New Weaponskills - Not what was expected

[darkhorror]

The New WSes are fucking awesome, and some of the crap I've read in this thread is just outright wrong.

Apex Arrow: Situationally the best Archery WS.

Blade: Shun: Best katana WS outside of abyssea barring Blade: Hi.

Entropy: Hands down the most damaging Scythe WS in the game by a large margin.

Exenterator: A THF/DNC WS with a 100% AGI mod, what else needs be said?

Last Stand: 4.4 fTP with 100% AGI mod for gun. THF can also use without /RNG.

Realmrazer: Sucks if you have Hexa.

Requiescat: Sucks because of the -20% Attack penalty, the 100% MND mod is pretty reasonably since it's mostly PLD/RDM/BLU.

Resolution: Extremely powerful now that the -ATK has been reduced to -8%. 100% STR mod.

Ruinator: Shits all over Rampage outside of Abyssea, barring obscene defense. 100% STR mod, Belt/Gorgets across all hits with base fTP of 1.0 and a large attack boost.

Shattersoul: If for some reason you're meleeing as a Mage, this is the best staff WS.

Shijin Spiral: Already known to be awesome.

Stardiver: Strongest Polearm WS in the game outside of abyssea. Twice the STR mod, slightly less fTP, but no gigantic ATK down like Drakes.

Tachi: Shoha: 100% STR mod, huge ATK bonus, and stacks with TP Bonus even better than Y/G/K.

Upheaval: Only really good with Mighty Strikes, in which case, it's the best.

This is correct, and even Requiscat can be good if fighting something with lots of resistance where it goes through that resistance.

People don't end up gearing these ws's well, or aren't 5/5 then complain. Not gearing well vs gearing well is a massive difference on these ws's.

This is shown by people complaining about Tachi: Shoha being over powered, while it's not even the best merit WS. Then complaining about the best merit WS being crap.

[Greatguardian]

The New WSes are fucking awesome, and some of the crap I've read in this thread is just outright wrong.

Apex Arrow: Situationally the best Archery WS.

Blade: Shun: Best katana WS outside of abyssea barring Blade: Hi.

Entropy: Hands down the most damaging Scythe WS in the game by a large margin.

Exenterator: A THF/DNC WS with a 100% AGI mod, what else needs be said?

Last Stand: 4.4 fTP with 100% AGI mod for gun. THF can also use without /RNG.

Realmrazer: Sucks if you have Hexa.

Requiescat: Sucks because of the -20% Attack penalty, the 100% MND mod is pretty reasonably since it's mostly PLD/RDM/BLU.

Resolution: Extremely powerful now that the -ATK has been reduced to -8%. 100% STR mod.

Ruinator: Shits all over Rampage outside of Abyssea, barring obscene defense. 100% STR mod, Belt/Gorgets across all hits with base fTP of 1.0 and a large attack boost.

Shattersoul: If for some reason you're meleeing as a Mage, this is the best staff WS.

Shijin Spiral: Already known to be awesome.

Stardiver: Strongest Polearm WS in the game outside of abyssea. Twice the STR mod, slightly less fTP, but no gigantic ATK down like Drakes.

Tachi: Shoha: 100% STR mod, huge ATK bonus, and stacks with TP Bonus even better than Y/G/K.

Upheaval: Only really good with Mighty Strikes, in which case, it's the best.

List is crap.

Apex? Get a Gandiva.

Blade: Shun? Get a Kannagi.

Entropy? Tell the DRKs that.

Requiescat? Get an Almace.

Last Stand: Situationally comparable to Wildfire if and only if you have the Attack to support it, but not nearly as useful. Does not blow the Empyrean out of the water.

Realmrazer: No one else uses clubs. Paladin? Get an Almace. Blu? Get an Almace.

Shattersoul: No one really cares, to be honest. Could have been put to better use on a better weapon type.

Shijin: Requires a relic to barely edge out Verethragna. Get a Verethragna.

Oh yeah, Exenterator: What needs to be said is it only does well outside Abyssea, and only if you're not stacking a force-crit JA with it. Both dagger users have force-crit JAs. It's a situational sidegrade WS that's inherently tied down by the fact that you don't often see situations where Dagger users are actually in groups large enough to give them the support spells required (and to fight the large monster types required) to do a meaningful number of WS without a force-crit. WS frequency is inhibited when spamming weak mobs, which is where you most often see Dncs and Thfs.

"Fucking Awesome"? Hardly. Even the best are sidegrades aside from Tachi: Shoha and Stardiver, 2/12 relevant WS. No I'm not going to count Staff and Club because I honestly don't give a damn. No point giving awesome WS to those weapons if no one's capable of using them to any degree of proficiency.

Ruinator is a shame too considering it's actually decent, but it's BST so again no one cares. All of the good WS are tempered in some way by the jobs that actually use them aside from Shoha, but it's kinda obvious why SAM gets nice toys.

[Malamasala]

I think I should be able to put all my points in staff. I mean, if that is the only WS I want to use, why should I not be able to do so? Pretty much the same thing as people wanting to merit all their weapons.

Except of course, if I could put 15 points in staff, all of you would complain you can't put 15 in each of your weapons. Because you all want to be best at everything, and I just want to be better than you at one thing since I specialize.

[Sparthos]

Merits a terrible excuse for 'diversification' when you had things like "Berserk Recast" or "Defender Recast" as options to choose from. Few jobs had a real choice between what to merit for Cat I and Cat II because it boiled down to improve a good aspect or bring a crappy aspect up a few pegs.

It's like: A choice between one of the best JAs a DD can have (zerk) or a shitty boost to a crappy JA that does pure shit for DEF and nerfs your damage output (defender). Decisions, decisions!

Warrior's Charge or Aggressive Aim.. oh man, the choices are tearing me apart.

I prefer talent trees but even those have flaws.

[Unleashhell]

I can understand why people are saying that you should be able to merit everything. Personally I don't see why you should be able to merit all the combat skills. Why even have a merit system? Just raise the cap on all combat skills and take off the merit system entirely. It would come out to be the same would it not? The merit system is designed for the player to customize two - three jobs that separate them from the rest of the jobs you level. Making those two or three jobs, the ones you put the most time into to gear and play the most. Keep in mind we are not talking job ability timers here we are talking combat skill only. Personally I would like to see 8 more upgrades in the combat skills category and an expansion in the "others" category, that adds other features to merit.

[Alhanelem]

I can understand why people are saying that you should be able to merit everything. Personally I don't see why you should be able to merit all the combat skills. Why even have a merit system? Just raise the cap on all combat skills and take off the merit system entirely. It would come out to be the same would it not? The merit system is designed for the player to customize two - three jobs that separate them from the rest of the jobs you level. Making those two or three jobs, the ones you put the most time into to gear and play the most. Keep in mind we are not talking job ability timers here we are talking combat skill only. Personally I would like to see 8 more upgrades in the combat skills category and an expansion in the "others" category, that adds other features to merit.

Pretty much this- Why even have the combat skill merits if you can get them all? May as well just raise the skill caps. Why even have merit WS if you can get them all? May as well make them auto-learnable.

People don't seem to understand why these things were placed in the merit system in the first place. If they wanted us to be able to get them all, they would have just made them generally available instead of having a merit point system.

That's why that game sucks, and I don't play it. x5

Your opinions are not facts. Clearly, all of those example games have plenty of fans. All of those example games have some mechanics similar to FFXI, and the best defense you can come up with is "those games suck so I don't play them?" That doesn't negate the point.

So basically, you hate any game where you can't be and get everything all at once. You hate making decisions and you want everything served to you on a silver platter. Where is the fun in that?

FFXI was designed to let you switch between jobs, yes. But it was NOT designed with the assumption that everyone would play every single job and level them all up to maximum- the developers themselves said they did not expect people to do this and were suprised at the number of people who did (this came up in discussions about storage space). Even for the people that do, most of them like playing certain jobs more than others, and will gear and merit for those jobs. They are still 100% capable of playing all 20 of them, they just tweak out their favorites a little more. This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing and should be encouraged.

You can't be good at every one of them is that what you're saying?

You CAN be good at every one of them. Merits are not so gamebreaking that a job is unplayable without its associated combat skill or magic skill merited to maximum or its weapon skill merited to maximum or attribute merited to maximum. Mathy elite types, feel free to chime in here and tell me the approximate impact on your performance with a weapon that doesn't have 8/8 merits in its combat skill vs the same one that does, but I don't think it's that significant. Unless you're a MNK, it's mostly about accuracy not damage, and what A+ skill DD can't easily max its accuracy anyway?

You can be good at all 20 jobs, and slightly better at a few of them. Just because you didn't 8/8 greataxe doesn't mean you can't bust one out on WAR if your group really needs it.

Merit points ARE talent trees, just without the tree structure.

A less punishing way to respec your merits is all the game really needs. Refund at least some of the merit points spent and have no time restrictions, or refund all merit points spent on something but place a cooldown on it. If you change your mind about something, it should be reasonably easy to do so. That way you can change something without going "crap, now I have to grind for a few more hours to change the merits I've already gotten". I think that's fair and reasonable.

[FrankReynolds]

Pretty much this- Why even have the combat skill merits if you can get them all? May as well just raise the skill caps. Why even have merit WS if you can get them all? May as well make them auto-learnable.

Hey everyone can attain all the same gear if they try hard enough. Might as well just give all the gear away too huh? Why even have gear if everyone can just get it?

People don't seem to understand why these things were placed in the merit system in the first place. If they wanted us to be able to get them all, they would have just made them generally available instead of having a merit point system.

They were put there so that players could continue to grow in strength, and have reasons to continue grinding, without the dev team having to do a full on level increase, and all the work that goes with it. Everyone had the same stuff, and there was none of this diversity you think your preserving.

Your opinions are not facts. Clearly, all of those example games have plenty of fans. All of those example games have some mechanics similar to FFXI, and the best defense you can come up with is "those games suck so I don't play them?" That doesn't negate the point.

So basically, you hate any game where you can't be and get everything all at once. You hate making decisions and you want everything served to you on a silver platter. Where is the fun in that?

Yes, I hate any game where I can't play different jobs effectively. That's why I am playing this game. Those other games have their own forums. I don't really care what the pros and cons of them are. I play this one because it offers me diversity in what role I can play. As far as a silver platter, We're talking about being able to spend points that I earned. Not getting points for free. I have points I can't spend, and jobs that could really use them. Where's the fun in that?

FFXI was designed to let you switch between jobs, yes. But it was NOT designed with the assumption that everyone would play every single job and level them all up to maximum-

Cool. People don't and won't. On a side note. They recently changed the Exp system so that people can in fact level and play every job fairly easily now. They still don't do it, but they can. You should check it out.

the developers themselves said they did not expect people to do this and were suprised at the number of people who did (this came up in discussions about storage space).

Did you think they were going to say "yeah, we knew you would run out of space, but we didn't really care."?

Even for the people that do, most of them like playing certain jobs more than others, and will gear and merit for those jobs. They are still 100% capable of playing all 20 of them, they just tweak out their favorites a little more. This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing and should be encouraged.

So basically, people already diversify on their own, but you think it should be forced upon them instead?

You CAN be good at every one of them. Merits are not so gamebreaking that a job is unplayable without its associated combat skill or magic skill merited to maximum or its weapon skill merited to maximum or attribute merited to maximum. Mathy elite types, feel free to chime in here and tell me the approximate impact on your performance with a weapon that doesn't have 8/8 merits in its combat skill vs the same one that does, but I don't think it's that significant. Unless you're a MNK, it's mostly about accuracy not damage, and what A+ skill DD can't easily max its accuracy anyway?

OK, go look on the AH and see how much you will have to spend to add 16 skill, 8 attack/accuracy, and 15 strength to both your TP and WS sets for your favorite job. Get back to me when you have that kind of gil laying around. that is from just 3 categories of merits. Then try getting your ls to let your Mage merited sam spam gekko on VW mobs in that because your sam doesn't have shoha either.

Each category in itself is somewhat of a small difference, but the more jobs you level, the more gimp they become. The more effort you put into your character in this regard, the less reward you get.

You can be good at all 20 jobs, and slightly better at a few of them. Just because you didn't 8/8 greataxe doesn't mean you can't bust one out on WAR if your group really needs it.

Merit points ARE talent trees, just without the tree structure.

A less punishing way to respec your merits is all the game really needs. Refund at least some of the merit points spent and have no time restrictions, or refund all merit points spent on something but place a cooldown on it. If you change your mind about something, it should be reasonably easy to do so. That way you can change something without going "crap, now I have to grind for a few more hours to change the merits I've already gotten". I think that's fair and reasonable.

Talent trees are cool, But they have to lead to equally powerful jobs. IE: if one tree makes you an awesome support blu, while another guy is a great DD blu, ok. While that still doesn't let you do everything, it does allow you to get the same performance as the next guy, if you put in the same amount of time and effort.

If one tree makes You great at one job, but a Gimp at 15 others, then very few people will bother with anything but the three most popular jobs. FFXI already has enough job favoritism.

[Dreamin]

And if you have more than 2-3 jobs that you used on a regular basis? You can't be good at every one of them is that what you're saying?

[Unleashhell]

And if you have more than 2-3 jobs that you used on a regular basis? You can't be good at every one of them is that what you're saying?

Has nothing to do with being good at any or all of your jobs. It has to do with what is the point of the merit system for combat skills if everyone just want to be able to merit them all?

[FrankReynolds]

Has nothing to do with being good at any or all of your jobs. It has to do with what is the point of the merit system for combat skills if everyone just want to be able to merit them all?

The point is that If you merit the skills then you are better than the people who didn't bother.

One of FFXI's biggest selling points is the ability to play multiple jobs / classes on one character. Merits in jobs specific categories are somewhat understandable because they don't limit you to just being good at one job, and rarely even force you to decide how to play the specific job that they are for, due to the fact that many of the categories are not something people would want to boost. Being limited to the number of merits that you can put into non job specific merits limits your ability to use the job change feature at all.

Unlocking them doesn't mean that people will just automatically have all the same crap.