[Suggestion] Remove Stamina Bar

[kukurumei]

Instead of removing the whole thing, i would say an adjustment/balance is in need. Say those basic attacks should consume little stamina comparing to a WS. Magic should use the same minimal stamina and still depletes MP.

And they should add more cool animation in it.

That's more or less pointless. IF you make costs of stamina minimal, then why have a stamina requirement at all.

It's like having HP if every enemy does 1 damage to you. Eventually you'll be like, why watch the HP bar, ever.

If you're going to balance the stamina bar, it's going to be much much much harder then that.

Reason it's a complex and redundant mess. Not going to say removing it will solve all our problems, but it'll certainly make things tidy to balance.

I like the stamina system, it's a thinker's battle system. It forces the player to think about thier next move and how to manage thier damage and skill usage. In some ways, it's like the heat gauge in the Mechwarrior series, you built a mech around ballistic weapons, (low heat) missiles, (mid heat) and energy weapons. (high to very high heat) You could group your weapons to fire in various ways, but you were always limited by the heat they generate, with penalties for overheating, ranging from reduced movement, to shutting down and becoming a helpless target, or my personal favorite, suicide from engine/ammunition explosion.

My point is that both systems force the player to plan a strategy: For a certain target, do they use lo-stamina attacks for constant damage over time, and risk not doing enough damage? Do they use stronger skills that use more stamina, generate massive spike damage, and risk tiring? Or do they choose a middle path, mixing hi and lo stamina skills for optimal damage and stamina use?

That's when the overriding strategy gets implemented. Speed is king, SPAM! That's what happens when you realized that quantity can make up for quality.

tactical combat through micro management = 400damage
Spaming = 380 damage

Speed is, and will always will be an effective tactic, when it comes to these types of battle systems. It's not wrong, just boring.

While it can be balanced, it's just a horrible mess to balance it with.

You're going to have a super tough time balancing that. Do you make light attacks weaker? do you make healers most costly, do you make defend stronger, do you make TP more powerful?

It's even more convoluted when you have every flexible skill setups.

A choice between doing an attack or not doing attack? Brute force is mightily elegant.

Ever seen the commercial where a guy is sinking in a sand trap, and his 3 friends are conducting a strategy meeting to properly save him? While the 4th guy grabs vine and throws it to him.

[Vanguard319]

Speed is, and will always will be an effective tactic, when it comes to these types of battle systems. It's not wrong, just boring.

While it can be balanced, it's just a horrible mess to balance it with.

You're going to have a super tough time balancing that. Do you make light attacks weaker? do you make healers most costly, do you make defend stronger, do you make TP more powerful?

It's even more convoluted when you have every flexible skill setups.

A choice between doing an attack or not doing attack? Brute force is mightily elegant.

sorry, but you have it backwards, brute force only gets you so far, and speed is absolutely worthless without the skill to stay alive long enough to close in and use it, therefore, skill has been and always will be more important than speed, and even brute strength.

Case in point: the zerg strategy for the Seed Crystal fight in ffxi was all-or-nothing and more often than not resulted in failure, the arrowburn strategy took longer, but had a better success rate, since you could recover after a partial wipe as long as your tank survived. Of the two the former was all about brute force (in the form of the best gear) and speed, while the latter required skill.

[kukurumei]

sorry, but you have it backwards, brute force only gets you so far, and speed is absolutely worthless without the skill to stay alive long enough to close in and use it, therefore, skill has been and always will be more important than speed, and even brute strength.

Case in point: the zerg strategy for the Seed Crystal fight in ffxi was all-or-nothing and more often than not resulted in failure, the arrowburn strategy took longer, but had a better success rate, since you could recover after a partial wipe as long as your tank survived. Of the two the former was all about brute force (in the form of the best gear) and speed, while the latter required skill.

Unfortunately FF14, speed makes up 90% of the regiment. That's why people want FF11-2. It's just elegant in how they approached the battle system.

And thus the controversy of stamina bar. to use it for attack or defense, when attack is overwhelmingly effective, due to it's animation and damage estimations.

[Aldarin]

Except that the limiting factor in many cases is the animation time, so unless haste affects both stamina regeneration and animation time it will be semi-useless.

anyways the system would not be redesigned from scratch. the current system works fine except for the redundant stamina bar. the only change would be the removal of the stamina bar, which would take little to no work on the part of the programmers.

[Lyndria]

I saw some arguments that the stamina bar adds an extra level of strategy to the game. While I used to think the same way I feel that is laughable now. Seeing as the same effects can be achieved by using the restrictions already placed in game.

Regardless,
Responses seem to be about 50/50. I think a compromise is in order:

Limit the stamina bar to effect certain abilities only.
- power-up type abilities: taunts, second wind, speed surge, ferocity, spiritbind, etc. (even some of these I am reluctant on)

This leaves out:
- spells, weapons skills, normal attacks, bought attacks.

So how do we make a difference between big/small weapons and big/small attacks with no stamina bar!? ohnoes!
- weapon delay is a clever idea: doesn't have to be like ffxi and could be universal for that type of weapon, is tied straight to the swinging animation. As for attacks; my bought attacks, seeing as they are much more powerful... *cough* would simply have a longer animation time on them, in the exact same way as some weapon skills take longer to pull off than others.
- If they add auto-attack, something similar to weapon delay would probably be implemented anyways. If they didn't add auto-attack you would just spam your attack every time the universal cooldown was up. Which honestly isn't much different than what we do now. Also no different than what rangers had to do in ffxi to spam range attacks, there was no auto-arrow. Although a visual this time would help.

How do we make a difference between Blizzaga 19 and Fire 1 with no stamina bar!? o_0
- Obviously simple: longer/shorter casting times, longer/shorter animation times (spell ending lag), cost more/less mp.

@Aldarin
I see what you mean about casting time and animation time being the same thing. I still see them as separate though because I can increase/decrease a spells casting time in addition to its animation time. Example: Chainspell from ffxi allowed the mage to cast with no cast or recast timers, but the animation of the spell leaving the mages hands was still a limiting factor. They could only fire off spells as fast as the animation would allow.

*Maybe I'll get around to updating the OP over the weekend.

[Zantetsuken]

I actually prefer the Stamina Bar. It gives the developers an additional balancing tool for future abilities and it gives the game tempo.

I think a queue system would be nice though, especially if you can macro up attack sequences (which would negate the need for Auto-attack)

This has potential to be a much better game than FFXI, rather than a simple clone.

[kukurumei]

I actually prefer the Stamina Bar. It gives the developers an additional balancing tool for future abilities and it gives the game tempo.

I think a queue system would be nice though, especially if you can macro up attack sequences (which would negate the need for Auto-attack)

This has potential to be a much better game than FFXI, rather than a simple clone.

That was the plan with stamina bar, as oppose to it's predecessor, atb bar. But reality is a biach isn't it. It only serves to complicate the system with more micromanagement, and thus also made it harder to balance the unbalance. You now have 3-4 variables instead of 1-2 variables to account for in every single skills.

So that means if you have 200 possible skills(not counting future expansions) you have that many multipled by the stupid stamina bar to audit.

It's simple math, at some point, it's simply not worth to deal with it. It's like saying what happens if I want to put in HP, defense-HP, wound-HP, and body part HP. Fun right? so many things you can play with. Not fun, if you want something that just works.

A queue system is likely not very good. There are several possible flaws with it, all of which involves the above only multiplied again. In fact we already have a hidden queue system currently, or more a buffer system. You can buffer upto 2 skills.

with any queue system it doesn't solve the underlining problem of over complexity, it just make it more complex. You have to still balance every skill's stamina usage, and TP check, and cool-down checks, cast check, MP check, and animation checks, and now you got to consider, cancel checks and order checks.

The system isn't broken because its unbalanced, that's half the problem, the system is broken because it's overly complex to the point of redundancy.

Limiting certain skills to stamina only and non stamina would be a good start for "middle ground". But then that's just stealing WoW's energy bar, rage bar, etc.

Ideas go in circle, and what seems original...really isn't. Hindsight is a baich as they say.

Trying to throw in complexity to hide problems will always be the devil's playground. Its bad for the makers, because they have a bigger job of getting it right, and it's bad for the users because they have a longer wait for it to be gotten right.

[Xquiel]

please keep stamina bar!!! it's allright, I like it

[Enthy]

/signed. It's stupid that i have to wait for the stamina bar long after the timer on the weapon skill i want to use is up and ready for use.

[Chory]

Stamina bar would be reasonable if there was no cooldown time for each ability. It would prevent spamming one action over and over. But since there are cooldown times for every action, all that stamina bar is doing, is prevent using regular attack too frequently. When we will get auto-attack, such a limitation will be no longer needed. Im pretty sure, SE will get rid of stamina when they'll finally implement auto-attack.