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

delete topic, please

I remember in FFXI you could mess with the damage on Goblin Bomb Toss or Fungar poison by doing specific positioning, that was kind of a cool secret (reminds me of the pointing certain directions while crafting lol). Some of that is already represented by "avoid the red/orange", but they could do some other things with it (for example if you messed up the Goblin they'd often hurt themselves instead, iirc).

It would be neat to see some of that concept brought back. Say when a dragon prepares to dive bomb if you stun them from the wing they fall over instead, increased stun and damage taken (rather if you stun them from the front it'll be normal). May even have different responses like if you stun a ram from the front they're immune (cause .. their heads are hard). Early FFXIV also had a system of targeted damage so you could break specific parts of the monster, which would stop certain moves or create certain loot drops (certain jobs were better at this, which wont translate well into our current setup- but the concept itself of breaking things could translate.. say if the dragon fell over and you attacked their rear you might be able to incapacitate their tail). A bit related but I in general miss each monster's weird quirk, like Gobbue eating mandagora or Snurbles raise / curing you when they crossed your path. Or that not every single monster ever has to be aggressive lol, I was a bit taken aback when the deer in ShB where like "DIEEEEEEEEEe" Xd.

Of course you don't want it to be so bad that you feel you have to memorize every monster or you're just awful (or that it ruins the opportunity for certain jobs to be useful, so like avoiding using the elemental wheel), but there is certainly a great potential balance there. Particularly for some of the open world monsters and light trash where you've the most freedom. Doing this stuff on bosses and things that require even tighter balance can get iffy, depending on what it was.

That works in other games where say, fire blizzard and thunder are basically the same spell but with different animations and elemental attributes.

Black mage alone would make this system too difficult to work with the way jobs are designed now. If you add resistances/immunities you screw over certain jobs. If you only add vulnerabilities, that would be less disruptive but would mess with job balance. In a different style of game that works well, but ffxiv isn't really designed for that.

It's because of Job favouritism - because not every Job would have the same debuff attacks, players would start demanding only certain Jobs that can exploit that enemy's particular weakness can enter a duty at the expense of everything else. FFXI had just such a system and suffered from player discrimination against certain Jobs or Job/Subjob combinations bad, something Yoshi has been conscious of since ARR first began development and it's something he is actively trying to prevent (this is why elemental buffs and damage was also removed).

Unfortunately that has resulted in Jobs becoming effectively homogonized and mechanically little different from each other, but that's the price that has to be paid for making the game as inclusive of all players and playstyles.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

I think the game should revamp its combat and focus on making sure that each monster feels different to fight.

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That's what mechanics are for. You can't honestly tell me that Ifrit and Shiva are the same fight just because they take the same damage from fire spells.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

Why can't you implement a system where each monster would have a certain weakness, exploiting which would give you a certain percentage of bonus damage and as a result encourage players to think and fight a little differently?

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Because they don't want to end up in a situation where certain jobs are better or worse in certain content. Why would you ever invite a BLM to fight Ifrit if 70% of their attacks would be resisted? Why would you ever take a DRG to fight something that resists piercing, etc? The game actually did have distinct damage and elemental types originally. They were removed because they caused more issues than they fixed.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

It's because of Job favouritism - because not every Job would have the same debuff attacks, players would start demanding only certain Jobs that can exploit that enemy's particular weakness can enter a duty at the expense of everything else.

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This depends on how things are done. not everyjob needs the exactsame toolkit that's the thinking that has leadus to the boringmess we're in right now.

XI generally speakingworked prettywell for the most part. it wasn't perfect but that was mostly down to design oversight when 90% of mob types shared the same weaknesses it becomes a problem. butyou could easily give bosses strengths andweaknesses ofother types. varying levels of strength, defence, speed, evasion, HP etc.

Boss 1 might be big bulky and tough but slow as result meaning he cant dodge a thing.and his heavy armor resists crits
boss 2 might be super fast and evasive but pretty squishy and fragile ths more succeptible to crits.
boss 3 might hit like an absolute truck but at the same time be pretty slow.

players could be the same.. gives jobs simillar strengths and weakness. it makes zero sense that a warrior can swing a great big 2 handed battlexe around as fast as a ninja with his katanas. whats that axe made of paper??? there's certainly no weight or power to it.

right now other than how much hp they have every boss is the exact same. same str.same def, same accuracy, sameresists. same everything.. you can see this easily by unsyncinga piece of level 50 content andtakingnote of how much damage a skill does when your level 80.. and then using that same skill against a level 80 boss.. and it'll be basically the exact same damage.

this iswhere people often feel stats are meaningless. because you can go against a level 50 boss with 9,000 crit, and your crit% will honestly be no different..its why so many people ignore stats entirely as the only one that ever matters is basically ilevel. you could delete every other statand it'd make zero difference in 99% of content..

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Originally Posted by Brightamethyst

That's what mechanics are for. You can't honestly tell me that Ifrit and Shiva are the same fight just because they take the same damage from fire spells.
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You kind of can do exactly that. every boss themselves is essentially just a glorified striking dummy the only real difference is the HP and a bunch of disconnected mechanics. you could quite literally swap every boss fora striking dummy in the same arena and the fights wouldnt change. it'd still be dance disconnected telegraphs while whacking the dummy. one of the common opinions is that most of the time you never even look at or pay attention to the boss in an encounter,, of all the things that go on he's quite literally the bottom of the list of things you focus on or pay attention to..

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

I brought this up on some other Internet resources and so far nobody can give me a clear answer as to why FF XIV doesn't try to have a more traditional battle system. It's silly when you're fighting bosses like Shiva and you attack her with fire, but it deals the same kind of damage ice attacks would.

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Yoshida explained it himself long ago.

Things like elemental weaknesses create an enviroment in which certain classes are more valued over others. If you have to beat Ifrit and the main dps of a black mage comes from fire attacks, good luck getting a party. Same for piercing damage for lances/arrows, etc. It's just flavour that only adds problems.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

every boss themselves is essentially just a glorified striking dummy the only real difference is the HP and a bunch of disconnected mechanics. you could quite literally swap every boss fora striking dummy in the same arena and the fights wouldnt change.

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And adding elemental resistances/weaknesses changes this how, exactly?

It sounds like some people want FFXIV to be a fundamentally different game than what it is. And that's fine to wish the game were different, but it's highly unlikely to go through that sort of shift.

Black mage and red mage for example would have to be severely redesigned for this kind of thing to function and not be broken.

People without any savage clears should not be making suggestions to the battle content. :)