Titan issues that need addressing.

So I haven't done Titan yet because I'm a dirty, filthy noob but I do feel like this game needs to have its netcode tightened up and the way it deals with enemy casting cleaned up in general. As a newcomer it took me a while to figure out I had to look at the castbar and a while longer to figure out that to see the castbar properly I had to move the entire enemy healthbar. Ten+ years of MMOs and a lifetime of gaming taught me not to let my eyes wander and to pay attention to where I was standing, only really looking at castbars if I was on interrupt duty.

Yes, yes, if this game wants castbars to mean something to everyone then peachy but there does seem to be a problematic disconnect between the warnings and the actual abilities. My internet connection can be iffy since I'm in Phoenix but no other MMO has given me this problem. And I've played quite a few.

So far I really do enjoy this game but this issue is my biggest beef as a new player.

For, ya know, whatever a new player's opinion is worth.

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Originally Posted by Ayuhra

So I haven't done Titan yet because I'm a dirty, filthy noob but I do feel like this game needs to have its netcode tightened up and the way it deals with enemy casting cleaned up in general. As a newcomer it took me a while to figure out I had to look at the castbar and a while longer to figure out that to see the castbar properly I had to move the entire enemy healthbar. Ten+ years of MMOs and a lifetime of gaming taught me not to let my eyes wander and to pay attention to where I was standing, only really looking at castbars if I was on interrupt duty.

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Truthfully at this point in time the game's felt like its had tight net-code for awhile now. The issue I would agree on is that animations don't necessarily make sense in correlation to damage. Case in point the moment a player realizes that a warning cone disappearing = the hit or miss confirm is locked in, and nothing you're going to do now will help (Unless its re-positioning for a push-back) is also the same moment a player usually improves at dodging vastly. People can be elitist about this and pretend that its obvious, but the reality is its not obvious when you're adjusting to it and you play pretty much any other action game or any movement-based MMO. At the very least its made me appreciate the attention to detail other games like Tera (Expected, since its Action) or even WoW (Not quite as expected) to pair animation timing to mechanics.

Case in point, if there's a circle on the ground in WoW, and it fades, and it fires a catapult style attack at me, I will not be damaged until the stone shard or fireball reaches my model, and I can still move out of the way in correlation to distance. In FFXIV, I will be hit because I was in the circle as it faded. This also leads to odd conclusions like having the orange warning fade, then having one appear where you stand, and you 'walk' into the explosion in front of you that's animating that's completely safe because you weren't there at the confirmation check. This was disorienting for me when I was still juggling both games at the time because sometimes I'd wander into attacks that 'faded' in WoW since I was so used to XIV dodging because I was playing that more.

But there are benefits to how it works the way it does now too, such as consistency in dodging different mechanics/fights.

For me the issue is my computer, not usually the connection. Most likely my graphics card. While the computer may be receiving instructions to display the cast bar and the telegraph at the same time, it takes it much longer to actually render the telegraph.

Edit: to be specific - by the time I see the telegraph the cast bar has already completed. There simply is no way to dodge once the telegraph has appeared. This is only the case for the nice looking telegraphs like Titan and Shiva.

It is markedly more pronounced with S rank hunts where my character animation will simply freeze and the hunt will actually be dead while I am still seeing 10% health on my screen.

Lol. Just laughing at the people who obviously didn't bother reading the OP or just looked at the pictures and just posted the usual titan responses. All the OP is asking for is for the animations to match the cast bar(which would be a good thing for every fight in this game). No where was lag mentioned or their inability to clear the fight. But we all know this will be 20 pages of people not reading the OP and just posting about how easy it is to dodge and anyone else just needs to git gud.

I guess the netcode is tight for some but not for me.

Or maybe I should think about it with a game designer hat on. Network systems aren't really my thing but from what I understand FFXIV was designed from the ground up to have a server-dictated live state as opposed to a client-dictated one. When the in game actions are determined by the server instead of the client the lag can kill you. There's no observable difference in combat for people with sound internet connections but folks like me it's a bit rough. I say move and I move but the server still sees me standing where I was a second ago.

WoW has, I think, a client-dictated live state so things like AoEs etc seem to sync up better there.

Soooo I guess what I am saying is I frequently wish the game was client-dictated. But that would take SE a year or so to do and a whole lot of money, it's not happening.

There was a point to all this rambling originally, I'm sick today and forget where this train of thought was supposed to go.

Good post. As someone who was forced to use an entirely separate program just to get Titan EX's clear (WTFast, and I also had to go as NIN for movement speed+), I felt this issue a lot.

In general, battles shouldn't be programmed to be such awful ping checks. SE should remember that not everyone lives on the datacenter's lap. As for the position of the cast bar, you can put it where you want, that's true, but it doesn't change the fact that we need to look elsewhere (at the ground) to know where to escape. And we only have one pair of eyes.

Animations don't line up with cast bars. They START when the cast bar ends. It's been this way forever.

Most people move their gui to have the target bar bigger and in a more central location. It's not just up to tanks and healers to pay attention to what a monster is doing. Dps don't get a free ride. Pay attention to what monsters do. "I wasn't watching the cast bar" is just another way of saying your not very good at the game. It's an integral aspect of anything beyond light party dungeons. People should learn it to stun, silence, and dodge/deal with mechanics. You need cast bars to do all of that. It's a skill for high end content. You will fail without it.

If people just wrapped their mind around the cast bar being an integral focal point of the game, they would realize 'lag' was never most people's problem. That is why the successful players always groan when there's another 20 page thread complaining about lag because we know that it's simple ignorance of how the game works.

Cast bar important. Make it big. Put it somewhere you can see. It will fix your 'lag' problems.

Is it the best design choice to have animations start after cast bar is done? Don't know don't care. The system works well if you use the tools currently available to you. Learn the game you play or whine about failing. Your choice. Regardless if they adjust the animation or not, you need to learn how the game you play works or you won't be decent at it.

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Originally Posted by Izsha

Animations don't line up with cast bars. They START when the cast bar ends. It's been this way forever.

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Depends what you mean with animation. OP is talking about the warning telegraph circles and certain animations/telegraphs have the animations show AFTER the cast bar, but most are meant to show the moment cast bar starts. All of Titans (any difficulty) telegraphed attacks are meant to show warning area circles during cast bar but people who have long enough delay do not have matching display which is part of what OP is complaining about. It's a tough fix because part of the issue IS lag, it really doesn't help there's only two datacenters, Canada and Japan.

tl;dr - The longer your latency to the server is, the more mismatched cast bars and animations will be. SE can't magically fix this without having servers closer to your location (and you hoping your ISP doesn't use shit routing services).

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Originally Posted by Izsha

Cast bar important. Make it big. Put it somewhere you can see. It will fix your 'lag' problems.

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If nothing else the default UI should have the castbar in a more noticeable area. I understand you can move it but it's poor UI design to have it floating up there in corner, it forces the eye to wander.

I think the point people are making with this "lag" concern is that what we have is unintuitive. Combine a server-dictated live state with a poor default UI and animation that starts later than most gamers are trained to expect and you will have a substantial population crying "lag" even if lag is not actually the main issue.

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Originally Posted by m3eansean

@ OP - why aren't you using focus target and why isn't your team stacked behind titan for the weights? The fight is a cakewalk once you memorize the attack patterns, no cast bar needed.

Please just attempt the fight a few more times, you'll get the hang of it.

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That is not me nor "my team", it's just sample footage of a Titan fight that shows an issue commonly seen in Titan videos. I could nitpick a half dozen things I feel they're doing wrong, but it doesn't change the issue of what's being pointed out in the original post. And while I personally do well enough in Titan trials, that is far from the point of the original post (which is merely pointing out issues that lead to many of the complaints surrounding this particular trial).

Should I assume that you do not want these issues to be looked into and perhaps improved/fixed? Would it, for some reason, upset you if the cast bar, telegraphs, and explosion effects were synced? When I read responses like yours I feel like you're suggesting it's "ok" for the encounter to be only "mostly working", and that it's really the responsibility of the players to correct for the problems rather than have the developers correct the problems inherent to this trial.

I won't disagree on the point that players have to adapt or fail (as it is what it is). But that doesn't mean the underlying problems shouldn't be fixed. Clearly Titan is an encounter that can be beaten. It would be better, however, if the issues were corrected and players could rely more on reflex than memorization (the former personally being a more enjoyable test of skill for gamers like myself who actually prefer MMOs with action based combat). The issues pointed out in the original post can be corrected without preventing memorization from being a viable way of beating this encounter, but I feel a player with enough reflex-based skill should be able to play Titan for the first time and have success. Currently that doesn't seem likely.