[byr1001] Uncapping the Merit Point Categories

[Zagen]

I like the idea of more diversity from one character to the next, not less. Couldn't they just fix merits so the ones that never get used are more appealing instead?

Like give Bio 3 Defense Down instead of Attack Down? Because seriously for a lot of Tier 1 and 2 merits that's the kind of changes that would need to happen. There are a few exceptions but for the most part the useless merits need huge buffs and at that point they'd become the "more appealing" ones.

The game has far passed it's era of specializing in 1 job in a certain way, that ideal is a dead horse and SE has a bat.

[Demon6324236]

Any capped progression system will never really have diversity. If you choose 2 out of 4 abilities for a job then you will choose the 2 best, and leave the others. If you choose 3 of 14 WSs you will choose the 3 that benefit you as a player, not necessarily the jobs you like. I think any capped thing, especially between all jobs, would be bad just because then people would go more for efficiency than for actual preference, like many do now if they play unpopular jobs like PUP, RDM, or DRG, when it comes to WS merits.

[Mirage]

Any capped progression system will never really have diversity. If you choose 2 out of 4 abilities for a job then you will choose the 2 best, and leave the others. If you choose 3 of 14 WSs you will choose the 3 that benefit you as a player, not necessarily the jobs you like. I think any capped thing, especially between all jobs, would be bad just because then people would go more for efficiency than for actual preference, like many do now if they play unpopular jobs like PUP, RDM, or DRG, when it comes to WS merits.

Any uncapped progression system will never really have diversity either, in the end.

Anyway, it is possible to have diversity in a capped system if the different abilities you have to choose between are actually powerful for entirely different reasons. If you have 5 merits and every single one of them is directly related to increasing your damage output, the choice isn't really a choice, but a calculation.

If you have some merits that increase damage output, and others that increase an entirely different aspect of your job than damage dealing, and you had to choose between this and additional damage dealing, then it comes down to actual choice based on what you want to do with your job.

I think the biggest issue with the current merits is simply that so many of them are really poorly thought through, and underpowered compared to other merits in the current state of the game. That's why there is so little diversity.

That being said, I'm definitely not against a very huge increase in the total amount of spendable merit points, I just don't think completely uncapping everything is necessary, and that it would just lead to a more boring game. I'd rather merits were actual choices, which requires SE to actually rebalance a lot of them.

[Demon6324236]

Any uncapped progression system will never really have diversity either, in the end.

I know it wouldn't be, but then again thats kinda the point. I would rather no cap, which allows for no diversity via merits, rather than forced cap in the name of fake diversity which we currently have where everyone basically chooses the same ones anyways.

Basically, we know that right now the diversity thing doesn't really work, keeping the cap for diversity is kinda stupid, but if you remove it, you are only removing the cap, not gaining or removing diversity really & you give people more to do in the game as well as making xp parties more worth doing for players. If you look at places like Worm parties they are dying down, or at least on Phoenix it seems they are, they often run on only 6~12 people, making it harder for newer players to catch up, so doing this would mean players need xp again, people would go back to Abyssea, GoV, and other ways of leveling, making it easier for everyone to level because of it.

[Yinnyth]

Basically, we know that right now the diversity thing doesn't really work, keeping the cap for diversity is kinda stupid, but if you remove it, you are only removing the cap, not gaining or removing diversity really & you give people more to do in the game as well as making xp parties more worth doing for players. If you look at places like Worm parties they are dying down, or at least on Phoenix it seems they are, they often run on only 6~12 people, making it harder for newer players to catch up, so doing this would mean players need xp again, people would go back to Abyssea, GoV, and other ways of leveling, making it easier for everyone to level because of it.

Once you break the cap, putting it back on is a hundred times harder than keeping it on the whole time. To abandon the cap now, is to abandon forever the hope that they can be fixed.

[Kincard]

Funny thing about the WS Merits is that you're more likely to use it for jobs that arn't your favorite because you lack a good weapon for that job. EX: My favorite job is NIN, but there's no reason for me to get Shun because Blade: Hi will outdo it in just about every situation factoring in AM. It would be more beneficial if I used my limited WS slots to instead upgrade my other jobs which I didn't bother spending an absurd amount of time 99-ing a REM weapon for.

Granted, I have Shun merited anyway because I'm NIN-crazy, but that's beside the point.

[MarkovChain]

Correct that would be awesome. If you want to make a difference between a good a gimp player you need to put barriers wether it is party size limitations, gil, or periodical duration. Otherwise you end up with abyssea exp-bot that are spamming LJ and at the end of the day everyone get the same things. I mean during abyssea rage you didn't see any job without their full AF3+2, didn't you ?

[Kincard]

If the boons of uncapped merits are as insignificant as you say, then it shouldn't matter to you if they do it because they're barely gaining anything out of it other than something to actually do in-game, and even from your perspective it's not like it would be taking away from your Afterglow accomplishments like AF3+2 did to a bunch of 75 gear. The point of the suggestion is that it's something easily done with almost no work on the part of the devs. I'm sure everyone would love a new merit system but that's not really point of the suggestion being made.

[Taint2]

It would stimulate the game some as well.

Sure some people will be mage botting their XP but others will actually have something to do. As it sits right now most people are sitting on 30/30 merits with nowhere to place them.

And MarkovChain has said most of the merits do next to nothing, but atleast the system woudl still be used.

[MarkovChain]

I don't want the game to be transformed into "spend 100 hours for 0.1% performance increase". Being "farm for 1% better performance" is already annoying enough ty. Like I said if you are bored you can always farm full AF2+2, but wait you actually need to do something for this unlike abyssea leeching/botting haha.