AOE Toggle Needs to GO

[AuctionGirl]

I bet we are moving to more of a FFXI type spell database, where you can cast any spell you want at anytime that you previously have learned. Thus removing the max actions bar.

If this happens, it sure will feel like the game is going backwards. This will help with balancing the game and skills, classes and jobs though. So it might be a step forward.

There is one thing I really enjoy in this game and that is mixing and matching skills from various classes and making your own class.

One thing that can be done which is kinda a hack for the situation but would add some complexity to the game would be forcing all spells to be AOE, any mob that is RED would be part of this AOE range, or any party members. The AOE would not work from outside of the mob range, this would lead to more strategy with mages just spamming spells, when 2 or more mobs are inside the mob party. This would put a damper on the sleep strategy, and I think it would add some complexity to the battle tactics. AOE would not work for yellow mobs, it would be considered a non-aoe spell if casted on a yellow mob.

[Tsuga]

Sorry dude, but majority wins. I don't want level caps on the new dungeons but the majority wants that, so odds are we're going to have that in the future. AOE toggle never really bothered me, so I don't care if they take it out or leave it in, but I'm sorry that you're losing something you like.

The problem with this logic is that the majority in this thread seem to be against changing it. It's as if just the fact that it was brought up as a possible con is enough to warrant changing it, even if the people who want it changed just don't know how to use it.

[Anty]

That's almost exactly how it is right now. Controller users: Press emote button when selecting spell target. Keyboard users: Press Z when selecting spell target.

The system is good, the main problem is that it's not explained anywhere. That's not Yoshida's fault though, that was put in by Tanaka but never explained anywhere.

I would prefer they keep the toggle in place unless they have a better system planned. I feel that if people knew how to toggle efficiently they wouldn't complain about it at all. Kind of like how people complained about BR before they knew how to efficiently use it.

Atm aoe are sometimes needed in leves. In every other situation (all but heals ofc) its useless since it even kills xp - in a normal sp party where you can claim only one mob and get the penalty of the not-red-yet mob which is stupid.

If it was a good decision or not ... well i hope we can tell with 1.19 since i doubt that 1.18 will deliver half the changes im hoping for.

[Ava]

I would like to see a good argument against toggle that doesn't lean on the crutch of "IS 2 EASY THX TO MP CAWST". And if your argument is that you're accidentally AoEing all of the time, then learn to pay more attention to what you're doing. It takes ONE flippin' button press to switch AoE on and off. If you can't manage that, please reconsider your class.

There are plenty of reasons the toggle should be removed.

Reasons why it should be removed:

- AOE Toggle removes any sense of decision making from support classes, healing has always been a game of making decisions. The better decisions you make, the better healer you are. This encompasses MP efficiency and just flat out decision making.

- AOE Toggle is an extra button press for a role that needs to react quickly, and cast quickly to keep his or her party alive. When you throw in an extra button press for AOE your reaction time gets bottlenecked by factors it shouldn't be, such as UI lag.

- By giving every caster in the game the ability to AOE, you remove the possibility of some potential jobs, such as Scholar or Bard.

- The controls for this game are already convoluted, things need to be minimized a lot, if they can provide us with a better way of AOEing (which I believe they can), then they should.

- AOE Toggle gives us an artificial sense of skill. It takes extra effort to deal with unresponsive UI/extra button presses to achieve an "OK" result.

Reasons why you would want to keep it:

- It's nice to be able to AOE anything, I don't think anyone would argue that. It's nice to be able to just equip one spell and with a single button press toggle between AOE and no AOE.

- The fact that you can AOE is a major unique difference between THM and CON. The major difference between these two classes is held by the fact that they have different AOE mechanics (THM being a cone, CON being a radius). So if it were removed, what's the incentive to be one or the other? (Battle Reform may address this, we don't know yet)

- Assuming the battle reform makes nukes useful, CON may suffer from action bar issues. If a dungeon requires AOE and has a variety of different enemies with different resists, how reasonable would it be to ask people to change their bar every other pack of monsters? Not very reasonable. (Judgement should be reserved until 1.18, it's probably safe to assume they won't make AOE important in dungeons if they plan to remove the toggle)

Other thoughts:

I am for the removal of the toggle, mostly for the reasons I stated; however, I try not to completely disregard the opposition. There are valid reasons for both sides of the argument, but in my personal opinion, removal is the better of the two.

In addition, a lot of people are making arguments under the assumption that we will always play with the current battle system and monsters. A lot of changes to combat will come with 1.18, as well as two new dungeons and who knows how important AOE will or will not be. Under the current claim system (I'm aware they are looking into altering it) you cannot claim several monsters and receive exp from all of them anyways, so AOE has limited use in the current game.

In addition, the only thing they stated is being removed is the toggle. Even if the ability to AOE is removed with the toggle, try to think about what kind of options this could open up for the dev team. They could make AOE job specific, or give us a materia that augments "Magic: AOE" or something. Just because the toggle is being removed doesn't mean they are scrapping the concept entirely.

[Tsuga]

you honestly think that its the ffxi fans fault? ... i think the whiners and complainers are coming from all mmo directions,
and the aoe toggle has nothing to do with ffxi, people from aion, wow or whatfuckingever could be asking for the same?
The reason why people compare this game to ffxi is SE fault, its a bad copy of ffxi which has more flaws then i can think of.

Jobs, spells, abilities, races, even the city themes in a way are copies of ffxi. the BR system is a copy that needs a lot of love still or has to be redone, the jobsystem is not so far away from the subjob system of ffxi either... so SE is to blaim for the many comparisons to ffxi, not the ffxi fans.

Nothing was/is really new in that game. But it lacked almost everything that should be the bare mininum of almost every mmo. If this game was called wow 2 people would compare it to wow as well, every time they start typing...

This game is made by the same development team, of course it will bear resemblance and reference, but that doesn't mean that this game should be anything like XI, and this and many other threads are made by people who seem to think that it SHOULD be.

I'm not saying that it's the former XI (I played XI for 3 years, mostly as mage classes, hence why I feel so passionate about the AoE toggle) players that are to blame for this, I'm saying it's the former XI WHINERS, the people who were jacked into XI up until XIV came out, and were expecting it to be XI-2, simply because it bears resemblance to XI.

- AOE Toggle removes any sense of decision making from support classes, healing has always been a game of making decisions. The better decisions you make, the better healer you are. This encompasses MP efficiency and just flat out decision making.

This wouldn't change if we had AoE set to our action bar rather than a Z toggle, in fact it would be "faster" to pull off the spell, thus making your supposed "decision making" argument moot.

I think you're assuming that these AoE spells would come at a higher cost, which would be solved by making AoE Toggled AoE spells more costly in Hate/MP. As I've said in response to many others in this thread, this is a totally different argument, and has nothing to do with the toggle mechanic itself.

- AOE Toggle is an extra button press for a role that needs to react quickly, and cast quickly to keep his or her party alive. When you throw in an extra button press for AOE your reaction time gets bottlenecked by factors it shouldn't be, such as UI lag.

If you're hitting UI lag, that is a UI issue, not a toggle issue. While toggling may be delayed by a fraction of a second due to UI lag, I have never been in a situation where it was enough to have any effect on whether or not I've been able to cure party members fast enough. The abysmal targeting system is more to blame for the difficulty in curing party members, and if anything toggle in its current state helps to alleviate that issue.

- By giving every caster in the game the ability to AOE, you remove the possibility of some potential jobs, such as Scholar or Bard.

So you're saying that they should nerf my class in order to create whole new classes that I may not be interested in? nothx.

- The controls for this game are already convoluted, things need to be minimized a lot, if they can provide us with a better way of AOEing (which I believe they can), then they should.

And are you suggesting that having two of every spell would be any simpler? One extra potential button press to initiate a spell is only confusing/convoluted the first time you use it, and that's due to lack of explanation. It is a more streamlined solution to the cluttering of our spell lists and action bars that would have been the answer to AoE in any other MMO.

- AOE Toggle gives us an artificial sense of skill. It takes extra effort to deal with unresponsive UI/extra button presses to achieve an "OK" result.

I think that it takes some amount of attention (if that's what you're referring to when you say "skill") to be able to alternate between AoE, and non-AoE in response to your surroundings, and the party situation, and while that would not be lost with the "-aga" spell response, it is a simpler solution to AoE.

The UI lag is a separate issue, and while it may affect toggle, I would hope that that issue will eventually be solved in general.

[Zanfire]

There are plenty of reasons the toggle should be removed.

Reasons why it should be removed:

- AOE Toggle removes any sense of decision making from support classes, healing has always been a game of making decisions. The better decisions you make, the better healer you are. This encompasses MP efficiency and just flat out decision making.

- AOE Toggle is an extra button press for a role that needs to react quickly, and cast quickly to keep his or her party alive. When you throw in an extra button press for AOE your reaction time gets bottlenecked by factors it shouldn't be, such as UI lag.

- By giving every caster in the game the ability to AOE, you remove the possibility of some potential jobs, such as Scholar or Bard.

- The controls for this game are already convoluted, things need to be minimized a lot, if they can provide us with a better way of AOEing (which I believe they can), then they should.

- AOE Toggle gives us an artificial sense of skill. It takes extra effort to deal with unresponsive UI/extra button presses to achieve an "OK" result.

Reasons why you would want to keep it:

- It's nice to be able to AOE anything, I don't think anyone would argue that. It's nice to be able to just equip one spell and with a single button press toggle between AOE and no AOE.

- The fact that you can AOE is a major unique difference between THM and CON. The major difference between these two classes is held by the fact that they have different AOE mechanics (THM being a cone, CON being a radius). So if it were removed, what's the incentive to be one or the other? (Battle Reform may address this, we don't know yet)

- Assuming the battle reform makes nukes useful, CON may suffer from action bar issues. If a dungeon requires AOE and has a variety of different enemies with different resists, how reasonable would it be to ask people to change their bar every other pack of monsters? Not very reasonable. (Judgement should be reserved until 1.18, it's probably safe to assume they won't make AOE important in dungeons if they plan to remove the toggle)

Other thoughts:

I am for the removal of the toggle, mostly for the reasons I stated; however, I try not to completely disregard the opposition. There are valid reasons for both sides of the argument, but in my personal opinion, removal is the better of the two.

In addition, a lot of people are making arguments under the assumption that we will always play with the current battle system and monsters. A lot of changes to combat will come with 1.18, as well as two new dungeons and who knows how important AOE will or will not be. Under the current claim system (I'm aware they are looking into altering it) you cannot claim several monsters and receive exp from all of them anyways, so AOE has limited use in the current game.

In addition, the only thing they stated is being removed is the toggle. Even if the ability to AOE is removed with the toggle, try to think about what kind of options this could open up for the dev team. They could make AOE job specific, or give us a materia that augments "Magic: AOE" or something. Just because the toggle is being removed doesn't mean they are scrapping the concept entirely.

Pretty much what i was thinking (and many others). Though with a limit on which spells you can bring to a raid would only really enforce the whole "think before hand" idea, but chances are like most things in this game, endgame probly wont be thought out that much by the devs.

[Griss]

If there removing the toggle from the spell select level to the top interface and calling it something else that's good.

If there going to be doubling the spell lists and keeping the ap system and maximum amount of slots the same thats a bad thing. if there adding more bars while allowing more actions to be set, Then that's kind of a good thing, but the number of button presses/user actions will go up negating any speed benefit the people who do not understand the function of the toggle are imaging will happen.

Seriously, hitting one button when you wanted to change how your spells acted is to complicated? if that's the case and this is where the game is heading we really are on the highway to hurpadurpvill.

[Anty]

This game is made by the same development team, of course it will bear resemblance and reference, but that doesn't mean that this game should be anything like XI, and this and many other threads are made by people who seem to think that it SHOULD be.

I'm not saying that it's the former XI (I played XI for 3 years, mostly as mage classes, hence why I feel so passionate about the AoE toggle) players that are to blame for this, I'm saying it's the former XI WHINERS, the people who were jacked into XI up until XIV came out, and were expecting it to be XI-2, simply because it bears resemblance to XI.

i know a lot of ffxi people and a lot are playing atm and nobody there wants this game to be like ffxi. They take other mmos as example for good of bad things as well. I don't think that people mentioning FFXI AH really want exactly the ffxi AH copy, the same goes for all the stupid text commands, instead of proper menus. And looking at how few people acutally say something in the forums, i wouldnt worry about it too much.

I stopped playing ffxi long before ffxiv came out. I still had my account and checked on the expansion, first abyssea update as well. But then stopped again.

I was done with ffxi. I never wanted it to be a clone. Yet, even before the whining started SE wasnt very creative. They took way too much from ffxi into ffxiv. If the game was more polished the way it was supposed to be, i bet there wouldnt be a dev-change and the game would be in a better state by now.

But due to the revamp of everything (the zones is something i welcome very much though) wasnt needed but since they started it, they have to bring it to an end. Atm nothing is really polished and finished. I hope that we won't see a ffxi-2
and i don't want a "world of fantasy" either. and honestly i dont have a clue where this game is goin to, which pisses me off a bit. But i can't do much more then wait and see.

In the end its the developer that needs to have a vision and a plan. And if they change their plans with every whiner then they fail big time.

[Dreadnought]

I confirmed with the dev. team that in the future they are planning to remove the AoE magic toggle.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU A THOUSAND TIMES THANK YOU

[Dreadnought]

That would cause balancing issues.

Perhaps and extra (optional) key press during the targeting? Kind of like now, but not sticky. And since you always have to explicitly hit it, you're not likely to accidenlty AOE things.

NO! not accidentally AOE things is your own responsibility as a player, not the systems responsibility to hold your hand.