
Originally Posted by
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...