[Suggestion] Remove Stamina Bar

[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.

[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.

[Taokii]

I personally love the combat system's goal. It isn't perfect and requires some tweaking, but removing the stamina bar isn't something I would like to see happen. Honestly as a CON it's one of the only things keeping me from nuking like crazy and finishing a fight in three seconds. It does prevent spamming, you can't sit there and press 11121112111211121112 otherwise you will run out. You have to time all of your attacks, but not to an extent that it is frustrating. It requires you to actively engage and not watch everybody loves Raymond in between starting and stopping a fight. That's my two cents anyways..

[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.

[Dreamer]

....remove stamina, add auto-attack, tweak and balance HP/MP/TP useage, remove BR and add Skillchain/magicburst, delete armory system, add some sort of sub-job system..

<-- FFXI is that way. Please go play it. Some of us don't FFXI-2. There is zero reason why the current battle system can't work with some minor tweaks. You don't need to clone another game's battle setup in order to fix it.

I see a lot of good suggestions, but I feel that some of conversation has gotten slightly off topic.
The scope of this is to examine the benefits/hindrances of the stamina bar.

Auto Attack:
- If auto attack is added it could work fine with or without the stamina bar.
- If auto attack is not added, it could also work fine with or without the stamina bar.

So my concern is that the additional threshold, bottleneck, etc. of the stamina bar in its current form is useless. The desired effects for limiting actions can be achieved using the other limitations already placed in the game.

- We could use longer/shorter animation times to differentiate between abilities like bloodbath and rampart. Or, use the stamina bar for buff actions only. (Featherfoot, Fercocity, Blood Rite, etc.)
- Does my Warmonger really need to take up half my stamina bar or could we just give it a longer animation time? Or could we just limit those types of actions to stamina without spells, WS's, attacks, ect. also taking away from the same bar?

examples:

Casting Sacrifice takes - mp, hp, stamina, casting time, animation time, and also has a cooldown.
Using Seismic Shock takes - mp, tp, stamina, animation time and also has a cooldown.

- in each case there is enough there to limit the actions of the player sufficiently in a variety of ways without using stamina.

It boggles my mind that people are so hung up on adding a lazy auto-damage feature to the game that adds nothing tactically in and of itself to the game. It's an outdated feature that needs to go the way of the dodo. People already can't seem to keep themselves from spamming melee attacks; this will only exacerbate that.

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.

LotRO has some minor queuing in its battle system. It didn't seem terribly effective. Granted, it was only one attack, so additional queuing may fix that. But my gut feeling is that being able to queue a bunch of skills would make it feel like the game is playing itself.

[Lyndria]

@kukurumei

agreed.

[Crowley]

Right now the only queuing that really happens is when you have depleted stamina. You can queue a spell once you are "letting go" of your current cast and slightly queue up the next, or queue the cast-bar portion of a spell during a WS animation.

Currently the "cast interrupt" mechanic is almost impossible to trigger when you truly need it, and most often, triggers when you think a spell is not queued or cast (or lag) and you go to cast the spell again. You wind up, then cancel, then have to recognize this and recast again.... hard to believe that portion is working as intended... something wrong with the Esc key?

Stamina, IMHO, is in place to limit physical dps rate ... so it isn't a spam-fest. Its the 4th limiting factor to disciples of magic though ... and I find it quite cumbersome. Even the idea is .. really. Might be better if that rank one spell at rank 50 didn't take the same amount of stamina ... but honestly I'd like stam completely removed. I cast 2-3 self-buffs and I'm practically tapped out >.> I have to stagger them to allow stam regen in-between, which slows down the pace of combat even more.

[Xquiel]

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

[Reika]

I personally love the combat system's goal. It isn't perfect and requires some tweaking, but removing the stamina bar isn't something I would like to see happen. Honestly as a CON it's one of the only things keeping me from nuking like crazy and finishing a fight in three seconds. It does prevent spamming, you can't sit there and press 11121112111211121112 otherwise you will run out. You have to time all of your attacks, but not to an extent that it is frustrating. It requires you to actively engage and not watch everybody loves Raymond in between starting and stopping a fight. That's my two cents anyways..

This. Stamina adds balance to ability use and prevents complete spamming of basic attacks.