I don't see the grand picture. Help me understand.

[Saburo]

Hey Mog,
I have no answer to your questions but here is some food for thoughts.

When thinking about where the game is going, there is something to bear in mind I believe: some elements are added as part of the coming 2.0 version and some others are added to make us wait.
I'm thinking of the ifrit loot system. It seems unlikely to me that they didn't know the current systemt is a mindless time-sink. I'm assuming they made it so to keep us busy. Now that we complained enough, they are gonna change it.
That doesn't explain why no water spell, enfeebles etc I guess.

I personaly don't worry too much about it since everything will change again when the level cap is raised. We will have to trash our gear and learn the new battle balance at that cap and the new abilities. And maybe that's where our missing spells are... Who knows?

[Gennosuke]

Hopefully the difficulty will come with the content they give us. I for one think by limiting players to 15 moves and shifting around DoTs and other debuffs like slow will make us dependant on other players and creating more team work instead of the current spam fest we have now.

Every class / job got atleast one usefull move for party mechanics

-Edit-

I remember Yoshi saying something about having everyone do their job for the success of the party, he wanted to make everyone feel like "yes! we survived because i did a good job and so did my team mates" or something like that

Good post, i agree with this. I think it's best for the longevity and success of the game.
Zerg/spamfest is very backwards and will kill the game in the long run.

The other point to mention is.. it should be realized that SE needs to make way and room for new classes in the future.
If they introduced all the spells now to only 2 mage classes. would be hard to invent new mages classes with good purpose. Perhaps they have a debuffer class in the works. I think it's a good, short list of meaningful abilities that define each class and gives it identity and purpose in a party instead of party of clones as is atm.

This game is only at the beginning of it's life, im sure they have many new spells/abilities/classes/jobs/features/combos planned out for the future.

I do sincerely hope though that self combos are absolutely not replacing party combos which i dont believe they are as they are re-working battle regimen system. So let's see how things turn out..

[Lakefingers]

You got spells like bind, stun and heavy on thm and you see this on other classes aswell (PUG and WAR) my best guess is that there is going to be some kind of tactical element involved in the use of the skills and we will see how that works on the moogle fight.

But it's a guess.

[LuxLex]

people keep praising

"its easier for newbies and the hardcore though..."
"its easier to balance"
"its easier its easier its easier"

i want a massive list of spells so i can choose how i solo THEN change to whats necessary for my grouping and endgaming.

Yeah this is so depressing. What the heck SE - mages with only 5ish spells? I mean nukes of 2 different elements AOE and non AOE, a "spell" which is more like an ability and sleep? That's just sad.

[Elexia]

Yeah this is so depressing. What the heck SE - mages with only 5ish spells? I mean nukes of 2 different elements AOE and non AOE, a "spell" which is more like an ability and sleep? That's just sad.

People that play FFXI said Abyssea sounded horrendous when they seen it was battle content involved in the 3 reskinned crag areas initially, therefore they judged before actually experiencing. Fast forward a year and guess what's XI all about? Abyssea and Voidwatch, I guess Abyssea wasn't such a horrible thing since everyone spammed the living hell out of it when SE introduced it.

Not only is our cap not final, but this is just the start of it, because jobs will also include more spells and abilities. Did we also forget that things scale as we level? When you have a handful of quality (tbd) spells that scale, it's better than having 80 spells that does set damage or that 1 spell (like most MMOs) that does insane damage or completely broken to use (like how mystics used to be in Tera.)

[Kiara]

I think the vision is pretty simple. The foundation of the ability system in this game is completely rotten. A new foundation is needed, and they have chosen a simple foundation upon which to build. We don't need 25-40 skills per class to have interesting combat. What we need is fewer, more useful skills that can be used together in solo and party situations. I look at the ability list and I see most of what is good about the current system with less trash.

Here lies a bit o' speculation Debuffs are gone, not because the devs don't think they're important, but because we want our job system now (and they want it now. It needs to have some time in the wild before 2.0 is released). THM was going to necessarily lose the debuffs before the job system came out. The next class will almost certainly be the debuff class, but it's not ready yet. I think the Devs made the decision to implement class changes and the job system sooner rather than later, then fill that debuffing gap when the new class is ready.

I see a vision. It hasn't so much been announced, but I think that if you use a little imagination and read a little between the lines it starts to become clear. But hell, this is just me, and I have been wrong many, many times.

Great post by Tin.

I agree with many that it seemed frustrating and a bit surprising at first, learning that all Debuff Spells were removed, but even as a mage, I felt the same way Tin did after a few minutes of soaking it in.

Getting back to representing more Final Fantasy Jobs, I definitely see the possibility of adding in Red Mage, or Blue Mage or some debuff Mage Class to take up the role of Debuffing.

Even from the early days of playing mage in this game, I felt Tanaka's design for Mages was pretty broken and rushed and haphazard:

• You learned all *6* (Six) Elemental Attack Spells in 1 level up.
• You get dumped all *6* Elemental Debuffs (Burn, Choke, Drown, Frost, Rasp, Shock) in 1 level.
• They dump ALL Ancient Magic Spells (Tornado, Burst, Flare, Flood, Quake, Freeze) - some of the most famous Magic in Final Fantasy history - in 1 level, with no fanfare or presentation or buildup. Huh?!
• etc.

They were giving us way too many spells (many were mediocre, or limited usage) and rushing / dumping the important ones all at once.

It's good to start from a solid foundation and focus on the important, key spells, traits and abilities and go from there.

While all of us at Rank 50 for a while are probably used to having so many spells at our disposal, there's something to be said about cutting away the fat and having a better core group of spells for new players learning their jobs and veterans to focus on the new combos and potential new Skillchain / Battle Regimen 2.0 System coming.

It also allows for more spells to be awarded at a better pace for future Level Cap Raise, or Job Quests (to unlock more abilities and spells later).

Ultimately, we'll see where this goes, and I agree it'd be nice to have more information (e.g., the complete Job System and all roadmaps for future abilities now), but I'm willing to give this new system a try and see how it develops.

[Jinko]

I do agree with the OP, the whole crafted vs NM loot is one of the biggest issues for me in this game at the moment.

If its not addressed by 2.0 I doubt I will be playing this game, Guildwars 2 is not far away ya know SE !

Well here I thought this thread was about spells. Got a little side tracked with mounts but I don't really care if I don't like them i just wont use them but spells on the other hand are being forced upon me and they look like they suck or are plain ripoffs from non ff games..

Only because you insist on being blinded by your rage towards WoW, not once did it pop into my head that they were copying WoW with either the mounts or the Fire/Ice combo.

There are many things they are or have been copied from FF11 also, do you have such a big problem with those ?

[LuxLex]

Not only is our cap not final, but this is just the start of it, because jobs will also include more spells and abilities. Did we also forget that things scale as we level? When you have a handful of quality (tbd) spells that scale, it's better than having 80 spells that does set damage or that 1 spell (like most MMOs) that does insane damage or completely broken to use (like how mystics used to be in Tera.)

Sorry, this just isn't good enough for me. You may be happy with 2 elements only and 1 debuff - but I prefer a little more complexity. For example, I love my blu mage in XI, I love having tons and tons of spells - even if I can't set all of them at once, I love being able to plan based on what I am doing, what debuffs I need etc.

I mean, maybe some people only use 1 spell ever but I am always using tons of spells - like trying to learn "frightful roar" now so my battle goes like this:

Metallic body, refueling, cocoon - pull Brontotaur with wild oats, cast Angry Eye to reduce it's strength, cast seedspray to give it TP, cast magic fruit to heal myself, cast bludgeon to feed it more TP and damage it... cast geist wall when it uses it's shell move, cast poison breath to poison it, use chain affinity burst affinity red lotus blade sickle slash (darkness SC) digest (MAGIC BURST)

I understand that my preference is just that, my preference, but I think they went too far trying to arbitrarily give every class the same number of slottable abilities. It takes away all the fun of being a mage.

[LuxLex]

there's something to be said about cutting away the fat and having a better core group of spells

I would agree with you if this was enough to be considered a "core" - but I think they went past cutting the fat and started hacking away at the bones.

[Jinko]

It could be as Hooliewho sort of hinted at that the vision may have changed after the Ifrit fight and people started taking in 7 lancers all with sentinel etc.

We can all see that the letter that announced the skill changes was very rushed so I wouldn't be surprised if they have done back over the class and job system to stop these incidents from happening in future.

Add ontop the removal of enfeebles and DoTs to be added to a class in the future you can start to see some kind of hazy picture at least.