Soul Crystal Upgrades

Hello,

I had an idea I wanted to put out there for future job upgrades that involve upgrading your job's Soul Crystal.

Ideas:

-Have a set of learned abilities or buffs that you "buy" with acquired points, similar to PvP. You could have one ability set to your hotbar (war hotbar is cluttered enough for me), that could randomly activate any of your learned buffs when the soul crystal ability is activated. This could add a bit of randomness and luck to battles.

or

-When your soul crystal ability is activated in battle, it strengthens cross-class abilities for a set time that would otherwise be ineffective/unused. For example, when setting additional abilities as War, I might put Raging Strikes into a special soul slot, giving me access to that ability when I activate my soul crystal in battle (long cooldown timer, of course). I also like the idea of the soul crystal ability temporarily removing the nerf you get when you use some class abilities in your Job. For example, mantra is nerfed when you use it as warrior, but I would love to be able to use it at least once in a big fight, at full mnk strength, without the nerf you would otherwise get. The nerf prevents it's normal use, so this option could add variety to cross-class ability utilization.

I think what you are asking for is in relation to Merit Points from Final Fantasy XI. But instead of points being used in a House or Inn they are spent on your Soul Crystal. I do like this idea, and would give people like me with all level 50 classes something to XP on again other than Chocobos.

+1 Sir!

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Originally Posted by Satyagrahi

-Have a set of learned abilities or buffs that you "buy" with acquired points, similar to PvP.

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This is basically another way of saying "increase the level cap": you're requiring people do the same stuff they'd do to level up while at max level in order to acquire new abilities. The PvP rank is just another leveling system.

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This could add a bit of randomness and luck to battles.

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Randomness in activated abilities is bad. When I need a tank CD, I want a tank CD; when I need a DPS CD, I want a DPS CD; when I need a utility CD, I want that utility CD. If you make it random, you're basically telling people to only take a *single* ability so that they can predict it.

As a WAR, the unavailable CC abilities I'd want are Raging Strikes, Keen Flurry, Virus, EfE, and Invigorate. All of those are useful in *entirely* different circumstances, not to mention that they don't even have the same targeting requirements. If it were set up to randomly apply one of those, I'd probably just grab Keen Flurry because it would give me another tank CD.

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-When your soul crystal ability is activated in battle, it strengthens cross-class abilities for a set time that would otherwise be ineffective/unused. For example, when setting additional abilities as War, I might put Raging Strikes into a special soul slot, giving me access to that ability when I activate my soul crystal in battle (long cooldown timer, of course).

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The biggest problem with this is that not every ability has a similar cooldown and yet you're giving them the same cooldown, which means that everyone would take the same exact abilities. All DPS (except BRD; BRD basically gets screwed in your system because they already get all cross class +dam CDs) would take Raging Strikes (same +dam as BfB without that pesky "take a crapton more damage" that lets it get away with being 80 secs instead of 180); healers would grab Mantra; tanks would grab either Keen Flurry or Raging Strikes (*maybe* Quelling Strikes for PLD when they're OT DPS). You're not really adding variety because there would be pretty explicit best choices.

This also gets into a case of outright bad design: a CD which only serves to allow you to use another ability (or abilities) is simply adding an arbitrary level of action that doesn't actually do anything, which is, as said before, bad design. You could accomplish the same thing, without the arbitrary starter action, by just providing the ability on its own (if you want it to be on a longer CD, that's entirely possible; the devs have said they can change aspects of abilities when job swapping); it's even possible to put multiple abilities on the same CD so you wouldn't even need it for that.

Honestly, if the devs want to allow us to have more abilities for PvE (they already made it so that everyone gets all of the PvP abilities automatically; the points are just there for beefing them up), they'll just provide us with them outright, either by increasing the level cap or just adding them at an existing level; there's no need to tie them to the job crystal for whatever reason or require doing more stuff after hitting 50 (the endgame is about acquiring better gear, which actually allows you to leapfrog pretty quickly from fresh 50 to progression level). There's also no need to draw them from the cross-class list either because it's way better to just design outright new abilities (which they did for PvP) rather than arbitrarily restricting themselves to a list that's intended to be on the weak end of the spectrum.

I disagree that allowing a brief period of time for one or two additional unhindered cross-class abilities is equal to raising the level cap. Raising the level cap would increase all stats for 100% of the time.

I do agree that adding randomness or luck is not desirable. Point taken.

I also agree that with different CD timers and such with different abilities, it would be a challenge for the dev team to balance. But with a little imagination one could picture each ability balanced nicely through various means that the dev team can employ :) I was not saying every ability should have the same CD timer.

Thanks for the posts!