Keep our skills when Level syncing in dungeons

[Packetdancer]

As an old D&D 3.5 player who would drag out grappling rules just to annoy the DM, the thought of that much math purely for the sake of spite makes me smile.

As an engineer, I approve. As a DM who's been running games since late 3.5, reading this gives me a headache.

(My next campaign is gonna be actually an FFXIV one, using the fan-made but extremely good FFXIV D&D 5e sourcebook. My players are going to go on a quest to explore Meracydia, and I made an expansion-style logo for the campaign and everything! I have had to construct a whooooole lot of lore more or less out of thin air and/or my ass to prep for this, though...)

Brief D&D digression aside, I really should make the slide deck for "why keeping your skills when level-synched down would be incredibly broken beyond words: the MATH edition"; spite-fueled or not, this topic does seem to crop up every few months.

[Kleeya]

Even if all was correctly synched so that a 90 dps does the same damage with his full 90 rotation as a lvl 20 sprout pressing two buttons, people proposing this kind of idea really don't seems to worry about how horrible it would be to end up with 90 players not having a clue of how to play properly.

Do you really want your Sastasha runs being 40 minutes long because the 3 other 90 players in your team, spamming the same skill out of combo, will do 1/10 of the damage they are supposed to make, way below than a sprout ? I sure don't XD

[swiss_Momo]

I can totally see how this would lead to sprouts/people at lvl getting kicked from early ARR dungeons because they lack the AOE toolkit

[Gullis]

How do you make a warrior with holmgang on par with a warrior without it?

How about astro cards? raid buffs? bard songs? dancer buffs? how do you make something scale with something that doesnt exist?

its like people only think damage spells and skills, but forget about utility abilities when making these. how do you make these scale? Because it seems like you either make higher level players have a huge advantage that would break the dungeons even worse than they are, or make them useless to the point where the whole change was pointless to being with

I'm not trying to be a smartass. Im just very curious how that would work?

Because it just seems like a impossible feat to me, without breaking the game. People mention SWTOR and sometimes Guildwars, but I got no clue about those games handles it.

[Mikey_R]

No because our stats are synced. My Dancer does her 720 potency dance every 30 seconds in low lvl dungeons and no one cares.
Worse MMOs like GW2 and ESO can do downscaling (syncing) without losing skills, it would be totally possible in XIV too.

At level 15, Dancer has 2 AoEs, Standard Step and Windmill, Windmill is 100 potency at 2.5 second cooldown base, which is 40 potemcy per second. Standard Step is 720 potency, but can only be used every 30 seconds, that is also 40 potency per second.

The only reason Standard step is worth using is because it has a smaller damage falloff.

If you also compare to the other ranged, Bard (level 18) has access to Quick Nock, a 110 potency GCD and can weave 110 potency Bloodletter. Machinist (again, level 19) has Spread Shot 140 potency and Gauss Round oGCD at 120 potency.

As a reference, if you standard step in a synced down Sastasha, you take off almost 50% of a mobs HP without a crit. That saves alot of time in a pull. However, how do you think this would change were you suddenly allowed to add the rest of their AoE kit? Plus the fact you can now increase the damage of yourself and someone else via Closed Position. Things would melt.

As for the other MMOs, I have not played them, so this is all anecdotal, but I have heard high level players coming into low level stuff just faceroll the content and newer players don't really have a chance of participating. That is something the team wants to avoid.

[ty_taurus]

Ignoring the overall job changes for a moment, what we should hope to see over time would be adjustments to jobs that fall in line with how MNK was handled, for example. Specifically, you can see that their core gameplay loop gets fully established by level 50, and that actions beyond that point either upgrade your performance or tack on subtle additions that add to that loop.

I think it would benefit the game a lot if it had a larger team of people working on job design and balance--perhaps having someone dedicated to managing the balance of each specific role, including Melee, Ranged, and Caster as separate roles, and trying to maintain a more consistent balance at the level 30, 50, 60, 70, and 80 thresholds while also trying to better handle how that gameplay loop is introduced and reinforced. It's a lot of work which is why it should really be given more resources.

Additionally, I think there's a lot of unexplored territory in "action glamours" that let you change the appearance of your abilities without actually changing their potencies. A very simple implementation of something like this would be letting people choose between a given action's animations for actions that upgrade over time (i.e. Choosing Stone IV's animation over Glare III's, or keeping Gravity II's animation when synched while using Gravity's potency). We could also see all new animations though as well. Like what about unlocking Atori's animations for Dragoon? In Bozja, Atori is a Nagxian Dragoon but uses entirely unqiue animations.

[Mikey_R]

The solution is simple: put a potency cap on skills in certain instances. ARR instances: max 400 potency (or whatever appropriate), and so on. It would work like the Echo buff. Anything is possible.

I've been playing GW2 since 2012 and ESO since 2017. I have NO issues participating in whatever group content on my low lvl, undergeared alts. Whoever said that is probably not familiar with their class or they only use auto attack in open world events, lol.

That doesn't account for the plethora of oGCDs and buffs jobs get at later levels, you will still be killing things far faster than normal, plus, it doesn't help jobs that rely on high potency actions to bring their damage up. Samurai, as an example, relies upon the much higher potency on its Iaijutsus to bring its damage up, Ogi Namikiri as an example would half it's damage, Midare Setsugekka then does about 60% of it's potential damage etc.

It is not an easy fix and far more complex than people make it out to be.

As for GW2/ESO, good to know.

[Mikey_R]

Let's try it. Of course that's not possible and this change will probably never happen in XIV so this whole convo is meaningless. But still, I would have to actually try it so see if this system would work or not. Sadly (or luckily?), I'm not a dev.

I have always thought that allowing a setting to level sync you but allow you to keep actions would be an interesting setting to have, limited to pre-mades though. If something like that was added, it could allow people to collect data between how it is now and how it could be. If anything, it would just be a bit of fun.

[kpxmanifesto]

Or worse, having a full rotation but it's hit with the balance stick to account for sync and you barely do any damage but still have all those buttons to press lol

I feel like they have difficulty balancing things as it is. If they can pull it off, great. But I'm doubtful they would.

[Jaquan]

Oh right how about we compare Black Mage. Let's use level 30 as a baseline. At this point natural BLM has only 2 stack of their stance and still need to use Transpose to keep their flow. They're also entirely dependent on their GCDs with one Swiftcast. BLM synced down from level 90 would have more fluid swap alongside their procs, Enochian, access to Leylines, Sharpcast every 30 seconds and Triplecast. Which one will do better?