Suggestion: Merits and Job Points

So, the time has come and passed now for which we've had a cap on merits and job points alike. In this post, I would like to throw out some suggestions for players to discuss and for devs to take into consideration.

Firstly, personally I would like to see an increase in the currently available merit categories. We have a cap of groups 1 & 2, and have so for years. With the increasing strength of all monsters, we are given gear with often impressive stats which work well in today's game. However, there are no improvements for the jobs themselves, thus leaving to to either join the grind or get left behind. Naturally, there will always be that separation between players which is good for a competitive nature (especially on populated servers), it's what drives players to better themselves. Improvements in the merits section, would not only improve job morale (I know...corny), but improve player performance with or without higher tier 'end game' equipment.

Alright, I'll get to it.

Groups 1 & 2 should be given unlock features, a soft cap of 20 and a hard cap of 30 after acquiring Master status. Perhaps simultaneously or each given a separate unlock by job points. I will explain once onto the Job Points suggestions

Each category within the groups should also be given a cap of 15. So much has changed since the level 75 cap days where 5 has been the max that this is only fitting.

Well...a very short explanation of merit caps. Everyone can visualize their job's categories without explanation. Moving on...

Job Points

Alright! You've worked hard in and out of CP campaigns, acquired Master status, geared yourself along the way the best you could and engaged in all the 'end game' content you could get yourself into. But you just keep acquiring those now useless job points...all the way up to 500. Wouldn't it be nice if you could do something with them? Well, here's an idea!

Let's not make it as simple as you'd hope...even if you have 500. SE loves to make us grind, so these suggestions may be right up their ally. Personally, I'm not fond of grinding, but figured the devs may take this into consideration if I state suggestions this way.

Allow an unlock of either Merit Points Group and one category at the cost of 500 job points. You do not have to cap this category, but you will have to spend 100 job points to unlock a second category. After you have reached a soft cap of 20 through this group, you are not eligible to unlock the 30 cap or unlock the other group and one category at the cost of...yes, another 500 Job Points, 100 per category . Sadistic!

How fun!

I'm going to offer a softer version of this to appease those who like little work with great reward.

Offer each of these Merit Group increases as Job points similar to the current 0/20 of course with the same unlock fee to avoid automatic cap of corresponding categories upon doing so. Must obtain Master status in order to have access to unlocks.

Happy discussion

I would like to add another suggestion about Job Points:

Could you guys at SE please make it so that we can see how many current job points we have spent in any given job total, instead of having to manually count them up? I hate spending job points, and not knowing how many more until I get my next Gift.

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Originally Posted by Aysha

I would like to add another suggestion about Job Points:

Could you guys at SE please make it so that we can see how many current job points we have spent in any given job total, instead of having to manually count them up? I hate spending job points, and not knowing how many more until I get my next Gift.

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It literally says how many you spent on the gift page, so...

http://i63.tinypic.com/2mr8lrb.png

Wait......what? How do you access the gift page? lol.

Must have been some button that I never saw on the UI before.

Sorry about stupid question, but I've never noticed a "Gifts" button in the Job Point UI before.... shows how archaic the UI actually is, lol.

EDIT: GAH! Those tiny little red arrows... I never noticed them. I figured the left and right arrows would swap between different jobs' job point screen rather than displaying an entirely new window.

I agree that the merit point system could use a tune-up since it hasn't really been touched in close to a decade.. But simply increasing category caps would probably be a bad idea regardless of how nasty and arduous you make the grind. You'd run the risk of over-tuning so that certain things could be stupidly overpowered and increase the imbalance/disparity of the usefulness for certain jobs compared to others. This is probably one of the main reasons behind the devs' reluctance to do any adjustments to the merit system. The problem is that the system was designed to be "the end" for us at 75cap, but the game has progressed far past the point where they should be game changers.

My question is, would it really hurt balance at all if we were able to cap out 5/5 on all categories? I can't think of too many examples where allowing so would change the gamestate drastically since everything is technically available currently (albeit, not from a single player at full strength,) and should be accounted for in balance testing. Would it actually be a bad thing if a single RDM could cast their Group2 debuffs at full strength? Or a BLM having full strength AM2s instead of having to choose by element? I imagine that the devs are hesitant to actually change any categories, so something like condensing the elemental related things into a single one is probably out, but I doubt that unlocking the overall caps so that we can 5/5 everything would be complained about or extremely difficult to implement.

Certain jobs have essentially zero choice when it comes to merits as well. A WAR who doesn't 5/5 "Double Attack Rate" or a BST who doesn't 5/5 "Sic Recast" and "Beast Affinity" is flat out "doing it wrong." There is no way to argue against this as they offer a far greater return than other options. WAR's other options are all low impact recast reductions which aren't going to be able to compare to the direct damage increase that DA gives. BST gains as much as a 50% Ready damage increase from the lowered recast and due to the nature of jug pets not simply matching your ilvl, BA is required for many pets to be able to hit 119. I know there are plenty of other jobs that have this problem as well, but I am tired of complaining already. lol

The simplest solution would be to remove the Group1/Group2 caps and allow us to 5/5 everything. And not attached to JP in any form.. That would do nothing more than increase the gap between those who have master status and those who don't, and basically function as an additional gift for hitting 2100JP. There would be a greater workload in creating a new system to link Job Points and Merits which would reduce the likelihood of anything happening at all, so simpler is probably best in this case. Increasing the caps to specific numbers would still discriminate against the jobs that have many categories while leaving the simpler jobs with "unspent" points, (for instance, NIN would need 40pts for Group2, but SAM only needs 20pts,) both of which would likely end up as points of contention for the playerbase.

I foresee far less complaining, and most of us rejoicing if the message was simply "Overall caps have been removed from Group1/Group2 merits."

This would still lampshade many of the more useless categories not getting replaced/changed, ("Tame Recast".... seriously? -_- BLM's G2 are ONLY AM2 which are useless at this point..) but the cap removal would be most welcome indeed.

Yes, the Group1/2 Caps are ridiculous, because most of them suck and are not worth taking, and the few that are, are no-brainers.

And Summoner/Black Mage.... they give us a maximum of 10 upgrades, but there are 6 different things we can choose (that are roughly equal but different elements). Okay, so we take 1 each of all 6... and that leaves us with 4 points to try to spread out amongst 6 abilities? How do they expect that to work?

And I really don't see how it would be all that overpowered, as most of the "Suck" abilities are abilities that are almost never used (the 1hr ability buffs, lol), or are things like Tame Recast as previously mentioned.

Or how about Angon/Tomahawk? lol. I've never seen anybody throwing those.

I'd very much support for a removal of the caps and just allow 5/5 on all. That, and I wouldn't mind being actually able to spend all these merits I'm holding. Family member has 75/75 Merits with nothing to use them on, and I'm almost to that point myself.

Another suggestion: Allow us to do the same with the Weaponskill Merits. Would it really be overpowered if we could max out all weaponskills instead of having to spend 1 in each weaponskill and only max 1-2 of them, given that most jobs can only use 1-2 weaponskills at most at any given time?

Especially since Magian weaponskills are usually better anyways.

SE seems to think unlocking this would cause balance issues that need to be addressed.

I'm not saying I agree, but some jobs do in fact have a amost all great/good options for Merit Categories (like Warrior, I only see 2 categories that I'd call mediocre).

All of BLM's Tier 1 is actually pretty good, and both tiers of RDM's merit upgrades.

Honestly, while there's a few Foe Sirvante's in the mix, most jobs have some great options and some good ones that are only ignored because of the great ones. You can bet I'd happily add SIRD to Rampart, if I could merit everything.

Personally, I don't think this would really worsen the balance in the game. The exception, from a casual lookover, might be RUN's awesome merit options.

I agree there is no foreseeable imbalance to unlocking merits caps. I don't understand how it would be when we're able to 5/5 2 of them. An improvement to current gameplay sure, but I dont see how any of them combine to create some loophole that breaks gameplay.

Nothing else in the game supports this customized sort of play. No one is looking for certain merit builds for a job over others. Also some players just change their merit categories already to fit what they are doing for their current group. Not that it rationalizes keeping it uncapped, just that the customization is mostly unnecessary.

If anything it just means some jobs merit categories need to be balanced to be as impactful as others.

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Originally Posted by Rwolf

I agree there is no foreseeable imbalance to unlocking merits caps. I don't understand how it would be when we're able to 5/5 2 of them. An improvement to current gameplay sure, but I dont see how any of them combine to create some loophole that breaks gameplay.

Nothing else in the game supports this customized sort of play. No one is looking for certain merit builds for a job over others. Also some players just change their merit categories already to fit what they are doing for their current group. Not that it rationalizes keeping it uncapped, just that the customization is mostly unnecessary.

If anything it just means some jobs merit categories need to be balanced to be as impactful as others.

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There are definitely some jobs that have functionally worthless categories, overloaded categories, etc. that could definitely benefit from actual adjustments, but I just can't bring myself to hope for the impossible, (since the devs said rather recently that they actively do not want to do so.) Allowing 5/5's in all categories is about all that I'd expect to be considered possible at this point. :(

If we're gonna shoot for the moon here though, I personally see a lot of potential in the merit system as a method to address known job issues. Some ideas:

• BST: Sic Recast - Increase values to -3sec for Ready and -11sec for Sic, combined w/ an additional lower limit cap of 10sec recast on Ready. It's rather absurd that BST is the only job that is required to equip TWO non-ilvl equips (one of which requires beating a mission line for, and the other is a weapon -_-) every 10sec. This would allow BST to hit to 10sec Ready recast mark w/o having to swap in old gear, and the special cap would eliminate the need to reset our TP every 10sec which is currently a major obstacle in playing the job the way the devs want us to. The value for Sic might seem high at first glance, but when combined with 100JP gift it would result in a 30sec Sic recast, which would make it somewhat comparable to Ready. (I know well that Sic is not as good as Ready in general, but it would be fun to play around with charmed pets occasionally. This would just let you do more than watch them auto-attack. XD)
  
• BST: Beast Affinity - Increase value to 3-5 per merit. (BTW, jug pets are naturally capped by your level/ilvl, so even if this was 10/merit, it wouldn't give us insanely high level pets, in case you were worried about that.) Lvl+3 would allow us to 119 all SoA+ jugs (including reforged relic hands). The jug pet system is astonishingly unintuitive. Each jug has it's own level caps, none of which are exposed to the player in-game so there is no way to know without referencing outside resources/wikis. This would help to reduce that problem by allowing every lv99 jug to spawn at the player's level.
  
• BLM: Condense elemental categories into blanket effects that cover all elements. Fill in the empty spaces with new stuff.. Occult Acumen, Elemental Magic: Recast / Cast Speed / Resist Rate (added as a direct percentage after m.acc is calculated) all sound reasonable to me. I honestly can't think of anything else that would not be potentially dangerous/OP. :x
  
• RDM: Condense elemental categories into blanket effects that cover all elements. Fill in the empty spaces with new stuff.. Occult Acumen, Fast Cast, Shield Mastery, Fencer, Enspell enhancements, (I'm sure someone who plays RDM seriously would have better suggestions.) Group2 is a bit tricky but it has always felt extremely unfair that so many debuffs are tied to merits.. If there's no way to condense them all to a single category, it seems like they could at least be reduced to two categories: Dia III / Bio III / Phalanx II (duration+effect) & Slow II / Paralyze II / Blind II (acc+effect).
  
• NIN: Condense elemental categories into blanket effects that cover all elements. Fill in the empty spaces with new stuff.. (Notice a pattern yet? lol) Ninjutsu: Fast Cast / MAB / MBDII, Dual Wield: TP Bonus (to compensate for the DW tp gain penalty, 1%-3% per merit.) Again, I don't play NIN seriously so I expect others would have better ideas.

Personally, I've been ok with the Group 1 point cap, but the Group 2 merits should be uncapped, it should be tied into the job point system, because if you are mastering your job, it makes no sense that you can't use all the capabilities of your group 2 merits.

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Originally Posted by Teraniku

Personally, I've been ok with the Group 1 point cap, but the Group 2 merits should be uncapped, it should be tied into the job point system, because if you are mastering your job, it makes no sense that you can't use all the capabilities of your group 2 merits.

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Calling it "Job Master" was a mistake on SE's part, you are not a master if you can't perform everything possible for the job.

I have always thought that after obtaining master and getting the additional 500 jp's afterwards should award the player with something. I thought maxing out all of your jobs merited abilities would have been great cause not only did you master your job you took it further by getting another 500 points.

There's a point and time somewhere, though, that one just has to say "Enough is Enough". JP, just like Merits, is an endless sort of thing and we obviously can't be buffing our characters endlessly.

However, what you COULD do, is have the Potpourri goblin give you 2x (since it's 30k per 1, BUT you gain both simultaneously) Potpourri for each JP that way you have something to use the JP for.

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Originally Posted by Aysha

There's a point and time somewhere, though, that one just has to say "Enough is Enough". JP, just like Merits, is an endless sort of thing and we obviously can't be buffing our characters endlessly.

However, what you COULD do, is have the Potpourri goblin give you 2x (since it's 30k per 1, BUT you gain both simultaneously) Potpourri for each JP that way you have something to use the JP for.

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Have some kind of equip piece that costs 500jp worth that will be a great piece for your specific job like a Evokers Ring +1 for summoners.