New 2-hour Abilities

[Glamdring]

The development team needs to make sure that players will use these abilities. There would be nothing more insulting to players than adding new 2 hours that we'll never use.

you mean like the beast one? If I want stoneskin I'll /whm or /rdm and keep my pet tyvm.

[Demon6324236]

Hey everyone,

The new 2-hours were developed based on the idea that they would share the existing 2-hour ability's recast timer and players would be selecting which ability to use based on the situation. Instead of these being a higher-tier or universal abilities that can be used for any situation, they are abilities that are designed to be used for specialized conditions.

I wish I could say thats what these are, or that there were alot of different situations in this game right now, sadly to say that would be a lie.

Below are the envisioned applications of some abilities as well as planned adjustments.

Please tell me how some of these should work, like RDM, or BST. Please tell me how they are being adjusted to make them worth using over our current ones, or over other jobs abilities.

While Mighty Strikes offers a lot of physical damage through critical hits for a period of time, the idea was to add a way to attack enemies that have strong resistances to physical damage.

As many have said, Mighty Strikes will do more damage in almost any case than this especially because this does not work on Weapon Skills. The only situation in which this is worth while is when you have a constant permanent Amnesia effect on you!

Based on testing and feedback, we are planning to make adjustments to extend the effect duration to 60 seconds. (Planning to make this change during this week’s Test Server update.)

On top of this, add the effect to Weapon Skills. Its really sad that the best 2-hour you could come up with for WAR is just a copy of a Merit Job Ability for another job!

The new 2-hour ability can be used for cases where just turtling up with Invincible and letting an enemy wail on you will not turn the tides of the fight, since you can enhance your defenses while reducing an enemy’s HP with the reflected damage.

The problem is the defense needs to be enough to keep you alive, while damage has to be enough to actually matter, any case you would even think of 2-houring as a PLD for a defensive maneuver, you would be taking to much for you to just block alone. Not to mention, that in any case this game has got to the point with tanking where if you want damage done, the DDs hit it, if the PLD is tanking it, damage is not being done, or needed.

As mentioned previously in the post about adding an enmity boost effect to this ability, we understand the problems with the enmity cap. We plan on considering this for paladin in general and not limiting it only to the new 2-hour ability effect.

As mentioned previously in the post following your last. Adding enmity to this effect means nothing as of now, and means nothing if you add these abilities before fixing that problem. If my power is out, and I plug in a toaster I just bought from Wal-Mart its not doing any more for me at my house than it was when it was sitting on the shelf at the store. I am happy the problems are understood, or you think they are, but just understanding them means nothing, because until something is actually done about it anything relevant to it will have to be changed again later anyways.

In addition to INT and MND, we will also be adding CHR to the stats that are lowered.

Still not a ton of uses for this that I see when compared to the overwhelming power of Soul Voice buffs, but however, I will leave you to it, not every ability is meant for zerging or melee power, and its nice to see a mage that helps other mages.

Meikyo Shisui excels in instantaneous power. On the other hand, the new 2-hour ability is for cases where an enemy's AoE damage is too strong and getting close is dangerous. It will allow you to evade special attacks while dealing damage.

So basically this is Perfect Dodge, it lets you evade all attacks, all, attacks, and gives you more power on your Weapon Skills on top of it for each you dodge. Do you see how much of a slap in the face that is to THFs? THFs get to dodge, but they get no stronger and they do not dodge everything thrown at them.

Magical attacks will not be evaded, but will be made so that the damage received is 0. This will not have any effect on breath attacks, though.

What the hell is this? You already made this 2-hour better than both Invincible, and Perfect Dodge, but now, you allow a SAM to not even be effected by magic!? I thought it was bad that you stole the Merit Job Ability of MNK, and made it a 2-hour for WAR, but now you have made a 2-hour that is effectively Perfect Dodge, Invincible, Perfect Defense, and Impetus, all in a single ability! For people who preach balance, you sure have a shitty sense of it.

With this ability we are aiming to make it possible to have a stable way of fighting by increasing defensive capabilities and diverting your time in battle towards enhancing offense capabilities.

With this ability you threw balance out the window for 5 minutes and thought you would create the single most powerful 2-hour ability in the game for any non-supportive job!

Trance is an ability that allows the player to take advantage of Waltzes and Steps, while the new 2-hour ability makes it possible to utilize Flourishes to the maximum. The advantage of this ability is that it makes it possible to always use the maximum effect for Building Flourish, Reverse Flourish, Climatic Flourish, etc., as you are granted 5 finishing moves.

How about you grant unlimited Finishing Moves for the duration. Maybe then it will be a little better off, instead of an instant 5 alone.

There have been requests asking for the recast times for Flourishes to be reduced or removed. The reason we did not do this is as you can expect, due to consideration for Reverse Flourish.
While it's not our intention to allow for weapon skills to be used continuously without limitations, it would be nice to be able to utilize Flourish II and Flourish III continuously, so we will be changing the effects as outlined below to allow for instantaneous damage.

I understand your not wanting us to be able to WS back to back, that would be terrible for something that lasts 1 minute, and may only be used every 120 minutes, which means at most 1 time in any event in the entire game that I have ever been made aware of. Not only that, but you could limit it, maybe give us 5 times we can use Flourish abilities at no cost during its duration, with no cool-down on them either, that should be fair for its duration/recast of the entire ability.

Reduce effect duration from 60 seconds to 30 seconds

Why is it that any time you start to enhance an ability that sucks, you make the duration go to shit in return for its effect. Again, we get at most 1 use in any event in the game unless you are counting on the luck of a Corsair to give you another use of it.

In addition to the Flourish recast timer being reset, it will be possible to use Flourish continuously up to a total of 3 times.

3 times... not worth a 2-hour recast yet again. Really, please look at the limitation you put on these effects. Look at the power that Perfect Defense gives, or Embrava, these make sense, they are amazing powers and give you a real enourmous boost, not to 1 person, but an entire party or Alliance! This is lack luster yet again.

The effect will wear off when either 30 seconds elapses or Flourish is used 3 times.

I don't even feel like replying to this, for lack of words. All I can say is make it last the full duration no matter what, it shouldn't make a giant difference.

During this week's Test Server update, we will be adding white mage's 2-hour ability as well the warrior adjustment listed above and fixing related bugs.

We are planning to address the bard and dancer adjustments in the following Test Server update.

You have alot more adjusting to do for them to be balanced or worth-while. As for WHM's, when under the effect of it, every party member better be immune to every status effect in the game. If not, this will be stupid, it should become the ultimate shield against ailments, end of story.

Amongst the feedback we have been receiving, there have been a lot of comments about changing the effects, reducing the 2-hour recast time, removing the shared recast timer aspect, and other ideas for largely changing the concept. It may take a bit of time to discuss and look into all of these, but we are planning to spend time on this without rushing implementation so that these are abilities that everyone is satisfied with.

I am happy you want to make everyone happy. I am sorry to tell you that you have a very, very, very, long way to go before that happens, because alot of your abilities are terrible right now, or need worked on so much they could become worth while. The worse part in all of this, is that alot of them could easily be fixed such as RDM's, yet we still have no word on them, and so far as it seems they will be made even worse before better. I look forward to the next post on these abilities, as I want to tell you yet again my opinion on them. From how things seem to be changing around here, I feel as though my opinion is finally worth voicing. So please expect a long, thought out, reply from me each time I see a post of interest.

[SpankWustler]

The new 2-hours were developed based on the idea that they would share the existing 2-hour ability's recast timer and players would be selecting which ability to use based on the situation. Instead of these being a higher-tier or universal abilities that can be used for any situation, they are abilities that are designed to be used for specialized conditions.

This is definitely apparent with the better of the new abilities, but some of them just lack potency or are based on situations that never arise. I'll give three specific examples.

The Good: Bard - Good concept and good execution! While melee damage being favored over magic damage make this new ability very situational, it does exactly what it is meant to do.

This ability tears the magic defense and resistance of monsters apart in a situation where Soul Voice would have...uh...added a few more INT to people one at a time? This is a good situational ability.

The Bad: Warrior - A good concept that ends up being less potent than a current option. Unless the new ability affects weapon-skill damage, it will be worse than Mighty Strikes + Tomahawk for all situations.

Literally the only time this new ability would pull ahead is if a Warrior made the horrible decision of using Ukko's Fury (Raging Rush) instead of Upheaval (King's Justice) while Mighty Strikes was active in that situation. Please, don't balance new abilities around people doing something horribly wrong.

The Ugly: Beastmaster - Something in the concept itself is flawed. Beastmaster is already a defensive powerhouse and doesn't need a defensive ability that sacrifices the pet.

A level 86 sheep that costs me less than 1,000 gil could probably survive Vana'diel's equivalent of full-on nuclear war if my little tarubroro were hiding in a safe spot with Pet: -% Damage Taken stuff on, and that sheep would still have the energy to attempt to mate with a nearby Carbuncle and re-populate the earth. Other stuff is even heartier than that!

Beastmaster doesn't need more defense in any sense, much less defense that requires giving up its best defense even for a moment. Giving up the pet for a large amount of damage over a short time would be a much better pet-sacrifice concept.

[Aldersyde]

The Ugly: Beastmaster - Something in the concept itself is flawed. Beastmaster is already a defensive powerhouse and doesn't need a defensive ability that sacrifices the pet.

A level 86 sheep that costs me less than 1,000 gil could probably survive Vana'diel's equivalent of full-on nuclear war if my little tarubroro were hiding in a safe spot with Pet: -% Damage Taken stuff on, and that sheep would still have the energy to attempt to mate with a nearby Carbuncle and re-populate the earth. Other stuff is even heartier than that!

Beastmaster doesn't need more defense in any sense, much less defense that requires giving up its best defense even for a moment. Giving up the pet for a large amount of damage over a short time would be a much better pet-sacrifice concept.

This so much. The new 2-hour is ugly and useless. I could get behind an ability that sacrifices my pet. I could get behind an ability that is defensive in nature. What I can't get behind is one that grants a defensive buff at the expense of the pet which only benefits the beastmaster.

Bst desperately needs something that gets them into party content, because as it stands now, it only gets invited to participate when people want a last spot filled after an hour of shouts or to pre-75 content where it doesn't really matter who comes on what jobs. Therefore, make the healing, status removal and stoneskin party-wide buffs when the pet is consumed (without modifying the high amount of stoneskin). This would make the concept at least somewhat useful (in that it would be at least better than what it is now), even if it's just in an "oh shit" type of situation. Of course, granting offensive buffs would be much better, such as att+, crit hit rate+, or crit hit damage+, something along the lines of what embrava did for sch.

But as it is now, giving up your pet for a defensive buff for the bst exclusively is just a bad ability and will never be used.

I'm also curious as to what the dev team thought the use of this ability would be when they dreamed it up. The gulf between how the devs think bst is played and how players actually play it seems to be really wide at the moment though.

[Theytak]

Hey everyone,

The new 2-hours were developed based on the idea that they would share the existing 2-hour ability's recast timer and players would be selecting which ability to use based on the situation. Instead of these being a higher-tier or universal abilities that can be used for any situation, they are abilities that are designed to be used for specialized conditions.

Below are the envisioned applications of some abilities as well as planned adjustments.

Really? I gotta be honest, the devs didn't really think that logic through. The game, as it is now, does not possess the highly situational state of affairs it used to. It's like the dev team designed these abilities back in 2007 and just shelved them until now. Back then, honestly, they probably would have seen a fair amount of use. Today? not gonna fly. Unless they fully intend to return the game to the hypersituational state of affairs with Seekers of Adoulin, then there's really no justification for this, and even then, the players' mindset has changed so much that we're still not going to happily accept hyper situational abilities. Moderately situational but still useable with some frequency? Sure, those are always nice. However, most of these abilities are not even remotely close to that point.

Currently, the "specialized conditions" in which these abilities would be useful either do not exist or can only be found in one, singular instance. Giving us 2hours to deal with things that aren't in the game yet is stupid, especially if you're not going to tell us that you're planning that.

[*]Warrior
While Mighty Strikes offers a lot of physical damage through critical hits for a period of time, the idea was to add a way to attack enemies that have strong resistances to physical damage.

Based on testing and feedback, we are planning to make adjustments to extend the effect duration to 60 seconds. (Planning to make this change during this week’s Test Server update.)

Like others have said, unless this is changed so that it also applies to weapon skills, mightystrikes + tomahawk will still be more useful against the mobs the devs are thinking of, especially because tomahawk helps every party member.

[*]Paladin
The new 2-hour ability can be used for cases where just turtling up with Invincible and letting an enemy wail on you will not turn the tides of the fight, since you can enhance your defenses while reducing an enemy’s HP with the reflected damage.

*As mentioned previously in the post about adding an enmity boost effect to this ability, we understand the problems with the enmity cap. We plan on considering this for paladin in general and not limiting it only to the new 2-hour ability effect.

So, instead of turtling up with PDT-100%, you're turtling up with PDT-whateveryourshieldblocks% and reflecting some of the damage back. You said that you'd be adding enmity equal to invincible to it, and I may simply have missed it, but does the reflect damage generate any enmity? If it doesn't, it needs to. Broken enmity system or not, when you give pld an ability meant to deal damage, and it doesn't do the one thing pld needs dealing damage to do (generate enmity), it defeats the purpose.

[*]Samurai
Meikyo Shisui excels in instantaneous power. On the other hand, the new 2-hour ability is for cases where an enemy's AoE damage is too strong and getting close is dangerous. It will allow you to evade special attacks while dealing damage.

*Magical attacks will not be evaded, but will be made so that the damage received is 0. This will not have any effect on breath attacks, though.

With this ability we are aiming to make it possible to have a stable way of fighting by increasing defensive capabilities and diverting your time in battle towards enhancing offense capabilities.

Get rid of the damage boost. This is already a very powerful defensive ability, the damage boost is absolutely overkill if you're going to make it that effective. Honestly, this sounds like a tank ability that you should have given ninja or pld, and if you had done that, you know full well there would have been no accompanying damage boost.

Amongst the feedback we have been receiving, there have been a lot of comments about changing the effects, reducing the 2-hour recast time, removing the shared recast timer aspect, and other ideas for largely changing the concept. It may take a bit of time to discuss and look into all of these, but we are planning to spend time on this without rushing implementation so that these are abilities that everyone is satisfied with.

It's very good, and VERY reassuring that you're willing to take the time to discuss and debate these abilities, and I'm absolutely thrilled that you've got no intention of rushing the process. Thank you for that. However, there are somethings that we absolutely need addressed before we can give much further feedback:

- We need to know what the deal is with your logic behind bst's new 2hour, because it is horribly inappropriate and inadequate, and we've really gotten nothing but silence and ambiguous mutterings about it. It makes absolutely no sense as a defensive ability. It's more akin to a suicide ability like mijin gakure. It's not just bst, either, the devs are being far to silent on the abilities as a whole, unless they decide to change them. We would greatly appreciate if they would make clear what there intentions were for each ability so that we can more easily understand what they're willing to give us and what we should be aiming for.

- We need to know how much you're leeway willing to give with these abilities. Is completely redesigning any of them even in the realm of possibility? Or are we stuck with these general ideas, and limited to adding to them and tweaking them to make them work more towards what we think would be useful?

- We need to know what the devs had in mind when they're creating these abilities. I'm not asking for "what new stuff are you planning to add" specifically, but "what types of new monsters are you planning to add that these abilities would suddenly be useful?" because most of the new 2hours don't seem to have been designed with current NMs and endgame events in mind. I'm not asking specifics, this is a matter of "you're obviously planning to change up how NM fights work, can you give us any hints/ideas as to what you've got in store so that we can give you better feed back on what we'd need to be able to respond to such fights?" This is a good thing, because it seems like the devs have recognized that right now, every fight is pretty much just negate all damage and kill it as fast as possible, which sucks all the fun out of the fights, but you can't give us this stuff and say "here's a bunch of super situational stuff you guys don't need right now. *wink*"

These three points, if nothing else, really need to be addressed if you want us to give you quality feedback, especially as to whether these abilities were planned around new, future content, rather than current existing stuff, because without that being explicitly stated, and giving us some idea as to what said content might entail, we're only going to be able to give feed back based on what we know, which is going to be "Perfect Defense, Embrava, KILLKILLKILLKILL" without question.

[Byrth]

It makes it easier to land BRD debuffs. It's actually pretty amusing that it wasn't part of the original 2-hour.

WAR: The 2-hour still doesn't affect WS damage, so it still isn't worthwhile. Warriors have about a 50/50 WS/TP damage split. Assuming Crits double damage (which they will against any enemy that is worth 2-houring), then the monster would need to have more than 75% PDT for the new 2-hour to be worth using.

Not only that, but you've already given us the necessary tool to invalidate this 2-hour entirely, Tomahawk. If a monster has 100% PDT and you Tomahawk it, for a little while it has 70% PDT. If 75% PDT is the cut-off, then Tomahawk + Mighty Strikes (30% with AF2+2 feet and 5/5 merits) is better than using this 2-hour.

You need to make this 2-hour apply to weapon skills too.

PLD: You aren't proposing a change, but I'm interested in hearing about potential changes to the enmity system. Please don't make them Paladin specific.

BRD: Okay, that was a pretty obvious change considering it's the only way to make the 2-hour give BRD an equal advantage. I approve!

SAM: I don't know if this avoids Tera Slash's additional effect (WSs received during 2-hour still hit for 0), but if it does then the 2-hour is entirely justified.

DNC: I'm not really sure what you're saying here. We can use 3 Flourishes back to back? Okay, that's nice I guess. It's pretty much a gimp Meikyo Shisui then? Definitely better than what we had. I would recommend extending the duration back to 60 seconds and reducing all flourish recasts, but you've already clearly decided not to do that.

[Kari]

DNC: I'm not really sure what you're saying here. We can use 3 Flourishes back to back? Okay, that's nice I guess. It's pretty much a gimp Meikyo Shisui then? Definitely better than what we had. I would recommend extending the duration back to 60 seconds and reducing all flourish recasts, but you've already clearly decided not to do that.

Yeeeeah. At least this is BETTER than the piece of crap we were going to get.
However, I'd definitely like to see some improvements. I'm glad to see we'll be able to do more with this, but there is NO REASON to not use this 2 hour for 3 Reverse Flourishes. I mean, if it's supposed to give us full use of Flourishes, I'd love to be able to do a few Building + Climactic WSs while Reversing for more TP, but with only 3, I'm going to Climactic before 2 houring, then use 3 Reverses. Building would be a waste at that point.

[Chamaan]

On behalf of every warrior everywhere: Please tell the developers that if they really believe a complete immunity to damage is balanced with a worse version of Formless Strikes, we're happy to swap abilities with samurai and call it a day.

This warrior two hour offers nothing to warriors that MS can't do with the raw physical power Mighty Strikes (and Tomahawk, as Byrth pointed out). You asked for other suggestions, we gave them. Pick one please and use it instead of your idea.

[Windwhisper]

This thread could use the picture of the dartboard where every default field is "boost SAM".

jokes aside. SAMs new 2h is very powerful. in comparism to their new 2h most pf the other new ones look like a good laugh.

[Amokzz]

RNG needs some love the new 2h is nothing special, its at best 15min JA material and our old 2h does half the dmg of an Aftermath Crit...

A full enmity reset on top of the new 2h would be a way in the right direction.