Thread: what I hope for 4.0 Battle System

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Accuracy in this game is useless.... let me explain. Each job (except healers and mch***) HAVE to complete their combos; esp DPS that NEED certain skills to hit or the whole game might as well go to hell (snap punch/demolish, all drg combo, fester/bane/painflare/drain, blizzard IV, all tank combos*, you get the picture). So they can't design a end game fight where accuracy is variable, like make the boss have an ability that lowers accuracy on one player or the whole raid, or have higher evasion. This boils down to every one DPS' ing needs to have Accuracy requirements and once it's met it is utterly useless after that. It's not like any other stats (with the exception of parry) that goes up in benefit the more you have of it.

I recommend an adjustment to this combo MUST complete sequence this game is based on. One way I believe accuracy can have marginally beneficial passed the based requirement is if they switch "Miss" into "Dodge" but have "Dodge" do a 1 dmg hit confirm so the current combos will still be completed and the jobs still gain their effects even though the dmg is basically 0! So we all get to keep our Grease Lightning III, Blood of the Dragon, Enochian, Aethertrail Attunement , Wrath, etc.
And it doesn’t have to be as low as 1 dmg; it can be adjusted to be a fraction of the full potential and say “Dodged” to signify you could benefit from more Accuracy and or less Evasion on the Boss. This would make skills like BRD's “Rain of Death” functional for more than just the Healers DPS.

Earlier I hope that AST loses its offensive buffs “Balance" and "Arrow”. I’d like if they swap those out for Higher Accuracy and Higher Evasion (suggested Buff names Eagle Eye=Accuracy & Featherfoot = Evasion)
[note: I know MNK has a skill named Featherfoot. I want them to lose it.]

Well this is my 4.0 wish list

TANKS
Give critz immunity in tanking stance and increase mob and boss critz chance to a point where tank will need to pop def CD to survive multiple critz if they are not in tanking stance. IMO MT should be in tanking stance and OT in DPS stance unless add/mechanic pop up.
That parry become a mandatory stat for tank and become the FFXIV equivalent of WOW def value to resist mechanic like crushing blow.

that won't be a drastic change for player to adapt.(use tanking stance when tanking, socket parry instead to str in accessory) and will make the tank feel more like a tank than a dps engine that can take hit better than other dps.

that they further reinforce each tanking design without preventing them from clearing content
PLD physical type boss MT
DRK caster type boss MT
WAR soak tank with high dps/treat burst
and if ever released
SAM high dps tank alternative for WAR raiding off tank spot

DPS
nothing really on my wish list other than EGI glamor for Summoner and maybe give healing style primal like phoenix to scholar pet list/glamor

Healing
Although ppl tend to class healer as direct heal (WHM, AST) and preventive heal type (SCH, AST). I prefer to split them as being doing either healing or dpsing, usually your raiding MH (WHM or AST) and doing both at the same time (SCH) as your raiding OH. If they release a 4 healer i would like it to belong to the "heal and dps at the same time" type to be an alternative to the auto include SCH off healer and that they further reinforce AST and WHM role as MH.


as for support class type we won't see them unless they change drastically the the current party format. Currently we have 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 dps basic party formation. so we can expect support to be spread across those role. Until they add a 5 member to this basic formation. Even then it will probably be a hybrid role slot and not a support role slot. I don't expect much change here since they released the RDM as a "range caster/melee dps hybrid"

tank/healer/dps is a key triad of the FF series and i don't see them switching it for something like Guild war triad (attack/support/kite) were every player swapped role multiple time during a fight according to circumstance.

What makes accuracy useless is every mob you fight is the same.

You don't have slow mobs with mega solid defence but low ass evasion. You don't high incredibly agile mobs that have paper defence but are incredibly evasive either. As a result there's never anything to balance accuracy with. Works both ways because players don't have evasion stats or anything either.

As for damage overall it's fairly static both incoming and outgoing. It's impossible for a tank to dodge a tank buster and take no damage. But it's also impossible for that tank buster to crit when it does hit the tank. There's no variance at all.

1.23 Paladins had a nice skill called Aegis Boon. Guaranteed block of the next attack and converted damage taken into hp. Meant a paladin could take a 1000t swing and shrug it off almost entirely. Nothing like that exists now because the game revolves around that damage being unavoidable. It's kinda boring like that.

You also had a huge variety in bosses. Chimera was incredibly tough and resilient to damage but low evasion. Garuda was pretty evasive and needed a higher degree of accuracy to hit. And then you had miser that was fairly squishy but had a large chunk of hp.

All meant that stats had a bit more weight as well.
Whm's for example weren't just a case of pile all your points into mind. Because sure it helped your cures and dps in cleric to put your points in mind. But also had vitality which directly increased enhancing magic which meant more powerful protects regens and stoneskins at the expense of weaker cures and lower dps.

Plds also where more strength meant your blocks were stronger and took less damage. More dexterity meant you blocked faster and more often...

Stats were a lot more interesting. Wish they'd built that up even more rather than dumb it down to hell. Currently most stats are meaningless. All that matters really is I Level. Any crit det or skill speed for example is largely irrelevant. Just getting the highest I level piece with the highest primary stat and you're good to go.. only time secondaries are even considered is when theres several options at the same ilevel.

but most stats are completely useless. str mnd int pie all do nothing at all on a ninja. skill speed det parry all again absolute jokes. to much skill speed mostly the same. you could effective just have 2 stats on most jobs. Defence and power...

Originally Posted by Iromi

I liked 1.23 also. The stats felt meaningful and there was much more to the battle system then "dps"

I'd like to see the kind of stuff Dzian mentioned come back. Give the game some more depth.

Did we play the same game?... If it didn't clear the encounter as quickly and reliably as possible, it wasn't taken. And at the heart of that was dps. The only distinctions were, just as now, "event" and "overall" dps (aka "burst" and "sustain").

And there was far less depth or complexity available to compositional decisions or even rotational decisions based on composition than in ARR and HW. I enjoyed 1.23 for the most part, and even before Yoshi's rework, thinking that ARR had definitely wasted some serious opportunities in the development of its combat system (as had Yoshi's rework before it), but I don't see any criteria from which you can arrive at that conclusion.

At best that might be that tanks and healers weren't quite as strong in 1.x, and therefore there was greater use of dps off-tanks and the occasional off-heal (a less specialized layout that I preferred slightly), but even the stats of those times only gave the illusion of choice apart from perhaps mitigation vs. eHP for tanks. The rest all funneled into exactly the same purpose and gameplay, but simply required optimal ratios in order to maximize.

@OP:
"Roles" are, in the end, mere specializations for which a degree of primary capabilities (damage-dealing in the case of any fight cleared by killing the enemies, or healing in any fight cleared by topping off a given NPC, etc.) is sacrificed to allow a higher degree of capacity for handling secondary functions (anything tactic that improves your raid's ability to clear the encounter that is not a direct, or primary, capacity, such as by reducing the ratio of incoming to outgoing damage) or tertiary functions (anything that improves upon those secondary functions while not directly contributing to them).

"Roles" are not job descriptions outlining your responsibilities. They are something that you must maximize correctly in order to redeem the cost of having taken you, a specialist with thereby less primary capabilities. Stop thinking of specialists as the given; they are an investment, and unless intentionally overpowered, they are a costly one. And if you do not allow a given tank, for example, an avenue for reclaiming that cost when the need for their specialty is limited, then rather than allowing a range of different gameplay styles for your tanks—from gambling into excess mitigation or under-mitigation based on the team's actions and tookits—then the question shifts instead from the tank's "how do I play" to the raid's "do we reeaaally have to take a tank?" or, when encounter designs forces you to take a tank who is otherwise contributing nothing (effectively standing in the room to prevent death by compositional debuff) that question shifts to "why are we playing a game that gives invalidates player choice?"

@Dzian
While the lack of enemy variety does certainly add to the lackluster-ness of our stats, consider the opposite — if our stat choices were mandated by enemy type. You'd have to swap out your legs, belt, and gloves just to handle this one agile enemy due to its added evasion, only to swap back for the next where that accuracy is unnecessary and you want as much damage as possible. Moreover, none of these changes actually have any effect on evasion, they just force you to carry more near-equal ilvl gear in order to be optimal for a fight, and to spend more time in your inventory screens.

To be honest, we still have exactly that. You just need to raid to see it. When your "casual content set" uses some 160 less accuracy than your "raid set", both around the same ilvl, it can be nice padding boost to go ahead and keep a hold of that raid drop that you can't possibly use in raids yet due to too little accuracy on your other pieces. But that's all that Chimera vs. Garuda ever amounted to, and likewise accuracy has only been alike to "gear tax" since then, its fee increasing as you progress through content tiers (just as Chimera -> Garuda did in 1.23).

I don't feel the loss in stats from 1.23, because they had no gameplay effect once the community had pigeonholed you into a specific "role". Yoshida-era designs have since progressively furthered this rutting of toolkits into singular means of acceptable play, and finally removed the long-running option of increased output (both damage and mitigation) vs. increased eHP for tanks in the vit/str reform, but at least he has all of 1&1/2 gameplay-meaningful stats (Crit on crit-proc jobs, and Spell/Skill Speed for rotational adjustment at particular breakpoints). While balancing issues still prevent Skill Speed from being as meaningful as it could be, that's at least an improvement over 1.23's variety, which amounted to nothing but numbers (what little hints it left as to gameplay niching, such as Elemental Fist burst for Monks, etc., being left too pitiful and unbalanced to ever come to light).

:: As for Aegis Boon, the only thing that invalidated it in the context of ARR/HW that it was up to a literal 200% DR. 'Sure, let me eat the guaranteed kill at 1 HP and be topped off for my trouble, on a CD equitable to Shelltron (its modern analog)?'

tl;dr:

Originally Posted by Zojha

That said, I personally would rather we move away from the role system, rather than reinforce it further and naturally disagree with your suggestions as a result. Where you want to increase the control of tanks over the denominator, I'd rather everyone got more control over it. Where you want a specific support role, I'd rather everyone have supportive interactions. And I mean interactions, where both people need to react and adjust to each other, instead of just throwing a buff at someone and never bothering with it again.

This.