Skill Point distribution [dev1021]

[AngryNixon]

Old system bad, new system better.

I know is very complicate this but, please make your time to understanding.

/end

[ESAR]

. . .


You keep saying it won't work, but I'm not seeing any math. I do love me some irony.

I wish there was a way I could keep this thing buried when I responded but it just doesn't work like that.
In the same sense that I wish the current system could be balanced, though it just doesn't work like that.

Let's see why the current system is unbalanced. I'm sure I've mentioned this all before but wth, i'll stab at it.

First, Behests are overpowering.
I make about 5 times the SP in five minutes of behest that I could in an hour of solo. (How's that balanced?)

Second, I can fight a monster for 30 seconds and it could give me 200SP.
I can fight that same monster with a buddy my level, kill it in half the time and still get 200SP. (How's that balanced)

Third, there are very few monsters that reward good SP as you level. these are monster with low HP and DEF. We rate this on a scale of SP/H. (lack of variety in targets, YAY!!!) It's what you all want right? must be.

Fourth. It's too hard to deal with exploits in the current system, that's why we'll have that bland feeling of leveling off the same mobs with the exact same party set ups, where certain types of classes will be unnecessary or unneeded. FFXI ToAU all over again! but that's what you want right! lol to fight those birds (or in this game coblyn/ raptors)

The real reason.
It's the way that SP is calculated, having SP be the exact same if you kill a mob of the same level every time causes this unbalance. It's impossible to get anything near balanced. (well I'm sure they could get close, but it would take a fair amount of effort, something they don't have time for. But even if they did put in all this effort, it's meaningless against the exploits. To deal with exploits they'll either nerf the SP so you wont level off them or they'll leave the SP and you'll only SP of them.)

Action based SP was the way to go, though the initial execution had problems.

What action based SP does is...

Balances every target (well close to balanced, some targets will fall a little shy of max SP (like 90%), but not by much. I'll used moles as an example because they can't be hit while under ground. There are ways they can rebalanced this though.)

Allows any party set up or strategy used to kill a target.

Prevents exploits, further balancing SP (with my system, not the original)

Honestly, Action based SP is the way to go, though it must be awarded every hit, not proc every so many hits if it's to be successful.

Also, in a party, SP needs to be pooled and split evenly as well if this is to be successful.

Hope that helps.

It will balanced the game and open up a about 90% of the targets as ideal to level off of, it's the idea they had originally.

Not to mention that last 10% of targets will give about 90% of the SP that the majority would meaning they wouldn't really be bad targets to level off of either.

Right now (with the current system) it's less then 10% of targets that are ideal to level off.

[Physic]

In all honesty, the dude is actually correct on many accounts,

In reality i doubt it will go back, they already placed this framework, basically saying they give up on the old system.

The truth is the old system worked very well with the rest of the game, the mob design and many other factors. It had some big problems though. But these werent flaws with the system itself, but with some of the execution.

Many people disliked the randomness, they should have eliminated this element, they should have had a base exp gain amount, or given you a little for every action.
having something proc say 1/4th the time meant that in short fights you could get screwed.
Most people didnt understand the system.


Problems that some people have said in this thread are not real problems with the SP system as it was. For example, the idea that your best exp comes from spamming actions is incorrect, you get sp for doing dmg, applying and effect, or for shields, from damage blocked. So, the biggest exploits were mages wanting a lot of people to get damaged, or possibly by trying to put massive debuffs on the mob, but debuffs generally help you kill mobs, also because the amount you get per mob is capped, your goal in general is not to actually hit cap, hitting cap repeatedly means you wasted your time, you be better off killing faster.

basically the enemies you fight were built with the whole system in mind, and allows you to have complex enemies, who are still worth it to fight. In a static system, any monster that can heal itself sucks, monsters with strong dmg abilities suck. Under the old system, people didnt mind monsters healing themselves, more opportunities to hit the cap, mages loved big dmg monsters because they could get more from heals. Fighting a lot of small mobs fast was as worthwhile as fighting large mobs. You could really adapt to many party sizes.
Early on it seemed wierd, but once you understood the system, you began to see, you could fight almost anything if your set up countered the monsters abilities well. You could chain mobs for hours, or you could kill big giant mobs in large groups.

he is right, with the current system the only way to make it worthwhile to fight any mob, is to carefully adjust each monsters sp given with how difficult it is to kill.
If you just go by defense and hp, any monster with a cure is not worthwhile, any monster with a big dmg attack isnt worthwhile, any mob with buffs isnt worthwhile, any mob that applies debuffs isnt worthwhile. (as compared to a mob with similar hp and defense). There is no advantage to holding mobs and doing more actions to them, because you could be attacking a different mob, also your more likely for more people to hit the cap. it was a better system that needed tweaks.
Part of the reason the combat seems stale now, is not because the combat doesnt have the tools, its that people arent fighting mobs that have interesting abilities you have to deal with, because there is no reward.

honestly fixed exp is fail, unless monsters with the same exp are of the same difficulty

[Viridiana]

Hmm. . . taking another look at it, and this time ignoring my knee-jerk reaction of "random sp sucks!", I can kinda see the appeal. I do still think it has its rough patches, but I'm not sure a system exists that doesn't.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that the current system can't be balanced. Whether it's worth the time investment at this point is another matter, though.

[zaviermhigo]

The new system isn't better, it just turns half the party usually into a leech. Now they are going to decrease party size to 8 because they couldn't admit that the mobs in this game were too easy. Outside of some massive tp attack, and how EVERY mob has a ranged attack, the mobs in this game are not tough. Few are, likes drakes, ants, crabs, scaling for rank. I'm not trying to make battles XI length but damn a two second fight is not fun for me, it may be fun for DDs but I'm a mage, all I do in 2 secs fights is spam cures and make sure the dds are alive, a game focused on DDs at all times doing a zerg is straight up lame. Why don't I get to use Paralyze often, why couldn't I skill up under the old action based system? because the mobs were easy and dds zerg. The best way to skill up under the old system was: my boyfriend and I , GLA and THM respectively, duoing crabs with punishing barbs before they gimped it. This required strategy and was more fun, in my opinion, than the LEECH and SPAM CURE system that people are forced into. Some linkshells don't even try to do magic defense down on enemies with BRs so mages can nuke it down, they always think "OMG DEF DOWN DD ZERG OMG OMG OMG", and this annoyed me to no end. Make mobs harder so that DDs are not the most important class in this game, instead they would just go compare damage size to each other that I can't even see because i turned that crap off lol. /rant -Thanks for never confronting the real problem of beefing up mobs Square Enix.-

edit: challenging mobs, but not mobs that necessarily one shot the whole party. I did not get one shotted often in XI, maybe two shotted. WTF at getting ONE SHOTTED a lot in this game, even tanks, even people with high vit lol and especially paper mage conj, and paper dd lnc. Difficulty is not measured in how FAST the mobs kills me, or how FAST I kill the mob, goddammit, its how much strategy went into the fight. You can get strat good enough to kill a mob in a min or less, but zerg should not be the main strategy. Also how many people even played FFXIV at the time with the action based sp, it isn't souding like a lot.

[Physic]

yea, i dunno bout now, but before 1 shot skills were usually avoidable, especially by mages. like i think raptors would tail sweep if you hit them in the back. basically what you had to do was keep the hate facing the tank, and the DDs in front of them, now if someone turned the mob, people would usually die, it also did different dmg the closer you were to the raptor i believe.
It was an interesting mechanic specific to raptors, but a lot of monsters had special mechanics, and ways to take advantage of them.

[ESAR]

Opening up every target as ideal for battle would greatly increase the difficulty of the game.

Having action based SP would allow for varying party set ups.

With the addition of a traditional auto-attack, we've no need to worry about zerging per ce.

There is one other major problem I think anyway you all seem to see as well, it's that why the hell is everything so powerful?!? lol

It just doesn't make battle fun, I mean, most of my time spent soloing is just cure bombing myself, it's boring and sucks.
One of the things action based SP would do is give you the option to pick a target because it was a good fight that took strategy, even if there was a harder fight I could fight, the SP difference wouldn't be significant enough for me to want to use that cure-bomb strategy I'm so ever starting to get annoyed with.

I think what they need to do is make monster react in a more realistic pace.
Why have a monster attack every 4 seconds when we attack every less then one? To make monsters more difficult they just have these ridiculous attack powers. Rather I'd like to see them attack similar to us, every second or so. It's not right that I can be fighting something and it just stands there and watches as I lay 5-6 hits into it, I feel bad lol.
Then it turns and "Blam!", there goes half my health. IDK, but I don't call that very strategic, fun or realistic.

If it requires them slightly extending the length of battle so be it.
I remeber those crabs back before the SP switch though, they were alot of fun to level off of, then they swtiched and I was stuck figthign Coblyn for the next 20 levels or some crap. Instantly it made me realize why they tried action based SP.
It also made me realize how much the system we adopted (from ffxi) fails in comparison.

Action based SP is defiantly the way to go but it needs to feel rewarding.
Changing it from a random proc to every hit does this.
Having it relate to stamina and TP prevents exploits
having party SP split makes it fair.
It has the the base to give bonuses to things that matter like AOE and effects in battle, though as we know from beta this can't be given in the same relation to cures buffs and debuffs because it makes people act stupid.

Even though I made < 20% of the SP that the mages I leveled with did the fights were rewarding and fun, I enjoyed the game (besides that damn randomness of SP lol). Now I can't even bring myself to playing it. Behests are just getting old and I don't always want to do guildleves to level off of, for one they are incredibly annoying. It's just because it takes time to figure out what difficutly.

I could rant about stuff here all day xDDD lol it's kinda fun.
Anyway I also think the choices for guildleves should be very easy to very hard.
Depending on your party the battle should just scale accordingly. rather then all this guesswork that's involved. I think it would be a very user friendly feature, part of what the game needs is just simpler methods of doing stuff. They're realizing that and are making crafting easier, next I think they should hit up guildleve difficulties.

And I'm really sorry if any of this sounds like gibberish, i'm rushing.
Thanks!