Why Does TP Exist in this Game and How Does it Enhance it?

[Jubez187]

Not a rhetorical question. I seriously want to know if anyone really understands the logic of this "resource." Resources can be fun to use under a few circumstances:

1. There is a sort of ebb and flow to the gameplay/resource

2. Mastery of this gameplay is greatly rewarding and almost essential to the success of the game.

Example: Tales of Xillia came out this past summer, in the game there are 2 resources. One that limits how many actions you can do in 1 combo, and pretty much a standard MP resource (that is used for skills). Normal attacks replenish MP; while blocking/dodging/weakness exploiting increases the amount of actions you can do in 1 combo. I use this example because this game had TWO active resources but I never felt like "zomg I can't use my skills" (which is why developers try to have resources that aren't binding, they want the players to use skills and have fun).

On to FFXIV and TP. TP pretty much fails on all accounts to try to give any interesting form of gameplay. The system is ONLY there to bind you in long fights. "Ebb and Flow" does not exist (I don't really know of any great ways of replenishing TP). The only ways TP can be used in this game are as follows:

1. Short fight; TP consumption was completely irrelevant.

2. Long fight; eventually TP got low and you just had to use your skills less (binding with no resolution).

3. If you wanted to "manage" your TP you would have to use LESS skills at the beginning of a fight (which honestly isn't practical seeing as you need to pour enmity and/or DPS onto the target).

(So pretty much it's either: irrelevant, annoying, or impractical to try to not make it either irrelevant or annoying)

So my question is....why? Why would someone think it's a good idea to put a mechanic into a game that can really only hurt the player with 0 sense of resolve. The worst part is that they have the nerve to say "Tactical Points" when there is no "tactical" way to go about using them. It's just a ticking time-bomb of almost inevitable frustration.



EDIT: After a couple of days of people saying TP is fine, or not, or that it could be like this or that..I just want honest an honest answer of: Has TP ever enhanced your gameplay experience?

[Moonwolfthegrey]

Good point
I guess something that can be done and which I think was very rewarding and encouraged good team play, is weapon skill combs with different players. This used to happen in a sense back in ffxi. So for example a monk would use weapon skill X after which a dragoon would use weapon skill Y and a warrior would finish with weapon skill Z, all in quick succession resulting in a big coordinated combo attack move that may result in increased damage plus or minus some debuff. There would be many such combos between all classes. ( I think they used to be called skillchains, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while)
This would encourage players to dps more actively in a coordinated manner with more insight into other classes.
As a reward to performing these skill chains( which woud happen frequently, for eg. 8+ times on a boss ) u get rewarded with maybe tp bonus or tp regen?, plus increase in ur limit break bar progress. I think this will allow more active tp management

[whiskeybravo]

There are 2 main ways of replenishing TP. Invigorate and Army's Paeon. Not all jobs have access to Invigorate, and not all parties always have a Bard. TP regenerates 60 per GCD, which technically means you never run out of TP. Most moves can be executed with 60 TP, and almost every move can be executed with 120 (2 ticks). A few require 3 ticks worth but I think those jobs have access to Invigorate.

I'm sure any sort of "logic" around TP as a resource centers around melee, since melee attacks typically don't use Mana as a resource. Sure, it would be more fun with unlimited TP, same with unlimited MP. Heck, why don't we just have unlimited HP, CP, and GP for that matter. Who really needs limitations after all?

Just my opinion: I think you are just trying to find something to nitpick about. The fact that your sig says there is nothing to do in the open world is evidence of a negative impression of this game. Negativity usually leads to nitpicking over minutiae.

I personally rarely run out of TP, and even if I do the TP regen is enough to keep attacking albeit at a slightly slower pace. Are you even having TP issues as a PLD? Typically they don't, since your usual rotation is not as TP intensive as, say, a WAR. Thankfully the enmity increases have reduced the need to constantly be spamming attacks to hold hate. In fact, on most mobs after a few combos you can sit completely still until they are around 5% health and never lose hate.

If you're not having TP issues, then there is really nothing to complain about. If you are just curious why TP exists, you are thinking too hard about it, because it's pretty obvious why it exists. At the end of the day, it's not trying to be fancy, it's just a generic system for skill management that doesn't try to do too much, or make things too complicated. Could it be more interesting or more interactive to enhance the game? Sure, lots of things could be. They keep saying they are listening to customer's ideas, so have at it.

[Kitru]

TP regenerates 60 per GCD

TP regenerates at the same server tick that DoTs tick on, which is every 3 seconds. As such, ignoring skill speed, a player regenerates 50 TP/GCD (60 * 2.5 / 3). As you get more skill speed, the less you get back. Since there are no combos that average out to less than 50 TP/GCD, you will always run out of TP eventually. The only reason that it's generally interpreted as an effectively unlimited resource is that we have a max of 1000, which means that, with an average consumption per GCD of 63.33 (PLD spamming RoH combo), it would take 70-71 uninterrupted GCDs until you were forced to lose a GCD thanks to resource limitations (950 / 13.33), which is nearly 3 minutes. Given that fights of any appreciable length often have enforced downtimes where you either cannot or should not be attacking, that gets extended almost indefinitely because you're regenerating all of your TP back on a regular basis.

The only time you'll ever run out of TP within a reasonably short time frame is when you're spamming the living hell out of AoEs, and, because TP regenerates comparatively slowly, doing so will prevent you from attacking for an appreciable period of time. As such, it's probably pretty safe to say that the mechanical "purpose" of TP is less to restrict ST performance, but, instead, to limit AoE performance.

If you're not having TP issues, then there is really nothing to complain about. If you are just curious why TP exists, you are thinking too hard about it, because it's pretty obvious why it exists. At the end of the day, it's not trying to be fancy, it's just a generic system for skill management that doesn't try to do too much, or make things too complicated. Could it be more interesting or more interactive to enhance the game? Sure, lots of things could be. They keep saying they are listening to customer's ideas, so have at it.

I can understand where the OP is coming from. TP is a simplistic resource that only ever crops up as a mechanic you have to consider in relatively rare circumstances. The main reason that it's in game is because we have a certain expectation of abilities consuming a resource and it doesn't make much sense for non-magical attacks to consume MP. Of course, the same could probably be said about MP since it's basically impossible for BLM or SMN to run out of their resource thanks to their fundamental design and the only time healers ever stand a chance of running out of MP is if they're spamming AoE heals and/or their big heals (which is almost never actually needed).

2 questions then arise: whether it should be removed and, if not, should it be made more complicated in order to justify itself? If it were removed, there would be no resource limitation at all, which basically means that everything would cost nothing and you'd be free to do whatever you want, which the devs probably don't want to happen. They probably want you to be able to go to town with AoEs but not indefinitely. As such, it probably shouldn't be removed. Since we've basically decided that it should remain, we have to determine whether it needs to be made more complicated and, if so, how so? Whether it should be complicated is something of a personal preference since the level of complexity a game requires/encourages is largely personal taste.

The developers ensured that ARR was very heavy on the movement/avoiding bad stuff on the ground aspect of the game, which lends it a level of complexity higher than most MMOs which don't use the same level of rapid repositioning/movement that ARR does (I say "rapid" because a lot of the effects don't give you much time to react and gtfo before they hit you for a crapton; even in WoW, the effects that are as common as those in ARR are much more heavily telegraphed). As such, ARR has afforded itself an increased level of complexity through enforced movement mechanics and increased attention demanded by the rapidity required by them (if you want to argue this, feel free, but I'll reference Titan HM, which is a stumbling block for a *lot* of people, even those with previous MMO experience, because it is one of the first truly punishing rapid movement/attention fights). The devs are probably happy with that level of complexity, which is why they left the resource management comparatively simple: players probably don't want to have to think about the how their resource paradigm when they're dodging cleaves and plumes.

Of course, if we decide that it *does* need more complexity, you have to wonder how exactly it could be accomplished. A simple solution would be to decrease maximum TP such that you actually run the risk of running out in realistic time frames. It would leave the basic model identical, but actually make the restrictions that it's supposed to exact more prevalent. A more involved solution would be to create separate resource paradigms for each job/class which basically means giving BRD, MNK, PLD, and DRG something like Wrath while increasing TP costs for all TP using classes enough that they're forced to use their secondary resource or risk running out of their primary resource too quickly.

Personally, I think it boiled down, largely, to the issue of required complexity and developmental necessity and expedience. It was faster, easier, and cheaper for the developers to leave the resource model functionally identical for all of the DoW classes and simply derive the needed complexity from moving and rotational/CD concerns. I'll agree that TP seems like a lackluster system given what it *could* have been implemented as, but I don't really see a problem with it because, while it's lackluster, it doesn't create any real gameplay issues.

[Jubez187]

A simple solution would be to decrease maximum TP such that you actually run the risk of running out in realistic time frames.

Great post, +1, but this solution is one step forward, two steps back. Okay, decreasing max TP to 700 or 500 only makes the "brick wall" point come faster. Seeing as there are no ways to gain TP innately for some classes, all you could do to combat this is to "sacrifice" some skills early on or hit the "brick wall' and use NO skills so that your TP regens. This is super frustrating and not really rewarding in the slightest.

I do agree with your 2nd point though. There is a lot of positioning and dodging that goes on, and it's already hard enough for the more casual players to make sure they're maximizing rotations, topping people off, holding aggro AND dodging AoE's.

To remove it from the game completely, I don't know. I know that it wouldn't affect my class (Paladin) as I do the same rotation all the time, and I wouldn't just have a go-to skill to spam had I no limitations. I just feel like there is a lot left on the table with MP and TP which could raise the skill ceiling of the classes in this game, and also make players feel more rewarding.

Heck, why don't we just have unlimited HP

Just my opinion: I think you are just trying to find something to nitpick about. The fact that your sig says there is nothing to do in the open world is evidence of a negative impression of this game. Negativity usually leads to nitpicking over minutiae.

If you're not having TP issues, then there is really nothing to complain about. If you are just curious why TP exists, you are thinking too hard about it, because it's pretty obvious why it exists. At the end of the day, it's not trying to be fancy, it's just a generic system for skill management that doesn't try to do too much, or make things too complicated. Could it be more interesting or more interactive to enhance the game? Sure, lots of things could be. They keep saying they are listening to customer's ideas, so have at it.

1. Unlimited HP would be worse than unlimited TP. You do realize that the ebb and flow of HP as a resource makes it so 1000's of people get to play a certain job (healers) and have fun with it? Why do healers love healing? Because they maximize efficiency of a scarce resource. I don't know what you were trying to get at in the first part of your post..I never said I wanted TP to be unlimited...

2. I love this game to death. I look deep into game design though, and was just thinking about this. If you don't wanna discuss game design, or don't feel you're fluent enough in it then stay out of certain topics.

3. If I'm not having TP issues then the resource wasn't "binding" which means that the economist in me (economics: the allocation of a scarce resource) hurts inside. The game is already gimped in so many ways regarding difficulty, and for a game that isn't TOO mechanically demanding, I would like to see some conceptual prowess shine through. As I said, we're speaking in terms of game design. A game being too easy is as much as a problem, if not more, than too hard. Pac-man needs its ghosts to be fun. So just because I'm not running out of TP doesn't mean this shouldn't be a topic of conversation.

[Kitru]

Great post, +1, but this solution is one step forward, two steps back. Okay, decreasing max TP to 700 or 500 only makes the "brick wall" point come faster. Seeing as there are no ways to gain TP innately for some classes, all you could do to combat this is to "sacrifice" some skills early on or hit the "brick wall' and use NO skills so that your TP regens. This is super frustrating and not really rewarding in the slightest.

The issue that it was addressing wasn't the joy-factor. It was the justification of the system itself, which is what you were largely asking about ("Why does it exist"). If you tighten the leash on TP such that running out of it becomes easier/more common, it has a greater justification since it is a more readily limited resource that has to be paid more attention to.

As to the "innate recovery mechanism" that you say the classes don't have, they all have the same one: the baseline TP regeneration. Yes, it's not all that impressive or interesting, but it's still *something* and, honestly, it's *enough* given that, for absolute resource consumption neutrality, you only have to sacrifice roughly one out of every 4 GCDs. It's not so much that it's frustrating or bad on its own, but moreso that it's simply *boring*.

To remove it from the game completely, I don't know.

I said that to demonstrate why we have it, even if it means nothing 99% of the time. TP could be completely removed without having a substantial effect upon a *vast* majority of gameplay, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a good reason to exist.

Most of what I was saying there was purely hypothetical or abstract. Resource models for games are always interesting things to analyze/compare/discuss. I was honestly surprised that ARR went with a variable size resource system for casters as opposed to the static resource systems that are becoming more and more common with casters in existing games. It matters less to BLM and SMN because, since they don't stack PIE at all, they have effectively static resource pools, but, for the healer classes, it's going to create some interesting issues down the line. Without intervention at some point, resource pools for healers could (and would) get large enough that healers stop using their lower level heals completely because their resource pools and regeneration (which is based upon max mp) would be large enough to soak up the inefficiency. I'm already seeing it to some extent with full i90 healers. It's one of the things that's always been problematic about variable size resource pools: they create drastically different use paradigms at different gear levels. Most newer MMOs have recognized this and are moving away from them and replacing them with static (or, at the very least, variation that is independent of gear).

I just feel like there is a lot left on the table with MP and TP which could raise the skill ceiling of the classes in this game, and also make players feel more rewarding.

Complexity and increased skill ceilings do not automatically translate into higher player satisfaction (which is what we're going for here). There's a higher relative skill ceiling on a WAR than there is on a PLD because the WAR is more active and has more options/stuff to think about than a PLD does, and yet, even though WAR has the more complex playstyle, many people still find PLD to be the more rewarding job to play. Just because there is more that *could* be done with it doesn't mean that there *should*.

I think your problem has less to do with TP and more to do with the overarching implementation of ARR's resources. It's pretty difficult to come up with a way to directly "complicate" a standard resource system like TP or MP without making it either arbitrary or outright annoying: RNG based regeneration mechanisms (e.g. regain X TP when you block or parry), regeneration mechanisms you have no ability to influence (e.g. regain TP whenever you are hit by an attack; since some enemies have high attack speeds while others have low attack speeds; you would have a glut on some fights and be starving on others), toggled consumption (e.g. turn on X ability to increase TP cost and damage), etc. While those changes make resource management more complicated and *somewhat* more compelling, they really just end up just making the system less predictable and enjoyable in the process.

All of the DoW classes use the same basic resource paradigm (ability consumption with consistent regeneration) with the exception of one: WAR. WAR is a job with a hybrid resource, which makes it different and more complex than straight TP. Because it's directly controllable and predictable (you generate Wrath through your own actions in an entirely predictable way), it's more compelling and interesting than what you'd get arbitrarily manipulating the TP system to complicate it. PLD gets close with Riot Blade and Flash, but not enough is done with their MP to really qualify.

As such, it's not so much that TP is a bad/boring system. It's that TP *alone* is a bad/boring system. PLD could be made a fair deal more compelling by actually integrating MP into their fundamental playstyle more. MNK could probably play around with certain powerful abilities that consume Greased Lightning stacks. I can't think of anything off of the top of my head for DRG or BRD, but it's entirely feasible for them to receive an additional secondary resource to compliment TP (possibly "jump charges" for DRG that are generated by some attacks and by their jumps; still not entirely sure about BRD). It creates the compelling resource management experience you're looking for without arbitrary complication of the existing resource, plus, it lets you create the feel you're looking for with the specific job without unintentionally impacting the others.

[gadzi_h]

IMO TP is there to simulate a stamina stat. This is not to say everything you are saying is not true. But it does make sense that in a longer fight we would run out of stamina as we dodge, attack and do all of this in heavy armour. But as it stands there is no variation on TP you get 1000 and that is it. However, if stats were more relevant they could have given TP buffs based on stat placement or an even better idea would be to drop in TP materia for melding into gear. At least that would give crafted gear some relevance at end game. Even TP potions and food would be acceptable. But to say everyone has the same TP is odd. Perhaps this was a decision made for reasons of class balancing.

[Nathan061111]

So many walls of text in this thread wish people could make points in a more concise way where possible.
Back on topic as Warrior unlimited TP would mean unlimited overpower which is just insane.
Overpower costs 130 TP and is insane at getting aggro, against Paladins at iLvl85-90, my warrior is 81, spamming CoS and Flash on clockwork bugs, overpower rips hate in 2 hits maybe 3 even with a few second lead.
In conclusion I think TP is there so you ration your utility skills, at least for Warrior, especislly considering Tomahawk at 120 as well.

[Kabooa]

So you can't sprint with abandon.

[Gooner_iBluAirJGR]

If each TP class (PGL/LNC/GLD/MRD/Archer) had skills that consume large amounts of TP for big effects/damage while executing combos
replenishes additional TP (10tp per successful combo skill) then TP might feel more important.

Example Pugilist:
Holy Fist: Delivers an attack with a potency of 250
Additional Effect: Heavy
TP Cost: 300
Recast: 30s

Death Blow: Delivers an attack with a potency of 100
Combo Action: Touch of Death
Combo Bonus: Consumes Touch of death DoT effect and deals 8 potency for every second remaining on Touch of death. (Max: 240 potency)
TP Cost: 450
Recast: 30s

Example: Archer
Haymaker Arrow: Delivers an attack with a potency of 600
Cast time: 5s (Moving will reduce potency based on how long the ability was channeled)
TP Cost: 600
Recast: 30s

Example: Lancer
Visceral Thrust: Delivers an attack with a potency of 100
Combo Action: Vorpal Thrust
Combo Bonus: Delivers an attack with a potency of 400
TP Cost: 500
Recast: 30s

p.s. Bloodletter could restore TP for Archers since they don't have combo skills.