Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
Because the "plain text numbers" in front of them aren't plain. Tooltips are expressed in terms of Potency. Well, what does Potency mean? Nowhere in the game are we given a definition for Potency. Logic says bigger is probably better when it comes to DPS/HPS but we still don't exactly what we're dealing with.

As a new player, I though Potency simply meant "damage". I couldn't understand why my attack with a Potency of 200 was only doing 67 damage. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong to cause my attacks to end up so weak. It finally took going to google to find out what Potency means and how it worked with my stats to produce a damage value. If I hadn't already been familiar with damage calculations from playing WoW for years, I might still have not understood.

There are other things on tooltips that can be likewise confusing, possibly because of term holdovers from other FF games that the devs just assume everyone will understand without thinking about how many players new to the FF franchise have been attracted to this game and don't have that prior knowledge. I brought up Limit Break as something to be added because it wasn't until I did Aurum Vale for the first time and the group was yelling at me to "LB" the last boss adds that I became aware the Limit Break existed. I kept looking through my BRD abilities list trying to find one that might be abbreviated as LB and could only apologize to the group that I couldn't find an attack that was "LB". It was then they explained Limit Breaks to me. It doesn't help that Limit Break is listed under General instead with the other class/job combat abilities. It makes little sense to group such a powerful combat ability with non-combat options.

It makes even less sense to force players, especially new players, to go to outside sources to get an understanding of basic game concepts. The problem is the new player, especially if they've never played a MMO before, isn't going to know the right questions to be asking. Yet here we are and so it's little wonder that so much of the player base struggles between the lack of transparency within the game itself not to mention a mentor system where the majority of mentors have no desire to actually be mentoring.
Took me a minute to figure out what "potency" meant as well, but I did notice that my higher potency spells did more damage than my lower ones. Trial and error gave me my definition. /shrug

I do think the LB thing does need to be explained way better in the game since the tooltip basically just says "Does your role's team resource skill" and not exactly how effective that skill is or how it changes based on charge. But like where else would you put it, because it is a general command?? I have mine on one of my universal hotbars and I hate to have to write a macro for every single job change so that I could replace it with a job/role-specific lb.
(y'all my comment was solely on why people don't understand how to AoE properly, not "this game ar 100% transparent ppl is dum" so like this quoting me and then changing the subject is getting hella annoying.)

Quote Originally Posted by Limonia View Post
But then they need to make the timing of them better. When I last leveled an alt character and was in the first dungeon the active help window about what an LB is popped up in the middle of a fight. How is a new player supposed to read and get it then of all times? And if you close the active help windows you have to manually search for the last entry, because the new ones are neither marked as new, nor can you just click on the chat notice to open the new entry.

But they could perfectly combine things like explaining LB with a mandatory novice hall.
And to both quoted... er quotes, honestly I think this will come down to SE probably needing to have two types of tutorials (that a player can hopefully opt out of both when they've made alts). One being an "I'm new to XIV" tutorial and one being "I'm new to MMOs" With the "new to XIV" being similar to what we have here with the hall of the novice (but enhanced with the how-to-aoe, what-is-limitbreak, and other similar additions), while the "new to MMOs" REALLY holds your hand and shows you, like literally dims out your screen and points with flashing arrows and outlines how to walk, how to jump, what sprint is, how to interact with objects (and using the x button if they're using kb&m), how to parse tooltips, how to navigate each menu and window, how the chat box works, how equipment and stats work. Something more intrusive than "what's this green circle, get it out of the way." *clicks X on the pop up window* 'cause I think that's really the only way to get people's attention (It seems to work in other games that use it). It could probably take place in like that aetherial sea before your first cutscene.

(Though, I'd like to see a third tutorial like a "Hall of the Hero" at level 50 that shows you more advanced mechanics of your role, like tank swapping, how to avoid overheal, when to use addle/feint, how to deal with knockbacks, prey markers, earthshakers, proximity damage, and other various mechanics.)