Skill cap adjustments, when?

[Ophannus]

Camate mentioned a few months ago that the Developers were working on readjusting combat skillcaps and available wepaon skills for certain jobs to promote balance. I was wondering if this idea was scrapped or if some jobs were finally going to get an update i.e DRK's Parrying Skill since they have Tactical Parry or RDM's Sword skill.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Or smn's smn skill.
Or nin's katana skill.

[Economizer]

Give throwing skill to more jobs. Blue Mages especially.

And why does Scholar, who is terrible at melee have parrying when White Mage, which is at least competent at it not? Actually, don't give White Mage native parrying, just boost their native club skill - the new club WS isn't WHM only, so at least an A- would be nice. Since other jobs will be getting staff WS natively without subbing White Mage with these changes, having a higher club skill to offset this would be nice.

Or smn's smn skill.
Or nin's katana skill.

Not every skill has a job with an A+ on it. Summoning Magic skill is very much so balanced with the cap of the player's current level for example, so raising it wouldn't exactly help. Katana makes a bit more sense at least.

[Dfoley]

Probably got lost with the parry/guared skill rate increase they promised and never added.

[Theytak]

They can give blu pup's throwing skill. It's not like we have any use for it...

[Luvbunny]

This thread is so funny - seeing how "balance" is just a whole load of BS - jobs have skills that is not applicable to them... It's like the developer just cut and paste the job skill and never really think ahead of what it uses for. Laziness exist within SE FFXI developer since 2003 - even when they do have a good budget to work with and the game was at its prime. Back then they can get cocky and told us to take it from behind, as it is, or go play something else. Now, they are still ignoring most of our suggestion and feedback and claim they no longer have manpower or it is "too difficult" to adjust and to balance properly. What they need to do is put back Yoshi to FFXI and move Tanaturd back to 14 so he can finish burning down that IP to the ground and call it a day and accomplish his greatest achievement - creating a game so full of "challenge" (fatigue system, hellooooooo??) that the player base just flat out rejected from the launch.

[RAIST]

Probably got lost with the parry/guared skill rate increase they promised and never added.

IDK about this....it's starting feel like they ninja'd a tweak to the skills' proc rates on us. May not have been a tweak specifically to the skillup rate, but a tweak to how often the skills proc, which would increase the skillup rate by extension.

I just got 24 points to guard on MNK working on the +3 tier WS line in Abyssea and my guard is grossly underleveled (still in the mid 60's). While working on WHM WS club line with /SAM (parry was roughly ~150 from sub)--I continually saw parry proc on level 80-ish flies both in Abyssea and Riverne (also got like 15 skillups on Shield to take it to 234 or something like that). Just geared up on SAM and was running around trying different camps for it's +3 trial, and was seeing Parry proc a lot, but the targets I finally decided to use on this trial are too low for it to skill (parry approaching 76 caps on NIN & SAM), but it is parsing a lot on them too.

So, if you're having trouble getting it to skill, might need to review your targets if it is parsing a lot like I'm seeing and you aren't getting the skillups--maybe try some elshina or something too. If it's not proc'ing a lot, might also be your gear and/or job choices getting in the way (evasion/AGL bonuses).

[Byrth]

As I said in this thread, they doubled the base skillup rate for parrying. They likely also increased it for Guard and Shield.

The problem with skilling these abilities (especially Guard) is that you have to fail evasion, counter, etc. checks before they even have a chance to proc, and then the proc rate is incredibly low (~5-10%) on anything that you can get a skillup from. Then, on top of that, your odds of skilling up per Guard/Parry are also pretty low (it used to be ~2%). So any time a monk with a 50% Counter rate and a 20% Evade rate takes a swing, they only really have a 0.04% chance of a skillup. At an average of .2 skill per skillup, they would need to take about 5 million swings before they'd cap guard.

Lower your Counter rate. Floor your evasion rate. Now you only need to take ~2.5 million swings to cap guard.

After the patch (doubled skillup rate), you'd be looking at about 2 and 1 million swings respectively. It's not impossible to take a few million swings, especially with a hoard of Mandragora/Phalanx and afking. It's freaking dumb to have to do that to cap skills though.


They should eliminate skilling up. Skills should just auto-cap when you ding the next level. Skilling up is an annoyance at this point that doesn't add actual interesting content (anyone can afk in Abyssea with Regen Atma). I wish they had opted to eliminate it instead of investing so much effort in items/foods that increase rates.

[Luvbunny]

They will never get rid of skill ups - it is one of their easy time sink to make sure that players are still playing for hours skilling up after they ride their express train that is Abyssea. Add to that the various weapon skill quest, mythic weapon skill quest, magian trials, etc... All these so called "(mindless) challenge" is to ensure that players have something to do for a good while. Expect for more of these coming up. 1500 plates, super low drop rates, high tier scrolls dropped from bcnms that most hardly go do, and more of these so called "challenge". FFXI is a cash cow for them to milk till it is dry - minimal works - so that they can fund Mr.Tanaturd greatest achievement that is FF14!!

[RAIST]

As I said in this thread, they doubled the base skillup rate for parrying. They likely also increased it for Guard and Shield.

The problem with skilling these abilities (especially Guard) is that you have to fail evasion, counter, etc. checks before they even have a chance to proc, and then the proc rate is incredibly low (~5-10%) on anything that you can get a skillup from. Then, on top of that, your odds of skilling up per Guard/Parry are also pretty low (it used to be ~2%). So any time a monk with a 50% Counter rate and a 20% Evade rate takes a swing, they only really have a 0.04% chance of a skillup. At an average of .2 skill per skillup, they would need to take about 5 million swings before they'd cap guard.

Lower your Counter rate. Floor your evasion rate. Now you only need to take ~2.5 million swings to cap guard.

After the patch (doubled skillup rate), you'd be looking at about 2 and 1 million swings respectively. It's not impossible to take a few million swings, especially with a hoard of Mandragora/Phalanx and afking. It's freaking dumb to have to do that to cap skills though.


They should eliminate skilling up. Skills should just auto-cap when you ding the next level. Skilling up is an annoyance at this point that doesn't add actual interesting content (anyone can afk in Abyssea with Regen Atma). I wish they had opted to eliminate it instead of investing so much effort in items/foods that increase rates.

eh... I see what you were trying to say with the numbers, but I think the math may be a bit exagerated. Granted, I don't have weeks of parsing to prove/disprove anything, just commenting on my particular experience since I reactivated a few weeks ago.

I got around 2 dozen points on guard and 15 on shield doing 800 WS trials on MNK and WHM. That was on Canyon Scorpions in Abyssea - Tahrongi, and Plateau Flies/Darners in Abyssea - La Theinne/Rivern A01. I was typically One-on-One, using weak WS for the most part to make them last longer--when one was about to die, I'd pull the next when practical, so I might have had 2 on me for a few seconds for a few extra hits in a roundor two, but not full time like pulling a mass of mandies in the tree. When Sekkanoki was up, I'd pull extras simply for the fun of making a big skill chain (which raped them, so I'd sometimes link/pull an extra one at start on purpose just to keep things flowing)--but again, it was two mobs for only a few rounds in that scenario too

Trust me...I wasn't taking MILLIONS of hits. Maybe a few thousand over the course of about 45 minutes in Riverne on one job and maybe 5 or 6 sessions in abyssea (got a few TE's sometimes, so averaged under 2 hrs each run, as I was capping ruby light, and fought until booted). It wasn't days of pulling mass mobs for hours on end to process at a 5% rate against a million hits.

A large portion of those skillups were .4 and .5--they started going more .2's towards the end, but at first it was a .4 or .5 about every 3-5 fights. They did slow down towards the end, but they were still coming. I even dinged a level on Shield in Besieged against mamools afterwards that I went to just because it was up (went from 234-235 shield and got 15k xp for spamming hexa/halo's while goofing off for less than an hour, not bad).

May need to look into what you are fighting, what you are wearing, and what job traits/abilities/merits/stat bonuses are enhancing your stats to see if you can't adjust something somewhere to see if it makes a difference (ie: On WHM, I kept AGL boosted, with minimal evasion gear--wanted to get beat on for the TP gain, and on MNK I only used Focus/Dodge when pulling the extra mobs for the big Sekkanoki skill change events, etc.)