Hey remember SC > MB? Make it required.

[Xihp]

I haven't read completely through all 13 pages of this thread, BUT I think the most simple solution would just be increasing the effectiveness of SC.


Basically:
Keep - all the setups, combinations, skillchains, the magic bursts, and even the timings the same. (Although a little more leeway on timing would be nice, even a second for laggers).
But simply change the damage of skillchains or the damage bonus of magic bursts and maybe reduce the enemy's stats.

Imagine a simple Scission, an earth elemental based effect, which lowers the opponents Dexterity, which is commonly associated with the lightning element.

Now imagine Dark/Light skillchains. Which would lower more of the enemy's stats.

Now that is just weapon skills. Physical Damage - Physical Stats reduced.

Next step would be Magic Bursts.

Let's say the first Scission is MB'd with a Stone 1. This should increase the enemy's damage cap taken against Lightning based attacks.

This would lead to another round of Skillchaining and Magic Bursting. The team would need to rotate weaponskills to create a SC to take advantage of the new Lightning weakness.

Of course this is still a lot of planning and understanding of mechanics, but it would definitely be worthwhile against harder enemies and missions.

So maybe update the cap of damage of skillchains. Example: level 1: 100%, level 2:200%, level 3:300%

Although this may seem like a drastic increase, how often do you ever see a skillchain involving more than 2/3 weapon skills?

2 Members spam Weaponskills for maximizing their own damage...

OR

2 Members spending the extra 30 seconds for each other and coordinating a proper and VERY effective skillchain to maximize the overall damage.

From what I've seen the 30 seconds is too much for just a 100% bonus damage SC, when they could just burn the TP and do another WS for just the same amount.

This is why increasing the damage and creating an alluring incentive for people where they can see the significance of teamwork.

[Llana_Virren]

Here's the problem: WS spam alone would create multiple Light SCs (with far fewer difficulties than lowering WS damage o accommodate a SC), and since the Tier 3 SCs are supposed to be more powerful, this would still keep "mandatory SCs" out of relevance.

However, you could make it so that Lv1 SCs lower/temporarily remove magic immunity to an element, Lv2 SCs increase Macc and MATK to an element, and Lv3 SCs lower stats.

[Xihp]

Here's the problem: WS spam alone would create multiple Light SCs (with far fewer difficulties than lowering WS damage o accommodate a SC), and since the Tier 3 SCs are supposed to be more powerful, this would still keep "mandatory SCs" out of relevance.

However, you could make it so that Lv1 SCs lower/temporarily remove magic immunity to an element, Lv2 SCs increase Macc and MATK to an element, and Lv3 SCs lower stats.

Sounds like every lazy FFXI player. If they increased the damage and gave us some incentive to switch up our weaponskills, then people wouldn't be so focused on "The easiest way to do decent damage is spam my 1 favorite weaponskill that does big damage". No player wants to use a lesser weaponskill to skillchain with their team just for a magic burst that does mediocre damage. They should just increase the SC damage.

The reason we used to do SC->MB was because that extra 65% damage on a skillchain was AWESOME. Setting up that magic burst with a Tachi: Enpi -> SATA Viper Bite -> Distortion Damage -> Magic Burst.

Back then we NEEDED the extra damage, but most players now kill everything so fast, we forget the option is there until a boss fight. And even then, most players don't bother. Most of the time because we focus on procs first, then by the time we finish our procs, the mob is almost dead and we zerg it down. No point in spending that 15 seconds on a SC if that 15 seconds is all it takes to kill the mob.

What if.... Skillchains add a TH effect?! :O Teamwork points or something. Like a hidden counter on the mob, increasing drop rates or exp or something.

[Zerich]

Sounds like every lazy FFXI player. If they increased the damage and gave us some incentive to switch up our weaponskills, then people wouldn't be so focused on "The easiest way to do decent damage is spam my 1 favorite weaponskill that does big damage".

or you could just make an empy weapon for your DD and use that WS (they all have Light or Dark properties). VOILA!
SC-baby!

[Llana_Virren]

Sounds like every lazy FFXI player. If they increased the damage and gave us some incentive to switch up our weaponskills, then people wouldn't be so focused on "The easiest way to do decent damage is spam my 1 favorite weaponskill that does big damage". No player wants to use a lesser weaponskill to skillchain with their team just for a magic burst that does mediocre damage. They should just increase the SC damage.

The reason we used to do SC->MB was because that extra 65% damage on a skillchain was AWESOME. Setting up that magic burst with a Tachi: Enpi -> SATA Viper Bite -> Distortion Damage -> Magic Burst.

Back then we NEEDED the extra damage, but most players now kill everything so fast, we forget the option is there until a boss fight. And even then, most players don't bother. Most of the time because we focus on procs first, then by the time we finish our procs, the mob is almost dead and we zerg it down. No point in spending that 15 seconds on a SC if that 15 seconds is all it takes to kill the mob.

What if.... Skillchains add a TH effect?! :O Teamwork points or something. Like a hidden counter on the mob, increasing drop rates or exp or something.

These would have been great suggestions 5 years ago when they would have been utilized. The current (and foreseen) environment would not be conducive to these ideae, however. Procs > TH, and Proc > SC. I suggested on a RDM topic that perhaps certain WSs or abilities, when used in a combination (ie SC or chained abilities) woudl temporarily remove NM immunities.

However "nice" and "innovative" these ideas may be, the mechanics of the game simply don't make them relevent.

[Rambus]

They already do, just not the kind you're thinking of. lol

that made me laugh.

Anyways the game was like that once and everyone complained it was too hard or maybe it was because my monk did not get invites because it does not do distortion, that sc was overrated anyway. Ether even I do not remember all the reasons they complained about having to sc and mb, just that they did.

I liked having to sc and mb but that was lost a long time ago to omg i needz to ws at 100 tp!

[Mirage]

Hello everyone! Since last time I posted in this thread, I have actually thought of another idea for skillchains.

What if performing skillchains with multiple people caused the participants in the skillchain to receive buffs based on the properties of the WS?

Skillchain properties consisting of multiple elements would grant buffs for all elements involved, but the way I imagined it, while you would get more buffs, each individual buff would decrease in potency. For example:

Creating a single element skillchain such as Detonation (wind) would significantly greatly increase the evasion and resistance to the wind element when two or more players took part in creating the skillchain. Creating Scission, however, would greatly increase the players' resistance to physical damage, and increase their resistance to the earth element.

If you created fragmentation (lightning+wind) however, you would only receive a moderate increase in evasion and wind resistance, but in addition also receive a boost to accuracy (or maybe critical hit rate instead, i dunno) and lightning resistance.

Creating a Light skillchain would then grant a buff based on fire (attack power, perhaps), light (perhaps cure potency?), wind and lightning, but the boosts to these would only be slight compared to if you did a SC with fewer elements. Of course, all this would be in addition to the ability to magic burst for extra magic accuracy and damage, if you for some reason would want to do this.

In my opinion, this is balanced. The lowest damage SCs have specific but potent buffs, while the strong SCs have several but unfocused buffs in addition to their damage output. Additionally, this buff would only function when there are several participants in the SC, so it would not further increase the power of jobs that can currently easily solo skillchains. Obviously, people would go for light/darkness skillchains for maximum damage output, and there is no doubt that in many situations, this would be the best choice. However, this new system would allow people to sacrifice damage output for other buffs if it would benefit the situation.

I could see this being really useful in lowman situations, where it would enable for example a sam/dnc and sch/whatever to perform Gekko->Immanence Ice to create a magic attack bonus for the sch, after a mob changed from being vulnerable to physical damage to being very strong to physical damage, making it ideal for the smn to nuke it down. It could also allow someone with not-so-great evasion to sacrifice damage output to increase their evasion while they backup tank after "something" went wrong. Even if you were on nin, tanking something that was incredibly evasive and had extreme accuracy, repeatedly performing fragmentation SCs with the ninja to keep the SC buff up fulltime could make the fight much safer.

I imagine that there would be very many situations where you could benefit from these. Please keep in mind that I do not intend for my element-buff suggestions to be set in stone. If you have other/better suggestions for buffs these SCs could grant, feel free to mention them.

I have not yet thought of what would be a balanced potency and duration for these buffs, but it should be enough for it to be noticable. I also think that if you perform several SCs with multiple people in quick succession, the most recent buff should overwire the earlier buffs. For example if a SAM used sekkanoki to perform SCs with two different players, the two other players would receive the buffs as normal, but the samurai would have the buff from his first SC be overwritten by the buff from the second SC.

Outside of the buffs, which would always be beneficial, there would be no change in how anything would work. In a zerg, you'd still not care about any of this and just spam whatever as fast as possible. No penalties would be put on this sort of fight, or any fight of any kind. However, those that take a few extra seconds to organize/synchronize their WSes in a situation where there isn't three WSes going off every 2 seconds, would be able to create new strategies for fighting various monsters that they perhaps think are pretty hard with their setup.

[Emitremmus]

This is actually a pretty cool idea I could get behind. I could see the ginormous bees in Adoulin only taking SC damage. It would be cool to have an enemy that only took SC damage from the element of the game day, but at the same time you would have people sitting there looking at charts for half an hour only to find out they don't have the right setup to make that SC, lol. Seeing people having to use timing and actual teamwork to kill something would be very nostalgic.

On a side note, it would be cool to bring SCs back into the spotlight by making them have bonuses similar to the flourish system. Each SC you close would give you a charge for a new job specific ability or something like that...hell perhaps new WS that require you to have X number of charges available to perform it. There's a lot of possibilities for something like this. Me gusta.

[Rustic]

In part, requiring skillchains would actually be one of the best checks to sheer zerg damage in the game.

Imagine if bigger NM's (or HNM's) took vastly reduced physical/magical damage off the bat. Skillchains would "crack" the defense temporarily, allowing for normal physical damage. Likewise magic bursts for magical damage. FAILING to close and/or MB would restore the defenses in question as the mob "turtled up". Broad-spectrum (Darkness/Light) SC's would create the shortest windows of vulnerability, while specific element ones would produce longer openings for normal damage, namely whichever matched the mob's elemental weakness. For MB's, it'd be based on how much MP went into the spell producing the MB- SC'ing Dia for a Light SC would only produce a few seconds of magical vulnerability, while Holy II would leave the target open for a much longer period of time.

Say it's a giant Orc NM. Orcs have Water weakness. Say, a Darkness SC would produce a 10 second window where normal damage was full. A Distortion SC would be 20. A Reverberation would be 30. MBing a Water-type spell on the target would cause magical vulnerability beyond the period of the magic burst for an amount of time between 2-30 seconds depending on the strength of the MB'd spell. Firing off a WS that isn't SC'd would reset the defense immediately after the window to close it failed, failing to MB a SC would reset magic defense.

Even if a mob doesn't have a specific weakness to an element, it can be simply given a generic "break" from SC/MB, possibly reduced vs. mobs that have a specific weakness- and the time breaks are effective for can be varied, to make that mob more or less challenging. Normal mobs could have a similar system- only instead of being a defense break, it leaves the mob vulnerable to additional damage. Closing a SC would increase regular damage rather than remove an exceptional defense for a period of time, and MBing would leave the mob with a magical vulnerability beyond the normal length of an MB- and failing to close an SC/MB would only remove the vulnerability while leaving the mob at normal levels of damage/defense for it's type, rather than giving it superior defenses.

Gotta be something to give combat more sense and reason than "spam your highest DPS at the mob", or else it's all zerg, all the time. It's not like enmity is much of an issue now either...

[Trumpy]

Im not saying hold off til you can perform a SC but if you have tp on 2 people and can do them it only speeds things up. I dont think i really ever say "hey dude you do tachi retsu and i will follow with shadowstich!" but i will try to time a WS i do to make a SC if possible. sometimes it can really speed up things. Also we dont usually change the WS we do just to make a SC just if they happen to make them.