[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Kazgrel]

To be fair, we all knew that BLM's weakness was always intended to be movement. The REAL issue and I'm surprised Yoshi as a BLM main couldn't figure out is that if you want to include a shit ton of movement mechanics and long cast times you need to compromise somewhere.

They should have given BLM's an ability that lets them store say 3 charges that allow insta cast abilities. This way, you'd burn 1 or 2 charges for burst damage, but you'd always want to keep one for mechanics, and this way as long as you spent 1, you're cooldown would always be counting down. If you made actual encounter design relevant where burst damage mattered, you'd simultaneously carve a niche where BLM is stronger than most.

So Triplecast, but with the capacity to save the charges and use them on demand vs. "next 3 spells are insta". I could go for that.

I was thinking perhaps have Firestarter apply to Fire 4, albeit at a much lower proc rate (10-15% vs the 40% that Fire has). Firestarter-procced Fire 3s are our best DPCT since they are instant, and zero mp cost doesn't impact how many Fire 4s we can squeeze off before needing to flip to UI for MP. Such a thing would border on being Dualcast-ish, though.

[Granyala]

This is mostly a nature of encounter design. Because of the way damage is tuned it forces these types of binary interactions in class design. I suspect there is a solution to this and keep an eye out for a new thread I am making that covers it a bit.

It's a problem of the elite having too much choice and time.

In your average guild these things are not an issue (unless DEVs fail big time and a class is broken). The take a subpar class played by a dependable player over FOTM anytime.
Hardcore guilds have either tons of applicants or members that are used to playing many a class and thus can always tailor raidcomps to any scenario as they deem necessary.

Unless you do extreme class/encounter homogenization, classes will and should always have strengths and weaknesses. BLM will shine on some bosses and suck on others. Nature of the beast. DEVs merely need to be sure that classes aren't too weak on bosses, where a kill becomes significantly harder if you don't have access to FOTM.

[Wrecktangle]

Agreed. BLM damage is fine when they don't have to move. For easier content - and maybe a handful of savage fights (usually the first or second floor), this isn't a problem. Unfortunately Final Fantasy is big on keeping all 8 of their players busy with at least moderate movement in the vast majority of harder fights.

SE gives them such a powerful weakness right? Here's the problem though, if you completely remove the weakness, what's their strength? They don't do staggering amounts of damage to warrant that weakness. FF14 Encounter design doesn't support carving out a BLM niche. It merely tries to equalize based on surface party contribution.

I'll give you a WoW example. I play Ret. My class is a low mobility, high defense, most powerful DPS cooldown in the game type of playstyle. In effect, basically the melee equivalent to a BLM right? That means that Ret has a very clear strength and a very clear weakness. I may not do as much damage all the time as my brother on fury, but with my cooldown usage, I can nullify extremely dangerous trash packs in M+ or push through a particularly dangerous phase of a boss. That is my niche and it gives my class value.

FF14 needs to really shake up the encounter design elements from flashy gimmicks to actual niches and then tailor class design to further improve this. IMO of course.

So Triplecast, but with the capacity to save the charges and use them on demand vs. "next 3 spells are insta". I could go for that.

I was thinking perhaps have Firestarter apply to Fire 4, albeit at a much lower proc rate (10-15% vs the 40% that Fire has). Firestarter-procced Fire 3s are our best DPCT since they are instant, and zero mp cost doesn't impact how many Fire 4s we can squeeze off before needing to flip to UI for MP. Such a thing would border on being Dualcast-ish, though.

I'm a huge fan of charges. It allows for a ton of flexibility without making something broken. My issue with your solution (when compared to mine) is that it forces you into fire still, and is based more on RNG and less on decision making.

A good example of my iteration of triple cast wouldn't even need to be a button cooldown. It could merely be a passive effect triggered off something else entirely, thus saving a hotbar spot!

Unless you do extreme class/encounter homogenization, classes will and should always have strengths and weaknesses. BLM will shine on some bosses and suck on others. Nature of the beast. DEVs merely need to be sure that classes aren't too weak on bosses, where a kill becomes significantly harder if you don't have access to FOTM.

What fights do BLM currently shine on? They do roughly the same DPS that any one else does, with a small margin higher because they're "selfish" DPS.

FF14 encounter design needs to change if they want to push a job strength/weakness paradigm (and I fully support that). Right now damage is simply too binary.

If adds weren't intermissions and DPS checks existed mid fight (a la A3S) instead of strictly enrage timers, etc. That's just the beginning too, tons more room for niches.

[StrawberryZebra]

What looks good on paper often falls flat on it's nose in real scenarios when community interaction and expectation are added.

Perhaps. Hell is other people, afterall.

But having some Jobs be better in certain niches isn't a deal breaker, provided they're not so hyper specialised in that one niche that they're underwhelming at everything else. FF14 tend to go with more homogenised Jobs to get around this problem. While that's great because it means they're more or less interchangable, it's also a problem because it prevents a Job from excelling at doing one thing.

That experience was trying to solve problems using our existing toolkits. I remember our first time seeing Ymiron use Dark Slash and it just instantly deleted our tank on a +15 key. he was dead. One shot. So we wiped, went back and then said ok, he can only block shadow damage once every minute, but the boss does the attack about every 30s so we used our hunters pet taunt to eat one, used cooldown to survive next, then used my bubble taunt to survive another then cooldown. etc. We had to get creative to get past the challenges in front of us.

Thats certainly one good example. My WoW guild came up with all kinds of unique and crazy strats to beat bosses over the years. Council type ones especially, where things need to be kited, off tanked and are generally complete chaos from the word go. They've never let me forget that time I had them spend an hour in Stormwind throwing a ball around in preparation for Lady Vashj. It worked though, we killed her the same night .

Even on easier content, throwing an AoE heavy 4 man boss at a healer that's focused more on single target healing is a challenge for them due to their class design. One that doesn't require you to come up with an elaborate plan with the rest of your group to overcome, but certainly one thats going to force you to bring your A game. Think having a Holy Paladin healer for a Heroic in TBC or Wrath - They're at a disadvantage sometimes, but they were never incapable of completing the content.

Again, we're still not meeting Faroth's criteria. It can't be too powerful or else it would have too large a cooldown. It needs to be impactful, fun, and pressed fairly frequently. I imagine a 20-30s cooldown personally.

Meeting all of the critera @Faroth asked for is impossible. Unfortunately Protect can only ever be a bland damage reduction skill - it owes too much to previous FF titles to be anything other else. For it to be impactful it'll need to be really powerful and therefore needs to be on a longer cooldown to keep it inline.

I would much rather see it taken the other way instead. Becoming a very obvious, very powerful skill makes it a tool players feel comfortable with as well as one that has a noticable effect on the rest of the group.

I would be against the idea of giving healers an invuln ability. Each tank already has one, and accordingly exploits them on harder mechanics. If you want a tank/healer team (the 4 of them) to come together and invuln their way through every mechanic - this will be the road leading there.

True, but the issue with Protect is that if you give it a small damage reduction it goes unnoticed. If you give it a massive number then it's too powerful. The best way around that conundrum is to remove the number all together.

As I mentioned above, Protect can only ever be a damage reduction skill. Logically speaking, the best way to remove the number from it is to crank the skill up to 11 and just ignore the damage entirely. Giving a single hit of complete invulnrability is absolutely something players will notice. Hell, go as far as to make it group wide - With a 5+ minute cooldown and a huge Mana cost. If it's going to be a noticable skill, it needs to be something outrageous and have appropriately outrageous drawbacks too.

You're right that could set the game down a very slippery slope, however I think there are enough areas SE can tune the skill to prevent that from happening.

[Faroth]

Meeting all of the critera @Faroth asked for is impossible. Unfortunately Protect can only ever be a bland damage reduction skill - it owes too much to previous FF titles to be anything other else. For it to be impactful it'll need to be really powerful and therefore needs to be on a longer cooldown to keep it inline.

I would much rather see it taken the other way instead. Becoming a very obvious, very powerful skill makes it a tool players feel comfortable with as well as one that has a noticable effect on the rest of the group.

Well, (spitballing here) Protect could have been a 20 second full party 50% damage reduction you'd use at a point (phase change, react to physical tells, whatever) when you know a boss is going to be hitting hard with physical attacks. Shell could be similar but for magic attacks. Wall/Reflect could have been a single target buff with a longer cooldown with cooldown/duration being the same or slightly staggered so the buff lasts just a little longer than the cooldown. It would act appropriately in that if that player happens to get hit, the spell is reflected and does full damage to the boss. That could be a decent damage addition, but the gamble is whether or not the person with Wall would get it, so it's not exactly overpowered either.

The idea being these spells would be on a class that focuses on damage prevention and has somewhat weaker healing where other healers have less reduction tools and more healing tools.

Not saying it would translate to how FFXIV was designed so much as I wish they had somehow been able to translate to MMOs from the ground up. A big problem with modern MMOs, though, is the "everything must solo" approach eliminates the option of designing true support classes.

I'm also a (extreme minority) fan of the EverQuest design drawing from D&D of having limited hotbars and a good number of skills/spells you don't need all the time, so you'd swap some as more/less beneficial depending on the dungeon/fight you go into. Taking the easiest, and laziest, WoW example:

You chose fire spec as a mage, Classic WoW laughed at you in Molten Core because everything was resistant or immune to fire so you had to respec.
In EverQuest there wouldn't have been the specs. You'd have all three specs spells, but limited hotbars. You would drop your fire spells going into MC in favor of ice spells by simply choosing them from your spell book. Arguably that would mean some players might choose a mix of fire and ice outside of those specific dungeons, some may go all ice, some may go all fire.

Of course, EQ was also not as concerned with perfectly balancing all the classes because they didn't have to be with no instances and no party limits on raid groups, so much of the flexibility EQ offered is lost in modern design capabilities as players will settle on the "only right spell set up" and such, particularly with raid spots being a premium. WoW's flexible raid scaling might allow them to address it, but I think they're locked in a system that works for them so it would be too drastic of a change at this point.

[Wrecktangle]

Even on easier content, throwing an AoE heavy 4 man boss at a healer that's focused more on single target healing is a challenge for them due to their class design. One that doesn't require you to come up with an elaborate plan with the rest of your group to overcome, but certainly one thats going to force you to bring your A game. Think having a Holy Paladin healer for a Heroic in TBC or Wrath - They're at a disadvantage sometimes, but they were never incapable of completing the content.

Paladins are not strong raid healers in WoW. One fight we were pushing a Mythic 16 Tyrannical Eye of Azshara key. We had a hard time killing him. Mind you we're in like 850-860 ilvl, before NH (so no tier). The boss does a partywide AOE hit, that did like 400k or some asinine amount every time it auto'd. That's not counting any of the avoidable damage either.

The boss also does a soak attack that when shared, using a defensive cooldown, would leave the entire party with ~ 15% HP. This meant were hardly ever stabilized. In order for us to have enough HP to survive I had to backup heal after each meteor (as a DPS), so we'd have enough to survive the next one. It ended up getting us the kill. Was a great experience.

Even still at the hardest possible content you could do at the time, a sub-optimal healer could do it. That's good design, like you said.

Meeting all of the critera @Faroth asked for is impossible. Unfortunately Protect can only ever be a bland damage reduction skill - it owes too much to previous FF titles to be anything other else. For it to be impactful it'll need to be really powerful and therefore needs to be on a longer cooldown to keep it inline.

I would much rather see it taken the other way instead. Becoming a very obvious, very powerful skill makes it a tool players feel comfortable with as well as one that has a noticable effect on the rest of the group.

I don't think it is impossible, but I do think it's incredibly difficult to do within the current design schema, which is why I pushed the discussion to see what people had to say.

I have some ideas on Protect, but unfortunately they just don't mash up with the current design schema all too well.

[Granyala]

Perhaps. Hell is other people, afterall.

But having some Jobs be better in certain niches isn't a deal breaker, provided they're not so hyper specialised in that one niche that they're underwhelming at everything else. FF14 tend to go with more homogenised Jobs to get around this problem. While that's great because it means they're more or less interchangable, it's also a problem because it prevents a Job from excelling at doing one thing.

Yeah, the age old conundrum of MMOs I guess.
Just look at what an absurd amount of effort Blizzards DEVs go through to push everyone within a few % and yet raiders still moan and bitch.

Imho DPS classes are too similar for me to play multiple. Every melee has the 1-2-3 combo BS, everyone has a "keep that up DoTs" etc.

- - - Updated - - -

Meeting all of the critera @Faroth asked for is impossible. Unfortunately Protect can only ever be a bland damage reduction skill - it owes too much to previous FF titles to be anything other else. For it to be impactful it'll need to be really powerful and therefore needs to be on a longer cooldown to keep it inline.

Uuh not sure. Protect used to be -50% physical only, shell used to be -50% magic (INCLUDING heals), both with a rather short duration of a few rounds.

Now that would be a wicked design in an MMO.
Shell/protes hybrid: AoE, 2m CD 20s duration 50% damage reduction, 50% heal reduction.
Do you shell the group and take a 50% heal penalty for the duration in order to survive heavy hits?
Could lead to interesting decisions, esp once you factor in reckless people taking avoidable damage that would otherwise kill them.

Certainly more interesting than a "always on" -5%.

[Katchii]

What about a Shell/Wall ability for WHM that was basically a reverse Guard ability that functions something like a Bard song? AKA a channeled ability cast by the Healer that reduces physical and magic damage taken while draining mana at a pretty hefty rate to balance the relative utility of the spell. To make it worth it over simply casting a HoT or something it would need to be a pretty large radius around the caster so as to allow multiple people to be affected by it. If executed appropriately it is more efficient than simply casting an AoE heal (otherwise there's no point in casting it instead of an AoE heal), if done poorly it's far less efficient and possibly encounter risking because the mana drain would be so high.

[dope_danny]

just about done with capping and gearing all my crafting jobs and its crazy to see people still spend so much money on crystals. But i guess atherial reduction is another sub system in this games sea of sub systems a lot of folks probably have no goddamn idea exists. Though i guess thats part of the fun.

[Katchii]

just about done with capping and gearing all my crafting jobs and its crazy to see people still spend so much money on crystals. But i guess atherial reduction is another sub system in this games sea of sub systems a lot of folks probably have no goddamn idea exists. Though i guess thats part of the fun.

Yup, been playing since launch and I'm not sure I know what this is. Does it give you crystals?

[Granyala]

Yup, been playing since launch and I'm not sure I know what this is. Does it give you crystals?

You mine collectibles from aethereal nodes and use a skill called "refine" to convert them.
Depending on collectible value you get crystals, polys and other materials.
Very easy to farm large amounts of crystals.

https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/w...rial_Reduction

[Katchii]

You mine collectibles from aethereal nodes and use a skill called "refine" to convert them.
Depending on collectible value you get crystals, polys and other materials.
Very easy to farm large amounts of crystals.

https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/w...rial_Reduction

Ah, that would be why. I don't know anything about the nuances of crafting and gathering and all the things available from them (aside from the obvious things you can gather and craft). I don't find that aspect of the game fun. May have to revisit that if it's THAT easy to get crystals.

[Kazgrel]

This year's contestant for "better late than never":

[dope_danny]

Yup, been playing since launch and I'm not sure I know what this is. Does it give you crystals?

If you ever are out mining and spot a yellow/brown ephemeral node on the map then for every 2 nodes checked, not even mined since that wastes time just clicked on, then for the next hour they can let you farm stuff that often are rocks and herbs with no apparent use. What you do is hit collectors glove and mine them as collectibles. Then aetherial reduction basically desynths them without a rating needed and you get crystals, clusters and a bunch of other things that are usually very expensive on the market board. Its an easier way for gatherers to make DOSH than farming stacks of lumber or ore.

[Granyala]

This year's contestant for "better late than never":

congrats.

[Graeham]

Well, I did Seal Rock for the first time in ages. My team secured three objectives at the same time and the other two teams completely ignored them...instead fighting each other. I suspect most if not all of them were bots, though. Needless to say, we secured victory rather easily.

@Kazela

Congratulations!

[StrawberryZebra]

I don't think it is impossible, but I do think it's incredibly difficult to do within the current design schema, which is why I pushed the discussion to see what people had to say.

I have some ideas on Protect, but unfortunately they just don't mash up with the current design schema all too well.

Flat damage reduction skills are problematic here because they scale inversely with both gear and content in absolute terms. The reduction percentage will still be the same, but the effect can be wildly different based on factors outside of the Healers control. What is life saving to a tank that barely meets the iLevel requirement is unnoticable on one that's got the absolute BiS gear in all of their slots.

To keep it feeling impactful you'd have to so a lot of complex under the hood math for it to provide just the right amount of reduction for each individual tank to make a difference, while also not providing too much as to make it overpowered. While far from impossible, having it provide 18.457435% damage reduction to your Paladin, but 43.45376% to your Warrior is an easy way to leave players feeling confused and overwhelmed by what should be a very simple skill.

As for the underlying game design choices they've played it very safe with ARR. Too safe, in my opinion. Totally understandable after the initial failure of 1.0, but I would have liked to have seen them take a few more risks with it going into Stormblood. Cautiously protecting what FF14 is now is limiting what FF14 could potentially be if they were willing to step outside of the rigid design structure currently in place.

[Granyala]

Flat damage reduction skills are problematic here because they scale inversely with both gear and content in absolute terms. The reduction percentage will still be the same, but the effect can be wildly different based on factors outside of the Healers control. What is life saving to a tank that barely meets the iLevel requirement is unnoticable on one that's got the absolute BiS gear in all of their slots.

To keep it feeling impactful you'd have to so a lot of complex under the hood math for it to provide just the right amount of reduction for each individual tank to make a difference, while also not providing too much as to make it overpowered.

No you don't.

Tanks no longer needing such CDs gives me the opportunity to apply them to s/o else or use the GCD for sth completely different.
It's part of the normal gearing process and it actually feels GOOD as a healer to know "yeah, my tank can take it now, look how far we've come!".

When we first fought Thok HC in SoO back in the day, one missed healer CD meant a wipe. As gear increased we got more and more latitude and the healer could take it easy(er^^) .

BTW: even if the damage is no longer life threatening to the tank, 40% reduction still means that I have to heal 40% less HP back up after the hit. So the CD, while no longer necessary to save his butt, is still impactful to me, esp once you figure in a tanks growing HP pool.
Less heals = more stones = larger virtual privates in parsers. Or so I've heard.

[dope_danny]

I just realised i've been able to get yellow scrips from Zhloe and the miqote in rahglars reach in 2018.

I'm a fucking retard.

[Kazgrel]

I just realised i've been able to get yellow scrips from Zhloe and the miqote in rahglars reach in 2018.

I'm a fucking retard.

Oof.

Been that way since 4.1. I’ve slowly stockpiled alembics just by doing those turn ins each week. I’ll work on making the 320 gathering/crafting gear this week or next.