Chocobo Companion Question

[LeviGratton]

Well this kind of makes me not want to spend any points whatsoever, since I'm only level 30 and I haven't even decided what end game job I really like, and even then you never know if you're going to be in the mood to do something else for a while or enjoy another series of class/job quests.

[hohenheimer]

Only drawback from leaving in freestance is they of course use the skills from other branches but do not gain the passives from each stance if you speccd for it.

[KenshinHomura]

very good info

[dekarguy]

Hello,

Your understanding on this is correct. As your companion ranks up you’ll gain SP; however, the amount of SP you receive is limited, so it will not be possible to acquire every skill for all three stances (defender, attack, and healer). With that said, we'd like you to look into how you’d like to specialize your companion and focus on acquiring the skills you need to make that happen.

Camate, could we at least get some information, either via tooltips, the tutorial, or on the forums of what the Max Rank and Max SP we can earn on the Chocobo Companion is? Considering we have to make permanent irreversible commitments when spending SP, not having that information from the beginning or on demand seems very problematic.

[SeraviEdalborez]

Re: Everyone asking how much SP abilities cost to unlock.

Rank 1 (Choco Drop/Slash/Regen) costs 1.
Rank 2 (first passive) costs 2.
Rank 3 costs 3. And so on.

These cost the same amount as you get SP from the previous level. You will be able to do:

-Rank 10 in one tree, 0 in others
-Rank 9 in one tree, 4 in one other, 0 in third
-Rank 9 in one tree, 3 + 2 in the others (1 unspent)
...etc.

----

If you turn off Active Help (like I'm sure many do), you will not realize that chocobo SP allotment is permanent. Personally I turned them off because I was tired of seeing them from beta. Not saying the blame isn't on the player here, but it's uncharacteristically rigid for SP allotment to work this way. Now I'm "stuck" with the terrible Choco Regen because I wanted to test how it would behave.

[Thane]

Unless there's a way to re-allocate these points, I guess I'll just finish the tank skill progression... Either way, it takes forever to level up these Chocobo's anyway. The biggest issue right now is the huge conflict it has with the Duty Finder. I can deal with having to dismiss him and use another Gysahl Green to resummon him, but not being able to use him while using the Duty Finder is a huge detriment.

[rzr22]

The issue with not having respecs is that you put blind faith in the devs. You have faith that the ability/trait/whatever is working as intended, balanced, and overall does what it sets out to do. Have you ever seen an MMO with perfect balance and everything works as intended? I sure haven't. And lets pretend the devs ever decide something is not balanced and need to change things. What if I suddenly don't like the change. Are you saying I'm SOL?

I'm sorry if I don't wish to be punished because of bad design on the dev's part. Respecs gives us an out to this. It gives us the ability to not be severely disappointed when we spend hours dedicated to a game just to realize the devs have let us down and designed something poorly or have decided to change something that we now dislike.

It also gives us the ability to change our mind. This is a game where you can be any class on a single character and suddenly you're against letting me change my mind? You people are absurd.

Now if Chocobo breeding will be the answer to respecs, then I'm all on board for that. It's both flavorful and friendly to its users.

[GilbertLapine]

Hello,

Your understanding on this is correct. As your companion ranks up you’ll gain SP; however, the amount of SP you receive is limited, so it will not be possible to acquire every skill for all three stances (defender, attack, and healer). With that said, we'd like you to look into how you’d like to specialize your companion and focus on acquiring the skills you need to make that happen.

Please put out information on the total amount of SP acquired by max level and offer a reset for those who allocated skills in ignorance. Theres no excuse for putting players at a disadvantage like this -- if you're going to limit the amount of SP available it needs to be made known upfront so players can actually "specialize [our] companion and focus on acquiring skills [we] need," as opposed to having a random assortment of low level abilities acquired on the unrealized prospect of total completion.

The issue with not having respecs is that you put blind faith in the devs. You have faith that the ability/trait/whatever is working as intended, balanced, and overall does what it sets out to do. Have you ever seen an MMO with perfect balance and everything works as intended? I sure haven't. And lets pretend the devs ever decide something is not balanced and need to change things. What if I suddenly don't like the change. Are you saying I'm SOL?

I'm sorry if I don't wish to be punished because of bad design on the dev's part. Respecs gives us an out to this. It gives us the ability to not be severely disappointed when we spend hours dedicated to a game just to realize the devs have let us down and designed something poorly or have decided to change something that we now dislike.

It also gives us the ability to change our mind. This is a game where you can be any class on a single character and suddenly you're against letting me change my mind? You people are absurd.

Now if Chocobo breeding will be the answer to respecs, then I'm all on board for that. It's both flavorful and friendly to its users.

Truth. I'd be totally down for this, but the devs need still need to give a reset for those who started allocating skills in anticipation of total completion (having not been told otherwise). Given the game is otherwise without skill trees (aside from bonus stat allocation.. which is also rather ridiculous given, once again, that there are no true skill trees) it was totally reasonable to assume that all the chocobo companion skills could be acquired as well.

Honestly, I think they should be as a reward for anyone with the patience to level chocobos to max (the exp rate is pretty ridiculous..), but I suppose thats a conversation for another thread.

In either case, additional chocobo skills seem to be of such marginal benefit anyway given the limited scope of chocobo usefulness (i.e. soloing.. or fate parties when you don't have enough people, which rarely happens at end game...) that I can't imagine anyone putting much time into this aside from simply to say they've maxed it out for bragging rights. Even then, given chocobos evidently can't be truly "maxed", even that limited value has been reduced.

Since I'm here, I'll expound a little on my overall thoughts on the three big problems with chocobo companions:
1) Duty finder cancel.. makes them almost useless, to me at least. They're a convenience, but by no means a necessity, and often turn out to be more trouble than they're worth given this sad fact.
2) Vagueness on available skill points, not reset. Not only is it unclear what rank you chocobo can achieve (I'm assuming 10 based on the achievement, but theres no guarantee of this... so 10+9+...+2+1 = 55 SP total?), but theres no option to change this once you find out that you can't actually max out your chocobo (a totally reasonable assumption given theres no other skill tree system in the game). Furthermore, theres no way to know ahead of time how skills will actually play out with the AI (i.e. you may want an awesome tank chocobo, then level it and find its buggy as hell), so a reset is pretty important here.
3) Slow leveling. Given the insanity of chocobo skill trees, and the prospect of chocobo breeding in thefuture, it seems odd that SE would see fit to make the leveling so incredibly arduous. Chocobo leveling should be an afterthought, and it ought to be more akin to FC levelling, not old school FFXI grinding. Chocobos should also be getting quest and fate exp, not just combat exp.

A number of people have voiced concerns that chocobo skill resets would negate the purpose of potential chocobo breeding, but I would think people would want to breed multiple chocobos with different skillsets regardless of the presence of a skill reset.

Personally, especially if they ease up on the exp requirement, I would think people would have more incentive to breed multiple chocobos with different builds, then modify each build using resets as they get a better feel for how the AI handles the target usage situation.

its people who do not pay attention to mechanics that we have to implement resets. should no like any tier tree when assigning points they are perms but im up for resets once every 24hr use.

Putting bad grammar aside, if you're trying to say that people like myself, who evenly allocated skills anticipating a fully maxed chocobo, are fools for doing so because of some existing game mechanic, I'd love for you to point me to it.. like I said above, there aren't any skill trees in this game so I don't know why I'd be expected to anticipate one on my chocobo. The closest thing I can think of is bonus stat allocation, which is at least somewhat reasonable as we know what level we will max out at, unlike chocobo ranks. Theres been talk in this thread about the rank 10 achievement, but that said theres also an achievement for completing your level 30 class quest... should we have expected the game ended at level 30 based on that? Obviously not, especially given it was common knowledge the game is capped at 50, but the point is that until this thread I am unaware of instance in which SE actually made players aware of the fact that skills were to be allocated limitedly or what rank they would be capped at.

With the understanding that this game does indeed not support skill trees, my initial interpretation of the vague "how you allocate your sp is up to you, be wise about your choices because the decisions are permanent" text was that I should be cautious in my skill allocations by level to avoid a lopsided experience before hitting max. Evidently, that wasn't the intent of the active help, but there's no way for players to divine that on their own. Kudos to those who took the pessimist route and assumed SE would abruptly force skill tree decisions on them, but those who started allocating points in good faith that chocobos would follow the established skill norms from character progression should not be penalized for the error.

[MerlinOmniking]

....

its people who do not pay attention to mechanics that we have to implement resets. should no like any tier tree when assigning points they are perms but im up for resets once every 24hr use.

[ArcheDragon]

This is stupidly ridiculous! I never saw anywhere that it was permanent or that at some point my chocobo would stop ranking up, so now I have 1 point in each tree and my chocobo becomes useless. Is this how SE operates now? Pulling mechanics out of their butts and implementing them in the most backwards fashion possible? "Play are game because you can switch classes on the fly and play whatever you like whenever you want to! But NEVER put points into your chocobo for fear that someday you might want to play a different class!!!!!!!" The same goes for the ACN to SMN/SCH, but at least there you can use GC seals though certainly not optimal as I like to use sch for dungeons and smn for soloing.