[dev1024] Job Adjustments - Scarlet Delirium

[Chriscoffey]

Thx, this will make my comeback decision more clear

Hey at least that is an honest reply... it sure feels like it sometimes over the last few years since the newest development team looks at dark knight differently than the first one did.

[Selzak]

Why would they increase the duration of the absorb on that to 180 seconds...? Three minutes to take a single hit, right? Then it turns into the sword icon for 60 seconds?

That just doesn't make much sense...

[Madawc]

Yes, you pop and and wait to get AoE'd. Or "tactically" use it faster then an enemy can WS you directly while tanking.

Either way, it is a stupid way of implementing it. upto ~500 dmg you only get 13% dmg boost. You want atleast 20% for get that minute worthwhile. Should you lose 99% of your HP you are looking at +49% dmg for 1 minute.

If SE had some brains they would make this a Job TRAIT which procs if you lose more then 50% of your HP. Like NINs Migawari: "severely damaging attacks."

[Selzak]

Looks like yet another good idea given a completely impractical and almost unusable application for DRKs to sit on in their long list of abilities and spells, while they sit there thinking about what could have been and watch other jobs do the things they play the job with the intention to do (SAM inflicts plague, WAR does spike damage, BLU helps out with unique enfeebles, THF stuns the enemy with Bully, etc...).

[Muras]

You know... I don't think I want this ability. I don't want to play DRK like this. Can't SE see that this is terrible? This isn't going to help anyone, the DRK or his party. If anything you'll see situations like this:

*Mob begins casting Blizzaga IV*
DRK: Ooooh!
*DRK runs into range*
*Everyone in range eats Blizzaga IV*
Everyone else: Why didn't you stun that!?
DRK: Pft, Scarlet Delirium of course! Derp.

Of course, only terrible DRKs will do that. I myself on the other hand will just never use the stupid ability. I'm not going to endanger myself and possibly my party by purposely acting stupid and getting myself killed. SE is basically asking us to act like idiots with this ability.

I dunno about other players, but I find it a little insulting that I'm being told I can't possibly be playing or doing it "right" because something is new and that it'll take me time to adjust to the effects. This game is 9 years old, and I've been playing since PC launch (October 30th 2003, says so right in my SE account for Rise of the Zilart pack). I also study game design and business in real life. I'm not trying to be elitist, but I'm trying to stress that I and many other players have enough experience to know when something isn't right. It only takes a little imagination to know exactly how to use something, especially in a 9 year old game. Mob AI isn't gonna suddenly change because of this ability. NIN isn't gonna tank any differently. WHMs aren't gonna heal any differently. It's easy to see exactly where this ability has it's uses, and it's not many.

I just don't understand why I have to "risk" so much on DRK for something that isn't even mediocre. I hate this sacrifice and risk theme. DRK is supposed to be a job that's powerful and selfish, the total opposite of sacrifice. It's PLD that's supposed to be sacrificing itself for the well-being of his comrades. I don't think I care what the dev team says, they are wrong. Both in theory and in design. I'm not trying to insult them by saying that though, I have a great respect for them and what they've done... They've made a great game overall. But nobody is perfect, and in this case they're just dead wrong. Case in point: You know their vision of balance is off when they feel taking most or ALL our TP for an ability is a good thing, but if you go in the other direction and give a little TP (Like SCH's Adloquium) all the sudden it's a big problem.

We have many DRKs trying to make it better, with so many great ideas. Even if the Dev team thinks something is overpowered, let's just TRY it in it's "overpowered" state on the test server and find out. That's what the darn thing is for isn't it? Let's try to start from the high end of things and tone it down IF it needs it, rather than starting from the bottom. We'll get better results that way.

At this point it's obvious they're just being stubborn. And I know they ARE trying to listen at least. But please, can't they just give us the benefit of the doubt? I want them to take some of the ideas we've given, overpowered or not, and add them to the test server. Best case scenario is a community rep creates a thread asking for everyone to post fixes and they all come under review by the dev team, and they add them to the test server to see if they're really good ideas or not.

I really believe we won't get any real results unless all us DRKs fight against this sacrifice and risk theme. We've had 15 levels of virtually nothing since 75, soon to be 20. After that, we have only 4 more levels to get something useful. Time is running out. If we want cool and useful stuff like what SAM is always getting, we gotta get rid of the sacrifice and risk theme. If DRK is at 0, and the buff is +1 and the sacrifice is a -1, what do you get? We're still at 0.

[Raucent]

In many cases, dangerous special abilities and magic that are used by the opponent can be halted by Stun, but there are instances where Stun does not work or cannot be cast due to recast timers. There are also instances where players will have to take the damage from some attacks in order to stop more powerful attacks instead.
[/COLOR]

lets see as far as moves we would stun vs take the pain on

Throat Stab
Citadel Buster
Spike Flail
the tonberry Rancor/grudge moves
Comet/Meteor
etc

the only real "heavy damage" spells we cant block

would be NMs immune to it such as some of the NMs in abyssea or some minor use in Campaign Battle/besieged
the only really non stunnable moves we would eat the damage on would be 2hr moves such as Avatar 2hrs (damn you Ogopogo 1% Tidal Wave) or other similar attacks

[Raucent]

gotta agree with ya Muras it would seem that we are getting passed over on several fronts:

their argument on our survivability with Stun wep Bash and Spikes is kind of null, Stun every 45 secs if you are NOT using Hasso/Seigan. Dread Spikes only works against physical attacks up to 1/2 of max HP, Tactical Parry with D rank Parry ... no point in explaining, add to that that we are giving up 25+% of our defense for Last Resort's haste and attack boost.

Drains while useful do also have a longer recast timer than cure and they are completely USELESS on undead or dark resistant mobs

Blood Weapon WAS very potent paired with Souleater agaianst several NMs back in '05 but with current NM's becoming resistant to SE after a few hits its not helpful, add to that that just like Drain it is Useless against any Undead

as far as their whole Sacrifice for a gain idea, I could get behind it if the sacrifice and Gain balanced out with the other jobs power boosts, as you said however there is no way in hell a smart DRK would let heavy AoE damage hit the PT for ANY sort of power boost at the expense of the whole pt

[NeoLionheart]

You know... I don't think I want this ability. I don't want to play DRK like this. Can't SE see that this is terrible? This isn't going to help anyone, the DRK or his party.....

.....SE is basically asking us to act like idiots with this ability.

.....I dunno about other players, but I find it a little insulting that I'm being told I can't possibly be playing or doing it "right" because something is new and that it'll take me time to adjust to the effects.

....I just don't understand why I have to "risk" so much on DRK for something that isn't even mediocre.

.....We have many DRKs trying to make it better, with so many great ideas. Even if the Dev team thinks something is overpowered, [b]let's just TRY it in it's "overpowered" state on the test server and find out.

At this point it's obvious they're just being stubborn. And I know they ARE trying to listen at least. But please, can't they just give us the benefit of the doubt? I want them to take some of the ideas we've given, overpowered or not, and add them to the test server. Best case scenario is a community rep creates a thread asking for everyone to post fixes and they all come under review by the dev team, and they add them to the test server to see if they're really good ideas or not.

I really believe we won't get any real results unless all us DRKs fight against this sacrifice and risk theme. We've had 15 levels of virtually nothing since 75, soon to be 20. After that, we have only 4 more levels to get something useful. Time is running out. If we want cool and useful stuff like what SAM is always getting, we gotta get rid of the sacrifice and risk theme. If DRK is at 0, and the buff is +1 and the sacrifice is a -1, what do you get? We're still at 0.

Couldn't of said it better myself, hit it right on the nose.

[Muras]

In many cases, dangerous special abilities and magic that are used by the opponent can be halted by Stun, but there are instances where Stun does not work or cannot be cast due to recast timers. There are also instances where players will have to take the damage from some attacks in order to stop more powerful attacks instead.

I forgot to go into a little detail with this too. Yes, there're moves we can't stun. However, like in the past, our party will often ask melee to be outside of range and only to run in and WS in order to avoid those impossible to stun moves, because getting hit with those AoE is stupid. Just because we have incentive to now ignore this, doesn't mean we're going to do it. This will only hurt DRK. People will get the mindset that it'll be easier to just avoid bringing DRK altogether to make sure someone doesn't try to make use of Scarlet Delirium. Those WHMs will still have to suddenly cure someone they otherwise wouldn't need to cure, you know? MP is precious outside Abyssea. Nobody will enjoy healing me. My drains certainly won't help on "very strong opponents", either.

[Selzak]

They think that we (along with others, like THF namely) just don't understand why the changes they're making are good ideas. It's happened like this for a long, long time. It seems like eventually they'd grasp the fact that they're doing it wrong.

We've given you several years to create a role for DRK to fill, how about you start taking our ideas seriously for a change? Job balance in FFXI has never been well thought out, but at this point it's just atrocious. SE needs to take a fresh look / new angle on more than a couple of the jobs- especially DRK.



The problem is that instead of different jobs filling different roles, you just have jobs that are good and jobs that aren't. Generally, the jobs that are strong can do it all- while the jobs that are weak can't do any of it.

Case in point: the glass cannon BLM will out damage a DRK, and that's fine..but it can also spend 30 minutes soloing things if it wants. SAM will also out damage DRK in many situations, but it doesn't sacrifice a damn thing for it- it even got one of the best survival abilities in the game with Seigan + Third Eye. NIN deals more damage than a party of PLDs put together, and it also tanks better. DRK is supposed to be an offense-oriented WAR, but WAR will put out more damage with one WS than a DRK could hope to dish out while digging through its superfluous bullshit for five minutes. RNG spends tons of gil on consumable items to do its job...and it barely even has one now. The devs have said that they don't want to introduce shit all for THFs to use their staple Steal ability on because "THFs may "exploit" this to sell items to NPCs"...WTF is Steal for if not making gil?

The way that you should go about this is by taking each job, putting them each in a variety of (relevant) situations, and asking- Why would I use this job here?

That should be a natural question when balancing jobs and creating these abilities, but I know that they can't be thinking this way because if you ran that test right now you'd see that a handful of jobs can do various things to different degrees, and handful of jobs can do some things situationally, and a few jobs bring almost nothing to the table.