Remove or decrease race penalties

[FrankReynolds]

There's a difference between changing something because it is bad design, versus changing something because you dislike the design.

Okay, but this is in fact bad design no matter how much you like it. Putting a decision on the start screen that will either enhance or fuck up your game play for the next 8-10 years is an incredibly mean thing to do. This is a video game. FFS it takes less time to change your major and move to a different college than it does to reroll from a friggin taru to a galka and rebuild just one melee job with a 90 e/r/m. You don't think that's a little bit too much pressure to put on a person the second they start a video game?

[Byrth]

Bulvine Scatology. Regular monsters do not have stupidly high attack, NM's are a different story. Regular monsters do not wear gear, eat food or use JA's. Their attack isn't that hard to estimate and a level 63~65 spider does not have over 300 attack and definitely not over 400.

Okay, so where is your proof?


Avatars use monster pDIF calculations. Avatar attack at 75 was 504.
kegsay.livejournal.com/5510.html


A naked WAR at 75 had about 350 attack with their Great Axe on.
276 Skill + 56 from STR (using 3/4 even though we know monsters technically use 1H weapons) + 8 base + 10 attack bonus = 350

[mizukanji]

I like the race stat things but i do wish we got a small amount of stats though i wish we had a guide in game .. i mean throwen in completely loss is bad

[Motenten]

saevel:

For a proper test, you need a couple issues worked out. First you need a baseline run to get the base damage, and that baseline should give you a solid estimate of its attack as well.

If you think its attack is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 (+/-50 or so), set your defense to be 300 and get the range of damage it can do to you. 50-100 hits should be fine.

From that info you can determine its base damage, and from the range + base damage you can estimate its attack.

After that, you can do the run with the extremely high defense value so as to determine the full effects.


I will note that the data you provided does indicate some degree of flooring, due to the high frequency of the damage value of 17. Curiously enough, 17 damage is also one of the values of damage I took (depending on mob, though most mobs in a single area gave exactly the same value) when I guarded hits against various mobs years ago when I was playing around with levelling guard.

If I were to take a random guess, I'd figure it to be 25% of the mob's base damage rating.

[Llana_Virren]

Okay, but this is in fact bad design no matter how much you like it. Putting a decision on the start screen that will either enhance or fuck up your game play for the next 8-10 years is an incredibly mean thing to do. This is a video game. FFS it takes less time to change your major and move to a different college than it does to reroll from a friggin taru to a galka and rebuild just one melee job with a 90 e/r/m. You don't think that's a little bit too much pressure to put on a person the second they start a video game?

I agree that re-rolling is unfeasible but the reason that it is more and more unrealistic is due to the tenure of the game. Don't get me wrong, I do not think anyone actually needs to re-roll to be good. If you're re-rolling because the lack of HP is holding you back, that's a game flaw. If you're re-rolling to get the extra STR... that isn't a flaw in the game, that's a personality issue where you want to maximize your potential while accepting no consequence or counter-positive.

Back in 2004-2005 re-rolling wasn't much of an issue... obviously with the amount of time the game has existed, re-rolling a character is a problem simply due to the amount of time needed to level the character's zone access and progress, let alone the job and gear.

Which leads me back to my point: mules should be able to share all gear (including Ex/Aug) because they all share the same account. I think mules also should, based on perhaps certain quests, share progress from the main account after meeting certain conditions (meaning you shouldn't have to redo RoZ/CoP for sky/sea, etc). And every race should recieve 5% HP bonus at a minimum. Personally I think 10% is more appropriate. Or, perhaps, the merits should be %HP rather than a static value (ie .1-15% versus 10-150 HP).

Re-rolling should be for name change or avatar change. The need to change race for HP is problematic, however changing race for the minor increase in another stat (such as STR or AGI) is not something that needs to be addressed as an issue.

Also, just to be clear, when I say "you" I am referring to any player; my intent is not to isolate you or imply a specific person.

[Demon6324236]

No, it really isn't all they're asking for.

Perhaps you should go back through this thread and learn what they want because yeah, HP is about it... OP has not posted in 10 days, last post was on page 6, since then basically everyone who was posted has wanted HP changed, so far as I can tell they are all smart enough to not care about other stats, especially if it would mean since they want all stats flatlined, they get nothing, rather than just wanting and getting HP.

[Godofgods]

pretty much every final fantasy in the series has had this in one for or another. Certain ppl are better inclined to using various things. Some times its equipment types, some times magics, better at defending or attacking. Race differences are just another form of that. I don't want to see that change. Things should have a difference between them.

[Demon6324236]

Other Final Fantasys are not Final Fantasy XI, they are not a MMO, they are not a game that has new content still coming after 10 years, they are not a game where people can choose to bring you or not, and they are not a game that allows the enemies to basically kill you in 1~2 hits in a real time situation no matter your gear or level. Other Final Fantasy games should almost never be used as an example for why something should work in this game or XIV because the rest are all Single-player JRPGs, this is a MMORPG, completely different genre and a whole different monster to tackle.

[FrankReynolds]

If you're re-rolling to get the extra STR... that isn't a flaw in the game, that's a personality issue where you want to maximize your potential while accepting no consequence or counter-positive.

Where do you get these ideas? Is this game owned / run by some educational institution? Since when is it required that all video games include lessons about sacrifice and reward or that every decision should have consequences? I don't need a video game to teach me that I can't have everything in life. Life does a sufficient job of that on it's own and I was fully capable of grasping that long before I ever picked this or any other game up. I hope this is true of everyone else playing this game as well.

Which leads me back to my point: mules should be able to share all gear (including Ex/Aug) because they all share the same account. I think mules also should, based on perhaps certain quests, share progress from the main account after meeting certain conditions (meaning you shouldn't have to redo RoZ/CoP for sky/sea, etc). And every race should receive 5% HP bonus at a minimum. Personally I think 10% is more appropriate. Or, perhaps, the merits should be %HP rather than a static value (ie .1-15% versus 10-150 HP).

Re-rolling should be for name change or avatar change. The need to change race for HP is problematic, however changing race for the minor increase in another stat (such as STR or AGI) is not something that needs to be addressed as an issue.

Also, just to be clear, when I say "you" I am referring to any player; my intent is not to isolate you or imply a specific person.

Wouldn't it make more sense to just adjust the merits so that a fully merited taru has the same HP as a fully merited galka only it would take far more merits for a taru to reach that cap than a galka? If they did that for all stats, they could keep the Consequence / Benefit thing that people seem so in love with without making race choice a permanent pain in the ass. It would still be unfair to taru's because they lack in the only stat that people would really feel required to merit, but people seem to like the idea of getting screwed by picking a cute character instead of a big character so why not?

[Motenten]

Basically, there are three categories of changes being brought up:

1. Flatline all stats across all races. Arguments for or against this change are pretty much inconsequential. Whether there are differences between the races or not is a pure design (artistic-level) decision, and changing this would be changing the "vision" the developers have of the game. It's not something you can argue for based on mechanics or past FFs or whatever. Essentially, there's no 'argument' to be made here, merely a note on preference.
   
2. Changes to base stats, excluding HP/MP. This is largely a minor change due to personal preferences of the "it would be nice if..." type, but there's still a valid argument to be made that weighting is imbalanced among the stats. Personally I'd probably argue for keeping the 28 point distribution*, but weight Chr at 0.5 per stat point, and Str at 1.5 per stat point. I can't see any significant relative difference in the value of the remaining stats.
   
3. Changes to HP/MP. Technically balanced with an 8 point sum between the two stats, but the 7/1 and 1/7 combinations (Galka and Taru) seem notably imbalanced compared to the others. If this were a game where you were restricted to specific jobs based on your race, this would be less of an issue, since clearly the jobs would be tailored to the races that could use them. However in a game where every race can be every job, and where not every job has some balanced value between HP and MP (ie: every job has HP, not every job has MP), the advantage/disadvantage to be had on the MP side is not properly balanced against HP. This is compounded further by the issues that have been brought up elsewhere.

* Just realized I'd posted my findings on point distributions elsewhere, but hadn't copied it here. Here's the writeup I did:

If you take all the 'grades' used to determine racial stats (A, B, C, etc) and convert them to numbers (1, 2, 3, etc), then every single race was built with the exact same number of points -- reminiscent of certain old RPG games, if you will.


Table for all the racial stat grades (pulled from the stat calculator page):

                          HP MP StrDexVitAgiIntMndChr
// Hume                   D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D
raceGrades[0] = new Array(4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4);
// Elvaan                 C  E  B  E  C  F  F  B  D
raceGrades[1] = new Array(3, 5, 2, 5, 3, 6, 6, 2, 4);
// Taru                   G  A  F  D  E  C  A  E  D
raceGrades[2] = new Array(7, 1, 6, 4, 5, 3, 1, 5, 4);
// Mithra                 D  D  E  A  E  B  D  E  F
raceGrades[3] = new Array(4, 4, 5, 1, 5, 2, 4, 5, 6);
// Galka                  A  G  C  D  A  E  E  D  F
raceGrades[4] = new Array(1, 7, 3, 4, 1, 5, 5, 4, 6);

HP+MP always adds up to 8. The remaining stats always add up to 28.

Build-wise it may make more intuitive sense to reverse the numeric order, such that A is 7 and G is 1, thus indicating where you're spending most of your points. Totals remain the same.

Table with the numbers reversed, indicative of 'build cost'.

                          HP MP StrDexVitAgiIntMndChr
// Hume                   D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D  D
raceGrades[0] = new Array(4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4);
// Elvaan                 C  E  B  E  C  F  F  B  D
raceGrades[1] = new Array(5, 3, 6, 3, 5, 2, 2, 6, 4);
// Taru                   G  A  F  D  E  C  A  E  D
raceGrades[2] = new Array(1, 7, 2, 4, 3, 5, 7, 3, 4);
// Mithra                 D  D  E  A  E  B  D  E  F
raceGrades[3] = new Array(4, 4, 3, 7, 3, 6, 4, 3, 2);
// Galka                  A  G  C  D  A  E  E  D  F
raceGrades[4] = new Array(7, 1, 5, 4, 7, 3, 3, 4, 2);

In terms of mathematical balancing, it works. Every race can be considered overall 'equal' because none of them have an advantage in the number of points spent.

The problem, of course, is that the stats themselves are not equal in value. If, for example, we assessed that HP was, point for point, worth twice as much as MP, then the weighted totals across the races would be:

Hume: 12
Elvaan: 13
Taru: 9
Mithra: 12
Galka 15

Similarly with something like Chr. Technically Mithra and Galka have given up a couple points in one stat to improve some of the others. However since Chr has such a low value in game, they end up with a net improvement in their total weighted score because what they gave up wasn't worth very much.


Obviously one must also consider the conditions of each assessment. If a mage is never getting hit, then a higher HP doesn't have much value, for example, but the value increases as the threat against the player increases. The value of MP, on the other hand, rapidly decreases as MP recovery improves, so the absolute value of MP depends on how much additional support is around. The issue is that those two conditions usually coincide: as the threat against any given player increases, the amount of support personnel required is also going to increase, which in turn devalues MP. So the relative HP:MP weighting shifts dramatically towards HP in endgame content.

So the current demand evolves from the conclusion that the overall weighted totals are no longer well balanced across the races, particularly in endgame. Non-endgame material doesn't see such a significant imbalance since the materials don't weight so heavily for or against any particular stat (though certain stats are still more valuable than others).

Addendum on weighting distribution for general stats:

If Str and Chr were evaluated based on a 1.5 and 0.5 weighting, respectively, the total points of stat distribution for the races would be:

Taru: 27
Hume: 28
Mithra: 28.5
Elvaan: 29
Galka: 29.5

To balance those all to 28 points would take something like:

Taru: +1 dex
Mithra: -1 int, +1 chr
Elvaan: -1 mnd or vit
Galka: -1 str