Ability Points, Skill Trees & Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

[Boblawblah]

My thoughts are "na, it's stupid" They'd be about as meaningful of a choice as stats were in Diablo 2.

[Graveyardprincess]

My thoughts are "na, it's stupid" They'd be about as meaningful of a choice as stats were in Diablo 2.

say that to my sorceress with ungodly amount of mp that regens constantly even without insight just standing in everything taking 0 damage forever

avarage d2 build get w/e stat and dex u need for gear and max vitality

me: never spent any on vitality just maxed out my energy dont need health if u cant ever be touched

[AmiableApkallu]

I really like the idea of them but I'm afraid it would only lead to what everyone else is saying - the community deciding one way is better because it does 0.5% more DPS or something stupid like that. We already see this when people lock certain jobs out of PF because they perform ever so slightly worse, despite being perfectly viable. Unless we can somehow make people stop doing it, I don't see a way it would work.

I might argue that Bozja shows that people can look past the meta. Outside of DRS and 5-person speed-runs of DRN (and the occasional cranky person in CLL who gets upset over saving only 5 prisoners), I've really not seen people care all that much about exactly what essences and lost actions others use. The needs of DRS don't seem to be forcing everyone who's not running it into the same builds.

[KisaiTenshi]

Here's a thought experiment. Think of a game (any game) where customizability worked really well - it made you different than your peers, it let you play differently, and still let you excel in the content. What was it about that game that let that happen and why could it not happen in this game?

It never really works in any multiplayer game. There is literately no way to make a game fair if the differences are too far apart that the meta becomes "use this exact build or you will be excluded from all content harder than facerolls." Which, guess what, was the case for most of 2.0 and 3.0 when the jobs were the most different. Right now it's like 'use WAR, or don't bother raiding as a tank'.

Like if you think about why the game does what it does, it comes down to fight choreography. If you have 3 different tanks and one is weak to piercing, one is weak to blunt, and one is weak to slashing, but you design the fight around each boss having this kind of combat, then you get painted into a corner where players will demand the content be nerfed.

Likewise with the elemental strength/weaknesses. It only works well when players can have that ahead of time. So as far as tanks and healers go, you can't design this. Since you can't have 6 DPS players, you can't have one player with each element, nor can you have each melee DPS with slash, stab and blunt.

I understand why they removed these elements, because it makes the PUG duty finding impossible. You'd have to make it so that duties have 1 of each which means you'd end up with 6 element casters (DPS, or healer if it calls for "Light",) 3 melee or ranged DPS, and with so many DPS you'd have to nerf everyones DPS down.

Unfortunately that means re-designing things in a way that would require changing everything. It's far too late in the game's life to do that. Never try to turn a game into something it was not. This is why FFXIV should never have had PvP, and should never have had the Deep Dungeon. The former because they had to effectively create a second game on top of the first one for it to work. And the latter had to be an alternate dungeon system. Sure the Deep Dungeon, is fun once or twice, but it's basically just "easy mode leveling" instead of playing the DF content.

So if you change things to be ability points, what are you going to do with the PvP? Pretend it doesn't exist like normal? What are you going to do with the Deep Dungeons?

It's just that I don't see what they want to do here. Unless they are going to basically add yet another dungeon mode, and basically go "Hey we're sending you back in time before the world was sundered, and also you have amnesia and don't remember any of your skills." Before the time of the ancients. I don't see how they can logically do this.

Maybe they could get away with having the player have to solve a solution to rejoinings, which involves going into each reflection and each reflection has a different combat system that has levels independent from the source.

[CidHeiral]

This is why FFXIV should never have had PvP

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

[Keldion]

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

I don't care for PVP myself but I am unbothered if it exists as a separate mode that doesn't encroach on the core gameplay.

Getting back on topic, any redesign or overhaul of character ability progression is forced to take PVP, Deep Dungeon, etc. into account.

Because of that, I wouldn't expect a talent tree system to be easily implemented. Every new expansion adds more content to the game that can be negatively impacted by such a sweeping change.

[ThaCa]

PvP is like the only remaining fun content in the game currently aside from maybe RP.

[HighlanderClone]

The question is always going to be whether it can stand to the test of actually being meaningful and not just something that gets diluted by there ultimately being an optimal build.

Even bringing up the Blue Mage example of that being a system to 'strive for' - It still has a pretty rigid rotation that you follow.

The thing is you could have a skill tree where everyone picks the same skills for Savage raids, but then someone might notice that "hey, actually this skill is super useful in solo PotD", and then someone might find another skill very fun to use in Eureka/Bozja.

You then have a job where it feels different in various different content types. I think that's worth it even if you have a strict meta for each content type, because then there will still be diversity across the whole game.

[Ryaze]

Something needs to be done to break up combat. This will be three expansions on a row with the same general feel for combat.

To the people objecting and saying “it’ll be unbalanced”, there will always be some measure of imbalance in any game. Imperfection is not a good enough excuse to not try.

And “there will only be one meta spec”. Of course there will be one meta spec, that's how min/maxing players and meta works. Nearly every single game has some mathematical “perfect” spec, but that doesn’t stop multitudes of people playing the game how they want. Heck, we see it now. There’s the best job within a role, but people play “weaker” jobs because they like them. Whether it’s because they prefer the different gameplay, the glams, the lore, whatever.

Live service games need change. Change or stagnate and die.

[KisaiTenshi]

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

Every time I tried frontlines it was like 50% bots by volume and I was like "these are just powerleveling bots, I don't want to be carried by this nonsense." Again though, I don't play it, so if you say it's good now, I'm assuming you like the PVP itself and not the easy EXP or grinding till you get the rewards and then dropping it entirely.