Ability Points, Skill Trees & Talents being considered to replace leveling. Thoughts?

[Frodnoxx]

Here's a thought experiment. Think of a game (any game) where customizability worked really well - it made you different than your peers, it let you play differently, and still let you excel in the content. What was it about that game that let that happen and why could it not happen in this game?

Weirdly enough for me, I look at some FPS games (specifically Deep Rock Galactic if anyone can relate). There a lot of different guns you can bring with their own features, strengths and weaknesses. The key here is that the enemies present such a wide variety of things to play against. For example there are big meat shield enemies, flying enemies, swarming enemies, armored enemies, etc etc and they each present a challenge that while any gun can deal with decently, some guns excel in.

Bringing it back to MMOs and FF14. I don't think there is anywhere near enough avenues of different challenges for a customization system to work. Every single boss encounter in the game presents: figure out where to stand and either do single target DPS or party wide healing. There are no other niches that players could potentially fill through customization because the options that do not lend themselves to single target dps are invariably worse than ones that do. And so the strict meta forms.

The most heavy-handed way to account for this is to do something like element/attack type weaknesses, but that's not interesting nor fun and has been attempted and failed time immemorial. But that's the basic idea that just needs some elegance injected into it. It's more difficult to come up with varying challenges for an MMO than an action game. But here are some examples:

- Having significant phases of the boss not be purely single target so that AoE, cleave, funnel, etc damage types can excel
- Having mechanics that emphasize different types of healing: clumped up, spread out, pressure on a non-tank, spot healing, etc.
- Having mechanics that emphasize a non-tank's self-mitigation or mobility

In conclusion. For a system that lets players change their strengths and weaknesses to work, the content needs to present different areas to be strong and weak in. And currently the game has a very narrow playing field. So unless this expansion's "Enhanced Combat Design" opens it up, I don't think a customization system in 8.0 will work.

[KisaiTenshi]

Here's a thought experiment. Think of a game (any game) where customizability worked really well - it made you different than your peers, it let you play differently, and still let you excel in the content. What was it about that game that let that happen and why could it not happen in this game?

It never really works in any multiplayer game. There is literately no way to make a game fair if the differences are too far apart that the meta becomes "use this exact build or you will be excluded from all content harder than facerolls." Which, guess what, was the case for most of 2.0 and 3.0 when the jobs were the most different. Right now it's like 'use WAR, or don't bother raiding as a tank'.

Like if you think about why the game does what it does, it comes down to fight choreography. If you have 3 different tanks and one is weak to piercing, one is weak to blunt, and one is weak to slashing, but you design the fight around each boss having this kind of combat, then you get painted into a corner where players will demand the content be nerfed.

Likewise with the elemental strength/weaknesses. It only works well when players can have that ahead of time. So as far as tanks and healers go, you can't design this. Since you can't have 6 DPS players, you can't have one player with each element, nor can you have each melee DPS with slash, stab and blunt.

I understand why they removed these elements, because it makes the PUG duty finding impossible. You'd have to make it so that duties have 1 of each which means you'd end up with 6 element casters (DPS, or healer if it calls for "Light",) 3 melee or ranged DPS, and with so many DPS you'd have to nerf everyones DPS down.

Unfortunately that means re-designing things in a way that would require changing everything. It's far too late in the game's life to do that. Never try to turn a game into something it was not. This is why FFXIV should never have had PvP, and should never have had the Deep Dungeon. The former because they had to effectively create a second game on top of the first one for it to work. And the latter had to be an alternate dungeon system. Sure the Deep Dungeon, is fun once or twice, but it's basically just "easy mode leveling" instead of playing the DF content.

So if you change things to be ability points, what are you going to do with the PvP? Pretend it doesn't exist like normal? What are you going to do with the Deep Dungeons?

It's just that I don't see what they want to do here. Unless they are going to basically add yet another dungeon mode, and basically go "Hey we're sending you back in time before the world was sundered, and also you have amnesia and don't remember any of your skills." Before the time of the ancients. I don't see how they can logically do this.

Maybe they could get away with having the player have to solve a solution to rejoinings, which involves going into each reflection and each reflection has a different combat system that has levels independent from the source.

[CidHeiral]

This is why FFXIV should never have had PvP

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

[KisaiTenshi]

lolwut? I was with you until this line. Sure it took a long time to get there but PvP is great now.

Every time I tried frontlines it was like 50% bots by volume and I was like "these are just powerleveling bots, I don't want to be carried by this nonsense." Again though, I don't play it, so if you say it's good now, I'm assuming you like the PVP itself and not the easy EXP or grinding till you get the rewards and then dropping it entirely.

[Frodnoxx]

...

I said in my post that elemental and pierce/slash/etc weaknesses and resistances is not the way to go because of the reasons you described. I also said there are other ways to have situations where players get to stand out without doing it with explicit weaknesses and resistances (see my bullet points). It can also be done without people being excluded by having enough areas in a fight where different builds can shine. Again I am not advocating for elemental weaknesses, but the analogy would be to have a fight that cycles through all the elements over its course. That way no one build is definitively better than another and people still get to be different.

But I also did say (as you are saying) that the game is what it is and the re-design would be too big, and the devs have made it all too clear how averse to change they are.