Almost into 7.3, what you think about the *improved* encounter design?

I will give them credit. Encounter design is 100% better than in EW. However it is still bad due to overall job design

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Originally Posted by Derio

I will give them credit. Encounter design is 100% better than in EW. However it is still bad due to overall job design

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I'll agree with this. They can do whatever they want with the combat encounters, and I can praise elements of DT design over EW for sure.

But the jobs are the lens you view the rest of the game at. If the jobs aren't fundamentally fun to play, it casts a shadow over the entire game, whether that be in savage, in dungeons, or on a dummy. You can give me the most engaging, fulfilling task on the planet, but if you give me a garbage, boring tool to work on it with, I will never be truly satisfied. Building mansions on foundations of sand.

This is my biggest personal gripe with all of FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

I'll agree with this. They can do whatever they want with the combat encounters, and I can praise elements of DT design over EW for sure.

But the jobs are the lens you view the rest of the game at. If the jobs aren't fundamentally fun to play, it casts a shadow over the entire game, whether that be in savage, in dungeons, or on a dummy. You can give me the most engaging, fulfilling task on the planet, but if you give me a garbage, boring tool to work on it with, I will never be truly satisfied. Building mansions on foundations of sand.

This is my biggest personal gripe with all of FFXIV.

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It's something on my mind when I compare the fight design versus job design.

Well designed or not, the shelf life of XIV's encounters is rather limited. It's a puzzle fight that you need to solve where to be and when. After you solve it, it gets into autopilot mode. I personally don't find that fun or engaging. Yeah, you can take weeks to prog fights with random parties, but still the parts you "master" get behind you in the autopilot sense. At best, it just gets frustrating when others fail repeatedly at points they shouldn't (the infamous "prog liars").

So what's left then? Job engagement - the thing you play as. If the fight design is so cemented, that ideally should be counter-balanced with job mechanics that attempt to keep you engaged, at the very least for the skill ceiling. What is the challenge today? A game of, like Zenos once said, "A test of your reflexes" whether or not you press your 30/60/120s abilities at the right spot to align everything. No joke that the healers can literally spreadsheet all mandatory healing requirements and even have some leeway oGCDs just in case.

If they intend to leave the encounter design paradigm as it is, they need to bring it with whatever they have planned for 8.0's job improvement, rework, or whatever it is.

I've been playing this game for 12 years. Given the past 12 years, I don't know why I'd expect some great overhaul of the game.

I personally haven't seen a single thing that struck me as being that much of an improvement. If the visual vomit in the new raid tier is supposed to be an "improvement", then they failed.

All they know how to do is "make fight go faster". That's the only way they know to "improve" encounter design. And this game's not snappy and responsive enough to become an action-combat game like they are so desperate to turn FF into.

After seeing them sacrifice BLM on the altar of "improved encounter design", I don't have any love lost for them either.

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Originally Posted by OdinelStarrei

But the jobs are the lens you view the rest of the game at. If the jobs aren't fundamentally fun to play, it casts a shadow over the entire game, whether that be in savage, in dungeons, or on a dummy. You can give me the most engaging, fulfilling task on the planet, but if you give me a garbage, boring tool to work on it with, I will never be truly satisfied. Building mansions on foundations of sand.

This is my biggest personal gripe with all of FFXIV.

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100% agree with this.

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They're literally the only thing that doesn't make me puke in dungeons. Are they interesting? No, not really, but at least they're not DDR slop while hitting a dummy. Wish we had actual engaging jobs to enjoy ourselves over that trash though.
To my perspective it's the bosses that are here to lengthen an instance. At least they quelled this down a little in 7.2, so instead of being infuriating, bosses are now as bland as trash.

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How? I mean, there's: no priority focus to be made. No mechanics linked to these packs. They follow on from each other at a pace that sounds like my neighbour snoring. How does that stop you falling asleep in the dungeons?

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Originally Posted by Merrigan

How? I mean, there's: no priority focus to be made. No mechanics linked to these packs. They follow on from each other at a pace that sounds like my neighbour snoring. How does that stop you falling asleep in the dungeons?

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I know right? There is almost no mechanics to them. They're bland.
Bosses do have DDR mechanics, which I do find to be a direct downgrade from bland because at least bland doesn't get on my nerves like DDR does.
And I find hitting mob packs less boring than hitting a dummy that keeps re-centering itself.

Edit: but I do recognize that trash packs have lost a LOT in terms of gameplay actually. Mostly an actual battle system and resource scarcity, which SE deemed not fun or something and axed out.

- For tanks: skill expression through offensive stance tanking, mob positioning because being hit from behind = autocrits, not being mindless to do (unless you went into tank stance and even then, you couldn't exactly press a button every 25s and get 3 benedictions at once either).
- For healers: skill expression through careful balance between offensive AoE spamm (MP hungry) and healing requirements (depending on the skill of the tank and the party's DPS). MP management was a big part of what made trash packs extremely engaging as a healer in dungeons before ShB.
- For dps: TP/MP management depending on the party's DPS, resource support (rphys mostly but also manashift in SB), mob positioning through a lot more variations on AoE shapes (MNK had 3 different shapes to cycle through for example, etc).

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Originally Posted by Valence

Edit: but I do recognize that trash packs have lost a LOT in terms of gameplay actually. Mostly an actual battle system and resource scarcity, which SE deemed not fun or something and axed out.

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I think this is the biggest downgrade of dungeon design.

We've seen on these boards that tanks not pulling W2W are very naughty indeed. Okay, but maybe the problem is they should only be able to do so in a strong party in which tank and healer are having to think about the other's resources.

Is it possible to pull all the trash to the first boss in Stone Vigil? I've never managed it with NPCs, but I'm pretty bad.

Dzemael Darkhold. I know it annoys people, but there are some really good pulls in there and even dps needs to be on their toes.

There are many other examples from ARR where the trash made the dungeons engaging.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

Is it possible to pull all the trash to the first boss in Stone Vigil? I've never managed it with NPCs, but I'm pretty bad.

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It is possible in a player party but it's really stressful, even with the best of tanks I know, I feel forced to use PoM to keep up with the throughput.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

It is possible in a player party but it's really stressful, even with the best of tanks I know, I feel forced to use PoM to keep up with the throughput.

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Thanks. Does not that make the dungeon more interesting than the current design?

Some players might like to try that full pull as a challenge. It adds replayability. And the fact a level 41 dungeon has a more difficult W2W than a level 100 suggests the current design has flopped.

It is more interesting, though fundamentally it's the same design, just that you can pull five groups (and the boss if you're completely mental) instead of two. I wouldn't mind removing the walls again but that would risk putting more pressure on tanks (some of who are already complaining about the pressure to go W2W), I'd personally prefer to fix the tank-healer-content relationship as is to make a more stable foundation to build on.

I do agree however, that low level dungeons being harder than high level ones is somewhat disappointing.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

It is more interesting, though fundamentally it's the same design, just that you can pull five groups (and the boss if you're completely mental) instead of two. I wouldn't mind removing the walls again but that would risk putting more pressure on tanks (some of who are already complaining about the pressure to go W2W), I'd personally prefer to fix the tank-healer-content relationship as is to make a more stable foundation to build on.

I do agree however, that low level dungeons being harder than high level ones is somewhat disappointing.

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The big reason for the wall-to-wall is the lack of danger from the adds. They simply don't threaten the group enough when mass pulled.
Honestly we haven't had a mass pull be threatening since the stormblood leveling dungeon that was in the stepps.

Additionally so much defensive power and self healing was given to the tanks also, that if there was ever a dungeon where tanks are really threatened, it would primary come from both A) dps just doing bad dps leading to all cds being burnt, and B) Healers being caught unaware because when have they last actually healed in a dungeon.

Of course the community is going to be applying this pressure onto the tanks.
And without class redesign across the board, it's never going to change no matter how many adds get thrown in the tanks face. They might as well let you pull right into the boss room, because tank busters do squat when your tank's 30% cd also gives regen+health shields, and their basic 15 sec mit is also a personal excog.

I'm in full agreement with everything you said there.

I see the issue primarily as a balance one, one of a triangular nature, with Content, Healers and Tanks as the three points. Each has it's own problems, the biggest problems for tanks are that content below extreme hits like a wet noodle against their mitigations, much less their healing capability and that there is no tank gameplay loop besides grab enemies and mit/heal. Healers biggest problems stem from the tank problems, if nobody takes damage then there is nothing for us to use our kits on (and given "normal content" damage, even when raidwides go out you can generally ignore one or two before you actually heal), add to that tank (and other) healing kits increasingly invading their space and the fact that healer damage "rotation" is one button; I don't see that as a problem inherently, it becomes one because we have nothing to do with our kits. All of which shines a blinding light on the issues that content has, mainly that nothing does any damage and interaction with the party is minimal at best, add to that the fact that all content is built to the same formula, the same one minute raidwide timer and you have a recipe for everyone being bored.

It's little wonder so many people don't even learn their jobs in such an environment, even though this content (along with job/role quests) should be teaching them to do it at at least basic level so they're not completely unprepared if they try extreme or savage. As I see it it's impossible to fix the root problem without addressing all three points of the triangle but the easiest to adjust quickly are the tanks (strictly because of how much testing they'd have to do to fix content) but fixing the content would be the most consequential route. I know a fair number of people will say "you can't balance jobs around dungeons, you'll break savage and ultimate" and they're right, but there's no reason they can't balance dungeons around jobs which is what they should have done from the start.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

It is possible in a player party but it's really stressful, even with the best of tanks I know, I feel forced to use PoM to keep up with the throughput.

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Good thing you should be using PoM on cooldown anyway.

/e: That said, yeah, the fact that tanks are healers makes the gameplay a shitshow at times. I like the brainlessness of WAR, but damn, 3 dps 1 tank is nearly always better, lol.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Say it with me kids

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design

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This seems a bit of an overstatement. Mostly because...

...We very literally can have better encounter design even with the kits we have now. Present encounter design generally doesn't nearly push the limits of even what kit opportunities we have already.

Or is there something about, say, bloated healing abilities --that kit itself--- that makes it impossible to use more than a portion of it (or, to virtually ever need to use GCDs)?

Is there something about our tank kits being excessive for the vast majority of present content that means that content would be unable ever to pressure it?

Is there something about our DPS CDs that enforces that we almost never have DPS checks beyond the final enrage?

Or mightn't those have almost entirely to do with tuning and/or the very basics of encounter design -- things we could absolutely improve upon even now?

The tools we have and the puzzle to use them in are two sides of the same coin. The deeper the class design, the more undermechanics we have to work with, but each fight can likewise supply their own, novel mechanics and without sufficient tuning, the first either will not work or will not matter.

To insist that you can't even have decent tuning or a modicum of creative encounter design so long as striking dummy play isn't up to one's preferences just adds excuse to getting shit fights with shit role interaction.

Do I want more interesting class design? Absolutely.
Heck, would I revamp healers practically from scratch if I could? Also yes.

But neither of those things are necessary for encounter design to be more engaging.

Job design and encounter design BOTH leave much to be desired, and the first isn't going to get much better without vision as to more creative encounters (that in mainstay content and/or outside of it -- hopefully both) in which to leverage kit additions and the second has very real room for improvement even now that present job design has yet to bottleneck.

Sorry if this comes off as semantic or a nitpick, but having seen similar claims of "We can't have X until we get thing Y (that is only one among multiple factors involved in X)" like this in other MMOs, claiming the helpful as necessary for any improvement has rarely seemed to go well -- usually offering defensive development more ammo to call players unappeasable.

Tl;dr: Present job design is limiting, yes, but there's no sense waiting until job design is rehauled to actually make decent use of even our existing kits. Small changes asap on both ends would be a good investment; it needn't be all or nothing, let alone job rehauls before we actually even, say, get fights tuned as to make good use of the whole of any healers' full oGCD heals kit.

I think you've mostly said as much yourself elsewhere, Snow, so I'm guessing/hoping this is just picking catchiness over actionability.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

I think this is the biggest downgrade of dungeon design.

We've seen on these boards that tanks not pulling W2W are very naughty indeed. Okay, but maybe the problem is they should only be able to do so in a strong party in which tank and healer are having to think about the other's resources.

Is it possible to pull all the trash to the first boss in Stone Vigil? I've never managed it with NPCs, but I'm pretty bad.

Dzemael Darkhold. I know it annoys people, but there are some really good pulls in there and even dps needs to be on their toes.

There are many other examples from ARR where the trash made the dungeons engaging.

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You couldn't even just mass pull most ARR dungeons back then either, unless you really knew what you were doing. And even then.
It became a bit easier once they decided to axe ARR trash HP by half at some point during late HW or early SB I don't remember when. But still, powercreep and sweeping battle system changes weren't that entrenched into old content yet either.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

I think this is the biggest downgrade of dungeon design.

We've seen on these boards that tanks not pulling W2W are very naughty indeed. Okay, but maybe the problem is they should only be able to do so in a strong party in which tank and healer are having to think about the other's resources.

Is it possible to pull all the trash to the first boss in Stone Vigil? I've never managed it with NPCs, but I'm pretty bad.

Dzemael Darkhold. I know it annoys people, but there are some really good pulls in there and even dps needs to be on their toes.

There are many other examples from ARR where the trash made the dungeons engaging.

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Amen.
This is a huge problem with current dungeon design. A tank should be able to gauge its level (and that of its healer) and adapt the pull accordingly. Completely removing this dimension by putting up artificial walls mutilates this role, annoys players who have the means to go faster, and harms newcomers in the sense that the “W2W” rhythm becomes an implicit obligation. An obligation that, paradoxically, would not exist if tanks were forced to go through this selection process again when they pull.

As previous players have mentioned, the ARR dungeons don't allow pulling that many mobs + sync is what keeps you without crucial spells. But recent powercreep and busted abilities has many endgame dungeons very easy. It's nothing of improved encounter, just same old formula and the fact that we are still getting corridor dungeons is quite sad. It's just one big run in a straight line and call it a day. There's nothing new or refreshing.

I was doing some Alliance Raid roulettes yesterday and I never realized how they offer more distinctive mechanics that isn't a DDR. And that's ever since forever, back to ARR alliance raids.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I was doing some Alliance Raid roulettes yesterday and I never realized how they offer more distinctive mechanics that isn't a DDR. And that's ever since forever, back to ARR alliance raids.

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yeah. looking at lvl 50 dungeons too. not all mechanics were perfect some were implemented rather bad, but they were certainly more varied than the mechanics in the new dungeons which look differently to each other but are the same.
they tried out stuff back then... yeah i would even say dungeons were better back then xD... at least on the long term. (because more varied and therefore less boring)

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Originally Posted by Asari5

yeah. looking at lvl 50 dungeons too. not all mechanics were perfect some were implemented rather bad, but they were certainly more varied than the mechanics in the new dungeons which look differently to each other but are the same.
they tried out stuff back then... yeah i would even say dungeons were better back then xD... at least on the long term. (because more varied and therefore less boring)

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I'm not sure I understand, which dungeons are we talking about? I feel like every time i get into an ARR dungeon there are no mechanics at all and i just site there 1-2-3ing the boss.

well, nowadays we do way too much dmg in these dungeons for most mechanics to actually matter.

i think the only mechanic that got more difficult is the one frome haukke hard because people have to pay attention to kill the adds before the boss kills the group.

but stuff like the tonberry king in wanderers palace. killing adds gives him a nasty dmg buff. one stack for every add. but the king just dies before the adds reach you nowadays.

in pharos sirius the first boss which gives you crystal stacks. three stacks and they explode dealing big dmg.

tam-tara hard. where you have to aim the aoe on you on the adds to kill them without them exploding.

yeah the turtle dragon in stone vigil hard is annoying and the cannons clunky, but at least the fight was different

there are a lot more, but sadly barely any of them matter nowadays

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Originally Posted by Altina_Orion

I'm not sure I understand, which dungeons are we talking about? I feel like every time i get into an ARR dungeon there are no mechanics at all and i just site there 1-2-3ing the boss.

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Just some examples from the top of my head:
Hullbreaker Isle had the banana mechanic in the first boss (boss went into a rage and only stopped if you fed him, allowing players to see how far they could keep it still and raging), and the platforming going on in the third boss (boss would occasionally throw players into different platforms).
Copperbell Mines Hard first boss used to be an interesting race against the clock and a burning floor.
Snowcloak second boss used to make players bait mobs into boss aoes, so they become big snowballs players could kick into the boss to damage it and interrupt abilities (sadly removed from the game).
Sastasha Hard's first boss has a prey mechanic that can be interrupted by a skilled tank, the second boss had a damage rush ability that was interrupted by either enough damage or a critical hit (if I remember right, has been a hot minute since I played it).

A lot of those mechanics are now trivialized because of powercreep mind you, but they exist(ed), and were varied enough to not let you fall into monotony.

Just as a sidenote, pair that with the fact that we got 3 dungeons every 3.5 months and had more varied class gameplay, and dungeons alone were enough to sustain a more casual player base for quite a while during each patch cycle.

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Originally Posted by Altina_Orion

I'm not sure I understand, which dungeons are we talking about? I feel like every time i get into an ARR dungeon there are no mechanics at all and i just site there 1-2-3ing the boss.

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That's either due to the dungeon being "modernized" or powercrept into oblivion.

We have over 2x the potency on our abilities than we did back in ARR, so you just kill most of those old bosses in seconds without ever seeing it's mechanics.

ovIm already named most, but even something early like the last boss in Copperbell Mines originally required you to regularly deal with adds before they break down some stone walls, which would spawn even more adds and overrun the party.
Unfortunately even back in Stormblood you could completely ignore the adds and just nuke the boss before that happened.

Most of the old dungeons weren't great either, often the implementation was where it fell flat. But the ideas were at least interesting and they tried something different instead of "dodge orange circles, stack, spread, chariot, dynamo"-number 25.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Of course, the combat approaches are vastly different, but the idea is still there: In WoW, there's no such thing as a "2min meta" (well, not counting a Bloodlust window, but that's usually in the opener when somebody brings the buff), and classes there only have inwards mechanics.

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Yes and no. That window isn't on a 2-minute timer and is more subtle, but there is a "pot(ion) window" (5 min), and maximizing synergy between short-lived (e.g., not 1+ minute) external buffs and skills exploiting them have been an important factor for so long as they've been offered -- even if that isn't often or in large numbers. Power Infusion is most noticeable among them today, creating balancing concerns for specs that synergize especially well with its added haste, but tanks regularly play around what external defensive buffs certain healers can offer, Innervation was also a necessity for many fights in the past, Unholy DKs buffed by Augmentation Evokers put a new ceiling on "broken", and even Night Fae Paladins and Priests in Shadowlands were generally selective about their party so they could max out their buffs.

Arguably, so long as tanks don't have stupidly excessive levels of Threat/Enmity generation and DPS have at-cost threat reduction available to them, the same is true of tanking. As long as there are worthwhile greeding opportunities but healers wouldn't necessarily have every GCD free for damage even when dealing with said greed, the same is true of healing. As long as there are DPS checks that are tight enough (in turn requiring a tight enough min to max ilvl range for the content), getting through consecutive precise DPS checks can even mean that your damage CDs are not just your own but must be leveraged as to minimize both excess and holding among those of your coDPS.

It's a matter of interconnectedness and fine tuning that has been lessened or lost in both games, often for its annoyance when mishandled being more frequent and palpable than its joys when well-handled, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and I'd love to see some more consideration of such here.

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In short, it is possible to make the jobs work without a collective burst window happening every 2 minutes if they had interesting inwards mechanics.

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Certainly, and leaving even a few externalizable buffs at shuffled times (say, 30, 40, 60, 90, 120, 180) wouldn't even limit that despite giving a modest bit more min-max consideration for holding CDs (now that they're no longer naturally synced).

That said, the reason XIV lacks most analogous gameplay is simply because of XIV's "combo" system -- in essence, apart from some small instances of consolidation, the optimal way to reduce the number of choices per button (i.e., to maximize button bloat / have the smallest depth of gameplay per button-count).

While in Stormblood in earlier we were at least occasionally allowed some rotational variance surrounding the time left before the target would die, typal modifiers (can drop Dragon Kick in a Demolish string and only lose a total of 22 potency despite having gained 90 effective potency off an extra Bootshine, since only Demolish's initial/direct damage is modified), and more significant %recast reduction per gear's worth of secondary stat such that we could actually ramp up SkS enough to get in, say, an extra Full Thrust combo per Chaos Thrust combo (objectively worse, but still an option), and DoT timers not quite being auto-synced to rotation meant adjusting other factors to neither lose a tick nor waste a tick... for the most part, combos have always meant that the gameplay ceiling could never offer quite as much as a WoW spec could (even if the result might nonetheless happen into a more cohesive, nuanced, and/or rewarding package).

And for the rest, it mostly comes down to intentional simplification since the end of Heavensward. See, for example, how the likes of Bard was pushed from 57% (WB, VB, SS, level 50) to 43% (+ IJ, level 60) to 25% (longer durations, Stormblood) to 17% (no Straight Shot buff), to eventually EW+'s 6% rotational non-filler casts before Apex Arrow/Burst Arrow (or 13.8% non-filler with an AA/BA per minute). See how the loss of Fracture in Stormblood reduced the rotational strings available to Monk, or how Greased Lighting IV actually made Greased Lightning a far less interesting resource in Shadowbringers.

Now, to be clear, I don't particularly miss Straight Shot being a buff we needed to rotate in, and I was actually pretty happy with Endwalker Monk (it stumbled upon something pretty great, probably the best we'd had since late Stormblood), but there's no doubt that there's a fairly sledgehammer approach to placating what they see as what players will complain about -- an approach that doesn't typically do well, either, with imagining what interesting little flows and stochastics could take a very simple APL as found on Icyveins into an interesting spec/job design.

But sure, if we get rid of the fixation on systems that exist largely just to reduce thought-per-button and can actually imagine out in-the-moment play and purposely offer that more depth that can be held in a 2-minute job guide, yeah, we could definitely see some better job gameplay here on XIV, too. (How likely those conditions are to be reached, though...)

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I was doing some Alliance Raid roulettes yesterday and I never realized how they offer more distinctive mechanics that isn't a DDR. And that's ever since forever, back to ARR alliance raids.

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This is precisely the reason I feel encounter design has been getting steadily worse, although to be fair it has stabilized a bit recently, but probably because it has hit rock bottom.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I was doing some Alliance Raid roulettes yesterday and I never realized how they offer more distinctive mechanics that isn't a DDR. And that's ever since forever, back to ARR alliance raids.

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Well until ShB came and since nier or especially EW's and DT's, it's been nothing but DDR though.