[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Graeham]

I pushed BLU to 70. Getting a group together for some of the more obscure dungeons/spells is a bit of a pain though.

I still need to beat Siegfried to advance the quests, too...so I guess I'll try it at the weekend.

[KrayZ33]

"flames in leveling dungeons / expert dungeons"?

If people flame in there, the group must be seriously horrible and might even deserve the vent of frustration.
You clear that shit while pressing 1 and 2.
You don't even need healers or tanks (as long as not both are missing).

Considering how easy it is to get banned or warnings in FFXIV, I really doubt that this is a thing.
Can't say I've seen anything in that regard in WoW either.
Trivial content is trivial, no one seems to give a shit, the rest are outliers and probably drunk/drugged or psychos - or both.

As for japanese PUGs.
From what I've heard and seen, their mindset is basically "let's clear this", instead of the western approach "let me be the first in DPS".
They usually play the safe route instead of the "I need to use every global possible" route.
Fewer wipes, less frustration.

"Slow is steady, steady is smooth and smooth is fast."

[Granyala]

"flames in leveling dungeons / expert dungeons"?

I have seen it happen but it is very, very rare indeed.
I got dissed and kicked for not pulling fast enough in Aurum Vale's first room back when it was current. It was one of my first runs as a tank too.
Go figure.

[KrayZ33]

I have seen it happen but it is very, very rare indeed.
I got dissed and kicked for not pulling fast enough in Aurum Vale's first room back when it was current. It was one of my first runs as a tank too.
Go figure.

I'm amazed you can even remember something so far back in the past.
I couldn't remember anything from classic in terms of "playerbase". I can only assume shitheads were present then too, because whenever something isn't completely trivial (Aurum Vale in ARR wasn't) people start bitching and are looking to blame someone all the time.
I mean, we are talking about a time when Titan Hard (or was it extreme? Whatever was needed for the first relic) was "super hard content"

In WoW
I think WOTLK was the first time I truely noticed elitism, maybe because I was in a server first guild at that time and grabbed just about every single title there was.
Jesus christ did we have some (very few) degenerates.

I mean, we were literally grabbing just about every server first kill possible on a server that had multiple raiding guilds (Nax, Yogg0, MimironHM, Starcaller etc. etc.) , except for Malygos and that Black Dragon which launched alongside Nax because we decided to do Naxxramas first and the other guilds did the Dragons and these guys would still complain about how people play like shit and stuff in our Raid when we wiped. And not even in a constructive manner, but with sarcasm and insults and just overall stupid statements that weren't even theoretically achievable ("I deal XXX-more DPS on my paladin twink in YYY-Gear" and shit like that. Obviously not even meant as an exaggeration when they said that.)
So I guess these guys exist everywhere, but I wouldn't say that this was a common sight in normal dungeons and stuff.
I'd go and say it's a common sight in Mythic+ dungeons now, but funnily enough, not in the cutting edge groups, but in the mediocre ones.

I guess the asshole-ratio went towards the mediocre playerbase in recent years. Most likely players that think they are better than they actually are.
It's a common sight in this forum too. So I believe it might be pretty accurate.

[Haidaes]

I leveled all jobs, mostly by dungeon roulette. There are tons of people that hawkishly watch their dps meters, which they aren't even supposed to have. Also alot of people tend to lose their cool with F(ail) players. Sure there are some people that go out of their way to be nice, more so than in WoW, but I absolutely can't pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows, like most people tend to about FFXIV. In fact if I had to compare it to WoW I would say there are more extremely nice and rude players, where WoW has just more of the indifferent mass inbetween.

[KrayZ33]

How do you even know they are using damage meters. I see no one *ever* chatting about DPS in game. Not even in Savage content when I pugged that shit.
People would rather leave when they noticed we don't have enough DPS. Obviously everyone knows who's doing DPS and who isn't.
You just have to watch the threat bar.
When I die 50% in and still catch another DPS in aggro who didn't die I know they are shit-tier players and shouldn't be in that group to begin with... but even in these groups. People would just leave and start a new one.
But that's savage content, not leveling/expert dungeons.

What server are you playing on? It ain't Shiva for sure.

It's more likely people are looking for bots or some shenanigans. Because I sure as hell have seen AFKers in dungeons that do basically only auto attacks (yes, just that, not even skills) and are lagging behind on every pull for 10 seconds.

These guys - I did kick myself. I'd be just as fast clearing that dungeon with a bot though since many people probably don't even have "join party in progress" activated. You wouldn't believe how many people do that in Alliance raids btw. Maybe you are talking about those?



I don't know man, it doesn't really add up. No one gives a damn flying dime for DPS in leveling dungeons as far as I have seen and it's not like I haven't played my very fair share of dungeons. At least enough to realize that the *outlier* is someone saying something other than "hi" at the start of the dungeon.
I can say with 100% certainty that the people you are refering too are not present in the quantity of "tons". That sounds so absurd to me, I'd put it on the same level as someone telling me that every second person is queer.

Most people don't even have relevant gear to measure something. Neither do you have a reasonable point of reference since most classes don't even have their skills unlocked in there.
I'd be hard pressed to believe it's anything more than your usual "aww darn, this is going to take a bit longer than usual, we got an honest healer over here". Or something like that.

[StrawberryZebra]

I think the big issue here is that while they didn't WANT to do it, they genuinely saw no way out. Healing balance and gameplay has been an incredibly touchy subject over the past 3 and a half years.

I've long advocated for switching the tank/healer meta completely. Make MP management a real thing and then pepper in one other management factor per job. Give encounters more rapidly incoming damage and give healers tools to handle them more efficiently and more quickly, allowing for them to choose how to handle it. It's easy, but expensive to burst heal a tank from low HP to full. This allows coordination between healers, if one is destabilized (i.e. low on mana) they can pivot to healing slower and letting the other healer handle the critical components since they have more margin for error.

To supplement that, let tanks have control of their durability. Not with some bland toggle switch or 3 minute cooldowns, but actual effects and oGCDs and some kinda rotational mitigation where they have choices on how much damage to sacrifice for additional durability to help stabilize healers. Not like a HW/StB situation where 100% offense all the time if capable, but real consequences for making mistakes. Not instakills, but things that ramp pressure up.

Naturally this requires a significant overhaul to job and encounter design, but it scratches the more dynamic itch I've been asking for.

For instance for SCH - you could treat the fairy as a healing battery. It does smart healing itself and has it's own MP (and ways to replenish it and burn it), but can also be used as a Innervate type of effect to give the SCH or other healer a burst of MP at the cost of the Fairy's effectiveness. That could be that jobs management aspect. WHM could have things like where the more HoTs actively rolling enable faster cast times or more efficient casts, so trying to keep that is optimal. AST - could have a reworked card system that isn't booty (no input here no solution). Sage could fill a DPS ish niche like Disc Priest where casting offensive spells grants free or reduced cost healing/damage and vice versa, but pending health and stability would have to sacrifice it's more methodical and efficient playstyle for the sake of the pull.

@StrawberryZebra - Just some ideas.

This sounds very much like WoW's guardian Druid, where they've got some degree of fine control over how durable they are at the expense of having to trade off some of their self healing and offense. Being able to scale defenses up and down as required creates an interesting push and pull with resources and makes for interesting moment to moment gameplay.

As for MP management - just yes. As things stand MP might as well not exist as a mechanic for healers, even when things are dragging on and you're on res number 40 the chance of ever running out of MP is slim to nil. Which makes having an efficient heal option just strange - You're never going to use it outside of leveling. Ability heals having no MP cost and being oGCD makes them complete no brainers most of the time. Efficiency is never a concern, neither is throughput. DPS is the only metric that really matters because you're squeezing in every opportunity to DPS while doing the absolute minimum amount of healing you can. That's a dangerous game state because it forces the content to always be approached from the DPS perspective only, where things become a simple number and movement check rather than one where nuanced failures can occour.

I know Squenix has gone on record as saying that they want healers to spend most of their time healing, but those aren't changes that can be made in isolation. They need to come with changes to tanks that mean they need healing too. That means that content needs to be designed in a way where it's dangerous to tanks outside of the telegraphed tank busters, be that just a high constant level of incoming damage or periods where tanks can't have active mitigation running or even giving tanks the choice between mitigation and DPS.

Those are genuinely interesting decisions to make because they'll shift depending on your group, what part of the fight you're on and what your resources are at currently. It adds mismanagement of MP or cooldowns as an additional failure condition outside of simply getting the dance wrong. If your tank dumps too much of their resources into DPS and the healers run out of MP then that should be a wipe. If the healers throw everything into DPS and can't put out enough healing that should be a wipe. If DPS take too much avoidable damage, that should be a wipe too.

The current paradigm is too restrictive to allow for complex failure conditions. That really needs to change first if the content is to follow.

The nature of XIV fights is what creates that attitude in the pug community, really. It's even worse than in WoW, which is saying something.

To be honest, I've found the FF14 community to be a lot harsher for pugging with than WoW. A single failure in FF14 is a group wipe generally. You make a minor screw up in M+ and it's an inconvenience but it's very unlikely to cost you the whole run by itself. Admittedly I've not pugged Mythic raids in WoW, though I find that WoW players are, on the whole, more laid back about screwups than FF14 ones are simply because they're not as costly.

The only time I've been in an M+ that simply wasn't completable was that time I tried a +19 De Other Side on Tyranical and we genuinely didn't have enough DPS to kill Hakkar. We used all our Pridefuls on him and spent a while trying different tactics, but at best got him to about 20% before he was casting Blood Shield faster than we could break it. It's not even like people were upset about it, the general attitude was "We'll come back with more gear and try again". In FF14 if the group wipes 2-3 times people just up and leave in a huff, even if the content is perfectly doable. People just expect you to already know the tactics before you set foot in the content, which is beyond unrealistic.

Considering how easy it is to get banned or warnings in FFXIV, I really doubt that this is a thing.

Don't let the scare stories fool you, its harder than you think to get a warning in FF14. I've been abducted and spent more time in GM Jail than most and I've always gotten off with little more than a slap on the wrist.

Sure, I'm not actively hostile towards other players, but I will gladly call out and kick people who are leeching, not contributing to the group, or are actively holding us back. That doesn't always make me popular as I'm sure you can imagine. As of my last stay in GM Jail I've been reported almost 4 times as much as the average player without any penalties or negative consequences beyond a quick chat with a GM.

[Haidaes]

How do you even know they are using damage meters. I see no one *ever* chatting about DPS in game.

When people complain about others not doing enough dps and or not using enough of a certain skill, they surely didn't just casually sift through the combat log themselves. I've had to "regularily"* block kick votes of newbies because some selfproclaimed gift to god thought others were not worthy of them.

Edit: * well let's say I've encountered it around 5-10% of my runs which was probably in the lower tripple digits when I was done. That may not seem like alot, but going by pure statistics if you encounter this a couple of times during leveling (one job) it certainly doesn't leave a good impression of the oh so great community. And that is not even including the google translate concilliation between french people that speak absolutely no other language than french and others, who held up more than a couple of runs.

[Wrecktangle]

SNIP

The current paradigm is too restrictive to allow for complex failure conditions. That really needs to change first if the content is to follow.

We're in agreement completely here.

The only time I've been in an M+ that simply wasn't completable was that time I tried a +19 De Other Side on Tyranical and we genuinely didn't have enough DPS to kill Hakkar. We used all our Pridefuls on him and spent a while trying different tactics, but at best got him to about 20% before he was casting Blood Shield faster than we could break it. It's not even like people were upset about it, the general attitude was "We'll come back with more gear and try again". In FF14 if the group wipes 2-3 times people just up and leave in a huff, even if the content is perfectly doable. People just expect you to already know the tactics before you set foot in the content, which is beyond unrealistic.

To be fair, and I've said this countless times when you're playing in that field (i.e. the upper elite field) people are very knowledgeable and understanding, not toxic. This applies to both games. When I was strictly pugging savages, I'd generally clear 2-3 floors first week. This basically gives you a pass into ANY group in the first month. They don't even need logs at this point (regardless of them being solid) because people know you're good and know that occasionally people make mistakes and are open to criticism/help.

If you're joining a +19 key and gave the gear for it, your IO really is relatively irrelevant (barring mythic raids who dont do M+ at all, but thats semi rare) and thus I would expect people to be able to say, damn everyones sustaining 5k+ dps, and we still can't clear this, gotta come back later. gg nice try guys.

Don't let the scare stories fool you, its harder than you think to get a warning in FF14. I've been abducted and spent more time in GM Jail than most and I've always gotten off with little more than a slap on the wrist.

Sure, I'm not actively hostile towards other players, but I will gladly call out and kick people who are leeching, not contributing to the group, or are actively holding us back. That doesn't always make me popular as I'm sure you can imagine. As of my last stay in GM Jail I've been reported almost 4 times as much as the average player without any penalties or negative consequences beyond a quick chat with a GM.

I've NEVER been to GM Jail, but I've openly removed people from groups and told them why (low dps). I've told people their logs weren't good enough to join my parties, and I've said things like if you don't know both sides of a fight (i.e. main tank/off tank roles) then you're not ready for a clear fight. You should know both sides to be flexible. I'm not usually a dick, just openly honest.

The forums on the other hand. Still permanently banned, but it was worth it. HAD to correct that guy. no 6th average percentile IN NORMAL PLD should ever be writing a guide on the OF about how to play. Not only was it blatantly inaccurate, like comically so, but his logs had his average CPM of 6 when it should have been like 27. He was literally pushing a button once every 10s...

I had to take one for the team for that.

[Xilurm]

I'm currently at 73 minutes as Warrior in a queue for the crystal tower raids. This is suffering.

I see his problem, he's queueing as tank. Tank queues for 24mans are usually trash, healer/dps are gonna be the better choices for queueing.

That makes no sense. I'm playing as a DRK and all 15 times I got in in under 5 mins.

[World Peace]

To be honest, I've found the FF14 community to be a lot harsher for pugging with than WoW.

Yeah, particularly in current content.

The current paradigm is too restrictive to allow for complex failure conditions. That really needs to change first if the content is to follow.

This is my biggest issue with encounter design in FFXIV.

I'm not actively hostile towards other players, but I will gladly call out and kick people who are leeching, not contributing to the group, or are actively holding us back.

That was me as well. I don't even bother with most grouped content anymore, outside of pugging old raids for mount drops.

[dope_danny]

That makes no sense. I'm playing as a DRK and all 15 times I got in in under 5 mins.

I got them all in about 8 hours, almost 4 of which was queueing.

[Granyala]

I'm amazed you can even remember something so far back in the past.

Well it's extremely rare that I got kicked from a dungeon, so that's probably why it stuck.

[threadz]

I finished 1 weapon so far. Not a fan of how long delubrum runs take. Hardly anyone uses the lost actions so it takes probably twice as long as it should.

[Granyala]

I'm still at the Void Ark stage ._.

[Graeham]

Well it's extremely rare that I got kicked from a dungeon, so that's probably why it stuck.

I've only been kicked a couple of times as well. Once for a disconnect and once because someone got salty that I won a loot roll.

[StrawberryZebra]

To be fair, and I've said this countless times when you're playing in that field (i.e. the upper elite field) people are very knowledgeable and understanding, not toxic. This applies to both games. When I was strictly pugging savages, I'd generally clear 2-3 floors first week. This basically gives you a pass into ANY group in the first month. They don't even need logs at this point (regardless of them being solid) because people know you're good and know that occasionally people make mistakes and are open to criticism/help.

If you're joining a +19 key and gave the gear for it, your IO really is relatively irrelevant (barring mythic raids who dont do M+ at all, but thats semi rare) and thus I would expect people to be able to say, damn everyones sustaining 5k+ dps, and we still can't clear this, gotta come back later. gg nice try guys.

This has, largely, been my experience too - People just accept that mistakes happen. People are happy to go with suggestions if you have them, listen to feedback and work together to clear content. That goes both ways, you need to own your mistakes too and take feedback from others. Anyone with an easily bruised ego tends to be weeded out pretty quickly.

Theres almost always been the unwritten rule that the people who are there deserve to be there. The WoW guild I'm in currently doesn't even bother with trials anymore, if you're a good player who fits with the guild then you get a spot. Easy as that. Admittedly we're far from the best guild out there, but we have consistently cleared Mythic Raids when they were relevent content.

At least in WoW anyway, I've not really done much Savage content in FF14 due to time constraints. All of my FF14 raiding has been pugged on a very ad-hoc basis so I can't really comment on what that community is like. I've not seen anything that's been too different from WoW, aside from the requirements being significantly higher. The general attitude in FF14 is "We're going to one shot this", where when I pug in WoW it's generally "We're going to complete this even if we wipe a couple of times along the way". Part of that is SL being relatively new and people still needing to learn all the ins and outs of a M+ run of course, but it's generally always been the case when you're pushing a high key that you accept theres a chance of failure. Not that it really matters, anything beyond a +15 is just for bragging rights anyway and most people treat it as such.

As a general observation, the "toxic" parts of most games player base is in the upper-middle, where players are accomplished enough to have some skill and experience under their belt, but aren't good enough to make the move to the upper tiers. It's a here where players tend to get stuck, and they vent that frustration on others.

The guys at the bottom know they're bad and don't care, they're having fun with it regardless.

I had to take one for the team for that.

F

It was worth it!

That was me as well. I don't even bother with most grouped content anymore, outside of pugging old raids for mount drops.

I'll happily pug pretty much anything, usually as a Tank. I'm either very brave or very foolish and I'm not sure which.

[Merie]

Anyone know how many sundered Ascians are left? I wonder if they're really content to simply let Fanny do whatever he wants now that the paragons are gone or if there would be internal strife.

[Thestrawman]

Anyone know how many sundered Ascians are left? I wonder if they're really content to simply let Fanny do whatever he wants now that the paragons are gone or if there would be internal strife.

We know of two in total at the moment. One is on our side and Fandaniel. That'll probably be all that are left, since the story concerning them is wrapping up and the items required to make more are lost.

[KrayZ33]

I'm kinda hyped for the new DPS class, seeing how they share loot with DRG.
I hope it will be some kind of hammer-wielding DPS.