Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

[Lmnop]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

EVERY TIME I READ ANYONE WANTING TO "FIX" SC/MB, THEY WANT IT TO REWARD EXP BONUSES.

Stop, it's gimmicky.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

I don't know if this would work take...

Say you have a TaruTaru BLM with 1000MP, best Restin MP set you can have, and refresh and Balad X2, some sort of gear refresh. I just don't think you'd have enough MP recovery methods to keep up with a partys kill speed :/ It's hard for me to convey all the hypothetical situations, but if your getting 200exp a kill from a mob, and then say you do a collective SC+MB for 66 additional seconds and 66 Aditional exp, you'd still need to rest your MP after the 3rd or 4th mob... even with BLM/SCH. And it would only get worse if your doing more dmg, because you'd be killing the Mobs Faster, and all the while your healer has to keep the DD's alive, even with /nin IT Mobs don't miss that often.

So you're saying as you kill faster using magic bursts you deplete mp faster so you eventually empty out and cause downtime, which could negate the extra exp you earned? Makes sense to me.

[Mhurron]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

EVERY TIME I READ ANYONE WANTING TO "FIX" SC/MB, THEY WANT IT TO REWARD EXP BONUSES.

Stop, it's gimmicky.

The problem is, if you don't make the 'fix' easier exp, no one is going to care. That is the unfortunate reality of the player base.

[ShadowHolyFlyingDragon]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

It's not like BLM doesn't have the option of killing HL Mob pets. With the introduction of Level Syncing, it's possible to keep at a minimum of 20k / hour with just a handfull of BLMs post 60. And the hardest part is finding someone to sync to at the appropriate level range.

Who really needs regular xp parties that require you to depend a couple of oafs to perform a skill chain correctly? XD /sar

And technically speaking, it's not like pre-50 sc/mb parties are not available. I just don't think a majority of the player base remembers "how to sc/mb." The problem is having to explain how to do it to a couple of chums

And God help the THFs that have to explain SATA. BLM & THF have it bad on that one.. lol

I actually played a healer on my BLM thru the 50's. .... and I was a Galka.

[Karinya]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

For starters, it doesn't even exclude parties that capitalize on weaker mobs and melee-heavy setups. In fact, they arguably benefit more since the easier the mob, the more WS damage they can do, which results in bigger SCs, AND weak mobs are less likely to resist the SC, resulting in double advantage.

And the bonus isn't percentage based (the way the OP had it). Don't forget that you can get TP faster on weaker mobs, too: not only stronger WS but more of them. That's what makes melee benefit so much more than BLM from lower mob level in the first place. Straight counting the WS damage (or SC damage) is definitely a bad approach IMO.

The WS system itself has a few flaws I'd consider fixing, though. There's too much of a gap in damage between different WS for the same weapon type, player, and mob. The mentality that if you're not using your biggest damage WS (and the hell with SC compatibility) you're wasting damage, and therefore SC can only be worthwhile if it happens to coincide with the highest damage WS for each player, derives from the reality that if you use a WS other than your biggest one you *are* giving up damage, sometimes quite a lot of it, and the benefit of doing so is not necessarily big enough to be worth it. Aside from a few special effect WS like stuns, IMO most WS should do reasonably similar damage under similar conditions, rather than having a few good WS per weapon and most of them rarely-used trash.

Also, TP over 100% aren't nearly useful enough for most WS -- they should scale near-linearly, so players aren't overly penalized for not spamming their WS as fast as possible. (Martial weapons would probably need to be adjusted, probably nerfed, for this.)

Secondly, it detracts from logical gameplay. You're arbitrarily giving extra importance to a specific strategy instead of letting the players employ it whenever they deem it to be the best course of action. We want SCs and MBs to have be useful because of what they do, not because SE gave them arbitrary bonuses.

This is true, but couldn't you say the same thing about killing mobs faster? And yet that not only has an arbitrary bonus, but a freaking *huge* arbitrary bonus -- up to 50%, which in some parties can be sustained for nearly the whole length of the party. Indeed, that's a substantial part of what created the current problem.

At some level of abstraction the whole exp system is arbitrary -- obviously high level mobs should be worth more than low level, but how much more? Isn't killing more mobs per hour already its own reward? Shouldn't the difficulty of mob families (via tp moves or different stats) be a factor in their exp value, to avoid always picking on the weakest families? Or should mob stats be balanced so there aren't any weaker families? (SE hasn't done either of the last two, obviously. Well, there are a few family adjustments, but they're far from adequate to actually balance different mob families in overall risk/effort/reward terms.)

Thirdly it's far more work to implement this and hope you didn't introduce some unforseen imbalance than to directly attack the problem's source and tweaking the way EXP scales with mob level. To balance your idea, you'd need to have the Damage:Bonus ratio scale with party level (low level characters do less damage than high level characters) AND mob level (to compensate for the fact that higher level mobs take less damage and resist more.) And that still won't guarantee that players won't find an exploit.

Players have already found an exploit in the way EXP scales with mob level, that's why we're having this conversation at all. How much do you want to stake on guaranteeing that they wouldn't find an exploit in the new version? It takes constant developer effort just to move the exploits around and keep the players working to find new ones (which, in fact, SE isn't doing), let alone achieve the mythical state of perfect balance (even after you've defined it - some party setups *should* fail, shouldn't they? But which ones?).

I agree that the exp tables are a good place to start. That doesn't address the problems of colibris and imps, though. East Ron[S] is strong evidence that there really is something wrong with colibris independent of the brokenness of high level exp -- other pre-55 exp is pretty much fine aside from people insisting on syncing only to East Ron[S], people stupidly trying to apply high level tactics to low and mid level parties, and the distorted tactics created by PLs -- and colibris are also the mobs that brought meleeburns to 55-60 instead of making them just about 70+ roaming in KRT/Ru'Avitau. Imps are also generally less dangerous than their level and need some work.

Sanction should also have its exp bonus eliminated, or at least modified. Latent refresh is a powerful enough bonus without adding free extra exp on top of it, and in practice, the Empire controls the AC so much of the time that that just isn't a meaningful limitation on either access to staging-point-based camps or the Sanction bonuses themselves. (Alternatively, making Besieged *MUCH* harder would be interesting, both in its own right and as a way to balance Sanction and Empire areas in general. If something anywhere near 50% of the time you couldn't exp in the Empire, people would have to be capable of tactics that worked outside it. But SE buffed besieged armies several times without getting their win rates out of the sewer, and they've mostly declared ToAU done and stopped adjusting it, so I don't hold out much hope for that. Either they don't dare make a change that would take the Candy away from players or they don't know how. The time limit patch was a terrible idea -- attacking armies should rage after the time limit, not retreat, which would put pressure on *players* to end the battle quickly instead of allowing them to win just by stalling.)

[Takelli]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

And technically speaking, it's not like pre-50 sc/mb parties are not available. I just don't think a majority of the player base remembers "how to sc/mb." The problem is having to explain how to do it to a couple of chums

No, the real problem is people just simply don't want to do it. They just want to sit there and whack away at the monster while playing their DS, or watching TV.

agree that the exp tables are a good place to start. That doesn't address the problems of colibris and imps, though. East Ron[s] is strong evidence that there really is something wrong with colibris independent of the brokenness of high level exp -- other pre-55 exp is pretty much fine aside from people insisting on syncing only to East Ron[s], people stupidly trying to apply high level tactics to low and mid level parties, and the distorted tactics created by PLs -- and colibris are also the mobs that brought meleeburns to 55-60 instead of making them just about 70+ roaming in KRT/Ru'Avitau. Imps are also generally less dangerous than their level and need some work.

Well... SE should buff (Or Nerf as some players would say), the Colibri. Increase their Defense by a few points, and some eva possibly. Eliminate the Mimic completly while adding in a "Monkey see-Monkey do" type of thing. A player casts refresh on self, it cast refresh on self, a player cast haste on some other player, the colibri casts haste on another colibri.

Or atleast make Colibri link! Why make such a weak mob, and not put in ANY way for it to kill the player. There shouldbe SOME risk when getting 25k+/hour.

[hexx]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

Or atleast make Colibri link! Why make such a weak mob, and not put in ANY way for it to kill the player. There shouldbe SOME risk when getting 25k+/hour.

You obviously have never fought Greater Colibri's have you they link like a mutherfucker.

[Lmnop]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

that damnable Skillchain chat log bug.

Make it so equip swaps stop cutting out SC damage numbers, and you'll realize they're a very nice chunk. They actually became quite grand ever since S-E upped their accuracy a while back. For instance, in puk parties, I try to make lots of Fragmentations since there's almost always another war and raging rush x2 is a nice way to always get a decent one. it's impressive how if you can make the SC, it works wonders (the absorb wind damage, but since frag is wind and lightning and SCs follow the path of least resistance, the wind component is completely ignored and an extra 2-600 damage is common).

Once that's fixed, it honestly wouldn't take much to make them useful.

Here's an idea (that might suck) for a Magic Burst fix:

step 1) PUT IT IN THE TRANSLATOR, YOU FUCK-UPS
step 2) increase magic burst damage by a decent margin but...
step 3) make the burst component highly affected by level difference (and probably just give all NMs a blanket resistance amount that makes them appear to be +10 levels)

Magic bursts become insanely useful on normal mobs, but remain a nice way to damage NMs w/out being horrendously potent. Basically, they do better on exp material but function identically to as they are now on NMs.

[Armando]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

This is true, but couldn't you say the same thing about killing mobs faster? And yet that not only has an arbitrary bonus, but a freaking *huge* arbitrary bonus -- up to 50%, which in some parties can be sustained for nearly the whole length of the party. Indeed, that's a substantial part of what created the current problem.

Yes, but it's still not as intrusive to gameplay. You've added the extra condition that if you maintain a rhythm, you'll get rewarded, but you've still left the task of achieving that kill speed to the player, and that goal seldom produces irrational gameplay. The SC/MB suggestion gives extra weight to a strategy, so now you're forcing a style of play on the players and potentially causing silly gameplay choices. For example:
Scenario A: DDs have no good WS to skillchain with, opt to do 500 damage WS separately (total 1k) it.
Scenario B: DDs use a weak skillchain: 200 damage -> 350 damage WS -> up to 175 damage chain (total up to 725).

A kills mobs better and is the logical choice, but the arbitrary rewards for Skillchaining can make B better even if the SC sees a partial resist, because not breaking the EXP chain would cost you so much.

It may not be such a big deal and players would deal with it but it seems like bad design to me. I believe game designers should intervene with player's game options as little as possible and only intervene when there's obvious flaws in the effort-reward ratios.

Well... SE should buff (Or Nerf as some players would say), the Colibri.

No. It is stupid for all mob families to be on equal fighting footage. A Taur should always be far more dangerous than a parrot of equal level. A giant spider should also be more dangerous than a parrot of equal level. It follows that the parrot should be worth less EXP. Problem is like Karinya said there are only 20 mobs (not even mob families) with bonus EXP. 8 of them are Sea mobs. 7 of the remaining 12 are completely fucking stupid (Demonic Roses, Riverne's Hippogryphs, Saurom.[S] Gnats, Kuftal Wyverns.)

Also I agree that the game's WS selection really undermines the SC system. Not only should they have been balanced better, I feel the game should've had more Job-specific WS too. And hell, the way we get TP is totally borked. The entire reason Acc is more beneficial than anything else other than Haste is because you get the same TP whether you smack the mob for 1 damage than for 200. I.e. It's always better to smack mobs more often for insignificant damage than to hit them less often for more damage. Haste increasing WS frequency was also a bad move in my opinion, given the exponential nature of Haste. This game's entire combat mechanics, Souleater zergs aside, completely boil down to "LET'S PUMP OUT WS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE."

I think the way the level correction penalties have been handled are also a major problem and caused a lot of harm. In my opinion it should have been handled by level differences ranges such that, say, ITs ranging from +7 to +11 Level all give the same penalty. Variances in mob levels are absolutely crippling and it's not because of the stats they gain.

Also this

that damnable Skillchain chat log bug.

Really goddamn. If you don't want people to use 3rd party apps don't make me have to use Windower to see my SC damage.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

Here's an idea (that might suck) for a Magic Burst fix:

step 1) PUT IT IN THE TRANSLATOR, YOU FUCK-UPS

I'm honestly baffled that this hasn't happened yet. I figured it was just one of those terms I needed to activate manually using /translate but no, they just plain didn't include it. Absolutely ridiculous.

[Zoltar]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

FWIW, BLMs CAN and STILL DO perform succesful burn parties, there is no resistance seen w/ timed nukes and everyone dropping a couple big ones. The mob still dies fast and kills fast like a drg meripo party

[Mhurron]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

FWIW, BLMs CAN and STILL DO perform succesful burn parties, there is no resistance seen w/ timed nukes and everyone dropping a couple big ones. The mob still dies fast and kills fast like a drg meripo party

Exactly, between this and melee burn parties exp/limit points come in fast. You can 'fix' SC+MB until the cows come home but unless it yields faster exp, people will continue to not use it.

[Takelli]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

No. It is stupid for all mob families to be on equal fighting footage. A Taur should always be far more dangerous than a parrot of equal level. A giant spider should also be more dangerous than a parrot of equal level. It follows that the parrot should be worth less EXP.

Then they should make them give less exp then, because they are so god-damn easy to kill. Then make other mobs give more exp for being harder than colibri. Like Puks, and the tigers/crawlers.

[Ketaru]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

Also I agree that the game's WS selection really undermines the SC system. Not only should they have been balanced better, I feel the game should've had more Job-specific WS too. And hell, the way we get TP is totally borked. The entire reason Acc is more beneficial than anything else other than Haste is because you get the same TP whether you smack the mob for 1 damage than for 200. I.e. It's always better to smack mobs more often for insignificant damage than to hit them less often for more damage. Haste increasing WS frequency was also a bad move in my opinion, given the exponential nature of Haste. This game's entire combat mechanics, Souleater zergs aside, completely boil down to "LET'S PUMP OUT WS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE."

That's also because we can gear swap without penalty. I'm sure Haste would still be among the best gear if we couldn't. But the massive weaponskills people can put out would not be possible if people had to stick to Haste gear at the expense of other attributes. As it is right now, the only slots where we really have to accept that tradeoff are our weapon slots. The only time we have to make a tradeoff between higher WS damage or faster TP gain is when we have to choose between a standard weapon, or a weapon that can strike more than once. For quite a few jobs in the game where their overall damage output can be determined in ways other than just their weapon's DMG rating, we almost unanimously pick the weapon that can strike more than once.

We could get TP in Haste gear, then switch to gear that gave us +50% Slow just to WS, and the fact that the gear has +Slow on it wouldn't hurt us in the least.

[Karinya]

Re: Bringing back SC+MB to parties (And possibly blm!)

A Taur should always be far more dangerous than a parrot of equal level. A giant spider should also be more dangerous than a parrot of equal level.

I disagree. If they're really going to be equal level then they should be about equally difficult. (Obviously difficulty is going to depend somewhat on the specifics of party setups.) If they can't find a way to make a parrot as dangerous as a taurus, or if it seems to ridiculous to do so, then they should just not have any parrots above level 60 or whatever (the opposite of the way there are no *low* level mobs of some families -- taurus, manticores, sabotenders, buffalo, soulflayers, etc. It would be silly to have a soulflayer you could defeat at level 10, so they don't.) Bunnies cap out around 65, IIRC. Sheep (as opposed to rams) even lower, at least until ToAU's karakul. Some apparently humble families surprisingly go up to 80 or so -- mandragora, for instance -- but not all of them. That's fine. But a level 70 mob should be a level 70 mob (except for HNMs and other special stuff like Beseiged/Campaign where they have a dummy level for level correction formulas so people can fight them without being 75, but stats that prevent a 75 from dropping them in 30 seconds.)

Level wears too many hats, but if it isn't going to be an indicator of dangerousness, then why are we bothering to /check things?

I think there should be more really dangerous taurus in the world than really dangerous parrots. But that dangerousness difference should be reflected in levels, too, otherwise what are they for?

And hell, the way we get TP is totally borked. The entire reason Acc is more beneficial than anything else other than Haste is because you get the same TP whether you smack the mob for 1 damage than for 200. I.e. It's always better to smack mobs more often for insignificant damage than to hit them less often for more damage. Haste increasing WS frequency was also a bad move in my opinion, given the exponential nature of Haste. This game's entire combat mechanics, Souleater zergs aside, completely boil down to "LET'S PUMP OUT WS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE."

I think something needs to be done with Haste, but I'm not really sure what -- its effect on WS isn't even the biggest problem IMO, it's the fact that it improves WS (through faster TP), regular damage (straightforwardly), AND Utsusemi recast (if you have it) all for the same stat. That's what makes it a god stat. Except for WS, where it does nothing -- so you swap it out.

Equip swapping definitely blunts a lot of tradeoffs between different pieces of gear, but it's deeply enough part of the game now that I don't see how it could possibly be removed. Lots of gear that's useful in some situations is nowhere near viable for being worn fulltime. So TPing in acc/haste and then swapping to str/atk to WS is most likely here to stay -- the only thing that could really impose a major tradeoff would be nerfing WS enough that having good attack on your regular hits became highly important to your overall damage.

Partly that's a mob level issue, though. Against ITs, having good attack on your regular hits IS highly important, and lots of TP for you and lots of TP for the mob is not such a good deal anymore. Haste builds are partly a function of the proliferation of haste gear from homam onwards, but they're also partly a function of low mob level reducing the *need* for acc and atk. You can't effectively kill an IT when your WS are the only thing hitting for real damage and the rest of your TP building is coming back in your face as Condemnation or Radiant Breath or whatever.

If high level players had an incentive to fight more challenging mobs, and the exp tables and check ratings for high level players were adjusted to take into account the way the availability of endgame gear and merits change the power:level relationship (IIRC they literally haven't been adjusted since RotZ introduced the higher genkai quests), then you would need a different approach to gear to effectively damage and kill mobs for exp, because 75s wouldn't be slumming on MJSP colibri anymore.

So I think the exp system for high level players should be adjusted first, before any more direct tweaks to melee formulas. They might prove unnecessary.

I think the way the level correction penalties have been handled are also a major problem and caused a lot of harm. In my opinion it should have been handled by level differences ranges such that, say, ITs ranging from +7 to +11 Level all give the same penalty.

Sure, then going one level over the breakpoint can wipe your whole party as 5 levels of range correction are all applied at once. I don't think this is such a good idea (at least, not without /check revealing exact levels or something).

The first effect of that system is that nobody would fight +7s (willingly) because you could be just as effective against +11s, which have only slightly more HP/def/eva (without the level correction formulas chipping in), but are worth a lot more exp. (Unless they wouldn't be, I guess.) But if while you were merrily fighting +10s and +11s you accidentally got a +12... then you can't fight it and can't CC it (both because of the level correction for the +12 to +16 range, which is *five* levels worse than what you were normally fighting instead of just one).

IOW, level variation would be unimportant except when it completely murdered you and danced on the corpses. I don't think that's a step in the right direction from what we have now.

Some camps could benefit from having tighter variation in mob level, but I don't really think it's that big an issue. If you're fighting at a reasonable level to begin with, you should be able to handle a couple levels higher, and a couple levels lower should still be okay (if not great) exp. Especially now that parties hardly ever have their own level variation anymore.

The bigger issue IMO with level correction penalties is that they don't apply the same way to BLMs as they do to melees, which causes problems at HNM/endgame (BLMs overpowered where the enemies are ultra high level; in Nyzul and other places where they're low level BLMs aren't that useful or desired) and in exp (BLMs want to fight a few very high level enemies with some rest time in between, melees want to fight lots of wimps quickly, the party can't do both and splitting the difference isn't great for anyone).


P.S. One thing colibri really need is to be smarter. Never use Snatch Morsel on a player who already doesn't have any food. (Target the highest-hate player *with* food, or don't use it if nobody has food.) Feather Tickle should automatically target the highest TP player on the hate list, and not be used at all if nobody has 50%+. If neither of those are appropriate, just keep up the pecking flurries. Without wasting half of their TP on moves with no or very little effect, colibri could be significantly more dangerous even without a stat adjustment.