Overall Battle System Adjustments for the Future

[ManaKing]

Also, the development team is aware of everyone’s concerns that monster’s special attacks are a bit on the fierce side.

They are currently discussing making it similar to new Limbus, Odin’s Chamber II, and Meeble Burrows where you can formulate a strategy to evade special attacks, and also with the defense adjustments it will be possible to withstand an enemy’s attack more than now as their attack power is reduced. The goal is to change the conditions where you need to defeat a monster right away because even a single regular hit from them deals too much damage.

Thank you. Your game would become significantly more fun by doing this.

Next, on to dark knight…

There are two large principles that the development team is keeping in mind:

• To make job adjustments by comparing aspects collectively to close the gap between dark knight
• To not make adjustments by comparing only fire-power to leave dark knight behind

Will Quietus become a real WS? Is defense mitigation going to be something DDs actually want in WSs finally?

Entropy would be significantly more attractive if you would give DRKs some magic adjustments. Dark versions of Holy and Holy II have been asked for probably 100s of times at this point. Making Absorb spells not decay so fast would also be appreciated.

Finally, elemental magic.

When comparing the amount of damage a character deals, elemental magic possesses a higher potential than that of other front-line jobs. However, there is a wide variety of ways to support front-line jobs and not nearly as many ways to support back-line jobs.

Instead of focusing only on adjusting black mage, in addition to our our recently discussed elemental magic changes, we feel it would be better to address the support difference by enabling other jobs to offer more ways to enhance the capabilities of magic users.

rdm?.....RDM? RDM~~~!!!!!

But seriously, we'd love to be of service. Adjust our Enspells to debuff magical defense and evasion in a useful and qualitatively significant way. Give us a reason to be.

[Chocobits]

Didn't see it mentioned, but with the change in attack/def, wouldn't Conqueror become the strongest weapon in the game?

[Byrth]

No. All of the changes they're describing are Monster -> Player. They've given no indication that they're touching Player -> Monster level correction at all.

Even if they had, DRK/WAR still has more attack than a Conqueror WAR.

[MarkovChain]

No. All of the changes they're describing are Monster -> Player. They've given no indication that they're touching Player -> Monster level correction at all.

Even if they had, DRK/WAR still has more attack than a Conqueror WAR.

They did indirectly say that they would touch player vs monster

Legion

Adjustments to HP/attack/defense
As mentioned above, we are looking into removing the level difference correction.
Due to the fact that removing the level difference correction and lowering the level of monsters at the same time would cause the monsters to become too weak, we are thinking about making adjustments to attack and defense, as well as HP.

If "too weak" refers to "they can't damage me", why mention their HP ?

[Yinnyth]

No. All of the changes they're describing are Monster -> Player. They've given no indication that they're touching Player -> Monster level correction at all.

It sounds to me like they're making it so both the level correction removal and the defense changes will work both ways based on the last line of the quote below:

•Even if defense is increased, the damage received is not reduced
This is mainly for higher level enemies where the level difference correction is imposed.

Every level a value is added per level to the value that is calculated from the attack/defense ratio, and defense is lowered and then taken into account.


Idea
1.The monsters created after Seekers of Adoulin will be created without the imposing of a level difference correction, and when higher level monsters are created, modification will be placed on attack, defense, and stats.

2.Remove level difference correction
By removing the level difference correction, it will be possible to reduce the amount of damage taken by increasing your defense.

Also, with the adjustments to the attack/defense ratio and the level difference correction, weapons that have a modifier of 1.0 will become much stronger than what they are currently.

But it doesn't come right out and say it.

[MarkovChain]

The fact that mythic rely too much on building 300% somewhere makes them gimp weapons. The better weapons will be those of the jobs that don't suck and whose weaponskill damage is not entirely relying on critrate. Relic monk and shijin spiral (plus boost will be quite overpowered), DRK and ragnarok+resolution, sam and shoha. Ascetic's furry has a 100% att boost too so maybe with glanzfaust it starts to be decent.

[Helel]

They said they were considering adjusting monster's defense due to removing level correction (see idea #1 that mentions SoA). That's clearly player -> monster.

[Motenten]

Next, on to dark knight…

...

In the event that you jump into battles and pay no attention to your defense, you will take damage for nearly two-times the amount that it is now, so the way the job is played will change.

Actually, re-reading this, there's possibly another explanation.

It started off with:

The damage you receive from an enemy's attack will increase up to 50% of your defense; however, if it is less (than 50%) you will still receive the same damage as if you had 50%.

That means the baseline is the player's defense at 50% of the mob's attack. For example, Ig-Alima at 1059 attack and a player with 530 defense, the mob is at capped Ratio against the player. It doesn't matter if you add Berserk, Last Resort, etc, to that, you'll still take the same damage.

Now, take a drk using Berserk+Last Resort (ie: "pay no attention to your defense"). That's +25% and +15% attack, and a commensurate -25% and -15% defense. So defense is down a total of -40%.

Starting from 530 defense, it's now 318 defense. New ratio for the mob is 1059/318 = 3.33, or 67% more damage than before. Bit of a stretch to call it 'almost twice', but the wording makes sense if you looked at it where your defense dropped by almost half, so then the mob Ratio would almost double.

That means they aren't saying the Ratio cap is ~3.33 or 3.5 or whatever, but that the defense that previously meant nothing (from 530 down to 318) now fully matters. In other words, they're not actually asserting any Ratio cap at all (other than at least 3.33). The cap could be 4.0, or, for all we know, could be completely unbounded.

If that is indeed the case, the risk from using Counterstance would be almost completely untenable. Every mob attack would be like current ranged attacks, which are mostly a death sentence for a counterstanced mnk.


So Camate: Please provide clarification. Is there an intended upper bound on the attack/defense ratio? And, regardless, how do they plan on addressing Counterstance with these changes?

[Byrth]

They aren't asserting there will be a future Ratio cap, I agree, but they've pretty much explicitly told us that there is currently a 2.0 Ratio cap for monsters, yeah? As a side note, some testing indicates that this ratio cap is separate from the level correction Ratio boost.
http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.htm...6&h=50&p=7#343

Also, I think SE-vision could see "decreasing the damage done by monsters (reducing level correction)" = "making them easier"

The truth is that such a change will have a pretty minor effect on current strategies (apart from the potential inclusion of Tarutarus) because you still need to stun the TP moves so that the status effects don't get off.

[Tennotsukai]

This is all really great news to read on, but I am wondering about DRK. Wasn't there supposed to be an update on DRKs absorb spells? What about working on DRKs survivability more than just their attack? Perhaps more absorb spells/dread spikes?