Please let us keep our abilities on sync down

[Shougun]

But it is still a burst you don't have at lower levels. this is more impactful in dungeons when you have downtime between pulls, so you have more uptime in your burst. I think we have fundamentally different views on how the low level should be handled, which is fine and it might be a case of agree to disagree on this topic.

Definitely, that is part of why (though not to you specifically) I had mentioned in this thread I imagine the curves will be best every 10 levels. So they're a bit more fine tuned. There are things you have to ensure, like a chain doesn't become less valuable than a non-chain, and then again using ceilings (with every 10 levels being a bit easier to control, and the floor just in case the game tries to give you a 50 potency spell or some hot garbage).

A good system is going to take a bit of thought, and personally I still imagine just setting up a series of rules and having it traverse the skills for me (like reading 1 -> 2 -> 3, and doing a first pass on potencies, if reaching the end and having spare change or excess then going again with a new set of rules). I probably wouldn't hand tune each item, but just ensure (through rules in the algorithm) that you don't get things like 1 -> 2 -> 3 turns into a potency loss compared to spamming one skill. You WANT to retain the structure of the job, so you reward playing the job roughly as designed.

Honestly, more recently, I had shower thoughts on other methods I might introduce instead of the above, like bringing back a break system (and or stagger). Which I am starting to get a little partial too. Where the rate of potency is just dynamically used (there is no per 10 level or even specific modifications to each spell), rather the game just says "right this is the max amount of potency I expect to be reasonable" and filters on the spot- where the excess goes towards break / stagger mechanics. At the point of break / stagger the monster can gain additional damage received modifiers, perhaps drop special rewards*, and may even change mechanics slightly (don't have to spend overly long on it, but like if you break the chimera it might stop casting dragon song but instead may dash to players and cast rams voice in a forward and rear cone).


The break points can also involve intricacies or multiple levels, like you can break a horn through frontal damage, hobble a leg from the side, stand in a specific aoe marker and deal damage to break a crystal shard on the boss (like you stand in the 'bad' aoe, and it registers the damage to that shard IF you dodge the 'bad', so you're dance timing things). Then of course the boss can add their own layers back for a more dynamic fight. These systems SE should feel comfortable working with too, given they've done them to some extent in multiple other games. In FFXIV 1.0 they had this too, but it was general damage (now we're using it for excess lol).

There are a few reasons I think this is interesting. First, in terms of balance- this is a lot easier lol, it's just the great wall of potency filter. Second it plays into a topic below about setting a better fight experience, and last it can help with older content and powerful players as you can reward them even further than the original dungeon designs (and may play a part in variations of gameplay, since when you first did it no one was breaking anything but now... now you are). The filter can be squishy, and its to catch over achieving not to force a weird attrition mechanic (its not there to cause you to hit enrage mechanics). Like some squishy element of it might be a portion of that excess (stagger/break) damage is turned into a DOT on the boss (so their bar starts to get gray health). Especially combining the below concept of reward to time though, where for example TRUST NPCs dynamically change their damage based on your performance (essentially), this makes it so you have a set time frame for that content with the same reward no matter THIS IS NOT THAT. You might end up experiencing more of the fights and having to pay attention to more mechanics, but the reward should represent your efforts (in a reward to time formula) such that you feel it was valuable / worthwhile time.

*Ideally rewards need to be kept relevant in some way, like material for cool weapon / furniture crafts or tokens and tomes (not a lot but hey you get 10 tomes for breaking the Ogre horn and then killing him during his stagger phase!). This way you can go do a Satasha dungeon and be like "maybe some glamour, but also I can work to get some other stuff done too".

Also I still think you could optionally allow players to 'min skill' sync, so if you want to intentionally return with the relevant kit you can. Ultimate, also, will force min skill sync- since that content is supposed to be a 'now and forever' and really if we had the tech for it I would even freeze the entire kit in time. So everyone, sans new jobs, always has the exact same fight tools and its purely player driven skill (and memorization lol).

On an (almost) unrelated topic, do people like having their burst cut off when things die? Do a trash pull, pop everything, 4 GCDs later, everything is dead. For me, that is wholly unsatisfying. Bosses? die after the 20 seconds burst phase, I mean, you got the burst in, but not a lot else. Great way to practice a rotation isn't it. /s

Personally I am always worried about keeping things exactly the same in challenge and / or not rewarding progression (so I 'expect' things to get faster) but I do wish that sometimes we could preserve the fight more but reward more instead. Since rewards as a function of time, you're rewarded more for the easier content (cause it's faster). But rather than making it faster (cause it's easier, sometimes much easier), I'd wish it was just more rewarding but perhaps still similar amount of time / challenge (within reasonable expectations).

For example Challenge Echo might attempt to nerf your character to what a player group of 8 had (or 4), with perhaps further nerfs to defense on avoidable damage (unavoidable damage might still leave you a bit forgiven, since that could lead to issues). Then if you beat this mode which took 10 minutes it would be worth the approximate same amount of rewards that clearing 4 runs in 10 minutes of epic echo would have had. It'd be more fun to farm old content, and you wouldn't feel like a fool for doing it.

I know that wasn't exactly your target topic, but I think of like how hunt monsters scale poorly, or how some bosses you way over ilvl sync, in the same space too and perhaps all this scaling tech we're talking about can be used with "I will reward you more yes, but it will still be some sense of "please pay attention to the mechanics"".

As for the people who keep saying 'I'm not a dev, that is for the devs to sort out', I just want to say, why not put a bit of thought into suggestions? By thinking about the pros and cons, or thinking about how things might be affected, you might be able to fine tune a suggestion to make it easier/more realistic to achieve. If I asked for the game to be made into an FPS, someone else responded, not possible/realistic for a multitude of reasons, but I came back with, that's for the devs to figure out, it doesn't make the initial claim less silly. This should apply to all aspects of the game.

I assume this was a general statement and not specific to me, but yeah I agree. Although I wont bother thinking of exact potencies because I just think if I got to that detail I might as well be telling them to hire me lol. That seems like work adjacent at that point .

I definitely agree given you can find I am probably one of, if not the, biggest wall of text and chocobo turd posters here XD (when it comes to trying to explain a desire / idea of what would be nice).

Now, the above is an extreme example to highlight a point. If we were to bring it down to this topic itself, then yes, I think most would agree that low level is boring and needs improving. However if some of us are coming back with concerns or reasons why we don't think it is realistic, then they need to be addressed and not just dismissed outright. A few of us have even tried to make more realistic suggestions that both improve the low level experience and makes it less jarring for higher level players to get synced down to. this system, once made, then not needing to be touched again, unless something changes fundamentally with the job itself. As opposed to a system that needs to be adjusted every expansion due to new tools and maybe even if potencies change.

I think we generally agree, but disagree on what realistic is. I personally think they're going to mess up hand crafted lower levels shortly after doing it (non-sustained effort), and that it will take more work to hand craft those changes rather than something dynamic. Such that while I KNOW an automated system wont be perfect I think it will be much easier to institute and also much easier to maintain, and ultimately just be more consistent experience and allow players to play the character that they have progressed. However, lets say both ideas are possible and there is no issue on either (SE isn't giving us a monkey paw or some sort of cost choice).. then to me I don't care which one is picked. If it feels better, it feels better!