Matsui's battle system information - Next week!

[Duelle]

- Classes to be unique, Conjurer's should have to pick whether they want to be a Black Mage or a White Mage, We don't need FFXI: SMN2.0 where you're only brought to the endgame event because you can cure people when we get more challenging content.

The only way that type of play would die is if you entirely lock out damage-centered casters from cures. Even if you add penalties to non-healing casters and toss in a trait to add cure potency, all you'd end up with is the "accepted" builds for casters including that trait and still shafting them with cure duty.

I'm more partial to maintaining class flavor and accepting overlaps where reasonable. Jobs like Thief and Ninja could then technically be two different approaches to the same method. Thief being the guy that learns his dirty tricks on the streets while the Ninja could be the guy that was trained to do what he does. That also reduces the chances of fiacos like utsusemi repeating themselves while making both acceptable for a damage role (unlike XI where THF was shackled to the bad gimmick that was emnity control and NIN was taken in a completely different direction than intended).

- Protect and Shell to last 30 minutes, All buff's are now auto-aoe.

100% agree here.

- Stamina to either be removed or heavily modified so it doesn't hinder the speed of battle. I just think it slows down the battle pace way too much because you're waiting on it to refill to hit the next action.

I'm iffy on the topic of stamina, if only because I saw how haste was part of the arms race amongst melee classes in FFXI (store TP being the other part).

- Animation locks to be completely done away with. I like the sidestepping of certain tp moves but animation locking currently makes this a really bad mechanic.

This should have died with the new game engine. Animation locking was partly excused because of the PS2 limitations, but to see this again in a "next gen" MMO is disappointing.

- Active and passive mode done away with, seriously, its nothing but a slowdown and screws over abilities like "quickstride" by the time you go from active to passive 4-5 seconds is almost wasted. LNC's fleet of foot will have to be changed into a buff of some sort.

I agree on the transition from "weapons sheathed" to "in combat" needs to be streamlined.

Personally, I'm more curious to hear how class dynamics are going to be affected by the overhaul.

The concept of strategy worries me a bit, because in the context of encounters you'd need to add something beyond "stand in one spot and spam a certain weaponskill to trigger an incap". Of course, in Duelle Land that means boss mechanics and extra things to do during a fight (like a boss at the end of a Garlean Fortress that requires the off-tank to ride on a machine that suspiciously looks like magitek armor to assist the raid during the first two phases of the encounter), or the encounter itself reacting to your group composition (a boss doing certain things if you bring too many mage classes, something else if you bring too many melee, running in circles yelling "I AM SO CONFUSED" if you bring hybrids like Red Mages). The reason for my worries being that XI's encounter design was far from impressive.

I wouldn't want to see that applied to open world mobs, though. Can't really make every mob you decide to fight feel like a boss. Makes things kinda silly, IMO.