[dev1206] Class Reforms: why the 15/11 limit?

Some mod verified that the water spell will not inflict dps.

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Originally Posted by Shaedhen

I see 3 obvious ones :

-Depending on your mp pool
-Depending on the enmity you want to generate
-Depending on the time you can allow yourself to be defenseless while casting

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Tiers does make sense, yes, but people cried pools of blood to make XIV a boring repeat MMO that you no doubt played in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, instead of trying to become a FF MMO.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

Tiers does make sense, yes, but people cried pools of blood to make XIV a boring repeat MMO that you no doubt played in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, instead of trying to become a FF MMO.

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ah yes the tier argument, I wonder how many times you unequipped banish II and used I so you would take less hate

Indeed Jinko, lots of speculation.
But still, even in the best case scenario (whm super move being water-based) I wouldn't really call the elemental wheel "balanced" as it was pre 1.20, would you?

Healing spells being alligned to water might also be the case, but that would be very unlike FF, and since Yoshida worked so hard to bring the FF-esque feeling inside of FFXIV with patch 1.18 and 1.19 it would be a bit disappointing to see it go away with 1.20 after all the steps forward in that direction made with the previous patches, don't you think?
Also, if healing spells were water-based it still wouldn't solve the elemental wheel balancement issues, which gives even more rightful reasons to be afraid about the fact that they're going to get rid of the elemental weaknesses aspect.

This seems pretty unavoidable to me, but I tend to be a bit pessimistic to I guess there's still hope.
Still, supposing the "elemental weaknesses removal" will happen, what I'd like to know is:
Will this be temporary until 2.0 to make things easier to develop and handle until then? Or a permanent change to the game mechanics?

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Originally Posted by Shaedhen

No, it's about not waisting mp by using an overpowered spell when it's not needed.

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Are you talking damage or healing here you need to be more specific.

As a Damage dealer there is no waste to mana if you are doing the damage, so I assume you mean healing, yes overhealing is an issue I guess, but then healer will have to learn when they should use their spells and which ones they should use at the correct times.

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It's not about giving gla or mrd better abilities to generate enmity, it's about you not spamming blindly spells, destroying your keyboard/joystick in the process because you will never ever get the hate on you no matter what you do.

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Why not ? what standard is there to suggest this shouldn't be the case, and lets not point to FF11.

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No, not on solo. Ifrit for example : depending on the situation you could be able to use a tier I spell before his next ws but not a tier II because it would take too much time and you might get the aoe.

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It seems sensible to me that as you increase in power your spells become more potent anyway, just because something is more powerful doesn't mean it should takes longer to perform.

As a MRD or LNC levels do they take longer to swing their weapon as their auto attack becomes more powerful ?

Skewer 1 and 2 use the same amount of TP and are executed at the same speed but do different damage.

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Originally Posted by Firon

ah yes the tier argument, I wonder how many times you unequipped banish II and used I so you would take less hate

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Very rarely of course, I guess.
But that's because the game was "forcing" you to make a choice and was limiting the amount of actions you could keep equipped at the same time to 30.
So in that scenario you weren't equipping lower tier spells not because you couldn't find an use for that, but rather because you had limited space and had to make choices.

In a scenario where you DO NOT have to choose your main class' abilities because you get them all regardless, this wouldn't be an issue, would it?


But even then, as I tried to explain several times with my previous post, I don't mind the "scaling system", there are pros and cons but I can be fine with that. I'm more worried about losing the "horizontal variety" the different elements provided.
That was guaranteeing a certain kind of depth that was very FF-esque and it would be a shame to see it go, even if replaced with other kind of depth-involving game aspects.
After all it's a FF mmo we're talking about here, not a generic good MMO. Sometimes some people lose track of this I'm afraid.
Yoshi-P worked very hard to bring back the FF feeling in this game which I am not scared to say was definitely lacking in several fields when the game was released in september 2010.

It would really be a shame to see a step backwards after so many successful forward ones.

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Originally Posted by Monsalvato

That was guaranteeing a certain kind of depth that was very FF-esque and it would be a shame to see it go, even if replaced with other kind of depth-involving game aspects.
After all it's a FF mmo we're talking about here, not a generic good MMO. Sometimes some people lose track of this I'm afraid.
Yoshi-P worked very hard to bring back the FF feeling in this game which I am not scared to say was definitely lacking in several fields when the game was released in september 2010.

It would really be a shame to see a step backwards after so many successful forward ones.

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Yoshi-p seems to be drawing inspiration from FFIII, crystal tower, lack of a Water spell etc.

Why is this not considered FF to you ?

There was only 22 white magic spells in FFIII by the way, some of which were enfeebling which will no doubt find a new home on a new class.

P.s There are no tiers of spells in FFIII either.

I was more talking about the possibilty of a missing "elemental weaknesses" aspect, rather than the water thing.
Different FFs showed a different number of elements.
Some games had 4 if I recall? The biggest number being 8.
In a game like FFXIV that has 6 elements (8 if you consider light and dark but I guess these will be going away with 1.20?) it seems a bit unbalanced, or uncoherent, to have such a two-split elemental wheel that doesn't include water.

Of course they could reform the elemental wheel into a single one, with 5 different elements.
For example:
Fire > Ice > Earth > Thunder > Wind > Fire

This doesn't make much sense, it's just an example.
They leave water out of the elemental wheel and make so healing spells are water based.
Uhm... it works I guess.

Altough, maybe it's just me, but personally I don't really like the idea of water-based healing spells and 5 elements wheel.
The 6elements one just sounded all much better to me.

I'm sure people were against wind healing based spells too, but FF hosted Wind, Light and Water based healing. You could make the stretch the various drains and aspir type of spells were dark based healing. There will be water element attacks, but its mostly for enemies (Leviathan exists so yeah.)

I don't think they can let the Elemental Weaknesses system active in a scenario where only monsters can use one of the 6 elements, which brings us back to the hypothesys of them removing the system completely.

It's not much about of other forms of healing existing with different element, they've been there for quite a lot of games.
It was more about the typical FF-esque spell called "Cure" being light-alligned.
But since the two spells Conjurer will get will probably be called in a different way, I guess you do have a point in the end.
I don't think leaving fixed tiers and typical FF-esque names for spells is the only way to mantain and nourish an FF-esque atmosphere in the game, I totally don't think that's *necessary*.
But still it was one of the many aspects contributing to that goal.
While I'm not claiming the game has got to suck if those are not there (that would be very short-sighted and childish), I can't say I'm happy either.

I'm 100% sure Yoshi-P's team can mantain the FF-esque through other means, but still, if they could have kept ALSO those aspects, it would have been even better for me ;)

We'll all learn to live through and forget about it, but I still am not happy this is happening.

I'll provide an example where the horizontal variety can make a real impact which is often discounted.

Replacing targeted -na spells will a universal has a significant negative effect on what the player can prioritize, in certain situations. Any time you only have 1 debuff on you the effect is more or less the same, although MP cost, casting time and recast time can't be set individually, but I wouldn't say that this is a huge loss as long as the catch-all spell has values towards the low end.

However if some attack (Bad Breath type attacks) or combination of attacks (a chain of WSs by a mob, or actions by different mobs in a group) happen to inflict a bunch of debuffs at the same time, being unable to target what you want to remove means being at the mercy of whatever mechanic is used to select what is removed.

The devs could design a priority order (silence is removed first, then para, then slow, then dots in a certain order) but that order wouldn't necessarily be optimal in every situation. Removing silence first makes a lot of sense for casters in most cases but is obviously useless for melees, except everyone can cast some spells (maybe not MNK DRG WAR depending what is excluded then, but all classes). Then in some fights a dot might do insane damage and be absolute priority while in another it does very little, etc.

Alternately they could use FIFO or LIFO (First In First Out, Last In First Out), ie remove the oldest or newest debuff respectively. Could also be based on remaining duration. Works, but a lot of the time the order in which you remove them won't be the order you might have wished for.

In XI you basically had a combination of the 2 types for white magic debuff removal (a range of -na for common debuffs and Erase as a catch-all for the rest, with Esuna being added later as an AoE version that could remove multiple debuffs and remove almost any type when certain conditions were met) but then dancer only had a catch-all with a ridiculously long recast and holy crap did it suck, especially when dealing with paralysis on you.

I suppose if the catch-all is nearly free, instacast with no recast none of those things matter, and almost any implementation would be better than Healing Waltz so we aren't doomed to something that bad, but combining the actions can make a real difference in this case, and there are situations where other common combinations being separatable can come into play such as with buffs and monsters with buff steal abilities, monsters that change element during battle, etc.

I'm eager to see how the class reform will play out in game but I think having concerns about some real losses in flexibility and the fate of the elemental wheel system is very legitimate given what we currently know.

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Originally Posted by Jinko

Are you talking damage or healing here you need to be more specific.

As a Damage dealer there is no waste to mana if you are doing the damage, so I assume you mean healing, yes overhealing is an issue I guess, but then healer will have to learn when they should use their spells and which ones they should use at the correct times.

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Yes, I said this mainly for healers but it can also apply to nukers. For example depending on what your fighting you might simply not need to use a highly powerful spell because a less powerful one, combined with everyone's else actions will be enough to kill the mob.

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Why not ? what standard is there to suggest this shouldn't be the case, and lets not point to FF11.

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Well i don't know... It just seems simple logic to me. Let's just get rid of the whole enmity system then.

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It seems sensible to me that as you increase in power your spells become more potent anyway, just because something is more powerful doesn't mean it should takes longer to perform.

As a MRD or LNC levels do they take longer to swing their weapon as their auto attack becomes more powerful ?

Skewer 1 and 2 use the same amount of TP and are executed at the same speed but do different damage.

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Well yes ok that's how it works right now but i can't say i do agree with it. I think that at some point you should have acces to something of an higher grade, and this should come with a little downside. But you should also still have access to something less powerful if you want to. And again, to me it just part of the whole "let's give players less choices, make everything easier and not too complex. They will have only one action available for what they want to do, or maybe two because we got to be kind sometimes, so they won't have to ask themselves what is better given a specific situation and just stick with the same spells fulltime".

I'd just like to add that I think a lot of their decision making came from being limited from the current UI. Up until 1.20, they've used ability cost because there was really no way to fill all 30 ability slots, which is all that UI could handle. Now we're getting enough abilities between classes, jobs and cross-class, as well as traits (something else limited by cost before) to fill up the entire UI.

I would speculate since they're redoing so much of the game that they're probably going to be redoing the core UI for abilities as well, since with a level cap raise (probably not happening until 2.0) they need to accommodate for more abilities and the current UI just won't allow for it.

So the 15/5/10 and 11 traits is just what we have to work with for now. There's a very good chance things will change quite a bit in 2.0.

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Originally Posted by Nagamaki

I'll provide an example where the horizontal variety can make a real impact which is often discounted.

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Very good example.
As I said before, I wouldn't mind some solidification/homogeneization of -na spells. FFXI has a plethora, maybe too many, grouping them together in, say, 4 or 5 spells would be something I wouldn't mind, but releasing only a single spell for everything is really a loss in terms of game depth, imho.

P.S.
Are you the same Nagamaki from the Elemental Gorgets tests many years ago in FFXI?



@Orophinn
That's one hypothesys I came up with, which I could sum up with:
1) We have UI limits with the max number of actions
2) Balancing all these actions for all the classes/jobs will be quite a huge effort for the small team handling live FFXIV, which would have consequences on the amount of other things we can fix and content we can add
3) Why don't we set a simple 15 actions limit for every class? That will greatly reduce the load of work for us until 2.0 is out, at that point we'll do things the way we want them without having to accept these compromises
4) Win!

Were this true... I honestly wouldn't have any problem with it. And I can also understand why they can't clearly tell us it's that way, it wouldn't be right from a P.R. point of view, would it? Especially now that they're gonna start to charge people.
But really, if things were that way I wouldn't mind, I'd just consider it a necessary compromise to accept while 2.0 is on the way.
But if that's wrong and this is just the first signal of the new direction they want to game to go... then yes, I'm a bit sad.

P.S.
Are you Orophinn of Tribe LS, maybe?

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Originally Posted by Monsalvato

P.S.
Are you the same Nagamaki from the Elemental Gorgets tests many years ago in FFXI?

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Yep, although I'd say my biggest contribution was figuring out, parsing and posting how accuracy and accuracy level correction worked (+2 = +1%, base % when acc == eva, etc). Still baffles me how long people had been arguing about gear without bothering to figure out something as basic as that.

Can only say it's a honour to see people like you are still around Nagamaki, always loved your contributions back in the days ;)

Ok! I'll quit with the OT now! :D

I just wanted to say that if you're in a nuking role, and you're worried about enmity, why wouldn't you just stop casting...?

Waiting for enmity to go down either from letting others get more or by using reduction abilities is a lot better than peppering with weak spells as waiting also allows you to recover MP and prevents you from continuing to accumulate enmity. Higher tier spells in FF11 were always a lot more MP efficient per damage dealt, too, so the scaling abilities will ensure that you're always casting at that high tier potency.

Estellios, while some people may prefer a Tier system to a Scaling one, that's not really the big problem here (if we can even talk about "problem").
It's more the possibility of a lack of "horizontal variety" that scares some of us, I'm sure that despite of personal tastes nobody has really big issues against the Scaling System.

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Originally Posted by Firon

ah yes the tier argument, I wonder how many times you unequipped banish II and used I so you would take less hate

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Cure II vs Cure III is a prime example. Mages use Cure II for usual battles to keep the tank alive while keeping healing MP costs down as it won't generate as much enmity. Cure III is for when you think the tank (or your other party members) need a huge heal (they get hit by a WS or you want to top them off before they get hit by an attack) and you had to consider the consequences of using it vs II since III will generate a ton of enmity.

The same goes for the use of DoT vs elemental vs ancient magicks. You used the ancient magicks to do a ton of spike damage (at the risk of wasting a ton of MP, which may come to bite you in the butt if you're both the healer and the nuker in a lowman party) with the risk of generate crazy enmity, elemental magicks to do steady damage while generating manageable enmity, and DoTs to do damage at very little MP cost and risk.

So yes, the current system does offer a lot of depth - maybe a lot less for the melee classes (there is ZERO reason to use the tier 1 version of a skill vs a tier 2 version), but it was definitely useful for the mage classes. The issue that I have with it now that I do agree with is that there are too many useless skills/spells and a lot of overlap. I definitely think that needs to be addressed in 1.20.

Edit: I'm also surprised at the civil discussion in this thread. No name calling or sweeping generalizations. This is very constructive discussion. :D

To sum the main points:

* Reducing the numbers of abilities to give more identity to the classes: understandable
* Limiting cross-class abilities: understandable
* Fixing to 15 abilities and 11 traits: problem

It's not the number of abilities per se that is the problem, rather a question of how rigid is the system. Some classes may be effective with 10 abilities, others with 17 (made up numbers): this affects magic users more because traditionally they had a larger pool of spells to pick from (even if you take into account the scaling).
If the "15/11" rule was just a rule of thumb (15+-STD, more or less), I doubt there'd be any problem. If it were 15, *period* it would be due to intrinsic differences between the classes.

And to reiterate, this doesn't touch anything on "useful" or "useless" abilities, it's an issue lower in the stack.

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Originally Posted by Shaedhen

I see 3 obvious ones :

-Depending on your mp pool
-Depending on the enmity you want to generate
-Depending on the time you can allow yourself to be defenseless while casting

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What.

For nukes none of this matters (tiers share a recast timer and lower-tiered nukes absolutely stink).

For cures, we get two Cure spells. Nuff said.

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Originally Posted by Monsalvato

Very good example.
P.S.
Are you Orophinn of Tribe LS, maybe?

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Newp, I'm the Orophin with one n on Figaro in Phoenix Order LS. I played on Gilgamesh in FF11.

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Originally Posted by Shaedhen

No, it's about not waisting mp by using an overpowered spell when it's not needed.


It's not about giving gla or mrd better abilities to generate enmity, it's about you not spamming blindly spells, destroying your keyboard/joystick in the process because you will never ever get the hate on you no matter what you do.

No, not on solo. Ifrit for example : depending on the situation you could be able to use a tier I spell before his next ws but not a tier II because it would take too much time and you might get the aoe.

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on the one hand you complain tiers help control MP usage, but in the same post you pretty much say your going to spam spells now that hate is not an issue. contradiction? know how to look after you MP?

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Originally Posted by Monsalvato

It's exactely what I wanted to say.
The things that made me afraid of the possible removal of elemental weaknesses are

1) Those spells aren't concentrated on a single job anymore. You can't make "elemental weaknesses" matter a lot in a scenario where only one of two jobs can use the element
that enemy is weak to. In such a scenario you're *FORCED*, from a gamedesign point of view, to either make so weaknesses are ther but hardly make a difference, or that simply they won't be there anymore.
2) The lack of a water spell, which destroys the "balance" of the elemental wheel.


Too early to say of course, but still I definitely am afraid.

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I find it kind of strange that you're so worried about this, considering you mentioned the Persona series in an earlier post when talking about elemental weaknesses and what not. There (well, in 3&4 at least), a large number of the characters only had affinity with a single element, but exploiting elemental weaknesses is easily one of the most important aspects of combat.

Not dumping all the elements in a single place and making you work to exploit weakness that are available to you, rather than constantly having tools at your disposal to hit all of them at once makes an elemental system a lot more worthwhile, IMHO.

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Originally Posted by Shaedhen

I see 3 obvious ones :

-Depending on your mp pool
-Depending on the enmity you want to generate
-Depending on the time you can allow yourself to be defenseless while casting

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No, it's about not waisting mp by using an overpowered spell when it's not needed.

It's not about giving gla or mrd better abilities to generate enmity, it's about you not spamming blindly spells, destroying your keyboard/joystick in the process because you will never ever get the hate on you no matter what you do.

No, not on solo. Ifrit for example : depending on the situation you could be able to use a tier I spell before his next ws but not a tier II because it would take too much time and you might get the aoe.

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I wonder if anyone has really read the reform list.

For CNJ I count:

3 Healing Spells

CNJ Mag. 1 Restores a portion of the target's HP.
CNJ Mag. 2 Restores a large portion of the target's HP.
CNJ Mag. 3 Restores HP of all party members within range of the target. Healing priority is given to those with lowest HP.

I want to call them Cure, Cura and Curaga respectively. It's probably safe to assume each one has a different MP cost with different enmity generation and spell cast times for use depending on the situation at hand.

2 Different Nuke elements

Earth

CNJ Mag. 10 Deals earth damage to the target. Chance to reduce evasion against earth magic.
CNJ Mag. 11 Target AoE Deals earth damage to all enemies within range of the target. Chance to inflict Heavy. Combo: CNJ Magic 10, Bonus: Increased damage towards target.

Let's call these: Stone and Stonega. I'd imagine, like the cures, these also have different MP costs, enmity generations and cast times. Not to mention you can combo these up to do additional damage for the same cost of CNJ Mag. 11. Whether there is increase enmity for that extra damage is unknown at this time. If not, then that's a bonus right there. Bonus, to me, doesn't imply negative effects. Whilst that's irrelevant for the current argument, I wanted to point that out.

Wind

CNJ Mag. 8 Deals wind damage to the target. Chance to inflict DoT effect.
CNJ Mag. 9 Target AoE Deals wind damage to all enemies within range of the target. Chance to dispel an effect.

Like before, we'll call these Aero and Aeroga. Something would be strange if these didn't follow the current trend of different MP, enmity and cast times. These combo up too for extra magic accuracy.

That's just for CNJ. Let's look at THM.

THM Mag. 3 Deals ice damage to target. Chance to inflict Heavy.
THM Mag. 4 Deals ice damage to all enemies within range. Chance to inflict Bind.

Blizzard and Blizzaga? These don't combo which suggests to me these are the strongest spells. That's speculation though. Still, they'll have different MPs, enmity and cast times attached to them. There's also an Ice spell for BLM that follows this combo-less ice style, but for now let's forget BLM.

Next spells:

THM Mag. 5 Target AoE Deals fire damage to all enemies within range of the target.
THM Mag. 6 Target AoE Deals fire damage to all enemies within range of the target.
THM Mag. 7 Target AoE Deals fire damage to all enemies within range of the target.

Fire, Fira, Firaga. They all hit AoE but that doesn't mean they all share the same MP costs etc. You can combo these up in turn to create a huge fire-y death nuke, but it's not like we have to. Only need a bit of damage or want low MP, low enmity - then we can always use Fire (or THM Mag. 5). Want to dish out destruction - then all that care amount enmity is probably futile because I can imagine the THM being a little on the dead side after using all 3 in a row.

The same goes for thunder based magic. I'll leave that out, but I will say it's safe to assume these will also follow our trend:

"Tier" 1 is low cost, low enmity, low cast time. With each increase in "tier" we can assume an increase in cost, enmity and cast times. Even though the costs will scale with level I hardly think the lower "tiers" would ever cost the same/more than the higher ones.

So, the argument that the new system offers no/little control over MP usage, enmity or cast times is a little flawed. Each job has at least two versions of a particular magic that allows the player to decide those really important questions:

Do I have the MP to cast a big nuke?
Do I want to generate a lot of enmity?
Do I have the time to wait x secs to cast the spell?

When you hit a no, you have an alternative choice i.e. a lesser nuke/heal.

This thread should be re titled Text Labyrinth, so many walls. I read a lot and wasn't sure if this was mentioned. But we don't what classes will look like past 50 or how far they will go past 50. For all we know 50 could be the equivalent of level 25-30 in FFXI. Trying to insert some perspective in the discussion. Apologies if this has been considered.

The point of the OP is not about the loss of tiers, because really each type or element still has at least 2 spells to it so it isn't like they are likely to all have the same potency/cast time/cost and in some cases like the cures, the differences are explicit in the descriptions.

He repeated that this wasn't the point a few times to try and get the conversation back on the right track but people keep posting counter arguments to the one person arguing that removing the tiers is a huge problem, which is really not the purpose of the thread.

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Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah

Look at the song list: http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Bard

How many of them are actually used in gameplay, especially at endgame?

Why have all that filler in there taking space and being generally useless? If you can't answer that question, they need to be removed.

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Save for the tiered songs each of the songs were widely used by good Bards in FFXI, maybe (assuming you played Bard) you just were not a good Bard and failed to see the use of those spells. I will agree that some might be more useful than others, however depending on the party setup a good Bard, again let me emphasize the -good- part here, would adapt and adjust the song buffs to best the party's strengths.

Also since they made the songs able to be cast on only one person that further diversified the use of different songs. The more you know.

I think the OP's concern is that they are forcing themselves into a pattern for aquiring abilities and traits on a class, not necessarily the abundance or lack of abilities on the classes. My guess is someone just came up with this idea to give an ability every other level and it worked well enough for what they had in mind so they went with it. Not much reason to that but it is all I can think of. Maybe they liked that it would be "fair" to all of the classes, that they all get the same amount of abilities and thought they will be more equal and balanced.

Who knows if the pattern will stay post-50 or if abilities will be added/altered before then. If it works out poorly later it is likely going to change. You know their motto: "Content subject to change"

I suggest trying the new system before complaining about things that may or may not exist in the new system. Getting all upset over speculation does nobody any good.

It is impossible to provide constructive criticism to the developers about anything until you have experienced it first hand.

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Originally Posted by grandm

on the one hand you complain tiers help control MP usage, but in the same post you pretty much say your going to spam spells now that hate is not an issue. contradiction? know how to look after you MP?

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Huh no, i meant quite the contrary. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

@Themis : Most of the stuff you show me there is just an single target spell and a aoe spell. For various reasons, aoe spells might not be the right thing to use ( waking up mobs, mess with group enmity, etc... ) and the THM ones are combo spells aren't they ? So my point doesn't really apply to those.

Anyway, I think i'm defending a lost cause here so I'm just gonna leave it.

You're all whiners....................

Yoshida is doing good. we don't need more flexibility... they shuold get of rid of all this shit flexibility

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Originally Posted by Themis

Fire, Fira, Firaga. They all hit AoE but that doesn't mean they all share the same MP costs etc. You can combo these up in turn to create a huge fire-y death nuke, but it's not like we have to.

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F**k Fire spells, i want a list of Ice spells to blast at my enemies

how generically western of them to focus on fire spells as your main nuke.

Nice to know you guys want 9999 spells and abilities added to the game... and nothing new to the future.... Congratulations!!!

its called a system so you dont be god like, we used to be god like at launch but no one liked it.

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Originally Posted by Dreadnought

F**k Fire spells, i want a list of Ice spells to blast at my enemies

how generically western of them to focus on fire spells as your main nuke.

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It's quite common for people to think fire as a naturally mage like spell, its hardly a western thing.

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Originally Posted by Nagamaki

The point of the OP is not about the loss of tiers, because really each type or element still has at least 2 spells to it so it isn't like they are likely to all have the same potency/cast time/cost and in some cases like the cures, the differences are explicit in the descriptions.

He repeated that this wasn't the point a few times to try and get the conversation back on the right track but people keep posting counter arguments to the one person arguing that removing the tiers is a huge problem, which is really not the purpose of the thread.

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^ This!

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Originally Posted by Camisado

I think the OP's concern is that they are forcing themselves into a pattern for aquiring abilities and traits on a class, not necessarily the abundance or lack of abilities on the classes.

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^ and this!

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Originally Posted by Mishakai

I suggest trying the new system before complaining about things that may or may not exist in the new system. Getting all upset over speculation does nobody any good.

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I don't think I got all upset? If I gave that impression I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention.
I didn't mean to shoot a "final judgement" on the patch either, OF COURSE we can't finalize that until we've really tried it.
Still, I think we can discuss it in a constructive way, especially if each opinion has reasons behind it and it's not simply shoot around in an unrational way.

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Originally Posted by Monsalvato

I'd just want to read opinions from other people as to why they implemented the 15/11 limit in their new design for classes (15 Actions, 11 Job Traits).
Maybe by putting all of our ideas together I'll be able to understand what developers had in their minds, and at that point maybe I'll be able to say I agree or not with their point.

To me it seems a particularly useless set of chains they're binding themselves with, with their own hands.
Let me explain further.

If it were about having a "generic goal" of making so classes stay as close as possible to 15/11 it wouldn't be that bad, but here we're talking about a very strict rule they have to follow no matter what.
They have to make so classes are:

• Fun to play
• Different enough from each other
• More or less balanced (can't have too strong and too weak classes

I perfectly understand and agree with this, but setting a 15/11 limit is not the way the go, it can actually create more issues than the ones it may solve.
What if a class reaches the forementioned three goals with, say, 12/9? They'd be "forced" to add 3 further actions and 2 further traits.
But since the class is already fun, different and balanced, those new things will most likely be useless, unoriginal and, in reality, just "placeholders".
They wouldn't add those things because the class needs them or because they thing the class would benefit from them, but because they HAVE TO, to respect the 15/11 limit they imposed on themselves.
Opposite situation, what happens if 15/11 is not enough?
They won't be able to do anything, because they have to respect the 15/11 limit.

Which brings us exactely to the Disciples of Magic problem with this incoming patch 1.20.
15 actions can possibly be enough for a melee class, which tipically relies on stances and abilities, but it will never be enough for a magic class which relies on a couple of abilities but also on a wide variety of spells.
The class reforms shows this issues quite clearly, 15 is not enough to offer variety up to the standards a Final Fantasy game is supposed to live up to.
They made quite a big mess there... even with the splitting of spells between CNJ and THM and the lack of water ones.
The source of these problems lies in two main causes, imo

1. They promised CNJ > WHM and THM > BLM. That's of course wrong because of many reasons, it should have been CNJ > WHM + BLM and THM > something else. But of course they couldn't help it because it wouldn't be "balanced" to add 2 jobs to CNJ and 1 to every other class (altough eventually that will happen, just not in time for 1.21 of course)
2. Even removing most of the debuffs, the majority of which had a debateable efficiency anyway, you're still bound to 15 actions between job abilities and spells, for a whole group of 50 levels... that's really wrong.

The problem at 1) wasn't an easy one, and the source of that is probably in the bad planning the original team did while creating the two different DoM classes.
But still... have they tried enough? And while I can understand there was no easy solution to this issue, is the one they found satisfying? For me, it's rather disappointing.
And the problem at 2) I just don't understand.
Which brings us back to the main question of this thread:

What is the purpose of having the strict limit of 15/11 actions?

What do they gain from that? What do we gain from that?
It seems to me just a limit for developers that will only bring issues, rather than solving them.

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I personally like it and being a 50 CNJ myself I don't see a problem with mages only getting 15 as well. That number will change as the level cap goes up so don't forget that. Also with job abilities that may go up as well. Let's say we play PLD and it takes abilities from both GLA and MRD, perhaps we will have more than 15 for the job PLD. Also didn't they say we can have 10 abilities from other classes?(@50)? If that was the case then we will have 25 spells/abilities.

Just wondering when are we to expect the information for class traits? They're supposed to follow from the class action reforms right?