Infinite arrows

[Februs]

There is one thing this thread put into my mind (thinking on previous FF games that had "ammunition types") and it makes me curious about how they might handle the Samurai job (we all know it's coming, so might as well speculate).

In the past, Samurai's attacks and spells changed depending on what kinds of Katana's you had in your inventory/equipped. You would use it, and, depending on durability, the sword would break and you'd have to buy another to use the technique again. Obviously, this would not work in an MMO, but I am curious how you guys think this kind of mech will be handled in the future, especially lore-wise.

Do you think they'll handle the samurai move set the same way as any other (Chakra management, for example), or will would you like to see them do something different with the job. It doesn't necessarily have to be consumables, mind you. I can picture the Samurai using two katanas (similar to ninja) in which the left handed weapon is not identical to the right (different from ninja) and effects the play style of the job... perhaps similar to stance dancing for Whm or Pld. Ie: equip this sword for dmg boosts. Equip that one for support boosts. Equip another to completely change you from Dps to Tank (highly unlikely, but you get the idea.) etc.

Way off topic, but this just kind of popped into my head while I was reading your guys' comments =/.

[Naraku_Diabolos]

In the past, Samurai's attacks and spells changed depending on what kinds of Katana's you had in your inventory/equipped. You would use it, and, depending on durability, the sword would break and you'd have to buy another to use the technique again. Obviously, this would not work in an MMO, but I am curious how you guys think this kind of mech will be handled in the future, especially lore-wise.

You should play SAM on FFXI. It is not like you said in your post. Why would a SAM use consumable katanas? Katanas do not break easily in real life, it only dulls depending on what you cut with it. The metal of the blade is steel that is folded over hundreds of times to the point that there is not a single molecule of air in it. Each katana has its own fingerprint, which is the design markings on the side so you can distinguish who the swordsmith was who made it.

SAM was a beast in FFXI. When it released, it was not perfect. It could build up TP to insane amounts to unleash Weapon Skills, and it could even Skill Chain them on its own. SAM was also known to miss A LOT during auto attacking, which is why the devs gave it The job ability Hasso, which increased the auto attack speed with two hand weapons, increased accuracy, and boosted attack. Being a DRK/SAM was insane as a killer. Since DRK used two handed weapons, Hasso made it better during battle. It increased TP and accuracy for DRK, and they could dish out a ton of damage.

[Februs]

You should play SAM on FFXI. It is not like you said in your post. Why would a SAM use consumable katanas?

I never said it should. I asked for opinions on how it might work, given some of the history of that job class. I am also very well aware of the durability of a real katana. They do tend to nick and dull easier than broad/straight swords, but I know well that they do not break easily. Thanks for the lesson, though... I guess.

What I was referencing (in regards to breaking katana's) was the way the Samurai class worked in FF Tactics. Tactics was one of the very first appearances of the samurai in Final Fantasy (aside from FFV), and in that game, the swords could/would break after use. The lore was that the spells/abilities of the Samurai drew upon the soul of the katana that was respective to the ability you wanted to use. Drawing out that soul as an attack risked breaking them. As a result, you needed a healthy stock of them to make sure all of your moves were available to you (until you got up to some of the really rare and good ones, that is. Though, even those could be broken). I was only wondering if it would be something similar in this game, or if different weapons would have different effects, or if they'd just stick with the tried and true methods we see in every other job in the game.

It sounds like that's the way it was in FFXI (which I have not played). So, I'm guessing we can look forward to standard Tp/Mp based abilities with no variance caused by weapon/ammunition type. Hasso certainly sounds like a useful ability... but something tells me that even if Sam gets it, Drk's/War's would even get to use it. The 3.0 jobs take abilities from other classes, but do not give. If Sam turns out to be the same way, it might not give out any abilities to other jobs.

[Niwashi]

There's a lot of regular day to day maintenance that games just gloss over as simply assumed. Having us as players keep up a stock of arrows if we want to shoot a bow adds a bit of realism, but at the cost of more hassle than that little detail is worth, so it gets shunted aside in most games these days.

It now seems to fall into the same category as using the bathroom or washing your clothes. Characters are just assumed to take care of such things when we're not watching them. For a professional archer, I suppose maintaining a full supply of arrows would just become a daily mundane task.

I also kind of like the theory of "repairing" your gear including re-stocking any ammo it needs, but you'd still need to gloss over the timing of it (since equipment doesn't need repairs nearly as often as you'd realistically need to re-stock your arrows).

What I was referencing (in regards to breaking katana's) was the way the Samurai class worked in FF Tactics. Tactics was one of the very first appearances of the samurai in Final Fantasy (aside from FFV), and in that game, the swords could/would break after use.

I didn't get very far in the Tactics spinoffs, as I don't like that genre as well as regular RPGs, but I don't recall that mechanic being used in any of the mainline FF titles. Many of them (including this one of course) have equipment durability, and the fact that equipment will break when reaching 0 durability, but I don't recall there being any where one job's weapon is any more likely to break than another job's. I'm glad that at least here, broken equipment only needs to be repaired and not completely replaced.

[Februs]

Snip.

Technically, durability and equipment breakage have never really been a "thing" in the Main FF titles, and that includes Tactics. In FF Tactics, there was no durability stat, and none of the other weapons in the game had the possibility of breaking do to use. It was only the Samurai's weapons that could break, and it was a RNG generated occurrence. It did not have to do with the durability of that particular class of weapon so much as it had to do with the lore of the skills the samurai used. The idea was that the act of drawing out your sword's soul was potentially harmful, and they applied the risk by using random chance to decide if the blade would survive the strain. Some of the blades had better odds than others, but there was no specific durability stat that the game applied to all weapons or scaled based on type.

Since Tactics, they pretty much did away with the idea of different weapons having different souls (and thereby, different abilities), however they kept several of the Samurai concepts in-tact. Bushido lore in most FF titles that the Samurai appear in has similar lore to the way the original samurai worked in Tactics (basically, the samurai code of conduct and the idea that their soul is in their sword). and there's some similarities in abilities and effects. In FFX, for example, Auron was considered the samurai job, embodied the perfect guardian, and although there was no risk to breaking his own weapons, he could use skills that resulted in breaking the weapons and equipment of his enemies, and in FFXII the Samurai's magic power scaled to the strength of the sword (very similar to the way the katana's worked in Tactics).

I imagine Bushido will make an appearance in FFXIV as well, but who knows if it will work the same way. After all, The Dark Knight job traditionally used their own HP pool to increase their damage output, but SE completely did away with that concept when they came out with FFXIV's version of that job.

[Atoli]

I also kind of like the theory of "repairing" your gear including re-stocking any ammo it needs, but you'd still need to gloss over the timing of it (since equipment doesn't need repairs nearly as often as you'd realistically need to re-stock your arrows).

Well, we have magical pockets that allow us to carry our entire furniture, 5 wardrobes full of clothes and an incredible amount of food, soil, potions and the like with us. I also have about 50-60.000 crystal shards. Even if they are kind of small, at that point, if our pockets weren't enhanced by some magic, we'd be walking around with pockets the size of an entire town. In that context, I don't find it hard to believe that everytime we go repairing, we also buy a big amount of arrows and stuff them into those magical pockets