New Notorious Monsters (06/04/2008)

[Akashimo]

It's kind of like a CCG, the rules are always in effect and apply to everything...except those cards that specifically say they can break the rules.

Yup. Too bad YGO TCG made it so god cards can't in legal tournaments ; ;

Yes, because everyone who uses a parser is an elitest asshat. I mean, it's not like people want to use it to know the exact changes in effectiveness between two pieces of gear, or to see how one combat tactic fares over another. Parsers are used solely and singularly because people want to kick you from parties if you don't Parse at least 1% higher then the guy next to you. /sarcasm

Haha. Basically.

So it's no big deal to lose one multi-hit item because you have a back up multi-hit item?

Yup. Since my backup can stack with DA and Joytoy can't, so its a ridill for rdms in a sense.

[Malacite]

Yup. Too bad YGO TCG made it so god cards can't in legal tournaments ; ;

And it's like 10x as expensive as MTG.

[Lmnop]

Ridill doesn't just break meripo.

TP burn Kirin? Dynamis, even? Anything that can be meleed, the top LSs will employ their BB mnk/nin + adaberk ridill war/nin combos on. At least the mnk/nins are only that obscene every 2 hours...

While I mostly agree with Karinya's suggestions, I don't think Souleater should ever have its effectiveness nerfed based off of Haste effects. That's a real avenue for them to increase damage that should stay a benefit. I think trying hard to attain that sort of haste gear is great... it's when they throw in a K club that it's just too stupid. And yes, wth with DRK's worst Souleater weapons being their A ranks?

Also, I don't really know Sevv personally but these days I'd find it very hard to believe he bots.

It's true that 2 handed changes have gone a long way in making the Ridill less broken. But it's still silly. And honestly, I wouldn't mind a light 2-handed nerf if it accompanied a massive decrease of multi-hit effectiveness. Of course, I'd rather just see Seigan have a chance of protecting as well as Utsusemi for short periods (I'm finding even just :Ichi to be better defense than Seigan).

[Karinya]

It doesn't matter if you personally bot, if someone in your LS does (for kings purposes). But that's beside the point anyway - if the gear is broken, it's broken for the people who have X hours a week to spend at kings spawn points *and* for the people who don't.

And the fact that more people trying to get that gear won't actually get more gear, just divide the same amount among more people, is a game design flaw in its own right. Sky, sea, Dynamis, Limbus, Assault, Salvage, Nyzul, Campaign are all self-scaling: more players doing those activities will get more total rewards. (Or the same players doing them more often, but all except Campaign have their own limits on that.) The biggest old limit on the scalability of sky - Ulli - was deliberately replaced with a drop from regular mobs, partly because of RMT, but partly because it was becoming too limiting when more and more players wanted to do sky. Now they just kill more statues and get as much diorite as they want.

New ulli > old ulli. The fight didn't change, but the pop conditions make it something that players can work for instead of just trying to outclaim other players (a bad system that bears no relation to actual playing skill, and where many people always go away disappointed if not angry - even aside from the RMT involvement).

The new NMs will probably have this property too, which is why some people want to see the rewards from *non*-scalable content added to something scalable. Why the heck do you think people make the same suggestion about *every* new content that comes along that looks like it might be scalable? Non-scalability is a big problem, and getting bigger as the high-level population continues to increase.


Other than that, I agree with Lmnop (as usual). Except about the Souleater/Haste issue - either one is already really good, even without allowing them to synergize. Gear that directly improves souleater would be fine; it already works with acc and +hp; anything that improves your regular damage (including haste) improves your regular+souleater damage. And at the current point in game balance, it would be a very bad idea IMO to improve haste in *any* way, even a minor one.

Why can't we have a DD job that *isn't* a haste monkey? DRK seems like a good candidate for a job that does something awesome that *doesn't* involve haste. More haste = more win; am I the only person that thinks that's a *bad* thing and there should be more than one way to be awesome?


"Nobody tanks anything serious with their face anymore" - this is partly because of the evolving redefinition of "serious", but mostly, it's the strongest possible condemnation of utsusemi anyone could come up with. Even aside from what it does in merits, it's now the ONLY (accepted) way to tank HNMs. Holy Shield (or whatever they call it) is very unlikely to change that, even if the reflected damage is a percentage *and* gives you hate (unlikely on both counts IMO, but then, as previously noted in this thread, I'm a bit pessimistic about updates).

If something is too much win (haste and utsusemi being the leading suspects right now) it doesn't help to give everyone access to it - that just narrows the possible/acceptable strategies for everyone. PLD/NIN tanking is a *symptom* of the problems with tanking, not a solution to them. Haste and utsusemi are so much free win that it doesn't even matter that you're abandoning the basic design of your job to exploit them - you STILL come out ahead. What more proof does SE want of how broken they are (individually, but especially in combination)?

[Armando]

Why can't we have a DD job that *isn't* a haste monkey?

Because S-E didn't limit Haste gear to certain jobs. The fact that all DDs essentially gear the same is mainly due to lack JSE's with job-specific buffs that will outweigh increases to universal stats and actions. The few JSE's with unique buffs we do have, don't provide useful/potent enough buffs to warrant keeping them on full-time.

Personally I don't feel the formulas are flawed; it's the way gear selection was handled that's at fault.

[Karinya]

I don't see the problem being that everyone *can* use haste, but that everyone *wants to*. I.e. all or nearly all DD jobs benefit more from a haste item than from whatever else they could put in that slot (acc, atk, store tp, etc.). (Blink tanks even more so - no need to trade off between damage and ability to keep your shadows up when you can get both at once.)

SE just got too generous with the haste %s. A slot where you can improve your total atk by 2-3% can also give you 5% haste (which improves DoT AND TP gain rate)... that's dumb. Haste gear numbers should be cut in half at least to make them a real tradeoff vs. other gear in the same slots.

Because of the other benefits of haste like TP gain and recast timers, in order for haste gear to be balanced it should give you clearly less normal attack DoT than acc or atk gear in the same slots. Instead it gives more because the numbers are just that big.

The fact that haste affects so many things at once makes it something that should have been handled more carefully and given out in smaller amounts. 3 or even 2% haste is a huge benefit. 5% is game changing, especially when it's given to everyone by an item you can basically buy.

[Armando]

SE just got too generous with the haste %s. A slot where you can improve your total atk by 2-3% can also give you 5% haste (which improves DoT AND TP gain rate)... that's dumb.

Accuracy does the exact same thing, just that its effectiveness doesn't scale up exponentially.

Haste gear is expensive and hard to get, for the most part. Nerfing haste gear in general is an easy way to piss off everyone who worked their ass off trying to get it. The problem isn't the amount of Haste available through gear, it's the amount of Haste available as a whole. Why not nerf Haste (Spell) and March?

Either way, I'm not totally sure it's an issue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you need a very good gear setup and/or a BRD or COR with you to be able to pull off a Haste gear setup without having your hit rate and Attack suffer too much, and most pieces of Haste gear save for a few are expensive and/or hard to get. In terms of DD'ing, it only breaks merit parties. Haste + Blink tanking is a whole 'nother beast that would spark a 10-page derail into the merits and flaws of blink tanking in general. I'm not up for that.

Either way, if you really wanted to nerf it, I think Haste gear should be left alone and instead have stricter limits on the total amount of Haste you can have. For example, you could make Haste from different sources (with gear, the Haste spell, and Marches being treated as separate sources) stack by multiplication instead of addition, and/or put a hard cap of 50% Haste counting all sources, possibly excluding Hasso from the cap. Personally I'm more partial to the Multiplication solution (as opposed to nerfing the spells and songs,) that way you're not nerfing any given thing, just how they interact together, and you make it harder for them to pile up so quickly.

[Lmnop]

Yes, I've been whining about Haste in general for some time. It annoys me that there really is an ultimate stat. But heck, while I'm at it I'm also still bothered at how much more important acc is than STR/Attack. If haste's behavior were ever toned down, I'd probably go back to complaining about acc.

Probably the reason I'm fond of Souleater and Haste is simply because of Homam. If you look at the whole Homam set, it just wreaks of Souleater glee. Haste, acc, HP, and sure we'll give some bonus MP because you're a DRK and not going to get much Refresh. Nerfing Haste's effects on Souleater would seriously dampen a DRK's reason to get said gear.

But counterpoint. Homam is so good that there's so much other gear that gets left by the wayside. Black Cuisses give something like attack+14 and STR+3? Who cares? Haste +3% and a handful of acc is better! This is a prime example of why Haste gear has become too effective. It's the only stat in the game (that I know of) wherein every point is always better than the last (unless you've hit a cap).

But Haste, currently, is the only thing keeping 2 handers in the same ballpark as a Ridill.

Armando: About S-E's poor haste gear decisions, that's in response to an earlier flaw they made: giving NIN access to every bit of Haste gear in the game. This is how the game was for quite some time (basically, from Zilart 'til Homam came out). Wars, Nins, and Monks were the only people with Haste gear. And they controlled Sky and KRT with it.

[Taskmage]

There are, frankly, a lot of things wrong with the combat mechanics of FFXI that are too ingrained to fix for social reasons as well as logistic ones. I just hope the recognize what's wrong with what we've got so that they'll design the next MMO better.

[Karinya]

I don't think the problems are unfixable. Steepening the PDIF curves (and/or extending the caps, if they're currently an issue) would make attack *and* defense more important, which would be a big step in the right direction. Heck, even adjusting exp to pull players away from the low-VTs would increase the need for acc and atk somewhat.

Anyway... if the same slot that gave 5% haste could give 30 acc, then yeah, acc gear would be just as much of a problem. But it doesn't. The numbers matter. (Arguably being able to cap acc so easily at high levels *is* a problem, and high level mobs need more eva to compete. At least that might help with the multihit WS... But it's overshadowed by haste IMO.)

I think they should impose a much tougher haste cap than you suggest, something like 40% for melee timer and 20% for recasts - maybe even less. Once you have the amount of haste you need, then you can equip for other stats. (For the same reason, I wouldn't except Hasso - it would still give you room to equip more non-haste gear, in addition to its acc and str benefits.) Ideally I'd combine this with the adjustment that increases the influence of atk/def, so players would immediately have something else to gear for.

Alternatively, all haste could work like DW delay reduction, with TP gain per hit calculated off the adjusted delay rather than the base delay, so it would improve your DoT (and recast timers), but not your TP gain rate (for that you'd need acc or Store TP). It would still be a good stat, but not TEH ULTIMATE (outside of WS). This would also reduce the flood of infinite TP that high level melees swim in, which would help job balance issues.


Radical solutions, I know. But I think the problem is big enough to demand them. Tiny tweaks aren't going to bring back tanking, hate control, or nuking as desirable aspects of a party, let alone make Kirin a challenge again and DEF tanking viable on the mobs that are challenging right now.

And to return to TM's comment: if they designed this game pretty well initially, but then wrecked it in an expansion, what stops them from wrecking the hypothetical next one too? How many years of play do you want to invest in *that* game before it gets taken over by a few blatantly overpowered strategies that SE refuses to rein in? If they haven't learned to bite the bullet and *fix things dammit*, and let the whiners go to hell, then they won't do it on the next game either.


It's an impressive testament to SE's ability and effort that the game remains fun to play despite these obvious balance issues. But it would still be better if they fixed them.

[Lmnop]

Haste is what's keeping 2 handers in the game. It's not even worth considering a nerf to haste until after multi-hit weapons become more reasonable. And none of these issues will be magically solved by whatever these new NMs drop. In fact, they'll either be useless or they'll break the game by introducing effective counterparts (Soboros to the Ridills, so to speak).

Great. Now I'm depressed.