3.0: Elemental Weakness/Resistance?

[Exstal]

A better question is why should there even be an elemental wheel?

[Carzilla]

Cool I hope they bring back elemental stats

[dreffen]

Q. As a GLD, how does the elemental wheel even affect you?

Hey let me say it again: no.

[Sapphic]

Hey let me say it again: no.

Ultimatelly, I agree, No. As all it does is put a fake limitation on what spells you can use instead of allowing you use your full arsenal of abilities. I main MNK because I enjoy that job the most, I don't want to have to dual main MNK and DRG just because of one fight.

[dreffen]

Ultimatelly, I agree, No. As all it does is put a fake limitation on what spells you can use instead of allowing you use your full arsenal of abilities. I main MNK because I enjoy that job the most, I don't want to have to dual main MNK and DRG just because of one fight.

It comes down to obtuse mechanics. Stuff like what is being suggested was dumb in other games, literally 10 years ago.

And it's still dumb.

[Sapphic]

I'll be honest right now. If this were ANY OTHER MMO, I wouldn't even care about the Elemental Wheel. DCUO? That would actually be harmed by an elemental wheel since characters pick a powerset focus and can only attack using that one element that they have.

So you would prefer for Ifrit, spam ice based spells, Shiva, spam fire based spells, etc. Or use your full quota of abilities in all fights? Or they add a new tanking class which does piercing damage, then add a boss that is immune to slashing, WAR and PLD become useless, dont have em geared and levelled? Byebye.

There has always been too much exclusion in FFXI based on mobs resists, thankfully Yoshi decided to keep that rubbish out of FFXIV and made every job viable for all content, not just specific.

[Sapphic]

It comes down to obtuse mechanics. Stuff like what is being suggested was dumb in other games, literally 10 years ago.

And it's still dumb.

Same people complain about "elitism" in FFXIV, if half the ideas they wanted, like this one where implemented which made content job exclusive then the levels of elitism would increase exponentialy.

[HakuroDK]

A better question is why should there even be an elemental wheel?

Because the rest of the game makes very little sense without it? Look, everything in the game, except actual combat mechanics, relies in some part on the elements. There is a single primal of each element by design. There are elemental crystals used in crafting, and crafting classes have to use only the specific element crystals for crafting by design. Every single player has elemental resistances by design. Hell, BLM and WHM share all six elements between them split down the middle.

And yet, despite this heavy focus on the elemental wheel in every other aspect of the game, it's not prominent in the center stage, which is the combat system. Fire burns fire elementals here, and inflicts the same amount of harm on water and ice elementals. In every other Final Fantasy game, if you tried to use a Fire spell on a Red Flan (a fire elemental monster), it would heal that enemy, and if you used anything but an Ice spell, it wouldn't deal that much damage. Only an ice spell like Blizzard could take out a Red Flan in a single shot unless you were obscenely overpowered for that area.

The fact that the elemental wheel, to my understanding, once existed and is now gone is glaringly obvious. There are other MMOs published by Square-Enix that use the Elemental Wheel. One of them is Wakfu, which is a direct copy of Dofus, which is a game with Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat. It has an Elemental Wheel and it's working out fine for that game.

Final Fantasy XI, to my understanding, also has an Elemental Wheel. I cannot speak about Dragon Quest X, but from the history of the series, I can only assume they would have an Elemental Wheel as well to keep pace with the previous installments of their franchise as well.

I mean right now, I don't even play a BLM. I think it's a pain in the ass to play right now, where I can't play a BLM for what a BLM has historically been best at in previous games in the franchise: exploiting elemental weaknesses. I wanted to play Scholar when it was first announced because I thought "Hey, cool! I can use Libra spells and exploit weaknesses for my party members to use!" (which, again, is historically what a Scholar has done in previous installments of the franchise) But no, all it is is just a hybrid of FFXI's Red Mage and a low-level Summoner.

So much potential for greatness was ripped from BLM, and SCH never got to see that potential as it got relegated to a pet healer job with access to a bunch of magical poisons topped off with a horrifyingly nerfed variant of one of the greatest Blue Magics in the entire franchise.

I respect this game for being true to its Final Fantasy roots, with the setting, the technological level, the emphasis on the crystals, the traditional job system, and all of that. But very few of the jobs have what have distinguished those jobs in the past.

Warrior was never a tank job. It was a Melee DPS that could equip heavy armor. Knight should have been the other tank job in this case.
Paladin is definitely a tank job.

Monk is Melee DPS, but a lot of its classic abilities have been bastardized by the MMO construct, like Kick, Focus, and Counter.
Dragoon personifies itself well.

Bard is a really bad hybrid of classic Bard and Ranger, and really should be separated ASAP so that Bard can shine as a proper Support job instead of a weird amalgamation of support and ranged DPS.

BLM is basically a WoW mage with an infinite mana pool, cut off from the elemental wheel that made BLMs so fearsome throughout the rest of the franchise.
WHMs never had access to elemental spells before except through Cross-Class, and its only actual offensive spells to date have been Dia (which only damages undead) and Holy (which speaks for itself). Other than that, WHM is pretty solid.

SCH has never, in the history of Final Fantasy, ever had access to the Bio tree of spells. Ever. Most installments don't even let SCH learn magic on its own, instead relying on using Libra to reveal weaknesses and elementally-aligned grimoires to beat enemies over the head with. XI made some very fittingly revolutionary alterations to SCH, namely in that it expected a similar level of intelligence from Scholar players as the story expected of Scholars themselves, using abilities that buff other abilities and could be considered highly situational.

SMN is fine as far as the lore is concerned, except that it is tied too heavily in with all of the SCH stuff when it really should be its own entity so that it can better specialize in the use of its summons.

--TL;DR--

All ranting aside, the Elemental Wheel is necessary because this is a Final Fantasy game, the Elemental Wheel has always been part of Final Fantasy from the very beginning, the Black Mage job has always, historically, been very closely tied in with the Elemental Wheel, and the entire game is themed around the very concept of the Elemental Wheel while mysteriously leaving it absent from the one aspect of the game where it really matters.

[SarcasmMisser]

Or, it could be like FFXI..

I'm going to say this because you come into every thread that tries to revive stupid concepts from that game like a fly to a rotting corpse (the corpse being those concepts which need to be buried) and I know it annoys you

No lets not make it like that, because that's a bad idea and the spirit of this game is to improve not regress back to the dark ages.

[HakuroDK]

So you would prefer for Ifrit, spam ice based spells, Shiva, spam fire based spells, etc. Or use your full quota of abilities in all fights? Or they add a new tanking class which does piercing damage, then add a boss that is immune to slashing, WAR and PLD become useless, dont have em geared and levelled? Byebye.

There has always been too much exclusion in FFXI based on mobs resists, thankfully Yoshi decided to keep that rubbish out of FFXIV and made every job viable for all content, not just specific.

You seem to be forgetting some things.

First and foremost, there are already bosses in the game that are heavily resistant to various types of melee damage. Turn 2 of First Coil is a prime example of this.

Second, this is about the Elemental Wheel, not the Attack Type wheel. The only jobs that use Slashing are Tanks. That will likely never change unless Square-Enix gives Lancers the Templar Job, which considering Templar is from the GBA Ivalice games, seems very highly unlikely.

Third, you seem to forget that the standard strat for a good BLM is to spam Fire until mana is empty, then spam Blizzard until mana is full. It's not what a BLM is supposed to be doing in a Final Fantasy game! They're supposed to rely on the Elemental Wheel, pick the best spells, and shoot those off! To counter BLM users being lazy in previous single player installments of the franchise, they had bosses which had "Barrier Shift", which changed the elemental weakness to another element.

Fourth, the only Job this would actually affect pre-3.0 is BLM, and it would only be to a BLM's benefit. Post-3.0, I would imagine that there would be multiple enemies and bosses in dungeons with weaknesses to Fire/Ice/Thunder as well as Wind/Earth/Water to eliminate the chance of arbitrary exclusion.