[dev1072]Gear-based systems are bad

[Frein]

When we told about skill it was meant "playing skill"...not game actions or skill points ^^:

He understood you perfectly. The problem you're not seeing, however, is that progress is a major component of the MMORPG gameplay experience and currently the only way we have to measure progress is through gear. If you can't get improvements through gear, how will your character improve? Stagnation and a lack of goals will easily lead to boredom.

Right now, and in the old battle system as well, choosing when to strike, dodging abilities, and picking the right skill sets/stats were the greatest determining factor of your victories.

Nonsense. Currently, as well as before, 90% of the outcome is decided by your rank and the opponent's rank. The impact rank has on all formulas is so heavy there is no way to reasonably overcome it. If your rank is high enough, you can almost auto-attack an enemy to death. If it's too low, you'll take massive damage and will barely be able to dent it regardless of what you do.

1. The battle system currently seems to be going in a direction with less player contro

2. The armory system has been declared that it will go in a direction with less player control, more job exclusive abilities, retooling other abilities to only work well on main jobs (like mp consumption increases makes curing outside of con/thm pretty impossible, although you can eq the abilities)l

On the contrary, I expect to get abilities with more impact. This was not possible before because they'd be accessible to everyone and everyone would be able to do everything very well.

An example: Imagine if every class had a non-TP 3-second stun. We'd just equip the stun from each class and chain stun stuff to death without letting it retaliate. This is why isolating abilities to certain classes gives them a lot more freedom to design meaningful abilities (not do-nothings like Keen Flurry or Enduring March).

Actually, I think we may already have such a problematic ability in the game: Twisting Vice. Unless bosses can force TP moves through without TP, it should be possible to reduce them to auto-attack tank & spank encounters by simply spamming TV. The only reason this isn't a staple strategy is that 1) bosses cheat on TP too much or 2) people have yet to adopt it.

3. The stat system for now will have no customization, with more to be added later, but it seems like it will be less than now.

There is barely any customization now either, unless you think doing it wrong is a viable way of customizing your character. This will not change as we will still get to distribute our points for each individual class and 85% of the time that will mean choosing between doing it right or doing it wrong.