Elemental Resistance change.

[Ramzal]

-snip-

Okay if you are not for that kind of change, that's cool. But how is this any different than when healers and DPS were putting vitality materia on their crafted gear in order to survive raid wide attacks? When players noticed that certain attacks that would normally kill them when they didn't have a certain amount of HP, they melded vitality materia to crafted gear in order to increase their likeliness of surviving on coming heavy attacks. How is that in any way different from doing that but for elemental raid wide attacks?

[Ramzal]

Than what would be the benefit of it over superior gearing/melding? Other than the gimmick of having melded your gear with elemental materia, as you already have, why would players do it? If it doesn't offer something meaningful over the current gearing/melding system. Also why would I need to understand that you dropped 1.3 million gil on doing it? You dropping over a million gil on something doesn't make it important to the overall game....

Again. To open up the option of doing so and bringing actual use to the materia that is present in the game. If you aren't going to make it useful, why have it in there? There's no point. The point in my mentioning how much gil I dropped was to give an idea of how it's not -easy- to do. Everyone wouldn't do it as they'd think "That...costs a lot of money just to decrease incoming damage. I'm not sure if that's for me." Which is okay. But some would be fine with that.

you DO realize that the responses about damage are in response the 2nd person that posted in this thread and not you? Stop being overly defensive over comments not directed at you.

One: I'm not being overly defensive. I'm trying to not turn the thread into "Lets make this 1.0." As that's not the point of this thread or the intention. Trying to keep it on track here as opposed to it becoming "lets make this 1.0" threads that we've seen thousands of times. People are very likely to see "Let's turn Black Mages into ifrit killers with Blizzard 3" and think "Wellep, that's not going to happen because it would upset the balance in the game and people would get excluded from parties, etc. reasons."

So can we be awesome enough to not take the thread down the road of something it's not about/not begin arguing in the second person and turning into a "well you're doing this even if I couldn't possibly know that and I disagree with what I think you're doing" match? That's just flame war territory and not really a road anyone needs to go down.

[Nutz]

Okay if you are not for that kind of change, that's cool. But how is this any different than when healers and DPS were putting vitality materia on their crafted gear in order to survive raid wide attacks? When players noticed that certain attacks that would normally kill them when they didn't have a certain amount of HP, they melded vitality materia to crafted gear in order to increase their likeliness of surviving on coming heavy attacks. How is that in any way different from doing that but for elemental raid wide attacks?

It's different in that vitality is a catch all stat. It uniformly adds survivability to all incoming attacks. Elemental resistances would need to be buffed well above the gains from stacking vitality on crafted accessories for it to be worthwhile, and if doing that actually made a difference then it would become compulsory to pass certain fights.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not specifically against this sort of change, just that I don't think it can logically happen in a vacuum. For it to make any sense at all I think a lot of changes would be necessary to gear and stats in general. Right now if elemental resistances were buffed a lot and certain attacks required more than the standard amount of resistance to survive then it would just create a situation where you had to have them. If there were no attacks that required them then there would effectively be no change, even if the stats were buffed heavily. People would still not use them.

Currently you have to sacrifice offensive stats to incorporate elemental resistances and people aren't willing to do that because it's unnecessary. If there was a wider range of stats and more interesting gear then I think it would fit in nicely. I merely think it doesn't fit with the very sterile and boring itemization that the devs are currently working with.

[Ramzal]

-snip-

Huh... That's pretty true and I agree for the most part. The stats do seem overly simplified for the most part IMO, thus draining most unique customization gear set ups the game could have.

[kyuven]

Creating a choice between increasing damage and decreasing damage taken to a personal preference.

Unless their design philosophy radically changes, the former will always take preference over the latter. There are lots of tools for mitigating damage available in the game, so unless elemental resistances were a complete separate slot from standard materia and stats and were present on EVERY item, there would still be no choice. The less time the fight lasts, the less damage everyone takes. And if you adjust fights to be tough without it, people will just stack VIT materia, which gives more HP and is far more versatile.
In other words, they would need to COMPLETELY rework the way elemental resistances work to make it worthwhile to even have them.
And there has to be a question in that case: Is it worth it?

[Lemuria]

I for one lamented the removal of elemental weakness and resistance in the first instance, but I'll try to avoid digressing from the topic.

A nice happy compromise with the system we currently have in place is to add a new special materia slot onto all existing chestpieces (Yes, even dungeon gear). Unlike other slots, this would have a removable materia crystal which has the sole purpose of giving significant boosts to elemental resistance. The crystals would be crafted through a mutamix quest where you hand in a certain amount of various elemental materia to combine them.

That way there's no overhauls needed aside from the one additional slot, and since you would only be able to equip one element at a time you'd have to choose wisely. The boost should be high enough to be noticeable, but not so much that it trivializes damage of that element.

[Hiruke]

Just remove elemental materia from the game and call it a day. Do you really want tanks to have to have an ice set for Shiva? A fire set for Ifrit? An earth set for Titan? etc. etc. Elemental resist gear was entertaining in FFXI, like watching a NIN tank a dragon and taking basically no damage from its elemental attacks, but that game was WILDLY unbalanced (and allowed for gear swaps, so you could swap elemental resist gear when needed and put on "real" armor otherwise). I can't think of any particularly good reason to have elemental resist materia exist, be more useful, or do anything besides stop being in the game at all.

[LalaRu]

Elemental wheel were removed for game semplicity, if I correctly recall a live letter long time ago.

I guess elemental resistance things into the game are leftovers of the cut done.

[Amatsuhira]

Primal BLM tanks approve.

[LineageRazor]

Just remove elemental materia from the game and call it a day. Do you really want tanks to have to have an ice set for Shiva? A fire set for Ifrit? An earth set for Titan? etc. etc. Elemental resist gear was entertaining in FFXI, like watching a NIN tank a dragon and taking basically no damage from its elemental attacks, but that game was WILDLY unbalanced (and allowed for gear swaps, so you could swap elemental resist gear when needed and put on "real" armor otherwise). I can't think of any particularly good reason to have elemental resist materia exist, be more useful, or do anything besides stop being in the game at all.

Yeah, due to the severe limitations on armory chest and inventory space, making resistance materia useful would mean having to stockpile six sets of gear for each job you care about resistance on. Talk about a nightmare!

Perhaps if we also reworked the materia system from the ground up it would be feasible... Say, for example, you could freely remove and attach materia at any time on any class, with zero risk. Then you could swap elements in when they are needed, and swap in combat stats when they're not. Or, alternatively, leave the melding system as is but have each piece of gear capable of holding multiple sets of melded materia that you can switch between.

Under the current melding system, though, no, it's just not workable. For your elemental resistance needs, you gotta just rely on battle mechanics, like Scylla's Fire Resistance puddles.