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

[sindriiisgaming]

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

...do it....

[Reimmi]

I say no thanks.

I have played several games who used skill points/talent trees. In the end you always end up with exactly ONE viable build that everyone has to use. No thanks.

Yeah, that. despite all the "praise" dragonflight gets, every spec i played came down to the single target build, or aoe build. No choice at all.

[Dzian]

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.

Nail on the head here. They've taken away every system players could interact with that adds depth to the game and in order to diversify they'd effectively have to 180 and put a lot of those systems back in..

There are thousands of games out there where choices work and work very well. Hell even games like call of duty with endless weapon choices loadout choices etc etc. You can still pick what you want and dominate the game.. there's a meta sure but it's also very easy to absolutely own the meta..

Or racers with an endless choice of cars. The fastest one isn't necessarily the best especially if it can't get round a corner

The key to balance is not in jobs but in content design..

Elemental weaknesses and things would be fine as long as they didn't repeat the mistakes of ffxi and end up in a situation where almost 90% of monsters shared the same weaknesses. Thus they were the only 2 players would typically sync merit points into..

Xivs big problem is every encounter is the exact same thing. The only thing that changes is boss HP. Every boss has the same speed, same defence stats, takes the same evasion the same resistances.. a level 90 boss takes the exact same damage from a resultant arrow as a level 1 bug.. because it has the exact same defence and mitigation.

Said it before but you can't create fun diverse and interesting jobs and choices without having diverse and interesting systems and mechanics in the game to play around with.

[Minali]

Calling it now we will have "Quick and Easy Sprout Guides" up on day 2, explaining sprouts "the ideal build* for their job so they don't have to "worry about this confusing system".

(* "ideal" by the standards of what the endgame raiders planned in a rapid effort of min maxing with a lot of calculations and spreadsheets)

[Mikey_R]

Elemental weaknesses and things would be fine as long as they didn't repeat the mistakes of ffxi and end up in a situation where almost 90% of monsters shared the same weaknesses. Thus they were the only 2 players would typically sync merit points into.

The problem is, FFXIV isn't built around such a system. Just as an example, Black Mage now has most of its damage coming from Fire aspected damage. This is fine if an enemy is weak to it, but what if it is neutral or worse, resists/absorbs the fire damage. Going with weak vs neutral, which one would you balance the BLM's DPS around?

Now, to get around elemental weaknesses/strengths, you would need to allow BLM the ability to swap which of it's spells actually do damage. A couple of ways this could be done is a stance that swaps Fire and Ice functionality, with all Fire spells being replaced with an Ice equivalent and vice versa or, if you want to go down the talent tree route, have one for fire, one for ice. The first option is essentially a palette swap. The second on has issues in being able to swap to a different element when you are randomly placed in an instance. Imagine you are set up for a fire weak enemy, then you go into the next encounter, and they resist/absorb fire, but you have no chance to change. You have been neutered due to no fault of your own.

This then leads back to encounter design, you have to have an enemy that is either weak to Fire/Ice or Lightning (assuming we can have Lighting as another option to use for the main damage spells). That in itself restricts what you can do. Unless you also want to give BLM access to Wind, Earth and Water spells as more, what is essentially, spell glamour options.

If we then extrapolate this to other casters, RDM and SMN and soon PCT, where they use a variety of elements for their damage, it can cause issues there as well.

Take this and expand to slashing/piercing/blunt resistances for melee.

To solve all of this, the easiest thing would be to have the benefits/downsides be small but at that point, you could argue what the point of it is. Bearing in mind, this is only scratching the surface of potential pitfalls. Yes, encounter design is important however, designing enemies that have certain weaknesses where you have no time to prepare is not good design. You are better off making the boss do mechanics that can potentially force you to use your utility. Yes, you could Triplecast at that point where you are standing still, but the next mechanic is movement heavy, so you are better off planning it around that. Make the boss hinder your rotation so the player has to have more forethought in to what they might need tools for. Something to break up the rotation you just mindlessly repeat.

[Edmund_Blackadder]

Calling it now we will have "Quick and Easy Sprout Guides" up on day 2, explaining sprouts "the ideal build* for their job so they don't have to worry about this confusing system".

(* "ideal" by the standards of what the endgame raiders planned in a rapid effort of min maxing with a lot of calculations and spreadsheets)

Sadly I agree we will just see people promoting the "cookie cutter" or "meta builds" which defeats the objective of having a skill tree. Would be interesting to see what happens in 8.0, meanwhile I am excited to play with friends in DT and go on another adventure.

[Tunda]

The problem is, FFXIV isn't built around such a system. Just as an example, Black Mage now has most of its damage coming from Fire aspected damage. This is fine if an enemy is weak to it, but what if it is neutral or worse, resists/absorbs the fire damage. Going with weak vs neutral, which one would you balance the BLM's DPS around?

Now, to get around elemental weaknesses/strengths, you would need to allow BLM the ability to swap which of it's spells actually do damage. A couple of ways this could be done is a stance that swaps Fire and Ice functionality, with all Fire spells being replaced with an Ice equivalent and vice versa or, if you want to go down the talent tree route, have one for fire, one for ice. The first option is essentially a palette swap. The second on has issues in being able to swap to a different element when you are randomly placed in an instance. Imagine you are set up for a fire weak enemy, then you go into the next encounter, and they resist/absorb fire, but you have no chance to change. You have been neutered due to no fault of your own.

This then leads back to encounter design, you have to have an enemy that is either weak to Fire/Ice or Lightning (assuming we can have Lighting as another option to use for the main damage spells). That in itself restricts what you can do. Unless you also want to give BLM access to Wind, Earth and Water spells as more, what is essentially, spell glamour options.

If we then extrapolate this to other casters, RDM and SMN and soon PCT, where they use a variety of elements for their damage, it can cause issues there as well.

Take this and expand to slashing/piercing/blunt resistances for melee.

To solve all of this, the easiest thing would be to have the benefits/downsides be small but at that point, you could argue what the point of it is. Bearing in mind, this is only scratching the surface of potential pitfalls. Yes, encounter design is important however, designing enemies that have certain weaknesses where you have no time to prepare is not good design. You are better off making the boss do mechanics that can potentially force you to use your utility. Yes, you could Triplecast at that point where you are standing still, but the next mechanic is movement heavy, so you are better off planning it around that. Make the boss hinder your rotation so the player has to have more forethought in to what they might need tools for. Something to break up the rotation you just mindlessly repeat.

adding such a system if it is done correctly you will reach to 2 points:

- there is a job synergy if there is a warrior there should also scholar and monk for example
- some jobs will suffer in some fights

[Rithy255]

Depends how it's implemented on "builds" I doubt they would go as far as to have some builds change role types (like a DPS becoming a tank or a tank becoming a healer)


I personally can see how some builds could work without a "clear meta" maybe some builds would be a better "off tank" build, or some builds would focus healers on more mitigation, I think the issue may come when you put DPS numbers and damage into the build.

[ReynTime]

Sounds better than what they have currently.

The focus on balance and homogenization is anti fun.

Depending on what they opt to, they're going to have to change the endgame gearing cycle, because as is you don't have much flexibility in job swapping in time to keep up.
"Some jobs not being very good for certain fights" has always been completely normal in any video game with multiple characters, builds, weapon styles and classes. It's only a problem in XIV now (leveling doesn't take anywhere near as long as it did back in pre StB days) because with a lot of effort you can get 2 archetypes geared up in 2nd to best in slot in a matter of months. Which discourages the idea of flexing whichever job is best for a given fight in the same expansion cycle.

[Burmecia]

In the end you always end up with exactly ONE viable build that everyone has to use.

This seems to be the thing always hiding behind innocuous looking idea of "skill trees" and "freedom and choice".