New 2-hour Abilities

[Cljader1]

You miss the point. Right now if you do Legion or ADL you want Perfect Defense because you want to survive TP attacks they throw at you along with normal hits. A DRK with this ability can put a lock down on a mobs TP, and make their own zerging power faster & more deadly with it. Normally while zerging ADL your waiting 4~5 hits for your WS, then you bust it out, and ADL uses his moves too which includes Tera Slash. Use this 2-hour, and now your WSing every 2~3 hits, without the fear of that Tera Slash coming down and instantly killing people. The same goes for Legion mobs which have this kind of thing going for them, it allows you to put a stop to them TPing and instead boost your own TP from it, allowing you to do more damage, and them to do less. The duration does suck but the ability in itself is very sound!

So basically SE gave drk a situational 2hr to deal with ADL, and you assume this ability will not get any resistance. I dont understand why drk 2hr have to be so sitituational, en-tp drain....really. I can already get off absorb-tp off every 30 seconds, and before the absorb-tp nerf drks was able to absorb 100% tp in one shot without the 50% mob's current tp cap. If you want to control ADL why not line up 3-4 drks and alternately cast absorb-tp, most drk have around a 30 sec recast on the spell. But a en-tp drain with no other special buff is underwhemming and very very situational. I could understand the 30 sec duration if the en-tp drain also effected ws. But as it stands right now, drks main contributions is it zerg, SE needs to add an extra buff to this 2hrs like a percentage raise in str and att while the 2hr is active.

[Demon6324236]

So basically SE gave drk a situational 2hr to deal with ADL, and you assume this ability will not get any resistance. I dont understand why drk 2hr have to be so sitituational, en-tp drain....really. I can already get off absorb-tp off every 30 seconds, and before the absorb-tp nerf drks was able to absorb 100% tp in one shot without the 50% mob's current tp cap. If you want to control ADL why not line up 3-4 drks and alternately cast absorb-tp, most drk have around a 30 sec recast on the spell. But a en-tp drain with no other special buff is underwhemming and very very situational. I could understand the 30 sec duration if the en-tp drain also effected ws. But as it stands right now, drks main contributions is it zerg, SE needs to add an extra buff to this 2hrs like a percentage raise in str and att while the 2hr is active.

The reason why is because no matter what SE will never give us abilities worth the 2-hour timer itself, which is what you seem to want. The ability to lock down mobs TP attacks for that time while boosting your own damage seems good to me, it could obviously be better but at the same time ask for to much and you will get nothing, on the other hand, look at everything else they adjust, SE giveth, and SE taketh away, upgrade DNC? Psh~ give it something better but cut the duration in half, its just how they work, I am not saying the 2-hour is the best ever, but I am saying its better than what you could have gotten and its not all to bad.

[Raucent]

Scarlet Delerium says Hello

[Cljader1]

The reason why is because no matter what SE will never give us abilities worth the 2-hour timer itself, which is what you seem to want. The ability to lock down mobs TP attacks for that time while boosting your own damage seems good to me, it could obviously be better but at the same time ask for to much and you will get nothing, on the other hand, look at everything else they adjust, SE giveth, and SE taketh away, upgrade DNC? Psh~ give it something better but cut the duration in half, its just how they work, I am not saying the 2-hour is the best ever, but I am saying its better than what you could have gotten and its not all to bad.

Why should we take lackluster 2hrs, en-tp drain could probably be worked into a dark magic spell form with high recast, but it not a viable 2hr. I mean look at sch original 2hr now that a REAL 2hr, SE moved heaven and earth to rework there 2hrs. Why cant drk's ask for the same treatment, btw war new 2hr is crap too, I can do there 2hr with my twilight scythe and I have more than 30 seconds with it too. Can't you see the garbage that being given to us, when SE put there mind to something you get something like sch's Tabula Rasa. SE put the same time into drk like you do sch please, a 30 sec tp melee drain is just unacceptable.

[Tamarsamar]

So basically SE gave drk a situational 2hr to deal with ADL, and you assume this ability will not get any resistance. I dont understand why drk 2hr have to be so sitituational, en-tp drain....really.

[Aldersyde]

The Ugly: Beastmaster - Something in the concept itself is flawed. Beastmaster is already a defensive powerhouse and doesn't need a defensive ability that sacrifices the pet.

A level 86 sheep that costs me less than 1,000 gil could probably survive Vana'diel's equivalent of full-on nuclear war if my little tarubroro were hiding in a safe spot with Pet: -% Damage Taken stuff on, and that sheep would still have the energy to attempt to mate with a nearby Carbuncle and re-populate the earth. Other stuff is even heartier than that!

Beastmaster doesn't need more defense in any sense, much less defense that requires giving up its best defense even for a moment. Giving up the pet for a large amount of damage over a short time would be a much better pet-sacrifice concept.

This so much. The new 2-hour is ugly and useless. I could get behind an ability that sacrifices my pet. I could get behind an ability that is defensive in nature. What I can't get behind is one that grants a defensive buff at the expense of the pet which only benefits the beastmaster.

Bst desperately needs something that gets them into party content, because as it stands now, it only gets invited to participate when people want a last spot filled after an hour of shouts or to pre-75 content where it doesn't really matter who comes on what jobs. Therefore, make the healing, status removal and stoneskin party-wide buffs when the pet is consumed (without modifying the high amount of stoneskin). This would make the concept at least somewhat useful (in that it would be at least better than what it is now), even if it's just in an "oh shit" type of situation. Of course, granting offensive buffs would be much better, such as att+, crit hit rate+, or crit hit damage+, something along the lines of what embrava did for sch.

But as it is now, giving up your pet for a defensive buff for the bst exclusively is just a bad ability and will never be used.

I'm also curious as to what the dev team thought the use of this ability would be when they dreamed it up. The gulf between how the devs think bst is played and how players actually play it seems to be really wide at the moment though.

[Demon6324236]

Why should we take lackluster 2hrs, en-tp drain could probably be worked into a dark magic spell form with high recast, but it not a viable 2hr. I mean look at sch original 2hr now that a REAL 2hr, SE moved heaven and earth to rework there 2hrs. Why cant drk's ask for the same treatment, btw war new 2hr is crap too, I can do there 2hr with my twilight scythe and I have more than 30 seconds with it too. Can't you see the garbage that being given to us, when SE put there mind to something you get something like sch's Tabula Rasa. SE put the same time into drk like you do sch please, a 30 sec tp melee drain is just unacceptable.

Tabula Rasa took how long before they added Kaustra & Embrava? You do know they didn't come with a SCH originally right? It was years before they were added, just like Alexander & Odin for SMN. The 2 best 2-hours in the game right now started as decent or bad 2-hours and turned into the best 2-hours in the game when they were added onto with abilities only able to be used under their effects, so using Embrava/Tabula Rasa as an example doesn't work so well.

As for WAR's, look at my extremely long reply to our latest info on these, I have part of that post as a response to the info on our wonderful~ 2-hour for WAR, its just Formless Strikes with a much longer recast. I'm not saying that we should just deal with the bad, I'm saying there are worse and you ignore the good your ability has. One of the most complained about parts of events right now is that everything has attacks that do way to much damage, this gives you the power to limit those massively by removing the TP from them as they get it, then fire it back at them for more damage than you had before. BST gets to gain defense by losing their best defense, RDM gets to have slightly stronger buffs that are barley better and the duration is to short to even buff properly, let alone others like Embrava does. Your not getting the short end of the stick, DRK is a nice 2-hour, there are much worse around right now.

Back when you originally posted you asked what their vision is for DRK, I cant tell you what their vision is, but I can tell you what I believe it to be. DRK is a job that takes its enemies power for its own, and turns the enemies power against them so they are easier to destroy. Examples of this are all throughout the job, Drain, Aspir, Absorbs, Dread Spikes, even the Mythic enhances those effects for your Absorbs, the job is about making your enemy weaker, while making yourself stronger, Blood Weapon did this too, as it stole their HP and gave it to you, and now this does the same but with TP, so you steal their TP, and make it your own weapon to crush them with!

[Karbuncle]

IF you leveled BST with the intent of it being a party job, You leveled the wrong job...

BST since inception has been the solo job of FFXI. Abyssea barely changed that for a little while, And even then in time, It once again became the solo job of FFXI.

While it could use some nice Party specific boosts i suppose, a 2hour would not be the solution to that.

[FrankReynolds]

First off, a ballerina may not perform in the Nut Craker, but that doesn't make her any less a ballerina.

I'm not disputing what the players push onto a job, what I'm saying is that whatever the players want to believe, the mechanics are more honest--I'm not even talking about what I wish it was, I'm simply looking at what's always been there.

An example would be pre-Aht Urgan exp parties--everyone was hard up to spend ten minutes at a time taking out IT+ mobs, it was a while before someone had the bright idea to chain T-VTs for lower but faster exp at greater net gains. The mechanics were always available to net better exp on weaker mobs, even if we ignored it.

I'll put it this way: you can use the end of a screwdriver to hammer nails, and if its your heart's desire you can hammer stuff with that screwdriver butt all day long... but in the end, its just not a very good hammer. You can call RDM an enfeebler all you want, but that still doesn't change the fact that--given it's tools and comparing jobs with similar, exclusive, or even superior tools--RDM is and always was a mediocre enfeebler. Now, that doesn't stop anyone from using it to enfeeble exclusively; I'm simply saying that was never what the class was suited for, that's just not it's specialty. And--given that RDM was never particularly designed to be a superior enfeebler, adding that it was never intended or advertised to be--then its as absurd and unproductive to beg for enfeebling updates as it has been to beg for AoE powers.

And for the record, RDM's enhancing powers have always been head and shoulders above it's enfeebling capabilities, otherwise it wouldn't be so famous for it's survivability.

The players didn't push it on the job. The job was designed to do a bunch of different things. It turns out that it was better at one of them than anyone else, so that became it's calling card. Red mage may have had a limited amount of unique enfeebles, but having all the spells in the world isn't going to help if you can't land them with any consistency, which red mage could and other jobs couldn't.

I don't care if you know everything there is to know about cooking and you have a degree in engineering and you can sing like mariah Carey while simultaneously winning the tour de France on a unicycle. If you show up in my driveway every Wednesday and empty my trash... Even if everyone you know is better than you at emptying trash. Even if you do a crappy job at it and get garbage all over the street. Even if you are far better at a million other things. You are not a singer or an athlete or an engineer or a chef. You are the garbage man.

Likewise, I don't care if bard can DD like crazy, or if red mage has lots of nifty buffs or if ninja can cast slow. That's not what their job is. I don't care about their side hobbies. I only care about what they bring to the group. That's how they get labeled tank, support, en-feebler. Maybe they will give Red mage some awesome new buffs that affect the party, or something that makes them an amazing DD, and then we can change the title to something else. But that's not what they were in the past and you can't change that. You can only change the future.

PS: If my hammer is wacky and misses the nail all the time, but the screw driver hits the nail on the head every time, then yes. I will build an entire house with a screw driver.

[Theytak]

Hey everyone,

The new 2-hours were developed based on the idea that they would share the existing 2-hour ability's recast timer and players would be selecting which ability to use based on the situation. Instead of these being a higher-tier or universal abilities that can be used for any situation, they are abilities that are designed to be used for specialized conditions.

Below are the envisioned applications of some abilities as well as planned adjustments.

Really? I gotta be honest, the devs didn't really think that logic through. The game, as it is now, does not possess the highly situational state of affairs it used to. It's like the dev team designed these abilities back in 2007 and just shelved them until now. Back then, honestly, they probably would have seen a fair amount of use. Today? not gonna fly. Unless they fully intend to return the game to the hypersituational state of affairs with Seekers of Adoulin, then there's really no justification for this, and even then, the players' mindset has changed so much that we're still not going to happily accept hyper situational abilities. Moderately situational but still useable with some frequency? Sure, those are always nice. However, most of these abilities are not even remotely close to that point.

Currently, the "specialized conditions" in which these abilities would be useful either do not exist or can only be found in one, singular instance. Giving us 2hours to deal with things that aren't in the game yet is stupid, especially if you're not going to tell us that you're planning that.

[*]Warrior
While Mighty Strikes offers a lot of physical damage through critical hits for a period of time, the idea was to add a way to attack enemies that have strong resistances to physical damage.

Based on testing and feedback, we are planning to make adjustments to extend the effect duration to 60 seconds. (Planning to make this change during this week’s Test Server update.)

Like others have said, unless this is changed so that it also applies to weapon skills, mightystrikes + tomahawk will still be more useful against the mobs the devs are thinking of, especially because tomahawk helps every party member.

[*]Paladin
The new 2-hour ability can be used for cases where just turtling up with Invincible and letting an enemy wail on you will not turn the tides of the fight, since you can enhance your defenses while reducing an enemy’s HP with the reflected damage.

*As mentioned previously in the post about adding an enmity boost effect to this ability, we understand the problems with the enmity cap. We plan on considering this for paladin in general and not limiting it only to the new 2-hour ability effect.

So, instead of turtling up with PDT-100%, you're turtling up with PDT-whateveryourshieldblocks% and reflecting some of the damage back. You said that you'd be adding enmity equal to invincible to it, and I may simply have missed it, but does the reflect damage generate any enmity? If it doesn't, it needs to. Broken enmity system or not, when you give pld an ability meant to deal damage, and it doesn't do the one thing pld needs dealing damage to do (generate enmity), it defeats the purpose.

[*]Samurai
Meikyo Shisui excels in instantaneous power. On the other hand, the new 2-hour ability is for cases where an enemy's AoE damage is too strong and getting close is dangerous. It will allow you to evade special attacks while dealing damage.

*Magical attacks will not be evaded, but will be made so that the damage received is 0. This will not have any effect on breath attacks, though.

With this ability we are aiming to make it possible to have a stable way of fighting by increasing defensive capabilities and diverting your time in battle towards enhancing offense capabilities.

Get rid of the damage boost. This is already a very powerful defensive ability, the damage boost is absolutely overkill if you're going to make it that effective. Honestly, this sounds like a tank ability that you should have given ninja or pld, and if you had done that, you know full well there would have been no accompanying damage boost.

Amongst the feedback we have been receiving, there have been a lot of comments about changing the effects, reducing the 2-hour recast time, removing the shared recast timer aspect, and other ideas for largely changing the concept. It may take a bit of time to discuss and look into all of these, but we are planning to spend time on this without rushing implementation so that these are abilities that everyone is satisfied with.

It's very good, and VERY reassuring that you're willing to take the time to discuss and debate these abilities, and I'm absolutely thrilled that you've got no intention of rushing the process. Thank you for that. However, there are somethings that we absolutely need addressed before we can give much further feedback:

- We need to know what the deal is with your logic behind bst's new 2hour, because it is horribly inappropriate and inadequate, and we've really gotten nothing but silence and ambiguous mutterings about it. It makes absolutely no sense as a defensive ability. It's more akin to a suicide ability like mijin gakure. It's not just bst, either, the devs are being far to silent on the abilities as a whole, unless they decide to change them. We would greatly appreciate if they would make clear what there intentions were for each ability so that we can more easily understand what they're willing to give us and what we should be aiming for.

- We need to know how much you're leeway willing to give with these abilities. Is completely redesigning any of them even in the realm of possibility? Or are we stuck with these general ideas, and limited to adding to them and tweaking them to make them work more towards what we think would be useful?

- We need to know what the devs had in mind when they're creating these abilities. I'm not asking for "what new stuff are you planning to add" specifically, but "what types of new monsters are you planning to add that these abilities would suddenly be useful?" because most of the new 2hours don't seem to have been designed with current NMs and endgame events in mind. I'm not asking specifics, this is a matter of "you're obviously planning to change up how NM fights work, can you give us any hints/ideas as to what you've got in store so that we can give you better feed back on what we'd need to be able to respond to such fights?" This is a good thing, because it seems like the devs have recognized that right now, every fight is pretty much just negate all damage and kill it as fast as possible, which sucks all the fun out of the fights, but you can't give us this stuff and say "here's a bunch of super situational stuff you guys don't need right now. *wink*"

These three points, if nothing else, really need to be addressed if you want us to give you quality feedback, especially as to whether these abilities were planned around new, future content, rather than current existing stuff, because without that being explicitly stated, and giving us some idea as to what said content might entail, we're only going to be able to give feed back based on what we know, which is going to be "Perfect Defense, Embrava, KILLKILLKILLKILL" without question.