[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[StrawberryZebra]

Hence why we need more mechanics and methods to fail that isn't an instagib or insta wipe w/o burdening the healers more.

And what would you suggest?

Having a fail be a DPS penalty ends up with Enrage timers either having to be so lenient that the boss is a complete pushover, or so tight that a single fail ends with an Enrage and the boss oneshotting everyone.

Having a "Sin Bin" of sorts, where a player is removed from the fight temporarily, leads to the same issues. Where the encounter can either be super easy to account for people failing, or so tight that a single failure is a wipe. Having a healer get sin binned both puts extra pressure on the remaining healer and punishes the one who failed.

If you're unwilling to use Healer MP to pay for a groups mistakes, then what do we really have left?

Some Heroic progression in WotLK was like this, too. Sometimes you'd get to where every healer was spamming their biggest shit on the tank and he'd still fall over. Just not a fun system and doesn't let good healers really shine.

The only fight I recall being that bad was Gormok the Impaler in TOGC, and even he wasn't quite Sunwell levels of bad. I certainly don't recall it happening in Naxx or Uldir, and never outside of mechanics failures in ICC. I could be wrong though, but I don't really remember it being a thing.

[Super Kami Dende]

I also never saw a radical change happen in WoW. Healing is still a game of "react fast and pump up their HP as fast as you can before the next big unavoidable AoE kicks in" Not that far off from missing a healing GCD = a wipe like it was back in Sunwell.
I don't think you can do much else to challenge healers in games like this.

What. The entire Tank and Ability prune nerfs to many classes was because a lot of Def CDs made people far to self-sufficient and Healers basically needed to have some of the possible fuckups moved back on to them.

[Granyala]

And what would you suggest?
Having a fail be a DPS penalty ends up with Enrage timers either having to be so lenient that the boss is a complete pushover, or so tight that a single fail ends with an Enrage and the boss oneshotting everyone.

How about designing the encounter to be difficult in itself beyond just hitting some stupid enrage timer?
You could offset the ease on the healing burden by limiting in combat rezzes.

That would shift the focus away from "gogo healer pick up the slack of our failings, lets see how much you can compensate for!11" to "Hmm we better not fail so much or it is a wipe".
Enrage would be the net result of too many mistakes, just as it is right now.

A DPS failing should carry an equal penalty to a healer or tank failing.

[Eleccybubb]

Holy shit.

Pyros is so damn better than Pagos. I'd say it's better than Anemos tbh.

Finally decided to just do it and already 50 with +2 wep in Pyros in like 2 days. Probably only gonna use the weapon for glam anyway since you don't need to light farm to take it into Hydatos.

Plus got the mount and sold it for a tasty 8 mil.

[Granyala]

I've heard that but I can't suffer through Pagos.
No.mount alone is enough to make me ragequit in minutes. >.<

[dope_danny]

Yeah i'm still not touching it. Last time something was that anti fun to me in an mmo it was called Warlords of Dreanor. i got my Omega weapon ages ago and have absolutely no desire to run goldbot sim 2k18 for a pity relic. The activity itself is so mindless no reward makes the time you will have put in by the end worth it.

[Wrecktangle]

Some Heroic progression in WotLK was like this, too. Sometimes you'd get to where every healer was spamming their biggest shit on the tank and he'd still fall over. Just not a fun system and doesn't let good healers really shine.

It's tough, because a few of my guild healers and my IRL buddy swear up and down that they loved that era of healing the most. They loved the stakes and how there was a clear difference between a good healer and a bad one (to be clear there still is, but the floor was brought up considerably in that regard).

The only fight I recall being that bad was Gormok the Impaler in TOGC, and even he wasn't quite Sunwell levels of bad. I certainly don't recall it happening in Naxx or Uldir, and never outside of mechanics failures in ICC. I could be wrong though, but I don't really remember it being a thing.

Off the top of my head, I remember Instructor & Patchwork in Nax, HM Iron Assembly & Algalon in Ulduar, Phase 3 Putricide, Adds on HM Lich King in ICC. Agreed not that many in the scope, but during progression I do remember tank healing requirements being very high.

How about designing the encounter to be difficult in itself beyond just hitting some stupid enrage timer?
You could offset the ease on the healing burden by limiting in combat rezzes.

A DPS failing should carry an equal penalty to a healer or tank failing.

Agreed in theory, although personally I think it's ok to have some mechanics carry differing penalties for the roles. We saw this a lot in WoW where we had a very weak healer team, and lots of Ex top tier DPS so we'd focus on those DPS based fights first and then when healers were geared up go back for those more demanding ones.

Regarding your example above though I find that the most useful way to approach this type of topic is to give an actual example. It's easy to say oh just design it to be difficult, but that is generic and un-insightful.

Take an existing encounter or job and explain the differences.

[Granyala]

Agreed in theory, although personally I think it's ok to have some mechanics carry differing penalties for the roles. We saw this a lot in WoW where we had a very weak healer team, and lots of Ex top tier DPS so we'd focus on those DPS based fights first and then when healers were geared up go back for those more demanding ones.

Regarding your example above though I find that the most useful way to approach this type of topic is to give an actual example. It's easy to say oh just design it to be difficult, but that is generic and un-insightful.

Take an existing encounter or job and explain the differences.

Yes, I agree that there should be mechanics for healers, mechanics for tanks and mechanics for DPS to follow. The general gist of what I am saying is: I want DPS to have more responsibility than only caring whether THEY die or whether their E-Peen might end up a few µm shorter.

Not every mechanic that a DPS fails needs to result in taking heavy damage or eating a vulnerability stack b/c ultimately, if the DPS knows that he survives this, the DPS doesn't care and offloads the effort onto the healer. Giving him a significant damage down debuff would make him care more b/c
a) the raid might wipe due to enrage
b) his E-Peen is gimped

As for actual design examples: Well how can you realistically punish a DPS w/o punishing s/o else? Damage down is pretty much the only way. CC might kill him (healer has to rezz his arse), damage he doesn't care about unless it kills him. And ... well.... that's pretty much it what encounters can do these days.


As for design examples: personally I am fond of soft enrages. Difficult phases:
e.g. very heal intense or heavy on tank cooldowns or generally progressively overwhelming via add spawns etc.

Imho the above is much more interesting than some binary "yo, lets see if you can dps the orb hard enough to not make it go boom and instagib the raid".
As for the hard enrage: you need those but here I also prefer a gradual overwhelming enrage (eg: boss collecting damage up stacks etc) to "ok playtime's over!11" hard instagib casts.

From a players perspective, I find it more fun if you can eek out a few more precious seconds by insane CD stacking or creative tanking compared to the alternative.

[StrawberryZebra]

The general gist of what I am saying is: I want DPS to have more responsibility than only caring whether THEY die or whether their E-Peen might end up a few µm shorter

Unfortunately, FF14 is lacking in DPS exclusive mechanics you can use to shift some responsibility onto them. Interrupts, for example, would be one way. Not an original way, sure, but one that would work. Having bosses reflect damage can work too, though that also puts some of the burden back onto the healers. Maybe have threat be a serious issue for DPS to have to deal with? Not brilliant either, but it does help separate the good DPS from the bad.

Having DPS need to kite adds, use clicky items and similar one off mechanics isn't ideal. They can be quite gimicky and can potentially be done by others. So could having to apply CC, looking beyond the fact that hard CC abilities are extremely rare and almost never used outside of PvP.

I mean... What else is really left? Without adding some more mechanics into the mix, you're not left with a lot of ways you can really have responsibility pushed onto DPS. And Squenix have been very reluctant to move out of their very traditional safe zone when it comes to new ideas.

[Granyala]

I mean... What else is really left?

Yep, not much, that's probably why they rely so heavily on their beloved enrage timers.

Even WoW has that problem an mostly gets around it with gimmicky stuff that gets assigned to 1-2 people you know can handle it. Encounters in which every DPS had to think for themselves and react individually have traditionally been the hardest.

Dishing out individual damage downs instead of damage in would be one option to force them to obey mechanics or risk wiping the raid due to enrage timer.

Alas, I don't have any brilliant ideas myself. Not surprising, if even professional gameDEVs can't seem to come up with a lot.

[StrawberryZebra]

Yep, not much, that's probably why they rely so heavily on their beloved enrage timers.

Oh there are ways you can make things tough for DPS. Single Player games have great examples of this, like Divinity Original Sin 1, where bosses will counter attack various elemental attacks, or will move in response to various attack types. Or think of a boss fight from old SNES era games, where you've got to learn the pattern before you can deal any damage to the boss. Hell, maybe even go all out on this one and have vertical blocks DPS need to climb to hit the right body part. It doesn't really matter what it you're asking the DPS to do, as long as they all have to do it, but it doesn't apply to the Tanks or Healer.

The real issue however is that given how basic FF14 is at it's core, I doubt their game engine is set up in a way where it could handle those kinds of mechanics in a boss fight. I've always had the impression that they intentionally kept things simple, I can't see them suddenly ramping up the complexity for themselves just to fix something they, likely, don't consider a problem.

[Katchii]

Oh there are ways you can make things tough for DPS. Single Player games have great examples of this, like Divinity Original Sin 1, where bosses will counter attack various elemental attacks, or will move in response to various attack types. Or think of a boss fight from old SNES era games, where you've got to learn the pattern before you can deal any damage to the boss. Hell, maybe even go all out on this one and have vertical blocks DPS need to climb to hit the right body part. It doesn't really matter what it you're asking the DPS to do, as long as they all have to do it, but it doesn't apply to the Tanks or Healer.

The real issue however is that given how basic FF14 is at it's core, I doubt their game engine is set up in a way where it could handle those kinds of mechanics in a boss fight. I've always had the impression that they intentionally kept things simple, I can't see them suddenly ramping up the complexity for themselves just to fix something they, likely, don't consider a problem.

As you said, there are a ton of single player examples that could be pulled from to make DPS'ing in encounters more interesting, but I just don't see them taking the time to implement them, especially when some of those examples could simply be circumvented by clever positioning of ranged DPS or something, or some other mechanic that heavily favors melee vs range, physical vs magical, etc...

Although one of the mechanics I think they could use more is the one that we saw in Castrum Abania where you have to shift to the right element to attack the boss and do damage or you end up dying.

I don't mind gimmicky fights either as they break up the monotony, so long as they're not overused, overly convoluted or cumbersome like the Oculus fight in WoW during WotLK.

I don't think FFXIV is really missing interesting mechanics, they just overuse everything and don't mix things up or deviate from specific patterns and have a pathetic few things on most bosses.

[Granyala]

I don't mind gimmicky fights either as they break up the monotony, so long as they're not overused, overly convoluted or cumbersome like the Oculus fight in WoW during WotLK.

I don't think FFXIV is really missing interesting mechanics, they just overuse everything and don't mix things up or deviate from specific patterns and have a pathetic few things on most bosses.

People still complain about the Oculus fight? Man that thing was easy.
My only complaint with Oculus was the constant -> onto the dragon -> off the dragon -> on -> off... ugh.

I don't believe that they have pathetic few things on savage bosses to be honest. Oftentimes there is a lot of crap going on at the same time and it takes time to learn how to deal with it.

[Katchii]

People still complain about the Oculus fight? Man that thing was easy.
My only complaint with Oculus was the constant -> onto the dragon -> off the dragon -> on -> off... ugh.

I don't believe that they have pathetic few things on savage bosses to be honest. Oftentimes there is a lot of crap going on at the same time and it takes time to learn how to deal with it.

The top tier difficulty stuff does have a lot more going on, I was more referencing the rest of the content, which makes up the majority of the rest of the game.

People don’t just complain, they still leave the dungeon immediately upon getting into Oculus. Not many, but some.

[Granyala]

The top tier difficulty stuff does have a lot more going on, I was more referencing the rest of the content, which makes up the majority of the rest of the game.

Yeah I agree that it is rather simple but you already have more than enough people failing, so I don't think more complexity would be a good thing.
More variety on the other hand would be appreciated.

[Wrecktangle]

So I picked up MHW on Steam winter sale with the SOLE intention of fighting Behemoth and acquiring the Dragoon gear. About 70 hours in and I finally accomplished it.

1) Their rendition of Behemoth was fantastic, I literally enjoyed every second of it. The notion of aggro felt real. In that if Behemoth didn't have a target, he was running rampant and causing a ton of a chaos (just like if a tank doesn't have threat in an MMO). It felt much better than in FF14, because it wasn't an instant wipe. You could delay, recover, or just survive.

His attacks felt real and weighty and you could do a lot of things to help tone down his oppressive behavior. Cutting his tail off made his tail swipe much easier to dodge. Breaking his horns removed his ability to murder someone with a gore. Charybdis is both powerful and relevant (and can be countered). The meteor/comet placements, and boss positioning felt perfect. There were real consequences for disrespecting mechanics or poor decisions. Ecliptic Meteor looks as impressive as it feels and is equally as dangerous.

All in all, it is proof IMO that this style of play could truly exist and well. The idea of battling traditional raid mechanics in a 3rd person action combat game felt right. I know it gets a lot of shit for being a casual buster/too hard, but I think with a proper difficulty curve in a game it could work.

2) The Drachen armor and Gae Bolg/Midgarsormr is perfect. The armor is both powerful and looks great. The real cherry though is that the weapon comes with the Blood of the Dragon effect when you vault jump (it has the swirling blue Dragon) and when you air dodge/attack. Then to tie it all in, your "Kinsect" is the Aether representation of Midgarsorm. He literally fights with you gathering buffs and marking areas of the enemy to inflict various status'.

I do however have ONE annoying issue with the set though. The weapon has a pretty cringy sound effect. Like metal spoons clanking together when swinging it around. I never noticed it on any other weapon.

Other than the sound issue, I genuinely fail to see how they could have done it better. The Insect Glaive is a cool weapon in its own right, and plays exactly like how I would imagine a Dragoon would.

Yes, I agree that there should be mechanics for healers, mechanics for tanks and mechanics for DPS to follow. The general gist of what I am saying is: I want DPS to have more responsibility than only caring whether THEY die or whether their E-Peen might end up a few µm shorter.

We're in agreement there. Although I'm not sure if my point came across correctly. I was saying that I agree that roles should have equal responsibility, but I said I do like the practice of different encounters offering differing levels of punishment for the rules. A great example IMO was the original 3 EX Primals. Garuda EX was a HUGE tank coordination check, not terrible on DPS/Healers. Titan EX was very easy for tanks. Near trivial actually, but had a really tight DPS check and coordination check on jails. Ifrit EX was largely trivial as a DPS, Healers had to be on point with positioning and awareness.

I'm also a fan of DPS having more responsibility other than pew pew.

As for actual design examples: Well how can you realistically punish a DPS w/o punishing s/o else? Damage down is pretty much the only way. CC might kill him (healer has to rezz his arse), damage he doesn't care about unless it kills him. And ... well.... that's pretty much it what encounters can do these days.

Within constraints of the existing design space? You can't. It's a binary game through and through.

Looking forward though - I'd argue you don't necessarily punish the DPS themselves, but rather the team for them failing. Good examples I've given before could be:

1) Implementing CC - Bosses have moves that can be interrupted via CC (or interrupts, or some similar system). Only DPS get interrupts/CC. These moves aren't 1 hit ko's, but rather impact the encounter negatively that lead to snowballing. Speaking personally I'd wishlist this as a tanks responsibility as well though, but make sure they can't do it alone.

2) Simultaneous DPS Checks - Please stop with the interim DPS checks. Look back to stuff like Titan EX, Levi EX, T6. Where add priority, positioning, and timing mattered. We need more frequent adds, and simultaneous with bosses.

3) Wreck's Eureka design - Rather than having separate adds, you could have a boss consist of several "parts". Some parts could have properties to discourage AOE, or need much more frequent ST damage to keep up. I.e. Let's imagine the Guard Scorpion dungeon boss from Ala Mhigo. Instead of being a single enemy he'd be main target, but you could also target his Tail, and each gun individually so 4 targets total. A great example of this was the Totorak end boss and Shinryu (although killing the tail should have been deeper than just additional damage on boss).

The idea would be that each part might have a mechanic or two to itself. For instance the guns might have a tank buster channel, and a wide spray unavoidable AOE damage. Killing one reduces the range of AOE making it avoidable, and the reduces the tank buster damage or removes a detrimental effect from it. I.e. Tail Laser has another tankbuster that leaves a Melt Armor debuff, increasing damage taken by X% for the next Y seconds and slows movement by a significant margin (thus making follow up mechanics, positioning, kiting, damage mitigation, etc. much harder).

As for design examples: personally I am fond of soft enrages. Difficult phases:
e.g. very heal intense or heavy on tank cooldowns or generally progressively overwhelming via add spawns etc.

Imho the above is much more interesting than some binary "yo, lets see if you can dps the orb hard enough to not make it go boom and instagib the raid".
As for the hard enrage: you need those but here I also prefer a gradual overwhelming enrage (eg: boss collecting damage up stacks etc) to "ok playtime's over!11" hard instagib casts.

From a players perspective, I find it more fun if you can eek out a few more precious seconds by insane CD stacking or creative tanking compared to the alternative.

Preach - agreed wholeheartedly here.

[Katchii]

Yeah I agree that it is rather simple but you already have more than enough people failing, so I don't think more complexity would be a good thing.
More variety on the other hand would be appreciated.

Mostly agree, variety would absolutely be appreciated, but I also think a little more complexity would as well because that would add variety on its own and also make fights a lot more interesting than what we have now.Take demon wall in Amdapor Keep normal, that's a great fight, especially when it was current. It wasn't especially hard, you just had to pay attention, and had multiple mechanics to pay attention to throughout and it felt like an accomplishment when you completed it without any issues. That's the level of complexity I'd be asking for mostly.

People leave oculus because it takes longer than other spam dungeons.

People who queue for random dungeons and then leave when getting the "longer" dungeon when none of them take long, are fucking idiots, because the deserter debuff takes longer than completing the dungeon would have.

The only actual complaints I've ever seen about the dungeon were about the dragons you had to ride and dismount constantly, but I agree with this sentiment. If they don't say anything, it's hard to tell what they're thinking.

[StrawberryZebra]

People still complain about the Oculus fight? Man that thing was easy.
My only complaint with Oculus was the constant -> onto the dragon -> off the dragon -> on -> off... ugh.

I don't believe that they have pathetic few things on savage bosses to be honest. Oftentimes there is a lot of crap going on at the same time and it takes time to learn how to deal with it.

The Oculus was a very poorly designed dungeon. Thankfully Blizz seemed to have learned from it and haven't repeated it since. Vehicle exclusive bosses are also avoided too, partly because players don't like them and partly because they're stupidly easy when you've got the hang of it.

I admit, I've never really felt overwhelmed by things happening in FF14. I suppose a lot of that is being a WoW raider in the past, so I've already developed those skills. I can keep track of timers, phase changes etc and know where I need to be in the next 5 seconds, the next 10, 20 and so on. You don't panic when you're ready for the AoE and already in a safe spot before it triggers. There just comes a point where nothing really surprises you anymore.

[Remilia]

Honestly, some of the things that are limiting is actually the combat style itself. In an action game (like MHW mentioned above) or FPS, you can do some rather interesting things just due to the sheer nature of it. Sure everyone is kind of a DPS but you can get some amusing things. That said, reliance on each other is a bit of a problem for some people cause 1 person failing = wipe.

For example (the non hard mode one anyways). Iirc the strategy. Basic run down is that someone will be chosen (random in hard mode) and so people will need to jump onto the platform in the correct order and the person chosen will have to jump all the way up to grab a relic in order to get an aura of invincibility (or whatever it's called). In the mean time the DPS needs to kill the adds and kill 4 ogres which spawns a corrupted light which needs to be detonated by people in order to damage Oryx and stun him before he blows up everyone.
Phase 2 he'll port people into a bubble slowly and you need to kill his shadow while the people outside needs to control the adds and kill them before they get inside. People inside can't heal by normal means so adds need to be taken care of pretty well.

Video below is not really a 'meta build' as newer builds makes it vastly easier on the DPS phase (and requires head shotting admittedly).


All said however, the problem is really that in a tab target kind of game play, it's way easier to burden the healer or tank than it is to burden DPS. Punishing DPS would in some form punish healers or tanks to pick up some of the slack or just wipe. I don't really have any solution honestly without an entire shift in combat style.
The encounter above in a tab target play style would be insanely easy to manage, but when you put it in an FPS with mobs on different levels sniping you and having to platform + precision shots, it's completely different feel to it all. If anything it's cause numbers don't matter and individual skill matters more.

[Katchii]

I assumed it was the length, as they don't say anything just leave.
But if people are really complaining about the dragons then what the actual fuck, I mean I look forward to getting oculus so it's a break from the aoe snore fest of every other dungeon.

Well, it IS longer than some of the dungeons you can get, but not egregiously so, and still takes less time than the deserter debuff takes to fall off so you can queue again. But none of the WotLK dungeons are particularly fast. Straight up questing is still by far the fastest way anyway, so if you're queuing for random dungeons to level faster you're doing it wrong anyway, so leaving because it's too long just doesn't make any sense IMO.

Regardless, back on-topic. Dungeons in WoW have a lot of cool things going on most of the time. Even if the fights are relatively simple, the mechanics are varied and interesting. FFXIV could take a page from WoW's book here. I think part of it is the visual effects tied to certain things in FFXIV vs WoW. In WoW, even if it's the exact same mechanic, it LOOKS different. In FFXIV, if it's a stack mechanic, you see the giant circle arrow thingy, if you're meant to dodge it, you see a big glowy shape on the ground that's the same as the glowy shape you saw on the ground in every other encounter you've been in, or it's the red arrow, or the blue arrow, or some other visual indicator that looks identical to the visual indicator you've seen since Level 1.

After thinking about it I'm not sure FFXIV has less variety in it's mechanics than WoW, (well...WoW is FAR older so I'm sure there are things it does that FFXIV hasn't yet, but you get my point I think) it's just that in WoW the mechanics look different and therefore are able to feel different because the visual fits the aesthetic rather than in FFXIV the visual is always the same and therefore the aesthetic is always the same so it feels far less varied than it actually is.

Anyone else feel this way or notice this?