Delete auto-learn of skills

[Gennosuke]

I would love to see a huge part of the auto learning of abilities and spells being removed.

Right now it really feels like the character is evolving without much effort. The need to venture out in order to do quests or fight a NM in order to unlock a skill or spell always was fun to me. It makes you grow more attached to your character as you put more effort into what the character has become at some point. This sure leads to a bigger feeling of achievement as well which the game is lacking right now. This would automatically lead to more game content as well which everyone likes to see.

The current system of guild marks already is a good way of attaining some new abilities I think. While lower level abilities should still be learned automatically to help new players to find their way around in the game, way more mid- and highlevel abilities should require effort to learn. It does not have to be all of them of course. Learning should not be limited to guild marks though. Seperate quests to unlock skills similar to some weapon skill quests in FFXI sure would be a great addition. Regarding magic spells it could be handled in a similar way. Automatically learning beginner spells but then learning through guild marks, additional quests among other possibilities. It does not have to be a scroll dropping of a NM somewhere in the wild even though I also liked that system back in FFXI.

Nice post! I completely agree with your ideas.

It is as you say, it gives a much bigger sense of achievement. You give great idea for balance too to keep all people happy. I vote for that.

[ViolentDjango]

I play RPG because i love to evolve and learn and become more and more powerfull and learn bigger et beautifuller magics and ws ....

Seeking out a scroll of a skill and uses it on me, always feels great in that evolution.

But i think you (SE) made a bad choice to put most of the skills in auto learning because we lose that impression of evolution and also you delete interesting content that is obtaining the skills.

I mean there are some skills i have learned without even noticed

The guild point system for acquiring skill is really great but all the others skills should be learn with a scroll.

It will have people 'force' to farm and CRAFT to make enought money to buy scrolls or players will have to farm drop monsters or ah or even better quests their scrolls.

Its a big change but i really think it is a vital one since player will sense better their evolution and it will add a lots of intresting contents.

What do you think ?

No...

Just no.

A bigger sense of accomplishment? There was nothing challenging or rewarding about spending hours upon hours in dungeons tyring to get a spell with a 1% drop rate to land. Forcing someone to waste their game time doing things they don't want is not a boon, its a negative.

There was nothing good about what FFXI did to mages -- especially post Abyssea. Having to slave over farming for Ancient Magic -- spells that are almost completely useless and inefficient -- just because of the off chance that they MIGHT be able to give you a SLIGHT chance at improved drops against a Notorious Monster is asinine.

We have advanced abilities that require work to acquire, they come from guilds and require you to get guild marks. Redesigning the game to accommodate the silly premise that a mage should have to grind to deal the damage that a melee class can deal out of the box is pretentious and asinine.

That's what dungeons that drop high quality gear are for. Abilities aren't the reward, abilities are the things you learn to use to earn your rewards. You're asking the teacher to grade the student on how quickly they can acquire a pencil as opposed to how well they do on the test.

What is up with people and this misconception that wasting time makes things more challenging or rewarding? Sure, plenty of things I had to slave over to achieve in FFXI felt great when I finished them -- but then whenever I'd stop playing the game, thinking about them left a bitter, bitter taste in my mouth. Wasting your time doing things that have no real bearing on your game experience and are needlessly time consuming is silly.

Case in point. For Blue Mage you had to run around and learn abilities, sometimes you had to spend a few minutes (maybe an hour at the most) to learn a spell, but more often than not you got it the first time the mob used it. That was good, it was fun to run around and explore vana'diel and solo mobs you hadn't considered fighting before. Then at level 70 you fought Raubahn, which wasn't an overly complicated fight, but was fun and took a bit of know-how and effort to complete.

THAT is a good challenge. They could have made him a little bit more difficult, but otherwise its a good demonstration of working on something (learning BLU spells), then using it to achieve a goal (beating Raubahn), then having something to show for it (access to 70+).

Conversely, I now have BLM90, and I've been trying to farm Quake/Tornado/Flood for weeks. Several occasions I've quested into the deep bowels of beastman zones to find the mobs that drop these spells, and farmed for hours upon hours. A 15-20 minute walk to 3+ hours of killing the same mob over and over and over again for NO gain. This is not a challenge. The monsters are easy and they are everywhere, there's no skill or talent required to get to or to kill them, especially at 90. What it -is- is a huge waste of time, because then I get to compete as BLM against THFs and other classes who are there for the spells -so they can sell them- while I actually -need- it to do my job.

SE could have just as easily have made the spells 100% drops from 6 different NMs you had to start a Black Mage quest line to face, but instead you have to deal with the asinine principle that wasting massive amounts of time doing nothing (killing 3 mobs, each with 16 minute respawns, over and over and over) is challenging and rewarding when really its just stupid.

When the "challenge" of doing something can be overcome by wasting hours farming completely irrelevant items and selling them, then buying the spell from the AH so you can stare at it until the 1 out of 55 times, all precepts of a rewarding experience go out the window.

As an aside: among my favorite games are Monster Hunter and Demon's Souls -- I -love- a good challenge, but a challenge and a mindless hassle are two different things. If I am to -earn- something, I want to earn it directly, not be at the mercy of people capitalizing on ill-conceived concepts of "challenge."

[MattyWS]

Again it's not like anyone is asking for a direct port of FFXI to FFXIV. I shall make some points;

A spell that may be level 40 does not need to come from a level 60 NM, it could come from a level 40 normal mob.

A spell doesn't need to be of a drop rate of 1% when it could be of a drop rate of 20% (kill 1 out of 5 mobs will likely drop the spell scroll).

A spell can be rare and exclusive, meaning you cannot trade or sell the spell and you can only have one at a time. Meaning use it or drop it.

A spell can be bought from points (guild points or company seals).

A spell can be quested, but the quest doesn't need to be tedious, hell the quest can even be interesting!

Some basic and common spells can be bought from a vendor for quite cheap, doesn't need to be expensive and this way there is no inflation if only NPC's can sell it, and no one can scam anyone else.

Maybe it's too late now, but in the future, any new spells should use one OR MORE of the above suggestions instead of being auto learnt.


This doesn't have to be for spells, it can be for abilities and weapon skills too!

And if BLU is introduced, I think it should be the same as in FFXI, that was one of the most fun ways of learning spells and it felt so good to learn a new spell like that, especially given BLU spells are rather unique and fun.

[Gennosuke]

Again it's not like anyone is asking for a direct port of FFXI to FFXIV. I shall make some points;

A spell that may be level 40 does not need to come from a level 60 NM, it could come from a level 40 normal mob.

A spell doesn't need to be of a drop rate of 1% when it could be of a drop rate of 20% (kill 1 out of 5 mobs will likely drop the spell scroll).

A spell can be rare and exclusive, meaning you cannot trade or sell the spell and you can only have one at a time. Meaning use it or drop it.

A spell can be bought from points (guild points or company seals).

A spell can be quested, but the quest doesn't need to be tedious, hell the quest can even be interesting!

Some basic and common spells can be bought from a vendor for quite cheap, doesn't need to be expensive and this way there is no inflation if only NPC's can sell it, and no one can scam anyone else.

Maybe it's too late now, but in the future, any new spells should use one OR MORE of the above suggestions instead of being auto learnt.


This doesn't have to be for spells, it can be for abilities and weapon skills too!

And if BLU is introduced, I think it should be the same as in FFXI, that was one of the most fun ways of learning spells and it felt so good to learn a new spell like that, especially given BLU spells are rather unique and fun.

Agreed, you bring good points to the table.

Some People have a negative assumption that we are asking for a very tedious or time-consuming or monopolizing system when having to obtain scrolls. Heck, i don't want any of that myself, I'm a casual player. I'm just asking for it to be fun and have a sense of accomplishment in gaining them. We already have quests for all sorts of stuff, why not have it for scrolls too? Just spices it up and makes it more fun. The game should not be all about grinding your way through ranks and spells, there should be a fun factor involved, otherwise it's really dull and boring.

Achievement is key in any rpg, spoon feeding sucks, kills the game. All we need is balance, that's it. Address the concerns and work on them.

[Bethor]

And if BLU is introduced, I think it should be the same as in FFXI, that was one of the most fun ways of learning spells and it felt so good to learn a new spell like that, especially given BLU spells are rather unique and fun.

<3~

/10chars

[Liham]

@MattyWS : Exactly


The people that don't agree with that statement think that i wanted the same system as FF XI BUT THAT IS WRONG.
First of all, i m not a big part of 'lets make FFXIV a FFXI-2' and i was taking it only as an exemple but you can take any mmorpg on the market if you want.
I quit BLM in FFXI partly because of the scrolls {impossible to gauge} {fishing}.

The solution could be for exemple that the skills are :
- Buyable in shop (with some originality like the bard in FF XI (yes a FF XI ref :$))
- Exchangeable with guild rank points (great system already in place but that should absolutely take all the skills)
- Questable (soloable)
- Auto learn (still a few can stay)
- Droppable (with 20% drop and certainly not 1% like FF XI)
- Craftable (????)
- Learned from monsters
- Exchangeable with company guild points
......

So are they still people against ? And Why ?

[zaviermhigo]

Why in the last 3 pages did people talk about guildmark abilities like they have spells? As conj and thm, you need the trascendence like abilities of both, maybe decrease enmity dart, fastcast, but you can't learn spells there. It would be cool if you had to save up 70,000 guildmarks to buy fire III, or Shadowsear II or something to that effect. The current guildmark abilities are an insult to the system most of us on the OP side are talking about.

If spells were craftable, would alchemist make them? I think so.

[Coraline]

I think that deletion of auto learning skills would be a waste of time. There`s enough things to do that waste time like repairing items. I can see maybe learning summons(quests) or blue magic(monsters) that way. I can see buying spells but you are gaining exp to learn a new skill you didn't know you were capable of.

[Airget]

Nah, you keep the spells as they are now and just utilize Guild marks as a means to obtain different abilities and traits. Though I am a tad concerned if the rumor about removing the action cost to set skills is true cause then that just means they have no plans of actually expanding on the Guild mark system like they should.

The way I see things is with the action cost limit you will end up having to choose what you want to use, however if they remove it then they'll just get one step closer to just being any old mmo clone. In a game that was represented as a means of playing how you choose if they do decide to take this path they are basically killing the tiny fragment of playability customization the game had to begin with.

I honestly don't see what's so hard about just adding a wide range of obtaining abilities, the devs keeping talking about how they need to make gear for dungeon rewards but why does gear always have to be the reward. They could easily add special Rare/EX items that can be exchanged along with guild marks to obtain unique abilities and traits for your class and actually develop a wide range of challenges to obtain them by.

Basically the scrolls could be obtained in dungeons, through Guild marks, through settlement reputation and maybe even from the beastmen. I just hate that there's a chance they are going to get rid of action cost since to me that's the most appealing thing I see with the game. I see action points and I think after a yr or two we'll have so many abilities and traits to work with it'll be hard to find two people that are actually the same. But in the end it sounds like we'll just all end up being the same with maybe 1 slight variation that doesn't really make us any different then the person next to us.

But ya getting back to the topic at hand basically keep auto-learning the same as it is now and when abilities are added later on have them be rewards from dungeons, chest, secrets, quest, settlements and such. Granted IO ddin't want to be this kind of guy but this would seriouslly be a deal breaker for me if they remove the point limit cost and instead add rank restriction and possibly worse an even firmer class restriction for a majority of abilities where they would just be better off saying, ya sorry just like how we said leves aren't a major part of the game, well customizing your class to your play style is no longer a means of customization either, sorry!

[syntaxlies]

I wouldn't mind if you had to go to the guild every five lvls and have an npc teach you an ability for free with a quick CS or something.

dont wanna pay and dont wanna farm. cross class farming is pain in the ass enough.