Thoughts on Elemental Magic Adjustments

Greetings,

We've been seeing feedback stating that the frontline jobs are the ones that are really receiving the benefit from weapons with item levels, and that elemental magic is suffering as many feel the spell damage is not increasing much for higher tier magic. Due to this, the trend is to repeatedly use lower tier magic, which is causing TP to be fed to enemies at a higher rate. The development team is aware of the situation and below is a comment from Akihiko Matsui who shares some insight into development ideas.

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Originally Posted by Akihiko_Matsui

Matsui here.

We definitely think feeding TP to enemies by only using certain spells repeatedly, which in turn makes it difficult to use these spells, is not very desirable.

On one hand though, there is a trade-off between using tier I spells and higher tier spells, including the TP amount given to enemies, and we would like to avoid any situations where constantly casting tier I spells would be optimal.

Also, as there would need to be balance adjustments between physical damage dealt by frontline jobs if we simply made adjustments to elemental magic by reducing the TP given to enemies or increasing the power of the spells, the development team would like to look into these adjustments details closely.

While this is only what the development team is thinking at the moment, they are aiming to improve the usability of elemental magic spells instead of simply boosting the power. As an example, they are considering methods such as reducing the enmity, MP cost, casting time, and recast time for high tier elemental magic.

Again, please note that these are only provisional ideas and I just wanted to let you know for reference.

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While I am sure everyone will disagree with me, another way you can help Elemental Magic is to do something about Formless Strikes, possibly nerfing or removing it. You gave us the Elemental update months ago with Delve so far as I recall, or right around it, which was great, the issue however with BLMs and such being invited for DMG is that even when we need Magic Damage, we do not look to mages, we look to MNKs who can use a single ability and pump out more Magic Damage than the mages can due to high haste buffs.

Another way you could help mages would be to shorten the delay post-cast based on the casters Fast Cast and Recast Reduction effects, allowing for overall faster casting. One of the larger issues with mages DDing is that we don't get nearly the same type of buffs or as powerful of buffs as frontline DDs, DDs can increase their attack speed by up to 80%, mages can do the same with casting time but without buffs, however have a 2 second delay on top of their cast time which can never be prevented, and few powerful buffs to Magic Attack, Magic Accuracy or INT, where as Attack, Accuracy, Double Attack, and the like are all found in basically every support job. If you add more buffs, a Magic Attack song category for instance, a reduction to the 2 second delay based on Fast Cast, and that kind of stuff, we might see BLMs and such actually brought to DD, for now, its Skirmish only really so far as I can tell, which isn't bad, but its only 1 event sadly.

This is probably going to be "bang head against wall" stupid to some people, but why not have higher tiers of spell include - effectively - a Subtle Blow bonus as part of the adjustment? (For example, drop it from a flat 10TP/spell to 9TP for tier 2 spells, 8TP for tier 3 spells, 7TP for tier 4 spells and tier 1 AM, and 6TP for tier 5 spells and tier 2 AM.)

Assuming that - say - Fire V does 50% more damage than Fire, this boosts the amount of damage dealt per 30% TP given from (arbitrary number here) using Fire to (2.5x that arbitrary number) using Fire V. (For example, if Fire does 1600 damage and Fire V does 2400 damage, you'd get 4800 damage/30 TP from Fire, vs. 12,000 damage/30 TP from Fire V - since it takes five casts of Fire V to generate the same amount of TP as three casts of Fire. You could also just cast it the same number of times and generate less TP, if that's the concern vs. damage output per enemy move.)

Obviously this isn't meant to be the sole solution, but I think it's probably worthwhile to include as part of the adjustments being made.

Could always nuke in subtle blow gear, lol

It's still kinda silly. I mean for a long time nuking was more tp feed efficient because you'd nuke with big nukes but now you are chaining small ones not so much. On top of that what about other spells like blu. Is it really balanced that a blu spell gives a mob 80 tp while doign way less dmg than a thf ws that gives 6?

Also it's about time you made innin work on blm/nin!

Well, apart from the fact that magic damage is pretty TP efficient even at 10 damage/nuke, and ignoring the fact that dAGI's affect on TP + stat vomit on gear probably means that we don't nuke for 10 TP/nuke anymore, and further ignoring the fact that subtle blow gear has always been an option even for mage jobs in situations where it's important (RDMs used to use it for chainspelling Rapido), .... TP feeding generally doesn't matter in any group situation where using magic as a damage source is strategically advantageous.

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Originally Posted by Byrth

Well, apart from the fact that magic damage is pretty TP efficient even at 10 damage/nuke, and ignoring the fact that dAGI's affect on TP + stat vomit on gear probably means that we don't nuke for 10 TP/nuke anymore, and further ignoring the fact that subtle blow gear has always been an option even for mage jobs in situations where it's important (RDMs used to use it for chainspelling Rapido), .... TP feeding generally doesn't matter in any group situation where using magic as a damage source is strategically advantageous.

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True. Thinking about it, I kind of misspoke when I said "a Subtle Blow bonus" in there. The idea was actually to lower the base TP before Subtle Blow was applied, so Subtle Blow +50 would drop tier-5 spells down to 3TP/spell. It's still obviously not meant to be the sole solution, but as part of a comprehensive fix it's at least something for the devs to consider carefully before dismissing out of hand because it came from the NA players.

I'm glad to see this is being looked into.

If you want higher tier nukes to be good:
Current: magic dmg=base+m.dmg+[modifier[dINT]]
New: magic dmg=base+[modifier[dINT+m.dmg]]
where modifier cannot = 0. and is dependent on dINT & spell.
That way, the effect of magic damage increases with spell tier.

Personally I would like spells of the same tier to all be the same damage & cost. That way it's less about which is more mp efficient or potent and more about exploiting the enemy's weakness or magic bursting off a skillchain.

Do that, add some songs/rolls that boost mage damage similar to how they do for DD.
(double attack = occasionally deals double magic dmg)
(attack = m.dmg)
(haste... could just leave it as haste & remove the after-cast delay & give a casting time- buff)