Something needs to be done about elements

So you see a Bomb, and to defeat it, you use...

Fire?

Come now, SE, this is Final Fantasy. You use Blizzard to kill bombs, not Fire. Fire heals bombs, and yet in this game, elements (or "aspect", as the tooltip calls it) means abso-freaking-lutely nothing. Thunder? Earth? Wind? Don't care. Potency is where it's at.

What's the point in elements? Just to justify the elemental materias and reduce the likelihood to get vitality and critical materia?

Some final fantasy games, bombs are x2 weak against fire, I do know what you are saying though. Ifrit would be a better example.

But it's all to make it balanced so this way blm doesn't have all these spells when the jobs/class can only have 15 abilities each cause the servers can't handle it.

I would love to see my benediction immediately kill undead enemies.

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Originally Posted by Jinrya-Geki

But it's all to make it balanced so this way blm

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That's basically it. BLM is built around the waxing (Umbral Ice) and waning (Astral Fire) of their mp based upon specific elements. If Ifrit were immune to fire, BLM would pretty much only be able to spam Blizzard and keep up Thunder, which means they'd be doing absolutely terrible damage. It's the price we pay for not having all of the spells just be clones of each other with different elemental attributes.

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doesn't have all these spells when the jobs/class can only have 15 abilities each cause the servers can't handle it.

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As I said before, it's not limited based upon the spell list but rather upon the chosen playstyle for BLM. On top of that, the number of abilities that each class gets isn't 15 (each 17 for each, except for Arcanist which gets 18) nor is it absolutely set in stone. On top of that, I find it hilarious that you think that the servers couldn't handle an increased number of abilities. That would be like saying that we couldn't get any more gear because the server couldn't handle it. Abilities are just database calls that trigger the effect labelled in the database, and it doesn't really matter how many abilities you've got because a larger data doesn't put appreciably more strain on a server unless you've got a *obscenely* large unsorted database or attempting to get a list based upon given attributes so that it has to iterate through everything; calling to a specific address doesn't care about database size.
That's laughably untrue on all 3 counts.

Just have Blizzard do 6 times more damage against Ifrit. Would be legit.

Then troll your group by casting fire spells to heal Ifrit.

at 14.1 it was possible to heal ifrit with using fire :D

The reason elements don't do anything is cause in 1.0 people would take Tankx1 WHMx1 and then BLMx6 to basically everything cause they could exploit elemental weaknesses, all other jobs were basically obsolete. So for 2.0 they took out any form of elemental weaknesses and just made magic damage equal to physical.

Not saying I agree with this design choice, just telling you that's the way it is.

Kinda makes Elemental Resistance obsolete then too. What is the point of the Materia and items that add Ele. Resist when they are pretty useless?

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Originally Posted by XanderOlivieri

Kinda makes Elemental Resistance obsolete then too. What is the point of the Materia and items that add Ele. Resist when they are pretty useless?

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*coughs* Primal hard/extreme mode runs will see a significant advantage with properly resistant gear. <.<

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Originally Posted by CrashingWaves

*coughs* Primal hard/extreme mode runs will see a significant advantage with properly resistant gear. <.<

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This doesn't really work for 2 reasons: first, the weapons that currently provide resistance provide it as a free bonus so the itemization is obviously seen as entirely dismissable by the dev team and, second, melding resistances onto crafted gear comes at the direct cost of other stats, which are the only advantage to crafted gear (pentamelding gives you a metric crapton of stats compared to a "normal" i70).

If the devs really wanted us to find resistances useful, they'd put it on gear that didn't have to be crafted. Either that, or they should allow existing blue gear to get melded so that you can add resistances if you so choose (restrict it to 2 slots max for balance purposes) so that you can get resistance on everything you're wearing (so that you can tailor your gear to the damage type of the content you want to focus upon) but the fact that you can get a lot *more* resistance from crafted gear still provides an explicit benefit.

The problem with elemental resistances/weaknesses/attacks in so very many games is that, because they're so specific, they're useless itemization in all but a minority of content. Even if it's amazingly useful, unless they *require* a certain amount of a given resistance (which WoW did in Vanilla), there's no real reason to use it because it only applies to a small amount of content (would you really want gear that's basically i100 for Ifrit but i60 for everything else?). If they try to provide global resistances so that resistance stacking is actually useful, there's no point in having specific resistances otherwise. The only real way you make it useful but not crippling/annoying (gearing up for fire resist was a friggin' *chore* that was worse than the already onerous attunement quests) is by having it exist as an non-required bonus with a reasonable opportunity cost, such that it's a benefit that is noticeable but not required for those people willing to spend a bit more.

Hmmm... I can see the problem with super effective elemental attacks in primal fights <.<

But that makes the elemental properties invalid. I actually wish they remove elemental properties. It's just a bad shape right now and means precisely jack

If I remember correctly in an earlier Final Fantasy the black Mage could cast an elemental spell on somebody's sword for an attack on the enemy. Maybe the BLM could do sonething like this and have it last a minute or something. Maybe this way all the other classes wouldn't be gimped.

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Originally Posted by Little_Ifrit

Maybe this way all the other classes wouldn't be gimped.

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It wouldn't actually be the other classes that get gimped. It would almost always be BLM, because no one else is particularly focused upon a single element. SMN gets the closest and, even then, Ifrit and Garuda are close enough in damage that, unless something is resistant to *both* Fire and Wind, they're not going to be problem. BLM, however, does a *vast* majority of its damage through Fire. Against Ifrit, even if he was hugely vulnerable to Ice damage, BLM would have terrible damage because they don't do enough damage with Ice spells and Umbral Ice.

The problem with the elements isn't in targets being weak to certain elements but rather in targets being resistant because players don't really have explicit control over what elements they're using constantly. If they *did* want to make the elements matter more, they'd have to do some really weird stuff: BLM would have to be given other elemental spells that provide Umbral Ice/Astral Fire (which means changing the name, but that's not really a problem) so that they don't get screwed over; SMN would have to be given more summons that cover a larger number; since your providing bonus damage to any caster that knows elemental weaknesses, the devs would have to provide a buff to non-elemental damage to compensate (so that you don't just stack 4 BLM/SMNs for primal fights).

All in all, it's just not worth the effort. It works in single player games where the player is controlling an entire party so that the individual characters don't need to be as complex as is required for an MMO (which is why BLMs get a bunch of options that are identical and only differentiated by the given element), but, in an MMO, it's too much effort to make it balanced. It's easier to just ignore NPC resistances and simply allow players to stack elemental resistances, either "required" or just optional, for specific fights.

Also, the BLM casting onto the ally's sword was FFXI, where Steiner could use Magic Sword when in party with Vivi (Vivi cast the spell on Steiner's sword but it consumed Steiner's MP rather than Vivi's; the selection was also determined by Vivi's spell list).

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Originally Posted by Exstal

Just have Blizzard do 6 times more damage against Ifrit. Would be legit.

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And if they did this you'd see in Rev Troll "LF 4 DPS for HM/Ex Ifrit, BLM only."

They had to normalize the damage of the elemental spells to keep things fair.

The end result would either be BLM OP or BLM useless, and both of them are bad for the game. There always has to be a balance and you can't limit 1 class from playing half the content because half of the fights have element resistance and you'd rather take Melee instead. You also don't want a repeat of 1.0 that would result in people only wanting BLM because of element weakness abuse. Every class has to be able to play every bit of content.

As for BLM casting elements on Melee/Bard/Tanks, I'd love that. Cast a 15 second element onto a players weapon and have them deal an extra 20% elemental damage with an amazing elemental/audio effect on their weapon while you receive a 20% spell speed reduction. Give them a resistance to the buff of 60 seconds and give the spell a 15 second cool-down, that way they have to cycle through DPS or even Tanks to help increase damage for enmity.

However, only reason I love it is because I'm a sucker for nostalgia and Vivi is my favorite FF character so... yeah. If they can implement something and keep balance, that's great, but it's much harder to keep balance than the average player thinks. Making everyone the same isn't the same as balance and making everyone unique can cause a lot of balance issues. Making everyone the same with gimmicks is also a tried-and-failed method, too. Single player is a much easier place to implement this as balance isn't really much of an issue, but in multi-player it's huge.

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They had to normalize the damage of the elemental spells to keep things fair.

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This^

Yoshi-P also commented on the fact that because different classes have different spell toolkits, it wouldn't be fair for one class to be able to kill a mob with one spell cast and one class not be to kill without a fight for their life, if they're even able to harm it at all.

The elemental resistances were removed for game balance, which I can agree with. I hated encounters/ battles in FFXI where BLM was the only way to go because they were so superior to other DPS in every way.

On the subject of elemental resistance for players, I think you'd be better off buffing up duration and potency of Resistance Ward Potions than playing with resistance gear. Ultimately, it's less problematic in the long term and more healthy for economics.

On exploiting enemy elemental vulnerabilities, it's a great mechanic....in Pokémon. Unless a game is designed to utilize such a mechanic it's just impossibly difficult to balance it out. FFXIV, for better or worse, just doesn't have vulnerabilities to such an extreme that one is useless/Mandatory against an enemy for the class balance reasons mentioned here.

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Originally Posted by XanderOlivieri

Kinda makes Elemental Resistance obsolete then too. What is the point of the Materia and items that add Ele. Resist when they are pretty useless?

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As a PLD from XI and now in XIV, I don't really miss having a multitude of Elemental Gear Resist sets. But it did add in an extra element to the battle system which made the game more interesting and involved.

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The reason elements don't do anything is cause in 1.0 people would take Tankx1 WHMx1 and then BLMx6 to basically everything cause they could exploit elemental weaknesses.

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The BLM spell list is kind of ridiculous. BLM should have access to the Elemental Wheel of Magics. Not just 3. Or they could have made it make sense, Black Mage, use "Dark Magic" like in XI. Which would be, Blizzard, Water, Stone and Dark and then give WHM the other; Fire, Lightning, Aero and Light.


Devs restricting jobs due to Boss Fight imbalance seems like the easy way out. They could have done Diminishing returns if spells are spammed or DPS is needed during a certain point in the battle etc...
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The elemental wheel was never remotely codified. Earth/Wind/Water have all bounced around between White mages and Black mages. The only constant has been the Fire/Ice/Lightning that the THM/BLM rotation is currently based around.

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Originally Posted by Deusteele

The elemental wheel was never remotely codified. Earth/Wind/Water have all bounced around between White mages and Black mages. The only constant has been the Fire/Ice/Lightning that the THM/BLM rotation is currently based around.

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Notice I said like in XI. Since this game uses the same Character Models and is loosely based off that game. It would make sense to stick with the same Lore.

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Originally Posted by LordSaviour

The BLM spell list is kind of ridiculous. BLM should have access to the Elemental Wheel of Magics. Not just 3. Or they could have made it make sense, Black Mage, use "Dark Magic" like in XI. Which would be, Blizzard, Water, Stone and Dark and then give WHM the other; Fire, Lightning, Aero and Light.

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Technically BLM only has access to Fire (Flare) and Ice (Freeze). THM has access to Fire, Ice, and Lightning. I seem to remember the first Class Quest text explaning the reason why they focus on those elements. Honestly, I've been a BLM for as long as I've been a WHM and I still have no clue what the BLM abilities are about. If you went by the Job Quests I'd be summoning Voidkin to do my bidding like a Warlock or something.

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Originally Posted by LordSaviour

Or they could have made it make sense, Black Mage, use "Dark Magic" like in XI. Which would be, Blizzard, Water, Stone and Dark and then give WHM the other; Fire, Lightning, Aero and Light.

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it is kind of like that though

BLM/THM has Fire, Ice, Thunder
WHM/CNJ has Earth, Wind, Water

but Fluid Aura being the only Water spell in the game is just hilarious.

My biggest problem with the lack of elemental resistance in this game is that it's led to a lack of variety in spells/skills for the classes/jobs.
Whenever I play this game, I have to compare it to XI, there are just to many parallels within the games not to, not to mention XI is XVI's senior in the FF series and the only other MMO in it.
XI had BLM with spell for each element, SMNs with summons for each element (which allowed the summons to be the main focus of the job), WHM having few offense light element spells to allow them to focus more on healing and buff spells, and Weapon Skills and Skill Links for your physical classes, followed by a nice Magic Burst from your nukers.
XVI's system is just so streamlined that it gets repetitive. All THM/BLM fling the same spell-rotations, all ACN/SMN place the same DoTs and use Garuda, CNJ/WHM barely ever use their offensive spells or buff during a battle, and the melee DPS barely need to interact and/or coordinate attacks with one another...

Except XI is a glaring example of how not to make an MMO.

Also, you keep writing XVI (16) when you mean to write XIV (14).

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Originally Posted by Exstal

Except XI is a glaring example of how not to make an MMO.

Also, you keep writing XVI (16) when you mean to write XIV (14).

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I dunno. Over a decade and it's still a sub based game, being the biggest money maker in the FF franchise, and multiple threads on here saying that this game should be more like it......

I think you just forgot to write "IMO" in there somewhere.

Except there never was any real interplay between elements in any Final Fantasy. It was pick whatever element the enemy is weak against and spam that.

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Originally Posted by SendohJin

it is kind of like that though

BLM/THM has Fire, Ice, Thunder
WHM/CNJ has Earth, Wind, Water

but Fluid Aura being the only Water spell in the game is just hilarious.

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midway through Legacy FFXIV's lifespan, the new team redid the magic setup. CNJ had ALL the elements including multiple water spells, but the new team split the spells between THM and CNJ and got rid of most of THMs spell (man do I miss shock spikes.) While they were splitting it, they ended up not giving Water to any of them. So the later half of Legacy FFXIV we did not have any water spells, but enemies did. They had gear to enhance our water spells yet none existed anymore. lol What was also funny was that, even though CNJ no longer had half of the elements, the storyline was never changed to reflect that, so it would still tell you that CNJ were in charge of elements that now belonged to THM. In ARR the CNJ storyline now only mentions the elements that belong to CNJ. THM was truly bad ass in 1.0 until the new team got rid of most THM spells, I remember THM was a monster and killing things in ways that make ACN seem underpowered in comparison. lol

Ah memories, cause that's all it is now, distant memories. :( But then again, we didn't have any MP regeneration at all back then, would have to touch an Aetheryte to get back MP, so even though things didn't use up much MP, you had to be very careful to not cast any spell that didn't need to be cast. So yeah, some are good memories and some not that good. ;)

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I dunno. Over a decade and it's still a sub based game, being the biggest money maker in the FF franchise, and multiple threads on here saying that this game should be more like it......

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I still play FFXI (3 subs and 18 characters, 10 are mules though) and FFXI is becoming more and more like FFXIV with every update. For example, it's super solo now cause you can have 3 Trust Companions out with you (Famous NPCs that fight with you.) Notorious Monsters pop MUCH faster and they drop their rewards at a DRASTICALLY increased rate. They added timed events that (somewhat) resemble FATEs. They added a ton of town crystals and now you can teleport from area to area like in FFXIV or even to other towns by paying gil, just like FFXIV, even to far off/difficult to reach areas, just like FFXIV. They even considered having the doors open automatically like in FFXIV (couldnt do it cause the door clicking is related to many quests, but they tried to add it.) In FFXI you can now pick the difficulty of certain content just like certain content in FFXIV. Even the UI is being redone to make it more efficient. FFXI even does item levels like FFXIV (although FFXI had it first.) And that's just stuff off the top of my head. Face it people, FFXI's abusive systems are a thing of the past, they want it to be as fun as FFXIV is and they are well past the idea/planning stage, it is already being implemented and it's not gonna stop (until the game goes offline forever and with 500-1,200 people on when I log in, it's not going away anytime soon.)

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Originally Posted by ruinedmirage

I dunno. Over a decade and it's still a sub based game, being the biggest money maker in the FF franchise, and multiple threads on here saying that this game should be more like it

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Let me refute each of those.

It's been around for over a decade with consistent development and support from its parent company. This is why it makes so much money: not because it is a good game, but because it is a long standing MMO that gets continual development. MMOs fail when they stagnate. You have to keep developing a game in order to keep people playing it. This is the *one* thing that FFXI has done well, but it has nothing to do with the game design and more to do with the business management.

The fact that it is a subscription game falls within this same category: people are willing to pay $15 a month if the game gets updated regularly, even if the content is mostly crap. Novelty is a huge factor.

On top of this, it also arrived when the MMO market was still pretty immature (it was released in 2002; WoW, which during the Vanilla days, made a *crapton* of horrible design decisions because they didn't know any better, was released in late 2004) and, much like WoW, got a *lot* of attention because of the cache of its name and the accompanying series. A preexisting fan base means that the developers have immediate access to a massive potential player base without having to put forth the effort to get attention. It's why WoW, SWTOR, EQ2, and WHO all had very large release numbers. FFXI had more of this than any other MMO ever released because the FF series has had a *very* loyal playerbase going back for over *20 years*.

As to the people saying that ARR should be more like XI, that's not due to the quality of XI; it's due to the fact that the average person is deeply uncomfortable with change. ARR has a dramatically different system than XI *or* XIV1.0. Even if the system were absolutely perfect in every possible way, people would get upset because it deviates from what they were used to in previous games. It doesn't help that a lot of people live under the absurd notion that you never have to make compromises when developing certain systems. It's also why FFXI has so many players; there are 2 basic varieties of players: long haul gamers, which will play for years as long as you don't screw the game up, and short term gamers, which will play for a couple months before they get bored. Once a game hits the 3-4 month mark, the short term gamers leave and the long haul gamers stick around and, most of the time, they'll stick around *forever*. The combination of these two elements of the same basic idea converge to explain XI's "superiority" to XIV: you've had a bunch of people that have played a given game for years on end with a poorly constructed system that they are incredibly used to switching to a new game that uses a different system. It's not that XI is superior to XIV; it's that those people are more used to it and they want anything they play to be either a minor deviation from what they're used to or simply the same system with a new story or development push.

One of the threads you're referring to talks about the lack of elemental weaknesses to exploit, which has been something that's deeply set within the FF series. The problem with this (which WoW found out very early on in Vanilla, with all of their endgame raids devoted to basically a single element, the major ones of which were fire) is that it prevents the creation a relatively simple but still compelling play experience. In effect, you're either going to two of these three: a manageable number of abilities, a system that allows for appreciable elemental weakness/strengths, and an interesting and compelling implementation of the combat system. Look at how BLM is designed: it's one of the most fun implementations of an offensive caster that I've seen. It's elegant in its design and fun in execution. The only way you'd be able to use that same playstyle while allowing for elemental weaknesses and strengths would be to create 3-6 times the number of abilities, since you'd need to allow access to all elements while preventing one of the phase aspects of BLM to be rendered redundant (i.e. you would need to allow for variant element Astral Fire spells, variant element Umbral Ice spells, and variant element Thunder/Thundercloud spells in sufficient numbers to cover all elements). Even so, you would have incredible amounts of redundancy when you don't have to worry about elemental resistances weaknesses and, when you do, since there are so many spells, you have to tweak your bars/rotation/keybinds to cover that specific set of elemental weaknesses and strengths. It preserves the playstyle and implements the weakness/resistances, but you end up with so many spells and so much non-combat ability management that it becomes untenable for anyone who doesn't enjoy regular UI manipulation.

There are a *lot* of people that misunderstand certain aspects of ARR and *why* they are good design decisions implemented because the developers were aware of the bad design decisions of other games. ARR has single role jobs/classes because it gives them stronger control over role population. ARR has very little intraclass/interclass customization because other games that *do* allow for such customization just end up with optimized cookie cutter builds that everyone goes with and anyone that deviates from them is denigrated for being substandard; in effect, the only choice you have in those games is whether you're going to be effective and identical or substandard and different.

ARR did away with the aspects of MMOs that developers and players wrongfully considered to be good design. It has been found out that talent trees are not good game design. It has been found out that allowing for multiple roles within a single class that, while not outright *bad*, is not especially *good* game design. ARR doesn't have open world end game or open world PvP because, once again, it's not good game design. So very, very many things about ARR were done because the devs took an objective look at what benefits and what baggage those elements of play brought with them. Rather than bringing them in because they sounded good or because that's just how things had always been done, they actually thought about the problems/goals and considered variant/non-standard designs that would allow them to do so with fewer problems while fulfilling the same goals (especially fulfilling those goals without the pretense and self-delusion of illusory choice proffered by so very many "customization" schemes).

Hell, I honestly believe that the implementation of ARR's endgame and group content development is the absolute best of any MMO I've ever played: the primal trials are boss fights without the arbitrary trash cluttering everything and you can repeat them as much as you want (which is *awesome* and largely without precedent); coil is a standard weekly dungeon with all of the stuff you'd expect implemented in a way that allows comparatively casual players to take part as well (since it doesn't lock you to a group); CT is a very interesting variation on the standard weekly dungeon because you can run it indefinitely but you can only get a single piece of loot per week. Anyone that claims that ARR's endgame should be more like FFXI needs to be put in a sack, have the sack thrown into a river, and have the river lit on fire. Camping certain spawn points for hours on end and getting into boss fights intended to last hours at a time for the "fast" kill is not good design. Sitting around doing nothing isn't fun, especially when your time can be quickly wasted because someone else got the first hit instead of you.

Basically, there are 2 reasons that FFXI is still considered a success: it's part of the FF series and it's been around long enough that there is tremendous inertia in the playerbase. Neither of those have anything to do with it begin a good game. *Many* commercial successes are completely bland games that were just marketed well or require negligible development with a ludicrously loyal and/or large potential player base (just look at people that play CoD or any sports video game: sports games are still basically the same as they were in the NES days and FPSs haven't really changed since Doom; the only real difference is just the improved graphics).

I, too, feel there is a huge lackluster on the elemental weaknesses/resistance in this game.

The way I see it, the elemental resistance/weaknesses shouldn't be about damage but bonus effects.

For example, a fire monster/boss. So attacking it with its opposite could give a small perk, such as self-heal penalty, a slow effect, etc.
An extra effect you wouldn't get otherwise. And that effect would tip the fight that much would still help a bit (especially considering the monsters/bosses build up immunity).

As for players, same. Boosting an elemental resistance would also boost a status resistance (sleep, slow, silence, ...)

That would allow to have a more meaningful elemental feature in the game, while leaving it somewhat underpowered as the developers wanted (and some players want).

Simply hovering your cursor over the element in your profile window would display which status is tied with what element.

What do you think?

N.B.: Also, by being able to pick up attacks from other classes, it would allow other jobs/classes to have access to some elemental spells too. So it wouldn't be restricted to BLM/WHM.

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Originally Posted by Kitru

Let me refute each of those.

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you really do like walls of text.

anyway, you've oversimplified and editorialized a CRAPTON. I don't actually disagree with the whole point of your argument (XI is tremendously outdated) but you're using phrases like "found to be good game design" when what you mean is "found to be safe game design" or even "found to be the popular contemporary idea of good game design"

if you honestly think open world pve and pvp is bad design you're crazy. ARR did a lot of smart things, but it also lost a lot of what makes MMOs fun in the process of streamlining and making the game accessible to all. I don't have a problem with this for the most part, and i certainly am not in the XI-Luddite camp, but at least be realistic and recognize that a lot of ARR's features come with a price.


oh, also your entire last paragraph is just out and out wrong, or at the very least, choking on hyperbole.

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Originally Posted by matic

you're using phrases like "found to be good game design" when what you mean is "found to be safe game design" or even "found to be the popular contemporary idea of good game design"

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Actually, what is considered to be good game design constantly evolves, and the definition I'm using is based upon what other games and developers are doing as they progress. There are certain explicit aspects of game design that transcend fashion, but the fact that many of them are new/newly discovered/becoming more well known doesn't mean that they aren't there. Just because a certain facet is popular doesn't mean it's good nor does the fact that some group of people enjoy it. Some people actually *enjoy* terribly designed games (just look at Risk; it is, quite possibly, the worst designed game *ever* and there are people that love the hell out of it) or specific elements of games that are bad design choices; it doesn't make them *good* though.

Tenets of good game design are based upon maximizing the enjoyment of as many players as possible while ensuring that the game is accessible. As an example, preventing new players from *ever* reaching the same levels as established players regardless of how much they play or how well they play is bad design (EVE does this): it provides explicit superiority to the older players, which many enjoy, but it prevents new players from getting involved or being able to compete on the same level. It's for this reason that the current end game design of most games is good game design: new players are able to reach the same level as existing players and are able to get to the level of progression as established players given a modicum of time and effort.

Keep in mind that I said "as many players as possible". There will be certain aspects of good game design that perturb some players; it's unavoidable because of personal preference. Some people like having incredibly complicated and largely unapproachable subsystems that require intense research and analysis. Some people like being able to troll other people. Some people like inactive time sinks where they're forced to sit around doing nothing, waiting for an entity to spawn (and, yes, ARR does do this; I never said that ARR was perfect).

Whether something qualifies as good game design depends upon the specific audience you're targeting and, oftentimes, there are aspects that are in direct conflict between two populations. EVE was designed for a very specific type of player. If you look at it is a traditional MMO for the "traditional" MMO player, EVE is a *terrible* game. If you look at it as a game designed for the very unique type of player that is drawn to EVE, however, it's an *very* well designed game.

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if you honestly think open world pve and pvp is bad design you're crazy.

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First off, I said open world *end game* PvE is bad. Open world leveling content and event content are perfectly fine and, in fact, quite good because they foster community. Open world end game content, however, is horrible, because it requires players camp locations and compete with other groups in order to get kill credit instead of allowing everything to actually do it. Even if you don't have to camp the given location because the boss is summoned through some other mechanism, it still affords other players the opportunity to troll whoever is doing said content, which is a bad thing since it allows a small number of players to deny access to the game to other players.

Open world PvP is bad design because it always turns into a trolling mechanism and either ends up being horribly imbalanced or influencing PvE balance. Yes, some people enjoy trolling, but games are not designed to facilitate the enjoyment a small number of people derive from pissing off other players and depriving them of the game (e.g. camping a player). It also doesn't help that open world PvP is naturally unbalanced and there is no effective mechanism for enforcing said balance. The often imagined good aspects of open world PvP (large scale player combat; player competition) only work in controlled environments that don't actually end up being open world PvP; they're, for all intents and purposes, large instances.

Keep in mind, I'm referring to this as it applies to a game designed with PvE in mind. Open world PvP works *beautifully* in PvP-centric games like EVE or Aion. What qualifies as good game design changes based upon the specific type of game you're trying to design, though there are some fundamental principles that are global, like the realization that the importance of one player's enjoyment only extends until that player's enjoyment encroaches upon others (many PvPers enjoy getting their heads kicked in every once in a while so getting killed by other players doesn't encroach upon their enjoyment as long as they have some control over whether they get their head kicked in or they're kicking someone else's).

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at least be realistic and recognize that a lot of ARR's features come with a price.

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I'm not sure why you seem to think I don't realize that ARR had to make compromises. I explicitly said that they had to when discussing the elemental weaknesses: you can't have a compelling attack string *and* an approachable number of abilities *and* elemental weaknesses. You can only choose 2.

As to cutting out certain aspects of games that other people like, I already said that you'll never be able to keep everyone happy. Game design is all about triage and making sure that as many people enjoy the game as possible. Some of the stuff you choose to do is going to piss off some people. Some of the stuff you *could* do is going to piss off a *lot* of people. Good game design is all about minimizing the number of people that you piss off while maximizing the number of people that enjoy the game.

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oh, also your entire last paragraph is just out and out wrong, or at the very least, choking on hyperbole.

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I'm going to guess you're one of those people that thoroughly enjoys FPSs and/or sports games. I challenge you to go back and look at the games that I talked about and actually look for what has changed appreciably about those games. Certain aspects have been *refined* somewhat and graphics are most definitely better, but the games are still fundamentally the same (especially sports games). It's not just sports and FPSs either; RPGs haven't changed much since the SNES era.

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Originally Posted by Raestloz

So you see a Bomb, and to defeat it, you use...

Fire?

Come now, SE, this is Final Fantasy. You use Blizzard to kill bombs, not Fire. Fire heals bombs, and yet in this game, elements (or "aspect", as the tooltip calls it) means abso-freaking-lutely nothing. Thunder? Earth? Wind? Don't care. Potency is where it's at.

What's the point in elements? Just to justify the elemental materias and reduce the likelihood to get vitality and critical materia?

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Bombs have always been weak to Fire...

I get your overall point, but your example is facepalm for someone trying to lecture about the way an FF is supposed to work.

They could fix this by making THM lore state that you are not really using "Fire", "Ice", "Thunder" but instead are shaping aether into elements that are considered destructive. This technique is called... a loophole!

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Originally Posted by BlueMage

Bombs have always been weak to Fire...

I get your overall point, but your example is facepalm for someone trying to lecture about the way an FF is supposed to work.

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What are you smoking? Bombs in the series have always been weak to ice or water. They always absorbed fire.

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

What are you smoking? Bombs in the series have always been weak to ice or water. They always absorbed fire.

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Iirc, bombs in II and XI were weak to fire. Using XI in this example because a lot of people here seem to be using XI as there baseline.

Source: http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Bomb

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Originally Posted by Itseotle

Iirc, bombs in II and XI were weak to fire. Using XI in this example because a lot of people here seem to be using XI as there baseline.

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I seriously have to wonder why some people seem to think that FFXI somehow amounts to the entirety of the series. This actually goes over all of the various iterations of bombs throughout the series and you'll note that a massive majority of the time, Bombs are fire elemental, which, even if they're not weak to ice or water, means that they're immune to fire.

Going through the mainline games one at a time...

• FFII: weak to fire and lightning
• FFIII: weak to ice and water
• FFIV: neither strong against nor weak to any element
• FFV: neither strong against nor weak to any element
• FFVI: absorbs fire, weak to ice and water
• FFVII: immune to fire
• FFVIII: absorbs fire, weak to ice and wind
• FFIX: absorbs fire, weak to ice, water, and wind
• FFX: absorbs fire, weak to ice
• FFXI: weak to fire, strong to everything else
• FFXII: absorbs fire, weak to water
• FFXIII: absorbs fire, weak to ice
• FFT: absorbs fire, weak to water, strong against ice
• FFTA: absorbs fire, weak to water and ice

That's 2 occasions where bombs are weak to fire, 2 occasions where they're weak to nothing, and 8 cases where they absorb fire and are weak to either ice or water. So, yeah, the people that think that FFXI defines the entire series need to get it through their heads that FFXI is in no way a game to use as a basis for examining something across the entire series. FFXI is a massive anomaly in so very very many ways.

Sorry to detract from the Bomb-Element-Weakness-And-Resistance debate (BEWAR, for short) but, while I understand Bombs were the OP's opening example, we've sidetracked FAR behyond the actual subject of this thread; The implication of elemental weaknesses and resistances: Gotta Have It vs No Way Jose.

I think in current MMO(s) elemental weaknesses really serve no purpose outside making a class OP or weak. Thus it doesn't need to be implemented. Like I've said in many posts they should just change the lore on BLM and conjurer to state that the "elemental" spells we cast is simply the mana we use taking that appearance.

Now had they made the game accommodate elements from the start of 2.0, I would be okay with it. However since summoners functions the way it does; adding elemental damage would break more than fix. To the point where they would have to almost make a 3.0 In other words the ends wouldn't justify the means for them as a company. Their time would be better vested in discovering how to make each class/job more unique w/o the use of elements.

Side note: they should make apocatasis just be a flat magic damage reduction buff, instead of being for specific elements.

you keep bringing up XI well I was a blm main the ONLY spells that where used where ICE spells and Thunder spells THATS IT. so please explain to me where the problem is? besides that can some one remind me who had water fire earth wind thunder and ice based spells in XIV.1 was it not CNJ? I remember THM using DIA BIO Scourge absorb TP?

FFXIV: ARR is the only Final Fantasy game I know of without elemental affinities, that goes for nearly every RPG I know.

It's a worse game off for it too, it makes the combat more bland than it already is.