Battle System Suggestions - MB/SC, Forced Delay, Enmity

[Byrth]

FFXI's battle system has many mechanisms that did not scale well from 50 to 99. Lets look at them:

1) Skillchains - The skillchain patch helped out, but it made the issue with skillchains even more obvious than ever before. The skillchain window is ~4-10 seconds after the previous WS. It varies a bit by job, but 7-8 seconds is a pretty typical TP-WS cycle time for a melee DD with capped Haste. So a single DD can skillchain indefinitely and benefit immensely from the system, but multiple DDs end up counting to 3 after the previous WS, waiting, waiting, WSing less often and picking up a little skillchain damage. It's still strategically useful to stay wise to the Skillchain system as a DD, but the system itself is cumbersome and could be more practical.

2) Magic Bursts - Magic Bursting off a skillchain (0-10 seconds after the skillchain) results in a 30% magic damage boost (+5% more per skillchain level past 2) and some more damage based on your Magic Burst Bonus gear. For a 6-step skillchain with +53% MB Bonus, you would have a 2.3x multiplier to magic damage along with a huge magic accuracy bonus. So why don't people MB? Well, it turns out that any Weaponskill with a skillchain property interrupts the previous magic burst window. In a situation with multiple DDs spamming WSs every 7 seconds, even if your melee are coordinating for magic bursts, spells do not cast quickly enough to catch the errant skillchain before another melee WSs.

3) Forced (Animation) Delays - After you use a WS, you will not autoattack for the next 2 seconds and cannot initiate any other action. After you use a JA, you will not autoattack for the next 2 seconds, and can initiate another action after 1 second. After you use magic, you will not autoattack for the next 3 seconds and cannot initiate another action during that time. This animation delay makes up a huge portion of player time in the current battle system. In the example above, 2 seconds of the 7 second TP-WS cycle is spent waiting for your WS animation to finish. That's almost 30%. If you're a mage with a good fast cast set, you spend about 60% of your time waiting for the 3 second delay to be up. These forced delays are super annoying and detract from the otherwise fast pace of battle.

4) Enmity - This is really just an honorable mention that I don't particularly feel like dealing with mechanistically in this post, but the enmity system is insufficient. All standard melee DD will cap enmity quickly when fighting a boss monster and then the monster will just spin, becoming untankable. There's essentially no threat that the monster will go after a mage. Hate is perfectly stable despite how much damage the melee are taking. It's boring.



Discussion:
Issues #1 and #2 are due to the 80% Delay Reduction Cap. DDs at the delay reduction cap attack 5 times faster than DDs with no delay reduction. Look at the above and imagine a 35 second cycle time instead of a 7 second cycle time. The top two issues are solved, and action animation delays (#3) take up a substantially smaller % of a standard TP-WS cycle. However, current content is balanced assuming we will use DDs that are at the Haste cap. If you attempt Incursion without any Haste, for instance, you are going to lose.

As a counterpoint, Haste is fun. Having essential Haste buffs is kind of a cool mechanism and I still find it fun to see myself attack faster and faster. It's just too bad that we lose so much battle system depth due to it (SC/MB, people skimp on JAs due to JA delay, etc.)



Solutions:
* Dramatically reduce TP gain to 1/3 or 1/4 of its present level - Possibly just let Haste affect TP/hit. Issue #1 would be addressed.

* Allow overlapping Magic Burst windows - So if a Distortion skillchain goes off and you start casting Blizzard V, but someone cancels it into a Fusion skillchain, your MB will still land for the proper damage as long as it's within 10 seconds of the Distortion skillchain. Issue #2 is addressed.

* Reduce animation delay - 1 second for WSs and 0.5 seconds for JAs would probably be fine after the TP reduction. Magic could drop down to 2 at least, perhaps also down to 1.

* Increase Magic Burst and WS damage - Do this adjustment "to taste" to even out high performance DPS to be approximately equivalent before and after adjustments.

* Fix enmity somehow - At this point I honestly don't care how easy it is to tank as long as it's possible to tank. I find easy-tanking strategically more interesting than can't-tanking.



This would create a battle system where people actually coordinate skillchains and magic bursts. It would be a player DPS nerf initially, but players could rise to the challenge. It would also subsequently fix a host of jobs:
1) Ranger (up) - Doesn't rely on Haste, so the TP change wouldn't affect them
2) Samurai (down), Warrior, Dark Knight, Dragoon, Thief, Ninja, Dancer, Blue Mage (up) - Lower WS frequency means more emphasis on white damage
3) Dancer, Puppetmaster, Rune Fencer - JA delay reduction would help these jobs out a lot
4) Black Mage, Scholar - Reduction in spell delay would massively help these jobs as magic DDs
5) Paladin, Rune Fencer, Ninja - Fixing enmity somehow would make these jobs far more useful