High Materia: A concept to allow for some player agency, without destroying balance

[Deceptus]

In the central Thanalan there is a place that you visit early in the game and after a few quests you can gamble your materia for a chance at better materia. Myself I just take them to the vendor and bank the gil as before endgame you won't need proper melds to complete most duties.

But then you see people with zero melds on their gear at all (even the bargain bin rank VIII's in their slots) and are missing out on easily 10%-15% of their substats.

[ForsakenRoe]

But then you see people with zero melds on their gear at all (even the bargain bin rank VIII's in their slots) and are missing out on easily 10%-15% of their substats.

In casual content or in highend content (savage prog etc)? Because one does not matter at all (casual content, as it has no enrage timers)

If I saw someone had no materia melded in an EX roulette, I'm personally not going to care, because we're still going to clear. On which note, if people can go into content with no melds at all (even EX trials) and clear, where's the stance of 'this system is not possible and a waste of resources, because one will be more damage' coming from I wonder? Since in the choice between 'not melding substats' and 'melding substats', one is 'more damage', but we don't hold people to do so unless they're in a certain threshold of content difficulty

idk I just don't understand the whole obsession with 'we must have perfect balance and anything that threatens it cannot be permitted', especially given that we had Abyssos this expansion, which saw certain comps mathematically unable to clear, something that has not happened in this game since Gordias. We've never had perfect balance between jobs, we never WILL have perfect balance, so why is there such a push to reach for it, even at the cost of everything being streamlined into a (subjective) bland morass of samey gameplay (cough healer and tank rotations)

[Mikey_R]

It is worth noting that there is a difference in comparing jobs to each other and comparing jobs to themselves.

In the case of comparing jobs to each other, ie. party composition, you don't necessarily take the highest DPS jobs as different people prefer different jobs and as a result, they are more likely to play and get better at said job, meaning they will perform better than if they played as a "higher DPS" job.

On the other side, comparing a job to itself, you want to take the best version of that job you can. Why should someone use Spec A when Spec B is just better in every way. This then isn't a case for job preference, but your functionality in the team you are in. This is likely why people are more strict when it comes to balance for a job itself when comparing it to itself than comparing jobs to each other. I'm going to take a PLD, when is the best PLD I can take.

On that subject, you might think your ideas provide no DPS benefit, which they don't really, however, how many provide useful utility that is just a great help in general? Again, just looking at your ideas for PLD;

Cover with 20% mitigation, useful in SB, don't see why it cannot have it's uses here,
Hallowed Ground having a 5 minute cooldown, insanely powerful, more uses out of (almost) complete invulnerability is just going to help in many scenarios,
Cleanse on Intervention, ok, how often is that actually useful? I assume the comment on P12S's tank buster is in relation to this, but if the only thing is one specific mechanic, it doesn't seem that useful, especially if you consider a shorter Hallowed Ground to (I assume) just invuln through.

So, you have 2 useful ones and one, questionable. Already you can see where people will say you have to take either option 1 or 2. However, between these 2 options, which one is better? Maybe, it is fight dependant? Which leads to the next question, how easy is it to swap between different options? If it is simple, why bother with the whole 'materia' thing and not just have it as a menu option? If it is also fight dependant, people will expect you to have the right materia for it as well, strats for PF at least will be made with specific specs in mind to make the PF life easier, this then defeats the point of it being a personal choice as, again, we are back to it being required.

On the flipside, if it is harder to swap, people will complain, especially if you have to swap several times throughout the savage progression. It just turns into needless busywork.

What a lot of people forget, just because they only focus on it, is that DPS is not the only thing you have to consider when designing a fight, a tank's mitigation kit and a healer's healing kit also have to come into play. You can design a fight that requires specific setups in order to win, which leave no choice, or you look at the basic kits, design fights around that and leave it up to the player to choose what to use, at which point certain things can destroy the balance you have crafted when designing fights, taking away that initial challenge you set out.

This again comes down to, to try and make a choice, but in reality, there is only the right choice and the wrong choice and noone wants to pick the wrong choice.

[ForsakenRoe]

stuff

Edit: I wrote a whole rant about the effect FFlogs has on people's perceptions of Job performances, how people misunderstand how log info works, etc. but it just ended up with me being angry so I'll just replace it with this:

I do not believe that, if some players are going to be hyper-specific about 'we have to follow the meta choices', that such a player stance is a reason to not-implement a system that players would enjoy using. If one choice is 'better' according to the meta, that's fine, as long as the gap between the choices is low enough that 'choosing the wrong one' is not punishing to the players. P3S saw a mechanic be entirely removeable with Macrocosmos (Life's Agonies), this did not prevent WHMs from joining PFs or clearing the fight. I see a system like this being similar, one option is 'better' for Life's Agonies, maybe true. But another choice might be better for Fountain of Fire, or the Add Phase, or Firestorms of Asphodelos. If we had WHM be incredibly good at dealing with something else in P3S, eg 'drop Lilybell, ignore Fountain of Fire entirely', then the issue of AST and P3S wouldn't have been so stark. It was because AST could do what it could, and WHM couldn't do something similarly broken, that it was seen the way it was.

On which note, I'm pretty sure 'delete a mechanic entirely' isn't intended behavior by the devs, but Macro's interaction stayed. Finding a way to 'break' the careful design of the devs is often a fun feeling to players, so players finding unique ways to 'break' encounter design (too strong a word for these example effects IMO) is likely to similarly feel 'fun' to players. 'Wow, we figured out a way to ignore this Esuna mechanic and it saves us some GCDs, now we can focus on preparing for the upcoming HPS mechanic instead of spamming Esuna for 4 GCDs each' or some such. Or those SHB times where you could over-mit a damage, and not get the damage down from it (updog strat E10S for example). Of course, there's nuance, and a line in the sand, of what is 'acceptable breaking' and not. EG if 'use X at Y time and the boss stops attacking entirely, allowing for a free win' existed, that's probably not a good thing to keep around, so it has to go. But something like 'Synastry can be used to spread extra effects like Exaltation's mit', oh cool now you can help mitigate both tanks instead of one, that helps on double-tankbusters but it's not like it's ever been 'necessary' so far, and I'd expect it to remain just as 'not necessary', but it'd sure be cool feeling to be able to slap it on both tanks at once, plus a Celestial Intersection on both, plus a second charge of CI (plus a shared-EssentialDignity) after the TB lands, wouldn't it?

[Aravell]

What a lot of people forget, just because they only focus on it, is that DPS is not the only thing you have to consider when designing a fight, a tank's mitigation kit and a healer's healing kit also have to come into play. You can design a fight that requires specific setups in order to win, which leave no choice, or you look at the basic kits, design fights around that and leave it up to the player to choose what to use, at which point certain things can destroy the balance you have crafted when designing fights, taking away that initial challenge you set out.

This again comes down to, to try and make a choice, but in reality, there is only the right choice and the wrong choice and noone wants to pick the wrong choice.

I don't understand this mentality. Why does it matter if a niche ability or effect breaks a mechanic? More ways to solve fights is a great thing. Having a fight that handholds you into doing one singular way to solve it or you just die is a prime example of boring design, it doesn't give players creative freedom. Just like how eating avoidable stuff gives a damage down now, so you can't even take a vuln for easier uptime like in E6S or hyper-shield a mechanic for uptime like orbs in E10S.

[Absurdity]

I don't understand this mentality. Why does it matter if a niche ability or effect breaks a mechanic? More ways to solve fights is a great thing. Having a fight that handholds you into doing one singular way to solve it or you just die is a prime example of boring design, it doesn't give players creative freedom. Just like how eating avoidable stuff gives a damage down now, so you can't even take a vuln for easier uptime like in E6S or hyper-shield a mechanic for uptime like orbs in E10S.

It matters for exactly one reason, the same reason why we have damage downs now...the devs hate it when we don't do the fight 100% how they want us to do it.

[DrWho2010]

there is no need for "high materia" with other effects because these "effects" are just the traits/abilities we would get levelling up.

again the only thing that matters is what's between the chair and the game. YOU

you suck at the game? practice to get better. don't try to have gimmicky things make up for your poor performance.

[Shougun]

there is no need for "high materia" with other effects because these "effects" are just the traits/abilities we would get levelling up.

again the only thing that matters is what's between the chair and the game. YOU

you suck at the game? practice to get better. don't try to have gimmicky things make up for your poor performance.

If it wasn't for the first sentence we would have no idea you actually read anything in the OP. I know you are on SE's 50 cent army but at least respond in context.

The OP wants agency. They are not saying game too hard. You ride SE's coat tails so hard sometimes I don't even think you read anything to make a post... Just some precanned denials, usually reads like political marketing.


I'm certainly not the sweetest thing here but man.. you are always so rude about other players feedback and in this case it was rude without reading.

[DrWho2010]

You want agency go play a single player game where you can build the way you want to play. This is a cookie-cutter MMO style game. The only thing that counts is player skill.

[ty_taurus]

This system is something completely unrelated to the game's current iteration of materia. Now, I'd say materia as it stands feels superfluous because, as stated, there's no agency in how you build. There is a "right" path, and everything else which is slightly worse, which feels like just another pointless set of criteria to wade through when either reaching BiS or gearing for a new raid tier, as those are the only two moments where materia does anything.

But the proposed solution is really something completely unique--a minimalist skill tree essentially unrelated to gear. Conceptually, I understand that because materia is equipped to gear in FF7, where the concept originates from, it neither the current system nor this proposed solution really resemble how materia works in 7. Something more faithful to the source material would actually be closer to the cross class system of ARR/HW. Equipping "Cure" materia to your weapon, for example, lets you cast Cure.

So really, this is more a discussion of should we have a very delicate branching upgrade system. As for that discussion, I'd be fine with something like that. I know it'd be a lot of work to design and balance, but that's also kind of the job of a game designer. As long as the options feel balanced and intuitive--that there's no "wrong" answer really, it can work fine. There's no reason it can't.