Quote Originally Posted by Firon View Post
Now if you got what betel was saying if XI did the system XIV was gonna get even @ 99 brd would have only 20 spells cause 70% of that list can become more compact.
I think I'm not getting this, sorry D: Can you explain it any other way?

I see two main differences between the two
1) Different format (FFXI use a "tiers" format, FFXIV use a "scaled" format like WoW)
2) Useless songs (songs that you could easily live without because you never use them anyway)


What are we talking about here? 1)? I don't really see the difference, it's not like you use low tier songs anyway, you just use the best one (x2).
This is just a different format, neither is right or wrong, both have pros and cons, there really are no big differences here.
If you're instead saying about 2) then yeah, FFXI (not just BRD) is full of spells/abilities nobody use because they're badly balanced/unefficient or just plain useless.
We all could live without them for sure and nobody would miss them or even notice they're gone away

But reducing the total number of spells/actions developers are "allowed" to give to jobs, doesn't necessarily mean that they'll all be useful.
For instance from the class reform list, I can already spot a few actions that looks potentially useless and that nobody will use, especially after you obtained better ones from higher levels.
This is just to show once again what I meant earlier.

That is that the balancing of classes and of abilities is done on a case-by-case process through a complex fine-tuning of each.
Forcing this number to be 15 (or any other number) doesn't automatically ENSURE that all of those abilities will be perfectly balanced, useful, efficient and entertaining to use.
You'll still need the case-by-case fine-tuning (altough if we're speaking about statistics, of course it's much easier and hence more likely to be able to balance 15 abilities over a short time, compared to the amount of work and time you'd need to balance 50)

And this brings up back to my question.
Why did they do it?
Is it a "temporary solution" for the beta-game that FFXIV will continue to be until 2.0? If that's the truth... I'd probably be fine, because then I'd knew it would be only temporary, to make their job easier until 2.0 ships, since the team working on the live FFXIV is much smaller than the one working on the 2.0 version.
Once 2.0 hits the two teams will rejoin and then they'll be able to handle all sort of things.
Is this the cause?
If it is, I think I'd be fine with how things are going. I would consider it a temporary and necessary compromise.
But if that's not the case then I still stand by my position that they are making a game design mistake by going this way, and that they will potentially bring in more issues than those they're trying to address, in due time.