Skill cap adjustments, when?

[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.)