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. :)

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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 it would disadvantage classes that do not have an advantage, and cause them to be excluded from parties. People who main those classes would find themselves under pressure to not play it anymore.

It does happen with blue mage and I think they are willing to explore it in limited areas like how it was done in eureka.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

Why would I invite? Because it's a game? You won't get into this fight but you'll get into another.

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Words cannot even describe how glad I am that you are not on the design team.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

Bunch of text

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First i'm just going to assume your signature is severly outdated or that's an alt, otherwise i really dont understand why are you having this discussion.

Leaving that aside, creating a scenario in which some classes are at a clear disadvantage just for the sake of it is simply not fun. If you do enjoy this kind of game design, you can try any of the other mmos that follow that philosophy and join the hundreds of players in their forums that complain each new content release because their classes or specs are useless or unefficient in it and can't get groups.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

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.

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to be honest it sounds like people want it to be you know a "final fantasy" game..

Even yoshi said something similar back in 2019 i think it was. The final fantasy franchise needs to go back to its fanbase and not mainstream audiences if it has any hope of survival.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

to be honest it sounds like people want it to be you know a "final fantasy" game..

Even yoshi said something similar back in 2019 i think it was. The final fantasy franchise needs to go back to its fanbase and not mainstream audiences if it has any hope of survival.

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I'd need to see the specific context of that quote, because that doesn't necessarily mean 'putting elemental weaknesses back into the game.'

Regardless of the rest of the franchise XIV is still doing well. And elemental weaknesses are not something you can just slap into the game as is and call it a day without huge overhauls to several jobs.

'This enemy is weak to fire' works great in older gams where your black mage has fire, thunder and blizzard etc doing the same thing but used against different enemies to exploit weaknesses.

When your black mage is cycling through fire burst phases burning their MP and ice regen phases to get it back while throwing out lightning dots, and you need them to be both viable but also not brokenly OP to the point of not taking other dps jobs in tiers of raid encounters etc, that doesn't work so well.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

I'd need to see the specific context of that quote, because that doesn't necessarily mean 'putting elemental weaknesses back into the game.'

Regardless of the rest of the franchise XIV is still doing well. And elemental weaknesses are not something you can just slap into the game as is and call it a day without huge overhauls to several jobs.

'This enemy is weak to fire' works great in older gams where your black mage has fire, thunder and blizzard etc doing the same thing but used against different enemies to exploit weaknesses.

When your black mage is cycling through fire burst phases burning their MP and ice regen phases to get it back while throwing out lightning dots, and you need them to be both viable but also not brokenly OP to the point of not taking other dps jobs in tiers of raid encounters etc, that doesn't work so well.

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oh no it doesnt refer to that specifically. the quote was from fanfest 2019 i believe..

but in general a lot of people seem to making a lot of comments about how bland and boring thigns are right now and many of the things that come up aretypically elements that are common in final fantasy games. it seems to be quite a common opinion that they need to bring some of this finalfantasy depth back in one form or another

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Originally Posted by Dzian

oh no it doesnt refer to that specifically. the quote was from fanfest 2019 i believe..

but in general a lot of people seem to making a lot of comments about how bland and boring thigns are right now and many of the things that come up aretypically elements that are common in final fantasy games. it seems to be quite a common opinion that they need to bring some of this finalfantasy depth back in one form or another

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There may be other things they can do in general to improve the game by drawing on past FF games. But elemental weaknesses is not one of them, not without huge changes to things like job design, job and raid encounter balance etc. And I'm only addressing this one topic because it's what the thread is about. There might be other ideas I'd support, but this one gets a hard nope from me considering how it would affect other aspects of the game.

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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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FF14 did try and have a more traditional battle system.
We had one until shortly before Heavensward.
Back then we had materia that would enhance your resistance to, or damage for, certain elements.
Parties of BLMs would load up on materia for whatever element a boss was weak to and blitz them down before they could really do any mechanics (really bad in Garuda).

But the final straw when when SMN used Titan egi to tank Ramu EX. Tank jobs were told to go home and turned away from parties because the pet was naturally resistant to Ramu's all thunder kit, and it had 90% magic resist (to stop it from dying from raidwides).

We tried having a "more traditional battle system" based on elemental weaknesses, and the devs didn't like how it rarely enhanced content, but mainly gave players ways to circumvent content entirely.
They didn't like it so much they emergency hotfixed it out, didn't even wait for an expac or even a patch to remove it.

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Originally Posted by ChocoPuni

Why would I invite? Because it's a game? You won't get into this fight but you'll get into another. Having some planning would also make the game more interesting, and if people can't learn how to not exploit the systems - it's only their fault and that can be penalized.

If they did have that, I'd rather have it back!

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For the sake of argument, let's assume this happened. We'll use Leviathan Unreal since he already has a mechanic which resists range attacks. If said mechanic persisted throughout the fight on both his head and tail, that means bringing anything but four melee would be detrimental. If we said limit it to say, he only resists magic attacks, Casters are worthless and healers can't DPS.

Do you not see the serious issue that would cause. For reference sake, Ninja was completely locked out of Titania and Innocence at Shadowbringers launch simply because its damage laughably inferior to every other melee and caster. Imagine entire fights where that philosophy became the norm. You'd drive far more people away from the game than adding elemental weaknesses ever will. Put bluntly, I doubt very many people care.

As for redesigning jobs to accommodate such a system. Are you okay with literally no new content for a year, possibly two? Changes like the ones you're asking for necessitate huge amounts of resources. Which means instead of new raids or even jobs (Sage and Maiming Melee DPS come to mind), we'll get elemental weaknesses and niche concepts better utilized on Blue Mage. These aren't changes to make eight years into a game's lifespan as it's likely to upset the current playerbase who already enjoys—even prefers—the current systems. Basically, you're asking for FFXIV to be a different game. That isn't going to happen.

Any combat system that results in preferential treatment of one job over another would need to restructure both the fights available and the reward system so people don't end up getting locked out of upgrading due to maining the "wrong" job for a patch of content.

In XI job favoritism was indeed rampant among higher tiers of content and reared its ugly head in certain leveling spots/ranges but that game also had, in my opinion, a stronger sense of community and friendship so you could get your oddball jobs into parties with friends or folks from your LS without much pain.

At the end of the day, XIV has been directed to make every job balanced on a razor's edge which leaves no room for depth outside of learning a rotation and a boss's routine. But from what I hear that itself is hard for people so who's to say we need more depth when what little we do have is difficult to grasp.

Not a bad idea in a void. But it wouldn't work for XIV. Not without MASSIVE overhauls. Take BLM for example. Has 3 elements that each serve a specific purpose. Lightning is a DOT, Ice regens MP, Fire is your big burst damage. If they added elemental weaknesses and there was an enemy weak to ice, what would you do? Just ignore your rotation to spam ice spells? That wouldn't really add any complexity, in fact it would remove it since a large part of BLM's skill comes from getting all your fire spells in without losing enochian.

That doesn't even get into how none of the noncasters currently have any elemental abilities that I can think off off the top of my head aside from Ninja and maybe monk if you squint. They'd have to add all sorts of skills to them. And then what, does every class get every element? Or do only certain classes get certain elements? That would start making them preferred over other classes for specific pieces of content which is explicitly against the dev team's design ideology. They want everyone to be able to just play the class they want to play, to experience the fantasy they want to experience in that role. If only certain classes got certain elements, you'd be pressured to play different classes to be able to compete, so if you just wanted to play X class and that's it, you'd be SOL.

Once again, that's not inherently a bad thing (in fact it could be pretty cool), but it goes against this game's design ideology. It just doesn't fit with how the game currently is.

If you like having to take advantage of stuff like element/status vulnerabilities, the Masked Carnivale has that.

Those kinds of mechanics really don't work in the modern MMO environment where class balance is valued instead of being an afterthought.

I miss the old battle system where elemental weaknesses existed. I'm really sad they took them away, and wish they would bring them back.

It's a great system that exists in most RPGs, not least of which most other Final Fantasy games and Pokemon. And I would really like to see it again.

It seems like some people don’t understand the underlying issues adding the elemental wheel back in would cause, maybe explaining it with old world of Warcraft content would. There was a raid, molten core, where nearly every enemy resisted or was flat out immune to fire spells. The Fire spec on a mage was useless, the destruction spec on Warlock was useless, and back in those days it cost the game currency gold to respec to a different damage type.

Now in our current iteration, the elemental wheel would effect strictly casters, either making them more advantageous to the fight, effectively locking out melee, or make them useless in a fight, locking themselves from content. The exception to this being ast, scholar and summoner since their damage types are “unaspected”.

Boss is immune to fire? Black mages are locked into strictly ice and lightning spells. Boss immune to earth/holy? White mages are locked out (I’m actually not sure what the damage type on glare is). If the boss resists or is immune to any of wind, stone, fire, or thunder red mage is locked out. Even if it’s just one of those elements rdm would lose access to a good portion of its toolkit.

If this concept were returned to the game it would have to be neutered to the point that it didn’t matter, make it too large of a damage increase and you change the meta for specific fights, case in point being the entirety of heavensward and stormblood dps meta being dragoon ninja and bard because of how powerful they were when working together, most other jobs were avoided when it came to party finder content.

So it comes down to if you are okay having to reroll your main class every content patch for the sake of being optimal, which the general population will not be.

Also this is looking strictly at raids and trials, dungeons with multiple enemy types would cause a lot more issues.

I feel like these people already know what it would mean to the game; I think they simply don't care that it would need intense rework. Never mind that once again, the game is simply too far old to incorporate this sort depth/complexity into its system, the game actually went through this phase as other people have pointed out and it was abandoned.

You're better off wish-dreaming for a different Final Fantasy mmo or a visually "modern" FFXI than hoping in vain FF14 will completely overhaul itself to accomodate all these changes.

This could help with the repetitive combat, especially the open world mobs.

This is why i love BLU, feels like I'm playing an RPG game

Weaknesses are cool and intresting the first time you get to figure them out. After that they become a "chore" that either limits your toolkit or is so meanigless that it can be ignored - that goes for all Final Fantasy games in my experience btw. My FFX-endgame constistet of Quick Hit 90% of the time, because even if the boss had any weakness it was meaningless.

By its nature as an MMO this game will require you to do things not once or twice but countless times - wether it be dungeons or boss fights. You only get the first time where its cool to figure it out once, after that your toolkit will be potantially cut by a good amount with nothing to show for.

You also need to consider that you're not playing this game alone - so playing extremly inefficient is not really an option. Which means that any customisation will, in the end, boil down to one set (maybe differing in nuances). The funny thing is that that goes for older FFs aswell - you have those that offer basically no or very little customisation by assing each character a job that dictates how their stats increase and what they learn (FFI, FFIV, FFVI, FFIX - in a sense FFIII and FFV: You get to pick the job, but then you're limited, pretty much like we are here. Minus crossclassskills) or you have those that offer more customisation, that ultimately boils down to basically one ideal set up or strategy (FFVII, FFVIII, FFX). I ended FFX by spamming Quick Hit with all my characters, all of them equiped with the same type of armor and their Celestial Weapon.

The MMOs that use an elemental weakness/resistance system generally are not ones with challenging or mechanically intensive fights (PWI and Aion come to mind and they are very old MMOs). Most MMOs, specially newer ones, go for the simplified Physical/Magic split since it doesn't outright screw roles that lack the respective element.

Even ESO where you could get whatever skill you wanted from any tree and make a dual axe wielding draconian werewolf mage they quickly moved from an elemental scheme to the aforementioned physical/magical split.

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Originally Posted by Jin-

This could help with the repetitive combat, especially the open world mobs.

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I think the opposite would happen. They can't give us a full rotation for every element because that would be way too much button bloat. So instead the rotation would be "oh it's weak to water so rotation is Water IV > Water IV > Water IV Water IV > Water IV...

Also they can't actually make you stronger than other DDs just because you used the correct element, because of balancing issues. Old RPGs solved this issue by limiting your MP pool. But they can't do that in an MMO, except you want to stay around and do nothing for basically half the fight.
This means there are technically no elemental weaknesses, just elemental resistances. Adding elements would nothing but punish casters and would not reward them at all. Just like Dark Knight who had to choose between damage and defense with Dark Arts in the past, but because of balancing he had to choose - while every other tank just had both at the same time. There was only risk, but no reward. Fun gameplay.

So, there's another game, a mobile game (it's a cool and generous gacha you should try it guys) named Dissidia FF: Opera Omnia.

It's basically a turn based RPG with protagonists from differents FF titles.
Year(s) ago they added Alisaie to the game, great! She uses Fire, Earth, Wind, Thunder and Holy damage!

But for a very, very long moment she was just a terrible character as elemental resistance exists. So if a boss resisted/absorbed one of the five element I quoted above, then Alisaie couldn't take part in this content.

Imagine if Titan Absorbed Earth, Ifrit Fire and so on, do you honestly believe RDM would be picked at all?

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

For the sake of argument, let's assume this happened. We'll use Leviathan Unreal since he already has a mechanic which resists range attacks. If said mechanic persisted throughout the fight on both his head and tail, that means bringing anything but four melee would be detrimental. If we said limit it to say, he only resists magic attacks, Casters are worthless and healers can't DPS.

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I'm really glad you bring up Leviathan, because this was a minor annoyance for NIN and RDM in Leviathan NM and EX and is even more pronounced in Leviathan UR.

Leviathan does have damage type weaknesses--at least, insofar as the head and the tail each have a damage type that they don't reflect. And it's pretty neat on paper. But man is it a pain in the ass for RDM. Fleche and Contre-sixte "deliver an attack", which mean they are physical. Spells are of course magical. Enchanted weaponskills "deal unaspected damage" which mean they're magical. This has a few consequences.

RDM, which double weaves attack oGCDs quite often, can no longer double weave Fleche and Contre-sixte effectively, because that involves the following sequence of actions: slow cast on head, instant cast on head, find and target tail, Fleche on tail, Contre-sixte on tail, retarget head before the GCD ends so you can start casting again. In practice, we can only really use one at a time. Even a quick-swapping target macro can't solve the problem entirely because there still might not be time to switch, use both oGCDs, switch back, and start casting; and it would need to be re-primed after any add mechanics.

Further, if the party fails to prevent hysteria puddles from going out, and any of them are on the head, the only available target for an Enchanted melee combo is the tail. However, the tail reflects magic. So the choices are a) do a melee combo on the tail and hope you don't annoy the healers or b) dump excess mana with E.Reprise.

NIN's Shuriken is physical but all the other jutsus are magical, so they might have similar target juggling issues. This problem also occurs in Void Ark against the demondog+demonasparagus boss pair, which don't reflect the wrong type of damage but are at least immune to it.

I'm glad this isn't the norm for fight design.

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Originally Posted by EirolOcarrol

I miss the old battle system where elemental weaknesses existed. I'm really sad they took them away, and wish they would bring them back.

It's a great system that exists in most RPGs, not least of which most other Final Fantasy games and Pokemon. And I would really like to see it again.

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See, I know that a lot of people play this game because of the Final Fantasy IP and expect it to be like the rest of the franchise, but the thing is, this is not an RPG, nor an RPGMMO. It's an MMORPG.

The genre is called MMORPG for a reason, the Massive Multiplayer Online aspect is at the forefront and the main focus of these kind of games. As such, when taking decisions regarding the design of different aspects of the game, there is a social component that needs to be taken into account aside from the technical aspects.

In FFVIII you don't run the risk of Quistis saying "sorry Squall, only students with Blizzard aspected weapons are allowed to take the Ifrit cavern test" or "sorry Zell, we are only taking a full Snipers team, melees just don't do well against a witch". These kind of problems however exist and will continue to exist in MMOs if you give advantages to a certain group over others. Which would be the case of elemental weakness/resistances.

Technically speaking, BLU offers this via Condensed Libra. Inflict either Astral, Umbral, or Physical weakness. Would be a little nice if we had a bit more control over which one you get...

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Originally Posted by lezard21

See, I know that a lot of people play this game because of the Final Fantasy IP and expect it to be like the rest of the franchise, but the thing is, this is not an RPG, nor an RPGMMO. It's an MMORPG.

The genre is called MMORPG for a reason, the Massive Multiplayer Online aspect is at the forefront and the main focus of these kind of games. As such, when taking decisions regarding the design of different aspects of the game, there is a social component that needs to be taken into account aside from the technical aspects.

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While I do not think elemental weakness should be a feature in this game, I don't agree with what you're saying here either.

First, I think you're thinking it in reverse. If you think of the phrase "red car" in the English language, "car" is the subject while "red" describes what kind of car it is. MMORPG means Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. The subject is at the end, and all the descriptors follows along from right to left.

So, it is

A game
A role-playing game
An online role-playing game
A multiplayer online role-playing game.
A massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
An MMORPG

An RPGMOO makes as much as sense as saying "car red" in the English language. It is an RPG with MMO features. An MMO is nothing by itself, just a bunch of descriptors.

Second, MMO doesn't inherently mean social. It is massively multiplayer online, not massively social online. The social aspect is up to the players. The game merely facilitates the multiplayer aspect.

Try Blue Mage

Maybe OP just should go play FF11 instead.