A Use for Classes.

[Bishop81]

How about quoting the right part. It would also give you an answer too.

There I fixed it. Happy? It got cut because the forums complained it was too long. But lets not get side-tracked.

Dodging isn't the only way to do combat.

Old school FF fights were just as challenging despite having no "dodging" whatsoever.

[Bishop81]

-snip-

Everything is to stretch out content in MMOs.

The "cookie cutter" mentality is from WoW. I don't see why it has to persistent in every MMO.

When I say "grind for skills", I mean do quests ... etc. to acquire a skill then select a few to take into battle. We already do this to a limited extend /w cross-class skills - you have to level a different class to acquire skills then choose a load out.

I don't see why there would be "incompatibility". Talk it out. Make the necessary changes to your load out. Done.

Not to mention, not all skills have to synergize with those of other players. Personal defensive CD skills have no effect on others at all.

Old FF games did fine without "dodging" mechanics. I don't see why we can't use a similar system here for players that can't dodge worth a damn due to their internet connection. It's just an alternative play style.

You can just play a Job if you want to continue doing things the WoW way.

[Saccharin]

I really wish people wouldn't take Blizzard's words as gospel. Not every game has to be like WoW. I think WoW's success has done enough damage to the genre already, killing creativity as everyone blindly follows in their footsteps afraid to try anything that WoW didn't do, lets not continue this downward decline.

When I say customise, I mean customise load-out per fight. There is no change in the number of buttons, you will only carry a finite set (of your choice) into combat.

Like it or not WoW is popular because they give people what they wanted. before WoW MMOs were a niche genre and to a certain extent they still are. If you look at most of the recent MMO flops, and some went free to play the started development while WoW was still rising. The suits got greedy and though yes we too can have millions of people playing a sub. It didn't work because they didn't understand why WoW worked. If it wasn't for WoW then most of these wow-clones would never had existed.

ARR went with the wow type because it's known to work but still kept enough to make it unique. Most importantly they kept it accessible - no hardcore raiding that so few actually take part in. Yoshi P in his post mortem of 1.0 said that they tried to make a FF11 2.0 but it wasn't FF11 and it bombed.

I see what you mean now by skills but it's the same effect. This is an MMO and it requires people and part of that is working as a team and these encounters require movement to survive an ability. Is popping a cooldown really that interesting rather than moving so far from the party not to kill anyone. To me it's not. We have some cooldowns that allow use to survive certain abilities but we can't use them often and I prefer that.

Given how popular crafting is in FFXIV ... crafting is mostly a grind. You grind for your cross-skills. You have to if you don't want to go broke.

Is crafting that popular? I guess levelling it can be a grind but in general I wouldn't call it a grind. I think crafting is FF is possibly the best system I have seen but with one problem. If it's not HQ (at level cap) it's close to vendor trash.

[Craiger]

WTF?

What's the point of the fights then? You just do your rotation and win without a problem...

So if I grind a lot, I can go into Turn 13 and beat it while eating at the same time? That's pretty much what you're saying (from what I can understand), cause getting maximum DPS is extremely easy if you don't have to dodge anything, or care about mechanics in general...

No offense, but that sounds just stupid and weird...

[Chihaya]

OP, I don't think the game is for you, time to move on to single player turn base stuff.

[Yukiko]

I guess OP is thinking about Element wheel in older FF games where you can "prepare" before Boss Battles with increasing your resistance...
Some games you could reach a soft cap and a hard cap (hard cap results in absorption, healing you when beeing attacked)...
Thats why most Bosses had normal attacks, elemental attacks and some even had "all element attacks"...

Final Fantasy games where you had a Boss doing only one element and you could negate or absorb that element were boring games (i will not tell names now in respect of Final Fantasy genre). The Problem SE had in those games were, that those bosses needed something to make them "a Boss" and oftn they added oneshot mechanics, so you HAD TO negate the element... well not on all games with such bosses, but each game had its own weakness!

FFVII and FFVIII are good examples with element wheels, the absorption became a part of the strategy where you could get healed from blackmages fire castings if needed and the balancing wasnt that bad either, ifrit as example "could" use his best attack and you get full healed or his weak attack and you could not be full healed... futhermore you sacrify other stats when putting everything to protection, not to mention there is more than "one" element...

Element wheels are used in MMOGs too, so please stop that nonsense with single player games!
And just to remind you: element wheel is only "one" example of how it can be done, there are many other possibilities!

[Gilraen]

I don't get all this 'hate' on classes. Like they cease to exist or something once you unlock a Job. Classes DO STILL have a VERY IMPORTANT role in the system even after you unlock your Jobs. They form the BACKBONE of the Jobs, you can't have the Job without the class. Those stat points you spend, those are put into the classes. Just ask anyone playing Summoner/Scholar. Further, not one Job ability is gained through leveling, not a single one. You have to quest for each and every one, all the abilities gained through leveling is gained by the classes themselves.

"But what of Dark Knight? That's not going to have a class." True AND false. Dark Knight will likely require people to have unlocked specific Jobs, but it will still be bound by levels. Levels are a feature of classes. Meaning one of the unlocking Jobs will be the Job that Dark Knight takes it's levels from, meaning it will still be tied to a class. The only way around this is if they make Dark Knight 'leveled' entirely though questing.

[RiceisNice]

...

It persists because it works. I've played WoW from classic to MoP. Back then, you had 10 different ranks of the same ability that'd you go back to your trainer to learn. A lot of them were nigh useless and just inflating your skill set.


Hunters had melee skills when they're supposed to be ranged. It doesn't even help that their melee dps is utter garbage, comparable to that of casters. Warlocks had "Detect invisibility" which had no PvE and PvP function. Literally because stealth =/= invisibility in that game. Mages had an ability that would display buffs on the target. Warriors had an ability that worked as a taunt...which is only usable outside of tanking stance (mind you any warrior, regardless of their spec, can use a tanking stance) the list goes on.

There were also a lot of other skills too; and you know what? FFXIV already suffers this to some degree. There were skills that worked as mediocre DoTs, debuffs, or provide yourself with extra evade as a dps. No one ever used these in an actual raiding environment because it's a waste of GCD and class resources for very very little benefit. We're seeing that right now with feint on DRGs and RoD for BRDs (only saving grace is that it can be free from wide volley, which is another problem of its own). Freeze immediately becomes irrelevant, cover has very little use unless the tank (me) isn't doing my job properly. Heck, most MNKs opt out of using fracture even when they have TP to support it to an extent because it's still a waste of a GCD and uses far too much TP for it's damage.

You said WoW is damaging the genre for what, being a success or setting the trend? What about other games that are doing the same or have done the same before? A lot of platformers are tacks of the mario formula; you can only add so much without changing the inherent design of it. It's working for a reason, and a lot of the things you're trying to suggest are also the reasons why a lot of rising MMOs have falled out.

And to add on, crafting does feel like another environment of it's own, since you can gear it up and everything. However, it has its own issues going on right now with the heavy emphasis on RNG. Some people also feel that that the classes are too similar to each other, though that's more on how the mechanics of crafting were designed to begin with. I don't really see this as a problem; but making each of the DoH classes unique to each other requires redoing the entire mechanic. I would love to see them step away from RNG crafting for end game for a bit, especially since it involves RNG and time gated materials.

...

And because that they're the backbone, some jobs don't deviate enough to add onto what they can already do; they feel like another gate to just learning new abilities. But it's also because that the jobs add abilities to a class makes it also unfeasible to go in as a class for the most part, especially as a archer who gets almost no benefits from having a variety of cross skills.

You could take away the jobs for each class, and they'd still play the same because of the baseline that is the class. It's also because of this that you can't really introduce two jobs to a class to have different playstyles if they'er within the same roles (such as Thief vs Ninja that was brought up a while back), unless you add in some sort of polarizing ability that drastically changes their playstyle, a weak example being defiance.

...

Having an element wheel creates class segregation when it comes to progression. Without redoing the current mechanic entirely, how do you expect a BLM to dps if the mob is completely immune to ice or fire? Or let's take away that mechanic, now suddenly BLM becomes a typical single-target caster dps. Or by some weird chance, they're fun to play. If they can do extra damage by just spamming fire (which may or may not be fun for some people), why would we bring a SMN or any other dps that cannot captilize on that weakness? Unless a BLM exploiting an element weakness does the same damage as a DRG would normally...now why would we bring a BLM on boss encounters that do not have elements applied to it?

[Bishop81]

I guess OP is thinking about Element wheel in older FF games where you can "prepare" before Boss Battles with increasing your resistance...
Some games you could reach a soft cap and a hard cap (hard cap results in absorption, healing you when beeing attacked)...
Thats why most Bosses had normal attacks, elemental attacks and some even had "all element attacks"...

...

Element wheels are used in MMOGs too, so please stop that nonsense with single player games!
And just to remind you: element wheel is only "one" example of how it can be done, there are many other possibilities!

Thank you.

I'm not very good at explaining things.

[Bishop81]

It persists because it works. I've played WoW from classic to MoP. Back then, you had 10 different ranks of the same ability that'd you go back to your trainer to learn. A lot of them were nigh useless and just inflating your skill set.

A lot of things in WoW persist because of inertia and publisher risk adversity.

WoW did many thing right. It did a hell a lot wrong too. The "WoW way" isn't the only way.

I don't really understand why everyone wants things to be like WoW. If I wanted things the "WoW way", I would play WoW. But I'm sick of the "WoW way", I came from WoW, after 8 years I'm a tad bit bored of it.

I'm not asking for the removal of WoW-like combat, just asking that it be supplemented for players who can't play properly due to bad ping and are hence excluded.