New 4.X open field monsters will be a shorter fight.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Being accessible to casuals does not mean that the world needs to be devoid of difficulty

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Have you seen the average DPS in duty finder? Did you see what happened to Steps of Faith? Did you see what happened to Gordias?

I don't want things to be the way they are, but I understand why they are the way they are, and it's a sad truth that if they want content to remain open to "everyone" they do have to neuter difficulty. At least there is hard content being developed as well, just in their own instances instead of open world. Anyone can go tackle them anytime they want instead of it being forced on everyone.

To answer "Why would there only be one level of difficulty in a given experience?", because they want open world content to be accessible for everybody, and again for that to be true they have to neuter difficulty or it won't be open for everybody. This is their design philosophy whether you like it or not.

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Why spend so much time developing a piece of content, if it's going to be ultimately meaningless

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Have we playing a different game in the last years? Every single piece of content is released with planned obsolescence in mind, FFXIV content is meant to be consumed right as it comes, with small repurposing in the form of roulettes in the case of instances and relics/gathering/hunts/etc in the case of open world.

To me it seems more like you people need to come in to terms about what this game is and is not, because again it's very clear the devs don't want to change their vision of the game.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Have you seen the average DPS in duty finder? Did you see what happened to Steps of Faith? Did you see what happened to Gordias?

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This. Like it or not, this playerbase is defined by its lack of skill, even compared to other MMO's.

The playerbase certainly isn't changing, so they have to cater to it. It's a sad reality.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Have you seen the average DPS in duty finder? Did you see what happened to Steps of Faith? Did you see what happened to Gordias?

I don't want things to be the way they are, but I understand why they are the way they are, and it's a sad truth that if they want content to remain open to "everyone" they do have to neuter difficulty. At least there is hard content being developed as well, just in their own instances instead of open world.

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Maybe this is just me talking as a teacher, but I don't see how anyone can expect otherwise when any real challenge and support were both nearly inexistant throughout content and gameplay leading up to them. Any alleged inability to make difficult content is due to their having already initially refused... to make proximally difficult content. That's like someone who's scarcely saved a penny saying that it's impossible to put aside a year's salary over their lifetime. It may have been more and more dehabituated, and may meet more resistance, but that's because the difficulty came later than it should have, and without much of any strong, purposeful entry when it did arrive (especially for those who skipped out on, say, content at minimum ilvl). Should XIV refuse to every try to bridge that gap through actually bringing their skills up, rather than just padding the (irrelevant, if they're not actually going to do anything challenging) difference with tome gear and other grindables, and pigeon-hole challenge into some glorified but tiny fraction of overall content?

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Originally Posted by alimdia

To answer "Why would there only be one level of difficulty in a given experience?", because they want open world content to be accessible for everybody, and again for that to be true they have to neuter difficulty or it won't be open for everybody. This is their design philosophy whether you like it or not.

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But you don't have to make open world content any less accessible in order to give it higher levels of difficulty. Not everything has to be devoid of triggers, conditions, or dynamics. Consider WoW's upward scaling for a moment, or dynamic spawns, or mob camps in skill-dependent MMOs (where less ambitious players can stealth kill one at a time, but a skilled player may pull the whole camp and nonetheless dodge every blow). By no means do you have to make the open world inaccessible to anyone to also make it potentially challenging for anyone.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Have we playing a different game in the last years? Every single piece of content is released with planned obsolescence in mind, FFXIV content is meant to be consumed right as it comes, with small repurposing in the form of roulettes in the case of instances and relics/gathering/hunts/etc in the case of open world.

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Have we been reading different forums? Has that system been reportedly ideal here? Inundating, perhaps, but almost never ideal. Do we really want to be paying primarily for reskins. As long as there is no aim to make the things you've designed actually last, and no aim to actually improve upon the deeper design philosophy, that's all it's going to be. I wonder how many pages I have to go back on general discussion to find complaints towards exactly that—or more likely, how many there'll be on the first page?

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Originally Posted by alimdia

To me it seems more like you people need to come in to terms about what this game is and is not, because again it's very clear the devs don't want to change their vision of the game.

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What can I say? Their loss. Complacency, short of a massive cult (in the sense of "cult-classic") player-base, has never meant increased subs. Nor has nearsightedness, frequent oversights, or content waste.

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Originally Posted by dragonseth07

This. Like it or not, this playerbase is defined by its lack of skill, even compared to other MMO's.

The playerbase certainly isn't changing, so they have to cater to it. It's a sad reality.

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Except games don't just cater to playerbases. They also shape them. Not to do so is immensely restrictive to any game's vision.

Isn't there specifically going to be an exploration zone with high hp mobs that you spend a lot of time grinding for rng loot?

I'm sure it will be a big hit.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Same reaction. The open world feels like a shallow skin of no consequence already. We need to make it more so? What?

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A thought with enemy monsters though, they just said they're decreasing the amount of time it takes to kill something. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be noticeably easier, for example, as a tradeoff for the lower hp they could increase the amount of damage it does single target or give it a few different telegraphs with a shorter cast time to make the fights more interesting and active. I don't know if they will do this but it's something to consider. Even leveling through HW there weren't really dangerous enemies but there were some that seemed to drag on because of their hp, that's not enemies being difficult that's just enemies being obtuse.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

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You're right, but to frame it from one teacher to another:

All of the players here are college freshmen taking a Gen Ed irrelevant to their major and are going to a party tonight.

I'm sure you've seen it: when something too hard for a player shows up, they don't think "How can I learn to beat this?" They either just want to get carried or cry about how hard it is.

There are exceptions to that rule of course. But, that is far and away most of this playerbase. The Dark Souls community has their philosophy of "Git Gud". Even new players get roped in, rather than spending their days whining. Here, the philosophy is "Stay Bad". And we do a great job teaching it with lovely phrases like "You don't pay my sub" and "Oh, yeah? How do you know how much damage I'm doing?"

Try as you might, you can't make someone care to learn. I've tried. Teaching at university, I learned very quickly when someone was a lost cause. This playerbase is mostly made up of lost causes.

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Originally Posted by dragonseth07

This. Like it or not, this playerbase is defined by its lack of skill, even compared to other MMO's.

The playerbase certainly isn't changing, so they have to cater to it. It's a sad reality.

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This is said of every mmo out there. That's why savage modes are important imo. And should be available for 4 man dungeons as well as primals and raids. And they should stick to the idea savage are hard and not nerf them. That way everyone gets content. Open world mobs in the end mean very little so whether or not they have small hp pools or larger ones is irrelevant.

In Heavensward the mobs are still reduced to gobflys even into the endgame of 3.0.

The problem, imo, is that the mobs in the open world are designed for a x.0 player to kill. Given that they are making the fight time shorter only seems to point that they will be even easier to kill, since even in HW, where they insisted on making the overworld mobs harder, they are still reduced to fodder after a rather short time after the player starts getting tome gear.

What should be done, is to set up mobs that would be scaled for the player that is deeper into the expansion, not just at its outset. Having sections where the flight or riding capability is no longer an escape option would also come to mind. (Garlean anti aircraft guns can't just be for their own ships, you know!)

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Maybe this is just me talking as a teacher, but I don't see how anyone can expect otherwise when any real challenge and support were both nearly inexistant throughout content and gameplay leading up to them. [...]

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You're coming from a point of view where if people are shown hard content they will learn and start to like to be challenged, that's not the reality, this is not school, if you don't like something you walk away and find another game that caters to you, this is what the devs fear, today's MMO market is over saturated, many new MMOs are coming out every year just to end up with a niche playerbase because people move on to the next flavor of the month, so losing a player for a difficulty experiment is not something they are going to do when their previous tests were met with failure (the two contents I mentioned).

I feel like for this point I have to mention the fact that this game was rebuilt after a failed launch, a failed launch is a massive financial hit for a game publisher, they took a gamble re-releasing it and it was a success, but the failed launch and how much it cost the company is something they will always keep in mind, and I believe the disaster that was 1.0 is the main thing preventing us from seeing innovations, they aren't gonna change the formula that "worked" and saved the game, they are gonna play safe until this game closes. Square Enix used to be two companies, Squaresoft and Enix, it was a failed CGI movie that nearly bankrupted Squaresoft and forced them to merge even after the success of FFVII, I think if ARR failed the company would have taken such a financial hit FFXV probably wouldn't be released right now and most other big projects would have been delayed.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

But you don't have to make open world content any less accessible in order to give it higher levels of difficulty. Not everything has to be devoid of triggers, conditions, or dynamics. Consider WoW's upward scaling for a moment, or dynamic spawns, or mob camps in skill-dependent MMOs (where less ambitious players can stealth kill one at a time, but a skilled player may pull the whole camp and nonetheless dodge every blow). By no means do you have to make the open world inaccessible to anyone to also make it potentially challenging for anyone.

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I think we might be thinking of different degrees of challenges here, when this topic comes up people usually want to see monsters that hit so hard you can't even solo one, like old school games, a type of difficulty like that means the less skilled (which unfortunately make up the majority of the players) would be the first at risk to quit the game over that.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Have we been reading different forums? Has that system been reportedly ideal here? Inundating, perhaps, but almost never ideal. Do we really want to be paying primarily for reskins. As long as there is no aim to make the things you've designed actually last, and no aim to actually improve upon the deeper design philosophy, that's all it's going to be. I wonder how many pages I have to go back on general discussion to find complaints towards exactly that—or more likely, how many there'll be on the first page?

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Of course you will find complaints of that, but as usual the people who visit the forums are a tiny percent of the people who play the game, so they rely on metrics, and if they have metrics showing many players capping tomes every week and looking forward to the next piece of consumable content, which group are they gonna listen to? I don't want to claim to know the percentage of people who would prefer a horizontal approach vs those who like the current formula, but if the former group was that big this game would have less active players, metrics would show a sharp decline in population, that doesn't seem to be the case.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

What can I say? Their loss. Complacency, short of a massive cult (in the sense of "cult-classic") player-base, has never meant increased subs. Nor has nearsightedness, frequent oversights, or content waste.

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Only time can tell if your opinion is right or not, so far the subs have been pretty stable with the current formula so evidence is not supporting your claim.

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Originally Posted by RaijinSupreme

Yeah having the mobs be harder to kill is just more annoying than anything. That may be what people liked back then, but it doesn't appeal to many of us who are playing this game today.

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Back in 1.x monsters didn't necessarily take ages to kill either. Things on your own level died fairly fast too.
What made the world dangerous was that 1. there were lots of really high monsters around that you had to look out for, take a wrong turn in the Shroud and you run into a giant tree that will oneshot you, take a shortcut outside Ul'dah and a drake will roast you, overestimate your abilities and take on an opponent that is too much for you and it will end badly for you and 2. normal enemies had actually dangerous abilities that you had to look out for. It didn't necessarily take long to kill a cactuar, but if you didn't evade it's 1000 needles (and nope, no bright red telegraphs), that was certain death, or if you got three skeletons, you learned that focusing them down one by one was a better idea than to AoE them since they siphoned off HP from you so they regnerated faster than you could damage them with the weaker aoe dmg and you'd run out of HP before you had them all down.

I'm not saying a dangerous overworld would necessarily be a good idea (even though I personally would love it), it is definitely an inconvenience and many would not like that.
But it's a fairly fun inconvenience, that also opens up amazing challenges (like servers banding together to beat a lvl 100 monster and stuff like that). I'm just saying, if you want to introduce danger to the overworld, do it right.
Higher HP pool of mobs = not danger.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

All the more reason not to give unlimited flight that purposely makes irrelevant all the topographical and mob assets you spent time developing.

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Take this sentiment to the World of Warcraft forums where it can die where it belongs. SE provides Flight the right way. It's fun, its rewarding without being punishing, and it gives players the full ground experience of a zone. Flight needs to stay.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

All the more reason not to give unlimited flight that purposely makes irrelevant all the topographical and mob assets you spent time developing.

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They already opened the flying can of worms, it's not going away any time soon.

But as far my view on flying:

Adding flying was the single best decision they added to the game just as it was the single best thing they added to WoW. Being able to just fly over all the inconvenient terrain and inconsequential trash mobs isn't a negative, it's a plus, a massive plus, a huge overwhelmingly absolutely awesome positive change that should stay right where it is. The way Blizzard is backtracking on flying and limiting it is actually one of the most horrible design decisions they ever made in my opinion. If anything, I'd rather be able to fly from the get go or barring that, at the very least have it automatically unlocked once we have a single job at whatever the new level cap is. There is a reason why people cheered when he said there would be flying and were booing when he announced requiring aether currents, I was booing it myself at home, just not as loudly.

Now you can certainly argue about how it makes enemies and terrain inconsequential, the solution to that isn't to ground us, it's to actually make us want to be on the ground more. Being able to just fly straight to an objective and skip all that nonsense is why I love flying so much. Being able to just get my exp so I can reach the required level for whatever main story quest as fast as possible is what my playstyle is, flying suits it just fine.

One thing I don't understand is if the open world mobs are supposed to be "hassle free", then why not just revert them to all be wildlife. Basically herds of mobs roaming across plains rather than static spawns of clusters. Then you can hunt and poach them if you want or just avoid and carry on without aggro. Then let the mobs have 1.0 behaviour where different species will prey on another.

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Originally Posted by Vexander

Flight needs to stay.

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I agree. The mobs and zones should just go instead.

It's a lot of resources we could put into instances. You could turn raids into actual locations instead of 4 boss rooms. 4 dungeons per patch instead of 2. Maybe even a 2nd 24 man raid. We can keep the main cities and housing areas as social hubs - it would be a bit like Fantasy Star online. Far more efficient resource usage IMO.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

I agree. The mobs and zones should just go instead.

It's a lot of resources we could put into instances. You could turn raids into actual locations instead of 4 boss rooms. 4 dungeons per patch instead of 2. Maybe even a 2nd 24 man raid. We can keep the main cities and housing areas as social hubs - it would be a bit like Fantasy Star online. Far more efficient resource usage IMO.

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Ew no. Mabinogi Heroes was like that and it doesn't even remotely feel like an actual game world, just like a single city with a handful of dungeons in a menu.

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Originally Posted by Atoli

just like a single city with a handful of dungeons in a menu.

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Like the people who sit in Idyllshire and queue for dungeons all day? >_>

No need to have HP sponges on the overworld, I'm happy with this.

There's a point where is too easy...
Yoshida, didn't Sophia teach us anything?

You can't make things too easy...balance

Have ANY of you actively tried to farm materials for crafting from enemy drops in 3.0? They tripled the amount of skin you need to make a single leather piece, and yet enemies take way longer to kill. Grinding enemies for crafting materials is a horrible waste of time,and the only reason they didn't already nerf it is that it is far more efficient to send your retainer to gather 10 skins per hour while you do more effective tasks.

Deepeye tears, skin, blood, scales... I just use retainers to farm it all. I've tried actively farming it, and its a waste. You don't even get reasonable xp from the stupid overbloated enemeis. I haven't actively fought non-fate, non-daily hunt monsters since 2.0. This change might actually get ME to engage in fighting normal mobs again. And that's good.

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Originally Posted by Gunspec

Have ANY of you actively tried to farm materials for crafting from enemy drops in 3.0? They tripled the amount of skin you need to make a single leather piece, and yet enemies take way longer to kill. Grinding enemies for crafting materials is a horrible waste of time,and the only reason they didn't already nerf it is that it is far more efficient to send your retainer to gather 10 skins per hour while you do more effective tasks.

Deepeye tears, skin, blood, scales... I just use retainers to farm it all.

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I thought that was the intent : to drive people who actively gathered their own materials for their own crafting to go ahead and rent the additional six retainers, so those retainers could go on ventures to gather the stuff rather than wasting the WoL's time getting them personally.

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Originally Posted by Gunspec

Have ANY of you actively tried to farm materials for crafting from enemy drops in 3.0? They tripled the amount of skin you need to make a single leather piece, and yet enemies take way longer to kill. Grinding enemies for crafting materials is a horrible waste of time,and the only reason they didn't already nerf it is that it is far more efficient to send your retainer to gather 10 skins per hour while you do more effective tasks.

Deepeye tears, skin, blood, scales... I just use retainers to farm it all. I've tried actively farming it, and its a waste. You don't even get reasonable xp from the stupid overbloated enemeis. I haven't actively fought non-fate, non-daily hunt monsters since 2.0. This change might actually get ME to engage in fighting normal mobs again. And that's good.

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Isn't that more a problem with crafting recipies and drops than difficulty?

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Originally Posted by dragonseth07

You're right, but to frame it from one teacher to another:

All of the players here are college freshmen taking a Gen Ed irrelevant to their major and are going to a party tonight.

I'm sure you've seen it: when something too hard for a player shows up, they don't think "How can I learn to beat this?" They either just want to get carried or cry about how hard it is.

There are exceptions to that rule of course. But, that is far and away most of this playerbase. The Dark Souls community has their philosophy of "Git Gud". Even new players get roped in, rather than spending their days whining. Here, the philosophy is "Stay Bad". And we do a great job teaching it with lovely phrases like "You don't pay my sub" and "Oh, yeah? How do you know how much damage I'm doing?"

Try as you might, you can't make someone care to learn. I've tried. Teaching at university, I learned very quickly when someone was a lost cause. This playerbase is mostly made up of lost causes.

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If that's the case, then by the same metaphor, this is a campus where only some 10% of students actually move beyond remedials and into the real deal. And that doesn't seem a shame? That doesn't seem utterly destructive to the point of the whole construct?

Personally, be in school or here, I've seen far too many "lost causes" succeed for that term to hold any significance. In XIV especially, I've seen people who "couldn't be bothered" enjoy difficulty immensely, as long as its introduced in proximal, intuitive steps.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

You're coming from a point of view where if people are shown hard content they will learn and start to like to be challenged, that's not the reality.

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That is exactly what I've seen here, though, small and anecdotal a sample or not. From what I've seen, it hasn't been primarily individual laziness or disinterest that would hold the playerbase back, but rather the communal idea of competence-irrelevance on one end, and that most people you meet will be irreparably incompetent on the other. And XIV has fostered that outlook. This is not an issue nearly as inherently powerful as it has become. It has been crafted, be that by design or negligence.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

I agree. The mobs and zones should just go instead.

It's a lot of resources we could put into instances. You could turn raids into actual locations instead of 4 boss rooms. 4 dungeons per patch instead of 2. Maybe even a 2nd 24 man raid. We can keep the main cities and housing areas as social hubs - it would be a bit like Fantasy Star online. Far more efficient resource usage IMO.

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Originally Posted by Atoli

Ew no. Mabinogi Heroes was like that and it doesn't even remotely feel like an actual game world, just like a single city with a handful of dungeons in a menu.

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What's the difference, though? You may as well have a panoramic in your room in front of a re-lootable chest if, as Khalithar pointed out, the entire point of flying is to avoid "inconvenient terrain" and "inconsequential mobs". Wouldn't gathering from home be more "convenient"?

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Originally Posted by Khalithar

Now while you can certainly argue about how it makes enemies and terrain inconsequential, the solution to that isn't to ground us, it's to actually make us want to be on the ground more. Being able to just fly straight to an objective and skip all that nonsense is why I love flying so much. Being able to just get my exp so I can reach the required level for whatever main story quest as fast as possible is what my playstyle is, flying suits it just fine.

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Now that first part I'm in complete agreement with, but probably for opposite reasons. I enjoy interacting with the environment in variety of ways. Flight, especially if includes a decent semblance of flight physics (sadly unseen in most MMOs), is amazing if it doesn't remove all reason to experience danger and to interact with topography. Now, that could be aerial enemies, wind currents, or even just limited flying mount stamina or availability, but in any of those cases, flight adds to, rather than effectively removes, previous assets and design.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Now that first part I'm in complete agreement with, but probably for opposite reasons. I enjoy interacting with the environment in variety of ways.

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And that is a perfectly fair way to look at things and is absolutely valid, we simply hold a different view on why we enjoy flying. I don't mind interacting with the world either, but my point when it comes to the "inconsequential" stuff, to put it in a more concrete example is this. What exactly is lost by when we have flying vs when we don't?

Example 1 (without flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

Example 2 (with flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

All flying does is speed up the process just a bit and that slightly more efficient process is exactly what *I* want.

But let's look at a way to make it more interesting. In this example, for argument's sake, let's pretend we have flying.

Example 3: You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, but on the way to get to the stuff you want to kill you suddenly notice on your minimap there is a rare spawn enemy that drops a nice piece of gear for whatever class you are when you kill him. However you notice he's in the back of a dark cave. Deciding you want the gear, you fight your way in through his cronies, possibly find a side quest that you can only see if you run in there, and finally you fight the rare spawn that has higher difficulty compared to other enemies in the zone but is still soloable and you get a nice piece of gear for your trouble and fight your way out.

Then you kill X amount of dudes for your quest and run back for your reward. Does it have to be gear rewards? No, obviously not, but if they do SOMETHING to make being on the ground worth our time? You can bet we'd be on the ground more often looking for interesting stuff and fighting rare enemies for gear/achievements/minions/mounts/etc. This most recent patch is good evidence of that, people weren't really in to PVP that much in this game, then Garo happened now PVP is jumping again, even if it's only for a little while.

One of the reasons why I enjoyed the HW areas was because the enemies were so powerful. If I had to pick a fight, I'd make sure it was with one enemy and I'd tread carefully. I couldn't just run through a pack of 20 enemies like it was nothing.

It also made me appreciate flying so much more. It felt like a relief and a reward for getting through it all the first time.

With weaker enemies, unlocking flying will feel less rewarding imo.

Pfft..casuals.. Keep it up Yoshida. You're doing a really good job on not convincing me to upgrade my PS3 to keep playing this game.

I want all the mobs are as dangerous as the ones around Adamantine node.
My point ain't "you can't fight back" but its the damage they do.
Each hit took around 30% of your max hp so you have to run for your life or pop chocobo and fight back.
And I believe everyone here died at least once to that shit ...

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Originally Posted by Khalithar

And that is a perfectly fair way to look at things and is absolutely valid, we simply hold a different view on why we enjoy flying. I don't mind interacting with the world either, but my point when it comes to the "inconsequential" stuff, to put it in a more concrete example is this. What exactly is lost by when we have flying vs when we don't?

Example 1 (without flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

Example 2 (with flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

All flying does is speed up the process just a bit and that slightly more efficient process is exactly what *I* want.

But let's look at a way to make it more interesting. In this example, for argument's sake, let's pretend we have flying.

Example 3: You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, but on the way to get to the stuff you want to kill you suddenly notice on your minimap there is a rare spawn enemy that drops a nice piece of gear for whatever class you are when you kill him. However you notice he's in the back of a dark cave. Deciding you want the gear, you fight your way in through his cronies, possibly find a side quest that you can only see if you run in there, and finally you fight the rare spawn that has higher difficulty compared to other enemies in the zone but is still soloable and you get a nice piece of gear for your trouble and fight your way out.

Then you kill X amount of dudes for your quest and run back for your reward. Does it have to be gear rewards? No, obviously not, but if they do SOMETHING to make being on the ground worth our time? You can bet we'd be on the ground more often looking for interesting stuff and fighting rare enemies for gear/achievements/minions/mounts/etc. This most recent patch is good evidence of that, people weren't really in to PVP that much in this game, then Garo happened now PVP is jumping again, even if it's only for a little while.

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It seems we are again of fairly equal mind, just with different lengths of expectations for what might all be achieved within a particular mode or setting, given enough mechanical depth. What I'm looking for is almost always some facet of immersion, but one of the key elements to that to me is pacing as something not only appropriate at its typical or habitual level (which I can even agree that the convenience of flight may in cases promote, rather than demote), but that their is also a degree of variation by event and choice. To illustrate that variation, let's take, for an instance, an:

Example 4: Your objective lies near the summit of a mob-encamped mountain path, the skies above which are patrolled by elite flying enemies. The quickest, but riskiest way is to fly (complete with—assuming unlimited resource—the capacity for engaging aerial dogfights, for which you are nonetheless less well equipped than these beasts), as your mount may be wounded or incapacitated. Less risky is to charge through camp on horse or the like, enemies trailing after you for as long as they can keep up but avoiding the aerial beasts above, and having your mount continue on while you dismount to defend it if need be. Safest, you can proceed by foot, scale cliffs and stealth your way through. That is the general tactical situation of one given objective area.

However, quests or events in the area could easily augment or adjust these decisions, such as by granting a defense or movement speed boost to either mount type, providing additional tools (e.g. caltrops or great-nets). These in turn, in seeing that area, that experience, from a different perspective and therefore from a different pacing, allows it a certain sense of the dynamic.

In truth, I think that, say, a great plains area would probably be better experienced from a higher speed than, say, winding paths amid a muddy woodland. As such, I think it would be an improvement to allows for a real choice of mount, rather than each being no more than extra glamours alike to our "barefoot" clogs, providing a consistent doubled movement speed. In Doma, a horse for the plains, with slower turning but greater maximum speeds; for the marshes or lake-lands an eft, to cross the waters and ground alike at some 80% bonus speed; for the crags, a chocobo for greater jump height. So on and so forth. You take one with you, and you keep it safe. Just that addition of physics and unit health can allow for a tremendous growth in engagement in the open world.

With that in mind:

Example 5: This is simply a large, mostly scenic zone, primarily with interactive but non-hostile wildlife. You normally fly over it, but if want to spawn some rather large... wyrms / worms / whatever, you'd need to look for the areas that wildlife is avoiding, and make a racket almost directly above them. Similarly, there are plenty of huntable creatures here that are scared of flying beasts, but have no instinctual reaction to terrestrial ones, even if still much larger than them. If you want to hunt them, you cannot easily do so by air (though you might drop down on them quickly from an obscured line of sight, if fast enough).

Since you mentioned aether currents before, to give a sense of what I thought worked and did not work in that system, I liked that they had us survey the land from a more "grounded" perspective first, but I disliked that the gameplay did not meet the excuse; there were no such wind currents, and rather than being able to leap from a vista to take advantage of having 'attuned' to one, one had to unlock each first to make use of any. One provides a framework for exploration, memorable highlighting so to speak. The other is a gimmick. A restriction. No restriction should ever be only that; if the excuse cannot become more than just an excuse, it has failed.

Why do people care about killing a lvl 63 reskinned ladybug faster than killing a lvl 64 reskinned giant ladybug? Why this is a complaint? No wonder everyone's so entitled in this game. :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Pinkie_Pie

http://gamerescape.com/2017/02/18/fr...ss-conference/

Robert MMORPG: Can we see inconsequential monster encounters have battle time reduced?

Yoshida: We do believe with 3.x that some regular field battles were a little longer than usual so with 4.0 they’ll be shorter.

So pretty much if you wanted a harder fight or at least make the world seem dangerous, don't expect that soon, mobs will die just like AAR health style, die in 2-3 hits leaving you with pretty much 95% health. SIGH.

I want the field open world monsters to be MORE of a danger, not a fly buzzing around you.

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Disagree. That shit is just a nuisance. No reason for open world mops to be HP sponges. One of the worse things about Heavensward, across the board was trash having too much health. Aside from the fact you fly over that shit 99% of the time anyways. What point is there even to them being a "threat".

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Originally Posted by Natashio

Pfft..casuals.. Keep it up Yoshida. You're doing a really good job on not convincing me to upgrade my PS3 to keep playing this game.

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Good. Less people with this attitude the better tbqh.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

One of the reasons why I enjoyed the HW areas was because the enemies were so powerful. If I had to pick a fight, I'd make sure it was with one enemy and I'd tread carefully. I couldn't just run through a pack of 20 enemies like it was nothing.

It also made me appreciate flying so much more. It felt like a relief and a reward for getting through it all the first time.

With weaker enemies, unlocking flying will feel less rewarding imo.

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They weren't powerful though. They just took longer to die. More HP =/= more powerful. Also NOTHING about unlocking flying was rewarding. All I felt was "thank god that's over".

I see Palace of the Dead floors 1-50 are leaking into the rest of the game

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Originally Posted by Gunspec

Have ANY of you actively tried to farm materials for crafting from enemy drops in 3.0? They tripled the amount of skin you need to make a single leather piece, and yet enemies take way longer to kill. Grinding enemies for crafting materials is a horrible waste of time,and the only reason they didn't already nerf it is that it is far more efficient to send your retainer to gather 10 skins per hour while you do more effective tasks.

Deepeye tears, skin, blood, scales... I just use retainers to farm it all. I've tried actively farming it, and its a waste. You don't even get reasonable xp from the stupid overbloated enemeis. I haven't actively fought non-fate, non-daily hunt monsters since 2.0. This change might actually get ME to engage in fighting normal mobs again. And that's good.

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This, so much this and yak milk + others its rediculous.

I'm quite happy to hear about it. I could not even explore the new areas of 3.0 and see their beauty, because dealing with the regular mobs were too much of a hassle and dangerous.

I don't mind their HP being lessened as long as they keep their damage output up so they still retain a level of challenge for your current level while exploring. They were giant damage sponges in HW and overworld mobs shouldn't take as long or longer to kill than Dungeon mobs in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Why even go to the expense, then, to create these zones? If not for relic grind gimmicks, PotD will have entirely eclipsed most of those functions anyways. Without them, we'd have more development time available for the gear treadmill of linear dungeons...

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Because Main Story Line... and side quests. Cannot forget your first foray into each zone when you were first starting out.

Current field boss fights are slow, long and boring. Making the fights shorter is one thing, but without making the mobs hit harder or introducing new mechanics, it will be even worse. Think turning an MMORPG into Call of Duty.

It's not a problem to have a shorter fight, but I think the real issue here is not that the mobs are too strong, but rather they are boring as all hell, sitting there whacking them left and right and half the time ignoring their special attacks and not moving out of the way.

What I think they should add: New mechanics, more action, lots of action, special effects, more special effects, cats. Maybe update with new hunts where there are mechanics involving the surrounding game world and turn the open field monsters into a sort of Trial or Raid, right there in the open world.

One of the main keys in gaming and MMORPGs is Exploration. That cannot be done in the 3.0 regions because of the mobs. I love exploring and I payed $ for the fricking game, and I saw videos of the new pretty regions, and yet when I got there the mobs were quite a hassle, and considering I was on my BLM deadly, because of the long casting time the skills have, and after getting pounded by 2-3 mobs who kept on interrupting, and my low HP, I died pretty quickly. And I don't throw myself at mobs, I'm patient and I will wait for them to pass to avoid as many mobs as possible.

I'm just wondering why people think they need to have an enemy be the level of difficulty as Alexander Prime in A12S.

Thank freaking goodness

Spending 30 seconds killing each mob was not my idea of a fun time.

Your idea of a dangerous open world is things taking forever to die? LOL. They tried that in HW and everyone was annoyed within hours. Leveling as a healer is suffering, don't make it worse.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Averax

Thank freaking goodness

Spending 30 seconds killing each mob was not my idea of a fun time.

Your idea of a dangerous open world is things taking forever to die? LOL. They tried that in HW and everyone was annoyed within minutes. Leveling as a healer is suffering, don't make it worse.

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Fixed that for you :D