Enhancing sp gain: more than just chaining.

I think the devs have commented on looking into mob chaining, but how about other ways to earn bonus skill points? dps and grinding as fast as you can is often less impressive than using tactics and complex teamwork, so why not give sp bonuses for playing in a complex mode that earns more sp per hour than mindlessly grinding chains?

A. Sp bonus if a regimen is used in the fight. More sp for different jobs in that regimen. Max sp bonus if two kinds of meleers and a mage are in regimen.

B. Sp bonus for a diverse party. 3 different jobs for a light party. 5 different jobs for a full party.

C. Small sp bonuses for debilitations landed like disorients concussives dias and paralyze, up to 5.

D. Incapacitation bonuses.

E. Defined tank bonuses. There are ways to mathematically tell if you are using a tank and hate control or if you're just bouncing hate whereverwhocares. This would play well with the new hate meter. SP bonus if one person's hate is clearly rigged by the team on purpose.

I'd like to see a team actually train on a mob if they are grinding it, not just killing as fast as possible. Practically speaking, a pack of archers or meleers just mowing everything down doesn't learn anything from doing so. Giving sp bonus to fights in which conscious training actions are taking place would help solve the monotony of grinding sp and the insane focus on kills per minute to determine who is a good job.

That's actually not a bad idea, maybe make the fights last longer too. Enemies seem to die in 2 seconds when I'm in a party, it'd be nice if fights lasted as long as they did in XI. Back in the day the only way to level effectively was to get a good light SC going so coordinating that was something you had to do.

Shyd approves! (b'.')b

I like this idea. Makes me think of RPG games as of late that you get AP points for doing actions in battle, 1 points per action, which made you want to do several moves prior to actually defeating the monster.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-How-to-Fix-it

I detailed a bunch of suggestions in a prior "how to fix SP" thread, but in the area of chaining, specifically, I think certain mini-objectives that can be achieve during each battle would help to make things interesting.

FF10 had the concept of "overkill" which was kinda neat. Perhaps if a similar mechanic could be worked into FF14's battle system for SP bonus, that might be interesting. SP bonus for incapacitating parts, or SP bonus for regimens, etc.

I almost included overkill, but think that would play too hard into certain jobs' inherent abilities and make the end of fights more painful than they're worth. WAIT STOP HITTING IT SO WE CAN I SAID STOP HITTING IT!

Can't think of a way to do overkill well.

Added incapacitations. How could i miss that lol

you know..... the old SP system had some of this stuff built in.
tanks got extra sp for tanking well, because you got sp for parries, and for blocking
You got extra SP for debilitating the monsters, so Weaponskills that did damage and debilitated, gave double bonuses.
you got SP for amount of hp cured, and for removing statuses.
incapacitations also counted as debuff pocs, but were gerenerally higher reward
regimens could reduce monster defenses, and do damage bursts, that allowed you to do more damage to harder monsters, which meant your sp reward scale was much higher (doing 100 damage on a higher level mob gave much more exp than doing 100 damage on a lower one.


main problem, is, people didnt share these exp benefits.

I think most of these bonuses are a good idea (dunno about the bonus for having one person with hate though, certain teams could be trying to bounce hate for more effeciency, and it actually be a more difficult task.), and with a base exp set in place and sharing of the bonuses, it allows you to go for mass murder, or difficult rewarding longer fights, depending on your playstyle. only problem is, will it be more exp than mass murder, or the same in a different way, and then trying to balance that into play.

I agree that this is what tanaka was going for--to end the monotonous, simplistic grind that FFXI devolved into. In mass murder, nothing is learned. In fact, things are forgotten. In FFXI we used to set up intricate hate controle formations and do full skillchains, maybe even two-part skillchains. All of that lost over time. Dead art.

He just didn't go about putting thoughtful training into the grind in a practical way. All of Tanaka's ideas are gold. Sometimes he just has no clue how to do it and assumes he does.

You used to get pretty epic sp for debilitations, but you couldn't rely on it. By the time the system was changed, battle regimens didn't even pick up. I wonder if regimens used to give you epic sp too and we just never knew it.

Even if Tanaka was secretly right, you can't just tell everyone to shut up and listen. It has to be obviously beneficial. You have to make it perfectly clear what you're telling the players to start doing, and not do. He was trying to say don't just archerburn everything down, but he hid it in an overly complicated system that no one understood but him.

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Originally Posted by Peregrine

You used to get pretty epic sp for debilitations, but you couldn't rely on it.

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All this encouraged was for everyone to equip their WS that proced a status on hit and for everyone to spam it, regardless if it was worth it or not (and you had to be first, since overwriting a debuff does not give you SP).

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Originally Posted by Peregrine

By the time the system was changed, battle regimens didn't even pick up. I wonder if regimens used to give you epic sp too and we just never knew it.

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They didn't give extra SP.

The reason regimens didn't pick up was because they just plain didn't work 80% of the time even if you did the process correctly. It wasn't until the Nov 24 patch that battle regimens actually started to activate correctly.

Even then (and still now) battle regimens were not worth doing in small parties, and the benefits did not outweigh the drawbacks enough.

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Originally Posted by Rentahamster

All this encouraged was for everyone to equip their WS that proced a status on hit and for everyone to spam it, regardless if it was worth it or not (and you had to be first, since overwriting a debuff does not give you SP).


They didn't give extra SP.

The reason regimens didn't pick up was because they just plain didn't work 80% of the time even if you did the process correctly. It wasn't until the Nov 24 patch that battle regimens actually started to activate correctly.

Even then (and still now) battle regimens were not worth doing in small parties, and the benefits did not outweigh the drawbacks enough.

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Uhhh maybe only mines overwrote then because i got procs for skull sunder and concussive blow multiple times, maybe concussive and skull sunder are different because they overwrite the effect. And yeah, different status effects had different values, the ones i used were worth it. Concussive blow progressively lowers accuracy, and allows your tank, even gladiators/marauders to evade more. skull sunder is doing DoT, if it didnt give sp, it would be a lie, saying it had no value. The truth is debuffs are actually useful to the party, some more than others, that probably why some gave more than others. Also in this game, the WS with debuffs, are usually more than worth it, their damage is good and they do something useful, thats probably why many of them have timers.

Another thing is even if only the first person got the credit, that wouldnt matter much if everyone shared the exp, or it was something that they gave bonuses to the whole party. Maybe the problem was that he was trying to kill 2 birds with one stone, rewarding skillful play, but at the same time reducing the ability to leech/plevel people. reducing the leech/plevel aspect by not sharing sp to the whole party may have been the bigger flaw.

I can tell you right now that using the defense down debuff on high level crabs gave you more exp per proc, and allowed you to kill them faster, the problem was, as you say getting regimens to actually work consistently before was pretty hard. The only way we could consistently get the effect was to have 3 people queue up, and then one person wouldnt be counted.

Basically anything that increased the damage you do to the mob, was increasing your sp gains, most noticeably on high level monster

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Originally Posted by Physic

Uhhh maybe only mines overwrote then because i got procs for skull sunder and concussive blow multiple times, maybe concussive and skull sunder are different because they overwrite the effect.

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Nope, proccing skull sunder while the mob was already under the effects of skull sunder does not give you proc SP, only damage SP.

Concussive Blow x2 and x3 did not award SP for the status proc, and neither did Disorient x2 or Disorient x3. It wasn't worth using after the first one hit.

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Originally Posted by Physic

Basically anything that increased the damage you do to the mob, was increasing your sp gains, most noticeably on high level monster

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It wasn't a 1:1 proportion of damage to SP. The harder you hit, the more SP you got per hit, but if you killed the mob too fast, you won't have enough total hits to average out the randomness, so you might get less SP overall. On the other hand, you could hit many times for less damage, and get enough total hits to accumulate SP despite the randomness, but have the fight drag out. When individuals in parties had both methods of play in the same party, problems occurred.

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Originally Posted by Rentahamster

Nope, proccing skull sunder while the mob was already under the effects of skull sunder does not give you proc SP, only damage SP.

Concussive Blow x2 and x3 did not award SP for the status proc, and neither did Disorient x2 or Disorient x3. It wasn't worth using after the first one hit.



It wasn't a 1:1 proportion of damage to SP. The harder you hit, the more SP you got per hit, but if you killed the mob too fast, you won't have enough total hits to average out the randomness, so you might get less SP overall. On the other hand, you could hit many times for less damage, and get enough total hits to accumulate SP despite the randomness, but have the fight drag out. When individuals in parties had both methods of play in the same party, problems occurred.

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Dragging the fight out gave you less sp over time, because as long as you can move on to the next mob, its always more valuable to get more sp per proc, unless you are running out of monsters, not to mention, you were less likely to hit the cap which was actually a bad thing, although everyone liked to see it. Better to get 499 per fight than wasting an extra 100.

pretty sure i got sp for concussives, i often hit or surpassed the exp cap. and mostly it was the debuffs in addition to the dmg that allowed me to do that, but its been awhile, i may have been rotating debuffs and going for whatever debuffs the party was missing by the end there.

Anyhow thats not the real issue, if everyone shared the sp gains, it wouldnt be important who got it first, and if they had a system like now with a base SP, and rewarded you non randomly and for the whole party, as the OP suggests for sucessful/useful actions/strategies, then it would solve both issues, while also giving incentive for harder battles.

Another option is they give you grades on the fight which give you more exp, much like SF games later would give you ranks like s a b c d f based on various factors mentioned, then give you exp bonuses based on that, so as to make it simpler for people to understand.

The suggestions all sound like interesting, valid options... but considering the massively larger amounts of SP that groups can already get over solo players, just doing things like this would only widen that gap and 'completely' destroy the solo game. As a game that's supposed to allow for either, they have to make sure that SP gained while outside of a team can at least remotely keep up with SP gained while in a team.

... of course, that's hardly even true right now XD. So we'll see how it goes. SP chaining for consecutively killing the same type of enemy can get pretty dull, but perhaps there are other options!

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Originally Posted by ZephyrAM

The suggestions all sound like interesting, valid options... but considering the massively larger amounts of SP that groups can already get over solo players, just doing things like this would only widen that gap and 'completely' destroy the solo game. As a game that's supposed to allow for either, they have to make sure that SP gained while outside of a team can at least remotely keep up with SP gained while in a team.

... of course, that's hardly even true right now XD. So we'll see how it goes. SP chaining for consecutively killing the same type of enemy can get pretty dull, but perhaps there are other options!

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they need to reduce or eliminate those old methods, they are killing the game. I mean i can understand leve linking sort of, because if it wasnt there people just would not link, and repeat the quests over and over, but it basically creates a game where people only feel rewarded for doing the same leves over and over, and have not much desire to explore/kill in the open world.
Behest would be fine, if it was actually challenging. The other thing is, some of these types of bonuses could translate into solo play, with long fights and what not, If the chains are linked to killing fast, soloers will always be unable to compete, if its linked to other types of things, it can boost a soloists exp as well, though of course parties will get more benefits from more different types of things.

I think that party exp should be noticeably better than solo exp though, just as long as soloing isnt impossible or totally unfeasible. With a good party search system, you should be able to solo/explore while seeking or creating parties.

I think soloing is best left to instanced settings. Way too hard to balance open field sp where parties should be. Soloers are probably best placed inside a large mog house, with a scripted series of fights and tasks for their level over the course of 30 minutes or an hour, that gives them sp based on things that SE can script and control for their level.

Or put the parties in instanced scripted sp settings, and give the soloers the fields.

25-30 just sucks. Too low for 1 star R40 leves. Too big for the field regen rates. Mobs just aren't dense enough to do anything but leve link after about level 26. Where SP on the field goes from about 26k an hour to immediately half that, right at the time where your TNL's start getting 40 and 50k tnl. It's demoralizing.

I really like your ideas for encouraging tactical play and group co-operation. It would certainly be an improvement over the current "kill it! kill it all!" method of levelling.

Not only do I think a system that overlays base-rate SP would be more engaging and interactive, but I think the developers could also use it to train the players on how to play their jobs effectively.

It should be no surprise, then that it turns out that the best way to get great SP per hour is in fact a great way to play marauder, lancer, thaumaturge, etc. That is, get the thing disorientedx3, concussive blow'dx3, dia'd, and paralyzed within the first few seconds of the fight, then blowing it away with a regimen actually shows players what they are truly capable of that goes above and beyond mashing 1 and spamming multishot primes.

Such a system can train good play into players, instead of rewarding them for playing like drones. The players will embrace whatever they're trained to get the best results from, so it only makes sense to reward them for playing their jobs well instead of DPS'ing "tha best."

Naturally kills per minute and sp per kill=sp per minute should be a big factor in your total, because otherwise people will just stall on kills and play with a mob (which is not humane), but not to the point where people are just incessantly focussed on DPS and what jobs are gimp versus gauranteed.