Allow Weaponskills from off-hand weapons with 50%- damage

[Yugl]

The OP's suggestion has a few benefits, but most are handled if you're not too lazy to change weapons or regain TP midway. The one benefit I can think of that doesn't apply is if you get the accuracy of your main hand weapon while conducting the WS.

[GlobalVariable]

I remember a suggestion I saw once for a JA on nin to instantly swap main and off hand weapons without tp loss. Seeing this thread reminded me of that.

[Duelle]

And once again, Hordecore has made a thread demanding SE to change something that is not to his liking, not explaining why he thinks his idea is a good one and what purpose it would serve.

He probably saw the idea for Escrime on the RDM sub-forums and wanted something similar for every class. Though Escrime is basically dual wield for RDM limited to Sword in mainhand and dagger in offhand only, granting the RDM access to WS from both weapons to make up for our otherwise poor selection of weapons for dagger and poor selection of WS on swords.

[Arcon]

I'd like to first say, Comparing losing ~10TP from switching weapons for procing, and Wasting 20 minutes walking when you could teleport, was probably in the top 10 of "Dumbest comparison I've read online".

It wasn't a quantitive comparison, it was a qualitative analogy. To show a qualitative, not quantitive, similarity in one respect, namely using laziness as an excuse for wanting the game to run smoother. This involves automating certain game elements, transportation is one thing, handling weapon skills another. If either of those can provide the same functionality (reaching a certain location in one case, using a different type of weapon skill in the other case), that enhances the flow of the game, while requiring less time and/or effort (in this case both). Whether or not they're quantitively comparable is a whole different story.

And this is not just about losing TP, this is about having to change weapons in the first place. Especially if you have to change weapons several times and you don't have a macro for it (like me, for example). Admittedly, staggering monsters in Abyssea is the prime example here, if I wanted to do 4 red stagger weapon skills, I would have to switch between Club/Sword and Sword/Club repeatedly (since club is underskilled and I use sword for faster TP gain). Then you wanna try different WS, but you aren't sure if the others were clean, so you change again. And changing is tedious in any way, because you can't change those weapons when both are equipped, so you have to unequip one first. And with the confusing targeting within the equipment menu even that can take a while. And in the time it takes for fully change, especially if you mess up once, it can cost you even more than 20% TP. It's still not comparable to 20 minutes like in the teleport case, but it's still annoying.

Now, While you make a decent argument, I'm still going to say it generally won't help as many people as you make it sound..

My exact words were:

[..] someone may get a remote use out of it [..]

I'm not even saying it's useful or that the world will benefit greatly from it. I'm not even saying it's worth implementing, I'm just saying it's not a retarded idea and there are marginal uses for it. Remember DNC using Joyeuse in offhand? I've even seen COR with that. Nice to have an extra stun available (even for DNC, if Violent Flourish isn't up). Another use, as mentioned before, would be self-skillchaining to create higher tier skillchains with an offhand weapon skill. Or, if we go with the OP's idea of doing less damage with the off-hand, could even be used to delay the death of a monster to get more weapon skills in.

In this case I'm assuming you were going for blue and it was either GS or scythe, and those are 2h weapons last I checked. And if you haven't triggered blue by 1% then it's rather pointless to try in my opinion, since 1 blue ws is likely to 1shot the mob.

It was just an example, it could have as well been a single-handed weapon skill. And there are tons of mobs who wouldn't even raise an eyebrow if they got hit with an underskilled one-handed blue weapon skill, even at 1% (Empousa being one of them). Also, that's precisely why reducing damage for an offhand weapon skill would help in this case.

But as I said, usefulness wasn't even my main arguments for having it. Those would be logic (because it would make sense, no one says player characters are right-handed, since they attack just as accurate and hard with both hands, and even iff, the damage reduction would compensate for that), making weapon skills more readily available, as well as less tedious to use and it being easy to implement.

And besides that, Theres still the issue of Weaponskill Animations. Using Evisceration With a Katana, or Savage Blade with a Club will just look and sound stupid.

Why would you even perform it with the main hand? It's an offhand weapon skill, so flip the animation sideways and do it with the left hand. No extra animating or adjusting required, just mirror the entire thing.

Even if you got past how unusual it would look to use some of the WS with a different main weapon, theres the programming stand-point, I'm sure there was a reason it was not added from the beginning.

There's probably a reason why they didn't, but I doubt it's programming related. Wouldn't be the first time (or second, or third, etc.) that SE didn't include something that would have been easy to add. As I said, there already has to be a function which produces available weapon skills depending on the weapon, all they'd have to do is run it twice. It already is done with CORs and RNGs, as someone pointed out before, so it definitely is possible.

Again, I'm not saying it should be implemented, it would only help me marginally and there's plenty of other things they should be worrying about first, I'm just not a fan of people talking down good ideas for reasons that contribute nothing to the issue at hand.

[hiko]

Getting TP with offhand often sucks due to low skill rating, and quite possibly being underskilled even for the already low cap. Club is a nice example. So dual wielding a dagger and club would help TP gain a lot, making it easier to proc

how dual wielding dagger/club help TP gain more than dual wielding club/dagger?

And changing weapons is just tedious if you need different kinds of WS all the time, especially if you only decide to AoE mid fight, and you do it frequently. Sometimes it's just nice to be prepared for either situation. What about Skillchain properties, trying to open a level 3 skillchain with one hand, close it with the other. Every bit of TP counts, you can't just switch weapons to make it work.

Not saying it's a grave issue or anything, just saying I could see uses for it. In fact, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible at all, offhand has no other penalties, so apparently FFXI characters aren't just right-handed. So why not allow it, even at full strength?

game balance and diversity. why not give all weapons the same WS list or let players use any WS they already learned no matter what weapon they have equiped

I'd like to add "Dual wield 2 handed weapons for 50% damage each". Not that I'd dual wield 2 staffs for the DMG rating, I'd do it for the stats.

empy/quint spear <yes please>
dual wielding 2HW will just over power mages (if they can make enough inventory, +2/+1 elem staff ftw)

I guarantee that most proc'ers have wasted more time switching weapons than walking somewhere because of no teleports (at least since the introduction of the proc system). I know i've wasted way more than 20 minutes waiting on dudes to proc a mob (not all at once, mind you).

But either way I dunno if this is the kind of thing i want SE wasting time on.

any player that started playing before abyssea would have lost way more time witout tele than anybody can loose on wainting trigger
if you remove teleport might as well remove all warps/Horst/conflux and you'll loose more time than having to swap weapons

[Arcon]

how dual wielding dagger/club help TP gain more than dual wielding club/dagger?

That wasn't a response to that, it was just to show why using two different types of weapons beats just using club to get WS or dual wielding clubs. It was leading on to the next point, that swapping the two from mainhand to offhand and vice versa sucks.

game balance and diversity. why not give all weapons the same WS list or let players use any WS they already learned no matter what weapon they have equiped

How will it upset the game balance or diversity? It only allows you to do what you already can do, only less tedious and a tad faster.

[Tamoa]

The advantages to being able to ws with offhand weapon are marginal at best and quite frankly it's not something I think the programmers should even waste their time on implementing into the game. Karbuncle has already pointed out the fact that it wouldn't be as straightforward as it may seem, from a programming point of view.

[Xilk]

The advantages to being able to ws with offhand weapon are marginal at best and quite frankly it's not something I think the programmers should even waste their time on implementing into the game. Karbuncle has already pointed out the fact that it wouldn't be as straightforward as it may seem, from a programming point of view.

Karbuncle has made the best argument in this thread about it not being easy to implement.
Most the rest is personal trolling or whining :P

I never saw this as a demand, only a suggestion. I don't think its a HUGE change, but I need a HUGE change. I think it would be situationally useful, and fun. I think thats plenty of reason to do it.

I also thought it would be simple.

I would not like it if it performed a dagger WS w/ an Axe. The animation should show it being done w/ a dagger. The weaponskills are and should be connected to weapons. breaking that would be terrible. However, trying to WS from off hand would require new animations to be made, which would increase the work required for this change considerably.

i think its a neat idea, but this difficulty probably would make it impractical.

[GlobalVariable]

I would not like it if it performed a dagger WS w/ an Axe. The animation should show it being done w/ a dagger. The weaponskills are and should be connected to weapons. breaking that would be terrible. However, trying to WS from off hand would require new animations to be made, which would increase the work required for this change considerably.

i think its a neat idea, but this difficulty probably would make it impractical.

Yeah, second set of animations for every 1 handed weapons set of weapons skills kills it alone. Very unlikely they'd invest the time for that let alone the more technical aspects. Even the tp lossless main/offhand switch suggestion I saw might be to much trouble for ffxi's engine/programming staff. I don't get where anyone got "demand" out of the OP though.

[Karbuncle]

I guarantee that most proc'ers have wasted more time switching weapons than walking somewhere because of no teleports (at least since the introduction of the proc system). I know i've wasted way more than 20 minutes waiting on dudes to proc a mob (not all at once, mind you).

But either way I dunno if this is the kind of thing i want SE wasting time on.

Well, That seems more like a problem of a bad player. If he can't time his WS to do it within 20 minutes, I somehow doubt that giving him the ability to use a sub weapon is going to fix his IQ or timing skills

It wasn't a quantitive comparison, it was a qualitative analogy. To show a qualitative, not quantitive, similarity in one respect, namely using laziness as an excuse for wanting the game to run smoother. This involves automating certain game elements, transportation is one thing, handling weapon skills another. If either of those can provide the same functionality (reaching a certain location in one case, using a different type of weapon skill in the other case), that enhances the flow of the game, while requiring less time and/or effort (in this case both). Whether or not they're quantitively comparable is a whole different story.

(A lot of my post is going to seem rude, I assure you its just the in your head. Read what i say in a calm fashion and it'll make it hurt less.)

If its only going ot help 1 person in a million every so often, There's no reason they should waste production time with it. IN that case, its a useless addition, Its wasting valuable production time. It would be almost as bad as updates to Chocobo Racing.

And this is not just about losing TP, this is about having to change weapons in the first place. Especially if you have to change weapons several times and you don't have a macro for it (like me, for example). Admittedly, staggering monsters in Abyssea is the prime example here, if I wanted to do 4 red stagger weapon skills, I would have to switch between Club/Sword and Sword/Club repeatedly (since club is underskilled and I use sword for faster TP gain). Then you wanna try different WS, but you aren't sure if the others were clean, so you change again. And changing is tedious in any way, because you can't change those weapons when both are equipped, so you have to unequip one first. And with the confusing targeting within the equipment menu even that can take a while. And in the time it takes for fully change, especially if you mess up once, it can cost you even more than 20% TP. It's still not comparable to 20 minutes like in the teleport case, but it's still annoying.

I think using the word "repeatedly" is going a bit too far. Unless you mean over the course of your entire Abyssea adventures. I also think, You should never be full timing Sword/club on any job. so i don't understand why you're ever in that situation.

If you're trying to proc sword, You should be using Sword/sword, or sword/shield, I'm assuming your PLD here. If you're trying to proc Club, Club/Joyeuse would probably be the best bet, or a Kraken Club. Either way, Once you get "The enemy is weak to light based attacks" you would Equip a Sword, Staff, Club, or Katana and start attempting to trigger with said weapon. Once you use a WS, you lose your TP anyway, and get like ~10. So saying "Well, If im using Sword/club and its light, I can use Seraph Blade, then Seraph strike without switching weapons", is kinda moot. Cause the only thing you'd lose from switching weapons at that point would be ~10TP, and this improvement would just save you 10TP.

My exact words were:


I'm not even saying it's useful or that the world will benefit greatly from it. I'm not even saying it's worth implementing, I'm just saying it's not a retarded idea and there are marginal uses for it. Remember DNC using Joyeuse in offhand? I've even seen COR with that. Nice to have an extra stun available (even for DNC, if Violent Flourish isn't up). Another use, as mentioned before, would be self-skillchaining to create higher tier skillchains with an offhand weapon skill. Or, if we go with the OP's idea of doing less damage with the off-hand, could even be used to delay the death of a monster to get more weapon skills in.

Again, not trying to be mean, but if its only going to benefit 1 person in a million once in a blue moon, its not worth the production time at all. the Dev team is clearly very restricted and limited on Production means, This, despite looking easy, From a programming standpoint would take substantial effort.

And in my eyes, it is a "retarded" idea. I'm using your words here, not mine. The idea just does not help enough people for it to hold merit. The idea in foundation is something I'm sure every player has gone "Gee, it would be neat if...", but at the same time, they all generally came to realize "it takes the IQ of a monkey to switch weapons, Theres no need for this in reality i guess".

It was just an example, it could have as well been a single-handed weapon skill. And there are tons of mobs who wouldn't even raise an eyebrow if they got hit with an underskilled one-handed blue weapon skill, even at 1% (Empousa being one of them). Also, that's precisely why reducing damage for an offhand weapon skill would help in this case.

Another thing where I'm trying not to be mean, but i think it will come off that way.

If you're trying to trigger blue, there absolutely 0 reason you should be killing the mob steadily to the point its sitting at 1% and you're going "F**K, we didn't trigger?", This situation is even less likely due to Abyssite of Discernment. It basically narrows it down to 2 to 5 weaponskills depending on what time of day you claimed it.

This seems more like an error on the side of Bad players, where i don't think being able to nerf-weaponskill would help them. They'd still probably be TP'ing on the mob. If they can't figure out how to hold a mob to get a Trigger, I find it hard to believe they're bringing over TP mobs.

But as I said, usefulness wasn't even my main arguments for having it. Those would be logic (because it would make sense, no one says player characters are right-handed, since they attack just as accurate and hard with both hands, and even iff, the damage reduction would compensate for that), making weapon skills more readily available, as well as less tedious to use and it being easy to implement.

I see your points, But again, I hate to sound like a terrible broken record, if its only going to help 1 in a million people once in a blue moon, and generally its only going to help lazy or bad players (I.E those who don't want to switch weapons, or those who zerg a mob to 1% then realize they want blue), there is no reason to waste production time, very limited valuable production time, for this idea.

Why would you even perform it with the main hand? It's an offhand weapon skill, so flip the animation sideways and do it with the left hand. No extra animating or adjusting required, just mirror the entire thing.

Its not that easy, There would be so many issues involved with that. unfortunately programming isn't Microsoft Paint, you just can't open it and hit the "Flip" button. It would take a hell of a lot of time and programming to go through every single 1-handed WS, encode a program to allow them to use it offhand, and to encode the program to nerf the WS Damage, and make entirely new WS animations for use of the Offhand weapon, etc etc.

There's probably a reason why they didn't, but I doubt it's programming related. Wouldn't be the first time (or second, or third, etc.) that SE didn't include something that would have been easy to add. As I said, there already has to be a function which produces available weapon skills depending on the weapon, all they'd have to do is run it twice. It already is done with CORs and RNGs, as someone pointed out before, so it definitely is possible.
I'm not saying it should be implemented, it would only help me marginally and there's plenty of other things they should be worrying about first, I'm just not a fan of people talking down good ideas for reasons that contribute nothing to the issue at hand.

you can't honestly type to me in a serious conflexion saying you can't tell the monumental difference between allowing an Off-hand Weapon's WS to be used with main hand, and a Ranged Weapon Weaponskills?

I don't know if i can adequately describe what i'm trying to say. Ranged weapons are basically another category. They have their own Animations/coding separate from Single handed weapons. They have their own formulas for damage/etc. a Ranged weapon is also separate, in animation, from the "Main Weapon". hence you drawing out the bow from nothingness.

Yah, i really can't explain what i'm trying to say, So i'll stop here. Goodluck with my wall of text :|