Thread: 3.0: Elemental Weakness/Resistance?

So obviously, from 1.X to 2.X, elemental weaknesses and resistances were thrown completely out the window in favor of "easier gameplay".

Now that the game has a healthy amount of players and will continue to have a healthy amount of players by the time 3.0 comes out, can we bring those back with the new expansion? Just seems kinda weird for Fire spells to damage enemies like Ifrit and Fire Sprites, or Thunder spells to damage Ramuh and Lightning Sprites.

I'm pretty sure most people wanting to play BLM, at least at first, did so with the intent of being able to exploit elemental weaknesses.

Originally Posted by Mardel

They already said they won't have them since it would cause jobs to be excluded.

Yeah, kind of like how this already happened regardless of that "preventative measure."

Liking your idea a lot, ffxiv is probably the only final fantasy to break the elemental wheel from past ff series, the only problem would be to balance it with current blm gameplay... Which could be possible but only at 3.0, let's imagine a different rotation for differents situations and adding wind/water in the said rotations to counter a possible resist, it could lead to something cool and the blm job would look more challenging.

I don't have a reference but I believe they spoke about tweaking the battle systems for 3.0.

At some point they have to add more diversity, 14 has an incredibly bland system for gear.

Originally Posted by SirTaint

I don't have a reference but I believe they spoke about tweaking the battle systems for 3.0.

At some point they have to add more diversity, 14 has an incredibly bland system for gear.

I just hope we don't get into gear bloat like in XI...

Originally Posted by SirTaint

I don't have a reference but I believe they spoke about tweaking the battle systems for 3.0.

At some point they have to add more diversity, 14 has an incredibly bland system for gear.

The astral/umbral cycle is far more interesting than the previous version of "spam ice at ifrit" system that we're talking about here.

Elemental resistances in this sort of game is bad because there's really no point. There's no skill in just using whatever nuke the current monster is resistant to, the *only* time this gets interesting is if you have changing vulnerabilities, but that's not something you're going to just stick on every boss.

While it may seem bland from a lore standpoint, from a gameplay standpoint it's really much, much better to ditch the elemental resistances as part of the base skill set.

Originally Posted by Lemuria

And that's what this game is REALLY missing. Each fight needs to feel different, but they don't.

Spam fire nuke vs. spam ice nuke does not make it more interesting. It's still just spamming one nuke, it's much better to just simplify the thing into a single generic "nuke" button, because that's all you're doing anyway.

It only gets interesting if the fire/ice/whatever spells are different in nature, but that doesn't work well in an MMO. With an MMO you want some semblance of balance between the classes to reduce the number of times where you only want to bring X class to content or never bring Y class to another set of content. Too much work to make that work with however many different elemental types. You're better to dedicate that design effort to coming up with new jobs with their own rotations and usage instead of trying to give 3-4 separate, interesting and balanced rotations to the BLM just so they can cast different color spells against different enemies.