Weapon Skill Damage bug and game balancing.

[Zumi]

PLD is pretty much the only job I play.

[DarkValefor]

How would anyone even hit 99999 damage ? I just came back and weapon skills were doing like 2k on my pld and i have excalibur.

You would need a strong Savage Blade set. I've seen PLDs hit 20k Savage Blade. I've also seen PLDs hit over 20k CdC but that PLD was geared with Dark Matter augments.

In any case, 20k damage against a mob that is weak to skillchain closing a 4-5 step skillchain and you could be reaching 99999.

Another option is to fight certain delve NMs with very specific mechanics. If I remember right there is a matamata NM you can fight that you can force to take x64 damage on either magic or physical damage, so your 2k WS would do it.

[Smokenttp]

You would need a strong Savage Blade set. I've seen PLDs hit 20k Savage Blade. I've also seen PLDs hit over 20k CdC but that PLD was geared with Dark Matter augments.

In any case, 20k damage against a mob that is weak to skillchain closing a 4-5 step skillchain and you could be reaching 99999.

Another option is to fight certain delve NMs with very specific mechanics. If I remember right there is a matamata NM you can fight that you can force to take x64 damage on either magic or physical damage, so your 2k WS would do it.

yeah pretty much this it is way easier to build around savage blade then chant on pld.As for skill chain damage in my experience only mobs with specific damage resistences/absorption or mobs with elevated magic defense bonus like sava savionic or abyssdiver reduces skill chain damage (and in this last scenario if you bring a geomancer to malaise then you can actually increase the skill chain damage "back to neutral" wich i found very bizarre but worked for me other spells like increasing magic attack or decresing magic evasion didnt even faze the skill chain damage but malaise did it so i belive that those monsters do have magic defense bonus traits wich can be lowered by malaise in order to reach normal skill chain damage on then).

[Afania]

Since no one dared to bring this up since the fix i figured i should do it myself, but i belive most people agree that the weapon skill damage bug was an happy accident and was wondering if the devs have just fixed it with the mind set that "it was broken" or if they spent some time actualy investigating what was going in the game for the 2 months the issue was present.

In my eyes the bug actually brought out a lot of improvements overall to a very significant number of jobs as well as making a lot of weapon skills that where not used at all ,save for increasing the number of steps an skill chain had, to an state where they are actually contributing for the damage (and yes having extra options is a good thing as stated by our fellow japanese player that helped change the pet enmity category on beastmaster).

Yes i do realize that some weapon skills got extremely powerfull due to the nature on how damage became but i still fail to see this as an issue on a pve balanced game outside the hive mind of players forming a party of meta jobs (wich was present even in the lvl 75 days so we cant say that this is exactly a new issue) and even then in my point of view what this allowed is to multiple people hitting max damage more then once on a multi step skill chain (and there we might have some issues on the tanking side of things).

Other then that i would like to call the attention to another potential benefit of the bug wich was gear progression and the acess to weapon skill damage armors, as you can get some as low as alluvion skirmish aguments (and ambuscade) and work your way to the top from there, without the need of killing something like OU to "grab the one ring that makes victory smite usefull", as this is the major issue on most of the dd jobs nowadays they all work but some require gear that are gated behind monsters that they really have not much ways to deal with by then selfs and are forced to resort to summoner astral conduit zergs in order to get what they need (again nothing wrong in having multiple jobs, and being versatile is an quality that separates a good team player from a bad one, but that should not be the only way to obtain gear and be usefull, this is not to bash summoner zergs either because this is still gated behind an one hour job ability and an fully geared DD on a meta job is actually able to pull off more damage on longer fights, but i would rather have more options to fight that does not require me to have previously beaten what i am trying to beat right now).

Lastly i would like to point out that the amount of shouts that happened for jobs that where not used at all before the bug, i at least saw an massive increase for jobs like mnk, nin , dnc, pup, drg, war, thf, rng wich was to be honest very pleasing to see, even people that previously shouted only for specific jobs started shouting for any kind of damage dealer they could find wich was honestly really awesome and welcome because people felt for once that they where able to be geared for the jobs.

So i would like to ask how the devs aproached this issue and if they are considering reveiwing the weapon skill damage change or if their decision is final and if that is the case what kind of balance they have on the table to bring back those jobs.

Thank you for your time.

There are many people asking dev keeping WSD glitch but from what I've read, most of them are based on their emotional satisfaction because it feels good to do big damage WS, and it make them kill NM faster. From game design pov, such argument isn't valid.

WSD glitch is a bad thing mainly because it trivialize harder content and made them easier than it should be. Higher level content NM has certain level of HP to keep the difficulty at certain level, since in FFXI the difficulty of a content is related to how long it takes to clear. The slower you clear a content the harder it can be since you will need to deal with more TP moves, accidents, player making mistakes and wipe, or even time out.

So the faster player power creeps, the faster content gets done, making the content life span shorter.

Another pro WSD change argument is about job balance. They argue that certain jobs like MNK gets boosted so it fixes some of the weaker jobs.

I agree that in past 1 year or so, the gear seems to favor 1-2 hit WS, so WSD change seems to "fix" this problem. However if we look into it, WSD change favors WAR, DRK as much as MNK, BLU. So it doesn't really balance anything since strongest DD got even stronger with glitch. The job that remains the same are DD using 1-2 hit WS: So jobs like SAM (Fudo) NIN (Ten) DPS didn't change much since these are 1 hits.

OP claimed "more jobs like mnk, nin , dnc, pup, drg, war, thf, rng got shouted" with WSD change, I think there are no evidence that it's because of WSD glitch. NIN (Ten), THF (rudras) does not benefit much from WSD glitch much since their strongest WS is 1 hit. PUP and RNG belongs to pet/ranged setup not melee, so WSD change or not they are not competing a DD slot with melee job to begin with, nor WSD change would do anything about community's preference on melee setup. WAR was already one of the most popular and strongest DD before change, so they don't need a fix.

The remaining jobs are MNK(VS, tornado kick), DNC (PK), DRG (stardiver) that benefit from it. That's only 3 from OP's list and it's faster/easier to fix these jobs by buffing them individually instead of doing a universal WSD boost for ALL DD jobs like WAR, DRK that's already on top AND got the benefit of WSD glitch.

Finally, OP made an argument about WSD gears being accessible to new players. This seems pretty biased to me, since many of the good WSD gears that made multi hit WS so OP actually came from newer content like Omen bosses (ammo), DM, AF+3 (Omen), Relic +3 (Dyna D), Month's of SoA quests (Ring), or pay 40m on AH (ring). You can get weaker multi hit argument on A.skirmish gears too, so WSD gear isn't more new player friendly than multi hit gear IMO. They are just as expensive/difficult to get for a brand new player.

[Isola]

lul (10 characters)

[chiefhunglo]

And I also have 10 characters done see how I made that up that's you.

[Shiyo]

WSD bug was very good for the game. It made a lot of weaker WS and weapon types(especially scythe!!) feel a lot stronger. The only weapon skills it made overpowered are ones that should be nerfed regardless of the bug existing or not - upheavel, reso, and last stand.

Please consider bringing it back, thank you.

[Afania]

WSD bug was very good for the game. It made a lot of weaker WS and weapon types(especially scythe!!) feel a lot stronger. The only weapon skills it made overpowered are ones that should be nerfed regardless of the bug existing or not - upheavel, reso, and last stand.

Please consider bringing it back, thank you.

- Last stand isn't OP nor benefit much from WSD glitch, it's 2 hit. Most of the big damage LS damage that we see in game are from mobs that takes extra piercing damage.

- Keeping the glitch then nerfing the stronger WS is more work for balance than just keep it as it is and fixing the weaker WS individually.

- Scythe(Anguta+CR build) was somewhat competitive to GS before Sept update. It's the lack of empy AM3 from Anguta and the lack of light SC property that made GS more useful overall. But if you seriously want to use scythe you can make it work. Anguta + CR build or R15 liberator + insurgency should still be ok post WSD fix I think.