Another, more in-depth response from Yoshi-P regarding F2PFollow

Dragoons were the highest DPS in 1.23 if played to potential.

The problem was to maintaining that potential, as it was reliant on having both high gear, and maintaining Power Surge which ,pre buff, was a pain to maintain. Post buff there wasn't really a competition among the high tiers. Only fights they fell behind on were very context specific ones where you essentially stacked BLM to speed-run until the fight actually got difficult.

That said, it may be debatable that they have the highest skill floor of the group now, with the most TP regeneration to prevent starvation and the highest Potency Per attack skills in the game, if FFXIVDB is accurate.

Edited, Jun 19th 2013 5:49pm by Hyrist

I just tend not to post when I disagree with Ostia. He hasn't quite crossed the line with me where I feel the need to vent, and I've decided to have my own little space for that instead of fowling up forums with it and risking my memberships.

That said, I disagree with him frequently, and this is no exception. Rather than argue the red herrings being used as examples, I'd rather just reiterate my confidence in the current combat system and the fact that as a vanilla, it is in a good position as a framework to evolve from.

Most if not all issues being complained about can be addressed in future patches. Though I would like an adjustment to the TP starvation issue. Perhaps TP restoration pots seeming we're able to have Mana Restoration pots in the game.

Other than that, I feel we're feeling good and comfortable for a phase three. More work needs to be done, of course, but SE's not in any danger at all of moving to a free to play model. In fact the only fear is how long it would take for them to make a return off their already significant investment. Lucky for them, the can afford the long term still.

That's Cool! We can discuss combat as we get higher on the Beta :P

You do know the same argument can be made about ARR as it is right now Right ? Just switch voice overs with cut scenes and other than that, as it stands today, is a "Get in get your loot get out"

Indeed! First off they have 3 problems that are overlapping with each other, one is the GCD, the other is encounter design, and class balance... Now class balance is the easiest to fix, my pug in beta, is no match for my dragoon in any sort of DPS fight, long or short i will beat him, so will archer also, but that can be balanced afterwards, it is not my main concern with the combat.

First off they need to take all the abilities that are not combo out of the GCD, there is no logical reason for a pug's heymaker to be tied to the cool down of his initiating attack, heymaker is a reaction ability and a bad one at that, it does less dps than my 1, and it has to be triggered by me evading an attack, so if i am fighting a boss, i will have to put myself in harms away in order for it to trigger, and if it does, then i need to make a choice, do i keep my combo going which will in the end get me the highest dps possible, or do i wait for the CD and hit heymaker for a low dps attack that adds a 20% slow ? As a DPS i should never put myself in danger, and the combat should reward me for playing correctly, i am pretty sure another class can add the same slow with little to no risk involved, heymaker is an ability that is there, just to be there, there was no tactical or strategic thinking involved when they created it. Also my dot should not be tied to my cool down, neither should evade, or second chance, this are abilities that should be ready to use when i demand them to be ready, not when combat dictates (For example in WOW my evade as a rogue is not tied to my GCD nor is 90% of my abilities, if i get aggro from a boss, i hit vanish and the aggro resets, i do not need to wait 2-4 seconds for the global to cool off) that is how GCD should work here.

Now the biggest problem in my opinion they have is encounter design, and i will tell you why, monsters are easy, bosses are easy, up to haker manor, there is no challenge involved, now will this change ? Who knows! From what i saw, they nerfed tam tara into the ground from phase 2 to phase 3, and there was really no need to do that, tam tara was easy already, but it was kinda long, so it balanced itself out in the end, right now is just another version of sashtasha, even their end boss is the same gimick. Unless they address encounter design, anything else they do will only result in the game being seen as "Easy" if they remove the GCD restrictions, now everybody will have even more abilities to spam, and 2 shot mobs left and right, because monsters are already a joke, now i am not asking for regular quest mobs to be buffed to XI levels, but atleast the dungeons ones should be different, and they are not, even as a PUG, i can tank a mob in a dungeon, kill it and laugh all the way to the bank, on the same level, if i where in wow, and i got aggro from a mob, i would be dead, or forced to use vanish or evade until the tank got the aggro, in ARR... the tank has little to no worries, if an add gets past him, even the healer can tank it long enough for one of the dps to wake up or the tank to actually do his job.

Oh and another gripe is auto attack, they are way to slow, to even consider counting them as the main source of DPS, i can use 3 abilities for one auto attack i get off... That is broken.

Love how he called out the 'Free To Play is the wave of the future' BS attitude that a lot of game developers have. No, the industry isn't changing, your game just isn't worth the money.

My respect for Yoshida has gone up.

Ostia I agree on the cases of Class Balance (which will always be a continuing development) and Encounter design, which again, will be a developmental issues.

However I am more tolerant of the idea of Encounter design, simply because we are talking the first 35 levels here. Now. You say up to Hakke manor, I have to question whether or not you have tested the new instances in full again. If so then I'd like you ask for a list of improvements that could be made to each one, in your opinion.

The reason why I am asking you to extrapolate so far in this is because I feel as if the answer to the depth of encounter design has to be instilled in each an every major encounter separately. Creating common tropes to encounter design should only really come into play for say Guildhests. Each fight in terms of bosses should feel unique, in my opinion.

Keep in mind: Instilling challenge, especially in a primarily leveling environment, becomes a matter of debatable degrees. These dungeon runs are supposed to be the equivalent of XP parties, not necessarily the 1.xx dungeon crawls we had before. So the idea is that these dungeons be challenging enough to be educational, but no so much that they cease to be productive as a leveling tool. This is the impression from Yoshida's words and the development angle I've manged to infer.

So I'd love to start breaking down each one with you and talk about the mechanics behind it, and how to raise the challenge without harming the productivity. I take great joy in this kind of theory-crafting and, if you'll entertain me, I'd like to share that joy with you.

The one criticism I cannot agree with is the GCD. Honestly at this point it I feel as if it harms nothing. Major buffs and chains still run off of a form of cooldown, be it buffs and specific attacks that run on individual cooldowns, or skills that have special conditions or debuff timers that discourage spamming. I feel they've properly mitigated the harmful components of the GCD while still keeping a decent pacing in the game itself. I also view it is unlikely they will further change it as it complicates other blance issues.

So let's focus on the other two topics for now.

Edited, Jun 20th 2013 12:45am by Hyrist

I agree with everything you wrote above except maybe this. I think I'd prefer the main source of DPS to come from firing special skills off. If auto attack dot becomes the main source of damage. Then that makes haste buffs in gear or spells or job weapon delay define which job performs better if accuracy is not an issue. In my opinion gear should be important. But that doesn't help combat feel more rewarding. All that does is make it clear that the person with good gear or buffs always wins, whether they earned that or not.

Skill shouldn't be defined by something you are barely controlling besides being in range or some job having an advantage in a dot enhancing ability over the others.

Excellent post, I'd rather see people post ideas than just complain about the state of things. You should copy/paste this into our problems/solutions sticky, the community reps are aware of it.

My one thought about this regarding the instanced raids: for at least the first 3, I'm thinking they're as easy as they are beacuse they're directly tied to main storyline progression and are the first dungeons new players encounter. I'm hoping the Toto Rak tier and up are at least the same as Phase 2 or even a bit harder. We'll see this weekend I hope, I should be read for TTR at least.

I hereby submit a simple rebuttal:

I'll accept your subscription based fee when your account management and payment system is all first party billing with a single user ID/password system and does not require such inane tripe as secure card or gimicky credits like crysta.

Blizzard's subscription based system works because one does not need to jump through hoops and sign up for x amount of third party billing systems just to give a company my hard earned dollars. One can be up and running in minutes: not hours.

And blizzard ALSO has a really healthy micro transaction system in addition to that subscription based fee. I'm sure they'd love to educate SE on things like "yearly averages" for micro transaction profits.


SE's account billing system has in the past burned myself and friends/relatives very badly more than a few times in the past. I *LOVE* what I'm seeing with ARR, but I'm still very doubtful of setting up a subscription simply BECAUSE it's a 3+ hour long ordeal every time I get the itch to give SE my money. I should not have to work that hard to give someone money, anytime, EVER.

All dungeons where Heroic for cap level, and it had 4 exclusive dungeons, a planet and 2 raids.

As it stands right now, we are going to repeat the 1.0 story arc, Beastman > Primals > Empire > Big bad Dragon.... As for end game content, besides the already used primals, we will have a few dungeons, an incomplete tower, and behamut lair which i bet you, you will not be able to fight behamut at release :)

Actually... I don't think the Tower of Lab come out at release... First major Patch....

But what they are saying, and we will just have to see if they follow through, is that content will come more frequently and faster, where SWTOR started with that content, they were VERY slow to add more and the players got bored. Hell, lack of content is why I went back to FFXIV during the welcome back campaign!

The story of SWTOR was the best feature. It felt like a single player KOTOR.



Isn't that how it is now? I mean, I found it insanely simple to log into the SE Account Managment System and handle everything.

Is there any kind of statistic as to how many people are still playing FFXI exclusively on the PS2? If they chopped the dead weight and gave XI a good once over without burdening themselves because of "PS2 limitations' I bet it would do a good job reinvigorating the game.