It's Time To Wake up

[Aegrus]

Looks like someone hasn't done end-game raiding with a BLM. :P

Looks like someone hasn't had as much experience with the general population. A small...read SMALL...minority use this effectivley, and generally, as a tank, its not an issue on DPS ripping threat initially, though it is always appreciated. You wanna know why? Just do a random PF with the majority that still haven't/can't clear ravana and you will readily see people that it would make no difference if they did or not (if you don't get the insinuation...they are bad).

Really? Skill bloat? No. Just no. 99% of the skills are useful, so that's not needless bloat.

Skill bloat is having TOO many skills that are largely redundant and not fun. Yes, skills can be useful, but when you have multiple cds that just do a hit on a 15-90 sec cd, have a different flavor of "Do Bonus Damage" or are just not pressed (see feint, haymaker, arrow volley/quick nock, blood for blood/raging strikes, Sidewinder and every other ability that 60+ sec that just does damage for examples). When every class needs 3 or more action bars bound just to play their class effectively, that is too many binds. Yes, some can utilize them, but in a game designed for consoles, tackling this w/o a keyboard is a nightmare for some players and the classes they choose.

I don't expect everyone to agree with every point, just as I am sure others have differing expectations. I, for one, am tired of lazy game development that is crippled by fear and shareholders. The way games became successful is they either filled, or created a niche to thrive in. You are never going to please everyone, that is reality, but that does not excuse lazy design decisions.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

stuff

You must not have played many mmo's. FFXI, for instance, had a zillion more skills than XIV, and it was played on consoles. Most other MMO's, aside from guild wars, have more than 10 skills you use regularly.

[Aegrus]

You must not have played many mmo's. FFXI, for instance, had a zillion more skills than XIV, and it was played on consoles. Most other MMO's, aside from guild wars, have more than 10 skills you use regularly.

Apparently you have not played many mmos. Just because there are a ton of skills, doesn't mean they are used all the time. Last I checked, most classes have 35-45ish binds for skills (some are lucky and can just not bind skills).

In ffxi, you used a few skills, you knew before the fight, that you macros to use with other abilities. Also, the game play was almost snail-like in pace compared to modern mmos. Comparing TWO mmo's, is not comparing many. You are listing 2 mmos that are nearly 15 years old.

Guildwars2 reduced skill bloat by a TON, you have to pick and choose skills, WoW has revamped and reduced it by a ton, Aion had a combo system that allowed for one button to allow for multiple chained skills to allow room for situational binds, Wildstar had an ability cap, Ragnarok Online 2 had maybe 2 action bars of stuff....

Please contribute something meaningful that anecdotal evidence, and fyi, ffxi was the KING of skill bloat. You did not use every skill, you used a small handful.
So I ask you, have you played anyother mmos other than GW and FFXI?

It's probably one of the most pompous attitudes possible to assume that people who disagree with you just don't understand.

Who, or what are you talking about and to whom? I am genuinely curious as I am incapable of reading minds.

***Sidenote.... The community on this forum is incredibly rude with their "quote". If you just remove the original content and replace it with "snip, stuff, etc..." you just prove how little you read of the original content that you can't actually pick a quote and instead insert some demeaning comment that proves you are just waiting for your turn to speak, not actually engaging in a conversation.

Quotes allow others to follow your line of logic, reasoning, or just to further enforce the point you are addressing or making.

[Remus]

You must not have played many mmo's. FFXI, for instance, had a zillion more skills than XIV, and it was played on consoles. Most other MMO's, aside from guild wars, have more than 10 skills you use regularly.

Most MMOs nowadays avoid ability bloat. Most games that has released now have had a small arsenal of skills because having too many starts to get tedious. WoW even cut down on some of their skills compared to how it was before because people didn't like the fact that there was so many skills. As the post before me has said all those games cut down on skills because lets be honest a majority of people don't like having that many skills.

[Assirra]

Most MMOs nowadays avoid ability bloat. Most games that has released now have had a small arsenal of skills because having too many starts to get tedious. WoW even cut down on some of their skills compared to how it was before because people didn't like the fact that there was so many skills. As the post before me has said all those games cut down on skills because lets be honest a majority of people don't like having that many skills.

Honestly what other people find bloat i tend to find mostly situational cd's or just fun things to mess around with.
You don't want to use all those skills? Fine don't then. However you have no right to take them away from me.

[Aegrus]

Honestly what other people find bloat i tend to find mostly situational cd's or just fun things to mess around with.
You don't want to use all those skills? Fine don't then. However you have no right to take them away from me.

This sums up the community well. You are afraid of change, and I understand this, esp with the ffxi to ffxiv 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0. However, this has to be dealt with.

You can still have choices in skills, AND, not have bloat. 10 is too few, 30 is pushing the limit of alot, but somewhere between 20 and 25 is a nice balance.

Just because you have alot of skills doesn't mean they are all situational. Some just have to be pressed on cd, but are boring damage skills. 2.0 had a good balance, and pushed the edge of bloat. Adding in5+ skills (revamps of old skills) i believe pushed it past the tipping point. Some classes got it easy, wars could just macro out a skill swap for fellcleave/decimate with innerbeast/steelcyclone, paladins just didn't have 3 weapon chains, ninjas had mudras (4 buttons for 7 skills), but others, such as bard or summoner had abilities made relevant or added to their list on top of the new 3.0 skills.

Lets use a Dark Knight as a great example.

Unleash/Abyssal Drain can literally be the same skill and no one would cry. This is a NEW class that was just released and they managed to give it a redundant skill out of the gate. Carve and Spit is an one of the better skills that I still lump into HEY HIT THIS EVERY-MINUTE FOR MEDIOCRE DAMAGE, at least you can choose to buff the damage or get mp back, however, this is still lackluster. Why is this a level 60 skill? Its not fun, its not game changing, its literally just an extra ability just to fill in a space for no real reason.

[Duelle]

You must not have played many mmo's. FFXI, for instance, had a zillion more skills than XIV, and it was played on consoles. Most other MMO's, aside from guild wars, have more than 10 skills you use regularly.

The jobs in XI that had a zillion skills were still boiled down to 4 or 5 abilities. For the million songs BRDs had, for example, the only ones that mattered ended up being March, Ballad, Madrigal once in a blue moon and Carnage Elegy when the planets aligned. Anyone focused on nuking pretty much uses their strongest element (Thunder or Blizzard, depending on how you merited).

This. Why don't we have something like this?! (That's not all, you have even additional mouseover-information in D3, too.)

And in FF14..It's just hilarious.. .there are entries for "Attack magic potency" and "Attack power" on the character chart.. and they are literally the same values as the according main stat.

Wow, so with 1000 intelligence I have an "Attack magic potency" of... 1000. Thanks for the information, really thank you very much, I don't know what to do without this information.

This was brought up back in beta, and the developers were pretty much saying "yeah, it's better if you don't know the percentages based off of value". On some level I think they don't want theorycrafters to accurately derive stuff (the way WoW theorycrafters could tell you how much defense rating you needed as a tank to become uncritable) to retain some semblance of control over the game. Hiding the effects of stats also makes subtle changes and nerfs to things much less noticeable.

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Skill bloat is one, one that will have to be addressed next expansion at the latest.

Agreed. I wasn't expecting them to add 5 abilities over the HW job questlines. I figured we'd get two, one at 55 and then one at 60 with a bunch of story stuff in between.

Job distinction. The class system was a nice throwback to 1.0, but now its just a meaningless restriction to new players. Wanna make a physical DPS? You HAVE to level lancer to 34. Caster DPS? LEVEL A RANGER/BARD. At least tanks only have to level other tanks and/or just monk to level 12 and be done. What does this yield? 3-5 mandatory abilities to play your class well. Invigorate, Swiftcast, Protect, Quelling Strikes(lol like people use this), Blood for Blood for a minor dps CD, Raging Strikes... It's not a choice when you are only given at most 5 skills that are possibly useful (warriors actual have to choose from 6 but that's pretty minor ultimatley).

Problem is that resolving this involves changing most classes and also their place in the storyline. Entry into your chosen city state does push you towards the local guilds. It would take a WoW Cataclysm-style revamp of Eorzea to pull this off (the gladiator's guild could be absorbed by the Sultansworn as a training academy for prospective members, for example).

DPS. I have to point it out, if you are going to tune savage fights to the point that you need to be performing the best you can, you have to have a way to know you are doing good damage, and you cannot do this without a third party program. Otherwise the bard, warrior, or paladin that is only performing at 40% of their damage potential just makes the group feel like they are under performing without knowing what exactly is wrong. All this does is make those that are pulling their weight get disheartened since OBVIOUSLY there is something that they as a dragoon, monk, and/or blackmage are doing wrong, since the bard is hitting the right songs.

I'd probably focus on the fact that raid clears were hinging on DPS from non-DPS jobs to skip on the time it would normally take to gear DPS jobs to meet those DPS checks. That's why some have convinced themselves all tanks should drop their tanking stance and use DPS accessories instead of playing like tanks.

[Voltyblast]

This was brought up back in beta, and the developers were pretty much saying "yeah, it's better if you don't know the percentages based off of value". On some level I think they don't want theorycrafters to accurately derive stuff (the way WoW theorycrafters could tell you how much defense rating you needed as a tank to become uncritable) to retain some semblance of control over the game. Hiding the effects of stats also makes subtle changes and nerfs to things much less noticeable.

So the devs prefers to make us play the "My X is bigger than your X" game huh?

And it's hard to hide the effects of stats when the nerfs are noticeable at first glance (str and dex not affecting parry/block dmg reduction and chance for example) and when the exact % IS required for certain content: accuracy needs a cap for raiding and without knowing what percentage it is, people will just pretend that the higher the better when you're already overcapped and overcapping is very often done, because you don't know the exact amount of accuracy required!. The game has no crit immunity so that's also out of the way, and parry is the most useless tanking stat ever since it's extremely low even with 600 parry, which should be about 4 to 5% (and no I didn't check the exact amount. That's the game's job, not mine). Determination maybe has a smal amount of % that it increases but still not sure why it shouldn't be there.

So in my opinion, there's no real need to hide the stats % or effects: if anything what this situation do is just make people focus on one stat and make it "bigger" and forget about the rest. But I think they're just lazy about it.

[Asierid]

This was brought up back in beta, and the developers were pretty much saying "yeah, it's better if you don't know the percentages based off of value". On some level I think they don't want theorycrafters to accurately derive stuff (the way WoW theorycrafters could tell you how much defense rating you needed as a tank to become uncritable) to retain some semblance of control over the game. Hiding the effects of stats also makes subtle changes and nerfs to things much less noticeable.

The best part about this is that it's nothing but a cheesy excuse.

You can already get pretty accurate numbers just by putting in the effort/time and testing them. We already have a pretty good idea on what the stat weights are, accuracy caps, how certain abilities stack, etc. Anyone who has even touched an MMO before stats were common knows that these things are relatively "simple" (Take some time and some math) given that you have access to a combat log.

They're just making things harder to discuss with the players for no reason. Not like they ever discuss changes and the like with us anyway...

[Sapphic]

You must not have played many mmo's. FFXI, for instance, had a zillion more skills than XIV, and it was played on consoles. Most other MMO's, aside from guild wars, have more than 10 skills you use regularly.

You only used 1 on most jobs tho XD your best WS.

Caster wise, FFXI was ridonkulous with how many useless spells and abilities. not to mention the imbalance of levelling up melee and getting abilities compared to levelling up a caster and spending millions of gil for spells.

FFXIV all skills are usefull, a small number in very limited cpacity (one ilm punch for example). FFXI abilities where forgotten when you got a better weaponskill.