Overall Battle System Adjustments for the Future

[Chocobits]

Didn't see it mentioned, but with the change in attack/def, wouldn't Conqueror become the strongest weapon in the game?

[Byrth]

No. All of the changes they're describing are Monster -> Player. They've given no indication that they're touching Player -> Monster level correction at all.

Even if they had, DRK/WAR still has more attack than a Conqueror WAR.

[MarkovChain]

The fact that mythic rely too much on building 300% somewhere makes them gimp weapons. The better weapons will be those of the jobs that don't suck and whose weaponskill damage is not entirely relying on critrate. Relic monk and shijin spiral (plus boost will be quite overpowered), DRK and ragnarok+resolution, sam and shoha. Ascetic's furry has a 100% att boost too so maybe with glanzfaust it starts to be decent.

[MarkovChain]

No. All of the changes they're describing are Monster -> Player. They've given no indication that they're touching Player -> Monster level correction at all.

Even if they had, DRK/WAR still has more attack than a Conqueror WAR.

They did indirectly say that they would touch player vs monster

Legion

Adjustments to HP/attack/defense
As mentioned above, we are looking into removing the level difference correction.
Due to the fact that removing the level difference correction and lowering the level of monsters at the same time would cause the monsters to become too weak, we are thinking about making adjustments to attack and defense, as well as HP.

If "too weak" refers to "they can't damage me", why mention their HP ?

[Helel]

They said they were considering adjusting monster's defense due to removing level correction (see idea #1 that mentions SoA). That's clearly player -> monster.

[Yinnyth]

No. All of the changes they're describing are Monster -> Player. They've given no indication that they're touching Player -> Monster level correction at all.

It sounds to me like they're making it so both the level correction removal and the defense changes will work both ways based on the last line of the quote below:

•Even if defense is increased, the damage received is not reduced
This is mainly for higher level enemies where the level difference correction is imposed.

Every level a value is added per level to the value that is calculated from the attack/defense ratio, and defense is lowered and then taken into account.


Idea
1.The monsters created after Seekers of Adoulin will be created without the imposing of a level difference correction, and when higher level monsters are created, modification will be placed on attack, defense, and stats.

2.Remove level difference correction
By removing the level difference correction, it will be possible to reduce the amount of damage taken by increasing your defense.

Also, with the adjustments to the attack/defense ratio and the level difference correction, weapons that have a modifier of 1.0 will become much stronger than what they are currently.

But it doesn't come right out and say it.

[Motenten]

Next, on to dark knight…

...

In the event that you jump into battles and pay no attention to your defense, you will take damage for nearly two-times the amount that it is now, so the way the job is played will change.

Actually, re-reading this, there's possibly another explanation.

It started off with:

The damage you receive from an enemy's attack will increase up to 50% of your defense; however, if it is less (than 50%) you will still receive the same damage as if you had 50%.

That means the baseline is the player's defense at 50% of the mob's attack. For example, Ig-Alima at 1059 attack and a player with 530 defense, the mob is at capped Ratio against the player. It doesn't matter if you add Berserk, Last Resort, etc, to that, you'll still take the same damage.

Now, take a drk using Berserk+Last Resort (ie: "pay no attention to your defense"). That's +25% and +15% attack, and a commensurate -25% and -15% defense. So defense is down a total of -40%.

Starting from 530 defense, it's now 318 defense. New ratio for the mob is 1059/318 = 3.33, or 67% more damage than before. Bit of a stretch to call it 'almost twice', but the wording makes sense if you looked at it where your defense dropped by almost half, so then the mob Ratio would almost double.

That means they aren't saying the Ratio cap is ~3.33 or 3.5 or whatever, but that the defense that previously meant nothing (from 530 down to 318) now fully matters. In other words, they're not actually asserting any Ratio cap at all (other than at least 3.33). The cap could be 4.0, or, for all we know, could be completely unbounded.

If that is indeed the case, the risk from using Counterstance would be almost completely untenable. Every mob attack would be like current ranged attacks, which are mostly a death sentence for a counterstanced mnk.


So Camate: Please provide clarification. Is there an intended upper bound on the attack/defense ratio? And, regardless, how do they plan on addressing Counterstance with these changes?

[Byrth]

They aren't asserting there will be a future Ratio cap, I agree, but they've pretty much explicitly told us that there is currently a 2.0 Ratio cap for monsters, yeah? As a side note, some testing indicates that this ratio cap is separate from the level correction Ratio boost.
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.htm...6&h=50&p=7#343

Also, I think SE-vision could see "decreasing the damage done by monsters (reducing level correction)" = "making them easier"

The truth is that such a change will have a pretty minor effect on current strategies (apart from the potential inclusion of Tarutarus) because you still need to stun the TP moves so that the status effects don't get off.

[Raksha]

I doubt the comment was directed specifically at you, but more at SCH in general. While I agree with you the way they handled it was stupid Its wrong to think that they didn't nerf it with good reason, a 1 damage Helix could do 262,144 damage if you had an Alliance of SCHs, thats starting at 1 damage, if you started at say, 50, you would hit well over 10 Million damage with an Alliance of SCHs. That would literally kill anything in the game even today, with a single spell in less than 10 seconds.

Had SCHs in general not abused that power, it would have never been broken down to its current level of uselessness. SE's way to nerf it was likely done in a panicking nature due to realizing how easily it could be exploited, and thus changed its accuracy to its current worthless level. The real problem is that SE never went back to it, they fixed the exploit of it but broke the ability itself at the same time, and then never looked back on how to properly fix it in a way which it could not be abused. SE often seems to do this, they make content or changes, and never look back on it, so if its broken then it stays broken and if its not then awesome, we can praise them for getting something right on the first try.

2 points:

1) The only thing anyone ever actually killed with this method was a yovra. No one ever actually killed AV with it.
2) iirc you could only reliably get ~5 SCHs to stick MV, and that was with bots.

Not saying MV shouldnt have been fixed, just saying that it shouldn't have been made useless.

[Tennotsukai]

This is all really great news to read on, but I am wondering about DRK. Wasn't there supposed to be an update on DRKs absorb spells? What about working on DRKs survivability more than just their attack? Perhaps more absorb spells/dread spikes?