Overall Battle System Adjustments for the Future

[FrankReynolds]

Anologies can be fun, and they can help to highlight some aspects of a situation that would be otherwise overlooked, but you should never consider them to be a perfect parallel. You can't brush off the realities that people bring up just because they don't fit into your analogy the way you'd like.


If you have people on salary, they receive the same money every month (or agreed upon timeframe), so the cost is measured in time. Which takes longer?

1. Nerfing one weapon.

2. Creating 10 weapons equal to one unique weapon, balancing magic damage so it falls in line with melees new abilities, then balancing fights so they can still pose a threat.

This assumes they don't already have to do all that... which they do. And I'll be honest here. I don't really care if it does cost more because it's the right thing to do. If they want to keep costs down so bad, they should have just made another online chess game instead of an MMO. These are expensive.

This is a decision to not burn bridges. Imagine a weapon which always hits regardless of evasion, perfect dodge, shadows, flying, etc. If the weapon has no significant downside, then it makes it impossible for devs to use any of those options for future fights, and possibly force them to make some current fights harder if the presence of that weapon is significantly increasing success rate beyond what it should be.

The only thing I see receiving a significant boost to success rate is the ability to not bring a blue or a blm. This has to do with Dark being a far better damage dealer than them. Not with a certain weapon.

PDT is cheap and overused? I'm more tired of melee zerging everything than I am of enemies who have phys shield, PDT, or cerb who it was actually well-implemented on.

Yes, it's over used. It's a cheap way to make magic relevant instead of addressing the problems with magic. It's a lazy way to build diversity and it leads to people creating lazy methods of overcoming diversity.

People don't use the scythe because phys resist is "cheap and overused." People use the scythe because it works. The problem is that the scythe is far too simple and far too effective so people would never even consider using a different solution.

For delicious irony's sake: That would probably be fine if people actually liked melee zerging everything all the time, but in reality, people seem to feel that strategy is cheap and overused.

Zerging all the things has nothing to do with magic sucking. If all things were equal and a group of mages could kill any old thing just as fast as a group of Melee could, people would just add mages to the zerg set up. That wouldn't make instant death moves go away, or change peoples minds about wanting to kill an NM once every ten minutes instead of once a day.

[Dekar]

Hello everyone,

Below is a brief message from Producer Akihiko Matsui.

I certainly respect the fact that Matsui went out of his way to mention that he's been busy. It's way better than just ignoring. Thank you, Producer Matsui!

[Dohati]

personally, i'd rather just wait to hear anything unless it had been like.... months and months w/ no word. it got my hopes up that i'd actually get to hear more news and i was just dissappointed with "sorry no stuff /o/ <3"

[Yinnyth]

Yes, it's over used. It's a cheap way to make magic relevant instead of addressing the problems with magic. It's a lazy way to build diversity and it leads to people creating lazy methods of overcoming diversity.

I've tried thinking of a way in which they could successfully replace PDT as a mechanic for encouraging players to use the more complex and less practiced magic system as opposed to the much simpler melee system, but I'm drawing a blank. If causing enemies to take less damage from melee attacks is the lazy way to encourage magic usage, what is a better-thought out method?

Zerging all the things has nothing to do with magic sucking.

I apologize for not being more clear on this topic. For now I'll put aside the fact that you don't see the connection between the rise of the melee zerg and the decline of the use of magical damage. My point was that although it is not the only factor involved, the special properties of the Twilight Scythe make it a contributing factor for why melees are generally chosen. Even enemies who are given PDT in order to hinder melee zerging can still be melee zerged by drks.

[Economizer]

I've tried thinking of a way in which they could successfully replace PDT as a mechanic for encouraging players to use the more complex and less practiced magic system as opposed to the much simpler melee system, but I'm drawing a blank.

Have the mob take increased magic damage.

It's essentially the same result, but you can't just use a weapon to bypass the physical damage doing less damage.

To be completely honest, I have no clue why elementals don't take increased magic damage of the element they're weak to. Resists on the elements they're strong to essentially do the opposite, so why not have mobs that are supposed to be weak to certain elements have negative resists? Use the mobs weakness and you could find yourself doing 12.5%~25%~50~100% more damage then normal, for an example implementation. There has to be a method that would make more sense then just having more magic accuracy on the target, casting Stone on a Thunder Elemental should do some serious damage!

[Yinnyth]

That's something I've honestly always wondered too. It always seems to be reduced magic damage for certain elements, never increased magic damage from certain elements. Always bugged a me a little that "weak to ice" meant "they're more likely to take full damage if you cast ice instead of something else". Changing that is definitely something I'd like to see added to the "fix the magic system" list of things to do.

But more to the point I was originally raising when responding to FrankReynolds, if giving enemies PDT is the "lazy" way to increase magic's utility, how is giving enemies negative MDT any less lazy?

[Raucent]

giving enemies increased resistance to physical damage alone is a lazy way when they could do something to try to make magic/SC more appealing, such as idk maybe lock an enemies 2hr for 30 secs or something by magic bursting off a lvl 3 or something. That gives an incentive to bring Mages and bring SC back into the game

[Yinnyth]

Drk can magic burst. Your healer can magic burst. Any job can magic burst with the right SJ. If all it takes is a magic burst to weaken the enemy to the point where you can melee zerg them again, that's what players will do. Magic burst, then zerg. It's the same thing that happened with Twilight Scythe in the first place. They tried to decrease the appeal of melee zerging by giving PDT to enemies, so players just equipped weapons which ignore PDT and melee zerged anyways.

[Kincard]

I always thought it was kinda funny that historically, when you ran into monsters like flans in other FF games, normal hits would do plain ridiculously awful damage (like 1-10), basically requiring you to fire off a magic spell or spend like half an hour in the same regular battle (Or run away I guess). The fact that they chose to go against that sort of design philosophy in an MMO of all things strikes me as odd since MMOs typically like to accentuate these things further in order to make all classes desirable.

[Sp1cyryan]

Matsui here.

I'm sorry I haven't been making much of an appearance on the forums lately.

Especially since I promised that we would be releasing information related to the enmity system and calculations, I realize I continue to make you all wait. I'm sorry to disappoint you all again and I'm sure there are some of you thinking "don't apologize, just tell us the essentials."

Unfortunately a lot of things came up suddenly which led to me becoming extremely busy this week and wasn't able to write anything up. I'm really sorry about this and I'd like to ask for just a bit more time to get you all the information you've been waiting for.

In the more formal words of Cardcaptor Sakura,

Ganbatte kudasai!