Now that leves will be gone from our main exp function...

[Physic]

Yep.

What's the point of adding supposedly cool content now, when all combat devolves into spamming random actions with almost no strategy or consequences? Dungeons, hamlet defenses, questing, whatever... all of those sort of assume that they players have to get together and do meaningful things in a party. Otherwise, they'll just be adding more snoozefest zerg fights in the game, except these now have a different name.

uhh battle only "devolved" into that when they made the cap lower than 10 levels. Back when they had large level difference groups, you needed dedicated healers, dps, and tanks, who were completely kitted for those roles. you couldnt spam random actions with no consequences, your dmg would suck and the monster would take forever to kill.

Imagine FFXI if you were forced to fight even match in 6 man groups, tanks would be useless, mages would get by with cheap cures with no cares, blm wouldnt get to nuke much, because stuff would die faster than they could cast an ancient magic.
oh wait it would seem to become a mindless spam fest and zerg fights.
It has nothing to do with battle and everything to do with the SP reward system, which wasnt the initial SP plan, soooo i dont think i could blame the original plans for that, it was the hastily added fixes that caused it. Back in the original SP system, good partying and not zerging was the best way to get SP, and you attacked monsters as high as you were able to kill at a decent speed.

A tank had to tank well, or people died, people had to dodge WS, or the mages had to cure it up and remove effects, DD needed to optomize their damage, guess what, spamming reg attacks is not the most damage. Using tp skills from your base class is the most damage. in fact, even better damage now, would be using small BR chains.

No battle system will be a non zerg fest versus monsters 1 person can solo its simple mathematics.

[Rydin]

uhh battle only "devolved" into that when they made the cap lower than 10 levels. Back when they had large level difference groups, you needed dedicated healers, dps, and tanks, who were completely kitted for those roles. you couldnt spam random actions with no consequences, your dmg would suck and the monster would take forever to kill.

Imagine FFXI if you were forced to fight even match in 6 man groups, tanks would be useless, mages would get by with cheap cures with no cares, blm wouldnt get to nuke much, because stuff would die faster than they could cast an ancient magic.
oh wait it would seem to become a mindless spam fest and zerg fights.
It has nothing to do with battle and everything to do with the SP reward system, which wasnt the initial SP plan, soooo i dont think i could blame the original plans for that, it was the hastily added fixes that caused it. Back in the original SP system, good partying and not zerging was the best way to get SP, and you attacked monsters as high as you were able to kill at a decent speed.

A tank had to tank well, or people died, people had to dodge WS, or the mages had to cure it up and remove effects, DD needed to optomize their damage, guess what, spamming reg attacks is not the most damage. Using tp skills from your base class is the most damage. in fact, even better damage now, would be using small BR chains.

No battle system will be a non zerg fest versus monsters 1 person can solo its simple mathematics.

I see your point
A zerg fest or tank and spank easy content wasn't the fault of the battle system so much as it was the MOBs
You can build MOBs that require skillful play under the only battle system

A Beast MOB with a tough outer... And you need to incap each part to do any real damage on it...
Incap moves don't do much damage (Because of the shell) so you need a really big BR to put enough damage on to break the shell
But incaps are tough if you can't build TP to do the weaponskills....
Siphon TP, Comrade in Arms and Invigorate help...
You use your Archers, Marauders and Pugilist to incap the headshell... Finally....
You have a choice.... everyone can attack from the front (And risk being hit by a massive AOE) or you can try to incap the sides or rear shells
Also Incapping the head (After the head shell has been incapped) will stop him from using that massive front AOE... so thats what you decide to do...
You could have also chose to incap the right shell and then the right arm underneath it to stop his physical counterattack but you decide to try to heal through it...

Challenging play isn't just in the battle system, you've just got to build interesting MOBs
Add some minions to that battle... give him a huge HP pool and you've got yourself a fight

[Kafeen]

Party Based MOB Grinding:

*Multitude of camping spots for each level range in different areas, and since the maps are big enough, so you don't have to fight over mobs.

I really hope this isn't what party play is reduced to. Guildleves are repetitive but nothing is more repetitive than standing in one spot killing the same type of mob again and again.

[Duelle]

Hopefully they will be making adjustments to mob distribution, respawn rates and remove the 10 level SP cap on mobs and then we shall be free to mash up the beasts of Eorzea.

Why remove the cap? It did away with a huge part of the problem that hit FFXI: people started overcamping everything they could for max exp/hour. This affected gearing trends and created asinine "expectations" of what people should have when grouping. It also created a stupid and pointless status quo while leveling. That's stress and pressure not needed during the leveling process.

[AlexiaKidd]

Why remove the cap? It did away with a huge part of the problem that hit FFXI: people started overcamping everything they could for max exp/hour. This affected gearing trends and created asinine "expectations" of what people should have when grouping. It also created a stupid and pointless status quo while leveling. That's stress and pressure not needed during the leveling process.

The cap should be removed as it is one of the main reasons people do not group up and party. You can solo some mobs that are 10 ranks higher than yourself and certainly duo/trio them, this makes being in a large group kind of pointless and also makes fighting tougher Mobs that challenge the group pointless. Raptor Parties one of the best things to grind on currently in the game are pointless to fight in a 8 person party at R40 (they are R55-60) as you go through them so fast you will run out before they respawn so it is better to go in a smaller group get more SP per kill and not run out by taking longer to kill.

With the cap removed people could group up, fight Raptors in a small party then if a few more join the party, head off to fight something a bit more challenging and be rewarded accordingly for it. Full 8 person parties could take down some of the tougher mobs in the game and be rewarded for it, with the cap in place there is no point in killing these mobs as the time taken to SP given is not good enough. Kind of like when doing Leve's and selecting your Star rating, sure you could do them on 5 star and the mobs be 20 ranks above your own and it will be much tougher but why would you do that when you can breeze through it on 3 star and the mobs be 10 ranks above you so you will get the same SP/EXP.

People will always use the most effective method for gaining SP/EXP (currently it is Leve abandoning), that will never change and removing the cap will make no difference in that respect all it will do is allow people to have more options in gaining that best SP/EXP per hour and give people a reason to make full parties and go out and fight tougher Mobs.

[Naqaj]

I don't grind to socialize.

All the shortcomings of classic MMO design and the "hardcore" playerbase that comes with it in a single short sentence. Well done.

[Radaghast]

Grinding parties are bad, no thank you.


Furthermore it's absolutely mindboggling to me that people are promoting the idea of killing thousands of dodos to gain a level as the best, most enjoyable, and interactive method in which to progress in a game. Outside of Korea/JP how many games are produced in that manner anymore? It's archaic.

People love to claim that it's great because it was in FFXI and FFXI was popular. So supposedly FFXI had 500,000 subscriptions at its peak. I'd love for someone to show me just how many of those are outside KR/JP. Looking at it in that manner would show you how backwater the ideas/gameplay were in reality.

Collecting 10 bear asses and having npcs sign their Fed-ex packages for sp, no thank you. Same shit, different grind.

[Duelle]

With the cap removed people could group up, fight Raptors in a small party then if a few more join the party, head off to fight something a bit more challenging and be rewarded accordingly for it.

While tossing in the asinine requirements I want to avoid. You know as well as I do what happens once you toss in level correction into the mix, and I for one don't want to see a system that once again favors stat stacking to ridiculous levels to overcome level correction. Moreso for accuracy, which was king in FFXI for a good part of the game's life yet was stupidly rare in gear in the necessary amounts to effectively overcome level correction.

People will always use the most effective method for gaining SP/EXP (currently it is Leve abandoning), that will never change and removing the cap will make no difference in that respect all it will do is allow people to have more options in gaining that best SP/EXP per hour and give people a reason to make full parties and go out and fight tougher Mobs.

Only when time is at stake, and only when forced partying comes into play. All you're giving way to is the crap from XI repeating itself, so I can't really support that because it only creates that gap between the haves and the have nots.

I don't even need to go into how this affected jobs that had "sub-optimal" set ups and were "sub-optimal" choices for exp parties. Overcamping led to greater resource consumption in parties, which led to people starting to try to work around downtime to continue maximizing exp/hour, which led to making anyone who has downtime built in to the job (read: black mage) into a liability barring specific conditions, which led to ousting of jobs, which also had a hand in screwing over hybrids (read: Red Mage). All because people had big number syndrome and wanted to see 200 exp from a dead mob. The current cap curbs that, nipping the problem in the bud.

You want full parties, go do the high level raids. Just keep that stuff away from the leveling process.

Collecting 10 bear asses and having npcs sign their Fed-ex packages for sp, no thank you. Same shit, different grind.

At least quests give you some sort of story behind things. Grinding in one spot and killing crap over and over again doesn't. That's called "making the grind bearable to a normal person rather than turn it into a chore that would bore a normal person to tears".

[Radaghast]

At least quests give you some sort of story behind things. Grinding in one spot and killing crap over and over again doesn't. That's called "making the grind bearable to a normal person rather than turn it into a chore that would bore a normal person to tears".

While I'm sure Farmer John's plight is interesting, most gloss over quest text and immediately start looking for the arrow pointers where you're supposed to collect. It's a grind no matter how you spin it. Some enjoy that, others don't. I'm not really advocating for only having one way to do things, just not the narrow mindedness of there only being one specific way to grind efficiently. Some enjoy their fortress of solitude questing, others enjoy grinding in groups.

[AlexiaKidd]

Duelle this thread is about making multiple forms of gaining SP/EXP and the only way that can be achieved for Grind Parties to become viable is to remove the cap. If everything was fine as is then there would be grind parties everywhere but there is not and this cap is one of the reasons for that.

Now if you do not like Grind Parties then that is fine this thread is about supporting other ideas that allow for other ways to gain SP/EXP and you should look into those. My preferred way would be to have Grind Parties as one of the options and the easiest way to achieve that would be to remove the cap along with other adjustments. The other way to do it would be to buff mobs a lot so that a mob that was the same rank as you would actually be an even match and a challenge, that would make something that is 10 ranks above you impossible to kill solo and would require a party to do so. Obviously further adjustments to SP/EXP would be needed to make this happen but I feel as though this way while I would prefer this way it would anger a lot more people.