Player vs. Primal

It's me again, back with another awful, terrible idea.

I have this concept of asymmetrical gameplay, where a player can play as a primal or raid boss and fight other players 4v1 or 8v1. Since it's technically PvP, morale will play a role here. Or at least, I think it should.

Playing as a boss will include the following mechanics:

• As the primal, the player must make the tactical decision of changing their phases. Phase changing will of course lead to more powerful abilities. However, the incentive to not just skip straight to the last phase is that the more time you spend in the lesser phases, the more powerful you are in your final phase. Also, a phase-change is also an attack, so it can be used to throw enemies off guard and kill them.
  
• The primal will also have a choice of phase changes. What type of phase will lead to your ultimate? An add phase like Ramuh? Or a 'heart' phase like Titan? The choices you make here will affect your endgame, as they dictate what abilities are available to you in the final phase.
  
• Tanks will use a psuedo-enmity system so that not only will they be relevant in this content, they will be important, but could possibly make them the most difficult role in this content. The way it works is that their traditional enmity attacks will instead add a set amount of 'points' to the target. When these points reach a total of 12, the boss will not be allowed to directly attack anyone else except the tank for 10s. For example, Skull Sunder applies 1 point, and Butcher's Block applies 2. You would need to perform the combo four times to 'aggro' the boss. However, boss players will have some skills that can ignore force targeting to counter this mechanic, and may even have an ability to clear or resist the effect. Another counter to this function is that the boss player can choose a passive that will give certain skills the ability to apply vulnerability debuffs.
  
• The way a boss player wins is by tripping up the adventurers and being as unpredictable as possible. In PvE, content is designed to be beaten by memorizing the fight from beginning to end; the bosses will never deviate from their pattern. As a boss player, your goal is to wipe the team of adventurers using every tool possible. You'll be able to do things like using crimson cyclone and plumes at the same time. Each of your skills are customizable for different effects. Maybe you'll put points into plumes to increase the number of enemies they target, or perhaps you will increase the size of crimson cyclones so that they are harder to dodge. Most of your skills are off-GCD, so a lot of them will be able to be used in tandem. However, even though many skills do not share cooldowns, they will have casting requirements, and because they are indeed off-cooldown, skilled players will probably be able to counter said attack by figuring out your cooldowns and the way you use them.
  
• As the previous point suggested, bosses are customizable. Ranging from the casting speed of certain skills, to a wide variety of resistances and passive bonuses, such as resistance to stun or silence, or the the ability to gain a stack of haste for any fool who fails to dodge your plume.
  
• Players will have tier 3 limit breaks, and bosses will have enrages. If the battle lasts for an extended period of time, someone is going to win.

What is this, Evolve?

Would be fun playing as Titan or even Ultima :D Also putting some of the more powerfull Skills on CD will help balance it out. Don't wana over use Gaia Crush or MB.

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Originally Posted by Reokudo

What is this, Evolve?

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Roughly, except in involve there's too much running around and chasing the monster down. Here it's 100% an arena battle.

I recall Yoshida has made comment on Evolve:

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Nova Crystallis: What are your personal highlights of E3 2014?

Yoshida: Even though we’re here at E3, I’ve had three LIVE shows, 13-14 interviews and I haven’t been around the show floor that much. Of what I have seen, the thing that has left the biggest impression is Evolve by the Left 4 Dead team. Having four players working together, and the fifth player gets to be the monster – it’s a mixture of PvE and PvP gameplay. This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time so when I see it I get really excited.

In a similar vain, the new Fable Legends is again four players, with one outsider that gets to be the Game Master type of player, putting down traps and monsters so that no two games is the same. It’s similar, but different and brings it up to the next level, although I’m sad that I haven’t been able to go to either booth to try them out. Of course there are other titles like Destiny that interests me too. Last year it was all about the consoles, this year it’s about the games on those consoles, so this year seems a lot more exciting but I’m stuck in here sadly (Laughs). Because I have a bad memory, I want to play the Master Chief Collection again and see if I can remember everything that happens.

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Nova Crystallis: On the subject of something similar to Evolve, would you consider something like that for FFXIV? For example, creating a large dungeon where one player becomes a monster and chases the rest through the length of it.

Yoshida: Evolve is going to be a very different game to Final Fantasy XIV, and again, the needs and the stresses on the console will be different as well. Four players versus one means they can better allocate their resources, where we have to use our resources in displaying lots of characters at once – that is our restriction that doesn’t allow us to do the same things that they are doing because they have only the four players and monster. It’s definitely something we’re interested in and we’ve been talking about it ourselves on the development team, about doing something similar. When we do make that announcement, you remember you heard it here first in this room! So maybe you have one player playing Behemoth, and 200 players coming out towards him, and in one swipe he knocks all 200 players down… everyone will want to be Behemoth and nobody will want to be the 200 so we will have to work on balance.

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The idea is interesting, and I hope it could be lore'd in somehow. Quick off shoot idea, some part of story has you dropped into a primal's entire being of Aether and you're broke mentally the shard that remains is the now new remnant of you and through Migardsormr blessing and all those people you've met, influenced, and produced faith upon yourself you can hold the viable shard of you at the forefront and leave the corrupted mind in shackles, except for sometimes it doesn't. Then you take your primal form and players have to take you down.

FFXI has the monstrosity system which I found really fun, I'd love to see something like that in ffxiv.

Basically they player would pick a zone to go to and play as a monster, like a bunny or a lizard. You then levelled up your monster by killing other monsters, as you reached higher levels you would unlock the monsters abilities, skills and spells as well as bigger monsters in the family, like lizard > raptor > dragon. In certain areas other players could enter as a 'gladiator' and fight you.

For tanks the ability provoke, which was kind of like a spike aggro move, would lock the enemy target on you for a few seconds. I was thinking for FFXIV there could be something similar. Where moves with increased enmity on them would instead force the opponent to target you, not lock them, just make them target you, this would make the tank a nuisance that they'd want to kill to stop the constant messing with them. While provoke could be used to lock the target on for a few seconds just to make it slightly more useful.

to play as a monster while fighting human players would be fun, the balancing is HEAVY on the healers and dps, since lets say Bahamut, a human bahamut would just nuke the healers and the only way they could restrict that is to only have us fight based on a aggro table I.E we can only select what is top agro, with codlins and such

if they do do this i will LOVE FFXIV more then ever and would try so hard to play as bahamut. :D