How can we get more in depth character customization?

[Magic-Mal]

And good thing it isn't because the materia system in VII made every character essentially indistinguishable aside from their limit breaks, you don't want that in an MMO.

I much prefer the way XIV handles materia and how you can customise your stats to your liking.

Too bad "customizing your stats" doesn't even happen in this game... the only two stats are Critical Hit and Direct Hit. Everything else is worthless.

[MageBlack]

And good thing it isn't because the materia system in VII made every character essentially indistinguishable aside from their limit breaks, you don't want that in an MMO.

I much prefer the way XIV handles materia and how you can customise your stats to your liking.

Why swim in the ocean when you can splash in a puddle. Different stroke for different folks I guess. Also, what you just described FFVII being bad for is exactly whats happened with roles in FFXIV currently. 6 of one, half a dozen of another...

[TheMightyMollusk]

Not to be controversial, but can anyone familiar with WoW explain how they manage class customization yet the same would not work in FFXIV? Or do WoW players push meta and all run the same specs anyway? Are the dungeons/encounters very different than FFXIV so that is why it works? I hear these two games compared constantly and wondered if I might have some perspective as to why FFXIV is so limited when apparently every other MMO has more class diversity.

WoW managed it eventually by vastly oversimplifying the talent trees.

Originally you got one point per level (starting at level 10) and had longer trees with varying skills, and you could freely put points into any of your class's three trees as long as you were high enough level to unlock it (and had any prerequisite talents unlocked already). However, this led to cookie cutter builds for each spec, and a lot of talents that were functionally useless. And cross-spec talents weren't always useful, because you'd still have to invest most of your points in your main spec to get the most out of it.

The trees got pruned in Cataclysm, and then later (I want to say in Mists of Pandaria, but I could be wrong) simplified again to just give you most of your chosen spec's main stuff right at level 10 and only have a few abilities to choose from every ten to fifteen levels. Which still led to a lot of cookie cutter builds, because a lot of those skills are still highly situational or redundant.

Even hunter pets got massively simplified. Pets used to have their own talent trees, and each family had their own special skills, with a few overlaps. Then they lost the talents, and each of the three pet specs shared their skills, with exotic pets usually having an extra (since exotics were only usable by beast master hunters, they got the extra perk), but losing a lot of the unique skills in the bargain. Really crippled my beloved devilsaur. (This is also ignoring quality of life changes to pets, such as having to feed them or level them up.)

So basically, they didn't manage it. They tried, it didn't really work out, so they backpedaled on it a few times and eventually more or less gave up. They try again every so often, such as Legion's artifact weapons with their own skill unlocks, but it just leads to more of the same.

[Nora_of_Mira]

What ways do you think we can get more in depth character customization?

I would give us more character customization options in the character creator. "Nay" to all the other stuff as it sounds like a balancing nightmare.

[Melichoir]

Breaking the "Illusion of Choice" issue with MMOs isnt actually to hard, I would think.

The biggest issue with Bosses and Boss fights is theyre driven by DPS. More DPS, faster boss dies, less mechanics to deal with = easier fight. The way to break this is to relax the focus on DPS as the main progress point by introducing boss fights driven by mechanics.

As examples, we currently have fights of this:

"Kill Target" - Main goal of the fight is to dps down the target. All mechanics in the fight deal with making it harder to dps down.

But we could also have fights like:

"Survive" - Boss fights are intentionally hard hitting tank buster fights where the goal is to survive mechanics for an allotted time. DPS can be used to ease certain aspects, but doing maximum DPS will not end the fight 'faster'
"Protect" - Goal of the fight is to protect a Target or Targets from Damage through the course of teh fight. DPS can help mitigate out going damage against mobs (maybe), but would more be in service of other aspects in the fight, like independant DPS checks per DPS, or performing actions during teh fight to ensure the targets remain alive (holding certain positions, tanking certain adds even as a DPS, etc). You can use DPS threat itself to act as a threat mechanic, while discouraging Tank mobbing by putting debuffs on players tanking more than x-amount of adds.

All these fights could be mechanically heavy to force more emphasis on being able to do fight mechanics, and less emphasis on composition being the "100% ideal". While it wont eliminate the min/maxing crowd who want only the most ideal comp, it may help mitigate the need for "You got to have x, y, and z to do this fight".

[Nora_of_Mira]

Breaking the "Illusion of Choice" issue with MMOs isnt actually to hard, I would think.

The biggest issue with Bosses and Boss fights is theyre driven by DPS. More DPS, faster boss dies, less mechanics to deal with = easier fight.

Idk what to address first, but the ideas you have for "survive" and "protect" is literally the Tank and Healer roles in a nutshell while just removing DPS. And a fight a that's not driven by how much damage you're doing? What are you actually imagining people doing here? Does any game do this? Is this "so out of the box thinking" that I just dont understand?

[Melichoir]

Idk what to address first, but the ideas you have for "survive" and "protect" is literally the Tank and Healer roles in a nutshell while just removing DPS. And a fight a that's not driven by how much damage you're doing? What are you actually imagining people doing here? Does any game do this? Is this "so out of the box thinking" that I just dont understand?

No, no game that I can think of currently incorporates those systems for a few reasons. The main being is yes, it's "Outside of the box" of what players expect in MMOs. Most MMOs are designed aroudn the idea of beating up monsters, and with that is the inherent point of "Deal tons of damage to kill dudes or tons of dudes." This means that ultimately, boss fights are tailored around the end goal of dealing "x amount of damage" to win, where every mechanic is made as a means of slowing down or interrupting damage dealt.

Mechanics like Moving away from teh boss to avoid aoe? Thats to slow down damage dealt. Failing the mechanic strains healers, which strains tanks, which can cause you to wipe, etc etc. DPS Checks mid fight to kill a target (that isnt the boss itself) that if not met will wipe you? Slows down DPS on the boss itself. Any mechanic that stops you from attacking (Eye mechanics as an example), exist to slow down Damage. The end goal, however, ultimately remains the same: Do "x" amount of damage to win. So long as end goal is "Deal x damage to win", the min-maxing crowd will pretty say "Hey, this is the optimal build because htis build pushes out the most damage." You could see a pretty good example of this in any fight where if you DPS fast enough, you can skip mechanics. And broadly, the better you DPS, the less mechanics youll have to deal with (even if you cant phase skip) which makes the fights shorter/easier. Conversely, if your dps is poor, you hit enrage and die. It revolves around damage dealt.


Where as, what I proposed would change the conditions to win. Instead of "Deal x damage to win", a survival fight would be 8 Minutes long, no matter how much damage you deal. If you get to the end, you win. However, fight mechanics would be dedicated to straining your tanks and Healers, where some of that burden could be lifted based on DPS doing fight mechanics perhaps via role actions or other new mechanics made for the fight specifically. Not that DPS wouldnt be a factor, it just wouldnt be teh deciding factor. You could have DPS checks in teh fight that if failed, make it harder to survive, but the checks dont have to be as high and could be more mechanically driven to make it interesting rather than sit there and push out your DPS rotation. Thats just an idea, of course. I dont have a completely fleshed out version of how it would work.

In a Protect fight, it would focus on tanking, positionals, and support NPC targets in some capacity. Again, this fight could be duration based or a hybrid of two. Such as "Protect Targets for 5 minutes, then Damage down the boss." As like the Survive example, fights would be more mechanics heavy, and less focused on 'ideal' comps with maximum dps. You could bring any damage dealer so long as their good at mechanics and do reasonable damage.

These would be ways you could start getting rid of, or at the least, mitigating the "Illusion of Choice" issue. That choice is based on what damage comps work best. If damage isnt the key strat to winning, then so long as you have decent damage dealers who can do a difficult fight well, you have more options.

[KaldeaSahaline]

Not to be controversial, but can anyone familiar with WoW explain how they manage class customization yet the same would not work in FFXIV? Or do WoW players push meta and all run the same specs anyway? Are the dungeons/encounters very different than FFXIV so that is why it works? I hear these two games compared constantly and wondered if I might have some perspective as to why FFXIV is so limited when apparently every other MMO has more class diversity.

While there are cookie cutter builds, there is plenty of non-meta decision making in the talent tree. Class customization is handled largely via the talent tree. It's not perfect, and it has expansions where it does a good job for some specs,and a downright abysmal for others.

Using Ret as an example (This is a Paladin based melee DPS spec). I have 7 rows of 3 different choices. Not all rows are DPS based and not all talents are equivalent throughput. Some rows synergize with others making "builds" for different content. I.e. dungeons might like a specific setup more, or if you're low on haste (skill/spell speed equivalent) a talent might be more difficult to manage and thus less valuable.

You can also synergize with your team. Imagine if your raid is consistently struggling with doing enough DPS to kill a priority add. You can sacrifice overall damage by picking a weaker talent, to boost on demand burst damage. Alternatively, for hard dungeon content, you can have a situation where your DPS partners are both very powerful AOE classes, so you can tailor your talents to focus on ST damage while they focus on AOE.

There were two different styles I brought up that could work in the current systems like the split class/job/role they did with Arcanist/Summoner/Scholar. I know the devs whined that it was too much work but I could see this FFXIV's version of a talent tree, a job stone for that weapon which gives you a different role/playstyle. A change like that would only happen in increments though unless it was the whole focus of an entire expansion and I'm also aware that, even if they started working on it today, we wouldnt see it until maybe 7.0

So aside from the excuses presented by the devs, what would you guys think of that as a customization solution?

I didn't like it enough to comment on it. While I relish the idea of being able to play a PLD as a DPS, I don't think it does enough as far as 'customization' goes, because even then all PLD DPS will play the same at that point.

[MageBlack]

I didn't like it enough to comment on it. While I relish the idea of being able to play a PLD as a DPS, I don't think it does enough as far as 'customization' goes, because even then all PLD DPS will play the same at that point.

Fair enough. I guess it would just be a new job added in so not real customization. Like for a PLD DPS job a Knight might work, would use sword and board but as offense instead of defense. I honestly cant think of much that would provide customization without overhauling all jobs and reballance all instances and like hell they are going to do that. Great discussions in here though!

[Sylvina]

Where as, what I proposed would change the conditions to win. Instead of "Deal x damage to win", a survival fight would be 8 Minutes long, no matter how much damage you deal. If you get to the end, you win. However, fight mechanics would be dedicated to straining your tanks and Healers

I've played a game which had fights which lasted a certain period of time no matter what. players HATED it becuase you were not rewarded for being good at it with a shorter fight. there's no room for personal optimization since the fight will ALWAYS be a certain time, so theres no incentive to do more than the bare minimum required.