"A system that rewards effort and innovation" can't be buzzwords for imbalance-get

[Lerris]

Since Raubahn only developed a 50% immunity each time, it was very manageable with only two of the three damage types. And the three damage types were broad enough to allow a lot of leeway in jobs.

[Peregrine]

Unfortunately you're wrong, I do have evidence:

-Changes to actions for Disciplines of War & Magic classes
-Further changes to enhance class uniqueness
-NEW- Adjustment of certain action effects in line with the introduction of dungeons
-NEW- Adjustment of range of effect for actions (single target or area)
-NEW-Adjustment of recast time and MP consumption for actions
-Reexamination of stats

All pulled directly from the LFTP. Sounds a lot like 'balancing' to me.

Clean your ears.
Everything in the game is changing. There is zero indication of job balancing in anything you mentioned. Balancing isn't simple change to accomodate auto attack and stat redesign. It's a fundamental decision to alter how jobs view other jobs.

If change isn't accompanied by balance, you're the first one left in town. If I were you, I wouldn't put my eggs in that basket you're holding. It has no bottom.

[Peregrine]

Things like that would be great, but then you have the issue of being forced to have a certain job type. What if nobody from your LS has levelled that job, or there's nobody free online from one of those jobs? It's the same issue that we had in XI where we couldn't even level unless we had a fairly specific setup for a party.

If your LS is made of a bunch of thaumaturges and archers, maybe you should think more about game balance and playing fairly and less about conveniently levelling the imbalance in the game. I'm not going to pretend that there isn't a large group here who only levels and only plays the imbalanced jobs because they like how the imbalance makes them feel and like how it gets them treated. I'm saying it's not very admirable and should be developed against.

If there are not enough of the other jobs, then the developers are already too late and have already failed to balance the jobs for so long that they've quit like they did in FFXI. In FFXI, meleers got massive enhancements to the point where black mage and ranger almost went extinct because the devs had a choice. Either enhance meleers and piss off the spoiled ranged attackers...or lose 70% of the game's population who refuse to "just level black mage if you want to be useful."

FFXI was so Darwinistic against meleers that everyone and their brother already knew instinctively to level archer and mages in this game. That lancer was going to be a bad investment from the start. The developers evolved and encouraged players to be like this.

How FFXI treated dragoons, thieves, and dark knights for 4 years was the reason it never got half of WoW's subscriptions. The game was a playland for rangers and mages, and the meleers paid to keep their lights on.

Now that the "just doesn't get it" is being fixed, there are two massive threats to this game assuming they can actually develop 8/10 content like they promise. The first is RMT and cheating. The second is class balance.

Right now they get a D in both. This game could never have worked as-designed, because the jobs are poorly constructed in comparison to each other. It is a fundamental weakness that most players were too busy screaming about chocobos to notice, and it's a huge issue.

None of Yoshida's to-do boxes addresses the 2nd most, arguably most important going concern for the game where it's grossly failing. Class/Job imbalance and poor design.

Whoever designed thaumaturges and archers should not be let near the new system, because that person fundamentally does not understand the consequences of their decisions.

[Issachar]

As a general lurker, maybe I too should say that Peregrine needs to get off his/her high-horse. Nothing but unwarranted self importance in this thread, as well as others...

Hell, just because you can't innovate on your own doesn't mean the rest of us should be robbed of tried-and-true tactics.

How real world combat works:

Too many infantry units? Strike them from the air.
Heavy hitting units such as tanks and demolitions specialists? Strike from afar.
Too many archers/snipers raining on your parade? Send in heavy/armored units.
Your snipers are getting rushed down by heavy units? Use evironments to your advantage.
Enemies using environmental advantages? Use demolitions.

See how this works? No, you do not, because you're acting like a Keyboard Master without any capacity to strategize.

[Rinsui]

Not again a Peregrine post on how "Tanking it straight" should be the only option *evar*.
Because standing right in the trajectory of a bullet is, like, the most effective way to win a gunfight.

Seriously, people may come to the conclusion you are either a maso or traumatized because people in FFXI wouldn't invite your PLD. Hint: Your job never was the problem.

[Peregrine]

Like I said, there will be no lack of people who want their imbalance-gets to stay how they always have. They'll balk at the concept of true class balance, because that would defeat the reason they play certain jobs, which is the high golf handicap they afford certain players who wouldn't be anything noteworthy otherwise.

They can't *actually* win the content, so they devise imbalanced ways to get around them and call that "strategy."

Not buying buckets of bologne around here, sorry.

Don't let them win fights they don't deserve to. If they can't win without 4 archers and 4 thaumaturges, they don't deserve to win. They don't even deserve the attempt. Balance the classes so inferior players can't ride the coattails of fad and broken jobs.

They think they're smart and powerful, when really they're just trite and weak. It's not strategy. Imbalance is how the weak progress through MMORPGs, convinced that they're strong.

This is the part where Matsui's guy-with-half-a-heart should fail. All the archer-getters out there in the crowd don't deserve to win simply by spiking Ifrit to death, staying out of AoE range, and heavy shot spamming so it can't get enough TP.

They think they're smart for coming up with these "strategies" when they're plainly obvious to everyone. Duh. Stupidly obvious exactly how difficult content will be shirked in this game by the "elite."

They should not even be allowed to step into a 8 man fight with less than 4 different classes. The 12 shouldn't even allow that kind of failure and weakness. That would make imbalance-getters RAGE. To have to come up with some other solution besides rangering ranger on their ranger and manaburning everything down.

There are certain FFXI players in the crowd here who have never won a single fight, because all they've ever known was to flock to imbalance to get AROUND a difficulty. And they like it that way because they only play the jobs that get them included in these fail "strategies."

Balance the jobs. You already know what the archer is going to say, naturally.

[Micronowski]

You know they could easily fix the melee/mage ratio by implementing a system similar to FFXIII's. Mages would build up the guard break meter, once broken melee's would dish out the damage(or vise versa).

[Peregrine]

You know they could easily fix the melee/mage ratio by implementing a system similar to FFXIII's. Mages would build up the guard break meter, once broken melee's would dish out the damage(or vise versa).

There are several thing they can do to fundamentally alter and block the ways that players shirk difficult content in MMOs. Let's stop pretending that what they do is "innovation" and "strategy" as a good start though. Glad, Archerx5, Thmx2 isn't a strategy.

It's how weak players skip that fight.

[RemnantWolf]

I can see what the OP is trying to say. I have seen it quite a few times, an MMO developer trying to make the game harder adds a lot of Area efficting attacks and it kills Melee fighters making ranged fighters like archers and mages.

Saying that SE will make this mistake before they even put in changes that would lead us to believe they will take this route may seem like an overreaction. But when you consider that most MMO developers just throw this in as opposed to new ideas that keep the game balanced for everyone, it may not be.

There are ways to avoid this, like giving each enemy a optimal range for damage and hate gain. And increasing a class's effectiveness in different situations, therefore making advantages for more diverse parties as opposed to ranged parties with a tank and healer.

Telling SE that making such imbalanced choices are not good for the game before they happen may seem premature but stopping it before it happens and making them think on what is a good balanced and difficulty increasing choice is better than letting them make mistakes before they happen is going to help the development team and the game much more.

[Teknoman]

Clean your ears.
Everything in the game is changing. There is zero indication of job balancing in anything you mentioned. Balancing isn't simple change to accomodate auto attack and stat redesign. It's a fundamental decision to alter how jobs view other jobs.

If change isn't accompanied by balance, you're the first one left in town. If I were you, I wouldn't put my eggs in that basket you're holding. It has no bottom.

Doesnt general adjustment count as balancing? Sure its not explicitly saying "We are balancing ___" but adjustments to most of the fundamental parts of the system as well as implementing a different battle system, and even changing up the stats/ distribution of enemies goes towards an attempt to balance things.

Besides, i'm sure things will be a little different, especially since it's the XI director, and i'd like to think he's learned from his past mistakes. Along with the fact that alot of servers were different back then. Even now...when I recently played on the Fairy/Sylph server, I really didnt see THAT many rangers 24/7, and on Midgardsormr, as a Paladin from NA launch until 2004, I really didnt have that much of a problem getting parties.

Always made sure I had a fairly balanced party (coming straight from standard FF titles to XI), and Dark Knights/Samurai seemed to be in decent demand with one ranger every now and then. After reading the OP again, I see where you are coming from, however, people are still going to figure out ways to "cheese" things in video games no matter what.