Enemy Debuffs In Current Endgame

Thankfully we are seeing some changes to endgame content to make meleeing a bit less stressful. However, I still see many complaints about the debuffs that enemies use so I thought I would provide a little advice.

The example I'm mostly going to reference is one that actually happened just this evening. Me and a few LSmates have been throwing our faces @ Golden Kist the past few days, as it's the last T1 kill we needed. He's universally accepted as the hardest (read: most annoying) Reisenjima T1 NM. If you've never fought him, you'll quickly understand this global opinion once you do. Keep in mind here, my LS is extremely anti-bring-only-the-most-useful-jobs, and playing the job you want to play, no matter what job that is, is praised. We got our Golden Kist kill tonight, and it was probably the most epic thing I've done in the game in a long long time. Wish I had recorded it. Anyway, we went tonight and trioed him. Myself as RDM/NIN, and my friends a SMN and COR. The Trusts almost always die very early in the fight. Even if they don't die at the start, they absolutely will not live through Manafont which happens many times throughout the fight. So we trioed this without trusts. It was a super fun experience.

Okay okay anyway enough bragging, that's not why I'm here. My point is, I use my Barelement and Barstatus spells religiously. They are very important to me. I'm not sure how widely known this fact is, but Barelement spells actually also help protect you from status ailments. In regards to Golden Kist, I was using Barpoison and Barwater since poison is of the water element. Barthunder would probably help against his AOE Stun as well. However, ever since the Staunch Tathlum came out, I've been testing wearing it full time.

And I love it. All of my other ammo/ranged items are now in storage. I mean, how much does 1% triple attack or 10 accuracy or whatever matter, when you're slowed, paralyzed, amnesiaed, or whatever? There's no way the other melee is going to out damage me using his regular ammo while he's debuffed. Ammo stats aren't that spectacular to begin with. So I've noticed when I do content and see a Paralyga or Silencega come out, I watch as everyone else gets debuffs and I resist them quite frequently.

Back on the subject of Golden Kist, his Death Trap move is an AOE Stun+Poison. The poison ticks for 200 so it needs be dealt with promptly. A Remedy works of course, but you're stunned (the internets say the stun lasts for up to 20 seconds but mine never seemed to last more than like 10 I think?) so it's going to hurt some either way. After the kill tonight, I asked my friends how often Death Trap gave them poison, and they said 100%.

Well, I'm here to announce that tonight, during our win, Death Trap poisoned me a total of zero times. ZERO! He was usually poisoning me once per attempt, but it never landed once on our final attempt. Not once.

So here's my thoughts on this whole enemy debuff thing. Don't be afraid to sacrifice a little DPS for utility. It can be a game changer, and it's beyond worth it. There are tons of items in the game that provide resistances to various status effects and the results I've had from using the new tathlum make me want to experiment with them.

That said, I do believe that the degree of enemy debuffs could be made a little bit easier on the community. For example, Traits could possibly become a little better. I've also thought it would be neat if those Traits were improved via our job specific equipment like Artifact or Empyrean. You never really see any Resists on any of our normal equipment, it's always a separate piece with probably no other stats so it never gets used. To be fair though, most of the Resist gear goes in accessory type slots so they make less of an impact on your overall performance. I've seen others suggest SE give RDM group Barspells, but I feel that could be a little overpowered. I suppose I could see since RDM is supposed to be the king of debuffs them giving us group Barstatus spells, but not Barelement.

If you have any other ideas or suggestions, and especially advice, feel free to post it here. However, please refrain from imposing the argument about this problem being solved by not bringing melees to content and only using mages - it's been discussed in many threads on many different forums already. Thanks. :)

Rooj I love most of your posts and your way of thinking/playing this game. The problem with your suggestion is not its validity. The problem with your suggestion is that nobody on these forums will try it. They don't want fixes that are already available . They don't want to sacrifice ANYTHING. They want SE to take away debuffs all together, or at the most make a mob debuff them once per fight. They want SE to make the game easier for them. Yes, I'm a bit jaded, but this community has made me that way.

Honestly the biggest mistake they ever made was allowing scholar to skillchain, that was so incredibly silly.

Not this SCH sc crap again. You started another thread entirely about that, so can you keep the argument there please?

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Originally Posted by Zeldar

Not this SCH sc crap again. You started another thread entirely about that, so can you keep the argument there please?

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You're really the only one arguing against it. It's no secret that it's broken.

The only 1 out of what, five? Put 1 intelligent person in a room with four retards and the one guys will say steak is better for you, while the retards will say Doritos are better for you "cuz dey tase gud." The others are smarter than I am and devote their time to playing the game instead of wasting it with you bull-headed idiots. Perhaps I need to learn from them. And yes, I do realize I'm a jackass and that I'll probably get forum banned for this. I'm beyond the point of caring anymore.

Melee making a skillchain feeds the monster TP, this can lead to all manner of nonense.
Melee takes damage from monster and needs a healer.
Melee need to be babysat from all debuffs etc
Melee can miss.

Scholar needs no healer, scholar feeds very little TP, is out of range of debuffs and attacks. Also they can't miss.

Who would take a melee if they can get a scholar on serious mobs?

Back in the day I was asked to level sam in order to setup skillchains for Nidhogg, Tiamat, sandworm etc You know what I would of 100% been asked to level if this system was in place back then? You know how many melee would of been in my hnmls if a scholar could of setup skillchains?

Everything in this game usually has a plus and a negative, for scholar this is not there. It's all positives.

What I would of done with scholar is make it so that using a scholar to skillchain makes the monster take 20% less damage from the resulting magic bursts, that mean you do less damage but you have an easier fight. Positive and a negative.

I see no reason that Immanence was brought up here while simultaneously having an active thread but yeah it's a pretty broken ability.

There's no reason to call people names.

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Rooj, I know this isn't the takeaway that you wanted someone to take from this, but you've been here for a few months telling everyone The Game Is Fine, and just announced you just finished Reisenjima Tier 1.

I do wholeheartedly agree with playing defensively more often than most people do (It's the paladin in me, I guess). I've said it before but a live 6-hit build will outdps a dead 4-hit build. There are fights were you can zerg, fights where you can play semi-cautiously (maybe you don't get to ride Berserk), fights where you swap to -dt gear for certain spells/periods, and the occasional fight where you might want to sit in some -PDT/DT gear. Maybe the usefulness of this will change with the change to AoEs.

Some jobs, like BLM, I can't understand why more people don't fulltime -dt gear in certain slots while not casting. If you can't get refresh in the slot, there's no justification for not wearing -dt/-pdt. You should also have a set that sacrifices everything to cap pdt/mdt (while not casting) because sometimes that's what the fight calls for. I know BLMs who have defending ring and never use it on BLM.

Yeah, most the time when we bar against a status, we bar against the matching element (baramnesra/barfira, barpara/barblizzara) for the reasons you mentioned, however sometimes its more useful for the bars to contrast, when the NM's main element and main status ailment conflict.

A two-stage skillchain (created by two Weapon Skills) will result in a 160% increase in magic damage on the magic burst.
All stages beyond that will result in an additional 10% damage increase on magic bursted spells (a three-stage skillchain will yield a 170% damage increase, four-stage will yield a 180% damage increase, etc.).

There you go. You asked and they provided.....a long time ago! Not to mention that a multi-stage skillchain allows for multiple spots throughout the process for a mage to burst. As I stated on the other discussion, in a 3 part SC I can burst 3-4 times, where on a SCH sc I can only burst twice.

And the negatives for SCH sc: A lot less damage. Negligible if the mages are killing it in 1 volley of bursts, sure. There are also plenty of mobs that either negate (hydras), absorb (tons of different mobs), avoid (any mob with shadows) or are impacted in others ways by magic damage. Some mobs rage when you hit them with a certain element. You said its all positive. Well here are some negatives. They can be overcome in certain ways, but so can the negatives for DDs.

Can't really disagree with debuff spam being an issue for more melee-oriented characters. Received damage is also a thing, but I guess we'll wait and see how they feel about the current tweaks in Ambuscade before applying them globally.

Otherwise, there are a few things that could happen...

Mob End:
- Diminish the accuracy of a debuff based on the potential number of targets it would hit.
- Add cooldowns to select TP moves so they can't be used in rapid succession.
- Revisit Subtle Blow and/or melee TP feed.

Player End:
- Make all status cures AoE by default.
- When cured of a debuff, gain a temporary resistance to its effect that diminishes over time.
- Improve the effect of elemental and status resistances.
- Holy Waters always remove doom/curse/zombie.
- Remedies adjusted to remove everything and possibly stack to 99.
- Add more resistance friendly gear or a means to augment existing items without sacrificing current values.
- Add more ways to better control a mob's TP gain (ex: Plague) and hinder their potency/ready time (Addle for TP moves).

Otherwise, some of the other factors to the anti-melee status was the bonkers evasion of high level content and the general trivialization of BRD and COR in the wake of GEO. Tweaking evasion ratings like they did with this patch is a step in the right direction, but I'd argue the content isn't terribly entry level friendly with the earlier phases of progression largely being "done" by other vets with little incentive to backtrack. Of course, this segues into how solo friendly things should be, which not everyone is keen on.

I would be happy even if one or two things in Sertha's post were implemented. For me I would at least be happy if they gave us two things:

1) Mallets: A consumable to clear amnesia. It's only fair since mages get echo drops. Though SE has been pretty stubborn about not giving us a consumable for amnesia for some reason.

2) Diminishing Returns on status effects. As an example, say that you're against an NM that spams an AoE Slow, and there's a DR for Slow that lasts 3 mins. If hit a second time with Slow within that time period, it is half duration. If hit 3 or more times within 3 mins, it is completely resisted. After the 3 mins the DR resets and the next Slow is full duration again. This is fairly common as a balance element in many MMOs, so it might be a good addition to FFXI as well.

I'm not going to hold my breath for either lol.. But it would be nice.

Isn't the death trap AoE large enough that you can't avoid getting hit anyway, negating one of the biggest advantages of SCH? Not sure why Zeldar even brought it up. Its advantage in this fight is just being able to create a SC instantly when Kist uses Manafont but I don't see why a melee couldn't. I just don't bring melee to that fight because you want elemental damage to remove Zombie.

Congratulations to OP for using correct bar spells and resisting Poison. Not to rip on OP too much but it's kinda like a guy wearing a baseball cap saying "when I turn it around, the visor protects my eyes from the sun!" I just feel that it's super obvious to use bar spells during fights. You didn't mention equipping any special resist gear (such as the cape dropped by that very mob) for your fight right? Sorry if I am missing something super obvious.

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Originally Posted by detlef

Not to rip on OP too much but it's kinda like a guy wearing a baseball cap saying "when I turn it around, the visor protects my eyes from the sun!"

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You'd be surprised.
http://catmato.com/img/misc/hat-fail.jpg

LMAO

Also, your Barspells mean poop without Enhancing Magic skill. And I forgot to mention that there are Cheers that provide status ailment resistance, I know of Resist Amnesia +10 in particular.

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Originally Posted by Rooj

I still see many complaints about the debuffs that enemies use so I thought I would provide a little advice.

The example I'm mostly going to reference is one that actually happened just this evening. Me and a few LSmates have been throwing our faces @ Golden Kist the past few days, as it's the last T1 kill we needed. He's universally accepted as the hardest (read: most annoying) Reisenjima T1 NM.

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Golden Kist is the toughest of the T1s, sure, but he's clearable by, most of the population that actually does Escha/Reisenjima, when people are complaining about current endgame being too hard, he's not even what people are considering part of the problem, that's what's so humorous about this post in the first place, though he is a decent example of why melee aren't used in the even harder stuff.

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Originally Posted by Rooj

My point is, I use my Barelement and Barstatus spells religiously. --- I'm not sure how widely known this fact is, but Barelement spells actually also help protect you from status ailments. --- I was using Barpoison and Barwater since poison is of the water element.

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I thought it was pretty widely known that Barelement spells help prevent their related element's status effects, using them, along with Indi-Attunement and Geo-Vex can be quite effective at resisting the lower-level NMs status ailments, however, as the NM levels rise, it becomes quite difficult to resist, even with resist sets (which will harm a DD's ability to DD quite a bit when using).

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Originally Posted by Rooj

However, ever since the Staunch Tathlum came out, I've been testing wearing it full time.

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Staunch Tathlum is a GREAT piece, I wouldn't go so far as to say I fulltime it, but, I certainly wear it a lot, I melee in it a lot, even, but the issue is, from what I can tell, if that's one of the harder mobs you've done, is that you've yet to hit the mobs that really trump your gear/buffs in terms of Macc vs Meva.

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Originally Posted by Rooj

So here's my thoughts on this whole enemy debuff thing. Don't be afraid to sacrifice a little DPS for utility.

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Blu says hi, the community has already more than shown they're happy to sacrifice some DPS for utility, or Blu wouldn't be as popular as it is, there are multiple jobs who, with tuned situations definitely outdamage Blu, but Blu brings so much utility to the table, which is why it's as popular as it is.

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Originally Posted by Rooj

That said, I do believe that the degree of enemy debuffs could be made a little bit easier on the community. For example, Traits could possibly become a little better. I've also thought it would be neat if those Traits were improved via our job specific equipment like Artifact or Empyrean. You never really see any Resists on any of our normal equipment, it's always a separate piece with probably no other stats so it never gets used. To be fair though, most of the Resist gear goes in accessory type slots so they make less of an impact on your overall performance.

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I think the vast majority of us agree that melees are in a poor spot in endgame, and something should be done, adding more resist traits to gear might not be a bad thing, but Magic Evasion is already on all of that gear, resist is just effectively a more targetted version of that.

Last night we were attempting Warder of Courage again, when it uses Soul Voice, it becomes extremely hard to deal with, keep in mind, we were using a Run tank, with all Charm Resistance gear, a Geo with Vex/Attune up, and a Bard with Light Carol II (who had soul voice buffed then dropped party before the pop) the Geo even 2hred (After the charm buffer the tank used wore), we resisted a good portion of charms, each time, but eventually one landed on the Run, and once that happened, noone else really had a chance of resisting, this has happened on every attempt, we can deal with all of it's other moves, (though Benediction can be annoying) charm is what really always seems derail us, we've also tried tanking it with a Pld using charm buffer and then fealty, with no success there either.

I think that Remedies should work through paralyze. You shouldn't have to sit there re-using it 30 times on a potent para.

I don't understand why people would have a problem with players getting proper diminishing returns on enfeebles cast on them. Especially in the cases of amnesia or encumber, they're typically attached to spammable TP moves and there is almost nothing you can do to combat that. The moment they wear they'll get reapplied for full duration or close to it. It is infuriating. I can tolerate enfeebles I can remove like para/slow/silence/etc, but lockdown enfeebles like Amnesia/Encumber/etc are just garbage.

I think you could alleviate some frustration if you gave people amnesia/encumber removal consumables and allowed all consumables to work through para (remedies at the very least).

^ Agree, but also, charm!!!! ^

Hmmm, a gradual resistance isn't a bad idea. Mobs have it, why not us? After a while, debuffs stop landing due to the mob building a gradual tolerance to that debuff. Giving it to players as well isn't a bad idea at all.

Actually forget to touch on AoE Dispels in my last post. Those can probably be considered the worst debuff of them all, especially when they clear everything. I know one of the RDM ideas I had in the past involved a spell that would absorb Dispel attempts. However, unless it handled multiple attacks (like Utsu), it'd still fall to spam if RNG hates you.

Mass Dispel, as a RDM, is by far my worst enemy. I'd rather be Amnesiaed x10000000.