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So, Wint, tell us about your honest impression of the new combat system.
If 1 is "just like in 1.0" and 10 is "a combat system reborn", where are we standing, and why?

Squee! He looks like an adorable little piggy!

I mean, ahem, yes, I suppose that will be fine.

It's an 11.

Honestly I was a little nervous about just hammering abilities but there are a few things that calmed my fears:

1) You can perform extra powerful chains. Say you open with one skill, then the icon for another 2 in your hotbar light up, depending on which you choose one of two others light up for the finishing blow so to speak. Not only are there combos, but combo paths you can take with different effects from the skills you use on the monster you're fighting.
2) You still need to watch hate. When we lost to the boss mob of that dungeon, one thing I did was steal hate from the tank accidentally on Archer. Our second time through I used some abilities you can trigger that do things like reduce your hate to allow me to spam for a bit before the effect wore. It feels a little more challenging to manage than say, FFXI, but once you get the hang of it it is a lot of fun.
3) We haven't seen all the abilities yet. My character was only level 35, and they're capping at 50 at launch so there are another 15 levels to see what is coming. Add to that the ability to use some of the skills from other jobs and we have a lot of choices and combinations to choose from, hopefully they will make the "sub job skills" useful in multiple situations so there isn't that perfect build out there that everyone will demand (que Kachi to come rant about this

Another thing I was responsible for (other than popping the pods I talked about earlier) was keeping up enfeebs like blind and poison. Between keeping those applied and running through my combos, and watching the environment and the monster behavior, there is enough there to keep a skilled player hopping.

One of my favorite aspects of Aion was its chain-skill combat system. A system whereby you would set up combos ahead of time and literally chain skills into one another. You could set up chains that had high damage, or you could set up chains that set up particular buffs and debuffs. Their version of this system was pretty simplistic, but it was very interesting to me as far as the possibilities of such a system.

I'll relate an example.. My main character in that game was an assassin (leather-wearing rogueish class that fights in melee). There was one occasion where I and a few other people wanted to do a mid-level dungeon, but we couldn't find a tank (1 tank class... WHY?!). So after a little thought and prep work, I tanked the dungeon myself. I did this by setting up stuns, blinds, evasion buffs, knockdowns, and spell avoidance into my skill combos so that I could minimize the damage I was taking from mobs in the dungeon. Because of my naturally high damage output I was able to maintain threat as long as nobody went nuts (and they were good about that due to the unconventional nature of what we were doing). It worked quite well. By using some thought and strategy I was able to tank the entire dungeon. It was one of my most enjoyable experiences from that game and it helped me to see that not everything has to be taken as it first appears.

The potential of a combo system you can manipulate yourself is quite high.

That being said, in any game based on numbers, there will always be one set of numbers that's higher than the other sets; that's just how math works. So when you're calculating pure damage output, yes.. there will be a "correct" combo to use for a given set of abilities. But that's only really useful if the encounter only cares about raw damage output. If the encounters are well-designed, they can require thought and strategy and utility. And once you add utility in there, raw damage calculations cease to be a thing since you start looking for particular effects.. and now you have to maximize those effects, and balance that with damage, and .... you get the idea.

I'm hoping they create situations where non standard setups are also useful. I know not all skills from a "sub job" are available to you on your main job, so maybe they will control things that way. The other thing that wasn't immediately apparent is how effective each skill is as a sub job skill. We will have to wait and see there.

One other thing that Yoshi-P said to me in my interview that I didn't get a chance to clarify: he said item stats would be much more effective than they were in 1.0. He told me that in 1.0, they accounted for 20% of the player's performance, but in ARR he wants to see it at about 50%. I believe he wants this so that end game players are inspired to pursue difficult to obtain gear, to really maximize their effectiveness. We'll have to see how that plays out, I know more than a few on these boards probably won't like that, since there seems to be more of desire to put more emphasis on player skill than items.

I'm not breaking the NDA, this was in my hands on during the media event which I confirmed I was allowed to post about

I didn't want beta players to think they could also post their experiences so I wanted to clarify

In one sense, creating a system as diverse as FFXIV's (or FFXI's for that matter) means that people will think they need to cherry pick the best of the best combinations and reject all others as hopelessly inferior.

Usually this is a ridiculous thing to do.

Now there are obviously combinations that are just silly... like, oh say, BLM/WAR... or maybe MNK/SMN. But most sensible combinations are perfectly fine, deviating only 1 or 2 percentage points off the "optimal" build.

As long as what you're picking makes sense, you should be able to compete, and that's the design challenge with a system like this.

Because of course they were.

I'd have been in trouble if I'd still been playing then.. I think my BRD was at like... 25? Maybe?

Hey Wint,

I want to ask you about something pertaining to this thought by Kachi:



I believe this is spot-on.

With that in mind, I wanted to ask you about the activity level of zones in FFXIV 2.0. One of the things that contributes to the immersion of FFXI is that you can run through certain areas and it's relatively calm, even tranquil... it's the opposite of Guild Wars 2, where it's hard to run for more than 10 seconds without being attacked by some pesky animal, or without some kind of quest flashing across your screen. Just think of how much less fun running through the Sanctuary of Zi'Tah would have been if it were busier like GW2.

Even FFXIV 1.0 got this right (for the most part), allowing players to actually take in the scenery as they moved through areas (too bad the scenery was so bland and samey).

So, have the revamped zones in FFXIV ARR been Guild Warded?

in the camps like around 6:45 it looks like the playstation 3 is going to explode or crash at any moment

http://youtu.be/KW6fL5X1fM4?t=6m45s

(didnt mean to double post)

PC version looks nice though

Edited, Feb 23rd 2013 3:10pm by Poubelle

They've apparently brought in a team from Sony to get that fixed.