Please Read: Pugilist Concerns

[silverdragontyr]

First off, this is not a thread to argue that Pgl will now suck, or create a huge debate over what might come of this update for Pgl. There are already threads for that. I understand that we do not have the update yet and have no testing at all. This thread is meant mainly to give the developers a clean, easy to find and read section for the concerns for 1.20, without having to comb through many threads, and possibly give suggestions that might help. If it turns out that you feel Pgl is already balanced, or these concerns are already addressed then we will be thankful and happy with the design. Anyways on to the concerns. If anyone else has concerns or ideas, feel free to add them and I will try to edit the original post.

MP

This is easily the biggest concern and most of the worries I see. People are concerned that Pgl's normal attack will be weakened to "balance" with the elemental strikes. Furthermore they are worried that if the Pgl's real damage comes from MP, with only a WS to recover it, that we will quickly run out of MP, leaving us weak and not useful as damage dealer. The only MP recover abilities we have is a WS, and one that requires us to be tanking for it to be used. While there are other abilities we can use from other classes, people feel that we should not need to level other classes for our main to be useful, and that it was a big problem with fighting before 1.20, such as the Ifrit fight.

Possible solutions
• Make Second Wind give MP as well as HP returned. This will give Pgl a source of somewhat constant MP.

• Give Pgl an ability similar to Life-surge, which grants MP for every hit. Possibly only able to be preformed without any "stance" up, or even canceled with any special attack barring WS, as to not make it over powered and not eliminate the purpose of consuming MP.


Pugilist Damage

This is mainly to highlight a concern people have, and I don't really have any ways that would "fix" it. People seem to be worried that A. Since Pgl may require so much MP, they will be forced to use the MP WS almost exclusively, restricting damage and WS potential. B. Albeit less mentioned concern I have seen, is the stances elemental damage. Many times before the elemental damage has been somewhat weak and easily resisted, if it is indeed considered "magic damage". If this is the case once again, then it could severely limit Pgl damage on anything higher then the Pgl's level.

Stretched Too Thin

This concern I want to address is the focus of Pgl. While other classes have a defined role and focus, Pgl seems to be much less so. Pgl seems to be a "damage dealer", however they have several abilities made for tanking, as well as seeming to be based somewhat around magic damage. People are concerned this will lead to Pgl being stretched too thin and making being able to reach our full potential, via gear and materia, very hard to do.

Equipment
The last concern I have seen, ties into the previous one. With Pgl using both Str, and Int, and odd & unique combination, as primary stats, people seem to be concerned that this will make equipping Pgl, with current gear very difficult. I just want you to keep in mind what Pgl may need for stats, when designing future equipment.


Well that is all I have. I hope this makes an easy to read section so you can understand many of the concerns people have. If these happen to be non-issues, considering we haven't played the update yet, then that is even better. Thank you for your time reading this and I hope Pgl will be a great and unique class, that will be fun to play.

[Meleena]

Lets hope someone will read this.

[Wevlum]

While generally I'm positive about the changes to pugilist, I do agree with most points you've brought up. MP management is my biggest concern currently and although we can't really be sure just yet, the mp recovery skills native to pugilist don't fill me with complete confidence on this issue. I can't comment on the WS seeing as we havent seen it in action (although "chance to" is mildly worrying) however we can pretty much all agree that in 90% of party situations relying on featherfoot for mp restoration isn't going to be great/reliable unless we're the tank.

[Miliant]

Following the great disaster that was the attributes patch that made pugilist damage laughingly low compared to other classes, now the second bit of awesome news comes in the form of pugilist being the only melee class in which 70% of the abilities are either mutually exclusive or situational.

It's only natural that you cannot use multiple elemental attacks or kicks at the same time. So, instead of having 15 abilities pugilists really have 4 abilities: Chakra, Blindside, Taunt and Featherfoot. The rest are either Weapon Skills or abilities that are mutually exclusive and drain mp. How many of those four abilities will increase your damage? Just one in addition to the one you choose for your situation: either one of the elemental attacks or kicks [edit: sorry, no kicks. monk only].

Monk's trademark has always been raw melee damage, kick attacks and counter (so far, the latter is nowhere to be seen). Now in the age of yoshida you imbue a game with the FF feeling by making Monk MP-dependent. I understand nothing.

[Betelgeuzah]

Monk's trademark has always been raw melee damage, kick attacks and counter (so far, the latter is nowhere to be seen).

Uhh, Monk has traditionally been a very wind and earth element focused entity. FFXI's Monk is not automatically the traditional Monk, just like FFXI's BLM was in reality less traditional than XIV's BLM is shaping up to be. Traditional BLM does not have privilege to every element, and traditional Monk is very much elemental based.

If I wanted to play as FFXI's Monk all over again I would play FFXI.

[Djeserit]

Yeah, Monk has often had elemental related attacks.

FF6: Aura Cannon (Holy Damage), Rising Phoenix (Fire), Razor Gale (Wind), Phantom Rush (Non-Elemental Magic Damage)
FF9: All Abilities under the Flair category (which was for Monk) cost MP. http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Flair
FF12: In the International Version (Which had Job-Specific License Boards) Monks had access to a slew of white magic.

Looking at the past history, the elemental based stances aren't too much of a stretch. We all just need to wait until we know how expensive the MP cost of the stances are.

[Miliant]

Uhh, Monk has traditionally been a very wind and earth element focused entity. FFXI's Monk is not automatically the traditional Monk, just like FFXI's BLM was in reality less traditional than XIV's BLM is shaping up to be. Traditional BLM does not have privilege to every element, and traditional Monk is very much elemental based.

If I wanted to play as FFXI's Monk all over again I would play FFXI.

Why do you assume I care about FFXI? I didn't even mention FFXI.
In FF, FFIII, FFV... in mostly every traditional final fantasy game I can think of that has an actual job system, really... monk didn't even have any spells nor any use for an mp pool.

As to monk being elemental, may be you're mistaking it with the monk job of FFT, but in reality FFT jobs have pretty much nothing in common with FF jobs.

[Betelgeuzah]

As to monk being elemental, may be you're mistaking it with the monk job of FFT, but in reality FFT jobs have pretty much nothing in common with FF jobs.

In FFIII the Monk profession came from the Wind Crystal, while it's powered up form Black Belt came from the Earth Crystal.

In FFIV Yang's claws added elemental and status properties to his attacks rather than increase his strength.

In FFVI Sabin had multiple Blitz attacks that dealt elemental/non-elemental magic damage.

In FFIX Amarant's Flair skills consumed MP.

Lastly, XIV's Monk does not have any spells either.

[Arcell]

These concerns pretty much mirror my own in regards to the proposed changes.

I've always said that Second Wind should just give us a portion of our MP back in addition to HP. It makes more sense than Featherfoot. As I mentioned in another thread, Light Strike increases evasion and costs MP and yet Featherfoot increases evasion to a greater degree and restores MP. No sense.

From what I gather from reading Pgl WS 8, it seems kind of like Bloodbath + Victimize but for MP instead of HP. Used in a combo there's yet another Chance that the effect can be increased. Now this move/combo seems to be what Pugilist/Monk will be relying on for MP generation. Whether or not this is good or bad hinges upon how often the effect occurs and the magnitude of the effect. If it's like most single-action restore moves and gives up a couple hundred MP back, that's awesome. If it's in proportion to damage dealt like Bloodbath, that too would be fine. Another thing to consider is the cooldown of both Pgl WS 5 and 8. If we can absorb MP faster than we can spend it with the other abilities, fantastic.

Most of these things are not issues in short fights or even EXP parties where you can take a break and it's not hurting anyone. But in long boss/NM fights this issue can become huge very quickly and would then lead to Pugilist exclusion from parties.

[Betelgeuzah]

But in long boss/NM fights this issue can become huge very quickly and would then lead to Pugilist exclusion from parties.

In long boss fights you will have access to same external MP regeneration abilities as every other mage. As in, Bard.