Let's talk about SP/EXP Chains!

[Speeral]

When people grumbled at the fact the chain had to break because the magic users needed to rest for MP, which was slightly alleviated by Refresh and Ballad ticking away, at the cost of Red Mage turning into a refresh bot.

And then the player base goes off and complains that they have no role in the party . . . .

Let's get serious you pick a class/job/role/epeen mechanism for a reason . . . . to play that role in the party for a reason. RDM was always a refresh whore, and secondary healer. BRD BUFF whore. PLD/NIN tank, SAM was tp builder and ws specialist.

Grow a brain buddy every class has its specializations, that's how a party works.

Let's look at last night, I was exping with Doho

we had 1 conj 1mrd, 1lnc, 1pug ranks 30-32 doing efts

the conj had two roles healer and BR nuker. That was their job in the party to allow us to kill fast and effectively, they had a DEFINED ROLE something to do and a precise goal explode things and keep pt members alive.

I was tank and puller for our efts pt

our lnc was our tp guy who set up our mrd to close the melee portion of the br
I opened

WE HAD ROLES AND A SPECIFIC TARGET ACTION. that is how xi worked and this is how xiv works

Its comments like yours that really shows how backwards some players are when it comes to group activities.

RDM solo had different tools, for party it had its role, and in HNM it had its role as well. Yes if you wanted to participate you had to follow that, if you did otherwise you deserved being booted out of the party plain and simple.

Doho I like the thread and agree Sp chains would be amazing and would make sp grind parties more fun. Than again you and Gandolf doing stupid damage is amazing and all ha.

Did you see near the end last night when Gandolf popped that no profundity 1500 dmg thunder 2, that poor eft was nuked and toasty :P

[Duelle]

RDM was always a refresh whore, and secondary healer.

RDM was a poorly-designed generalist. Team Tanaka decided to invent the refresh niche because they couldn't be bothered to fix RDM nor make BRD more attractive to play. Players forced RDM into healing because FFXI had a horrible distribution of roles. Summoner was also a victim of this, sadly.

NIN tank

Player-created role that would have been nerfed within a week of being discovered under any normal, rational developer team that could take scope of what that would do to encounter design and overall class balance.

Its comments like yours that really shows how backwards some players are when it comes to group activities.

I wouldn't be so bothered by it had it been someone that actually had a history of being a support class. Like oracle or maybe scholar (which was eventually introduced much later). Instead it inexplicably fell on the guy with a sword in hand that happens to be able to cast magic. I'm just here to comment in hopes that crap does not repeat itself.

I also know what led certain classes down that road, and wish to avoid the mistakes of the past.

[northernsky]

RDM was a poorly-designed generalist. Team Tanaka decided to invent the refresh niche because they couldn't be bothered to fix RDM nor make BRD more attractive to play. Players forced RDM into healing because FFXI had a horrible distribution of roles. Summoner was also a victim of this, sadly.
Player-created role that would have been nerfed within a week of being discovered under any normal, rational developer team that could take scope of what that would do to encounter design and overall class balance.
I wouldn't be so bothered by it had it been someone that actually had a history of being a support class. Like oracle or maybe scholar (which was eventually introduced much later). Instead it inexplicably fell on the guy with a sword in hand that happens to be able to cast magic. I'm just here to comment in hopes that crap does not repeat itself.

I also know what led certain classes down that road, and wish to avoid the mistakes of the past.

I can see that you have bad feelings about misbalance of some of FFXI classes, but linking it to exp chains is far fetched

[Speeral]

RDM was a poorly-designed generalist. Team Tanaka decided to invent the refresh niche because they couldn't be bothered to fix RDM nor make BRD more attractive to play. Players forced RDM into healing because FFXI had a horrible distribution of roles. Summoner was also a victim of this, sadly.
Player-created role that would have been nerfed within a week of being discovered under any normal, rational developer team that could take scope of what that would do to encounter design and overall class balance.
I wouldn't be so bothered by it had it been someone that actually had a history of being a support class. Like oracle or maybe scholar (which was eventually introduced much later). Instead it inexplicably fell on the guy with a sword in hand that happens to be able to cast magic. I'm just here to comment in hopes that crap does not repeat itself.

I also know what led certain classes down that road, and wish to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Poorly designed generalist? Well let's talk rdm for a minute.

Back before SE upped the level cap there were a bunch of mobs that cannot be low manned or solo'd except by rdm. Fairly powerful no?

Examples and if you really want hope on Sylph server speak with yetimon and Smokari.

They have (most older guys on the server have seen this) low manned Tiamat, Jorm, KB, Faffy, most of sea, Seiryu, Turtle, and other nm's that after not playing for 14 months I cannot remember any more. usually their setup was 4-6 mostly rdm and 1 pld/nin. Now these mobs even then many times took 10-18 people to take down. Their rdm were not just refresh whores they were there doing damage from DOT, to small nukes, to melee(unless tp restricted).

RDM was not a poor generalist, as a solo fighter and in a group stance, a well macro'd and geared RDM could stand against the toughest nm's the game through at the players. Those who understood RDM knew their strengths and weaknesses.

We can speak about SMN.

When talking HNM's SMN had three roles buff, back up emergency heal, and Damage using summons. When ls's first started doing the land wyrms the accepted method at the time was tank+heal+buff pt, and then through as many SMN's as we can because Garuda will do high spike dmg, and then we can uncast them to shed hate, rinse and repeat.

No one class in that game did not have uses or a way to use that class. The players themselves had pigeon holed people into job and subjob combos for different uses depending on the nature of the mob and what its strengths and weaknesses were. That is how strategy works once you find a working strategy you follow it so you don't get defeat. All games are built on layered systems, once you understand the system you understand the game and you defeat the challenge ahead of you.


Now back to exp since that'sthe thread topic. Take exping most payers do not like it hence they want to do it as fast as possible and get to the content where ever it resides, mid game/end game. So in exp pt's most parties were fairly open to getting any job once they filled certain roles tank/heal/buff/nuke pre ToAU, post TOAU there was fast DOT melee, healer, buff was what players looked for to get maximum exp in minnimum time.

Even in XIV everything is fast and less grindy over all compared to xi, but to bring back systems that made the monotony of grinding a little more fun is not a bad thing. Also in XIV there is much less strategy, much stronger pc's, and weaker mobs making sp'ing very easy and worth doing between resets. But why bother when we are still waiting until the meaty content comes? right now unless you really want to you don't need strategy to kill stuff fast and efficiently while using resource management.

This game does not require thinking on a high level like xi did. So Duelle I would suggest having better arguments and some for thought about what someone will counter when you make a statement but with not much behind as proof.

Also www.youtube.com

search rdm solo
rdm low man
rdm anything and you'll see rdm was not a poorly developed job

[Duelle]

Poorly designed generalist? Well let's talk rdm for a minute.

<snip>

Your attempts to justify the class' state by naming a bunch of solos (that should and would have been nerfed under any rational developer team) and lowman attempts simply show how clouded RDM's image is to some. The class is a hybrid with multiple roles available to them. Except that in the party-based game that was FFXI, this meant nothing because people needed heals and the class was further boned by Refresh being on its spell list because no one had an inherent way of regenerating MP. Instead of changing RDM to better fit a chosen role within a party (a RDM choosing to play like a melee DD in a party and being beneficial, a RDM choosing to heal and being beneficial, a RDM choosing to nuke and being beneficial), SE decided to trash the RDM concept and turned it into a enfeebler whose real value was Cure, Haste and Refresh in party play, AKA the play style that the game was built upon.

The solos don't and have never mattered, because the game was built from the groun up on partying. Yes, there are individuals who talk about the devs' own innaction to oversights in design as if it were a feature of the class when in reality it simply perpetuates a problem and creates more the further we go along. And as long as RDM is still a cure/refresh/haste bot in party play, my point will continue to stand.

We can speak about SMN.

<snip>

HNM somehow made it alright that you could do nothing to level SMN short of playing as /WHM (not even SMN/WHM) for 70 levels until you got the lv70 blood pacts? And the fact that scaling for Blood Pacts was horrible until they actually decided to help those scale with Summoning Magic Skill? Broken ways of skilling, the still-broken spirits, not to mention how long it took them to realize how asinine it was to have a universal timer on Blood Pacts, leading to the split of Rage and Ward? The job was a joke below 70 except under the effect of Astral Flow. That doesn't say "proper design" to me. The more I look at it, the more I realize that this job got boned by player dynamics because of how it was designed and now close to a decade after the game was released it is finally starting to look like it should have right out of the box on launch day.

Take exping most payers do not like it hence they want to do it as fast as possible and get to the content where ever it resides, mid game/end game. So in exp pt's most parties were fairly open to getting any job once they filled certain roles tank/heal/buff/nuke pre ToAU, post TOAU there was fast DOT melee, healer, buff was what players looked for to get maximum exp in minnimum time.

Even in XIV everything is fast and less grindy over all compared to xi, but to bring back systems that made the monotony of grinding a little more fun is not a bad thing. Also in XIV there is much less strategy, much stronger pc's, and weaker mobs making sp'ing very easy and worth doing between resets. But why bother when we are still waiting until the meaty content comes? right now unless you really want to you don't need strategy to kill stuff fast and efficiently while using resource management.

There's an actual psychological take to why I say what I say. People are less prone to be in a hurry when there's no visual cues to cause them to hurry along. The chain timer nagging at you constantly is what in part created that "go go go-!" mentality, and this is not helped by the fact that if wearing your underwear on your head out in public gave you a 5% bonus to exp certain players would do it just for efficiency's sake. I'd rather exp per hour be affected entirely by how players pace themselves over focing everyone to set themselves to the exact same metronome mark just because it gets them more exp/hour due to chain multipliers. The sense of urgency in gaining exp is not really necessary (and in my case, completely unwelcomed).

rdm anything and you'll see rdm was not a poorly developed job

Read my signature.

Spoke with the dev. team about the discussion going on here regarding SP/EXP chains (and your ideas behind them). They wanted me to relay to you that there are plans in place for chains, but the specifics will be looked into once the main battle adjustments have been made.

Oh well. I can only hope they come up with something better than the system in XI. I liked people not being complete efficiency mongers for once.