Improvements to the Battle System - Each Monster Should Have One or More Weakness

Not a bad idea in a void. But it wouldn't work for XIV. Not without MASSIVE overhauls. Take BLM for example. Has 3 elements that each serve a specific purpose. Lightning is a DOT, Ice regens MP, Fire is your big burst damage. If they added elemental weaknesses and there was an enemy weak to ice, what would you do? Just ignore your rotation to spam ice spells? That wouldn't really add any complexity, in fact it would remove it since a large part of BLM's skill comes from getting all your fire spells in without losing enochian.

That doesn't even get into how none of the noncasters currently have any elemental abilities that I can think off off the top of my head aside from Ninja and maybe monk if you squint. They'd have to add all sorts of skills to them. And then what, does every class get every element? Or do only certain classes get certain elements? That would start making them preferred over other classes for specific pieces of content which is explicitly against the dev team's design ideology. They want everyone to be able to just play the class they want to play, to experience the fantasy they want to experience in that role. If only certain classes got certain elements, you'd be pressured to play different classes to be able to compete, so if you just wanted to play X class and that's it, you'd be SOL.

Once again, that's not inherently a bad thing (in fact it could be pretty cool), but it goes against this game's design ideology. It just doesn't fit with how the game currently is.

If you like having to take advantage of stuff like element/status vulnerabilities, the Masked Carnivale has that.

Those kinds of mechanics really don't work in the modern MMO environment where class balance is valued instead of being an afterthought.

I miss the old battle system where elemental weaknesses existed. I'm really sad they took them away, and wish they would bring them back.

It's a great system that exists in most RPGs, not least of which most other Final Fantasy games and Pokemon. And I would really like to see it again.

It seems like some people don’t understand the underlying issues adding the elemental wheel back in would cause, maybe explaining it with old world of Warcraft content would. There was a raid, molten core, where nearly every enemy resisted or was flat out immune to fire spells. The Fire spec on a mage was useless, the destruction spec on Warlock was useless, and back in those days it cost the game currency gold to respec to a different damage type.

Now in our current iteration, the elemental wheel would effect strictly casters, either making them more advantageous to the fight, effectively locking out melee, or make them useless in a fight, locking themselves from content. The exception to this being ast, scholar and summoner since their damage types are “unaspected”.

Boss is immune to fire? Black mages are locked into strictly ice and lightning spells. Boss immune to earth/holy? White mages are locked out (I’m actually not sure what the damage type on glare is). If the boss resists or is immune to any of wind, stone, fire, or thunder red mage is locked out. Even if it’s just one of those elements rdm would lose access to a good portion of its toolkit.

If this concept were returned to the game it would have to be neutered to the point that it didn’t matter, make it too large of a damage increase and you change the meta for specific fights, case in point being the entirety of heavensward and stormblood dps meta being dragoon ninja and bard because of how powerful they were when working together, most other jobs were avoided when it came to party finder content.

So it comes down to if you are okay having to reroll your main class every content patch for the sake of being optimal, which the general population will not be.

Also this is looking strictly at raids and trials, dungeons with multiple enemy types would cause a lot more issues.

I feel like these people already know what it would mean to the game; I think they simply don't care that it would need intense rework. Never mind that once again, the game is simply too far old to incorporate this sort depth/complexity into its system, the game actually went through this phase as other people have pointed out and it was abandoned.

You're better off wish-dreaming for a different Final Fantasy mmo or a visually "modern" FFXI than hoping in vain FF14 will completely overhaul itself to accomodate all these changes.

This could help with the repetitive combat, especially the open world mobs.

This is why i love BLU, feels like I'm playing an RPG game

Weaknesses are cool and intresting the first time you get to figure them out. After that they become a "chore" that either limits your toolkit or is so meanigless that it can be ignored - that goes for all Final Fantasy games in my experience btw. My FFX-endgame constistet of Quick Hit 90% of the time, because even if the boss had any weakness it was meaningless.

By its nature as an MMO this game will require you to do things not once or twice but countless times - wether it be dungeons or boss fights. You only get the first time where its cool to figure it out once, after that your toolkit will be potantially cut by a good amount with nothing to show for.

You also need to consider that you're not playing this game alone - so playing extremly inefficient is not really an option. Which means that any customisation will, in the end, boil down to one set (maybe differing in nuances). The funny thing is that that goes for older FFs aswell - you have those that offer basically no or very little customisation by assing each character a job that dictates how their stats increase and what they learn (FFI, FFIV, FFVI, FFIX - in a sense FFIII and FFV: You get to pick the job, but then you're limited, pretty much like we are here. Minus crossclassskills) or you have those that offer more customisation, that ultimately boils down to basically one ideal set up or strategy (FFVII, FFVIII, FFX). I ended FFX by spamming Quick Hit with all my characters, all of them equiped with the same type of armor and their Celestial Weapon.

The MMOs that use an elemental weakness/resistance system generally are not ones with challenging or mechanically intensive fights (PWI and Aion come to mind and they are very old MMOs). Most MMOs, specially newer ones, go for the simplified Physical/Magic split since it doesn't outright screw roles that lack the respective element.

Even ESO where you could get whatever skill you wanted from any tree and make a dual axe wielding draconian werewolf mage they quickly moved from an elemental scheme to the aforementioned physical/magical split.

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Originally Posted by Jin-

This could help with the repetitive combat, especially the open world mobs.

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I think the opposite would happen. They can't give us a full rotation for every element because that would be way too much button bloat. So instead the rotation would be "oh it's weak to water so rotation is Water IV > Water IV > Water IV Water IV > Water IV...

Also they can't actually make you stronger than other DDs just because you used the correct element, because of balancing issues. Old RPGs solved this issue by limiting your MP pool. But they can't do that in an MMO, except you want to stay around and do nothing for basically half the fight.
This means there are technically no elemental weaknesses, just elemental resistances. Adding elements would nothing but punish casters and would not reward them at all. Just like Dark Knight who had to choose between damage and defense with Dark Arts in the past, but because of balancing he had to choose - while every other tank just had both at the same time. There was only risk, but no reward. Fun gameplay.

So, there's another game, a mobile game (it's a cool and generous gacha you should try it guys) named Dissidia FF: Opera Omnia.

It's basically a turn based RPG with protagonists from differents FF titles.
Year(s) ago they added Alisaie to the game, great! She uses Fire, Earth, Wind, Thunder and Holy damage!

But for a very, very long moment she was just a terrible character as elemental resistance exists. So if a boss resisted/absorbed one of the five element I quoted above, then Alisaie couldn't take part in this content.

Imagine if Titan Absorbed Earth, Ifrit Fire and so on, do you honestly believe RDM would be picked at all?