Elemental Weakness and ResistanceFollow

Kachi, I am shocked!

Given your impeccable track record of steadfast confidence in the company through its trials and tribulations, I am admonished that your once unshakable faith is now tarnished by a shred of doub-

Oh- wait, never-mind.

On a more serious note. The conditions in which elemental wheels work is when they are the core mechanic, meaning the game mostly surrounds itself on the establishment and exploitation of weaknesses throughout and there are only rare exceptions.

Given the, (From the description of the media releases about the beta) dungeon-based orientation of leveling and frequency of bosses with different encounter methods. I'd dare say that mechanics that force you to change up your tactics, is something we can expect to be habitual, if no where else than the very same fields that the Media has already affirmed themselves.

The Pods in Toto-Rak and the Boss there, that Wint himself has described twice now, already seem to force you to be more than simply DPSing blindly. But be aware of your positioning and the existence of adds, mobs and area effects. If this trend continues I don't believe there is much validity in saying that this was a cop-out decision, rather than acknowledging that they have other means of keeping fights interesting, rather than keeping in mind that rock does in fact beat scissors.

Depending on the extent of the partial NDA release, I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more of it in the future, especially with more than Gridania's zones being available to test out.

Edited, May 31st 2013 5:59pm by Hyrist

Ha, that about sums up my lot as well. Planned on being a game developer, was stupid and went to the wrong college and picked a major that was relevant, but not the right major, and here I am working as a graphic designer on the outside looking in. I too highly doubt I'll ever be there on a professional level.

As far as my experience in game design (only fair I share mine since I posted the question), I have extensive experience coding in flash and html, and actually started designing a flash based mmo several years ago. The sheer logistical nightmare of that forced me to can the idea, but not until after several 10,000 lines of code and a pretty boss random encounter engine. Flash just isn't the right medium for an mmo really. Not nearly enough processing power. I also have extensive experience coding games in RPG Maker for fun. Not really much to the coding there, but still some fun little side projects.

I have dreams to one day create a Greek Mythology-based MMO pitting the realm of Zeus vs. Hades vs. Poseidon in a 3 way power struggle (loosely based off the Perseus Jackson line of books, lol I know), but I doubt that will ever come to fruition.

In a single player enviroment I'd agree with you.

But in a multiplayer and most especially in a massive multiplayer environment you run into instances where the First Order Operators stack into a compounding problem due to the sheer number of players working for the 'best' advantage.

It's not so much as not being the odd one out as it is not being the cool kid in the bunch. You can try to program it out as much as you like, the players will find ways around it to shove out the 'weak links' in favor of the path of least resistance, even if those other methods are adaquate.

It's easier to align the performance levels into a more acceptable error range if you reduce the number of free variables you're working with. For instance. Instead of each element in turn, MND based magic or INT based magic could have resistances, or Magic in general if the encounter is designed to have that specific component taken out by a Melee or a physical ranged. They did this well in 1.23. The resistances really weren't a matter of what element the enemy was weak against, but what type of damage they were vulernable two. It helped give every class and class type a role to fill, and I think they should expand on that.

My background (BA) is in Philosophy and I've only dabbled in gaming theory/game studies.

I come at most of my discussions with a more logical/philosophical/anecdotal tilt, and less scientific/methodical/developer one.

I couldn't develop my way out of a paper bag; the only thing I can do is "hello world" and some bash/shell scripts.

I've always been interested in being a part of developing a game, brainstorming, ideas, implementing (getting people to implement them, lol) would be awesome.

I've dabbled mostly with things like storynexus/interactive/textbased fiction, because that's a decent way to flesh out a story line and the bones for a game. If I were ever to make a game it would be along the lines of an adventure based one....

...or I could just complain about stuff here. :)

Again, no more so than for base stats like STR/DEF/etc. It's more difficult if EVERY encounter and abilities is assigned a SINGLE affinity, but it's really not a difficult mathematical problem no matter how you slice it. Strengths and resistances are one of the most fundamental mechanics of strategy games.

Designers aren't generally inputting generic "weak against" codes. There's a value associated with it. The "lighting" tag is, again, just a narrative tool to help the player understand why this attack does 1.25 damage. That aside, you should design your battles around the classes you built.

I think you're overthinking all this, but I generally agree that there isn't a lot of depth with the elemental wheel. When you're in control of an entire party in a single player game (e.g., Pokemon), there's some thought of resource management to consider. When you're in control of a single character, it's boring. Having said that, it's not like they're pigeon holed into those mechanics. Say you wanted to allow players to equip elemental equipment for offensive/defensive purposes. There is room for depth and situational tactics there with minimal liability for balance problems.

I'm confident that they'll at least replace the elemental properties of the elemental magic spells with fewer flat properties to differentiate them (which they should have done anyway, elemental wheel or not).

I don't understand how they couldn't just let opposing spells do a tiny bit more damage. Before ARR BLMs still only used thunder>thundara>thundaga(burst) combos for EVERYTHING and it got kind of boring playing it. Only thing fire was used for was for doing fire parties and that dungeon with the ants. Just wiping out elemental weaknesses/resistances all together makes me wonder what's the point of them having an element. It would just be for graphics pretty much. I mean I'll give it a try but having a certain element do a small fraction of extra damage wouldn't hurt the game that bad in my opinion.

I can see where they're coming from. Resistances tend to favor those with multiple jobs to min max each fight and they are harder to balance. Let's say a boss is weak to fire. Jobs without fire could be cobsidered gimp. Players woukd be prone to taking 6 blms a healer and a tank unless weakness to fire just means blms dps equals meleer dps. In that case why have ekemental weakness?

Learning each mobs'weaknesses has merits. But resistances to elements was sortof crappy superficial gameplay. With this, each mage on your team can specialize in a particular element effect.

That may end up being a net gain in tactics.

I'm reminded of the elemental situation in WoW pre-WotLK. While I was a small fry during that time, I recall tales of Elemental resistances and weaknesses. Tanks used to have to farm specific armor sets with tons of resist to a certain element so they could do their job effectively. I personally don't mind this notion, as gear aquisition was pretty much the only reward in that game. Now I'm not entirely sure if monsters had elemental weaknesses in WoW at one point or not, but I could see how it could be an issue in that game. With Priests only doing shadow/holy damage, Mages primarily speccing into either fire/ice/arcane, Shamans primarily doing Nature/Fire, and Druids doing Arcane/Nature I could see how many could be disadvantaged in many different fights in a single raid. However, I never really saw this as a problem in FFXI, as every job that was meant to do damage with spells had access to the whole elemental wheel, excluding light/dark. BLM, SMN, SCH, BLU, RDM, GEO, and even DRK and NIN. No one Job was really at a disadvantage in any encounter, as each one could pick a spell best suited for the mob if need be. The only jobs that were at a spell disadvantage were WHM and PLD, but they both have other primary roles to fill. Light magic did suck compared to other elements, but that was mostly due to design decisions with MPcost/damage and cooldowns. They could have just as easily tweaked the Banish spells to have a lower cooldown while still making them less efficient to cast than other elemental spells to prevent WHM DD.

Now I do admit that the whole CON > WHM and THAU > BLM thing confuses me greatly when it comes to which 1st tier gets what elements and if WHM loses theirs, but I don't see how this is going to be that big of an issue in FFXIV. BLM will still most likely have access to all six elements and Darkness, Summoner will most likely get the ability to summon something of every element at some point, and Scholar will most likely get the ability to set their books on fire or pee on them to cast water spells. They aren't coming out with enough jobs right now to really have mages be specialized in specific elements. That aside, job lore wise, I don't think they would have enough jobs to pigeon hole into specific elements. It might be a fun idea to have GEO only cast earth spells, but it would put a lot of people off if they didn't have access to snow/rain/wind/thunder/lava/etc. (wood?).

If this discussion is in some way meant to encompass the certain elemental damage that specific weapon types were capable of, I don't believe that it should. Yeah you might get lucky with a Red Lotus Blade on a Mandragora every now and again, but the elemental properties weren't a huge deal in most circumstances. I don't know how entwined certain jobs are with certain elements in FFXIV, but it would be just as easy to make it not be a game breaker if using thunder inclined polearms on Ramuh.

To me the whole thing seems like preemptive PVP balancing somehow. I truly hope I am wrong, as that whole ordeal in WoW meant constant nerfs, buffs, and complete reworks of classes every month or two. And I don't think that SE would have a PVE/PVP balancing team anywhere near as good as Blizzard's. It wouldn't be hard to give every caster access to every element. Hell, most jobs already have that in each game (they even gave DRK low tier BLM spells in XI). If the whole situation revolves around WHM being able to solo, make their couple light spells not suck and give them a couple more to round them out.

And if the whole thing boils down to "Every other recent mmo has done it, so we should too" then congrats on removing something unique and awesome about your MMOs and your franchise in general. There better be some awesome reason to cast one spell over another otherwise you might as well just give everyone "Generic Mana Bolt A" and call it a day...And it better not be another Thunder > everything else because it costs more MP and you get it at a higher level... That was stupid even in FFXI.

You have a point there and I never played Rift. I think in WoW you could just craft them which wouldn't have been too terrible, but having to have so many sets that would only be useful in one-two fights would be pretty annoying.

Reminds me of a story back in the early days of FFXI. We were having a tough time beating Shiva, so one of my friends who tagged along was determined to survive and bought a ton of ice resistance gear, as ludicrous an amount as he could put on. He spent the whole way there (on that dreadful walk to Fei'Yin) boasting how he was going to be the only one of us who'd live through Diamond Dust since he was uber-prepared. Only, when the fateful moment arrived and Shiva two-houred, he was (no word of a lie) the only one to die. Just completely one-shot for more health than he had, at that. I laughed so hard...

Anyway, moral of the story, elemental resistance really wasn't all that great in FFXI.

Speaking of gear sets, I'm being reminded of how we won't be able to change equipment mid-battle. It was a pet peeve for me on WHM in XI while trying to heal someone and they blink out as soon as I try to target them. It removes the need to switch gear to accommodate elemental weaknesses, which there will be none anyway.