Remove or decrease race penalties

[Thegreatmonkey]

The problem is that players don't want to just work around the handicap of a race choice. They want to be able to deal the same damage as everyone else while still being a Taru. All the gear in the world and that damned Elvaan DRK still has more STR!

Yes, I agree that there are very few of us who will work around it. And those few players are better at the job then others and over all can put out more damage vs other players. But if SE would just fix Def. and Vit, a lot of the "one shooting" would go away....amusing the player knows how to play the job and work the game to there linking. And while Tarutaru are more likely to get one shooted, With most of the new NMs out today, it dose not matter if your Galka, they will and can still get one shooted.

[saevel]

Yes, I agree that there are very few of us who will work around it. And those few players are better at the job then others and over all can put out more damage vs other players. But if SE would just fix Def. and Vit, a lot of the "one shooting" would go away....amusing the player knows how to play the job and work the game to there linking. And while Tarutaru are more likely to get one shooted, With most of the new NMs out today, it dose not matter if your Galka, they will and can still get one shooted.

DEF and VIT are "fixed" you just gotta understand the defense formula to realize how much defense is required. Monsters have a different pDiff floor then we do, you'll never get their pDiff so low that their hitting for 0's. Their also wielding DMG 200~300 delay 240 weapons so that even if you floor their pDiff their still going to hit you for a ton of damage. 4VIT reduces their DMG by exactly one, so instead of a DMG 300 weapon their now hitting you with a DMG 299 weapon, not much changed.

Conversely we abuse this formula to do maximum damage, though SE's LCF imposes an artificial cap on the amount of damage we can do. If SE were to make VIT / Def "more important" then our damage output would suddenly drop like a rock. The whole battle system is kinda screwed up as it was balanced for level 50 (not 75 as some people think) back in 2002 and only slightly altered for the 2H update.

[Byrth]

DEF and VIT are "fixed" you just gotta understand the defense formula to realize how much defense is required. Monsters have a different pDiff floor then we do, you'll never get their pDiff so low that their hitting for 0's. They're also wielding DMG 200~300 delay 240 weapons so that even if you floor their pDiff their still going to hit you for a ton of damage. 4VIT reduces their DMG by exactly one, so instead of a DMG 300 weapon their now hitting you with a DMG 299 weapon, not much changed.

Conversely we abuse this formula to do maximum damage, though SE's LCF imposes an artificial cap on the amount of damage we can do. If SE were to make VIT / Def "more important" then our damage output would suddenly drop like a rock. The whole battle system is kinda screwed up as it was balanced for level 50 (not 75 as some people think) back in 2002 and only slightly altered for the 2H update.

Is this not exactly the problem with VIT? lol

Also, monsters get +5% Ratio for every level they are above you. IIRC they were shown not to have a Ratio floor beyond that, but they do have high attack.

Say you're fighting Ig'Alima, who is 21 levels above you and has over 1059 attack. Even if you had 1100 defense (which you probably won't), he'd still have a Ratio of ~2. 2 is the Ratio cap for 1H weapon users against monsters of equal or lower level. So even if you gear/buff for defense, the best you can do is even him out player vs. EM monster levels of Ratio. Now, tack on that he has really high base damage and see how reasonable it is to tank him.

Okay, apply all that to Gallu in Legion and add in Mighty Strikes, which pushes his Ratio up to 3. Now his melee attacks are essentially MS WSs. 4 is the cap for monsters. Without defense buffs he would have a 4.0 Ratio. Instead he has a 3.0 Ratio. How is Defense useful, again?

[saevel]

How is Defense useful, again?

Umm .. you realize you just agreed with me right .....

Really look back over it again, I said exactly what you did, that defense is largely useless as the amount we'd need to be remotely useful is so high as to be unrealistic. I also said that VIT works exactly the same for the mobs as it does for us, if SE was to make VIT "more important" it would nerf our damage on monsters as they would also the effect.

[Demon6324236]

DEF and VIT are "fixed" you just gotta understand the defense formula to realize how much defense is required.

This line can mislead to the idea your saying that its fine as is, even if your not.

[Byrth]

Yeah, or as saying that Defense has any real effect at all. In order to make it so DEF and VIT have an effect:

Remove the level correction Ratio boost that monsters get and we do not.
This exists, so changes to Ratio calculation obviously don't have to affect both players and Monsters in the first place. This would largely solve the problems in the previous post, and doubling your defense would halve monster Ratio regardless of its level.

Make it so monsters use fSTR2 instead of fSTR
This would make it so that monsters gain 1 point of base damage per 2 dSTR instead of 4, so player VIT becomes more important.

Change the negative dSTR behavior of fSTR so that it's possible to substantially lower base damage by increasing VIT.
This would have little/no impact on players but a large potential impact on monsters if we stacked VIT gear.
Example:
* dSTR = -16 = Base Damage -24
* dSTR = -40 = Base Damage -60
* dSTR = -100 = Base Damage -150
Currently the problem is not only that 4 VIT lowers monster base damage by 1, but also that VIT becomes less and less effective as you pass monster STR. 22 more VIT than the monster's STR? Congrats on base damage -4.



There, now stacking VIT and Defense make a reasonable difference.

[saevel]

This line can mislead to the idea your saying that its fine as is, even if your not.

I never said it was fine, just that it effects us the same as monsters and we already abuse that. It's not just the LCF effect though Byrth is using that as an example on higher monsters. Go inside abysesa and brew something, notice how it's still hitting you for damage even though you now have 9999 defense and it most certainly doesn't have 1000+ attack? Monsters have a ratio floor that prevents their pDiffMin from ever hitting 0, no amount of defense will get the monster to hit for zero. Byrth's idea was for certain effects to only apply to us and others to apply to the monster so that the attack formula favors us instead of them, decent idea if SE is willing to go along with it.

[Byrth]

Well, two things:
1) Even at the Ratio floor, you still hit for a mix of 0s and damage. I've hit for damage on level 45 monk in Abyssea.
2) The "ratio floor" that you think exists for monsters is an outgrowth of the level correction that I talked about. There's no ratio floor for an EM monster.

[saevel]

Well, two things:
1) Even at the Ratio floor, you still hit for a mix of 0s and damage. I've hit for damage on level 45 monk in Abyssea.
2) The "ratio floor" that you think exists for monsters is an outgrowth of the level correction that I talked about. There's no ratio floor for an EM monster.

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.

[Llana_Virren]

That's the point. They aren't needed.

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.

You are mistaken in assuming race has anything to do with jobs. That is not how FFXI works. FFXI's unique job system allows people to play all jobs regardless of race, and nothing else limits their job experience either, so why should race?

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.

Making a new character to be good at other jobs is not an acceptable solution, the fact you even mentioned it shows you have no grasp whatsoever of how MMORPGs work.

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)?

Why would anyone even want that? What's so great about 11 extra STR? The (very unlikely) 1% damage output increase?

"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.