Quote Originally Posted by Frein View Post
He understood you perfectly. The problem you're not seeing, however, is that progress is a major component of the MMORPG gameplay experience and currently the only way we have to measure progress is through gear. If you can't get improvements through gear, how will your character improve? Stagnation and a lack of goals will easily lead to boredom.


Nonsense. Currently, as well as before, 90% of the outcome is decided by your rank and the opponent's rank. The impact rank has on all formulas is so heavy there is no way to reasonably overcome it. If your rank is high enough, you can almost auto-attack an enemy to death. If it's too low, you'll take massive damage and will barely be able to dent it regardless of what you do.


On the contrary, I expect to get abilities with more impact. This was not possible before because they'd be accessible to everyone and everyone would be able to do everything very well.

An example: Imagine if every class had a non-TP 3-second stun. We'd just equip the stun from each class and chain stun stuff to death without letting it retaliate. This is why isolating abilities to certain classes gives them a lot more freedom to design meaningful abilities (not do-nothings like Keen Flurry or Enduring March).

Actually, I think we may already have such a problematic ability in the game: Twisting Vice. Unless bosses can force TP moves through without TP, it should be possible to reduce them to auto-attack tank & spank encounters by simply spamming TV. The only reason this isn't a staple strategy is that 1) bosses cheat on TP too much or 2) people have yet to adopt it.


There is barely any customization now either, unless you think doing it wrong is a viable way of customizing your character. This will not change as we will still get to distribute our points for each individual class and 85% of the time that will mean choosing between doing it right or doing it wrong.

rank had a large effect on your performance, however in targeting things of a fixed rank, IE how well you were able to fight different things 10 levels above you, or how far above that you could kill things, was most directly based on your skill selection, understanding your jobs strengths, and weaknesses, and capitilizing. There were a number of people with the same gear, and the performance level was vastly different, in terms of what they could survive, what they could kill, etc.

You believe they will make gameplay more skill centric, but i see nothing that hints toward this, i understand from your post you dont like the idea of people having the option to use similar skills, but making only 1 class have access to a skill doesnt make the game more centered on skill, it just requires you to have certain jobs. Making certain jobs invaluable doesnt equall a skill centric game, in fact in a skill centric game, you generally want every class to have a variety of abilities that allow them to perform equally, the key to uniquness is making it so that the way they go about handling the tasks is unique and synergistic within the class.

regardless i think its clear that the focus is going away from a free selection of skills, stats and roles, and into a more rigid system where your effectiveness will be most completely decided by gear and jobs, a lot of people asked for that, they need rails.