More Customize Skill

[JunseiKei]

I can't believe I forgot the plague of STR tanks during Pre-3.2. It seemed to attract the people who didn't know how to play their class, thinking that using STR instead of VIT made them better tanks over night. It was very easy to tell the good ones from the bad ones when the first pulls started.

If you were a healer during that era you would prefer a bad VIT tank over a bad STR tank any day of the week.

because vit comes with useless stats like party and does not increase ur dps. Its also very ez to tell a good player from a bad player if they don't know that u need every bit of dps to pass A3S wall and only need certain amount of hp to survive tank busters.

There was a huge [skill] difference between tanks that were raiding and actively trying to clear versus tanks that were not raiding, were not as good, but followed the meta and caused issues as a whole.

As a healer doing that era, it was an ill-begotten nightmare.

[Shurrikhan]

[Giant "Red Herring" Image]

No one is talking about bosses or their mechanics. Just because you read a guide doesn't mean the mechanics are pointless. If Zurvan EX is any indicator, people can know the mechanics *cough* SOAR *cough* and still fail them.

1. Customization at it's worse --> Look up the guide or entry is barred.

2. Mechanics, post-guides --> Look up the guide or entry is barred.

[SundayTrash]

There was a huge [skill] difference between tanks that were raiding and actively trying to clear versus tanks that were not raiding, were not as good, but followed the meta and caused issues as a whole.

As a healer doing that era, it was an ill-begotten nightmare.

Not really even if they use vit accessories, that extra health is not necessary outside of savage since its not gonna increase ur overall CD stuff don't hit hard outside of EX and Savage, from my experience I can still heal and dps. Maybe the faults lays in the healers.

[Jandor]

No one is talking about bosses or their mechanics. Just because you read a guide doesn't mean the mechanics are pointless. If Zurvan EX is any indicator, people can know the mechanics *cough* SOAR *cough* and still fail them.

People are talking about customization being pointless because eventually people will figure out optimal solutions, i.e. beat it.
That happens with all content though, that's pretty much the game... "oh no, people will figure out the best abilities required to beat a piece of content then work towards doing that, what a waste of time!"

[CookieMonsta]

There was a huge [skill] difference between tanks that were raiding and actively trying to clear versus tanks that were not raiding, were not as good, but followed the meta and caused issues as a whole.

As a healer doing that era, it was an ill-begotten nightmare.

there was an added problem to Vit back in Gordias as well. Because Vit didn't impact AP at all, you actually experienced poor emnity generation growth as you geared up. So the vit tanks back in the day also tended to have Emnity issue in addition to DPS problems. So they were tankier(?) but they couldn't generate emnity for crap.

[Zojha]

Well, we should put it this way: Customization can work to some degree.

We see that with jobs already. After all, our jobs are a form of customization already, and for the most part, the devs do a good job making sure that you don't get shunned for picking or not picking any particular job. On the flip side, cross class skills are an utter failure in that regard. So it's safe to say: As long as the performance of two or more options remains within a certain delta value, customization can work.

The issue is that in practice, devs are only humans too and they probably aren't theorycrafting fight by fight. In fact, considering they didn't even see healers dealing damage becoming meta, they probably aren't theorycrafting at all. It is likely to assume that the more complex their game becomes, the more likely they are to lose track and control of that performance delta. And once they do, deciding which job to take might end up a decision much like deciding which cross class skill to take. That is what we don't want to happen.

So the real issue is: How do we ensure performance differences stay within a certain value without doing very complicated math every time we want to introduce or change anything?

[CookieMonsta]

Well, we should put it this way: Customization can work to some degree.
?

Thats exactly the problem. The only games that get away with radical customization have to relax their grip completely on balance and pretty much hand it to the community + meta to deal with. The FFXIV devs work really hard to ensure their fights can be cleared more or less as intended with a wide variety of jobs. I would argue take a game like DOTA 2, with its formidable resources and zero money-making pressure, cannot attain perfect balance so instead they tweak and shape the existing meta (but unlike FFXIV, they don't dictate it).

Its two differing philosophies of designing content. Either design content around the existing classes/systems or release content as is and shape the meta instead that naturally forms around your content.

[Altena]

It would have to be exceptionally balanced in the sense that putting points in skill A = the same (or similar) amount of damage/mitigation/special effect as skill B.

Blade & Soul did this reasonably well.

Unfortunately most games don't do it well, and you end up having a standard skill build that is optimal which equates to the illusion that there is customization but really there isn't.. It also can't be insanely impactful - otherwise becomes far too difficult to balance.

The closest thing to skill customization I can ever see working in this game is something we already have - equip a different weapon and boom! suddenly you have a completely different skill tree.

[MagiusNecros]

snip

Players merely following the one build meta at the time. And boy did the lack of skill really show. You can min max content if you want but if you can't play your job at a high level it wasn't worth it. And because of everyone chasing the STR meta stats were nerfed to force Tanks to go after VIT once again. Good job player base!

[SundayTrash]

Thats what I miss about old school mmo like ragnorak, even WoW and Diablo 2, they did the skills tree really well like having to spec into it even access the skill and passive and investing points into it to increase its effectiveness.
Also the one stats per class is getting very stale, I miss the wide range skill per class that work off of different stats point.