Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
I'd be fine with seeing positionals scrapped, (snip)

I feel like a lot of these issues with positioning in particular though, can be saved by adding a secondary "best of" check, and revising mob turning to look more natural, though, and I'd very much like to see such attempts before entirely condemning the possibilities for positionals and their future uses.
Agreed.

I actually kind of meant the opposite in this case. While I don't mind the idea of giving out more personals, provided they can be used integrally and satisfyingly enough, I want ultimately to give them more axis to interact with these things through mechanics to which anyone and everyone has access.
I still think you can word this more intuitively, because I'm struggling to follow this.

Undermechanics are those mechanics that basically just don't pop up in tooltips. They're not buffs, or debuffs, or damage types (though they can be assigned to a given damage type). Positionals, for instance wouldn't be an undermechanic per se, but the division of a hitbox into separately checkable elements of front, flanks, and back would be. They're the framework, upon which other mechanics or strategies can be built. For instance, someone else mentioned a (under)mechanic by which you take and deal less damage when distancing yourself from your target/attacker, but deal and take more damage when charging them. That range and direction-checking system would be an undermechanic, and it's things like those that I feel XIV could hugely benefit from.
Ah alright, that explains it quite well, it's surprisingly intuitive when you think about it. While undermechanics are super important (and I'd be curious what line of work you are in IRL) you'll notice that I tend to focus on the "gameplay experience" rather than the underlying system design. The reason I do this is I feel that it's significantly easier for people to relate too, but in no way is meant to undermine your statements. I do agree with you wholeheartedly that more dynamic elements (aka more robust undermechanics) would go far for FF14 as a game.

To a degree. I remember writing out a framework to Sandpark for every undermechanic I think would be necessary to generate interesting and diverse mob scripting / AI, but I haven't been able to dig it up as of yet. Let it suffice to say that you simply have a table determined by mob type that assigns multipliers to various throughputs (similar to how healing usually sub-multiplied to generate less threat/enmity relative to damage), but wherein additional throughput types have been added, such as mitigation (personal, external, sabotage, intercepting, or theoretical), where those types may vary based on whom they were applied to (saved the guy I most wanted to kill = you're next, or maybe even the new first), and the current enmity table or certain other triggers (e.g. %HP or %target HP or average enmity-to%HP) can adjust those multipliers. It would require a fairly robust set of undermechanics, but if made modularly, it could be reduced for the majority of mobs while still allowing for a comprehensive spectrum of behaviors.
We're saying the same thing here so I think we're in agreement. Again I think you're focusing more on the actual design of the sub-systems where I am focusing on the experience that those systems subject a player too.


In this case it'd be more like they'd adjust resource expenditure rather than receiving an actual buff, unless that's something unique to the mob type, but yes, in effect, very much like that.
When I said buff I could have been more clear. I don't mean a literal buff visible on the bar. It could easily be a measure at which the enemy simply attacks/cast bar speeds up that we never see on the surface.

That said, there is something to be said about feedback. No visible buff/debuff would be somewhat confusing to the average player, BUT I firmly believe that 'figuring' things out, can be fun. I.e. That faster attack/cast speed triggering off anyone's HP being low. You'd have to be blind to not see the boss literally pounding away 3x as fast or dropping threat and targeting a low HP teammate. I don't see anything wrong with trying to figure out WHY a mob is doing that rather than reading a tooltip.

I'm out of time as well for today, I'll follow up sometime tomorrow. It's been fun discussing these ideas with you.