Zepla: The Players Endwalker Left Behind

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Originally Posted by Elissar

The leap between easy/normal content and extremes is not big.

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It is though. I can basically collect vuln stacks as a tank in any normal mode content without any hindrance whatsoever to the healers because the bosses simply don't deal enough damage. Just the other day, I had eight and stood in multiple AoEs during the last boss of Aetherfont. I only took 100k, which isn't enough to proc Holmgang. Now yes, I did that with full BiS but even with i660, I shouldn't be able to cheese max level content to such an absurd degree when it's relevant. I couldn't collect anywhere near that amount in Extremes.

Basically, you more or less have to go out of your way to die in a good chunk of normal mode content because everything is scaled so low, it's practically impossible to kill you. Just look at the current 24 man series. Europhsyne is such a joke, you don't even get LB3 for Menphina. She just explodes.

And the game doesn't teach you how to play your job. It never has. You don't even unlock White Mage's core mechanic until level 52. Which turns out to be mostly useless anyone since you'll rarely need what is essentially instant cast Cure II. How about Samurai and the whole looping system? A big reason for the simplification we've seen starting from Shadowbringers and being double downed on for Endwalker is because people didn't know how to play their jobs. That, or they just weren't willing to learn. Yoshida even outright stated maintenance buffs like Heavy Thrust and String Shot were removed entirely due to casual players forgetting to maintain them. Which is more than a little ironic when the new Melee releases (Reaper) with a maintenance buff almost identical to Heavy Thrust.

That all said, I think Zepla trying to define demographics was never a good idea. They're all too subjective.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

I mean inherently, some of these changes aren't necessarily overly detrimental, as you still have fundamental mechanics present in the normal mode counterpart, which do get expanded on across other tiers of difficulty. It's just a shame they were changed, but IMO, with all the content between Level 1-to-89, there's a significant amount of learning opportunities, assuming you go through the natural process of doing story > optional trials/24-man raids. -

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which would be valid, until they get around to gutting things like Aurum Vale. as a young healer I dreaded that place, but I learned a lot from it. now, its a snoozefest. what few boss mechanics there are have been dumbed into submission. so while there are a few learning opportunities, they seem determined to remove even those lol

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

assuming ren's summary is accurate her takes about what counts as midcore are fairly off but her point about no midcore content is spot on


Extreme fights are midcore. In theory. They run the gamut of being barely above casual to harder than some savage floors. Zodiark for example is a joke of an extreme but Sephirot is harder than some savage fights.
BA is hardcore. Too big punishments for death, too much prep work in terms of study and grouping requirements. Its closest competitor is delubrum savage.

Delubrum normal however is just an alliance raid with inflated hp bars and not in the duty finder for some bizarre reason.

Dalriada and Castrum are midcore. They have some penalty and the fights can trip you up sometimes and some coordination is neccessary but the lack of enrages means a couple of people can scrape an eventual clear.

Shes completely correct on criterion being normal, savage and ultimate difficulty instead of normal (easy) extreme (medium) hard (savage). Some of those mechanics are killer.
Fun fact: alexander was supposed to have 3 tiers of difficulty but time constraints meant they had to cut it to 2.

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Just came to agree with this. There's no way BA can be considered 'mid' core, and Extremes can vary a lot, specially some from ARR and Heavensward.

Disagreement exists because players react to these labels as a reflection of personal skill, rather than as a measure of how and when they're engaging with content. If you wanted to work through last expansion's savage content now, you probably could crack through all of it in an incredibly relaxed fashion. But that's a completely different experience from scheduling time off on patch release to clear the same fights in blind progression during the first few days of release. Some people really dislike the stress of that, others thrive off it.

Zepla herself is probably aware of this. From what I gather, she previously worked her way through every Ultimate that was released. With TOP, she attempted to do early blind prog, hit a progression wall, and quit the game after getting burnt out. This has nothing to do with personal skill or challenging yourself, and everything to do with engaging with content at a pace that you simply don't enjoy. For context, Xeno made some fairly astute observations following her previous departure from the game that sums the issue up quite well, and Zepla outlines her personal experiences with burnout in that video very honestly as well.

i like eureka

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

It is though. I can basically collect vuln stacks as a tank in any normal mode content without any hindrance whatsoever to the healers because

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Ma'am, the really casual player avoid responsibility like a plague. They won't play as a tank unless they know deeply how the instance works. See "tank anxiety".

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Basically, you more or less have to go out of your way to die in a good chunk of normal mode content because everything is scaled so low, it's practically impossible to kill you. Just look at the current 24 man series. Europhsyne is such a joke, you don't even get LB3 for Menphina. She just explodes.

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Really depends of your groups, alliance raid day 1 is a wipe fest. You can re-watch ultimate raiders playing and dying in their first try. You are right if you are saying that such content is short lived - as soon as everyone gets higher iLVL, it's harder to die. However, this phrase is objectively speaking, wrong.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

And the game doesn't teach you how to play your job. It never has. You don't even unlock White Mage's core mechanic until level 52. Which turns out to be mostly useless anyone since you'll rarely need what is essentially instant cast Cure II. How about Samurai and the whole looping system? A big reason for the simplification we've seen starting from Shadowbringers and being double downed on for Endwalker is because people didn't know how to play their jobs. That, or they just weren't willing to learn. Yoshida even outright stated maintenance buffs like Heavy Thrust and String Shot were removed entirely due to casual players forgetting to maintain them. Which is more than a little ironic when the new Melee releases (Reaper) with a maintenance buff almost identical to Heavy Thrust.

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If jobs are simplified, there is no need for deep in-game guide. You need to decide: jobs are harder than the average player is able to learn for extremes, savages, etc...or they are too easy and the game doens't have anything else to explain because it's obvious.
Personally, i believe in midterm. Just like healing, it's not the role/job itself that defines difficulty, but battle design and your group performance. In any case, if you are trying to optimize your rotation and performance, you are not an average joe already.

People do not fail in extremes/savages because they don't know their rotation enough, they fail because many battles need group coordination. Any battle that you can be carried is easier.

Dais extreme (requires group coordination, has enrage): 24% clear
Mothercrystal (sometimes requires group coordination, small DPS test): 46% clear
Zodiark (it's so easy that you can clear following a donut, barely has DPS test): 46% clear
source: https://ffxivcollect.com

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

That all said, I think Zepla trying to define demographics was never a good idea. They're all too subjective.

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it's not.

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

Just came to agree with this. There's no way BA can be considered 'mid' core, and Extremes can vary a lot, specially some from ARR and Heavensward.

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People seriously overstate the “punishment” for dying in BA, if you are anywhere besides ozma extremely likely a healer will sac you, if you are at ozma and you are a new player often a vet will sac you anyway even if it means they get sucked out instead, if you get sucked out to ozma well you still got 15 obscures, 18 eureka fragments for upgrades and a chance at both zenteksuken swords and the conditional virtue, that’s how BA was setup to work, you chipped away at it and used eureka fragments to do more damage and get further in

In the extremely rare case there is a wipe or too many die for the number of sacs the party has then it takes about 10 minutes at sprite island to get back to 60 and you get 500 conceptuals/fundamentals out of it

New player setups for logos actions are also easy as hell these days, bring a damage essence, bring a support action or 2, have SOTR up and don’t bring platebearer

Considering you can oneshot it (and the majority of people do) just by mindlessly following someone else’s call-outs I think it’s pretty hard to justify BA as hardcore

i've found that NA servers emphasize going your own way and figuring out how to do things that work for you rather than doing any accepted strat/mechanic and the few fights that require following a mechanic in a specific way are the fights that NA players struggle the most with.

instead of assuming other people are going to do the right thing and just doing what you need to do, people think "oh, they suck. i'll do it for them."

which - my sibling in christ - is the opposite of what you need to do.

if you want someone to learn a strat, you need to give them an environment where everyone else is stable and doing the correct thing. they have a harder time learning if someone keeps flying in and changing things up as they're trying to figure things out. they don't need additional voices or people changing what they do and where they go. they don't need you deciding you want to stand on the left this time and resolve the left mechanic when they started off on the right and did the right one several times already.

NA players also just like going to different places, standing on different areas/platforms. they don't have a "comfy" spot where they chill out during that fight and don't move unless it's to resolve something. the monk could be to your left, to your right, behind you, in front of you -- the blm might be far away this time, they might be close and that can mess up stacking up or what tethers to who.

this results in minor slip-ups that, when combined with someone failing an important mechanic, can cause wipes.

jp servers don't have this issue. sorry non-jp server folk but we're pretty miserable when it comes to handling raid mechanics. we lack consistency and coherence.

as for the original op post, i miss having something like bozja tbh.

I absolutely loved Zepla's points about Eureka, and Bozja bringing so many different types of players together. Whether you agree or not that it is midcore or not, it does seem like a bridge between all of the players contentwise. I think that the game does show its cracks when it doesn't have new exploratory content.

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Originally Posted by Elissar

This video is objectively speaking, wrong.
The way she describes the casual player is awful. The leap between easy/normal content and extremes is not big. Each fight teach you as the battle goes on (Golbez is a good example), you don't need a static to clear extremes. Savage is a different thing, they do more puzzles and positioning than extremes. It's more complicated to clear Savage in party finder.

Tbh if you reached lv90 and have no main or any idea of your rotation, you need to explore more. Variant/criterion content can be great for training. We have dummies for a reason. The game does what it can do to stimulate your progress. She said "the game doens't teach you about your rotation", what else do you need? lol

As i said, weird video, feels like she started to play ANY GAME last week.

This one was made just to pay her bills.

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The game never teaches you an optimal rotation. And with some jobs, they're not exactly intuitive, either. I had to actively look for them and find resources outside the game. The really casual players won't think of doing that because they're here to have fun, not to study.

As much as I agreed nearly 100% on last week video, this one is supposed to be the one about cusuals, but it's about midcore players. Even if I agree with what she says about content for them (I don't play neither extreme or harder content because I don't like the idea of having to connect to for a raid, and organize myself around that), it's exactly what she said in the previous video. In FFXIV terms, midcore content is content that with a long shelf life with low barrier entry but no punishment to leave. Things she already talked about. That could be a difficulty between normal and Extreme, but even with that, if it's not doable in pickup and need premade to work well, it seems to me the problem gonna be the same.

Overall this one has a lot less meat than the previous one. A lot harder to watch, she circles around her point far too long before getting to it.

hello, just register today to join the discuss

this may be controversial, but I think "casual content" is overall where you can be relaxed without have the possibility to getting other player's toxic intent or uncomfortable pressure,
such as msq, fates, hunts, grinding, crafting, fishing, housing, Gold Saucer, Mahjong, Triple Triad... etc. (in a non-objective sense, those activities that others may find boring, but you may enjoy)
ps: does relics / Big Fish / Jack of all card should count as midcore/hardcore of the casual? and I didn't mention mini-games, because their frequency of updates, depth and replayability is too low.

and midcore is something you can get through DF alone with 7 other players, or at least (you know it will) under 3 times tried (in theory)
they're mostly or totally blind, and might don't have well prepared equipment (yet mostly better than min ilvl), without guide macro (mainly refers to behavior that requires other player to "just" follow the script/guide)
ps: players who are unwilling to communicate or read chats may not be suitable for this consideration, as it will be a frustrating experience for both them and their teammates,
and yes, this consideration may be biased due to cultures, introverts, and pressure of the partying itself would already make players feel they MUST read the strategy or guide first before anything.

due to its punitive nature of gameplay and independent, I would say even Eureka/Bozja itself may not be a good casual content standard already, and I'm saying this as a Eureka enjoyer,
also same as how people don't like DD would not care about Eureka Orthos's innovate, I don't think other "Bozja 2.0" is Panacea.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

The game never teaches you an optimal rotation. And with some jobs, they're not exactly intuitive, either. I had to actively look for them and find resources outside the game. The really casual players won't think of doing that because they're here to have fun, not to study.

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The game can't teach you muscular memory, just practice can do. As BLM, some players like to use ley libes at the middle of Golbez arena, i prefer to use it on the corner. No guide will make me prefer X or Y.

The casual player is also playing a MMORPG, researching for stuff is part of the immersion.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Maybe it's rose tinted goggles, but I remember being able to recover from deaths and clear, and now, they seem to have a lot more body checks that lead to wipes like Savages do and a lot more overlapping mechanics. I HAD to watch a guide for Ex5's big combo attack at the end because the X/Box expanding pattern just isn't visually obvious while also trying to deal with the stack/spread things. Extremes used to be more midcore content than they are now, so we had that bridge better in the past, even as recent as ShB. Emerald Weapon (the fight that is now Golbez) was hard, but that's because it hit hard. Other than the balls at the start, if you had a death or two, you could get those people back on their feet and keep going. If you're short a person in either Gales 2 or 3 or the meteor/flare/knockback (either one of them) or the skyfall thing then two man circles (that are immediately followed up by said body checks), then it's a wipe. In Emerald, if someone died to the sword cross attacks, you could raise them and you could survive the group stack marker that came after it even if down a person.

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Thats so true... i dread that mechanic so much, will i stand right? might the player with the knockback be off? the other two dps? will the healer cleave us? or was someone dead and its over (unless you pull tank lb3)?
For savage this might be ok but on randoms... same as Flamespire followed by stack/spread... so many messed it up and wiped you.

If they wanna go the hard pass or die route, they need to remove the enrage or at least give us more time. I still feel if we manage to recover we deserve a chance to clear, even if it takes longer...

It always had their hard mechanics but lately its so... frustrating if you cant pass bc that one guy not being able to do a mechanic wiping us. I just feel it sucks you cant "carry" one over an mechanic until it finally clicks for him...

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

The game never teaches you an optimal rotation. And with some jobs, they're not exactly intuitive, either. I had to actively look for them and find resources outside the game. The really casual players won't think of doing that because they're here to have fun, not to study.

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Originally Posted by Elissar

The game can't teach you muscular memory, just practice can do. As BLM, some players like to use ley libes at the middle of Golbez arena, i prefer to use it on the corner. No guide will make me prefer X or Y.

The casual player is also playing a MMORPG, researching for stuff is part of the immersion.

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in my humble opinion, it's more than casual, but simply what people enjoy with.
learning and improve, meta, optimization have no different while it's on the right person, instead, it's objective and personalized,
a self-willed process of discovering and understanding about game's detail of what they're interesting about.
and I think FF14 still have something can do indeed, such as shorten and improve roles' training, potency compare (single/aoe, no traits)...etc.

Been saying this for years but glad someone with influence said it. So now the sheep can go think on it rather than keep quoting the same 4 counter claims

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Originally Posted by Jirah

Been saying this for years but glad someone with influence said it. So now the sheep can go think on it rather than keep quoting the same 4 counter claims

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Nah, the sheep will just dismiss her opinion because she is a content creator.

This is why I have always disliked the blanket titles of “casual” and “hardcore “.

I would consider myself a “hardcore” player as I’ve been around since 2.0, got many jobs to 90, a combat mentor, and much more. I do take breaks (mostly because of money issues) and I don’t do savage content because I know I can’t commit to such a thing.

I’m trying hard to understand the points being brought up but don’t seem to find the same when I play. It’s like I’m playing a different game. Maybe I haven’t reached that content or don’t do it? I don’t know.

Influencer yuck

That's not wrong, Casual has been changed to be a pejorative meaning "person who sucks at the game" and hardcore meaning "person who poopsocks and no lifes the hardest content only".
Thats why it feels like everyone is clamoring for this midcore content even if what they really want based on what they say is casual/hardcore
Saying you want hardcore implies you want more nolife content like grinding ultimate 12 hours a day and saying you want casual content implies you want roulette spam and guaranteed clears with everything.

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

Nah, the sheep will just dismiss her opinion because she is a content creator.

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Pokemon community has the issue aswell but majority of their “content creators” foam at the mouth for every move (bad or worse) gamefreak does while the ones that want better design are seen as a pariah….until they bootlick again

I dont think FF14 is much different from the pokemon evangelical community besides the fact one loses the “child” argument. But the thing people really need to hear is the people that hate the game are gone or never played. We all love the game but some of us are not enablers

I like how she addressed the midcore issue of like, "yeah we have extremes, a whole 3 bosses every year, big whoop." Midcore basically doesn't exist in this game. You're either a hella chilled out casualbro (nothing wrong with this) or a sweaty pf/static raider with barely an inbetween and it's been talked about here for years and nothing changed. Maybe now that a sTrEaMEr is bringing it up, SE will listen but let's be real. Dawntrail's devteam are probably already done with its core elements and even if it weren't I doubt they'd revamp their successful (from a $ standpoint) structure just because a few people are burned out on it. Especially not when the majority of their players are fine with the same old.

Realistically all they had to do was tune variants for ex-tier difficulty and then give it rewards to make objective/goal-oriented types of players want to participate and they probably could've white-knuckled through the content drought. But they didn't. And they dropped the ball on relics too. And there's no exploratory zone either. And the cash shop gets monthly updates while the main game stagnates, which, yeah, different teams work on those things, but from an optics standpoint it looks terrible. And so now people are finally asking why they're paying monthly to play this game, and a lot of people are dropping it. I know a guy who's stayed subbed for years just to keep his house. He didn't even play the damn game, he'd just stay subbed to maintain his large mansion. I thought he'd never quit. Yesterday he DMed me saying he was gonna finally just let go of his house because there're other better games and he can't be bothered with this one. I'm glad Zepla mentioned the risk of telling people to "jUsT pLaY oTheR gAmeS" because people really don't get it. I've been saying it for a while and so have others but maybe now that someone with clout is saying it, it'll resonate. When you push people out like that, oftentimes they'll just stay gone. Hell, I've been playing other games lately too. Know what? I'm seeing a lot of former XIV players who don't know what a Zepla is, but their reasons for leaving echo her videos at an eerie 1:1 ratio.

So yeah.

Does Zepla see something like Eureka mid-core, or the type of content she's looking for?

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Originally Posted by Boblawblah

Does Zepla see something like Eureka mid-core, or the type of content she's looking for?

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She said that she thinks Eureka and BA are some of the only existing midcore content in the game, which I would disagree with given how hostile and unfriendly that content is to new players trying it out, and how much the zones, particularly BA rely on outside organization through discord servers to attempt.

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

This is why I have always disliked the blanket titles of “casual” and “hardcore “.

I would consider myself a “hardcore” player as I’ve been around since 2.0, got many jobs to 90, a combat mentor, and much more. I do take breaks (mostly because of money issues) and I don’t do savage content because I know I can’t commit to such a thing.

I’m trying hard to understand the points being brought up but don’t seem to find the same when I play. It’s like I’m playing a different game. Maybe I haven’t reached that content or don’t do it? I don’t know.

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I wouldn't call that hardcore. I'd call that "been playing the game a long time." Getting every job to cap isn't remotely difficult or skill intensive, neither is being a mentor (which is a huge part of the reason mentors are such a meme). And if you don't do savage content then your perspective on what difficulties the game offers is just lacking.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

She said that she thinks Eureka and BA are some of the only existing midcore content in the game, which I would disagree with given how hostile and unfriendly that content is to new players trying it out, and how much the zones, particularly BA rely on outside organization through discord servers to attempt.

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For the zones themselves, I can agree it really just depends on the type of activity going on. It's frustrating that BA requires Discord, which is why I give Eureka and Bozja a partial pass.

The most frustrating part about each zone is their ramp-up time. There's just not enough to do for the first half of each tier, and it can be a struggle if there aren't other lowbies around. BUT - Once you get past that small hump, it's smooth and engaging.

Man I shouldn't even be posting here, it's another bait thread by a weird narcissist. lol

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

I wouldn't call that hardcore. I'd call that "been playing the game a long time." Getting every job to cap isn't remotely difficult or skill intensive, neither is being a mentor (which is a huge part of the reason mentors are such a meme). And if you don't do savage content then your perspective on what difficulties the game offers is just lacking.

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This is what I mean in my replies.

How I see myself isn’t correct for the label of “hardcore”. Also took me 3 years to get battle mentor, which is a great achievement for me (meme or no).

This is why some players, like myself, feel upset or ignored when we give thoughts because we aren’t the “right ppl who can”.

Games need good end game, that’s true. But I’ve seen many MMOs focus so hard on pleasing end game players that the early or mid game suffers.

The stat squash FF14 did was something that changed the way the game was. Removing TP as well. Did the game start to feel dumbed down then?

I do hope any concerns get looked at though.

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Originally Posted by Elissar

The game can't teach you muscular memory, just practice can do.
...
The casual player is also playing a MMORPG, researching for stuff is part of the immersion.

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I think this goes back to not only people not well defining the terms casual/midcore/hardcore, but people in one group are genuinely so far set apart, they don't see how what they're saying doesn't fit. I remember an old news report someone showed me of George Bush Sr going to the grocery store to show how "normal guy" he was. When he got to the checkout, he didn't know what it was or how it worked. He didn't understand the idea of having your stuff scanned and then paying for it. The last time he'd gone to a normal store to buy stuff was probably 20-30 years prior when people would just look at your stuff and add it up on one of those paper machines to give you your total. He'd become wealthy enough so long ago he had people that did the shopping for him outside of really big buys that went through contracts and lawyers, like buying homes or the like. Instead of showing him as a "normal guy", it apparently (this was a bit before my time, but the impression I got and from the person showing it to me) cemented in people's minds how out of touch he was.

To a hardcore person, "researching for stuff" like rotations and fight mechanics is so common, they think that's what everyone does. Shocking as it is to hear it...many people don't. I'm not sure how many, but it might even be a majority of the playerbase. We've all been in roulettes or 24 mans and seen plenty of people that have no idea what they're doing. And I don't mean "Ice Mages" that "want to be Ice Mages"; I mean people that basically press their 1-2-3 but that's about the extent. And sometimes, those are even weird, like SAM's branching combos or MNK's nonstandard "infinite combo" rotation. And that's BEFORE you get the Nadi things, which change up the order you do things (for the Dragonkick/Bootshine/Dragonkick bit) that outright upends it, or SAM's...that one ability where you just use the three finishers to get the seals and buffs. Sure, most anyone can read the WAR tooltip to see they need to open up with Storm's Eye and keep that buff up if they can, but some of those other cases aren't as apparent, and then you get to Jobs that don't do that. Like RDM, you want to weave oGCDs only after the second spell in your dualcast so you don't clip. Makes perfect sense once someone tells you that, but if no one's told you/you haven't read a guide? It's not so naturally intuitive.

The game doesn't even tell you what an oGCD or weaving is, despite this being essential to high end play. Not optional, not optimal; essential. I started in ARR and didn't figure that out until SB when I noticed getting the Pacification debuff in PotD didn't disable all my attacks (despite the debuff description), some things I could still use. When I started looking up guides for Jobs (specifically SCH) on YouTube, that's when I learned it was actually different, and around 5.0, I noticed (looking at the official "Job Guide" webpages) that there are those little "spell"/"weaponskill"/"ability" tags, and that's when I figured out, for the first time, how to tell which was which on my own. I'd been playing since 2.3. You can mock me if you want, I'd wager that's a fairly common story.

It's very easy, once you know a lot, to forget what not knowing a lot was like and what you had to do to know what you know, and I've yet to find someone in FFXIV who figured out what oGCDs and weaving were without either a guide or someone who HAD watched/read a guide explaining it to them.

Casual players don't generally research stuff, or don't research much. Researching using out of game resources is not generally part of immersion, and this is probably one of the best metrics we can use as a defining point of casuals vs midcores vs hardcores. Indeed, to many people, researching mechanical stuff breaks the game down from a world to a series of mechanics, which is immersion breaking. I'm not sure immersion is the right word at all to describe that...

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

I would consider myself a “hardcore” player...
It’s like I’m playing a different game. Maybe I haven’t reached that content or don’t do it? I don’t know.

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I think hardcore is generally going to involve people doing coordinated content with others that requires a good deal of outside research and training/muscle memory. There are exceptions - like there are some insanely hardcore...crafters; and no, I don't mean that as a joke. There are some people who have done so much research and put in the hours, they can tell you what things sell well and poorly, where you can personally farm the mats, which enemies drop which things and which gathering nodes give which resources and what times of day they spawn and...and don't even get me started on the hardcore FISHING community in this game.

...but those are more exceptions substituting one form of hardcore for another. Same with solo deep dungeon runners, which is non-group content that still requires a lot of skill, research, and dedication.

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

Removing TP

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Call it dumbed down, call me and everyone that agrees Stupid Casuals.
I still generally think Removing TP is a Good thing.
There was noting more annoying back in the day then running out of TP while trying to AOE Mobs, then getting yelled at for not using AOEs and running out of TP when teh Tank was going full force with their Wall-to-Wall Pulls.

Ok the one other thing I remember was Cleric Stance. Thank Goodness that Garbage is Gone. It was a cute idea, but was ultimately annoying and lead to more issues rather then this...skill gap or Complexity or whatever I hear about it.

TP is one of those weird "it could have been tweaked to be good...but wasn't" things.

Effectively, MP is in a similar state. Other than chain Raising, there's really nothing else it...does. Except for BLM. Every other Caster, Healer, and the Tanks that use it (PLD and DRK) are designed to be somewhat MP neutral over time (when they're MP negative and run out eventually, this is seen as a problem and adjusted) so that MP is effectively not a limiting factor. Because basically no one wants to have to stop using actions and wait for MP to regen (imagine if RDM running out of MP and having to 1-2-3 unenchanted melee autoattack for 30 sec or so for it to regen before going back to casting; while that might be accurate to the single player FF game Red Mages, most MMO players in the modern era and game would find that bad...and a lot of other magic Jobs don't have those kinds of abilities to fall back on, like WHM or etc...)

It's one of those things that would make sense in a different kind of game, but...not really in this one based on how it works.

Though it does beg the question of why MP stuck around when TP didn't, but here we are. PvP kits often don't really use it, like WHM Cure 2 is based on charges (like Afflatus Solace), not MP cost in PvP; Recuperate is really the MP thing in PvP.

Content difficulty matters less than you might think, and you don't need to be handed a fight tailored to your exact skill level. Go to the next hardest fight from where you are at and start learning. You don't need hundreds of difficulty settings to cater to individual playstyles.

No, the problem is that in the process of streamlining gameplay, they've progressively streamlined out the community. If you've got a group of friends waiting to do stuff every time you log on, then you'll do content well after you have all the rewards for it. I know people who still regularly do deep dungeon group speedruns despite having all the rewards, purely for the social aspect of it.

Coerthas fates were good for creating this atmosphere historically, when level boosts weren't available. Hunts were also good for this in ARR and HW, when there was a degree of mystery about spawns, and when players were less organized. Eureka and Bozja were good for this as well. Endwalker does a really good job of making content accessible and easy to jump into as a single player, but it comes at the cost of removing frameworks required for these communities to grow organically in game.

I think the reason why this forum is so popular is because it acts as a form of substitute Barrens chat. If you had a lot of players together in the same zone, a lot of these conversations would happen in-game in shout instead.

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Originally Posted by Elissar

Ma'am, the really casual player avoid responsibility like a plague. They won't play as a tank unless they know deeply how the instance works. See "tank anxiety".

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Not only is this not a retort to my argument, DPS can still repeatedly get him by things in casual content without much concern. Sure, they don't have the absurd survival of a tank but you can easily collect vuln stacks and live.

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Originally Posted by Elissar

Really depends of your groups, alliance raid day 1 is a wipe fest. You can re-watch ultimate raiders playing and dying in their first try. You are right if you are saying that such content is short lived - as soon as everyone gets higher iLVL, it's harder to die. However, this phrase is objectively speaking, wrong.

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You're comparing day 1, hour 1 when nobody knows what's going on to the overall damage scaling on the fight. Of course players are going to die to stuff that don't know is happening. That doesn't change the fact Europhsyne falls over. In fact, my day one experience never saw a single wipe. Within two days, I'd see maybe one or two wipes at best despite running it or Aglaia constantly. The only real things that got people were stuff like Rhalgr's knockback. At least when it comes to potential full party wipes. Hell, day 1 of Paradigm's Breach, over half the party got knocked off and eleven of us were still able to kill the boss from like 40-50% because he does absolutely nothing threatening. All while people who picked up threatened to report us for not wiping and "holding them hostage" because they wanted to reset the fight.

My dude, you weren't getting LB3 for Menphina day 1, hour 1. She simply doesn't have enough health. Nophica doesn't do anything to tanks for almost five minutes. In fact, looking at one of my logs, I needed a run with thirteen deaths just to even see her tank buster actually existed. So no, what I said is not objectively wrong. Both Aglaia and Euphrosyne are absolute facerolls from the second they released.

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If jobs are simplified, there is no need for deep in-game guide.

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Simplification doesn't necessarily mean completely braindead to the point anyone can play them decently well. Unless it's Summoner we're talking about. That job didn't just get simplified. They straight up lobotomized it. Both the examples I provided are current job design. Sure, in dungeons where you basically can't die, it doesn't matter. What about when those players try doing harder content or demand other players compensate for their inability to play the job correctly. Speaking of Summoner, I just happened to run a dungeon and they were getting doubled over by the tank. I was quite literally doubling their damage. The healer was several thousand above them. This person had absolutely zero idea how to play the easiest job in the game. At level 90.

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Dais extreme (requires group coordination, has enrage): 24% clear
Mothercrystal (sometimes requires group coordination, small DPS test): 46% clear
Zodiark (it's so easy that you can clear following a donut, barely has DPS test): 46% clear
source: https://ffxivcollect.com

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I don't really know what you aim to highlight with these statistics. First and foremost, that site is opt-in. Therefore, it's wholly inaccurate for the actual clear rates of content considering you need to sign up and link your lodestone to the site—which the majority of players won't do. Regardless, even taken at face value those clear rates are pretty solid for a game that doesn't actively promote any difficult content whatsoever and is very casual focused.

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it's not.

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It's not what? Subjective? Of course it is. Ask different people to define "Casual," "Midcore" and Hardcore" and you'll get several completely different answers depending how if they view those denotation as skill level, time commitment or hours played. Nevermind the fact, you then have the "semi" prefix and the whole thing gets incredibly murky.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

The game doesn't even tell you what an oGCD or weaving is, despite this being essential to high end play. Not optional, not optimal; essential. I started in ARR and didn't figure that out until SB when I noticed getting the Pacification debuff in PotD didn't disable all my attacks (despite the debuff description), some things I could still use. When I started looking up guides for Jobs (specifically SCH) on YouTube, that's when I learned it was actually different, and around 5.0, I noticed (looking at the official "Job Guide" webpages) that there are those little "spell"/"weaponskill"/"ability" tags, and that's when I figured out, for the first time, how to tell which was which on my own. I'd been playing since 2.3. You can mock me if you want, I'd wager that's a fairly common story.

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I'm not mocking you but I am genuinely mystified and curious as to how this is possible. You played for years without noticing that some buttons aren't on the global cooldown? How?

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Originally Posted by Elissar

The game can't teach you muscular memory, just practice can do. As BLM, some players like to use ley libes at the middle of Golbez arena, i prefer to use it on the corner. No guide will make me prefer X or Y.

The casual player is also playing a MMORPG, researching for stuff is part of the immersion.

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How is having to research stuff out of game "part of the immersion"? A game should do a good job teaching you the mechanics and you should never have to look for outside tutorials unless you're trying to minmax to an absurd degree.

Maybe Dawntrail will have something like Bozja in it. It's way too late for that to be added into Endwalker.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

I'm not mocking you but I am genuinely mystified and curious as to how this is possible. You played for years without noticing that some buttons aren't on the global cooldown? How?

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Hm...no ofeense taken, then.

Well, for one thing, I played healers almost exclusively, and at the time I think their casts took up the whole GCD, so oGCDs weren't much more than "more responsive" heals (being all instant casts). I also mainly played WHM, which didn't have many oGCDs. Benediction always has had that weird delay and Asylum had to be targeted so it didn't really come across as something you could use whenever. I also came from WoW and I don't recall any of the classes I played in WoW having abilities that didn't work with the GCD system (again, the ones I played), so the idea genuinely didn't occur to me there'd be non-GCD based abilities. I also tend to play by feel (controller) a lot, so I don't usually keep my eyes on my crossbars, meaning things staying lit up or not wouldn't have been apparent at all since my eyes were on party health bars and I healed with (as was the way to do it at the time in ARR and HW) Cure/Regen/Medica spells that I knew the locations of by feel on my controller. It's hard to see something when you aren't ever looking at it.

And think about it, the name is Global CoolDown. Which heavily implies it affects everything. And you can't use an oGCD while a GCD is in progress or within the 0.7 sec animation lock of it.

If you aren't looking for it or don't know about it already, it's not very apparent that it's a thing. Again, I started noticing it specifically in PotD because of Pacification because that DOES gray out everything EXCEPT your Abilities, which makes it stark that there's some kind of difference there. It doesn't really say anything about what that difference is, but it makes it clear there is one.

And as far as I can tell, the game never actually defines the difference between a Weaponskill (GCD disabled by Pacification), Spell (GCD disabled by Silence), and an Ability (oGCDs). It doesn't tell you the difference between them in any way. It doesn't tell you that oGCDs can be weaved, doesn't tell you what clipping is, how many oGCDs can be weaved without clipping, or what Animation lock is, or extended animation lock (gap closers/openers) vs normal abilities, nor the edge case things (RDM's Enchanted Weaponskills having reduced GCD limiting weaves).

Some of these could be considered more advanced topics, but the basic stuff it really should teach in the game. Though I'm not sure how to standardize that, considering many Jobs don't get an oGCD until super late, so Hall of the Novice wouldn't work unless we give every Job an oGCD before level 15.

Now, this might have been different for someone playing Jobs with lots of instant casts, but for healers with 2.5 sec GCD and 2.5 sec cast times, oGCDs not exactly stand out like they do for a melee with all instant cast attacks.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Hm...no ofeense taken, then.

Stuff

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I think it's just surprising because you still have insta-casts like Regen, and you can then see that most of our WHM skills go on cooldown and others dont and remain available for pressing.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Some of these could be considered more advanced topics, but the basic stuff it really should teach in the game. Though I'm not sure how to standardize that, considering many Jobs don't get an oGCD until super late, so Hall of the Novice wouldn't work unless we give every Job an oGCD before level 15.

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This was, to an extent, how earlier versions of the game were, many jobs DID get an OGCD very early on. Like for example, PGL got a crit selfbuff (internal release) at like level 6. Keen Flurry on LNC (parry buff) was somewhere in the single digits iirc. Fluid Aura on WHM was 15. We've lost a great many of those though because... reasons? Like, Keen Flurry is whatever, but a crit buff, on what is now the most crit reliant job in the game (chakra procs)???

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

I think it's just surprising because you still have insta-casts like Regen, and you can then see that most of our WHM skills go on cooldown and others dont and remain available for pressing.

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I think it's more the underlying mechanics.

I remember thinking in HW, probably, how Tetra seemed - as I put it at the time - "more responsive" than Cure 2. Like I noticed that Cure 2 would sometimes take a minute to (start) casting but Tetra would always go off really fast. I think at the time I chalked it up to being instant cast as Regen was the same way (casts immediately after another action). I probably didn't chain Regen people to notice it wasn't as responsive to ITSELF, and Regen was the only exception back then, right? Or did Cure 1 also have a faster cast time? It's been so long I don't remember.

What I DO know is that I had to go outside of the game to learn:

1) That oGCD weaving is the preferred form of healing,
2) oGCDs are for routine healing, not emergency buttons (games like WoW tend to use CDs as more powerful abilities for emergencies or special situations; ex Vanilla/BC Paladin Lay on Hands with its 60 MINUTE cooldown),
3) Animation lock on all actions is ~0.7 sec,
4) Given a GCD of 2.1 or greater seconds, you can complete an instant cast action (0.7), one oGCD weave (1.4), and a second oGCD weave (2.1) without clipping, but any more cause clipping,
4b) Given a GCD of 2.5, you can comfortably fit one oGCD after a 1.5 sec cast without clipping,
4c) That special cases exist (RDM Enchanted Weaponskills come to mind) where the ability has a shorter GCD that affects this (Eukrasia abilities also do this since they're instant but technically only a 1.5 sec GCD after the ability, half of which is the animation lock)
5) Slidecasting grants a narrow window of movement due to animation lock (the game does not EVER say anything about this other very important technique),
6) At the time (this was SB) how macroing Eos' abilities got around the GCD system entirely due to them being her actions and not on your own GCD or oGCD or animation lock,
7) The difference between Weaponskill, Spell, and Ability.

(7) was the only one of those things I more or less figured out on my own, but it was only after learning the rest through a YouTube guide on SCH (can't remember whose, maybe Momo, but don't recall) and reading the Balance WEBSITE (the Disc is a plague; but once they had the website it had some pretty good info on weaving for both RDM and SMN, as that was during ShB that they put it up, and the RDM one I remember trying to find the picture later since it was a really good visual of what was going on and what was and wasn't clipping).

I know you aren't mocking, but I'm just saying, legitimately, I'd bet money that at least half the playerbase doesn't know the ins and outs of oGCD vs GCD if you had a true cross-section sample of the community, and I'm not a betting person in general. Even people vaguely aware that some abilities are "more responsive" than others probably couldn't explain half of what I just did here. It's a pretty alien concept that most other games I've played (and I have played a lot...) tend not to have. I'm honestly not able to think of one other than FFXIV offhand that I've played that has a GCD/oGCD/animation lock/slidecasting system like FFXIV does.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

If you aren't looking for it or don't know about it already, it's not very apparent that it's a thing. Again, I started noticing it specifically in PotD because of Pacification because that DOES gray out everything EXCEPT your Abilities, which makes it stark that there's some kind of difference there. It doesn't really say anything about what that difference is, but it makes it clear there is one.

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I see, well thank you for sharing your experience. I must admit I'm still quite perplexed by the whole thing but I suppose that goes to show how diverse the audience playing this game is.

This actually raises an interesting question of how much explanation is too much and how much is not enough. What may be obvious to one person may not be obvious to another, and the more explanations and tutorials you put in may help one player and exhaust another. It's a fine line the devs have to walk, as it is with most things they work on it seems.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I know you aren't mocking, but I'm just saying, legitimately, I'd bet money that at least half the playerbase doesn't know the ins and outs of oGCD vs GCD if you had a true cross-section sample of the community, and I'm not a betting person in general.

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I wouldn't expect the average player to figure out that entire list of bullet points without assistance, but I figured out basic weaving at level 2 on PLD as soon as I got Fight or Flight. I'm not a super genius god gamer, it was just obvious I could still push one button while the only other button I had was greyed out. I would be surprised if most people weren't able to piece that together on their own.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

This was, to an extent, how earlier versions of the game were, many jobs DID get an OGCD very early on.

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I just glanced through all the jobs and it seems most of them still do. DRG gets Life Surge at Lv. 6, MCH has Reassemble at Lv. 10, Berserk on WAR at Lv. 6, Raging Strikes on BRD at Lvl. 4, etc. Even the healers get one pretty early on.