Final Fantasy XIV - Page 10

Resistances weren't just factored in with immunity were they? It's been a long time since I played the game, but I thought each mob type had certain weaknesses as well, such that even though it was a lower level spell, the extra damage you'd get from casting Blizzard on a mob weak to ice, at least with a magic burst would far surpass what you'd get just casting Thunder instead. The main reason you'd cast spells other than the weakness were just because you had spell cooldowns to worry about, and thus had to additionally cycle between the spells they weren't immune to on top of the one they were weak to. It's been awhile though, so I may be wrong on that. Still though, even if it wasn't used that way (in fact or in practice), there's no reason they couldn't have done so in FF14.

I really liked the fundamental concept of skillchains and magic bursts in FFXI. It was a pretty beautiful combination of understanding the enemy's elemental weaknesses, how certain skills function together, and perfecting coordination and timing between party members. It took a lot of skill to execute well, and was extremely satisfying to do the full thing flawlessly. In the end, it wasn't quite as effecient as just burning things down, but that seems to me a problem of design that they should have been able to work around if they were committed to reintroducing such a system.

An example of what it might look like for anyone who never played ffxi:
Say an EXP party had 2 melee damage dealers (let's say a Dark Knight and Warrior), a Black Mage, Tank (usually Paladin or Ninja), and 2 supports (White mage, Bard, or Red Mage). This type of setup was pretty common early in the game's lifespan. A skillchain would require some element of coordination and skill from pretty much every member of the party. Each type of skillchain would give bonus magic damage to a specific element or set of elements upon completion for a brief window. So the melees (often including the tank) would need to know which skills to do in which order to produce a specific type of skillchain to benefit a certain mob's elemental weakness. This meant they had to know enemy types and weaknesses, and how their weapon's skills interacted with various other job's weapon's skills.

The Black mage needs to intimately know the casting time of his spells to land the correct spell at the correct moment to get the bonus damage. The supports can time their own disables/debuffs/nukes with this effect as well, though that was less utilized. And on top of that, the whole chain of timings can be turned on it's head with certain spells (ancients) where the Black mage has such an extremely long cast time that must start first, forcing the melees to time their skills so the skill chain ends just before the black mages spell goes off rather than the other way around.

To me, that's really cool. In practice, even before people turned to other tactics for increased efficiency, it was rarely used to full potential because you could almost never count on random pubs to know everything. But when you did find someone competent, either who knew what to do already or was quick to learn, it was just awesome. Hitting a 3 part chain flawlessly with optimal skills for a specific mob and landing every magic burst, with even the supports and maybe even melees (dark knight with drain / paladin with holy) involved was just so damn satisfying. It added a lot of depth to the system and would force a decent amount of variety in playstyle as you adjust to different mob types and party compositions.

I haven't played too much FF14 yet, but of what I've seen from Thamaturge, that kind of depth just doesn't feel like it is there. Efficiency seems to be more about chain casting and knowing what to do next for optimal time usage. That has it's own draw, I guess, but playing as a mage, I much prefer when mastering timing and knowing resistances are valued more. Where sometimes the best thing to do for overall efficiency is just rest and get MP back while waiting for your next opportunity to get an insane magic burst to make up for the time. Or when you put your damage in your party's hands, casting an ancient and trusting the rest to hit their timings for your spell to do its best.