players should have more HP. This is obvious to anyone who's compared the game at 75 versus 99.

I do not, however, think that the other stats of races should be less-different just because they hold you back "100 points of dmg" on a WS.

No one cares about their STR, VIT, or anything else, they just don't wanna die instantly from bullshit attacks, thats all they are asking for...

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Originally Posted by Demon6324236

No one cares about their STR, VIT, or anything else, they just don't wanna die instantly from bullshit attacks, that's all they are asking for...

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No, it really isn't all they're asking for. Or else they would say (as its been said by me and at least one other person) that players need at least 5% HP across the board. This is about the other character stats, but people do not want to admit they think its the reason they do less DMG.

Here's my queue:
If everyone here has already agreed that players should all be at higher HP (since the scaling of HP is borked post-75)... then what's the argument about?
Or is HP not the only reason to be against race stat differences? I think Tarutaru having less STR/VIT than say, Hume; or Galka having less DEX/AGI than Mithra, is intentional and relevant to the game-world sociopolitical backdrop....

I can't speak for others, to me HP is very much the only reason. And increasing HP across the board will solve fuck all. That's not a solution, that's wasting development time. Because all that will happen is new mobs will be released that deal even more damage and the balance is completely broken again.

I've heard all I ever want to hear from you in this sentence:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

However, just because it sucks doesn't mean it needs to be fixed.

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If you truly believe that you should not be allowed to live with or near people or associate with them, because that mentality is an absolute danger to society. This is one of the dumbest hings I've heard people say on here, and that's from a board that allows Pchan, Starcade and Rosina talk uncensored.

If something sucks, not only should it be changed, but it must be changed. If you don't see why you're beyond help.

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Originally Posted by Byrth

This does not indicate that there is a non-0 ratio floor. Ratio has a minimum of 0 as long as monster attack is a positive number, and monster pDIF is different from Player pDIF. Similarly, player pDIF doesn't have a non-0 "floor."

In order to show that their Ratio is floored to a non-0 value, you'd have to:
1) Set yourself up with a certain VIT
2) Let them hit you enough that you're pretty sure you've seen their entire damage range
3) Increase your Defense without affecting your VIT
4) Show that their damage range is unchanged

Then you will have shown that they are Ratio floored. As a side-note, you'd need a monster with high enough base damage that you can detect small changes in their upper damage/swing limit even when you have very high defense.

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Melee data
BLU/SCH with 643 defense (wasn't trying for super high def) and 93 VIT. Target was a single 63~65 spider outside Whitegate

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33
17
17
31
32
32
48
49
17
22
38
18
37
17
27

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Two crits for 67 and 92 respectively.

No 0's, the monsters pDiffMin never got to 0 even though it's obviously under 0.5 and that monster sure as hell doesn't have 300+ attack.

You can't argue around this, once your pDiff hits 0.5 the pDiffMin should be 0 and you should get 0 damage hits. The monster could have a 9999 DMG weapon and if it's pDiff ends up being 0 then it'll hit for 0. Unless you want to argue that a number multiplied by 0 doesn't equal 0?

That was data for a single spider, I fought 9 others while testing out Blue spells, at no point in time did I see a single 0 damage hit. Those are level 63~65 WAR monsters without any form of attack / defense buff or debuff present, this is how I'm positive I was at more then 2x their attack.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

No, it really isn't all they're asking for. Or else they would say (as its been said by me and at least one other person) that players need at least 5% HP across the board. This is about the other character stats, but people do not want to admit they think its the reason they do less DMG.

Here's my queue:
If everyone here has already agreed that players should all be at higher HP (since the scaling of HP is borked post-75)... then what's the argument about?
Or is HP not the only reason to be against race stat differences? I think Tarutaru having less STR/VIT than say, Hume; or Galka having less DEX/AGI than Mithra, is intentional and relevant to the game-world sociopolitical backdrop....

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It's simple really. Many players rolled taru's back in the day either cause they were cute or they wanted to play mage jobs. That or they rolled Hume to "play it safe". That worked fine and was a great thing back then, I remember feeling a little regret on choosing Elvann due to the INT, DEX and MP hit I took.

Flash forward, it's now 2012 and melee spam with STR WS's is all the rage. Magic damage and MP has taken a decidedly smaller roll in the overall strategy of the game. Monsters now use high damage AoE attacks and you need high HP and a good DT/PDT set to survive. What used to be a liability is now a minor foot note, and what was a minor foot note has become a major bonus.

People who chose Taru, or even Hume want to get the benefits of Elvann / Galka without having to give anything up. An across the board HP boost would raise all boats and those players don't want that. They want to be "the best" and don't want their race becoming a liability.

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Originally Posted by saevel

Melee data

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Where's the second set of melee data that shows increasing defense does not continue to decrease damage? You aren't showing a ratio floor; you're showing that monster pDIF is different from player pDIF.

Also, what's your basis for saying the monster doesn't have 300+ attack? Every attempt to determine monster attack has returned much higher values than we expect based on the level/stats. Check out Ig-Alima, who has 1059 Attack "naked." That's approximately 2x what we'd expect a player wearing only a weapon to have.

Based on player calculations, we'd already estimate that level 65 spiders have about 280 attack (227 skill + 35 from STR + 8 base + 10 attack bonus 1). I'm pretty sure we can easily get another 20 out of whatever the difference between monster and player attack calculations are that inflate their attack so much, and it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to expect the spider's attack to be >400.

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Originally Posted by Byrth

Where's the second set of melee data that shows increasing defense does not continue to decrease damage? You aren't showing a ratio floor; you're showing that monster pDIF is different from player pDIF.

Also, what's your basis for saying the monster doesn't have 300+ attack? Every attempt to determine monster attack has returned much higher values than we expect based on the level/stats. Check out Ig-Alima, who has 1059 Attack "naked." That's approximately 2x what we'd expect a player wearing only a weapon to have.

Based on player calculations, we'd already estimate that level 65 spiders have about 280 attack (227 skill + 35 from STR + 8 base + 10 attack bonus 1). I'm pretty sure we can easily get another 20 out of whatever the difference between monster and player attack calculations are that inflate their attack so much, and it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to expect the spider's attack to be >400.

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Bulvine Scatology. Regular monsters do not have stupidly high attack, NM's are a different story. Regular monsters do not wear gear, eat food or use JA's. Their attack isn't that hard to estimate and a level 63~65 spider does not have over 300 attack and definitely not over 400.

I deliberately picked a target that would be easy to figure out it's attack and that I could just as easily get more then double it's attack in defense. I can go smack around level ~20 mobs (prevent fSTR from going to 0) and get the exact same results. I actually did this a LONG time ago as a 75 RDM/BLU on different levels mobs to see if there was a point at which adding more defense would help (cocoon + meat vs cocoon + taco for soloing stuff), the answer was no. Once your at slightly more then twice the monsters attack all additional defense means jack squat, it won't even overcome LCF as that seems to be applied after ratio floor.

This isn't that hard. Monsters have a ratio floor that is between 0.5 and ~0.8 with pDiffMin never going to 0, I'd estimate it to be between 0.25 and 0.4 as an absolute minimum.

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Originally Posted by Arcon

I can't speak for others, to me HP is very much the only reason. And increasing HP across the board will solve fuck all. That's not a solution, that's wasting development time. Because all that will happen is new mobs will be released that deal even more damage and the balance is completely broken again.

I've heard all I ever want to hear from you in this sentence:


If you truly believe that you should not be allowed to live with or near people or associate with them, because that mentality is an absolute danger to society. This is one of the dumbest hings I've heard people say on here, and that's from a board that allows Pchan, Starcade and Rosina talk uncensored.

If something sucks, not only should it be changed, but it must be changed. If you don't see why you're beyond help.

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You definitely misunderstood. I'm talking about the fact that some things suck (such as, Tarus get less STR) but that's the nature of the beast (read as: the choice you made). There's a difference between changing something because it is bad design, versus changing something because you dislike the design. If you willfully ignore that in attempt to make your rainbow world more realistic, then that's your right. But to somehow suggest that anything that sucks, even if it sucks based on your own choices, should be renegged is just unrealistic, immature, and equally dangerous to a society that has grown to believe that no action should have consequence.

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Originally Posted by saevel

Bulvine Scatology.

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I cringe every time I hear that. It's bovine, not bulvine. Use proper English instead of this bullshit.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

There's a difference between changing something because it is bad design, versus changing something because you dislike the design.

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Okay, but this is in fact bad design no matter how much you like it. Putting a decision on the start screen that will either enhance or fuck up your game play for the next 8-10 years is an incredibly mean thing to do. This is a video game. FFS it takes less time to change your major and move to a different college than it does to reroll from a friggin taru to a galka and rebuild just one melee job with a 90 e/r/m. You don't think that's a little bit too much pressure to put on a person the second they start a video game?

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Originally Posted by saevel

Bulvine Scatology. Regular monsters do not have stupidly high attack, NM's are a different story. Regular monsters do not wear gear, eat food or use JA's. Their attack isn't that hard to estimate and a level 63~65 spider does not have over 300 attack and definitely not over 400.

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Okay, so where is your proof?


Avatars use monster pDIF calculations. Avatar attack at 75 was 504.
kegsay.livejournal.com/5510.html


A naked WAR at 75 had about 350 attack with their Great Axe on.
276 Skill + 56 from STR (using 3/4 even though we know monsters technically use 1H weapons) + 8 base + 10 attack bonus = 350

I like the race stat things but i do wish we got a small amount of stats though i wish we had a guide in game .. i mean throwen in completely loss is bad

saevel:

For a proper test, you need a couple issues worked out. First you need a baseline run to get the base damage, and that baseline should give you a solid estimate of its attack as well.

If you think its attack is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 (+/-50 or so), set your defense to be 300 and get the range of damage it can do to you. 50-100 hits should be fine.

From that info you can determine its base damage, and from the range + base damage you can estimate its attack.

After that, you can do the run with the extremely high defense value so as to determine the full effects.


I will note that the data you provided does indicate some degree of flooring, due to the high frequency of the damage value of 17. Curiously enough, 17 damage is also one of the values of damage I took (depending on mob, though most mobs in a single area gave exactly the same value) when I guarded hits against various mobs years ago when I was playing around with levelling guard.

If I were to take a random guess, I'd figure it to be 25% of the mob's base damage rating.

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

Okay, but this is in fact bad design no matter how much you like it. Putting a decision on the start screen that will either enhance or fuck up your game play for the next 8-10 years is an incredibly mean thing to do. This is a video game. FFS it takes less time to change your major and move to a different college than it does to reroll from a friggin taru to a galka and rebuild just one melee job with a 90 e/r/m. You don't think that's a little bit too much pressure to put on a person the second they start a video game?

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I agree that re-rolling is unfeasible but the reason that it is more and more unrealistic is due to the tenure of the game. Don't get me wrong, I do not think anyone actually needs to re-roll to be good. If you're re-rolling because the lack of HP is holding you back, that's a game flaw. If you're re-rolling to get the extra STR... that isn't a flaw in the game, that's a personality issue where you want to maximize your potential while accepting no consequence or counter-positive.

Back in 2004-2005 re-rolling wasn't much of an issue... obviously with the amount of time the game has existed, re-rolling a character is a problem simply due to the amount of time needed to level the character's zone access and progress, let alone the job and gear.

Which leads me back to my point: mules should be able to share all gear (including Ex/Aug) because they all share the same account. I think mules also should, based on perhaps certain quests, share progress from the main account after meeting certain conditions (meaning you shouldn't have to redo RoZ/CoP for sky/sea, etc). And every race should recieve 5% HP bonus at a minimum. Personally I think 10% is more appropriate. Or, perhaps, the merits should be %HP rather than a static value (ie .1-15% versus 10-150 HP).

Re-rolling should be for name change or avatar change. The need to change race for HP is problematic, however changing race for the minor increase in another stat (such as STR or AGI) is not something that needs to be addressed as an issue.

Also, just to be clear, when I say "you" I am referring to any player; my intent is not to isolate you or imply a specific person.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

No, it really isn't all they're asking for.

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Perhaps you should go back through this thread and learn what they want because yeah, HP is about it... OP has not posted in 10 days, last post was on page 6, since then basically everyone who was posted has wanted HP changed, so far as I can tell they are all smart enough to not care about other stats, especially if it would mean since they want all stats flatlined, they get nothing, rather than just wanting and getting HP.

pretty much every final fantasy in the series has had this in one for or another. Certain ppl are better inclined to using various things. Some times its equipment types, some times magics, better at defending or attacking. Race differences are just another form of that. I don't want to see that change. Things should have a difference between them.

Other Final Fantasys are not Final Fantasy XI, they are not a MMO, they are not a game that has new content still coming after 10 years, they are not a game where people can choose to bring you or not, and they are not a game that allows the enemies to basically kill you in 1~2 hits in a real time situation no matter your gear or level. Other Final Fantasy games should almost never be used as an example for why something should work in this game or XIV because the rest are all Single-player JRPGs, this is a MMORPG, completely different genre and a whole different monster to tackle.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

If you're re-rolling to get the extra STR... that isn't a flaw in the game, that's a personality issue where you want to maximize your potential while accepting no consequence or counter-positive.

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Where do you get these ideas? Is this game owned / run by some educational institution? Since when is it required that all video games include lessons about sacrifice and reward or that every decision should have consequences? I don't need a video game to teach me that I can't have everything in life. Life does a sufficient job of that on it's own and I was fully capable of grasping that long before I ever picked this or any other game up. I hope this is true of everyone else playing this game as well.

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

Which leads me back to my point: mules should be able to share all gear (including Ex/Aug) because they all share the same account. I think mules also should, based on perhaps certain quests, share progress from the main account after meeting certain conditions (meaning you shouldn't have to redo RoZ/CoP for sky/sea, etc). And every race should receive 5% HP bonus at a minimum. Personally I think 10% is more appropriate. Or, perhaps, the merits should be %HP rather than a static value (ie .1-15% versus 10-150 HP).

Re-rolling should be for name change or avatar change. The need to change race for HP is problematic, however changing race for the minor increase in another stat (such as STR or AGI) is not something that needs to be addressed as an issue.

Also, just to be clear, when I say "you" I am referring to any player; my intent is not to isolate you or imply a specific person.

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Wouldn't it make more sense to just adjust the merits so that a fully merited taru has the same HP as a fully merited galka only it would take far more merits for a taru to reach that cap than a galka? If they did that for all stats, they could keep the Consequence / Benefit thing that people seem so in love with without making race choice a permanent pain in the ass. It would still be unfair to taru's because they lack in the only stat that people would really feel required to merit, but people seem to like the idea of getting screwed by picking a cute character instead of a big character so why not?

Basically, there are three categories of changes being brought up:

1. Flatline all stats across all races. Arguments for or against this change are pretty much inconsequential. Whether there are differences between the races or not is a pure design (artistic-level) decision, and changing this would be changing the "vision" the developers have of the game. It's not something you can argue for based on mechanics or past FFs or whatever. Essentially, there's no 'argument' to be made here, merely a note on preference.
   
2. Changes to base stats, excluding HP/MP. This is largely a minor change due to personal preferences of the "it would be nice if..." type, but there's still a valid argument to be made that weighting is imbalanced among the stats. Personally I'd probably argue for keeping the 28 point distribution*, but weight Chr at 0.5 per stat point, and Str at 1.5 per stat point. I can't see any significant relative difference in the value of the remaining stats.
   
3. Changes to HP/MP. Technically balanced with an 8 point sum between the two stats, but the 7/1 and 1/7 combinations (Galka and Taru) seem notably imbalanced compared to the others. If this were a game where you were restricted to specific jobs based on your race, this would be less of an issue, since clearly the jobs would be tailored to the races that could use them. However in a game where every race can be every job, and where not every job has some balanced value between HP and MP (ie: every job has HP, not every job has MP), the advantage/disadvantage to be had on the MP side is not properly balanced against HP. This is compounded further by the issues that have been brought up elsewhere.

* Just realized I'd posted my findings on point distributions elsewhere, but hadn't copied it here. Here's the writeup I did:

If you take all the 'grades' used to determine racial stats (A, B, C, etc) and convert them to numbers (1, 2, 3, etc), then every single race was built with the exact same number of points -- reminiscent of certain old RPG games, if you will.


Table for all the racial stat grades (pulled from the stat calculator page):

Code:

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                          HP MP StrDexVitAgiIntMndChr
// Hume                  D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D
raceGrades[0] = new Array(4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4);
// Elvaan                C  E  B  E  C  F  F  B  D
raceGrades[1] = new Array(3, 5, 2, 5, 3, 6, 6, 2, 4);
// Taru                  G  A  F  D  E  C  A  E  D
raceGrades[2] = new Array(7, 1, 6, 4, 5, 3, 1, 5, 4);
// Mithra                D  D  E  A  E  B  D  E  F
raceGrades[3] = new Array(4, 4, 5, 1, 5, 2, 4, 5, 6);
// Galka                  A  G  C  D  A  E  E  D  F
raceGrades[4] = new Array(1, 7, 3, 4, 1, 5, 5, 4, 6);

---

HP+MP always adds up to 8. The remaining stats always add up to 28.

Build-wise it may make more intuitive sense to reverse the numeric order, such that A is 7 and G is 1, thus indicating where you're spending most of your points. Totals remain the same.

Table with the numbers reversed, indicative of 'build cost'.

Code:

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                          HP MP StrDexVitAgiIntMndChr
// Hume                  D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D
raceGrades[0] = new Array(4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4);
// Elvaan                C  E  B  E  C  F  F  B  D
raceGrades[1] = new Array(5, 3, 6, 3, 5, 2, 2, 6, 4);
// Taru                  G  A  F  D  E  C  A  E  D
raceGrades[2] = new Array(1, 7, 2, 4, 3, 5, 7, 3, 4);
// Mithra                D  D  E  A  E  B  D  E  F
raceGrades[3] = new Array(4, 4, 3, 7, 3, 6, 4, 3, 2);
// Galka                  A  G  C  D  A  E  E  D  F
raceGrades[4] = new Array(7, 1, 5, 4, 7, 3, 3, 4, 2);

---

In terms of mathematical balancing, it works. Every race can be considered overall 'equal' because none of them have an advantage in the number of points spent.

The problem, of course, is that the stats themselves are not equal in value. If, for example, we assessed that HP was, point for point, worth twice as much as MP, then the weighted totals across the races would be:

Hume: 12
Elvaan: 13
Taru: 9
Mithra: 12
Galka 15

Similarly with something like Chr. Technically Mithra and Galka have given up a couple points in one stat to improve some of the others. However since Chr has such a low value in game, they end up with a net improvement in their total weighted score because what they gave up wasn't worth very much.


Obviously one must also consider the conditions of each assessment. If a mage is never getting hit, then a higher HP doesn't have much value, for example, but the value increases as the threat against the player increases. The value of MP, on the other hand, rapidly decreases as MP recovery improves, so the absolute value of MP depends on how much additional support is around. The issue is that those two conditions usually coincide: as the threat against any given player increases, the amount of support personnel required is also going to increase, which in turn devalues MP. So the relative HP:MP weighting shifts dramatically towards HP in endgame content.

So the current demand evolves from the conclusion that the overall weighted totals are no longer well balanced across the races, particularly in endgame. Non-endgame material doesn't see such a significant imbalance since the materials don't weight so heavily for or against any particular stat (though certain stats are still more valuable than others).

Addendum on weighting distribution for general stats:

If Str and Chr were evaluated based on a 1.5 and 0.5 weighting, respectively, the total points of stat distribution for the races would be:

Taru: 27
Hume: 28
Mithra: 28.5
Elvaan: 29
Galka: 29.5

To balance those all to 28 points would take something like:

Taru: +1 dex
Mithra: -1 int, +1 chr
Elvaan: -1 mnd or vit
Galka: -1 str

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

Wouldn't it make more sense to just adjust the merits so that a fully merited taru has the same HP as a fully merited galka only it would take far more merits for a taru to reach that cap than a galka? If they did that for all stats, they could keep the Consequence / Benefit thing that people seem so in love with without making race choice a permanent pain in the ass. It would still be unfair to taru's because they the only stat that people would really feel required to merit, but people seem to like the idea of getting screwed by picking a cute character instead of a big character so why not?

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This would be so great, everyone could merit everything to a super race level of stats too - you could have the HP and VIT of a Galka, the MP and INT of a Tarutaru, the STR/MND of an Elvaan, the DEX/AGI of a Mithra, and the CHR of a Hume. My only caveat would be that this should be a separate and new merit category from everything else.

And for game logic, here's this - you'd need to have beat CoP (and of course unlocked merits) to unlock these new merits, since you've "broken" your chains - the primary game logic for race differences if you will. There could even be a quest for it, and if it really kills people that hate Tarutaru or obsess about a game needing to be weighed down with morals and life lessons (aside from the standard "don't be a jerk" that happens when you play with other people), the quest or meriting could be harder for Tarutaru like everything else is in the game.

Flatlining the stats in this way, by bringing it to everyone's strengths, and by having a bit of game logic, will make the design easier to deal with since the devs won't have to worry about making another set of RSE at 99 that somehow is competitive with the wholly better gear we have now, nor will they have to worry about shutting out Tarutaru from entire events by making mobs hit too hard, nor have to worry about making Tarutaru actually have any amount of advantage to balance out the biggest disadvantage ever by making MP pools worthwhile or INT based magic damage competitive (although they should do this regardless) with melee jobs.

But I guess if making things even between races is so unpopular we can remove the quest and key items to open those weighted doors in Quicksand Caves, and start working on more ways to make life worse for anyone who isn't the Galka masterrace.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by FrankReynolds

Where do you get these ideas? Is this game owned / run by some educational institution? Since when is it required that all video games include lessons about sacrifice and reward or that every decision should have consequences? I don't need a video game to teach me that I can't have everything in life. Life does a sufficient job of that on it's own and I was fully capable of grasping that long before I ever picked this or any other game up. I hope this is true of everyone else playing this game as well.



Wouldn't it make more sense to just adjust the merits so that a fully merited taru has the same HP as a fully merited galka only it would take far more merits for a taru to reach that cap than a galka? If they did that for all stats, they could keep the Consequence / Benefit thing that people seem so in love with without making race choice a permanent pain in the ass. It would still be unfair to taru's because they lack in the only stat that people would really feel required to merit, but people seem to like the idea of getting screwed by picking a cute character instead of a big character so why not?

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You're still trying to sell me on the idea of making it possible for "Player A" regardless of race, have the same stats (not counting gear) as every other Player.
And that's the single idea that I will refuse to bend on. To keep it simple, a fully merited Taru should not, under any circumstances, be able to have equal HP or STR or VIT or whatnot, of a fully merited Elvaan. Period.

Yes everyone needs more HP.
Yes we should have better-organized and designed merits (I'm looking at you, RDM).
No, we should not make it so that race is purely cosmetic.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

No, we should not make it so that race is purely cosmetic.

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Why is this a bad thing? Game changing, permanent stats should not be tied to physical appearance.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

No, we should not make it so that race is purely cosmetic.

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You can't say what we should or shouldn't do, because this is simply a matter of opinion. You think variation is good, others think it's pointless. Yet others think there's a useful middle ground.

Increasing HP across the board would not help at all, it's not a solution to this problem. A solution would be to diminish the difference between the races. Leave some difference there for people who want to be special snowflakes, but make the races functionally similar. HP is the only outlier in this regard. The difference in HP is currently at about 30% while the MP difference is at up to 50% (between Galka and Tarutaru), while all other stats hover in the 10% range. And that's despite HP/MP being a lot more relevant and noticeable. If Tarutaru's advantage in MP would be reduced to 10% and HP disadvantage reduced to 10% it would already be a huge help, and it would still be a larger difference than all other stats.

It's a safe rule of thumb that on the internet, "yes" and "no" are 99/100 opinion, so I'm saving the few characters of typing "in my opinion" after each yea or nay.

As far as races, and we agree that we're now talking about stats -other- than HP and MP:
The game did change dramatically, however you can't just say "well guys, its been a nice run, but since we don't need all this MP anymore let's just change it into HP so that we don't suffer any of the penalties as DD, that everyone else did playing mage all these years".

You're not talking into account that these stats are both positive and negative. Mithra naturally excelled as both Thieves and Rangers, and were supposed to based on the role of their race in Vana'diel. The same applies to Tarutaru, who throughout lore sacrificed great physical strength for magic power.

So should any willy-nilly Elvaan or Galka be on equal footing to a Mithra as a THF or RNG (or NIN, by extension)? Or any Galka or Hume be able to out-nuke a Taru? The idea that "everyone is equal" and "everyone can do whatever he or she wants to" is all well and good, but it contradicts the entire premise of having different races.

(The lack of significant importance to magic damage hurt everyone equally, so that is not an unfair swipe against Tarus. However the need for significant HP to survive attacks has always been the bane of being a Taru. The problem is not how little HP Taru have, but rather how minute the increases in HP between 75-99, and that also affected everyone.)

Again, we keep going back to HP/MP, but I've already said that should be handled on the side. We're really talking about STR/VIT/DEX/AGI/MND/INT/CHR now, and those were tilted one way or another to offer diversity... and it does. The game might have changed to tilt HP and MP one way or another, but the remaining stats have remained somewhat true to form (*cough* CHR on DRK WS...).

To emphasize... again... for HP... everyone should get substantially more than they have now; but by increasing it across the board racial alignment becomes unnecessary.

Lastly, permanent stats are not tied to physical appearance, they are tied to race-as is the case in virtually every RPG...ever. The appearance is chosen after the race. You can't deliberately switch the two in attempt to argue that appearance somehow affects gameplay, because it doesn't.

No. If you increase HP across the board then SE will keep making monsters that can kill Galkas with WS+melee hit (and thus one-shot a Taru). We need to bring the HP of frontline jobs close together so that they can design monsters that are difficult but don't alienate one of the more popular races.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

As far as races, and we agree that we're now talking about stats -other- than HP and MP:
The game did change dramatically, however you can't just say "well guys, its been a nice run, but since we don't need all this MP anymore let's just change it into HP so that we don't suffer any of the penalties as DD, that everyone else did playing mage all these years".

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Actually you can. They pretty much do that to some group or another every single time they change something. That's why you don't full time B.Haidates any more or grind for 7,000 hours to get one level anymore. Does it suck a little for the people who lived through the shitty part? Yeah, a little. But not nearly as bad as continuing to endure the shitty part for all eternity. Wishing that others suffer just because you have suffered is quite a problem don't you think?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

You're not talking into account that these stats are both positive and negative. Mithra naturally excelled as both Thieves and Rangers, and were supposed to based on the role of their race in Vana'diel. The same applies to Tarutaru, who throughout lore sacrificed great physical strength for magic power.

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I'm taking into account the positive and the negative. I don't like either.

They can rewrite this whole thing with robots and gummy bears as the main characters if they want or make everyone talk like Samuel L. Jackson. There are a million things in the lore that are inconsistent with the way the game actually works anyways. Don't try to take issue with this one minor inconsistency just because it suites you.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

So should any willy-nilly Elvaan or Galka be on equal footing to a Mithra as a THF or RNG (or NIN, by extension)? Or any Galka or Hume be able to out-nuke a Taru? The idea that "everyone is equal" and "everyone can do whatever he or she wants to" is all well and good, but it contradicts the entire premise of having different races.

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How do you know that they didn't just make the different races to fit the story line? What makes you so sure that they must have designed different races just to meet someones desire for different stats being permanently placed in the game? Every piece of fiction of this nature that I have ever read has featured different races like elves and dwarfs and crap. Sometime the dwarfs are crazy tough warriors. Sometimes the elves are tiny. Sometimes they're huge. Sometimes the cat people are magicians. Sometimes they are too stupid to fit any job really. Who are you to say what that JP guy was thinking when he wrote that stuff? What makes you think that the guy who wrote the lore knew anything about how stats work at all?

In my personal opinion, the people who wrote the story line and the people who designed the stat / battle system probably didn't give each other requirements like that. I suspect that someone wrote a cool back story and then some other guy went "oh, cool. I guess I'll give elves some of this and tarus some of that". I doubt that he ever really considered whether or not that would make the game fun. How could he possibly know that it would be annoying the crap out of people who were stuck with that crap 10 years later? Do you really think he would be too married to it to change it? Because, he is considering it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Llana_Virren

Lastly, permanent stats are not tied to physical appearance, they are tied to race-as is the case in virtually every RPG...ever. The appearance is chosen after the race. You can't deliberately switch the two in attempt to argue that appearance somehow affects gameplay, because it doesn't.

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You didn't notice that the races all look different from eachother? Or are we having a misunderstanding about the definition of appearance? And again, who cares about what other RPGs are doing? I don't pay them money. They don't make FFXI. In Halo I can dominate the rocket launcher and PWN your face all day. That is not allowed in this game. Should they add it just because some other game did it?

Perhaps a solution could be to add merits that were inversely proportiona(or something)? The less HP you have, the more HP the merit would give you per point put in it. Then do the same with all the other base stats as well.

Every race could still increase any stat they wanted, but a galka wanting to raise his HP further would get less out of it than if he had increased MP, and less out of it than a taru putting the same amount of points in HP.

There could be some sort of formula developed to control how much of each stat you'd get. I wouldn't know what it would be like cause i'm no mathematician.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Byrth

No. If you increase HP across the board then SE will keep making monsters that can kill Galkas with WS+melee hit (and thus one-shot a Taru). We need to bring the HP of frontline jobs close together so that they can design monsters that are difficult but don't alienate one of the more popular races.

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As a premise I would agree, that all "WAR" would have one value for base HP, all "WHM" or "BLM" their own, job-dependent HP value. The issue however isn't with HP so much as the other stats. We already agreed that players need more HP. (And yes, I'd also bet that SE would just get up and make even more retarded NM moves to account for the HP increase... because, well, SE is retarded like that).

The problem (as I see it... better?) is that the argument is that all "WARs" (for example) should have matching base stats for everything (no consideration for Race stats), not only for HP.

Frank says he doesn't like Race-affiliated stats, and he is correct that not every RPG maintains the same "lore" for what Races are (or even what constitutes its own Race, for example Elf versus Wood Elf versus Dark Elf versus Changling, versus et cetera ad nausium). However I did not say that SE did this with FFXI to appease any individual, but rather they took the "model" and put their own twist on it. And traditionally in Final Fantasy, smaller characters (usually denoted by job, Race or age) had lower HP but with job-based stats. So to use that as a model, a Taru WAR could in theory have higher attack than an Elvaan WAR ... but still significantly less HP.

The proposal is to make it so that Races served no purpose beyond cosmetics, and I think that in order to do that, you have to say that Races should serve no purpose. It is specifically this point with which I disagree, based on the precept of what a Race is and how it correlates to the RPG environment.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Camate

Greetings everyone!

There seems to be a large discussion going on over on the Japanese forums in regards to this topic as well!

Here is a comment from Producer Akihiko Matsui:

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There is problems when you get "You can't play pld because you do not have enough hp to live though an attack. After putting all that DT, MDB and so on you only have enough room to do so much to pad hp.

(Kinda taking a comment of someone else posted here about there being problems because HP values are too low for the current mobs.)

I am a taru mage but I pad Hp because 90 hp might prevent me getting one-shotted.

Max mp is meaningless anyway because of how people can control MP management and MP restore. So if max Mp is meaningless, then it tilts an imbalanced favor for max hp because HP is meaningful in this game.

I also feel STR for melee is tilted more for melee effects then INT is for mages. So then you have an imbalance of liking melee setups/races as apposed to mages. All zerg strategies are melee orientated because buffs pad them better. So you have those imbalances too.