Steal, Aurasteal, Despoil & Mug Discussion

[Nebo]

I don't think any THF would disagree with the idea that the ability to steal enhancements from monsters is cool thing to be able to do.

-The reality is though, there are only a handful of situations where you can steal a buff of any real value to you as a THF - 9 times out of 10, its just a utility dispel.

What I will say is that most Thieves I know feel that Aurasteal was implemented badly.

-It should have never been combined with steal just to "fix" steal. Especially since item steal procs first. Read: We are never going to fix Steal so lets just mash this totally unrelated thing onto it. Think of all the thrills you can have fighting skeltons!!!

-A 5 minute recast is MUCH to long for an ability of this kind.

You separate that sunnuvabitch from steal and lower the recast?...I'm putting 5/5 into it right then and there. (You can even make it share a recast with steal....no one cares about steal.)

The idea of Aurasteal is amazing, unfortunately the ability itself is pretty crap.

[Nebo]

I am completely fine with not being allowed to select which status ailment to attempt to inflict with Despoil, and have it be dependent on the mob family you're fighting, as long as it is no longer tied to the same recast timer as Steal.

I can't imagine a situation where this random/variable enfeeble would be useful for its enfeebling effect. How will you base a battle plan around an ability that you have no idea what its going to do?

if Despoil is to be left on a 5 minute timer and still not have a 100% success rate, debuff inflicted should be permanent (until the mob dies) unless it is a NM of a higher level than you.

Despoil Doesn't work on any NM's....at all - they don't have items to steal. Obligatory SE Bullshit response: "THAT's WHAT AURASTEAL IS FOR! IT IGNORES RESISTANCES! HAPPY RAINBOWS, CHOCOBOS AND SUNSHINE!!! YAY!!!!"

I am also fine with letting aura steal remain on a 5 minute timer and having the absorb-buff chance be dependent on how many merits you put in it, again, as long as it is on a separate timer, not shared with Steal nor Despoil.

5 Minutes cool is too long for any steal ability...especially Aurasteal. I could care less about steal and despoil though, those two retards don't do anything useful.

-Heck, SE could make steal, despoil and aurasteal all separate abilities but still share a (lower) recast timer....I'm happy. But that would be ignoring the problem that steal and despoil are totally irrelevant to the game...meh

Just stop making every steal-like ability share the same cooldown. It is not fun and it would not disrupt balance.

Agreed.

[Falseliberty]

when did despoil even come out? I can count on 2 hands the amount of times i have used this,
has got to be the most worthless dam ability ever. holy crap mug is worthless too.... do the devs even play this game?
If I sound sour, it's cuz I am ><

[Lokithor]

Steal, Despoil and Aura Steal should have their own separate timers. Each should have a base recast of 5 minutes.

Change Aura Steal merit to a Steal / Despoil / Aura Steal recast reduction of 1 minute per level to a final recast of 1 minute.

For steal, developers need to re-jig what can be stolen from mobs to make it worthwhile.

Aura Steal should have be 100% dispel and absorb. Change it from a trait to a Job Ability (therefore not associated with stealing at all).

Despoil should be changed so that the ability transfers a debuff from the thief to the mob. Eliminate completely the stealing of useless items.

[Mirage]

I can't imagine a situation where this random/variable enfeeble would be useful for its enfeebling effect. How will you base a battle plan around an ability that you have no idea what its going to do?

Non-selectable doesn't have to mean random. If the effect is consistent within the same mob group, you would get predictable results with Despoil every time you used it on specific enemies. If Despoiling a mandragora always lead to the mandy's damage output decreasing, you could base a battle plan around it.

Detaching an item-steal from Despoil, and making it strictly a debuff ability could allow for it to be usable on NMs too. The most important thing is however that it gets its own cooldown. Just splitting the three abilities into separate cooldowns alone would help a lot, because now you have a dispel, a debuff, and a potential item steal every 5 minutes, instead of only one of those three every 5 minutes.

Would I have preferred the recasts to be lowered as well? Sure, why wouldn't I want that? Decreasing them all to 3 minutes instead of 5 would perhaps be reasonable. I'm just saying that separate timers would increase their usefulness a lot already.

[Phogg]

In that case it should certainly be reversed. I guess Dynamis mobs have no steal pool then since whenever I use steal on them, I dispel their buffs instead of getting items.

I farm dyna as thf almost always and I would say in the many many runs I've done I've stolen less than a handful of coins. Its just a really rare thing.

The thing that bugs me, is something about aura steal seems to increase the accuracy of steal, but only on buffs. Mobs with no buff to steal in dyna >>> almost never successfully steal. Mobs with buffs, like crawlers cocoon, steal rate is really really high, like eyeballing 80-90% high. That aura steal rate seems consistent in other content as well, where the successful steal rate on items outside dynamis is much higher, but still lower that buff steal success rates. That just kinda bugs me lol

[SpankWustler]

The Steal family of job abilities are definitely in need of...something. Outside of Aura Steal, they're all currently so outdated that it's hard to even suggest a direction to go.

Non-selectable doesn't have to mean random. If the effect is consistent within the same mob group, you would get predictable results with Despoil every time you used it on specific enemies. If Despoiling a mandragora always lead to the mandy's damage output decreasing, you could base a battle plan around it.

A decent compromise between the dependability a player wants and the nutty nuttiness a Development Bro might want could be to make Despoil vary by the target's specific job rather than monster family, maybe?

There would still be enough randomness for the random element to be present. But, the very small pool for Black Mages could be "INT Down or Magic Attack Down", while the very small pool for the ever-popular-with-monsters job of Warrior could be "STR Down or Attack Down".

If this were combined with the enfeebling effect kicking in whether an item were stolen or not, Despoil would be...somewhat less awful than it is now.

[FrankReynolds]

Steal needs to be completely retooled. RMT have better ways to make money now. Let's make it a 99% chance that you will get a common item (single currency / log / w/e depending on the event), with a 1% chance that you will get the good item (HMP, 100 currency, B.Haidates etc. you get the point).

Despoil... doesn't need to exist. Just give thief some useful ranged equipment again if you must make thief an enfeebling job.

Aura Steal is never going to be useful beyond "Oh, that was neat! I had boost for 30 seconds!" or "yay, I took down ice spikes on a level 75 skeleton that had no chance of killing me anyways!" unless they come up with some way to allow players to target a specific buff and then shorten the timer. It's not funny when a job that survives by not getting hit steals a flame spikes effect instead of that 200 hp per tick regen that was slowing you down.

[Nebo]

The Steal family of job abilities are definitely in need of...something. Outside of Aura Steal, they're all currently so outdated that it's hard to even suggest a direction to go.



A decent compromise between the dependability a player wants and the nutty nuttiness a Development Bro might want could be to make Despoil vary by the target's specific job rather than monster family, maybe?

There would still be enough randomness for the random element to be present. But, the very small pool for Black Mages could be "INT Down or Magic Attack Down", while the very small pool for the ever-popular-with-monsters job of Warrior could be "STR Down or Attack Down".

If this were combined with the enfeebling effect kicking in whether an item were stolen or not, Despoil would be...somewhat less awful than it is now.

A big part of my problem with Despoil, is that I feel like it should have been made to allow the THF to "Steal" the effect (similar to how Absorb spells work).

So for me, yeah maybe enfeebling a specific BLM job type with MAB down would probably be more useful than Despoil is curently, bu I'd much rather they give us a much more useful and consistent effect to steal with it, (TP, HP, Attack, etc). As oppose to making it some situationally useful enfeeble.

[Vold]

There's nothing new I can really add, so I'ma just throw in my support if nothing else.

This game is in such dire need for certain ability adjustments because the game has changed so much in the past 4 years. Said adjustments worked fine in the past but for today's standards they are extremely sub par at best, and it doesn't help one lick for them to go untouched as months continue to pass. I really do not want to hear another balance excuse out of SE about it. All those excuses ever are is excuses for not having to bother fixing things.

I know it's a horrible pain in the ass to have to go back and adjust things but come on, if we can't get expansion after expansion on a more timely schedule than once every 3-5 years then at least give us the courtesy of making the game as it is the very best it can be. Especially when some of us, like me these days, tend to shy away from all of the 18 man content of late because it's just not possible for me to commit to it. So I have to fall back on being made happy in other ways, like job adjustments. The VW era was such a perfect time to be done with this issue. All that work that went into job adjustments and yet some of the most basic problems that exist managed to survive. How is it even possible that they cannot see how worthless mug/steal/aurasteal/despoil is? or perhaps they know full well how worthless they are, they just don't want to spend time improving them because it's a mountain of work. Specifically for despoil.

My idea is for them to combine steal, aura steal, and despoil into one. Do away with the worthless aurasteal merit and give something else worthwhile. Do away with the despoil JA to clear up another JA on THF so it can have yet another useful JA in the future because I think the jobs have like a 15 JA limit? Or something along those lines. Then, that just leaves steal. A steal that will steal items, debuff the monster, AND steal it's buffs. Since our shit is all shared timers anyway you might as well do this so as to free up JA slots because we can't do but one of them anyway every 5 fricking minutes. We don't care about the choice because it's not much of a choice to begin with.

And if you think the ability to probably not steal an item, debuff a mob with MAB down, and stealing it's protect is somehow unbalanced and will heavily tip the battle in the THFs favor, well, I know when someone is blowing smoke up my ass to get out of some work to fix a job.


As far as I really care, I want to see mug and steal both timed to 1-2 minutes rather than 5/15. That's all I really want. I couldn't care less about your despoil or aura steal. Steal success is so low that I'll still probably not use steal but once every 10 minutes anyway when I remember the damn thing exists. I would like to use mug like once per monster, assuming it dropped gil, to get my shotty extra 1-35 gil per fight. Heaven forbid we can mug a HNM every minute. We're gonna have THFs coming out of HNM battles with diamond gold rings earrings and gold necklaces with giant pendants that reads THUGS 4 LIFE on their fingers ears and necks because they just got sooooo rich mugging gil. That's how silly a 15 min mug is. Maybe it used to be super duper in the beginning but 10 years later it's a waste of game space.

I want THF to be a damn thief, not gimped to the point it's just a TH bitch. Is that so much to ask in 2012? Either turn us into a real DD threat like they are in most MMOs, or give us our thieving back. Either one works for me. But I grow tired when I look at my THF and know the only reason for it to exist is to provide TH7+ and maybe a little eva power if solo. That's retarded.