Debuff mechanics - to situational.

[ToraFomalhaut]

One of the major issues I have with debuffs and why I don't think the way they work with the current game would support a debuff class such as Red Mage being added in the future is that SE currently pick and choose when your debuffs work in all fights of consequence such as primals and raids.

Most of the time if a debuff lands on a boss it's usually part of the fights mechanics. Such as Ifrit and stunning Eruption or ADS and silencing High Voltage. The rest of the time these effects are simply turned off, reducing your abilities to their base form of pure DPS.

I can understand it is probably easier to balance a fight by turning off these debuffs but I can't help but feel it cheapens these abilities if they only work when the developers decide they will, and takes away from what could be a much richer in flavor and dynamic combat system in boss fights.

I know it's probably a personal gripe but it always is disheartening, for me at least, to enter a boss fight and see my abilities lose half of their effectiveness simply because the fight hasn't been balanced to make use of them.

[Starfox71rt]

I believe this is because certain debuffs would be way more effective than others causing their associated classes to become more desired than others.

[Deusteele]

All debuffs in this game suffer from diminishing returns.

I.e. The more often you apply a debuff the shorter it's duration becomes, eventually the target becoming Immune to it for a short time before the cycle resetting.

And they have to limit the effect of debuffs on certain mobs otherwise you chain stun important mobs and trivialize mechanics.

[Gamemako]

All debuffs in this game suffer from diminishing returns.

Not all. Resistance debuffs (Storm's Eye, Disembowel, Dragon Kick, and Foe Requiem if you want to include it) do not ever diminish.

This whole "Red Mage debuffer" rubbish from FFXI needs to be wiped from the annals of history, along with the rest of FFXI.

[Feilina]

Do we speak of crowd control (stun, mezz/sleep, silence, root...) or do we speak of debuffs (-%dmg done, +%dmg received, +%cast time...)?

[Maelwys]

This whole "Red Mage debuffer" rubbish from FFXI needs to be wiped from the annals of history, along with the rest of FFXI.

LEAVE MAH BST ALONES!!



(I fully agree on NIN blinktanks though!)

[Urthdigger]

This is probably for the best actually. I'm quite certain that classes where the main focus is on debuffs (Or party-wide buffs) can't be balanced effectively in an MMO. For the most part debuffs tend to fall into one of two categories: Either they aren't considered very useful, or they're so vastly required you can't party without one. This works fine in an off-line game, where a boss being utterly crippled by a timely status effect doesn't ruin anything, or where going with a suboptimal party member won't get folks yelling at you.

As for the other question of why abilities seem to be "switched off" for certain fights... imagine if you COULD stun any attack. I bet you it wouldn't add more flavor and dynamic combat. It would simply result in the "required" party setup being one where you have enough stunners to stun every attack that's remotely a problem. The debuffs that are turned off, typically sleep, stun, silence, knockback, and bind, are disabled because they are easy solutions to problems the boss poses. The other debuffs, like slow, DoTs, Eye for an Eye, Virus, I don't think I've run into fights where these are disabled.

[Feilina]

This is probably for the best actually. I'm quite certain that classes where the main focus is on debuffs (Or party-wide buffs) can't be balanced effectively in an MMO. For the most part debuffs tend to fall into one of two categories: Either they aren't considered very useful, or they're so vastly required you can't party without one. This works fine in an off-line game, where a boss being utterly crippled by a timely status effect doesn't ruin anything, or where going with a suboptimal party member won't get folks yelling at you.

LotrO initially (SoA-times) has done a good job with that. They had a Loremaster to debuff enemies (pretty powerful) and Burglars to buff the group, pretty powerful too. Sure there where bosses hitting hard and therefore it was wiser to choose the Loremaster but it always could have been done with the burglar. In raids you typically had both of em.
Unfortunatley the community wanted tohave a mage and no Loremaster, they also wanted to have a thief and no burglar. And as time passed by Turbine changed em, sadly if you ask me.

The debuff mechanic used by the bard is good, it takes high resources (TP) but offers good use (-10% dmg dealt by hitted enemy). And it is rough, as time goes by, to keep the debuff up.

[Urthdigger]

editing...

LotrO initially (SoA-times) has done a good job with that. They had a Loremaster to debuff enemies (pretty powerful) and Burglars to buff the group, pretty powerful too. Sure there where bosses hitting hard and therefore it was wiser to choose the Loremaster but it always could have been done with the burglar. In raids you typically had both of em.
Unfortunatley the community wanted tohave a mage and no Loremaster, they also wanted to have a thief and no burglar. And as time passed by Turbine changed em, sadly if you ask me.

The debuff mechanic used by the bard is good, it takes high resources (TP) but offers good use (-10% dmg dealt by hitted enemy). And it is rough, as time goes by, to keep the debuff up.

You mentioned them being powerful, and that's part of the problem. When support classes aren't useless, they often hit the other side: Being so powerful they're required. And that is just as much an issue as a support class being underpowered, because now instead of nobody wanting them, nobody wants anything else.

A comparison can be drawn to tank and healing classes, which is a fair comparison. However, there's already an issue with an overabundance of DPS compared to other classes (Let's face it, folks flock to DPS for reasons I'm not going to get into here). If support classes enter the game and become a requirement (Either due to player perception or due to the game being balanced around the assumption you have one), that's now going to be "one tank, one heal, one support, one DPS", further reducing the available slots for DPS. And I guarantee you the pool of folks playing support won't come entirely out of the DPS, so that's less people playing tanks and healers on top of it. It won't exactly ruin the game, but it's going to take an already existing issue and make it worse.

[Feilina]

Fair points. I meant to make an example of a game which has done good with support classes.
The fact the we only have groups of four players kills the "pure support class" instantly. (LotrO had 6 per group)