[dev1206] Class Reforms: why the 15/11 limit?

[Shaedhen]

on the one hand you complain tiers help control MP usage, but in the same post you pretty much say your going to spam spells now that hate is not an issue. contradiction? know how to look after you MP?

Huh no, i meant quite the contrary. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

@Themis : Most of the stuff you show me there is just an single target spell and a aoe spell. For various reasons, aoe spells might not be the right thing to use ( waking up mobs, mess with group enmity, etc... ) and the THM ones are combo spells aren't they ? So my point doesn't really apply to those.

Anyway, I think i'm defending a lost cause here so I'm just gonna leave it.

[Sanlord]

You're all whiners....................

Yoshida is doing good. we don't need more flexibility... they shuold get of rid of all this shit flexibility

[Dreadnought]

Fire, Fira, Firaga. They all hit AoE but that doesn't mean they all share the same MP costs etc. You can combo these up in turn to create a huge fire-y death nuke, but it's not like we have to.

F**k Fire spells, i want a list of Ice spells to blast at my enemies

how generically western of them to focus on fire spells as your main nuke.

[Sanlord]

Nice to know you guys want 9999 spells and abilities added to the game... and nothing new to the future.... Congratulations!!!

[indira]

its called a system so you dont be god like, we used to be god like at launch but no one liked it.

[Jinko]

F**k Fire spells, i want a list of Ice spells to blast at my enemies

how generically western of them to focus on fire spells as your main nuke.

It's quite common for people to think fire as a naturally mage like spell, its hardly a western thing.

[Monsalvato]

The point of the OP is not about the loss of tiers, because really each type or element still has at least 2 spells to it so it isn't like they are likely to all have the same potency/cast time/cost and in some cases like the cures, the differences are explicit in the descriptions.

He repeated that this wasn't the point a few times to try and get the conversation back on the right track but people keep posting counter arguments to the one person arguing that removing the tiers is a huge problem, which is really not the purpose of the thread.

^ This!

I think the OP's concern is that they are forcing themselves into a pattern for aquiring abilities and traits on a class, not necessarily the abundance or lack of abilities on the classes.

^ and this!

I suggest trying the new system before complaining about things that may or may not exist in the new system. Getting all upset over speculation does nobody any good.

I don't think I got all upset? If I gave that impression I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention.
I didn't mean to shoot a "final judgement" on the patch either, OF COURSE we can't finalize that until we've really tried it.
Still, I think we can discuss it in a constructive way, especially if each opinion has reasons behind it and it's not simply shoot around in an unrational way.

[Dargoth_Draconia]

I'd just want to read opinions from other people as to why they implemented the 15/11 limit in their new design for classes (15 Actions, 11 Job Traits).
Maybe by putting all of our ideas together I'll be able to understand what developers had in their minds, and at that point maybe I'll be able to say I agree or not with their point.

To me it seems a particularly useless set of chains they're binding themselves with, with their own hands.
Let me explain further.

If it were about having a "generic goal" of making so classes stay as close as possible to 15/11 it wouldn't be that bad, but here we're talking about a very strict rule they have to follow no matter what.
They have to make so classes are:

• Fun to play
• Different enough from each other
• More or less balanced (can't have too strong and too weak classes

I perfectly understand and agree with this, but setting a 15/11 limit is not the way the go, it can actually create more issues than the ones it may solve.
What if a class reaches the forementioned three goals with, say, 12/9? They'd be "forced" to add 3 further actions and 2 further traits.
But since the class is already fun, different and balanced, those new things will most likely be useless, unoriginal and, in reality, just "placeholders".
They wouldn't add those things because the class needs them or because they thing the class would benefit from them, but because they HAVE TO, to respect the 15/11 limit they imposed on themselves.
Opposite situation, what happens if 15/11 is not enough?
They won't be able to do anything, because they have to respect the 15/11 limit.

Which brings us exactely to the Disciples of Magic problem with this incoming patch 1.20.
15 actions can possibly be enough for a melee class, which tipically relies on stances and abilities, but it will never be enough for a magic class which relies on a couple of abilities but also on a wide variety of spells.
The class reforms shows this issues quite clearly, 15 is not enough to offer variety up to the standards a Final Fantasy game is supposed to live up to.
They made quite a big mess there... even with the splitting of spells between CNJ and THM and the lack of water ones.
The source of these problems lies in two main causes, imo

1. They promised CNJ > WHM and THM > BLM. That's of course wrong because of many reasons, it should have been CNJ > WHM + BLM and THM > something else. But of course they couldn't help it because it wouldn't be "balanced" to add 2 jobs to CNJ and 1 to every other class (altough eventually that will happen, just not in time for 1.21 of course)
2. Even removing most of the debuffs, the majority of which had a debateable efficiency anyway, you're still bound to 15 actions between job abilities and spells, for a whole group of 50 levels... that's really wrong.

The problem at 1) wasn't an easy one, and the source of that is probably in the bad planning the original team did while creating the two different DoM classes.
But still... have they tried enough? And while I can understand there was no easy solution to this issue, is the one they found satisfying? For me, it's rather disappointing.
And the problem at 2) I just don't understand.
Which brings us back to the main question of this thread:

What is the purpose of having the strict limit of 15/11 actions?

What do they gain from that? What do we gain from that?
It seems to me just a limit for developers that will only bring issues, rather than solving them.

I personally like it and being a 50 CNJ myself I don't see a problem with mages only getting 15 as well. That number will change as the level cap goes up so don't forget that. Also with job abilities that may go up as well. Let's say we play PLD and it takes abilities from both GLA and MRD, perhaps we will have more than 15 for the job PLD. Also didn't they say we can have 10 abilities from other classes?(@50)? If that was the case then we will have 25 spells/abilities.

[Imagene]

Just wondering when are we to expect the information for class traits? They're supposed to follow from the class action reforms right?