Thief Job Ability Synergy: This is not 2005

[noodles355]

It's not an overstatement. And the fact that you think it is shows your lack of knowlage about how Treasure Hunter used to work. There were conclusive tests done years ago that showed the old Treasure hunter traits both added a 50% increase in drop rates, whilst the +1 items (gloves, dagger) added 1%. Two traits: 50% + 50% = 100%. Adding treasure hunter would double the chance at drops. I would call double pretty significant. Wouldn't you?

The fact that Square Enix has SAID themselves that they are looking to increase our damage dealing potential and looking for ways to allow us to take control on the front line is what makes me think they are moving THF in a different direction.

Link please

Regarding the RMT nerfs: Did I ever state my opinion on the nerfing of those abilities? Did I ever make clear my position? Did I ever say it was OK? No I fucking didn't. Stop inferring such absolute horseshit from my posts. I made statements. I did not give my opinions on those statements.

Fair enough I missed off Critical Attack Bonus. But ability/trait only the majority of what we recieved were utility abilities.
And Thief is still not a heavy DD, even with all these buffs. Equally geared and played it will not put out the same numbers as an equivilent War, Mnk, Drg etc inside abyssea, and those + Sam and Drk outside.

I love how in your attempt to "balance" my list of DD vs Support abilities, you've taken it down from significantly more utility than DD abilities to just "more. As hard as you tried, Thief still has more utility abilities. What does that say?

Yes, in practice, due to bad game design, we are more DD than utility. But that is purely because of poor game design and doesn't change the fact that theoretically we are meant to be more utility based. Are you new to FFXI? If so you may not have realised yet how SE works, and that they will be ignoring the fact the utility side of our job is stupid, and continue to try and buff us in this way. They will never say "screw this" and just focus on more DD abilities. Yes of course we want them too, but they won't. But hey, maybe I'm being unfair, maybe the new dev team will realise the problems. But I would still wager money on them instead of trying to make us shift more to the DD side, that they will keep trying to buff the utility side to achieve their original goal of a light DD and utility job.

[Zyla420]

and everyone completely ignores my post for the sake of arguing.... lovely lol.
btw any testing done on TH has yet to be proven even now, like what? 10 years into the game? thus the TH testing done is highly non-conclusive. and i'll tell you from personal experience, old TH traits do not increase drop rates by 50% each, if they did everyone would have everything and servers would've shut down years ago cause nobody would be playing anymore...

[Nebo]

Link Please

[...]Thief will instead be able to direct the flow party through the use of its techniques. This will include new ways to manage Enmity, allowing the player to more freely raise and lower Enmity and avoid dangerous situations. For endgame content, the Thief may also be improved to deal out more damage[...]

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=21769

This one was part of the whole plan they outlined for all the jobs when they first announced the level cap increase.

I'm sure you are right in that that they have no intentions of shifting their vision of our fundamental purpose or giving up on giving us more crappy utility/enmity stuff that doesn't work. Maybe they aren't aware that we find it so useless? Maybe they think its good?

I came to terms with that part of THF being what it is years ago. I don't make suggestions to fix it, not because I wouldn't like to see them become useful, but because it would take a MAJOR overhaul of the THF job to do that...I don't think we are going to see that kind of love. I would just like something along the lines of the slight DD tweak in the OP so that we can make use of SA and TA more often.

Whether or not SE will see it my way? You're probably right. They probably won't. But like the man said "If you don't ask you don't get." I would rather try and bring suggestion/discussion here where at least I know they read from time to time, rather than just complain about it elswhere but do nothing.

Looking at this thread, one can see that lots of players have very different oppinions of what Thief's identity is. "Its a utility job, no its a support job, no its a hate manager, no its a damage dealer, no its a Tank, no its a Hybrid" etc etc.

My oppinion as to why this is happening is that the game keeps changing, as it must, and the updates that SE has given us don't address the problems that come with that natural evolution of the game. So as a job we have a lot of things that aren't so useful and a lot of things we can sort of do that we aren't very good at.

Even our prized Treasure Hunter crutch that we could always count on to be wanted is being given away.

My issue with Sneak Attack and Trick Attack is just a result of the way that I play. I solo and Duo as much high level content as I can. On my own time. To make gil, to get gear, to finish Empyrian Armor, work on Twashtar etc. So to me, the "party only limitations" are in my face every day.

It is definitely easier to land them if you have a steady group that you run with, but my time is not always spent with a steady group. I join/create Pickup groups a lot for exp, Nms, and to meet new people from time to time. The limitations of the constant chaos in big groups is really apparent there.

This is where I feel those limitations hold us back as a DD (and as a TH enhancer) more than reasonable (reasonable being subjective of course). I feel like, even being able to land them once a minute, we would still be a "light DD" in the eyes of most of the playerbase. But as A THF, I think I would personally find it less frustrating.

I'm all for being a job that enhances the party or is enhanced by working together with a group. It's the whole "Nearly useless without a group" limitation of these abilities that never made sense to me.

[Laphine]

It's funny to see that they didn't provide anything that helps us achieve those objectives. I suppose we can still use the "we still have 9 levels to go" excuse. Maybe we could consider conspirator as the tool to increase our damage...err, i just can't do that because it would be like saying warcry is what really pimps war (athough acc always had more value than attack).

SE sadly did say we would stay dependant on the party. I guess we will never see any change to sa/ta into solo perspective. Well, i hope they get a damage boost then!

[Nebo]

this has been debated for the longest time, and i can see why. thf dd capability in most of the game content is sub par in comparison to most of the other melee/dd jobs. the reason? we're classified as melee/support/utility, and that's where the problem lies.

fact: we deal mediocre dmg in comparison to solid dd jobs.
fact: our utility abilities are some of the most useless abilities in the game.
fact: we have a grand total of 3 real support abilities, 2 of which are pretty much useless at this point. (we have 5 if you count TA and aurasteal)

imo either 1 of 3 things need to happen to balance this discrepancy out:

A. increase our overall dmg potential to at least come close to sold dd's.

B. drastically increase the usefulness of the utility abilities we have, and add more to compensate for the lack of dd.

C. give us more support abilities that are actually relevant at this point in the game.

I always thought about this in the sense that if I was going to "Fix" our utility I would do something like this:

A universal steal timer of 30 seconds (MAXIMUM), and a seperate category for Enmity Steals.

Dramatically increase the success percentage, with a cap of 95% with +steal gear.

I would then create a bunch of different kinds of steal that all share this 30 second timer.

• (Item)Steal: Same as it is now (I like your idea of stealing temp items [That don't take inventory space] that are useful to us mid-battle instead of the useless fodder crap we can steal and despoil now). Percent chance would remain the same for valued steal items like coins and dynamis currency. These would simply be HQ steals as opposed to regular temp items for battle.
• Aurasteal: Seperated from (item)Steal. Only steals & dispells Buffs. Does not attempt an item steal. Will not fail if inventory is full, etc.
• Despoil (Attack): Inflicts Attack Down and Steals a 15% Attack Boost.
• Despoil (Accuracy): Influcts Accuracy Down and Steals 30 Accuracy
• Despoil (Critical Hit Rate) Inflicts Crit Hit Rate down and Steals a 10% Critical hit Rate boost.
• Despoil (Magic Evasion) Inflicts Magic Evasion Down and Steals 30 Magic Evasion.
• Despoil (Magic Defense) Inflicts Magic Defense Down and grants 15% Magic Defense Bonus.
• Despoil (Evasion): Inflicts Evasion Down and Steals 30 Evasion
• Despoil (TP): Steals 35 TP
• Despoil (HP): Steals 350 HP
• Despoil (Speed): Inflicts a 10% "Speed Down" status effect (stacks with but is not a slow effect) and causes a "10%Speed Boost" Status effect (stacks with but is not a haste effect.)
• Mug: Inflicts Damage and Stuns the target. No longer steals gil.

*All Despoil abilites are specific, not random, and do not attempt an item steal.
*All Despoil Debuffs and Buffs last 2 minutes (enhanced by +despoil gear).
*All Buffs stolen with Aurasteal last the standard base duration of the buff. Duration is not determined from the time the monster used it.

Conspirator Recast is shortened to 2 Minutes and grants current stolen Despoil buff effects to your party. e.g.Despoil (Attack) + Conspirator = Party Attack Bonus.

• "Current enmity target" restriction is removed from Conspirator

Enmity Steals To be on Seperate recast timers. Recast timers are not shared:

• Collaborator: Steals 25% Enmity: 30 Second Recast
• Accomplice: Steals 50% enmity 1 Minute Recast
• Perpetrator: Steals 100% Enmity 5 Minute recast
  *Effective range will be extended

Flee is a party buff (like Mazurka) so we can help them {run away}.

Hide adds Invisibe, Sneak and Deodorise. Sheds enmity on all but a very select few HNMs (IE: Works on almost everything in the game)

Perfect Dodge is reduced to a 5 minute recast Job Ability and a new 2 Hour is given.

• A defensive ability called "Evade" will be added. One minute recast timer. Allows the THF to automatically dodge the next phsyical Attack (TP or otherwise) directed at him.

Job Traits, THF specific Ranged Weapons, or THF specific gear will be added to enhance Status Bolts/Arrows accuracy, potentcy etc.

That is the kind of utility I invision being relevant in 2011 FFXI.

[noodles355]

and everyone completely ignores my post for the sake of arguing.... lovely lol.
btw any testing done on TH has yet to be proven even now, like what? 10 years into the game?

Actually there was significant tests done years ago, maybe 2006ish? I don't remember. Anyway, the sample size was very large and showed pretty convincingly withing a respectable magin of error that TH1 increased drop rate by 50% and TH2 increased it by 100% (doubled). The concensus was that Thief's Knife and Assassin's Armlets increased dropr ate by only 1%. Sadly as I said this data is very old (and now irrelevant), so I can't comment on how accurate the TK/AA tests were (because 1% is a very difficult number to measure when you concider margins or error and the number of results you would need for it to be accurate) but the TH1 and TH2 traits were done with a large enough sample size to be accurate.

[Laphine]

oh yeah, i myself have a parse back from when i farmed onions from gobs. At the time, the drop rate shown on the wiki was less than half of what i had (20% vs 50% or something). The wiki drop rate is probably unrealiable, but this certainly made believe that test even more throughout the years.

A reason why everyone didn't get everything they wanted could be due low drop rate. But for example, if something had 1% drop rate, adding tk and/or relic hands would do more, or at least the same, of adding TH2.

[noodles355]

I sware I wrote another reply to Nebo after my lasty post but it doesn't seem to have gone through. I don't really remember what he said without re-reading it (must not have been important) so I'll look over it tomorrow and correct him then.

[Nebo]

I sware I wrote another reply to Nebo after my lasty post but it doesn't seem to have gone through. I don't really remember what he said without re-reading it (must not have been important) so I'll look over it tomorrow and correct him then.

Sweet! Make sure you try real hard to be correct this time when you do it

[Arcon]

I sware I wrote another reply to Nebo after my lasty post but it doesn't seem to have gone through. I don't really remember what he said without re-reading it (must not have been important) so I'll look over it tomorrow and correct him then.

Kinda feels like arguing with a less annoying version of kingfury (at least they're not adding "my friend" all the time). Someone who has an idea that people disagree with but holds on to it despite all criticism, and trying to debunk that criticism with invalid arguments, popping out more inappropriate ideas as they go along. Don't really see the point in it. If people believe THF should be a heavy damage dealer, let them believe it and be disappointed with each update again.