Job Adjustments for the Next Version Update

[Duelle]

Alternatively people could not flip out by assuming the worst

You must be new here... >.>

Translation: The Tanaka Era has conditioned pretty much everyone that has played this game since RotZ to expect the worst when the developers make a change, as while promising and pretty-sounding, there would tend to always be some boneheaded implementation that would ruin the whole thing.

[Glamdring]

not gonna quote Theytak, too long. I agree with most everything you said, EXCEPT the part about pup being designed with the 6-man party playstyle in mind. I think the vision from the get go was as another soloer job, using a different mechanism than bst. It was just poorly executed which is why we are only overcoming-to an extent-"lolpup" after all these years.

But you hit the nail on the head about the long memory of 1st impressions. To this day there are people still trying to claim an XP reduction if a beast has a pet. Seriously, that hasn't been the case since what, 2004 or so? So yeah, lolpup still exists in some people's minds. Drg, smn, same issues, their flaws are still in the forefront of players minds (if you want to call them that). the obvious example, any pet job's damage output, most can't seem to grasp that you have to add the pet's output to the player's output to figure out actual DPS-and that you are doing that for the non-pet jobs in any calculation, the difference is the value of their pet damage is 0, ours is not.

The other player issue is the one track mind. You know, the "official" strategy people. Yes, strategy x has been shown to work. Problem is, y-n also work, but noone will do them because they aren't x. And noone will try to make o-w work, even though they may very well work with a bit of fine-tuning. That's how jobs just die in this game. Example, could paladin tank in Aby? yeah-if the other players didn't try to break records on every swing/cast. But they did, so Zerg killed pld. That's why as much as I love my new rune I was kind of sorry to see it introduced-what's the use of a new tank when all content is Zerg Uber Alles? So yeah, it's levelled and I'm going to keep playing it because I like the style, but I'm resigned to its primary use being to solo beastman/mob mage types, and the few occasions I can talk my friends into letting me play something besides thf or brd.

[Alhanelem]

I'd like to follow up a bit about the planned wyvern enhancements for dragoon.

To give a simpler idea of what we have planned, by equipping a high content level weapon, we are envisioning that the stats of your wyvern also increase along with you. It's somewhat close to what a player mentioned about making it so your wyverns damage value, delay, attack, and defense increase based on your own values.

Currently there are pieces of equipment that have pet enhancing stats and by equipping them they influence your pet's strength (for example, there are already polearms in existence that enhance wyverns); however, this is not what we will be doing this time with polearms.

Okay, so this is great, so how about doing this for SMN, PUP and BST too? This would even give high damage staves such as the R/M/E weapons meaning to SMNs who choose not to melee.

Why in the world would this only apply to dragoon?

(edit: I guess other people were thinking exactly what I was thinking! How often does that happen?)

[Hawklaser]

Alternatively people could not flip out by assuming the worst and post pages of why it won't work despite misunderstanding and making wild assumptions, but hey..

Difference between when they say "Addition of polearms that have stats to increase the parameters of wyverns", vs saying they will be allowing your lance to adjust the stats of your wvyern. First one causes Pet: effects being on weapons to jump to mind while the other does not cause that as much, though would still get some of the same feedback because with Pet: effect gear already being in the game that could be what was coming. All in how the news is delivered.

Back to the all the adjustments, while this may solve some of DRG's wyvern scalability, PUP, SMN, and BST is still going to have issues unless they have plans to consistently add new grips, animators and jugs. So for grips, see one of two things happening either they become situationally used or they will be the only one used. And as for the Jugs, unless they are special Rare/Ex ones that don't get used up, every BST is going to have immediate access to them, and there will be a huge demand for them. With high demand, can only hope supply will be able to keep up otherwise prices are either going to be very high or will struggle with trying to get them unless you make your own. And when Content Level goes up again, end up back at square one.

[Theytak]

Greetings everyone (and happy Friday!),

I'd like to follow up a bit about the planned wyvern enhancements for dragoon.

To give a simpler idea of what we have planned, by equipping a high content level weapon, we are envisioning that the stats of your wyvern also increase along with you. It's somewhat close to what a player mentioned about making it so your wyverns damage value, delay, attack, and defense increase based on your own values.

Currently there are pieces of equipment that have pet enhancing stats and by equipping them they influence your pet's strength (for example, there are already polearms in existence that enhance wyverns); however, this is not what we will be doing this time with polearms. With that said, it'll help a lot if you think of this as the polearms that are to be introduced from here on out will allow you enhance your wyvern, and the enhancements will not only increase specific stats. (We will be making it possible to enhance your wyverns after we implement the RME revamps.)

Also, the reason we didn't choose grips was because there are varieties of strong pieces of equipment that can be selected based on the situation, and if we were to make these enhance wyverns, it would be difficult to choose other options.

With that said, we felt it would be best for dragoons to be able to enhance their wyverns with their weapons.

Mmmm. I'll need to hear from you that this is also being applied to bst, pup, and smn, and then get a much more concrete explanation of just what it is you plan on doing, before I can really judge it. Thus, I'm going to stand by what I said before,

Fixing pets by adding new, pet enhancing gear is not the correct answer. It's no different than applying a band-aid to someone who's in need of surgery, and expecting the band-aid to somehow magically fix the problem. The only difference this little clarification gives, from my perspective, is that we'd be getting one of those cool cartoon-character band-aids, rather than a boring one.

not gonna quote Theytak, too long. I agree with most everything you said, EXCEPT the part about pup being designed with the 6-man party playstyle in mind. I think the vision from the get go was as another soloer job, using a different mechanism than bst. It was just poorly executed which is why we are only overcoming-to an extent-"lolpup" after all these years.

That's not true. PUP was a horrible soloer at first. It didn't have the gear, or the resources, to reliably solo. The only reason people made it work was through grit, and because we had no other choice. PUP has become a soloing powerhouse, but that's no different than NIN becoming a tank, or bst becoming a soloer (bst wasn't intended to solo either, they were just damn good at it)

The other player issue is the one track mind. You know, the "official" strategy people. Yes, strategy x has been shown to work. Problem is, y-n also work, but noone will do them because they aren't x. And noone will try to make o-w work, even though they may very well work with a bit of fine-tuning. That's how jobs just die in this game. Example, could paladin tank in Aby? yeah-if the other players didn't try to break records on every swing/cast. But they did, so Zerg killed pld. That's why as much as I love my new rune I was kind of sorry to see it introduced-what's the use of a new tank when all content is Zerg Uber Alles? So yeah, it's levelled and I'm going to keep playing it because I like the style, but I'm resigned to its primary use being to solo beastman/mob mage types, and the few occasions I can talk my friends into letting me play something besides thf or brd.

I'd like to remind you that I'm one of those "official" strategy people. The reason other methods aren't used isn't because people don't know how to do them, or don't want to do them, but because they're not remotely as effective or efficient as the tried and true melee zerg. Sure, method x, y, and z might all be able to kill the NM, but when the key difference between them is that method x achieves the same results as method y in a third the time, and method z with half the people, it's clear that method x is the superior choice, and doing either y or z is a waste of both your, and everyone else's, valuable time. That said, the main reason tanking died was more that tanks couldn't even hope to try and hold hate in a zerg situation. If they could, which SEis slowly working them back towards, that would only make zerging even better.

[Alpheus]

now I'm a bit puzzled. Why is this approach not being applied to SMN, PUP, BST as well?

If I had to guess, they wanna see if this pans out well and then roll it out for the rest of the pet jobs. If it doesn't pan out THEN they'll have to rework stuff from the ground up so they're probably trying the least intrusive method first on a job that doesn't necessarily need it per se.

[RAIST]

If I had to guess, they wanna see if this pans out well and then roll it out for the rest of the pet jobs. If it doesn't pan out THEN they'll have to rework stuff from the ground up so they're probably trying the least intrusive method first on a job that doesn't necessarily need it per se.

Think you may be giving SE too much credit. If that were the case, the proper thing to do would be to put it on the test server and let people test it for them and provide feedback before going live with it--be that on just DRG or all pet jobs. That is, after all, the primary function of a test server---to test significant changes before putting them into production.

As it stands now, it looks more like they have seperate plans for each pet job...none of which really make sense if you acknowledge that the problem is inherant to the pet's scaling since level 75 cap was exceeded (may be the problem here.. SE just not getting it). If they would just fix that aspect across the board, there may not need to be any additional gear added as an attempt to fix the job (that's not exactly a fix to the job...more a tweak to it's gear selection, but not a fix to the job).

Now, if they wanted to add grips and such as new items to help us tweak pets in certain ways like we already do with Magian's and such, that might be acceptable (provided the pets themselves are fixed)---but to make that basically a requirement to put them on par with where they should be naturally is just not acceptable when our main inventory is already clogged up with Pet: Enhancement gears as is.

[poodlehat]

I wish there was some kind of jug, maybe not as powerful as a typical one, but that could be used with bst as a sub. It would be maybe level 49 all jobs?

[Luscia]

Here's the thing and yeah maybe it's me being a DRG main, but; the only possible reason I can see this being DRG only vs SMN, BST and PUP is because DRG isn't a traditional pet job. The wyvern doesn't get any options to really do much of anything; it heals every minute when not /mage, it deals breath dmg every minute on command but that dmg really isn't much in the long run and thats it. We as the DRG can up it's survivability via Steady Wing, but there's still a really good shot of it getting taken down quickly and we can heal it by sacrificing some of our own HP to do so and get a little TP in return. BST, SMN and PUP all have more options so to speak; SMNs have different avatars to call upon and depending on the type of mob or power needed you will use a different avatar, same goes for BST; you need power you will use a heavy hitter, you need a tank you will use a pet with high def. PUP's puppet is only slightly different, but again has options in what you need it to do; it can be a nuker, a healer, a ranged attacker or even a tank. But a DRG's wyvern does pretty much nothing, so anything to help it out is a welcome change as it is a part of being a DRG.

[Demon6324236]

On the list of new pets, I want a Mantid, that is all.