Any specifically AoE spells should be ground-targetable.

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I really...REALLY loved this visual effect in WoW, however...this is Final Fantasy.

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I can never stand stupid arguments like this. "This is Final Fantasy!" Since when did it being Final Fantasy meant it couldn't have a well-designed control scheme? Since when did that mean it couldn't have good animations for spells and attacks? Since when did that mean that doing anything NEW (for the franchise) was so taboo?

I gotta say, Final Fantasy fans have got to be the second most fussy playerbase next to Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic's eyes get changed by like 2 pixels in sonic 4, and the whole dang community rails the game for being unfaithful to Sonic.

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You don't need an indicator to tell you that 4 mobs sitting on each other is a lot more likely to be hit by an AoE spell/skill than 4 mobs who are more than 30 feet apart of each other.

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Without an indicator, when casting a spell for the first time you have no damn idea what it's going to hit. Yes, after you've used it a few times, you get a feel for it, but you can still never be as precise as you could with a targeting indicator. You've still failed to address what is bad about having one other than you obviously think it's an "easybutton." It's not. People are still going to hit too many mobs with AoEs or make other mistakes and die. this is a helpful interface improvement, not a crutch. Even if the game told you the range of the AoE, since the game gives you no indicator of distance you have to figure out and guesstimate over time to figure out how distance works in the game. And what if you're someone like me, who has no visual depth perception? It's incredibly difficult for people like me to judge distances. All this does is allows us to make a fair, informed decision about whether to cast a spell or not, and softens the learning curve while still perfectly allowing skilled play.

At any rate: "Itt'l be a clone of WoW is a cop-out, not a valid argument. "Easy button" is not a valid argument either, or every interface improvement to the game in its history is an easy button.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

No, you can't guarantee that. The game doesn't tell you or give any indication of the size of the area of effect. You have no way of knowing for sure until you've cast the same spell a million times. And what if you only want to hit 3 of those 4 mobs? With ground-targeted AoE, you can do that. Otherwise all you can do is hope only one of them moves and moves far enough. Also bad is the fact that apparently some spells are radial AoE and others are conal, and the game doesn't even have the courtesy to let you know that before you cast.

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So glad finally someone said this, cause I have a final point to make on this exact quote here.

Now, if you were to be learning anything in real life, you learn by doing right? You don't learn by having it done for you each time. If you were (just for arguments sake) a mage in real life, and you had just learned a new spell, you would need to cast it hundreds of times before you mastered its use. Now in FFXI I knew the exact range of every spell ingame (up until the cap rose above 75). I would know EXACTLY how far I needed to be from each player to range in each different bard song (and before you say they all had the same range, they most definately did not, each song had it's own range, and further modified by your choice of instrument). I knew the exact range of aoe's from my Black Mage spells, knowing when it was safe to cast Firaga III on Goblins for example, without worrying about pulling that scarily close Dhalmel or Eft. I also knew the exact effective range of all my aoe heals, and all of my single target spells too.

I also knew the exact range (I should also point out that this is all through testing each spell and many many deaths, not using windower plugins) I would need to be away from monsters or other players to negate enmity, for example when I would run out to do Divine Seal > Convert > Cure IV. Some players would run forever before they did it, I would run to within half a yalm of the effective area that the monster calculates enmity for and then boom, full health, full mana, and 0 enmity acrued. Same for using Summoner abilities and hate free kiting.

The point is, I learned every inch of each spell, I knew the perfect time to cast each spell, and loved the game for this. As with everything out there, it was easy to play, but nigh on impossible to master, and that was a big part of the challenge for me. I loved the feeling that I was connected to my spells, in the fact that I understood their exact mechanics, even down to knowing roughly how much a spell would resist on each monster type per level and weather condition.

There was nothing better than constantly being on a learning path in FFXI, adding a targetted AoE circle for spells kind of takes all of this away, and just brings us back round to more mundane and thoughtless features. It may seem like not much, but all these little subtleties are what made me happy in the pants about XI, and I hope we would never have to start stealing features from the bigger MMo's that would negate these adventures.

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Originally Posted by Vahzl

Don't easybutton the game!

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Summary of your post. You didn't need to write 4 massive paragraphs to tell me that.

GIVE ME A BREAK. Making an improvement to the design of the spellcasting system does not eliminate all need to learn anything, nor does it eliminate skill, nor does it eliminate anything else other than bad design. Learning the distance of AOEs is an adventure? COME ON. The adventure should come from genuine challanges presented by the game, not from a poor control interface.

You want challenge? How about if SE makes it so we have to type out text commands to cast spells and there's no other way? How about if we have to manually type in the name of the target, and if there's more than one we have to type in some identifier to pick the right one? How about we make it so HP and MP don't regenerate and you have to sit in one spot for half an hour again?

There is nothing wrong with this suggestion. It is a perfectly good, useable, well-designed system that is used in many games BECAUSE it is well designed. Should we intentionally make things difficult just for the pure sake of making them difficult?

I've got a lesson for you: Fun games can be difficult, but difficulty is not always fun. There are genuine challenges, and then there are things that just get in the way or annoy/frustrate you. Difficulty should come from a horde of monsters coming to kick your butt, not with you spending hours and hours playing the game to learn the exact distance of your AoEs. It's still not easy to tell, especialyl with someone with my kind of vision difficulty.

I had fun playing FFXI- but the fun had nothing to do with the user interface. The most fun part of FFXI was not the things that made it hard, but the things that made it FUN. And believe me, FFXI has tons of things that are still unnecessarily difficult. Fortunately, the gameplay itself is still fun.

Agreed. Killer feature. Although, it's super lame that they are taking out the aoe ability. I hate the toggle, but there has to be a better way.

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Originally Posted by Neptune

Agreed. Killer feature. Although, it's super lame that they are taking out the aoe ability. I hate the toggle, but there has to be a better way.

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Well I'm sure they're going to add seperate AoE spells. Whether they fix unclaimed mobs not giving stuff or not, we still need AoE for monster parties.

Oh, and to exemplify good difficulty vs bad difficulty:

Good difficulty: Having an NM that has very high attack speed and damage that must be weakened with enfeebles to successfully defeat. He also has minions, some of which you need to kill and others you want to CC (crowd control) and ignore.

Bad difficulty: Being unable to defeat said NM because of needlessly difficult controls or other design/interface flaws that result in you battling the UI and the controls, not the monster that you know how to kill. If you're unable to win a fight, it should be because you're either 1) not strong enough as a character or 2) you do not know well enough the necessary tactics to win.

A good targeting system for AoE does not alter the good difficulty, and eliminates the bad difficulty.

I don't know if someone already said it
but we do have AoE ground-targetable ( almost ground-targetable )

it's AM spell
cast it on yourself >>>>> after some time it will be active and hit every thing near you

uh, no, that doesn't really count.

Well, so far, the only arguments I'm seeing against this are "don't turn the game into WoW" (cop-out, not valid argument) and "don't easy button the game!" (Doesn't easybutton the game)

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Summary of your post. You didn't need to write 4 massive paragraphs to tell me that.

GIVE ME A BREAK. Making an improvement to the design of the spellcasting system does not eliminate all need to learn anything, nor does it eliminate skill, nor does it eliminate anything else other than bad design. Learning the distance of AOEs is an adventure? COME ON. The adventure should come from genuine challanges presented by the game, not from a poor control interface.

You want challenge? How about if SE makes it so we have to type out text commands to cast spells and there's no other way? How about if we have to manually type in the name of the target, and if there's more than one we have to type in some identifier to pick the right one? How about we make it so HP and MP don't regenerate and you have to sit in one spot for half an hour again?

There is nothing wrong with this suggestion. It is a perfectly good, useable, well-designed system that is used in many games BECAUSE it is well designed. Should we intentionally make things difficult just for the pure sake of making them difficult?

I've got a lesson for you: Fun games can be difficult, but difficulty is not always fun. There are genuine challenges, and then there are things that just get in the way or annoy/frustrate you. Difficulty should come from a horde of monsters coming to kick your butt, not with you spending hours and hours playing the game to learn the exact distance of your AoEs. It's still not easy to tell, especialyl with someone with my kind of vision difficulty.

I had fun playing FFXI- but the fun had nothing to do with the user interface. The most fun part of FFXI was not the things that made it hard, but the things that made it FUN. And believe me, FFXI has tons of things that are still unnecessarily difficult. Fortunately, the gameplay itself is still fun.

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So you are saying that my enjoyment of the game is wrong, and I should only enjoy it in the way that you wish it to be enjoyed?

The things I said were the reasons I liked it, and not something you can call people out on, because it is a personal experience, and nothing more.

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[Removed by Moderator according to the FINAL FANTASY XIV FORUM Guidelines.]

FFXIV has nothing to lose by adding a useful GUI, and everything to gain.

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Originally Posted by Vahzl

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So basically you're saying that this function is a good idea.

Thank you.

PS: it's a moot point.