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

After having done hall of the novice so many times on alts, I can't help but think of how there is barely any interactables in fights or dungeons the further I got into the game. Of how hall of the novice teaches you "Hey, see this sparkly chain? Interact with it to prevent reinforcements" which said reinforcements are training mammets but it does teach you fights should have those, at least the ARR ones have interactble objects. Yeah the turtle boss in the crescent is different because the player actually has to interact with coin bags and carry them over to a pile. Which when the turtle boss that feels like something innovative when its actually just ARR fight-design, I think that does say something about how too many fights are variations of heigan the unclean from wow, that is to say they are dance fights.

I can see how the devs may see this as a clear improvement and the players already onboard with the guitar hero playstyle to also find it a great spectacular improvement. Just see how Xenosys rates current savage/ultimate content, for instance. It's hard to deny that nothing has happened at all.

However, for HW players like me, this is just the train going in the wrong direction even more and they've been losing my interest at increasing speed. Not only we lost all job and battle systems when ShB axed everything out of the game, and they continued to dumb down everything further to ensure that everybody sings to their tune without any deviation to the script, but they also doubled down on the DDR so much that the game has all turned about memorizing fights and adjusting your uptime on a spreadsheet while jumping all around like frogs in a blender (©Mao).

Like, I'm sorry but as a player from HW, and even though the changes have been gradual enough for me to have ended up like the metaphorical frog in slowly boiling water and numbed by it enough that it actually took 2 expansions for my unshakable love of the game to really understand that the game was actively hating on what it initially offered me when I got to play it first.

Not only this, but they're actively trying to turn everything in this game into stupid bosses in the middle of a circular arena, with the same guitar hero slop to perform. It doesn't matter if it's rock, metal, rap or classical, because ultimately it's always gonna boil down to their current model of DDR before anything else. And as I said above, for those that love it, they'll love the sudden variety bringing up so many different musical genres, but for me, it's the game mode itself that is actively telling me I'm not welcome into pve anymore.

I thought I was playing a RPG? Where are the dungeons? Where is my RPG gameplay??

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Originally Posted by Valence

I can see how the devs may see this as a clear improvement and the players already onboard with the guitar hero playstyle to also find it a great spectacular improvement. Just see how Xenosys rates current savage/ultimate content, for instance. It's hard to deny that nothing has happened at all.

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What do you feel has changed? I don't see much difference aside from fewer debuffs being used and boss hitboxes not occupying 80% of the arena (which is just reverting an Ew change, not something "new" as such). It's still the same in/out, stack/spread, proteans, defamations, tethers and nisi. I suppose there are fewer puzzle mechanics now, and we get a curtain call reprise instead of a limit cut reprise every fight this expansion, but I'm just not seeing whatever this "new fight design" is that people are talking about.

I have already spent countless hours discussing it in length in many, many threads, and people that do not see it inevitably tell me that it's in my imagination, so forgive me if I don't feel like wasting more time of my life because if you're not seeing it or identifying with it, then odds are you'll probably not understand. Those who know, know already.

Though if it can give a hint, take HW BLM with literally zero movement tools, and see how its gameplay behaved in HW. I feel it's the best example to give without going into whole essays about the technicalities.

I’d rather just point to HW SCH. Can the “dissipation is the hardest button to ever exist” crowd even imagine HW SCH

as someone who skips all story and doesnt give a crap about it: I really like dawntrail more than most other expansions

the raids are great, the dungeons are better (boss design), we even have challenging crafter and gatherer content

Wait... they 'improved' it...? I thought they just run at 1.1x speed and call it a day? Lul...

Oh yeah, also try to clutter the screen and call it increasing stress while giving barely any options to tweak the game's brightness and bloom.

Savage is arguably the best its ever been with the most recent tier.
There's a lot of salty weirdos in this thread.

Dungeons will never be difficult.

I'm looking forward to the deep dungeon content.

The faster pace is a breath of fresh air for me. I really enjoyed the extrem / savage encounters in this extension. On the other hand, there are some things that I think need to change:

- The overall pace of the dungeons MUST be changed. Take away those artificial walls. If the tank wants to pull everything, let it pull. And let the group wipe if that mistake is made... Or congratulate themselves when a particularly daring pull has been handled correctly. Adding artificial walls only serves to undermine a role (tanking) in which one of the main components has always been how many mobs to take.

- Trash packs need to evolve radically. The design of boss encounters is just fine, both in dungeons and in higher-level instances (up to savage. I can't say for ultimate). But the packs could just as easily disappear, they're so uninteresting. They're only there to lengthen an instance.

- For bosses, give me more dmg randoms for dps. As a healer, the rhythm that everything is boring as long as the group is good is... Unbearable. In a dungeon, it makes it impossible to have fun. On higher difficulties, it's even worse:we find ourselves in those extraordinarily frustrating cases where the group dies if a mistake is made. So it's : either the group plays well, or it wipes: there are too few cases where an exceptionally good healer can save his raid through sheer mastery of his class.

- Please invest in the boulevard of buffs, debuffs and dispells. It's extraordinarily under-exploited in this game.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Valence

I have already spent countless hours discussing it in length in many, many threads, and people that do not see it inevitably tell me that it's in my imagination, so forgive me if I don't feel like wasting more time of my life because if you're not seeing it or identifying with it, then odds are you'll probably not understand. Those who know, know already.

Though if it can give a hint, take HW BLM with literally zero movement tools, and see how its gameplay behaved in HW. I feel it's the best example to give without going into whole essays about the technicalities.

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I guess the configurations of AOEs/cleaves that they use these days force you to move more but that doesn't feel like much of a paradigm shift compared to anything from Sb onwards. Other than the fact that it's forced them to make the casters not be casters anymore anyways.