Will they maintain AP cost for native abilities?

From the battle reform blueprint:

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Classes

Actions will undergo major revisions, along with both the underlying mechanics and conditions.

By major revisions, not only do we mean the tweaking of effects and potency of existing actions - we will work from the ground up to redesign and reassign actions based on clearly identified class roles.

We will also make a number of changes as part of our reexamination of how actions are equipped and the character requirements for doing so. First, actions learned by each class will be set to the action bar by default when playing as that class. Also, we will be making some actions settable on any class, while other "class-defining" actions obtained at higher ranks will be usable only by that class.

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http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...print?p=138995

At first I thought that the bold part meant that each class will have all of its actions automatically equipped on its action bar, meaning that:

1) It's possible to equip every action from a single class (what about all the spells?)
2) There will be tweaks to the AP and slot system

But the wording is not 100% clear so it would be nice to have feedback from a dev.

This would also lighten up some concerns people have regarding the ability to learn raise at rank 14, and to use it from rank 1 on any given class.

For instance, if only cross-class abilities cost AP points, they are going to balance it in a way that you will have to choose carefully which ones you want to use to insert in a presumably limited cross-class action bar.

I was just thinking about this the other day! I realized (and somehow didn't notice before...) that a big difference between 11 and 14 is that you had access to all of your job's abilities/spells at once in 11 (BLU excluded, of course). Perhaps taking away AP cost for your current class, while keeping it for equipping outside abilities/spells would be more interesting/useful, especially if they're breaking up single/AoE spells.

Interesting thoughts...

But if actions learned by each class will be set to the action bar by default when playing as that class, does that mean all of them? What if there are more than 30. (There are only 3 rows of 10 slots, right?)

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Originally Posted by Darium

Interesting thoughts...

But if actions learned by each class will be set to the action bar by default when playing as that class, does that mean all of them? What if there are more than 30. (There are only 3 rows of 10 slots, right?)

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Yeah I thought about that too. If it's by default, I guess it means that you won't be able to select them, so it would have to be all of them.

Now, with class rebalancing, they might remove some abilities and give them to the upcoming jobs. Or they could increase the amount of slots, or automatically equip the higher tier of a given ability.

Or maybe there could be a slot for say, cure, and when you activate that slot, you have a drop down menu (or something more efficient in a fight) for cure1 or 2 or 3, i-e to select which tier of the ability you wish to use.

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Originally Posted by northernsky

Yeah I thought about that too. If it's by default, I guess it means that you won't be able to select them, so it would have to be all of them.

Now, with class rebalancing, they might remove some abilities and give them to the upcoming jobs. Or they could increase the amount of slots, or automatically equip the higher tier of a given ability.

Or maybe there could be a slot for say, cure, and when you activate that slot, you have a drop down menu (or something more efficient in a fight) for cure1 or 2 or 3, i-e to select which tier of the ability you wish to use.

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All good thoughts.

If people are upset because they are losing the imaginary surplus sp, I can just imagine the nerd-rage if you had to select your cure through a sub-menu. :D

So what if a native Class ability costs 0 AP? It would definitely add to Class distinctiveness. But wouldn't that mean all current AP would have to be recalculated? And either current character available AP would have to be reduced and/or current AP costs would have to be increased.

And maybe this would indeed add to class distinctiveness, but wouldn't it take away from character distinctiveness?? If every level 20 Gladiator automatically knows all the same abilities ... doesn't that make them all the same in the end??

I guess you use AP more like a customization skill point system, but at this moment I'm not sure how that could be made to work.

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Originally Posted by Sorel

So what if a native Class ability costs 0 AP? It would definitely add to Class distinctiveness. But wouldn't that mean all current AP would have to be recalculated? And either current character available AP would have to be reduced and/or current AP costs would have to be increased.

And maybe this would indeed add to class distinctiveness, but wouldn't it take away from character distinctiveness?? If every level 20 Gladiator automatically knows all the same abilities ... doesn't that make them all the same in the end??

I guess you use AP more like a customization skill point system, but at this moment I'm not sure how that could be made to work.

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All good questions, hence why it would be nice to have a dev's comment to clarify.

I think that having 0 AP cost for native ability is a very good idea, I don't think it would be so hard to balance the remaining points to spend. Then they need to solve the problem of having too many native abilities to fit the current action bar.

I don't think it reduces character's distinctiveness anymore than at the moment. It would if you could only equip class-specific actions, but as long as they maintain a significant amount of space for cross-class abilities on your action bar, it stays the same.

So in this scenario it's simply UI's action bar that is the limiting factor. That may not be a bad thing. Plus the capability to use macros for skills that exceed the capacity of the action bars mitigates that limitation somewhat, I think.

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Originally Posted by Sorel

So in this scenario it's simply UI's action bar that is the limiting factor. That may not be a bad thing. Plus the capability to use macros for skills that exceed the capacity of the action bars mitigates that limitation somewhat, I think.

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I agree but from the developers point of view, I remember reading that the point of the action bar was to eliminate the need of macros for quick actions, as opposed to the drop-down menu from XI.

So I'm not sure if they would consider relying on macros for extra abilities. I'm not sure how they could fit so many abilities on the action bar and keep it efficient, considering that it was stated that there were plans to make all the actions slots visible at the same time, compared to the current toggle between 1,2 and 3.

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Originally Posted by northernsky

I agree but from the developers point of view, I remember reading that the point of the action bar was to eliminate the need of macros for quick actions, as opposed to the drop-down menu from XI.

So I'm not sure if they would consider relying on macros for extra abilities. I'm not sure how they could fit so many abilities on the action bar and keep it efficient, considering that it was stated that there were plans to make all the actions slots visible at the same time, compared to the current toggle between 1,2 and 3.

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Well I guess it would all depend on the context of the action as well as the role the character is playing.

A DD may keep his one-shot damaging abilities on his action bars, while his special scenario abilities (e.g. Raise, Cure) or special combos (e.g. Poison --> Skull Sunder) on a macro.

Meanwhile a Tank may keep Cure on his action bar, while keeping the Second Wind --> Sacrifice combo in his macros.

But one of the problems I see with that, though, is that if it's not on the action bar, you won't see it's cooldown timer.

This makes me think that the action bar and the "list of use-able abilities" could be 2 different things.

Right now it's the same, i-e you can not use an ability that is not on your action bar. But if they make all innate abilities useable, plus a short list of cross-class abilities of your choice (same way that Blue mage would choose its spells), then from those 2 groups you could customize your own action bar.

That said, we would need a way to access all those different abilities that do not fit the action bar during a fight. Maybe an action-bar slot could be a drop-down menu for the remaining, use-able abilities that do not fit the bar.

You still have access to these abilities in fight but you keep the convenience of the action bar only for your top 30 abilities/spells. I think this would be mostly useful for mages for which spells quickly fill up the bar.

But we have to think about how this will scale, too. A drop down menu with every ability a character has learned from all their classes could be too unwieldy to navigate effectively. It would only get worse as the level caps get raised and more abilities and classes are added to the game.