3.0: Elemental Weakness/Resistance?

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Originally Posted by Giantbane

I'm pretty sure the other problem is that it's actually pretty weak as a defensive stat, such that even though you know you'd be primarily taking lightning damage in something like Ramuh EX, it's still not worth going to all the trouble of stacking lightning resist even if you're the tank.

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it's mostly hamstrung by formulaic ilvl gear, echo and too many instant death abilities.

While I agree that the resistances in place in this game are generally a joke -- the only place where you have to put in any thought (or did) was BCoB T2, there's no compelling reason to put them in place. I think they've done a fantastic job of making every class/ job viable for every piece of content. Sure, there are a couple of pieces where job X might be a bit better than job Y, but nothing like the crap-fest in FFXI where many pieces of content could not be completed by the majority of the player base without at least a couple of slots being filled with specific jobs, if not the entire roster being set in stone.

Also, some of you guys must have played a different FFXI. The one I played, where I was a BLM more or less the entire time, had me casting blizzard spells 80% of the time. If I wasn't casting blizzard I was casting thunder.

I'll be honest right now. If this were ANY OTHER MMO, I wouldn't even care about the Elemental Wheel. DCUO? That would actually be harmed by an elemental wheel since characters pick a powerset focus and can only attack using that one element that they have.

But this is Final Fantasy. This is the franchise that practically invented the Elemental Wheel and mechanics on how to make the elemental wheel an increase in challenge.

You remember Amon from Syrcus Tower? In FFIII, one of his most famous abilities was called "Barrier Shift", which caused his elemental weaknesses and resistances to randomize. That same ability was given to many bosses in future games. Magus from Chrono Trigger comes to mind, as does Spherimorph from Final Fantasy X, and such mechanics just seem very much in the spirit of Final Fantasy as a franchise. I mean heck, we have everything that says an elemental wheel should exist, from the six elemental primals to elemental crystals to synthesis using the power of the elements... everything says this game should have an elemental wheel, but it doesn't exist.

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Originally Posted by Catsby

You should see how badly people play the game as it is. I actually had a party member tell me he wasn't going to re-position himself during T5 phases because it would "lower his dps potential". This was after he burned to death in lava/fireballs about 3 times.

I can't bring myself to level any more DPS jobs because them doing 'white' damage makes them all feel the same. The only real difference left is where you stand when you do it. Emphasizing damage resistances would be awesome because it would add so much more depth and potential to the game both in and outside of combat.

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Monks that use all attacks from flank, or only use a single line of combos. Black Mages only using Firaga then transpose. SMN using Ifrit on bosses and spamming Ruin. These people always give me a good chuckle.

I'm not sure what to feel on damage resistances. If it wasn't so difficult to gear multiple classes with relevant gear I'd be okay with excluding certain jobs from certain fights if was simply easy to just switch to another job with equivalent gear.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

...where many pieces of content could not be completed by the majority of the player base without at least a couple of slots being filled with specific jobs, if not the entire roster being set in stone.Also, some of you guys must have played a different FFXI. The one I played, where I was a BLM more or less the entire time, had me casting blizzard spells 80% of the time. If I wasn't casting blizzard I was casting thunder.

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Jobs getting sidelined was mostly linkshells being bad/overpopulated and not because the jobs were useless. I remember tanking top tier HNM as THF, magic DD as NIN and pulling as BRD. The BLM spell thing is basically the same problem as ilvl. the spells scaled partially off their level rather than their element and were granted to you at varying levels. This usually meant the higher level spell was the best one.

No. /10char

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Originally Posted by HakuroDK

So obviously, from 1.X to 2.X, elemental weaknesses and resistances were thrown completely out the window in favor of "easier gameplay".

Now that the game has a healthy amount of players and will continue to have a healthy amount of players by the time 3.0 comes out, can we bring those back with the new expansion? Just seems kinda weird for Fire spells to damage enemies like Ifrit and Fire Sprites, or Thunder spells to damage Ramuh and Lightning Sprites.

I'm pretty sure most people wanting to play BLM, at least at first, did so with the intent of being able to exploit elemental weaknesses.

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Hey, how about no.

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Originally Posted by dreffen

Hey, how about no.

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Q. As a GLD, how does the elemental wheel even affect you?

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Originally Posted by HakuroDK

That's why I had this topic suggesting all these changes for 3.0 rather than anytime in the 2.X era. If they're gonna be overhauling things anyway, might as well slip some of this stuff in too, yeah?

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I don't think you have been paying attention to any of the recent live letters, Yoshida has been using 3.0 as an excuse to not implement anything complicated, saying that new players will come with 3.0 and he doesn't want to stress them out with anything complicated.

I'd wait until 4.x for any kind of complexity.

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Originally Posted by Alukah

I don't think you have been paying attention to any of the recent live letters, Yoshida has been using 3.0 as an excuse to not implement anything complicated, saying that new players will come with 3.0 and he doesn't want to stress them out with anything complicated.

I'd wait until 4.x for any kind of complexity.

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You know, sometimes I wonder just how complicated an elemental wheel is. It can't really be all that complicated, can it? Really? Honestly? That... really boggles my mind.

A better question is why should there even be an elemental wheel?

Cool I hope they bring back elemental stats

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Originally Posted by HakuroDK

Q. As a GLD, how does the elemental wheel even affect you?

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Hey let me say it again: no.

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Originally Posted by dreffen

Hey let me say it again: no.

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Ultimatelly, I agree, No. As all it does is put a fake limitation on what spells you can use instead of allowing you use your full arsenal of abilities. I main MNK because I enjoy that job the most, I don't want to have to dual main MNK and DRG just because of one fight.

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

Ultimatelly, I agree, No. As all it does is put a fake limitation on what spells you can use instead of allowing you use your full arsenal of abilities. I main MNK because I enjoy that job the most, I don't want to have to dual main MNK and DRG just because of one fight.

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It comes down to obtuse mechanics. Stuff like what is being suggested was dumb in other games, literally 10 years ago.

And it's still dumb.

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Originally Posted by HakuroDK

I'll be honest right now. If this were ANY OTHER MMO, I wouldn't even care about the Elemental Wheel. DCUO? That would actually be harmed by an elemental wheel since characters pick a powerset focus and can only attack using that one element that they have.

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So you would prefer for Ifrit, spam ice based spells, Shiva, spam fire based spells, etc. Or use your full quota of abilities in all fights? Or they add a new tanking class which does piercing damage, then add a boss that is immune to slashing, WAR and PLD become useless, dont have em geared and levelled? Byebye.

There has always been too much exclusion in FFXI based on mobs resists, thankfully Yoshi decided to keep that rubbish out of FFXIV and made every job viable for all content, not just specific.

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Originally Posted by dreffen

It comes down to obtuse mechanics. Stuff like what is being suggested was dumb in other games, literally 10 years ago.

And it's still dumb.

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Same people complain about "elitism" in FFXIV, if half the ideas they wanted, like this one where implemented which made content job exclusive then the levels of elitism would increase exponentialy.

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Originally Posted by Exstal

A better question is why should there even be an elemental wheel?

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Because the rest of the game makes very little sense without it? Look, everything in the game, except actual combat mechanics, relies in some part on the elements. There is a single primal of each element by design. There are elemental crystals used in crafting, and crafting classes have to use only the specific element crystals for crafting by design. Every single player has elemental resistances by design. Hell, BLM and WHM share all six elements between them split down the middle.

And yet, despite this heavy focus on the elemental wheel in every other aspect of the game, it's not prominent in the center stage, which is the combat system. Fire burns fire elementals here, and inflicts the same amount of harm on water and ice elementals. In every other Final Fantasy game, if you tried to use a Fire spell on a Red Flan (a fire elemental monster), it would heal that enemy, and if you used anything but an Ice spell, it wouldn't deal that much damage. Only an ice spell like Blizzard could take out a Red Flan in a single shot unless you were obscenely overpowered for that area.

The fact that the elemental wheel, to my understanding, once existed and is now gone is glaringly obvious. There are other MMOs published by Square-Enix that use the Elemental Wheel. One of them is Wakfu, which is a direct copy of Dofus, which is a game with Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat. It has an Elemental Wheel and it's working out fine for that game.

Final Fantasy XI, to my understanding, also has an Elemental Wheel. I cannot speak about Dragon Quest X, but from the history of the series, I can only assume they would have an Elemental Wheel as well to keep pace with the previous installments of their franchise as well.

I mean right now, I don't even play a BLM. I think it's a pain in the ass to play right now, where I can't play a BLM for what a BLM has historically been best at in previous games in the franchise: exploiting elemental weaknesses. I wanted to play Scholar when it was first announced because I thought "Hey, cool! I can use Libra spells and exploit weaknesses for my party members to use!" (which, again, is historically what a Scholar has done in previous installments of the franchise) But no, all it is is just a hybrid of FFXI's Red Mage and a low-level Summoner.

So much potential for greatness was ripped from BLM, and SCH never got to see that potential as it got relegated to a pet healer job with access to a bunch of magical poisons topped off with a horrifyingly nerfed variant of one of the greatest Blue Magics in the entire franchise.

I respect this game for being true to its Final Fantasy roots, with the setting, the technological level, the emphasis on the crystals, the traditional job system, and all of that. But very few of the jobs have what have distinguished those jobs in the past.

Warrior was never a tank job. It was a Melee DPS that could equip heavy armor. Knight should have been the other tank job in this case.
Paladin is definitely a tank job.

Monk is Melee DPS, but a lot of its classic abilities have been bastardized by the MMO construct, like Kick, Focus, and Counter.
Dragoon personifies itself well.

Bard is a really bad hybrid of classic Bard and Ranger, and really should be separated ASAP so that Bard can shine as a proper Support job instead of a weird amalgamation of support and ranged DPS.

BLM is basically a WoW mage with an infinite mana pool, cut off from the elemental wheel that made BLMs so fearsome throughout the rest of the franchise.
WHMs never had access to elemental spells before except through Cross-Class, and its only actual offensive spells to date have been Dia (which only damages undead) and Holy (which speaks for itself). Other than that, WHM is pretty solid.

SCH has never, in the history of Final Fantasy, ever had access to the Bio tree of spells. Ever. Most installments don't even let SCH learn magic on its own, instead relying on using Libra to reveal weaknesses and elementally-aligned grimoires to beat enemies over the head with. XI made some very fittingly revolutionary alterations to SCH, namely in that it expected a similar level of intelligence from Scholar players as the story expected of Scholars themselves, using abilities that buff other abilities and could be considered highly situational.

SMN is fine as far as the lore is concerned, except that it is tied too heavily in with all of the SCH stuff when it really should be its own entity so that it can better specialize in the use of its summons.

--TL;DR--

All ranting aside, the Elemental Wheel is necessary because this is a Final Fantasy game, the Elemental Wheel has always been part of Final Fantasy from the very beginning, the Black Mage job has always, historically, been very closely tied in with the Elemental Wheel, and the entire game is themed around the very concept of the Elemental Wheel while mysteriously leaving it absent from the one aspect of the game where it really matters.

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Originally Posted by Tupsi

Or, it could be like FFXI..

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I'm going to say this because you come into every thread that tries to revive stupid concepts from that game like a fly to a rotting corpse (the corpse being those concepts which need to be buried) and I know it annoys you

No lets not make it like that, because that's a bad idea and the spirit of this game is to improve not regress back to the dark ages.

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Originally Posted by Sapphic

So you would prefer for Ifrit, spam ice based spells, Shiva, spam fire based spells, etc. Or use your full quota of abilities in all fights? Or they add a new tanking class which does piercing damage, then add a boss that is immune to slashing, WAR and PLD become useless, dont have em geared and levelled? Byebye.

There has always been too much exclusion in FFXI based on mobs resists, thankfully Yoshi decided to keep that rubbish out of FFXIV and made every job viable for all content, not just specific.

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You seem to be forgetting some things.

First and foremost, there are already bosses in the game that are heavily resistant to various types of melee damage. Turn 2 of First Coil is a prime example of this.

Second, this is about the Elemental Wheel, not the Attack Type wheel. The only jobs that use Slashing are Tanks. That will likely never change unless Square-Enix gives Lancers the Templar Job, which considering Templar is from the GBA Ivalice games, seems very highly unlikely.

Third, you seem to forget that the standard strat for a good BLM is to spam Fire until mana is empty, then spam Blizzard until mana is full. It's not what a BLM is supposed to be doing in a Final Fantasy game! They're supposed to rely on the Elemental Wheel, pick the best spells, and shoot those off! To counter BLM users being lazy in previous single player installments of the franchise, they had bosses which had "Barrier Shift", which changed the elemental weakness to another element.

Fourth, the only Job this would actually affect pre-3.0 is BLM, and it would only be to a BLM's benefit. Post-3.0, I would imagine that there would be multiple enemies and bosses in dungeons with weaknesses to Fire/Ice/Thunder as well as Wind/Earth/Water to eliminate the chance of arbitrary exclusion.

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Originally Posted by HakuroDK

Knight should have been the other tank job in this case.
Paladin is definitely a tank job.

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Knight is Paladin as far as the Japanese are concerned.

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All ranting aside, the Elemental Wheel is necessary because this is a Final Fantasy game, the Elemental Wheel has always been part of Final Fantasy from the very beginning, the Black Mage job has always, historically, been very closely tied in with the Elemental Wheel, and the entire game is themed around the very concept of the Elemental Wheel while mysteriously leaving it absent from the one aspect of the game where it really matters.

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Your argument is pretty sound. I can't argue with that logic. Maybe if there is some kind of wild sweeping change of class / job system, ele wheel may come back but I also have a creeping suspicion that it's still not worth it.

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Originally Posted by Exstal

Knight is Paladin as far as the Japanese are concerned.

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Really? I always thought they were different, and the FF Wikia has them listed as being two separate entries.

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Knight_%28Job%29
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Paladin_%28Job%29

I suppose they are interchangeable in a couple of games (like FFI), but there seems to be a distinction in FFIX, with Steiner being Knight and Beatrix being Paladin. But one thing's for sure. This is definitely a topic I should look into on my own time. Not here in this thread as it's unrelated, but still.

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Originally Posted by Exstal

Your argument is pretty sound. I can't argue with that logic. Maybe if there is some kind of wild sweeping change of class / job system, ele wheel may come back but I also have a creeping suspicion that it's still not worth it.

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Well as long as you can respect the validity of my argument, then I can respect your feelings as well.

Simple solution for BLMs, give us a lv55 or 60 skill that flips the attunement of our spells. All traits would remain the same except Fire and Ice would flip. We'd spam B1 instead of F1, and use F3 to regen MP.

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Originally Posted by HakuroDK

You seem to be forgetting some things.

First and foremost, there are already bosses in the game that are heavily resistant to various types of melee damage. Turn 2 of First Coil is a prime example of this.

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Bosses such ass? Turn 2 is your choice of WHAT to make the boss weak too. Each Node controls a different aspect of the boss. You choose the path....

Other mobs have Melee resistances down only because jobs can apply a debuff to it so they can do extra damage. The same way a job can apply Magic resistance down so Mages can do extra damage.
There is nothing that is RESISTANT to Piercing, Blunt, Slashing or Magic outside of T2, and the Mechanics of Leviathan that I can think of at the moment. Am I forgetting something?

FFXI elemental wheel........ 95% of all cases cast Thunder and Ice... repeat for profit. Unless it is resistant to Thunder cast Blizz and Fire. Oh its weakness is Water??? Cast thunder anyway!!!!! The only ime you stopped casting Thunder and Blizzard was if the mob was highly resistant to Thunder or Ice, or out right absorbed them. Oooh so strategic!
If you have 6 spells that do the same EXACT thing, what is the difference from casting Earth 4, vs casting Thunder 4? How are these 2 actions diff from each other?
Elemental wheel = A false perception of "choice" when you are really doing the same exact thing. All it is doing is changing the graphics for you so you can feel better.....Cause now you have 6 spells taking up space that do the same exact thing........

And what content are certain jobs excluded from in FFXIV??? Currently no matter the job, content can be cleared just fine. Start adding "resistances" to every boss, that will go out the window and make Duty Finder a nightmare.

@HakuroDK (On PS3 browser so multi-quoting is hard. This is inresponse to Pg 6)

In FFXI and FFXIV the Japanese versions do in fact call Paladin Knight.

WHM in the series has had access to Aero so they have in fact had elemental spells natively.

BLM in the series I believe has never had access to all elements in a single game outside of FFXI. Their staples were the Fire, Blizzard and Thunder line of spells. Chck out FFwiki.

FFXIV brought back the familiar BLM from the series and reworked it which is awesome in my opinion. I don't see how adding an elemental wheel will help the game really. As BLM we spam Fire spells for damage and Blizzard spells for MP recovery. If we add an elemental wheel we'll just be doing the same thing with other elements so it doesn't change actual gameplay. If they change BLM to be like FFXI's and give them all elements then we're clogging up the skill lists with abilities that won't be used on some fights. I'd rather have new abilities that I can use on all fights.

Besides, in FFXI unless a monster was immune or highly resistant to them you'd only really be using Blizzard/Thunder spells and that game did have an elemental wheel. In earlier games in the series it was almost always better to use your strongest spell over the elementally appropriate one. For example just before you fight Krakken in FFIII you obtain Blizzaga. Krakken is weak to thunder spells but takes the most damage from Blizzaga, casting Thundara only after your Blizzaga MP runs out.

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Originally Posted by MartaDemireux

In FFXI and FFXIV the Japanese versions do in fact call Paladin Knight.

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This. Paladin to us is ナイト (Knight) to the Japanese.

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WHM in the series has had access to Aero so they have in fact had elemental spells natively.

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From an MMO design perspective, it's also important to note that even healer classes should have access to some form of damaging spells. This was an easy call to make when they tied WHM to conjurers.

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BLM in the series I believe has never had access to all elements in a single game outside of FFXI. Their staples were the Fire, Blizzard and Thunder line of spells. Chck out FFwiki.

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This. Black Magic in general was basically assorted tiers of Fire, Thunder and Blizzard. FF6 was pretty well remembered for screwing you over because of that (especially the boss in the tower of fanatics if you were unlucky enough for him to set his barrier to water, wind or earth and happened to get him into that HP threshold where he no longer changed his barrier).

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FFXIV brought back the familiar BLM from the series and reworked it which is awesome in my opinion. I don't see how adding an elemental wheel will help the game really. As BLM we spam Fire spells for damage and Blizzard spells for MP recovery. If we add an elemental wheel we'll just be doing the same thing with other elements so it doesn't change actual gameplay. If they change BLM to be like FFXI's and give them all elements then we're clogging up the skill lists with abilities that won't be used on some fights. I'd rather have new abilities that I can use on all fights.

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Agreed. The fact BLM's spells flow as they go through their rotation is very well-designed. They really took the best aspects of modern mage design and managed to make nearly all skills universally useful.

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Besides, in FFXI unless a monster was immune or highly resistant to them you'd only really be using Blizzard/Thunder spells and that game did have an elemental wheel. In earlier games in the series it was almost always better to use your strongest spell over the elementally appropriate one. For example just before you fight Krakken in FFIII you obtain Blizzaga. Krakken is weak to thunder spells but takes the most damage from Blizzaga, casting Thundara only after your Blizzaga MP runs out.

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This, too.

What if instead of the Wheel they used the Elemental Field concept from the chrono series?

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Originally Posted by Velox

It's too late for that now as classes were reworked so that the elemental skills were split between conjurer and thaumaturge.

I prefer it this way.

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A solution could be giving all elemental spells back to CNJ and give the THM the Astral and Umbral spells back.

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Originally Posted by Myrhn

In 1.0 had both resistance but BLMs had all the element spells so if u encounter an enemy with a elemental resistance you just change the spell.

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No
Before job-system: All element spells were on CNJ (except the Astral/umbral spells)
After job-system: THM/BLM got Fire, Lightning and Ice spells. Lightning spells were single target spells, Fire spells were AoE spells and Ice spells were Crowd Control spells (Bind, Heavy)

Fight against single target? use Lightning
Fight against many targets? Use fire and keep an Eye on the MP bar
The element of the target? not important

How nostalgic, I like it...
In 1.xx we had some very good suggestions about element wheel, even in 2.0 BETA there was a great discussion ongoing.
I just fear all those good postings are lost, once rejected it seems SE is forgetting about them.

About job lockouts: we already have them, if you like to speedrun you need that and that. its even so far to be kicked out from groups! The fun ends when this happens in dungeonfinder groups.

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Originally Posted by Numenor1379

Simple solution for BLMs, give us a lv55 or 60 skill that flips the attunement of our spells. All traits would remain the same except Fire and Ice would flip. We'd spam B1 instead of F1, and use F3 to regen MP.

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And what kind of depth would that add?
It seems like people want elemental wheels just for the sake of having it

Re-introducing elemental wheel for 6 base elements would only do something for BLM, egis and a bit for WHM. It would be a lot of work for something that only affected a few jobs.
The reason it worked in FFXI was because you had more factors to play with: if your elemental magic skill allowed it you used Thunder IV in full MAB/INT gear for max damage followed by Blizzard IV. If monsters resisted your spells you used Blizzard IV with HQ ice staff in Elemental magic gear. Same thing applied to enfeebling magic like sleep and dark magic which had stun. It only had a few exeptions like Kirin, an earth affinity endgame boss so thunder didn't work well so you had to use Blizzard or Aero(wind)
FFXI also had a lot more classes that could do elemental damage: BLM/SCH/BLU/NIN/DRK/RDM/SMN/PUP, furthermore some weapon skills did elemental damage. FFXI was build around elements, FFXIV is not.

Compared to this in FFXIV with only a few classes and perhaps NIN mudras, re-introducing it now would be a lot of work for little gain. If we get more magic users dealing elemental damage later it could be relevant.

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Originally Posted by hallena

It seems like people want elemental wheels just for the sake of having it

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People who never experienced MMOs with actual resistances feel this way and it's pretty obvious. It's not "for the sake of it" because a TON of changes that came with ARR was "for the sake of it" - Hell even the changes prior to 1.22 were "for the sake of it" because people complained about having "too many skills to choose from."

@Kisshu - Not really, it affects everyone if Yoshida does decide to reimplement actual gear, rather than stat pieces. Many gear had additional fire/wind/ice/etc damage tagged onto them as well as many skills that were an elemental property, for example in XI and 1.x Paralyze was "Ice" element and Blind "Dark/Umbral." Removing it was a lot more work than reintroducing, because they also gutted a lt of depth in general with the battle system :p

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Originally Posted by Tupsi

People who never experienced MMOs with actual resistances feel this way and it's pretty obvious. It's not "for the sake of it" because a TON of changes that came with ARR was "for the sake of it" - Hell even the changes prior to 1.22 were "for the sake of it" because people complained about having "too many skills to choose from."

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The change to ARR was to make it more accessible. Not "for the sake of it" Not everyone want to reroll a new job for a specific encounter or farm 50million different weapons and i'm pretty sure SE understood balancing your combat around a system only 24 people like isn't a good business decision.

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Originally Posted by hallena

The change to ARR was to make it more accessible. Not "for the sake of it"

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Removing shell and combining it into protect (only if you're a white mage of course!) was a change "for the sake of it", because he felt it would "stress" players to have to cast more than one spell for protection.
Changing the cross class selection too was for the sake of it, as it wasn't even unbalanced in 1.x, it was just a remnant of the previous (more open) system.
If you've already forgotten, he removed a lot of things that would "confuse new players", which is his whole design philosophy for the Expansion: To make sure no one gets "confused" or "stressed", which is why they got rid of gear with additional effects.

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Not everyone want to reroll a new job for a specific encounter or farm 50million different weapons

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Yeah...just like people only farmed 1 weapon in ARR and never once touched any alternatives. :)

i really miss the astral / umbral spells, enfeebles, and drains that THM had before jobs :(. that was a fun class to play.

I don't look back on the days of "Grab X BLM and have them all cast X spell simultaneously" and feel in awe of the complexity of that strategy.

I think the game would benefit more from an expansion of it's Materia system; Example: Rare & Uniques http://torchlight.wikia.com/wiki/Gems_(T2)

I also believe gear could begin to show a bit more diversity; I also think they should consider adding end-game equipment with worthwhile Set Bonus attributes.

http://i.imgur.com/QbNzHxD.png

I would also like to see an expansion to the Stat Allotment available in the game; something that allows us to invest points to upgrade PvE abilities similar to how we upgrade PvP abilities.

Elemental wheels and resistances just limit what you can do - in my opinion it's better to remove restrictions than to reincorporate old ones.

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Originally Posted by Giantbane

You're better to dedicate that design effort to coming up with new jobs with their own rotations and usage instead of trying to give 3-4 separate, interesting and balanced rotations to the BLM just so they can cast different color spells against different enemies.

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Yeah, why would we possibly want EXISTING jobs to be remotely interesting when we can waste time building new jobs which have the SAME dull rotation and do the SAME thing on EVERY enemy?

The point I was making is that enemies are boring as sin. If they're not going to make the mob mechanics fun, then they could at least make the combat mechanics more involved. Whether that's through utilizing elemental weaknesses, forcing players to adopt different spells and skills on different mob types I care not. However, it's the most obvious choice and a glaring omission in the Final Fantasy series.

Look at your attributes tab. Go ahead. Notice the 'elemental resistances' portion. Also note that it's about as useless as a broken saber. Why does this even exist if they're going to make elements so utterly worthless? Why does elemental materia even exist if it's solely to add points to a stat which has zero impact?

If this game can make people stop and think for 2 seconds before choosing an attack, it will have succeeded in making a combat system which is engaging. Until then, it'll be the relentless spam-a-thon it has always been since being reinvented.

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Originally Posted by Tupsi

Removing shell and combining it into protect (only if you're a white mage of course!) was a change "for the sake of it", because he felt it would "stress" players to have to cast more than one spell for protection.

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The Protection/Shell merger was likely done for a combination of ability compression and role protection purposes. Shell as a trait for Protect means one less ability taking up space on ability bars or one less "must have" macro. If Paladins and Scholars got Proshell that would be one less reason to run a Whitemage instead of a Scholar.

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Changing the cross class selection too was for the sake of it, as it wasn't even unbalanced in 1.x, it was just a remnant of the previous (more open) system.
If you've already forgotten, he removed a lot of things that would "confuse new players", which is his whole design philosophy for the Expansion: To make sure no one gets "confused" or "stressed", which is why they got rid of gear with additional effects.

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New and old Paladins regularly get confused and have arguments about which among the Buckler(high Block Rate/Low Block Strength), Kite Shield (Average Block Rate/Average Block Strength) or Tower Shield (Low Block Rate/High Block Strength) line is the better shield type at an ilevel. Add in abilities such a increased potency for Shield Swipe/Bash, buff/debuff increase or infliction, Enmity modifiers, and Elemental Resistance/Absorption/Weakness things will just get crazier and harder for both new and old players.

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Yeah...just like people only farmed 1 weapon in ARR and never once touched any alternatives. :)

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There is a difference between farming for necessity, farming for vanity and farming for completion. Having to farm 7+ weapons for one class in order to stay competitive is different from having to farm only 1 of 3 to stay competitive.

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Originally Posted by Dhex

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No offense but those bonus stats those armors get sound really sucky. Were they all equally bad or was there that one BiS armor bonus that every tank who didn't have couldn't get into a good party without having it first?

Because that's what we're really talking about here. Diversity, to an extent, is an illusion. In a system that includes bonus stats and set bonuses, there will always be one weapon or armor that people consider staple and if you don't have it on your class then you're doing it wrong. Imagine if the Curtana gave 5% MP every five second and the soldiery sword gave you 10% more to your max hp. Curtana is useless and soldiery weapon is the sword all tanks should have or they suck.

Real diverse.