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See, what was originally going to be my 4th MMOs & Gaming blog rather got... derailed during the process of writing it, and devolved into a "Why I Hate Dark Knight" post. Was talking with a friend online tonight, and decided meh, what the hell, I'll post it anyway.
Because I'm not going to be putting on the newly-launched official forums, mostly because I have the sneaking suspicion that they'd ban the ever-loving-HELL out of me.
So.
Here it is:
So I was thinking about the whole MMO thing, and I came to the conclusion that it must really suck to try and develop one. I mean think about it, here you are, faced with an enormous project, limited time to complete it, and a set of design requirements which, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are often set in a difficult-to-balance form of dynamic tension.
What do I mean by that last bit?
<3<3I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.<3<3
Given the sort of budgets we're talking about, at least with an MMORPG, most developers don't want to deviate too far from the norm. You want to be able to draw people in, in the classic "it's like, but" fashion. "It's like Warcraft, but with better PVP", for example. It's striking that balance between what you know people are comfortable with, and obviously works, with enough individual character, so to speak, as to set your particular product apart from the rest of the market.
In smaller scale, you want to have classes that are sufficiently familiar as to be recognizable in terms of general archetype, yet be sufficiently distinctive as to give your game a unique character. And on top of all that, you often need to have a variety of classes within a given archetype, and each of those classes has to be distinct from each other, while maintaining overall utility and balance.
Something that FFXI has been historically terrible at, I might add. SE has always had a handful of jobs that they just don't know what to do with, and as such those jobs tend to get the short end of the stick fairly consistently. Take Dark Knight, for example (please, ba-dum-tish). In theory you've got a fairly straightforward concept here; a melee DPS class that has a secondary focus in combat magic. Should be easy, right?
Apparently, not so fucking much, because SE gave DRK one functional gimmick, and then subsequently spent quite a while taking it away from us, while throwing all kinds of utterly useless crap at the job.
Ahem.
So, like I was saying, you've got a wide variety of jobs that are inherently built to the "Melee DPS" archetype; WAR, MNK, DRG, SAM, DRK, BST, and a few that blur into rather indistinct categories of their own (NIN, THF, DNC, PUP), but in terms of the first six, you can look at it as SE's attempt to mix the categories of offense, defense, and utility into a variety of different cocktails.
And failing miserably at it, since those six jobs are about as balanced as a twelve-year old kid with Parkinson's tottering about on six-inch spike heel stripper shoes.
Ahem.
But as I was saying, offense (like Berserk for Warriors, Hasso for Samurai, L-O-FUCKING-L Last Resort for DRK), defense (like Counter for Monks, Seigan for Samurai, L-O-FUCKING-L Dread Spikes for DRK), and utility (Provoke for Warriors, lolCircleAbilitiesforeveryoneelse).
You might get the impression that I feel SE has somehow dropped the ball on this whole balancing act, and is instead prancing about the arena like an incontinent chimpanzee flinging massive handfuls of watery feces at a good half of the jobs available to the FFXI player.
And you'd probably be right.
I look at Dark Knight as... well, as an example of everything not to do with a given class. Like I said, it's fundamentally a simple concept, but SE has managed to fuck the class up (and over) on a fairly regular basis, largely by either abandoning core mechanics of the class, making them largely unplayable, or just plain giving the job utterly useless abilities that nobody really cares about. On the one hand, you have Last Resort, which until the advent of Tier II merits, was a figurative slap in the face to the class as a whole. "What, you want an ability to raise your attack at the cost of lowering your defense! Sure, we can do that! We'll just make it last 1/6th as long as the equivalent job ability for Warrior, while forcing you to expend hundreds of thousands of experience points once you reach 75 in order to make it as good, for those whopping 30 seconds."
Next we have Souleater, which, to be honest, was a good chunk of the reason I wound up playing a Galka. Sacrifice HP to deal damage to the enemy, brilliant! I'll just take a race that has the most HP! Except we never really got a cost-effective way to get that HP back, short of using Blood Weapon, and once players figured out that a high-Haste DRK with a multi-hit weapon was a total nightmare to many things for the 30 seconds that Blood Weapon was up, SE immediately began to nerf the combo, generating a wide array of NMs that either had immunity to, or built immunity to, Souleater.
Oh, but wait, there's Dark Knight's ability to cast spells! That has to be worth something, right?
Hah.
No, not so much, when you limit the job to the weakest elemental magics you can find, and couple it to a small handful of spells that DRK can cast well, but again a large portion of monsters in the game are totally immune, or at the very least highly resistant to Dark Magic spells in the Drain or Absorb category. There was a brief moment of glory when Absorb-TP worked quite effectively, and garnered consistent results for the DRKs using it, but apparently the ability to generate TP on command was decreed solely the domain of the Samurai, so the spell was promptly nerfed. Oh, but wait, they gave us Occult Acumen, that gives up a whopping 10% of the spell's MP cost back as TP by the time we hit the mid 80's!
Seriously, I can't believe that Occult Acumen got past the design committee with anything other than a "Seriously, let's totally fuck with DRK again, it'll be funny" as the mission statement.
So what has DRK gotten since the level cap went up? Lesse, the ability to weaken Arcana (HAH); bonus TP for parrying (with the job's massive E rating in the skill); a level of attack and critical damage bonus which is actually useful (but worth noting that Warrior got twice the crit bonus); the ability to enhance one of our Dark magic spells every five minutes, which is arguably useful, but again, once every five minutes.
Part of the problem with DRK is a matter of time, when you get right down to it. Casting spells takes too long; in the time it takes to cast a Tier III nuke, a DRK with a good haste build will typically get in two or three swings, which will do more damage, generate more TP for the DRK, and consume no MP. The only real way to fix that aspect of DRK's mechanics would be to give them more Fast Cast than God (and certainly more than RDM), which probably wouldn't sit overly well with some folks.
So really, the obvious answer for SE is to look into ways of utilizing DRK's MP pool in more creative ways than just spellcasting, which SE seems loathe to even consider. I can imagine abilities where you convert the %HP loss of Souleater in %MP loss, or have a persistent %MP loss in order to boost damage dealing capabilities, or defensive capabilities. There are a lot of ways to make DRK an effective, top-tier damage dealer again, but it's going to require some measure of thinking outside of the box.
Because I'm not going to be putting on the newly-launched official forums, mostly because I have the sneaking suspicion that they'd ban the ever-loving-HELL out of me.
So.
Here it is:
So I was thinking about the whole MMO thing, and I came to the conclusion that it must really suck to try and develop one. I mean think about it, here you are, faced with an enormous project, limited time to complete it, and a set of design requirements which, while not necessarily mutually exclusive, are often set in a difficult-to-balance form of dynamic tension.
What do I mean by that last bit?
<3<3I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.<3<3
Given the sort of budgets we're talking about, at least with an MMORPG, most developers don't want to deviate too far from the norm. You want to be able to draw people in, in the classic "it's like, but" fashion. "It's like Warcraft, but with better PVP", for example. It's striking that balance between what you know people are comfortable with, and obviously works, with enough individual character, so to speak, as to set your particular product apart from the rest of the market.
In smaller scale, you want to have classes that are sufficiently familiar as to be recognizable in terms of general archetype, yet be sufficiently distinctive as to give your game a unique character. And on top of all that, you often need to have a variety of classes within a given archetype, and each of those classes has to be distinct from each other, while maintaining overall utility and balance.
Something that FFXI has been historically terrible at, I might add. SE has always had a handful of jobs that they just don't know what to do with, and as such those jobs tend to get the short end of the stick fairly consistently. Take Dark Knight, for example (please, ba-dum-tish). In theory you've got a fairly straightforward concept here; a melee DPS class that has a secondary focus in combat magic. Should be easy, right?
Apparently, not so fucking much, because SE gave DRK one functional gimmick, and then subsequently spent quite a while taking it away from us, while throwing all kinds of utterly useless crap at the job.
Ahem.
So, like I was saying, you've got a wide variety of jobs that are inherently built to the "Melee DPS" archetype; WAR, MNK, DRG, SAM, DRK, BST, and a few that blur into rather indistinct categories of their own (NIN, THF, DNC, PUP), but in terms of the first six, you can look at it as SE's attempt to mix the categories of offense, defense, and utility into a variety of different cocktails.
And failing miserably at it, since those six jobs are about as balanced as a twelve-year old kid with Parkinson's tottering about on six-inch spike heel stripper shoes.
Ahem.
But as I was saying, offense (like Berserk for Warriors, Hasso for Samurai, L-O-FUCKING-L Last Resort for DRK), defense (like Counter for Monks, Seigan for Samurai, L-O-FUCKING-L Dread Spikes for DRK), and utility (Provoke for Warriors, lolCircleAbilitiesforeveryoneelse).
You might get the impression that I feel SE has somehow dropped the ball on this whole balancing act, and is instead prancing about the arena like an incontinent chimpanzee flinging massive handfuls of watery feces at a good half of the jobs available to the FFXI player.
And you'd probably be right.
I look at Dark Knight as... well, as an example of everything not to do with a given class. Like I said, it's fundamentally a simple concept, but SE has managed to fuck the class up (and over) on a fairly regular basis, largely by either abandoning core mechanics of the class, making them largely unplayable, or just plain giving the job utterly useless abilities that nobody really cares about. On the one hand, you have Last Resort, which until the advent of Tier II merits, was a figurative slap in the face to the class as a whole. "What, you want an ability to raise your attack at the cost of lowering your defense! Sure, we can do that! We'll just make it last 1/6th as long as the equivalent job ability for Warrior, while forcing you to expend hundreds of thousands of experience points once you reach 75 in order to make it as good, for those whopping 30 seconds."
Next we have Souleater, which, to be honest, was a good chunk of the reason I wound up playing a Galka. Sacrifice HP to deal damage to the enemy, brilliant! I'll just take a race that has the most HP! Except we never really got a cost-effective way to get that HP back, short of using Blood Weapon, and once players figured out that a high-Haste DRK with a multi-hit weapon was a total nightmare to many things for the 30 seconds that Blood Weapon was up, SE immediately began to nerf the combo, generating a wide array of NMs that either had immunity to, or built immunity to, Souleater.
Oh, but wait, there's Dark Knight's ability to cast spells! That has to be worth something, right?
Hah.
No, not so much, when you limit the job to the weakest elemental magics you can find, and couple it to a small handful of spells that DRK can cast well, but again a large portion of monsters in the game are totally immune, or at the very least highly resistant to Dark Magic spells in the Drain or Absorb category. There was a brief moment of glory when Absorb-TP worked quite effectively, and garnered consistent results for the DRKs using it, but apparently the ability to generate TP on command was decreed solely the domain of the Samurai, so the spell was promptly nerfed. Oh, but wait, they gave us Occult Acumen, that gives up a whopping 10% of the spell's MP cost back as TP by the time we hit the mid 80's!
Seriously, I can't believe that Occult Acumen got past the design committee with anything other than a "Seriously, let's totally fuck with DRK again, it'll be funny" as the mission statement.
So what has DRK gotten since the level cap went up? Lesse, the ability to weaken Arcana (HAH); bonus TP for parrying (with the job's massive E rating in the skill); a level of attack and critical damage bonus which is actually useful (but worth noting that Warrior got twice the crit bonus); the ability to enhance one of our Dark magic spells every five minutes, which is arguably useful, but again, once every five minutes.
Part of the problem with DRK is a matter of time, when you get right down to it. Casting spells takes too long; in the time it takes to cast a Tier III nuke, a DRK with a good haste build will typically get in two or three swings, which will do more damage, generate more TP for the DRK, and consume no MP. The only real way to fix that aspect of DRK's mechanics would be to give them more Fast Cast than God (and certainly more than RDM), which probably wouldn't sit overly well with some folks.
So really, the obvious answer for SE is to look into ways of utilizing DRK's MP pool in more creative ways than just spellcasting, which SE seems loathe to even consider. I can imagine abilities where you convert the %HP loss of Souleater in %MP loss, or have a persistent %MP loss in order to boost damage dealing capabilities, or defensive capabilities. There are a lot of ways to make DRK an effective, top-tier damage dealer again, but it's going to require some measure of thinking outside of the box.
