Jobs growth past lvl70?!

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

If you want me to address everything, then try and see the point I was trying to make. My post was meant to be taken as a whole, not have individual sentences snipped out and responding to that. So, to make my point clearer:

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I always read the post whole, then respond with the whole post in mind but still separating the specific parts. If for no other reason, then to remind myself of what I was responding to once I go back to the post some time later.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

However, this applies to 1 or 2 abilities from your whole kit, the majority are done in Stance A, with the odd switch to stance B, just for those 2 abilities. I then ask, what is the point in the other half of the abilities in the first place, if you never use them, that's where the stance button bloat comes from in that regard.

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Not only is that something that can be avoided by carefully choosing what effects to add on stances (and no, they don't need to actually be any ongoing effects if finding such would be too much of a hassle, or they could be something unique like increasing potencies of specific skills that are otherwise unaffected, increasing movement speed, maybe shortening the cooldowns of some skills, options are numerous, and not all can be compared and made strictly better than others). Even if not, however, I still fail to see where there is a problem in a stance having undesired effect in comparison to its alternative, when there is still the utility of it opening a skill you wouldn't have otherwise. You say that it's a stance bloat...but you never actually made a valid point as to why it is that. It's no more a bloat than giving situational skills. Heck, many of the skills on most classes can be cut out, and the classes would become boring, but you still could do just about everything you do with them. But these skills add variety, an opportunity to utilize them in some circumstances. Options. And go back to the first post and read what this thread is about. About the possible ways of making characters grow past lvl70. I'm not really sure why you even begun talking about the latter steps of design when this threads focus is on the preemptive "brainstorming" step.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

So far, you have not said anything that justifies having the stance option in the first place in regards to my first point, as all you come back with is more skills = good, whilst ignoring the fact that half of them are useless, and so pointless to have.

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Whether a skills is useless and pointless to have entirely depends on the skill and its development. I have made zero of that. I have not suggested any. You took something way out of context and are clutching at it despite me saying more than once that you are simply wrong. And yes, I can say that you are wrong, because we're talking about what I wrote. I'm 100% sure that I know better than you what I meant by what I wrote.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Also, I was not asking you to build a house. You are the one that started laying the foundations by adding potency to your ideas. Instead, take the approach I took, lay out a blueprint on how you think it could play, with your stances involved.

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As I said in my previous point, the only reason why I didn't do it like you did was not to make suggestions for skills, but to make the example seem more "live". Theory-crafting and math formulas are not something that many people enjoy, so they could skip past anything that resembles those.

Don't read from my posts something that's not there. Once again, the potencies, the effects, all of them have zero meaning. They are just to make the explanation seem more similar to what the reader is already familiar with, but they are NOT suggestions of any sort.

And this has gone long enough. I won't waste time trying to correct someone that stubbornly continues to see in my posts something that I on more than one occasion said and explained why it's not there. Agree or disagree...either is fine with me. Anything more would be just spamming.

One point, you mention brainstorming, which includes looking at the good points and the bad points. For an idea to be good, it needs to have as few bad points as possible, so it's better to look at the bad points and see if they can be reduced. It might seem like I'm nitpicking, but that's fine. I point out a flaw, someone can come back and say something which could make it better, then I can nit pick again and, at the end, you have a better, more solid idea with solid propositions rather than a hand wavy explanation that really has no details and doesn't list out any cons. Just like with critisism, there is no point in surrounding yourself with the good points, you need to take the bad things and see if you can improve on them, and in the end, you come out better for it.

Now, for something different.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

I suggested something very similar to this with MNK and their Fist Stances being more involved in what abilities they could use and it came up mostly negative responses. It was a bit more extreme in that it effected all of MNK's toolkit, changing GCD and oGCD alike, however, it would be pretty simple to handle with MNK.

Fist of Earth - AoE combo (AotD, One Ilm Punch, Rockbreaker).
Fist of Wind - Buff combo (Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes, Demolish)
Fist of Fire - Damage combo (Bootshine, True Strike, Snap Punch)

Have all stances grant the 5% bonus FoF currently grants and you've got a solid baseline to continue advancing the class from there.

As for the other classes, it might be more difficult but the potential is there.

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So, when I get into a situation where I go Dragon Kick, True Strike, Demolish, Bootshine, Twin Snakes, Snap Punch, Dragon Kick, True Strike, you expect me to change stance after every attack to maximise damage of the GCD, which in turn will delay any oGCDs you have as Monk can only fit in one between each GCD unless under RoF. If you want pointless actions that restrict what a Monk can do in it's GCD rotation and makes it needlessly complex, you are on the right track, however I'm pretty sure most people will be against it, as you have already stated. And no, I haven't seen your original post and the negativity that others had towards it, but it took me all of <5 seconds to think of a way that that system is completely against the idea of monk.

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And as a bit of fun, random shower thought, most Jobs already have a stance feature in place in various ways, let me explain.

Tanks, easy, Tank/DPS stance.

Healers, only Astro with Noct/Diurnal, and you can't switch in battle, so it is technically a stance, but you have to decide before combat.

DPS, this is going to be longer
BLM, Astral Fire/Umbral Ice, grants access to Fire 4/Blizzard 4 respectively and they are split into a damage phase and a resource building phase.
SMN, DWT can be considered a stance, it changes the properties of Ruin 3 and Tri Disaster, and allows access to Death Flare, whilst also building a resource which allows you to summon Bahamut.
Bard, each of it's songs is a different stance, each does something different, whether it be building up resources for a big attack, or mimicking the old River of Blood trait they used to have.
DRG, BotD and LotD, both give access to an extra ability in Geiskogul/Nastrond and both give access to the 4th/5th tier of combos, changing how DRGs rotation goes. Even if you don't count BotD, LotD would still be a stance, as it changes Gieskogul to Nastrod.
MCH, Whilst it is probably a weaker example than the rest, Gauss Barrel gives access to heated shots, as long as you are in the 50>100 heat range, and it gives overheated status which helps in your wildfire burst.
Technically, Monk has them in the fists (which is a useless choice) and in the forms, however, the forms are there more to give a more fluid combo rotation and not necessarily to change things up.

So, so far that's 3 tanks, 1 healer and 5-6 DPS which can be considered to have stances, which is 9-10 jobs in total out of 15 and to continue, Ninjas did have stances in the shape of poisons, but were removed as you stayed in one stance over the other in 99% of cases. So basically, stances are already there, they just aren't there for all jobs and are implemented differently, which is how it should be.

It would be great if playstyles didn't change from expac to expac for some, if not most, jobs. It makes so much more sense for current rotations to remain as they are and add new skills via traiting old ones with potency increases and additional effects. Changes and additions should always be thematic and enhance what exists rather than totally overhauling from level cap to level cap.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Snip.

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I left out the part of my original suggestion that would make Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes and Demolish all 21 seconds so you'd realistically would only need to go into Fist of Wind after 2 Snap Punch/RockBreaker combos, making it not much different than BRD rotating their Songs but even with that, people found fault with the entire suggestion as it would "make MNK's rotations stale", which isn't entirely without merit but muscle memory sort of makes all rotations stale after awhile anyways.

Regardless, you're entitled to your opinion.

Honestly what I want to see? Another job change.

Have our characters grow in to something new (ex: Paladin becomes Holy Knight, Drk becomes Abyss Knight, Warrior becomes Berserker, etc.) that comes with increased potency and all new animations on our base weapon skills with new battle stances and graphical effects. I really don't want to be level 80 and doing Fast Blade, Riot Blade, Savage Blade, and Rage of Halone still.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

I left out the part of my original suggestion that would make Dragon Kick, Twin Snakes and Demolish all 21 seconds so you'd realistically would only need to go into Fist of Wind after 2 Snap Punch/RockBreaker combos, making it not much different than BRD rotating their Songs but even with that, people found fault with the entire suggestion as it would "make MNK's rotations stale", which isn't entirely without merit but muscle memory sort of makes all rotations stale after awhile anyways.

Regardless, you're entitled to your opinion.

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The problem is you are restricting the free flow of the monks combo. You can still end up in positions where you would have to switch after every GCD, increasing the buff/debuff lengths doesn't change that. Also, it is completely different to Bard. You might see it, for Monk, as Wind (Buff) > Fire (2 rounds of damaging moves) > Wind etc. but the difference is, Bards GCD abilities aren't locked behind ANOTHER condition, in the case of Monk, you are locked behind the forms.

If Bard has to rebuff, they do, easy, Straight Shot > DoTs done, doesn't matter where they are in their songs, doesn't matter what order, infact, if straight shot doesn't need to be refreshed right there and then, you can delay that further, refresh DoTs is applicable, and be no worse off. However, the same cannot be said for Monk, since they are locked into a combo system, in your system, they can end up in the situations I described, but they have the extra condition that they have to switch between wind and fire. Doing Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes > Demolish when Twin Snakes will last till the next combo is a damage loss, as optimally, you would do True Strike. So, you end up switching stances between everything. It doesn't matter how long you make the timers, the situations can, and will happen.

As I mentioned, I will point out flaws hoping for someone to come along and mention a potential fix, however, this is one of those times where I think you haven't been able to see the flaws, and how much it can affect gameplay. More buttons does not mean better, especially when this is a case of adding buttons to press for the sake of adding button, which is what we are trying to avoid.