Last edited by Kyriani; 2019-08-11 at 07:56 PM.
This is the kind of mindset I don't understand. Waiting 1-2 seconds for something? What about Limit Breaks, they're 3 seconds to cast in addition to their long animations. You're not "doing nothing" during that time, you're still engaged in combat. There are ways to have time where the player isn't actively hitting buttons at every second without losing their interest.
Having small windows of downtime doesn't need to break up the flow of the game. First person Shooters do it all the time - Reloading your weapon in cover, that's a small break from the combat. That brief window gives you time to consider your next move. Are you going to try going around the side to flank or maybe now would be a good time to use a grenade? Perhaps you're just going to stick your head back out and carry on shooting. Even Doom, a game which is all about fast paced kinetic combat, gave players a couple of seconds breathing room with it's Glory Kills.
Turn based games are another great example. Just because it's not your turn to take action doesn't mean you're not still engaged in playing the game. You're considering your next move, what moves your opponents are going to make and so on.
All FF14 really has instead are transitions between phases, which are technically breaks but ones which disengage you from combat entirely. You pretty much just group up and wait for it to be over. I'd consider that a bad way to break up combat, where as my above example about reloading I'd consider a good way to break up combat. One is dictated by encounter design and leaves the player little to do but wait, while the other is an opportunity to think about what other options you have and when/if that break is taken is left entitrely at the discression of the player.
I've always considered MMO's to be low effort games by and large. Games that ask very little of me but my time. I've been ill this week and haven't really been up to playing anything too taxing so I figured I'd take it easy and play Summoner. Quite honestly, I'd have been better off playing Guilty Gear. It's less effort for me than DPSing FF14, and that game plays like this;
(Also Hi @Dugna, my forum Avatar is fighting yours! )
FF14 has slowly accumilated more and more oGCDs so what starts off being a reasonably slow paced combat eventually ends up being a challenge based heavilly on it's execution, much like hardcore fighters such as Guilty Gear. Is that an ideal comparison? No, perhaps not. But FF14 is slowly becoming a game where those execution barriers are presenting themselves as issues for players like @Advent. That's not to call them out as being "bad", only to highlight that this is a problem for players right now.
I do wonder where we'll be with it in another expansion or two. Do we want FF14 to be the MMO that requires precise execution across 40+ skills to play well? Do we want it to require 120 APM to excel at like Starcraft, or be a game that rewards well thought out decisions like Magic the Gathering? We're at something of a crossroads in the design at the moment and whichever path Squenix choose will shape the game and it's audience in the future.
There's a distinct difference, to me at least, between activating an ability with a cast time and "waiting" the same amount of time before you're allowed to do anything. Having a spell with a 4 second cast time is very different feeling than having to wait 4 seconds to hit an ability, at least in terms of game play feel.
True, the end result is the same, you have to wait 4 seconds between activating another ability. However, in one of those scenarios your character is literally doing nothing and in the other it's casting a spell. The difference may be small, but the difference in game play feel is pretty profound to me.
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All of those smaller sources of xp add up. You can be in queue for a dungeon while doing as many FATEs as possible, chugging along on side quests, doing Beast Tribes or tagging along on the hunt and hoping you get enough credit for gold.
Separately, none of them are spectacular, but they add up. That said, dungeons are the far better option, but you have to wait in queue as a DPS (unless you want to do Trusts which is a separate discussion, IMO) which means you have time to do something else to supplement the xp you're going to get from the dungeon.
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Depends on what you mean by "a shit ton" because I've been leveling alt jobs from 70-80 in a matter of 3-4 days pretty casually, doing the Roulettes, cruising around doing FATEs and side quests as I'm waiting on the queues and then queuing up for the highest level dungeon I can (if I get through all of that in the same day, which isn't often).
I could be doing Trusts and be going maybe a little faster, but I only use those as a last resort or if I just don't feel like doing side quests because they're so slow and predictable.
Yeah that's probably the #1 thing that makes me say that WoW's better for raiding than other games, the support. Y'know besides that their encounter design team is one of if not the best in the industry.
I remember playing Swtor and dealing with such nonsense to try and find a decent guild. Its so hard to filter through stuff when there's no support, people always talk big. I lucked out and found a great guild and then they announced they were going F2P and my guild dissolved and that was that for that game.
Last edited by Baconeggcheese; 2019-08-12 at 01:57 AM.
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
A majority of ff14 savage bosses don't require doing mechanics in sync together. For the most part it's just doing your own part so no, being in a group of 8 has no impact, the players just aren't that good. Every single boss this tier (up to e3s, since that's where I'm at), it's been everyone has their own role to do regardless of what the other people do. e3s is legit primal level difficulty, I'm not even exaggerating.
I was referring to: 1 player makes a mistake, dies = wipe, as it usually is in savage. Esp at these early gear levels where enrages are definitely an issue.
Very few people are that good that they can handle these encounters out of the box. I certainly can't and need at least 5-10 tries to get a hang of it. Multiply that by 8 and and you get 40-80 wipes quite easily.
Sure, doing JUST THEM MECHANICS is easy as f*** once you understand what to do. Doing the mechanics and playing your class at a high enough level to meet the demands of the design team? That requires a bit of practice. Not a whole lot, compared to sth. actually difficult like playing the piano, but you need to see stuff a few times.
Finally back from vacation time to finish off Titania.
Also Sch is p fun might make it my main healer over AST/WHM when I get it to 80.
Honorary member of the Baine Fanclub, the only member really.
Can't wait til my group gets leveled up (a few finally came over from wow) all this talk about savage but I refuse to do it with randoms because of bad experiences. Should be fun once we're there though!
I admit the example was intentionally exagerated, perhaps almost to the point of hyperbole, but I don't feel that undermines the point I was making.
Broadly speaking, I was stating that there are two directions FF14 could go from it's current design. One which is more execution heavy, with longer rotations and more oGCD's, more bosses with telegraphed AoEs you need to be watching closely to avoid and so on. A game where, fundamentally, the challenge is all in the execution of your rotation while avoiding AoE and doing mechanics.
The other direction, which I also exagerated in the extreme by comparing it with Magic the Gathering, is one where the gameplay revolves around making the right decisions in combat rather than on execution. Where carefully choosing the best option for the given situation from a larger pool is where the core gameplay loop lies.
Right now I'd say that most of the DPS jobs are skewed more towards the former, relying on lots of button presses in between other skills in your rotation while keeping a close eye on what the mobs/boss you're fighting are also doing. Most of the content in Shadowbringers has been in line with this too, with almost every single dungeon boss having a visual tell you need to be on the look out for if you want to avoid AoE. As a result, the people who prefer the latter option may not find what they're looking for from a DPS job.
Both are fine ways for the game to go of course, one isn't inherently better than the other, but with the game on the whole speeding up since Heavensward I do think it's right to question if it's either required or desirable.
Yes indeed.
You don't need to have long casts for it either. Like I brought up with my reloading example, there are ways you can do this so the player doesn't even know it's happening. What if you could hold down the button for 3 seconds to charge up the skill to do extra damage. That's a fun way to get a couple of seconds time out for the player to think about what they're doing without removing them from the experience.
How about having all your skills on cooldown? That's a brief window of downtime while you wait for them to be ready again. Or a multi-hitting super move with a long animation. There's lots of potential outside of FF14's long phase transitions.
Last edited by StrawberryZebra; 2019-08-12 at 04:42 PM.
I'm not against phase transitions in practice, what bothers me about them is how it affects the classes designed around ramp up and a timed payout. Like Summoner with Bahamut and Phoenix...they could go completely wasted if used right before a transition. Many classes were updated to mitigate that somewhat, like Monk and Black Mage, but there are still some that have abilities tied to a long build up like that.
In many cases the game play feel is far more important to me than what is actually going on, as long as I don't "feel" the down time within my game play it's not a big deal.
I like the charging idea, I would just wonder how that would work with latency and stuff. Much as far as player agency goes I like the idea behind that. It really would add a layer of depth and decision making to any class that had it.
True, pretty much all DPS classes have something like this, though some have it worse than others. With the changes made, Summoner and Machinist seem to be the most affected with how long it takes to build up to their big CD usage. Black Mage and Monk used to have it bad too, but that was practically eliminated with their changes.
I think that's why I gravitated towards Red Mage in Stormblood and Dancer now, neither one of those classes are heavily impacted by this sort of thing, recover quickly and can simply just start right into their main rotation with no, or very little, build up.
8-9k DPS? I'll take that any day over this:
Yes this was my expert roulette. Yes we tried to help. No he was not a sprout, and he was shittily geared (roughly i428). 0 deaths.
Speaking personally here - I don't like non-GCD locked classes. It's one of my chief complaints in WoW with regard to Ret. That's just me though. I like @Katchii don't mind some downtime, but excessive (and it doesn't take much for me to consider it excessive) is a detriment.
As a huge DS fan, the reason I like those games isn't the combat engine. It's arguably the weakest part of the game IMO. I like it because it's a fair but punishing game where every death is genuinely my own fault. I like the atmosphere and sense of exploration and the grandiosity of the boss encounters and the items.
It's really all about oGCD usage, shields and regens. I know that sounds stupid, but a great example is the dual tank buster. You do not have to heal the OT once, the entire encounter with like a direct heal. The tankbuster won't kill them and neither will the follow up Entropy. Let regens handle it. The entire 2nd flare phase has 0 damage going out expect autos. It's like a full minute and a half of unmitigated Glare spam lol. You don't need to panic heal the incoming damage from the flares, again regens will handle it.
The first bit of the fight has no real damage going out there either.
If you don't have free GCDs, then every single utility spell becomes a dps loss. In particular, I like Ret paladins being able to toss a Cleanse, a Blessing of Freedom, a heal or two, etc. To me, that's central to the class identity. Thus it's very important for Ret paladins to be non-GCD locked. Of course, it's possible to take this too far. See the design of the WoW Classic paladin, for example. Nothing but empty GCDs for you to spend utility on.
Now, FFXIV can get around this to a degree by making utility be off-GCD.