[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Pannonian]

An example I can give for a specific fight is Reaper on P2S. You use the early gluttony opener and you basically have to keep Gluttony on CD using a modified Shroud rotation during your 2 minute burst. If you do it correctly you can use Gluttony and Gibbet and Gallows before the boss becomes untargetable and starts jumping around the room. This is very tight to the point where if you delay it by even 2 or 3 seconds you won't be able to fit it in. Not doing so really screws your Soul generation for the rest of the fight.

It's something that you probably won't notice at first but once you play a job a lot, you'll notice that you're at the exact same GCD at the exact same time on each fight and if you're not, it's because you screwed up and it might ruin your rotation down the line.

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lol yeah, not being able to pull the hood up is criminal

Haven't played RPR, as i main mch, but in p2s i can always shuffle a bit in the dmg down phase at around min.4-5 - the ability with the numbers - forgot the name.

More annoying to me is P3S adds, as all my stuff gets ready while icannot attack the boss (worse, wildfire gets ready while you do adds, so you have to sit on it for 15-20 secs).

As much as this is a downside - i see one big upside - it adds another layer on top for me: trying to find the perfect rotation for the boss for my group, but yeah, i get your gripe with it.

My biggest hatred is reserved though for missing half a gcd and everything come of 1 second too early or too late - just feels so wrong!

[KrayZ33]

Also I dunno what you're talking about with SAM. It's probably more strict than any job because it needs a very specific amount of Sen at certain points in the fight. Like, sure you can fix it but you're going to end up drifting your CDs away from raid buffs which is a big deal for high aDPS jobs like Samurai and Reaper.

I don't know at what level you start accepting "high end" parsing. But if it starts between 80-90% parses I can safely say I'm in there.
Samurai isn't strict at all in that regard.
You have several options to delay your burst by quite a bit without losing too much damage (if any at all)
And you can even speed it up like 6 GCDs or something roughly every 2 minutes.
Even our opener is pretty chill as we can't fully squeeze it in anyway.
Meaning you can start like 4 GCDs late and still get all the important stuff in there and you "only" lose out of on like 1-2 buffed combo finishers
which is already pretty low on the overall-potency chart.

Heck, my highest potency skills (2400 potency in 2 GCDs) can be delayed for basically 25 seconds without losing any damage at all.

Aside from that, most drifts are fixed by boss design as 100% uptime isn't always possible and not only that, more so than *ever* in this game, the raid right now has several mechanics at the 2 minute marks so that it's better to delay your raidbuffwindow a few seconds pretty much always.

Birb has quite a few (more than 3 times at the very least).
P2S has this split-numbers thingy (whatever it's called) which is also right after a window comes up.

[Katchii]

An example I can give for a specific fight is Reaper on P2S. You use the early gluttony opener and you basically have to keep Gluttony on CD using a modified Shroud rotation during your 2 minute burst. If you do it correctly you can use Gluttony and Gibbet and Gallows before the boss becomes untargetable and starts jumping around the room. This is very tight to the point where if you delay it by even 2 or 3 seconds you won't be able to fit it in. Not doing so really screws your Soul generation for the rest of the fight.

It's something that you probably won't notice at first but once you play a job a lot, you'll notice that you're at the exact same GCD at the exact same time on each fight and if you're not, it's because you screwed up and it might ruin your rotation down the line.

I imagine this is really only something you see so consistently in groups with consistent performance. I only do stuff with PUGs, and only on normal difficulty, so this is something I don't think I've ever seen. At least, not enough for me to think of it as a trend or anything other than a coincidence.

[Poppincaps]

I imagine this is really only something you see so consistently in groups with consistent performance. I only do stuff with PUGs, and only on normal difficulty, so this is something I don't think I've ever seen. At least, not enough for me to think of it as a trend or anything other than a coincidence.

It's pretty common if you play your rotation consistently and are doing the bosses repeatedly like you do when you're playing Savage. It's also somewhat dependent on your job as jobs like Bard, Dancer, and Red Mage will have some slight variance in their GCDs, but not in their overall rotational flow. If you're inconsistent either because you're not experienced with your rotation or the fight or your team requires you to adjust to bad boss positioning or failed mechanics, then you probably won't notice it or achieve it.

I dunno if there are spreadsheets out that have mapped out each fight down to the exact GCD for an optimal rotation in Endwalker, but they did exist in Shadowbringers.

[Katchii]

It's pretty common if you play your rotation consistently and are doing the bosses repeatedly like you do when you're playing Savage. It's also somewhat dependent on your job as jobs like Bard, Dancer, and Red Mage will have some slight variance in their GCDs, but not in their overall rotational flow. If you're inconsistent either because you're not experienced with your rotation or the fight or your team requires you to adjust to bad boss positioning or failed mechanics, then you probably won't notice it or achieve it.

I dunno if there are spreadsheets out that have mapped out each fight down to the exact GCD for an optimal rotation in Endwalker, but they did exist in Shadowbringers.

What I mean is it's not just YOUR rotation that's affecting the flow of combat, it's the overall group performance. The entire group's performance has to be consistent for the battle to progress in that same consistent manner. You just typically don't see that same level of consistency unless you're in a static group. Which as you said, is very likely in Savage content, but in normal mode PUGs, isn't common.

That was my issue with Summoner previously when I played it before the rework. Because I only ever did PUG/ Duty Finder/ Random group content where I was in my rotation in boss fights was almost always different.

[Poppincaps]

What I mean is it's not just YOUR rotation that's affecting the flow of combat, it's the overall group performance. The entire group's performance has to be consistent for the battle to progress in that same consistent manner. You just typically don't see that same level of consistency unless you're in a static group. Which as you said, is very likely in Savage content, but in normal mode PUGs, isn't common.

That was my issue with Summoner previously when I played it before the rework. Because I only ever did PUG/ Duty Finder/ Random group content where I was in my rotation in boss fights was almost always different.

I'm kinda confused by what you mean. Fights in FF14 are based on timers not on percentages like they are in WoW. Your entire team could just auto attack while you do your rotation and it'd be the same if they were also doing their rotations at the same time. Unless you're talking about having to adjust to random people not being consistent in terms of mechanics, but I mentioned that in my post.

[Wrecktangle]

What I mean is it's not just YOUR rotation that's affecting the flow of combat, it's the overall group performance. The entire group's performance has to be consistent for the battle to progress in that same consistent manner. You just typically don't see that same level of consistency unless you're in a static group. Which as you said, is very likely in Savage content, but in normal mode PUGs, isn't common.

That was my issue with Summoner previously when I played it before the rework. Because I only ever did PUG/ Duty Finder/ Random group content where I was in my rotation in boss fights was almost always different.

You don't really pull normal modes back to back repeatedly so it's not a fair comparison. If you did, You'd likely see similar results like we're mentioning in savage, and this is even true in pug savage, not just static.

[Katchii]

I'm kinda confused by what you mean. Fights in FF14 are based on timers not on percentages like they are in WoW. Your entire team could just auto attack while you do your rotation and it'd be the same if they were also doing their rotations at the same time. Unless you're talking about having to adjust to random people not being consistent in terms of mechanics, but I mentioned that in my post.

Mechanics happen on a timer, yes, but the invuln phases of bosses (phase changes usually) typically happen at specific HP break points. That's what I was referring to.

If you just stood there taking hits and not doing any damage, the boss wouldn't go through the same song and dance as if you were doing damage to it.

[StrawberryZebra]

It's been a core complaint of mine. Every single pull I'm at the exact same GCD at the exact same mechanic at the exact same with with no variation at all (PLD). My job is so strictly GCD mapped out that we have excel calculators that tell you the exact GCD order to get the best parses in a given fight.

Very few jobs have significant variation in their gameplay.

On the one hand, that does make it easier than some games to really get to know your job on a fundamental level. On the other it makes it so predictable you could probably write a simple script to play it for you. It's like learning to play the Piano, but you're stuck playing the same songs. You can play a handful really, really well but that's it.

You only get to learn new songs when another expansion comes along. For some people that's great, they like, or need, to learn things by rote. For others that's awful when you want to show how well you really know your job but are stuck doing the same thing over and over. Some people are happy playing Chopin's Nocturnes over and over, some people want to play Jazz.

The problem is that the majority of jobs are those that play the same music all expansion, with too few that get to play Jazz and wing it. I don't think either preference is really wrong, just that there are too few jobs in the former catagory and too few in the latter.

The irony is Wildstar wasn't a particularly solo friendly game, at least not at end game (I suppose most MMOs are solo for leveling at this point), so the statement was odd since they weren't serving the under-served market either.

Wildstar tried to be all things to all people - Thats part of the reason it burned out so quickly imo.

[Poppincaps]

Mechanics happen on a timer, yes, but the invuln phases of bosses (phase changes usually) typically happen at specific HP break points. That's what I was referring to.

If you just stood there taking hits and not doing any damage, the boss wouldn't go through the same song and dance as if you were doing damage to it.

That is not true for this tier at least with the exception of the final Savage boss, but that's a door boss situation and is essentially considered a different boss fight.

[Katchii]

That is not true for this tier at least with the exception of the final Savage boss, but that's a door boss situation and is essentially considered a different boss fight.

OK, but it's true for other/ previous bosses.

[Ghost of Cow]

OK, but it's true for other/ previous bosses.

Someone that raids more than me can chime in, but I really don't think this is true at all. Savage guides even included timelines of when everything was going to happen because it tends to be by time, not boss HP.

[Katchii]

Someone that raids more than me can chime in, but I really don't think this is true at all. Savage guides even included timelines of when everything was going to happen because it tends to be by time, not boss HP.

I'll look into it more, I never raided Savage and my experience in normal mode content is different than this.

I may be wrong, and if so I'll revise my view.

[Myradin]

Weren't we supposed to be getting female Hrothgar sometime during EW's patch cycle? Its weird they dont seem to have been mentioned

Color me super impressed, Yoshi-P is working on making FFXIV quite possibly the most solo friendly MMO on the market. Trusts will be available for all dungeons and eventually trials starting with ARR in 6.1. He said between speaking to Final Fantasy fans and market research, the main reason people aren't playing FFXIV is because they don't want to play with others.

Edit: I assume MSQ roulette is going away in 6.1, both Castrum and Prae are being turned into 4-mans.

Also impressed with the graphical upgrades, the models look the same just better as opposed to WoW where some of us didn't recognize our characters afterwards. >_>

FFXIV's models are already pretty decent, so all they're doing is increasing texture resolution and improving material shaders and lghting.

Upgrading wow's models was a more daunting task due to the models themselves being rather old and terrible from a technical standpoint. Could blizzard have done a better job updating thm? For sure, my draenei never felt the same after, but what FFXIV's doing is considerably easier considering their models are already pretty solid (outside of fingers and feet omg).

[Ghost of Cow]

FFXIV's models are already pretty decent, so all they're doing is increasing texture resolution and improving material shaders and lghting.

Yeah, the models themselves really aren't bad. The thing that would need updating the most - at least in my opinion - is all the gear that looks like it's out of the SNES era if you look too closely.

[Wrecktangle]

I'll look into it more, I never raided Savage and my experience in normal mode content is different than this.

I may be wrong, and if so I'll revise my view.

Almost all content post HW is this way, every once in a while they sneak something in, but for the most part it's strictly timer based. ARR had a lot of content (trials especially) that were driven by time and/or HP%, which IMO made for some of the best content, but also some of the wonkiest to do later when synced/overgeared.

[Katchii]

Almost all content post HW is this way, every once in a while they sneak something in, but for the most part it's strictly timer based. ARR had a lot of content (trials especially) that were driven by time and/or HP%, which IMO made for some of the best content, but also some of the wonkiest to do later when synced/overgeared.

Fair enough.

I do remember the wonky-ness of the ARR trials with the ultimate being gated behind HP wiping groups if they didn't do the mechanics to clear the adds because they either didn't get to see the adds because the boss was dying so fast or because of DoT's or something else hitting the boss while the adds were up.

But I'm more remembering 24 man mechanics. Now that I think more about the fights and how they flow, most of them do just flow on a timer, for the most part. But there are still typically a ~50% HP phase switch where they do an ultimate that you have to watch for. Most trials have this too (I distinctly remember Titania Savage having this). Or maybe I'm just correlating the phase switch to an HP% because that's about what HP% the switch happened?

Regardless, I'm just typically along for the ride paying attention to the mechanic and not the timer, and it's why I enjoy Red Mage and Dancer so much, the rotations are not as static as the others and feel more organic than most.

[Wrecktangle]

Fair enough.

I do remember the wonky-ness of the ARR trials with the ultimate being gated behind HP wiping groups if they didn't do the mechanics to clear the adds because they either didn't get to see the adds because the boss was dying so fast or because of DoT's or something else hitting the boss while the adds were up.

But I'm more remembering 24 man mechanics. Now that I think more about the fights and how they flow, most of them do just flow on a timer, for the most part. But there are still typically a ~50% HP phase switch where they do an ultimate that you have to watch for. Most trials have this too (I distinctly remember Titania Savage having this). Or maybe I'm just correlating the phase switch to an HP% because that's about what HP% the switch happened?

Regardless, I'm just typically along for the ride paying attention to the mechanic and not the timer, and it's why I enjoy Red Mage and Dancer so much, the rotations are not as static as the others and feel more organic than most.

While I'm not an expert on 24 man raid mechanics because I typically don't do them more than once (unless you're the madman like me who actually enjoys casually running the ivalice raids) I think you nailed it yourself when you correlated the phase switch to an HP%, not actual design; which is further proof to what I and some of the others were unfortunately talking about when we said, same GCD, same exact mechanic, at the same tempo every single time.

[Lane]

Upgrading wow's models was a more daunting task due to the models themselves being rather old and terrible from a technical standpoint. Could blizzard have done a better job updating thm? For sure, my draenei never felt the same after, but what FFXIV's doing is considerably easier considering their models are already pretty solid (outside of fingers and feet omg).

Blizzard didn't even try with some of the models. It's interesting you're the second person to mention Draenei, one of the races I thought came out the best (relatively). Mine looked mostly the same if not a bit better. Humans and NEs were absolutely butchered though and with 1-2 exceptions ended up with all new faces that didn't bear even the slightest resemblance to their originals. Compare to BEs who look like natural upgrades.

I was hoping for some model modifications in FFXIV, hands and feet like you mentioned. I also wish they'd fix the Elezen to be more proportional. The head to shoulders ratio is ridiculous and it's not just the fault of the long neck. I made a max height Highlander and her head was almost double the size of an equal height Elezen. Elven races are usually the most attractive, but Elezen always look like a gangly mess.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Well I like that the aesthetic of my character isn't being totally changed.

While I like the updated WoW models, I didn't like how they Disneyfied. I used to be a badass steely eyed beastman who would mess up puny humans. I'm okay with my new look but I wish I looked as cool as I was back then.

For FFXIV characters, what stands out the most is the hair. Wish they'd fix that.