[byr1001] Uncapping the Merit Point Categories

[Nala]

Unless they added the ability to merit things that made substantial boosts to character performance no it would not.

Merits like Increase WS dmg x% would be in the same category as Elemental magic damage x% so you'd have to choose or something actually potent, as it stands with the merit system job specific there are only a handful of abilities you actually merit, if you merit anything beyond the ones that give the most benefit chances are you do not actually play nor care for that job.

The only other thing is base stats, of which the main benefit is not having to choose between STR DEX and INT, as VIT and CHR do little to make them more worthwhile merits over the other base stats. That said some of the best peices of gear in the game give up to +15 or more to a single or even several base stats at a time meaning capped stat merits are barely the equivalent of 1 peice of gear.

[Yinnyth]

The only other thing is base stats, of which the main benefit is not having to choose between STR DEX and INT, as VIT and CHR do little to make them more worthwhile merits over the other base stats. That said some of the best peices of gear in the game give up to +15 or more to a single or even several base stats at a time meaning capped stat merits are barely the equivalent of 1 peice of gear.

Those are a perfect example of how the merit system fails to live up to what it's supposed to be. If I want to be a good BLM, I need INT merits, and possibly MND merits if I ever use white magic debuffs. But then I'm screwed if I want to be a good SAM also.

My opinion is that merits should not force you to choose between which jobs you want to be good at. Instead, they should force you to choose what you want each job to be good at. If I had my way, you'd put merits into the attribute pool, then every job gets to choose its own attributes from that pool to be boosted. So I could choose CHR and VIT for my BRD, and DEX and AGI for my THF. Furthermore, I'd add secondary bonuses to each attribute to make the choice of attributes harder.

[Vagrua]

Limitations are annoying to progress.

[Demon6324236]

Thats when adding new categories with caps, or adding a new form of points, actually comes in & works well. Merits wouldn't have a cap but new ones could, and a new points system could, both of which would easily make a new form of merits with a cap and real choices!

[Yinnyth]

Thats when adding new categories with caps, or adding a new form of points, actually comes in & works well. Merits wouldn't have a cap but new ones could, and a new points system could, both of which would easily make a new form of merits with a cap and real choices!

Now there's a suggestion I actually like.

[FrankReynolds]

ARe people really still calling the ws merit cap a choice? It says cap right in the name. As in "Handicap". Not choice cap. It's a limitation to what you can do. Not an opportunity to do what you want.

A choice would be "Hey guys, we added all these ws's and you can merit as many as you want to their caps for the low price of 100,000,000 merit points. Choose wisely.".

That's obviously an exaggeration, but you get the point. Instead of setting the bar at a point where it was possible for you to merit them all, but unlikely that most people would actually do that (the smart way in my opinion), they set the bar where anyone could do it in a day and then capped them (the lazy way).

[Arcon]

The current merit system offers two choices: suck or don't suck. There is no customization aside from that. I don't see how anyone can defend that.

What FrankReynolds said sums it up quite nicely. If everything was uncapped, you would actually have to choose what you merit. I don't think people realize just how many merits it would require to cap everything. It's unrealistic that anyone would actually do everything. It would allow you to focus on what jobs you want to play, instead of just meriting everything the best way, which is what people do now.

If someone actually wants to sit through months of grinding EXP in Abyssea to cap everything, good for them. Then they actually deserve to have everything merited. Otherwise you'd have real specialization, unlike what you have now.

Even if the current system offered real customization, I would still be against it, because customization through limitations sucks. People should not be excluded from content based on their preference. Why should someone have to give up Aura Steal for Feint, or vice versa? This game was designed to allow people to play everything, that's why the job system is set up as it is. FFXI is literally the only game with classes I know which allows you to have multiple classes leveled and switch between them at will. Merits go against the entire design philosophy of the game, which happens to be a philosophy I'm attracted to.

I don't see why people value distinction so highly at all. It seems like a completely arbitrary desire.

[Tanama]

I have a simple suggestion that would help the game, would not be difficult to implement, and would not cause any serious balance issues.

Remove all the merit point category caps.
Please let us hold more merits as well ; ;

(Category Caps are the limits on a group of merits. So the category cap for Tier 1 merits is 10. The category cap for Combat Skills is 30, etc.)


A. Will this cause balance issues?
No, because:
1) The strongest players pick one of their jobs and merit for it.
2) If they are perfectly merited for one job, it presents the biggest balance threat when given more merits because you have to assume that they would be on that job in situations that require high performance, the hardest events.
3) If they are perfectly merited for one job, any future merits that they obtain from having the cap increased will necessarily be less valuable to their job than the ones they already have.
4) Optimally-merited jobs barely benefit from increasing the caps.

Example:
Warrior is in some ways the greatest threat for this kind of adjustment because they are so versatile, so the limitation on combat skills/stats stands to benefit them the most. Still, what happens if you uncap a perfectly merited WAR?
- They gain 12 DEX and VIT.
- Their Warcry and Aggressor recasts drops 50 seconds.
- Instead of meriting three of Upheaval, Resolution, Ruinator, and Stardiver, now they can merit all four.
- They gain 14-15 accuracy (0-8% hit rate) with some of their proc weapons.

So you have barely made Warrior stronger. The other jobs benefit even less than this. Plus, at a time when people complain about the difficulty of events (like Legion, Provenance Watcher, etc.) this gives them an opportunity to help themselves. I mean, what do you want our failure rate to be on these events? Is it really too low at the moment?



B. Why should we do it?
1) This will give players nearly-unlimited potential for character growth. - It would take 6706 merits to cap out. Players currently have ~2000 or less. Even with an epeening "I get 250k/hr" Abyssea party, it would still take them almost 80 rl 24-hour days to cap out from 2000 merits.

2) A limiting merit system has always been the antithesis of the job system. - One of the major draws to FFXI is that the game lets you play through with only one character, which you are free to become attached to. There are certainly times when you need to change your role, and the job system accommodates that. It is silly to suddenly reverse this at the level cap, which is where players spend almost all of their time these days. When the cap was at level 75, you go 1 to 75 as a Red Mage playing however was convenient in any type of party, but Tier 2 merits forced you to decide whether you wanted to use your Red Mage to solo or do Salvage.

3) Programming-wise, this almost has to be possible and reasonable. - The category caps have been increased before several times. You could either remove them from the interface (clean) or increase them to the maximum amount (dirty but definitely possible).

4) At a time when content is sparse, this would give a much-needed boost to activity. - People want to play, but don't have anything that they can do to improve their character. This would make it so there is almost always something they can do.

5) Increased participation in events/systems that yield XP. - More people would do Grounds of Valor. More people would do Campaign. More people would do Besieged. More people would do Dominion Ops. More people would do Voidwatch. etc. If you increase the incentives, you increase the odds that people will partake in an event. Giving XP value serves as an incentive.





Fellow posters, I challenge you. Come up with a situation where the above proposed change would alter the way we do any event. Where it would make something noticeably easier. Where it would affect the "balance" of anything. Try!

The current merit system offers two choices: suck or don't suck. There is no customization aside from that. I don't see how anyone can defend that.

What FrankReynolds said sums it up quite nicely. If everything was uncapped, you would actually have to choose what you merit. I don't think people realize just how many merits it would require to cap everything. It's unrealistic that anyone would actually do everything. It would allow you to focus on what jobs you want to play, instead of just meriting everything the best way, which is what people do now.

If someone actually wants to sit through months of grinding EXP in Abyssea to cap everything, good for them. Then they actually deserve to have everything merited. Otherwise you'd have real specialization, unlike what you have now.

Even if the current system offered real customization, I would still be against it, because customization through limitations sucks. People should not be excluded from content based on their preference. Why should someone have to give up Aura Steal for Feint, or vice versa? This game was designed to allow people to play everything, that's why the job system is set up as it is. FFXI is literally the only game with classes I know which allows you to have multiple classes leveled and switch between them at will. Merits go against the entire design philosophy of the game, which happens to be a philosophy I'm attracted to.

I don't see why people value distinction so highly at all. It seems like a completely arbitrary desire.

I completely agree with Byrth, Arcon and the rest of the people supporting this thread. They have all explained it a lot better than I would.

The development team would do us a great service by uncapping the merit point categories. Camate and company continually say that they take all suggestion into consideration, well here we are. The majority of us strongly believe in this change. Uncapping the merit point categories will not break this game in any way shape or form as explained by various posters in this thread.

177 'Likes' is a ton for the English Forum and that's not counting the other Likes from supporting posts on this thread.

Mr. Matsui, community members, development team, please make this happen!

[Raksha]

Someone should translate the op and post it to the JP forums with a link back here.

[Terasan]

Great idea for a change, Byrth, liked and wholeheartedly support the removal of unnecessary limitations like this. As it stands now, there's very little room for true customization and specialization due to terrible merit choices (job-specific merits) like many have said previously. This would open up a bit more room for true uniqueness, as many players would never touch the true depths of the merit system (Pchan not meriting CHR for his MNK, for example) but others would.

Removing, or even relaxing the caps on the merit system would reduce the amount of "cookie-cutter" builds we see, where for a certain job, it's x/5 this, x/5 that and must have this WS 5/5 or GTFO.

A thought I had, sort of in line with this, is instead of having the options laid out for us in the form of 4-8(?) merits per category per job, we could actually choose what we'd like to merit for each job, in sort of a tree-like structure (Merit such and such to unlock further upgrades but locked into that tree). Keeping unlockable spells/abilities intact of course, but for example:

WAR Merits, current (10 upgrades available for each area):
-Berserk, Defender, Warcry, Aggressor Recasts, Double Attack Rate
-WAR Charge, Tomahawk, Savagery, Agg. Aim effects.

WAR Merits, my suggestion (Separate trees for each JA, split to potency or recast):
-JA effects and recast (Including JAs like Retaliation, Blood Rage, etc); Choose one tree per JA, additional effects possible in each tree (Blood Rage re-adding a small crit damage increase, for example)
-DA Rate or damage increase
-Unlockable JAs/Trait changes (Warrior's Charge having the current Triple Attack chance or increased damage much like the AF2+2 legs augment)

Didn't really mean to hijack your post with my idea, Byrth, but wanted to show support for a change to the current merit system of some form, in order to promote even more unique character builds in some way; either by removal of the current merit category caps, or by an "overhaul" of the system.