Concepts from other MMOs that would be utterly anathema to FFXIV

[Omedon]

Through some... heated discussions and some friendly ones I've come to get a feel for the particular attitude of the community FFXIv attracts, and I don't say that to be snarky, I actually like you people.

That said, I maintain at least one "foot" in WoW at all times, and I went back this past weekend to hang out with some friends. While doing so I explained WoW's most recent patch's core feature, gear corruption, to one of said friends, and in doing so I realized "oh my god, this would get universally dumped on in FFXIV!"

Gear corruption is a random possibility every time you loot gear that the gear will have dark void corruption on it, a stat that is tracked on your character that the higher it gets, the more messed up things happen to you, but in trade you also get extra power and damage. There is a counter-stat called corruption resistance that you can build up slowly, that cancels out all the bad happening to you while letting you keep the extra power... but the possibility is there for players to go beyond their resistance, by a lot, and be constantly dodging extra personally-relevant mechanics that are (I believe) invisible to everyone else.

Basically, any member of your party at any time could have 2-3 more mechanics to dodge/manage that can potentially damage/debilitate them above and beyond what's already in whatever fight you're in.

When I consider how mechanically and culturally hard FFXIV leans into making sure everyone in your party is "vetted to be here," adding an optional layer of difficulty that individual players can opt into for the sake of extra damage, problems heaped on the healer and the rest of the party that they have no say in nor can they screen or detect it... I can't think of anything more anti-FFXIV than that haha!

So how about you? Have you ever played another game that did something that made you think "Oh my god this would blow FFXIV's mind in the worst way" and what was it?

[Videra]

Corruption (and Titan-forging, the very thing it was made to replace) are absolutely god-awful systems that have no place in World of Warcraft, nor FFXIV. It's a concept that is anathema to good game design, not just FFXIV.

As to the question, a pet-class like the old creature handler in Star Wars Galaxies would probably be absolutely non-functional in this game. Which is sad, systems that have depth like that are *grand*.

[Frosthaven]

So a couple of my own thoughts:

Gear corruption is a random possibility every time you loot gear that the gear will have dark void corruption on it, a stat that is tracked on your character that the higher it gets, the more messed up things happen to you, but in trade you also get extra power and damage.

WoW's gear corruption is waaaaaaay too rng to be what it is. It makes up a great portion of any individual's contribution but feels entirely unearned and random. I absolutely hate it as-is in the game and it messes up any feeling of earning/progression over time. Keep this to AARPGs, not MMOs.

When I consider how mechanically and culturally hard FFXIV leans into making sure everyone in your party is "vetted to be here,"

This is only true in some very specific end-game scenarios (such as Ultimate). FFXIV outside of those settings is one of the easier MMOs on the market by a fairly wide margin. Even the difficult stuff is typically hard-scripted, so it's just a matter of learning the dance and then dancing.

So how about you? Have you ever played another game that did something that made you think "Oh my god this would blow FFXIV's mind" and what was it?

Oh for sure! I'd love tab targeting and macro targeting from the older WoW expansions to be copy and pasted in. I would also love instanced housing like Wildstar had - for all its faults it really nailed housing down.

[Bright-Flower]

Whether you love or hate it, WoW is a much more experimental game than FFXIV. Stuff like corrupted gear, titanforging etc, would probably not be taken well. A lot of the high end gear in FFXIV lets you plan it out. You don't know what pieces will drop in savage sure. But EX primal weapons let you get a weapon at 10 kills, you can pick and choose what parts to roll on from normal mode raids, and prioritize specific tomestone pieces. As well as deciding what to roll on for alliance raids though you need rng to get it to drop.

That's not to say FFXIV never tries anything new. HW added deep dungeon, they've tried exploration zones some different ways with the Ishgard thing and Eureka, blue mage job as side content, gold saucer mini games etc. But FFXIV tends to experiment less with the core progression of end game gear and I think doing anything too crazy with that may irk people. I think the last 'huge' change they did was solidifying how normal/savage worked in HW, with some minor changes too like tweaking the loot system in SHB to make normal mode raid loot easier to farm and w/e the changes to savage loot were.

I don't think that FFXIV's encounter design would play well with some of the RNG that WoW adds with randomized loot buffs and corruption like you say, or even things like unusual trinket procs.

[VictorTheed]

Skill Trees like ESO would be my pic, that's my favorite thing in all of ESO is the customization of your passives and skills/ skill lines u pick from, that is so much fun, I love it death.

I've heard all the arguments against it and I don't care I choose fun over meta, but I know if they were gonna do something like that it would have been done in arr lauch so it ain't happening but that would be my pick.

[Enla]

The story-replay pools from LoTRO come to mind and for the longest time I had been wanting FFXIV to do something similar. We're finally getting New Game+ and it's a HUGE step in the right direction but it's still not quite the same as we select from chapters instead of individual quests like LoTRO offered. That said I'll take what I can get and I'm happy FFXIV is allowing people to go back and experience the story again.

[Omedon]

This is only true in some very end-game settings (such as Ultimate). FFXIV outside of those settings is one of the easier MMOs on the market by a fairly wide margin. Every encounter is hard scripted, so it's just a matter of learning the dance and then dancing.

Well, as I learned in another... spirited thread, this actually permeates all levels of the game, which is fine, but it's not the norm on a game-mechanical level in the general MMOniverse. Case in point: role quests. You'd never get those in WoW, where you're actually skill-gated to go any further in the core of the game's individual storytelling questing. The playerbase of FFXIV has, understandably, come to rely on this trust that everyone who makes it to 80 has been gated and tested by the story and its content that they have a barebones understanding of their class. WoW does not do this, not so formally.

[Frosthaven]

The playerbaase of FFXIV has, understandably, come to rely on this trust that everyone who makes it to 80 has been gated and tested by the story and its content that they have a barebones understanding of their class. WoW does not do this, not so formally.

I disagree with this assessment. I feel that there isn't enough skill gating/stepping stones (specifically for the harder content, not casual stuff you can and should be able to face roll through). Most content in this game you could mess up and be fine with eating the damage.

* Healers and incoming damage are tuned in such a way that they spend minimal time actually needing to heal and instead contribute to the dps numbers.

* Tanking is done in such a way that if you have your stance on and hit a thing once or twice it'll stick to you, so you just focus on dps numbers.

* Dungeons amount to just pulling every mob in the dungeon at once and skipping half the boss mechanics because they don't really matter.

It is very straight forward and incredibly forgiving, so when players get into the actual hard content they get backhanded by mechanics that were more punishing than they'd face anywhere else or even be prepared for.

Edit: As for WoW, I played the most back during the burning crusade. You had heroic dungeons you had to cc for every pull (sometimes multiple cc) and very unforgiving bosses. You had to grind them out just to step foot into the kara raid (my favorite place in that game), so there was this built level of trust acquired since you know what everyone went through just to get in. The game has changed quite a lot since I last cared about it, but that is what I recall as a good progressive difficulty preparation. Doubt that would fly in any MMO anymore, though. As for inherited/earned trust in FFXIV, just browse through the duty finder thread.

I'll leave it at that, though, because I don't want to derail your thread and I quite like the concept of things people love from other places

[Kalise]

Have you ever played another game that did something that made you think "Oh my god this would blow FFXIV's mind in the worst way" and what was it?

1) Green DPS having to actually... Heal. (Found in every MMO except FFXIV)

2) The gear progression from BDO. The literal worst iteration of gear progression I have ever known in any game ever to have existed. First of all, all gear is low chance RNG drop from random mobs in the overworld. THEN when it drops you have to upgrade it. In order to do that, you first need to grind a bunch of materials that are low chance RNG drops from mobs in the overworld. THEN you have to pray to RNGeesus as you upgrade your item to +15 to then knock it up to rank I and if you fail any upgrade, you lose progression (Unless the item is an accessory, in which case it is destroyed completely). After getting it to rank I you then start to need upgraded materials to enhance it further (Made by combining 10x the low chance RNG drops you were previously using) and then continue upgrading to +15 and then to rank II. Rinse and repeat this until you reach rank V.

3) Ability customization from City of Heroes/Villains. Where each skill had up to 6 slots for enhancements which could modify anything from its damage, accuracy, cooldown, resistance (Damage Reduction), defence (Evasion chance), healing/regeneration etc. Including rare "Sets" of enhancements which would provide additional bonuses based on how many you have slotted into a particular skill. The end result was most of the classes could make builds that allowed them to solo raid bosses. Be it through capping out mitigation (80% resistance and 75% defence) while still having enough damage to bypass the Arch Enemies regeneration. Or in the case of Controllers/Dominators, being able to perma-CC said boss.

Oh, and you could recolour every single skill how you wished. Wanna throw neon green fireballs? Go for it. Zap people with black lightning bolts? Sure why not. Look like giant walking turd? Oh wait Stone Defence already did as baseline...

4) The Mastermind class from City of Villains. The way you worked is you only had a handful of support skills yourself... But you had a team of 6 summons to do your work for you. Be they a group of Thugs that throw molotovs and shoot people with uzi's, a bunch of Robots firing missiles and lasers, a bunch of Zombies that punch stuff for a billion damage, a group of Mercenaries that have assault rifles and rocket launchers and miniguns, a selection of Demons that can breathe fire or even a group of Ninjas who'd slice things up with Katanas and throw Shuriken and Caltrops at people.

5) Stat system from Anarchy Online. Stats are meaningful. You have like 10 pages worth of stats, with each one having a level of affinity based on your class and race going from Dark Blue (Low affinity, high cost to increase and low cap) to Green (High affinity, low cost to increase and high cap). With certain stats having "Trickle down" into other stats (I.e. You increase you Agility and various other stats like Run Speed, SMG, Dual Wield etc would also be increased slightly (Without going towards their cap). In addition, most equipment and skills didn't have level requirements, instead only having stat requirements. This meant that if another high level player could buff you, you could equip items and use skills that were way stronger than your level (For example, when my level 20 Engineer got buffed by my brother to twink on a level 140 Robot minion... So much higher level than me I couldn't personaly see it as it was simply Level ???. Thus letting me solo missions much higher level than me by just putting my deathbot on Hunt and going AFK while he murders the entire mission... Unless it was those damn OP robot dogs. F those robot dogs.)

The sheer level of customization in that game was incredible. Due to so much flexibility with stats. A lot of it was viable too it was simply a matter of how hard you worked on it and how good gear you got to support your dumbass choice of using for example, weapons that are Dark Blue affinity (Which, at one point I believe was actually a potential max DPS strat for Soldiers, to dual wield Pistols/SMG's instead of their natural affinity of Assault Rifles)

6) Astellia Online's approach to MSQ related dungeons. In that game, when you have to do a dungeon for the MSQ, you run it solo. No NPC help (Other than your Astells). No parties allowed. Alone. In an easy version designed to be done solo. Purely for story. Then, 10 levels later, you unlock the farmable versions. One which is solo but still gives loot and is more challenging than the MSQ version (Of course, this game has Astells, "Pokemon" that can fill in a role for you like Tank or Healer or DPS to aid you) and one with is multiplayer and gives more loot than the solo version (Also, loot is individual. So when you open the chest after a boss, instead of it dropping 1-2 items that you roll on, EVERYONE gets like 5-6 random items from the pool)

7) Blade and Soul's dojo that tells you how to play your class. Including a number of demonstrations where you have to do specific combos of skills and/or have to not stand in the giant yellow telegraph.

8) Guild Wars 2's open world events (Aka FATES) which not only don't take a million years to complete, but actually give nice rewards like relevant experience and gear. (Also featured in Rift's err... Rifts and Warhammer Online's Public Events)

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

I honestly Wish ffxiv would use a spec system honestly...
Unlike other mmo I feel like ffxiv is forcing us to play the way the dev team wants to enforce with the job when there so many different ways that could be played.. Long term wise playing the job becomes a brain-dead activity where you're just using the same combos, some set every time outside every now and then debugging/silencing or dodging your playing the same way from level 30 all the way to 99 way they have it.

Thats what kills games for me and leads to me quiting off and on honestly is the game play is just repeat Rinse,dodge,Rinse, run ,dodge,rinse,change targets (really simple minded game play once u hit 30 and remember your pattern the only diffuclity is fights you don't know and then you have to learn that bosses pattern and it once again becomes simple minded. (Wouldn't hurt if they got a better Ai System)