Thread: On the topic of Role Actions in 5.0 and beyond

Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

I am referring more to interactions like Celestial Opposition extending Lucid Dreaming or Deployment Tactics and the Fairy, where individual parts of your own kit can come together to give you more, and you usually have to consider them if you want their full benefits.

Ahh, in that case I'm hesitant to agree without more specific parameters, since the quality of such synergies varies tremendously.

• I dislike being obliged to weave all my buffs into Celestial Opposition, almost to the point I'd rather cross-class skills not be affected at all and the duration of increase diminishes with each further, lower-value effect. (Yes, we do already have these tier orders, as shown from when OIP stripped buffs in a particular sequence in PvP.)
• I like stacking Mantra-Minuet-Convalescence-Defiance into a heal to be spread for far greater effect. If those were all my own skills I had to stack together, or if other options for those skills expense weren't competitive with the stacked use, however, I would not.
• I love the breakpoint-crossing synergies of things like Blood Weapon + Quietus in mass-AoE, though I wish the breakpoint was pushed to a sooner position and the reward past that breakpoint softened.

Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

It's also possible to add more interplay via anti-synergies as well. SCH has Dissipation and DRK used to have Dark Dance and still has DA-Dark Passenger, both of which don't work well with Blood Price.

These, too, I'm fine with, depending on the parameters. The only thing that annoys me is when the kit seems balanced around the assumption that no anti-synergy would occur, despite the cost that would have on immediacy, burst (mitigation, in DRK's case) or CD-coverage over time. If truly balanced, I in some way like the forking paths caused by anti-synergy more than about half of our current examples of synergies, so long as they aren't hard counters to each other. This fit the aesthetic of DRK, because you knew that it would cost you something, but you often felt you had no choice, which just felt... properly edgy, and bursty.

Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

To give another analogy, compare it to Magic the Gathering:
- In general, should your class feel more like a value deck, an engine, or a combo deck? In other words, how much synergy do you want?

And this is exactly how I proposed BLU should be able to create it's own skill arsenals, to the point of calling them "decks". And I generally agree, though in practice certain types of builds are contextually favored, often to the exclusion of all others. Thus a lot of design in XIV, so long as the game does not encourage having access to many different decks (jobs) and does not allow for their simultaneous progression (e.g. only one armor class progressable via weekly currencies and raid locks), will have to be tailored towards making the differences feel significant while in fact being insignificant in practice. We have our "all jobs on one character", yet far less freedom to progress multiple aspects at once at a competitive level than one does in almost any other MMO (wherein additional characters means additional sets of weekly lockouts), and for now we have to balance design around that inflexibility, even if it vastly diminishes identity or content variety.