Removing TP

[Shurrikhan]

there was a bit more to it than just TP. you had other elements such as incaspaicaitions and the then removed regimen system wehch they could have revised. but the incapacitations where still there. do you dragon kick from a bosses flank for increased damage or do you do it from the front or rear. slightly less damage but the possibility to break a bosses tail or head or some such. which could then make the rest of an encounter easier. break chimeras tail for example and now he cant tail swipe your party for the rest of the fight... bust a bosses arm and now his power punch is a lot more manageable..

there were also benefits to stockpiling tp. while it may have resulted in less dps over the course of an encouter it would allow for burstier spikes which proved usefull for many groups in things like garuda. with adds. untill such things as the blm exploits were discovered at least allowing the adds to be largely ignored. so it did have a trade off a little less damage over time for a little more damage when it was needed..

was it perfect no but it's something they could definitely have built upon and wouldhave been much more interesting than just do thesame static rotation every time regardless of what your fighting.

Oh, I agree completely that those things had promise; I, too, pushed for their return in a revised fashion in ARR. When the changes first came out, I couldn't understand why we still had both strict combos and TP, when TP already acts as a limiter to mostly enforce combos. I couldn't understand why they didn't differentiate the elements mechanically, rather than just nominally (at first into "elemental" and "non-elemental" magics and quickly into just pure "magical" damage). And though technically the incap system was gone by 1.23, and positional elements did not affect incap back when the system did exist, they were cool concepts and all of that easily could have been improved upon into a whole concept of sub-targeting.

How do you take down a magiteck colossus? Hmm... Where should be begin? Should we break its visor? Do we risk its mad flurry when it can't actually see us, and therefore can't be baited? Can we make it exhaust itself? Can we break its exhaust ports while we're at it so it overloads? At that point we'd have good access to the head as a whole, yeah? Do we -- can we -- do anything to its sword arm in the meantime, cus that swing one-shots anyone who's not in cover?

Good stuff, good stuff. Instead we got one option only: hit it til it's dead.

I should still have a write-up somewhere for how to do that fluidly, yet unobtrusively, from sometime in ARR. It involved differentiating damage-rate via a sort of improved Stagger system and differentiating damage types from a mechanical, rather than merely nominal, standpoint. I'll have to fish it up sometime...

The same can be said of TP pooling, though I find it a bit less workable with the current system, and as small as the rewards often were back then -- unless you waited for a literal 40+ seconds without consuming a bridge or finisher -- I find pre-comboing, syncing form, lining up a job-based burst phase (AF, DWT, LotD), and readying shots actually more compelling tactical adjustment. Or I would if there were just some small adjustments to make meeting the changing conditions of the fight at cost to standard rotation more viable...

They are consolidating it all into MP, yes they talked about a new bar with seeing shields and stuff so ill just have to wait until 5.0 to see.

I had really hoped they'd swap into in-line absorption and HoT/DoT info as per WoW and the like. That or bar atop HP for the shields, as per Overwatch allied bars.

They should have kept the more tactical combat instead of going for an "action" combat, and TP wasnt useless, they could have easily made it more important for the classes/jobs that used it. Just like MP is for magic based classes/jobs

Is MP ever tactical, though? SMN and RDM need only do one thing to maintain MP. They hit the (Lucid Dream) button when it's lit. Likewise, once a fight has been learned, that's about all any healer does.

TP only had two modes: you're able to play as normal, or you're --for the time being-- not able to play at all. And that will be true of virtually any pure expenditure resource. Now, if you go a more PvP-like route of having specials cost TP, or being able to skip ahead in a combo at TP cost, while the weakest skills actually regenerate a bit of TP and comboed skills have a much more slightly increasing cost, then yeah, you could maybe make something tactical out of that. But, consider the effect on burst and thereby average damage due to raid buff stacking during said burst. If you can briefly circumvent your limiters, that's a ton of damage. The devil's in the details, and a result that lends itself to a particular optimized gameplay path could just turn into (HT-Db-)CT-FT-FT-FT for an optimally-playing level 50 DRG within Trick Attack, to such effect that it's worth it for him to just stand there using nothing or just True Thrust, ad nauseum. We can espouse "tactical" play all we want, but if the result of the system, in actual fights, in actual compositions, doesn't allow for tactical freedom with multiple optimal or near-optimal routes to take, it's not going to give tactical play, but merely esoteric, choppy, and counter-intuitive playflow.