Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

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Originally Posted by TopKatt

wait...I said this was a good read. But did anyone actually read this?
The OP takes there own opinion and makes it fact.
Feels that certain ideas from the dev team are bad, but provides proven bad ideas.
The OP hates the current mechanics of boss battles, but provides zero solutions. My understanding they want more Tank and Spank and no dps races?
wants to run 4 man dungeons with 2-99 players?
and thinks blayflox NM was hard...."Among these dungeons, you have ones like Brayflox, whose difficulty took many first-timers by surprise"..really?
Thats so sawft

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OP seems to think just because they mention it's a japanese player blog it'll hold more weight as well. :)

I would like to see a couple more 8-man dungeons though with interesting stuff in them. CM and Prae were kinda interesting at first because everyone was getting used to what you do in an 8-man party, etc. Something 8-man that feels a little more like exploration but with difficulty would be cool.

I'm pretty sure that half of the people that liked the first post din't even read it all. Because there's no way that it would get so many likes if they did.
This is just another cry post like the other 50 we get every day (nerf Titan, Titan is not fun, and so on) and they never go this viral really.

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Originally Posted by Bizniztyme

OP seems to think just because they mention it's a japanese player blog it'll hold more weight as well. :)

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It's starting to look like it should hold less weight, for that very same reason.

I could have swore I read or heard some where echo boost was put in for Japanese players who where not used to western mmos.

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Originally Posted by TopKatt

Saying people prefer dungeons pre lvl 50 is a generalization. The op dresses it up like a fact.

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I read the entire thing, and this quote was perhaps the only thing I found myself disagreeing with. At least within the circle of people I associate with, hardly anyone enjoys those dungeons. They're so boring. I really enjoyed Pharos before they neutered it, and the ruined city of Amdapor isn't bad. However, so many of these dungeons are mindless that they feel painful doing.

This is the "best state of the game" post I have ever read. It hits the nail on the head. I will definitely source this on my next blog post about the game. I describes very much what I think.
The Primal fights are nothing but mechanics and I therefore do not consider them worthwhile content.

More like more people actually bothered to read it and agree and the people that disregard any criticism for the game and think everything is perfect and flalwess are once again proven to be a vocal minority, also funny how a couple of people that say they like the overuse of mechanics haven't even beat T5.

I wouldn't mind the non scripted fights. It can become quite boring when you know the fight like the back of your hand. (Even though times you accidentally mess up like I recently did in Titan). But to mix things up would be very nice in my opinion. I'm no hardcore player, will probably never be one. But something has to be done to add a challenge to these fights.

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Originally Posted by Roris

More like more people actually bothered to read it and agree and the people that disregard any criticism for the game and think everything is perfect and flalwess are once again proven to be a vocal minority, also funny how a couple of people that say they like the overuse of mechanics haven't even beat T5.

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So because someone didn't beat turn 5 they can't like the mechanics of all the fights before it? Great logic there. lol

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Originally Posted by TopKatt

Saying people prefer dungeons pre lvl 50 is a generalization. The op dresses it up like a fact.

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I prefer dungeons pre level 50 when it came to socializing. Once people step foot and fought Demon Wall socializing started to die and finger pointing started to happen. God forbid someone tried to do AK without DL gear back then.

Doing the current dungeons and raids if it ain't with a premade group it tends to be a very antisocial environment.

Flipped through the original while reading. Really nice job on the translation. Good work.

Amazing post, and definitely summarizes a lot of what I've been feeling lately and it explains some of the ambiguity/lack of motivation I've felt towards completing some of the end-game content. Thanks for sharing/translating it.

I totally agree with the blog post, and thanks for the translation, OP...

"Team Jump Rope" mechanics is one of the major design flaws in this game and it places all the pressure of winning on the weakest member(s) of the party. It creates an environment for hostile player relationships, and further erodes the relevance and usefulness of an already weak gear system.

I've enjoyed reading some of the proposed fixes in this thread as well... The idea of a time consuming climb back up to Titan after being knocked off is fantastic. (it could incorporate the 'fall damage' to reduce HP to 1 and put pressure on healing before you reach the top.)


Mechanic-based fights that require memorization are not remotely the same as those that require skill. Skill is gained via familiarity with the game's systems but ARR's boss fight systems are all islands unto themselves. Success in them is determined by their own specific mechanics that exist virtually nowhere else in the game.

I'm not against boss fights with new mechanics, but they should make the fight more difficult rather than be the sole pivot point by which a fight is won or lost.

In FFXI (pre-Abyssea), some of the most memorable fights were the ones that had unique mechanics which ramped the difficulty up, but still allowed for player mistakes and a bit of luck.

• Divine Might (one of the best fights ever)
• Proto-Ultima (Citadel Buster, on <t>, (Run away!) /cry /comfort <t>)
• Kirin (mechanics based on what you learned by fighting the other gods)

One of other neat things touched on in the blog was the fact that a FFXI player could be a 'hero' in a battle by carrying a bit of the weight for the newer players.

Sadly, there is little opportunity in ARR to compensate for someone who isn't pulling their weight. The mechanic-driven battles of ARR put rigid ceiling on skillful play and punish the entire party for those who don't perform. :(

While a lot of this post is solid and makes sense one core point he keeps harping on I will disagree with.

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Originally Posted by EmiliM

Yoshi-P has said that “making the fights scripted is so that anyone can clear it once they have the patterns memorized”, and designed the fights using this philosophy. But because of the “mechanics-driven” problem mentioned earlier, the fights are never really eased/nerfed and remain only beatable by those who can deal with the mechanics.

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We can train pigeons to act as guidance systems for bomber planes, We can memorize the route to take through an entire city to get from A to B, we can memorize thousands on thousands of random facts/words/etc/etc/etc.

EVERYONE can memorize the mechanics. Whether they do or not is entirely up to them.


I still agree having EVERY event mechanic driven is a mistake (should be a mix of mechanic driven, brute force, mix, gimmick [considering mechanics and gimmicks different things.. IMO a gimmick is something semi amusing/supposed to be such as if you summoned a giant mongoose to attack Caduceus], etc)


But I can't agree that, with the exception of diagnostically mentally disabled individuals, there is a person playing who can't manage "if a red circle appears under you... move out of it"



Also IMO the "have as many or as few as you want!" is a really unbalanceable system. If they are tuned to 24 people sure skilled players can do them with 20. but suggesting that 8 amazing players should be able to do what 24 average players can just tells me the event isn't tuned right. (dps check for example to keep adds from piling up in an event like Turn 4... that would be saying 1 amazing player is doing 3x the dps of an average player.. say average these days is 200.. they are doing 600?)

Having larger raids AND more raids would alleviate the problem though. Currently it is not realistic to have a bench. Why? Because a bench would need at minimum someone for every role to be able to fill in no matter who misses (so a melee dps, caster dps, bard, healer, and tank)... In the current raid size that's over half a raid sitting on their hands keeping themselves from getting lockouts in case they are needed. Then with the number of raids. With only 4 events we can't realistically cycle the bench in so everyone gets some raid time for the week. The total raid time start to finish is only an hour. "Ok you get 1 event this week!" is not going to fly with anyone who WANTS to raid"

Having 24 man raids would allow a couple things.

1. a healthy bench (4-5 players)
2. allow particularly skilled groups to still run even if they have 1-2 people miss

Having MORE raids would allow a couple more.

1. allow a healthy bench via allowing you to realistically cycle in your bench to get raid time

- Doing a quick search/going from experience this is what current MMOs have compared to FFXIV

Traditional MMOS (ya know.. the ones where you actually group with people to play the game)

---FFXI can't find a list of the current SoA raids. But if it's anything like it used to be then there are several hours worth of relevant content to raid (used to be SO MUCH MORE but I hear they basically reset gear and made the old stuff irrelevant)

---EQ: VoA expansion top tier had 8 raids (total length of all 8 combined.. ~4 hours) but it was still relevant to farm at least the tier before for months after the top tier was cleared.. which is another 3 raids adding an additional hour or so of content

the big "modern" MMOS

---Rift: Tier 2 (couldn't find info on new tier offhand and quit b4 it released) had 8 raids in 20 man and 4 in 10 man. Again guilds still often went and hit up previous tier for an hour or so a week to fill in slots/new members/etc.

---WoW Top tier has 14 raids. Far as I know there are also 2 tiers of difficulty (normal/heroic) and guilds run both? (not sure on that)

2. let you raid multiple nights even during farm so you can do things like have 2 scholars on roster.. One that can't raid every Tuesday/Thurs and one that can raid every night the other can't


Simply put having nothing available but 8 man raids is doing nothing but hurting the raiding environment. Sure do what Rift/WoW did and provide some small scale raids (8 mans) but give us a REAL CT (8-9 bosses tuned for a premade raid like we were expecting) and release alongside the 8 man coil.

Couldn't agree more with him.

The writer is right about stats and echos.

They're next to useless in the face of pattern memorization.

In XI you could tell who is a great player in a group but in XIV there is no such thing. You either follow the pattern or you don't. In extremes the great players cannot compensate for the mis-steps of the less experienced. Skill in this game is binary. You either follow the steps or you fail.

Now that I think about it; why am I working so hard for gear to begin with?
The animus is not THAT much stronger than easier-to-get gear and in the end it's not going to matter that much especially for a warrior.

Reading all the thread responses is just plain sad.

I would never say the game is perfect, in fact I believe it has many flaws and certainly a lot of things that I don't like... but this apology of the skill-less is just horrible.

I guess this is why we start seeing things like the white tanoki suit, the skip to next check point or all the clue systems.

In my opinion, games should strive for high difficulty with low tedious factors. FFXIV does this well in many of the end game fights: you wipe in coil and everything instantly resets and you can try again. And again. And again. Until what makes you leave is not that that the time ran out and you wasted your weekly entry but the fact that you have to accept you aren't good enough to beat the encounter today and Perhaps tomorrow will be different. (Side note: ATMA quest is the exact opposite: high tediousness, low difficulty).

Maybe I just miss the (not so long ago) times when games weren't afraid of not being politically correct and would tell you in your face: "You suck at this".

Ok, so I'm going to be the detractor here. I will preface this with some of his arguments are good, but many are a conflict of interest for the continued success (measured in subscriptions) for this game.

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A mechanics-driven battle system

At this point (2.25), the current end-game content is the Second Coil of Bahamut. And the previous, first Binding Coil of Bahamut has been made so that even the so-called "mainstream" players can clear them without too much effort. Yes?

Let's take a look at the first Coil as an example:

In Turn 1, you no longer need to feed the slimes to Caduceus, so that's a huge easing of difficulty.
People were skipping slimes before the first patch. As long as you know the fight and outgear it over the bare minimum anyone could do this.


In Turn 2, Allagan Rot is (still) the faster method. However, anyone who cannot properly handle the mechanic will still die and possibly wipe the party. The mechanics has been eased to the point where even if one or two people mess up you may still be able to clear it. Nevertheless, the enrage method remains the mainstream strategy.
I feel that Turn 2 was the major roadblock to lesser skilled people progressing through Coil until the Enrage method was discovered.

In Turn 5, if you cannot deal with the mechanics of divebombs, twister, etc., you will not be able to win no matter what your character or equipment level is, with or without Echo. In fact, if your DPS is too high, you will actually run into trouble with Conflag/Fire Balls.
And this pretty much sets the trend for all the new turns of Coil, and maybe every piece of harder content equivalent to Coil going forward. (I don't think Primals or CT will ever fall under this category) This is also how I feel the cutting edge content should be until something comes out to replace it. People that have it on farm can still screw up occasionally, and it's both refreshing and frustrating to know that even if you know a fight inside out that it can still whip your ass sometimes.

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The largest group here, the casual players, have all yet to still challenge the Extreme Primals and Coil. But the reality is that a large portion of this group have already stopped playing altogether.
So you're telling me nearly 60% of the playerbase have stopped playing by now? I find that kind of hard to believe. I'm in a FC full of what I would call "casual" people (I don't actually raid with them) and to this day, as a full FC, have never beaten Titan Ex. They just finally got their T5 kill a few days ago after finally putting some serious effort into it the past few weeks of a few hours a night 2-3 times a week, which isn't something a casual would typically do, but that's the kind of effort that has to be put forth if you're serious about beating something.

Right now they maybe put an hour's worth of attempts into Titan Ex and then give up. That's what casuals do. The people in my FC don't seem too concerned about being at the cutting edge of things, they just want to beat it eventually. They seem content enough doing atma farming, dungeons, gardening, all facets of what the game has to offer.

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Changing the battle system

My recommendation is a battle system that does not rely on mechanics/gimmicks.

Turn 4 of the first Coil, prior to the nerf, had almost the perfect balance in terms of difficulty. It was built so that it can be cleared long as the players can fully exercise their skill potential, and is directly affected by measures such as the Echo and gear ilvl.
So essentially you want a battle system where you don't have to dodge anything? I guarantee you will lose far more players (your hardcores and your midcores) if you have a battle system like this because it will be bland and unimaginative. I hate to pull the FFXI card, (but it was already done in this post at one point) but it seems like you want a battle system that mocks FFXI where all you do is trade hits with a boss, heal through the damage, and occasionally use a devastating attack. FFXI had one of the most boring battle systems I've ever witnessed. Its only redeeming features were skillchains and magic bursts.

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I'm not saying that gimmicks/mechanics are evil and should be removed completely, just that fights should not be “driven” by them. “Why not just make the boss or enemy simply strong?” is the basis of my recommendation.
That's exactly what you are saying though. I read this as you'd rather have a boss hit your tank for 75% of their health and put all the skill based play around your healers being able to precast/react around that. The wide array of abilities that a boss can use that affects the whole party is what I feel brings that certain level of challenge for the encounter. It's also what separates the good players from the bad, as one weak link will ruin you on the harder encounters.

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Having more freedom in setting your own party size... or not
I don't think the development team quite understands just what made these contents so good for many players. And that is “as long as certain key jobs are in the party, you're more or less free to build the rest of the party any way you liked” (a FFXIV raid leader reading this is probably thinking “I wish!” right now)
FFXIV works the same way? You need tanks and healers, and a bard would be preferable. (sounds familiar...) Everything else is your choice, although there are certain setups that may work better for specific encounters, just like in FFXI.

Yoshi-P says “people get tired of contents after about 3 months”, and that's absolutely wrong. Everyone played these things for years at a time, and even the more recent Abyssea update had me playing for well over a year.
People played that content for years because it's all they knew. They had fun playing with their friends and continued to play the game. People that didn't enjoy this branched out and experienced new games like WoW and preferred its content that had less of a time investment for it. I can guarantee that this game will lose more people if all we had to do for a year was the first Binding Coil of Bahamut.

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Now, what about the current FC/LS situation in FFXIV?

After each patch, you'll see your FC/LS's static teams in coil all day, and wonder whether anyone will even have time to talk to you.

If the system is changed so that more people can participate then you might have been able to go “Hey I just got here, let me join you guys!” (this wasn't easy to implement even in FFXI, but they did it)

The obstacle here (besides the obvious 8-man design limitation) is the instant death mechanics. As long as these mechanics exist, people will only want to play with those who won't make mistakes and would never want to *add* more people into their party.
I agree that I'd like to see larger party content other than CT and the two open world encounters that we have, but this isn't the obstacle. If WoW proved anything, you can carry less skilled people in content that required more people. The obstacle is the dev team afraid of taking a chance on making larger scale content because it will exclude smaller FCs that can't/aren't willing to branch out to other people to team up with to do it.

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Weekly lockouts and other time-gate measures

There are a number of weekly lockouts in FFXIV, however, there are no attempt lockouts. You can try something for as many times as you want until you win. This is another factor that pushes the system towards being mechanics-driven.
If you want to implement something to drive away a large portion of your players, then this is the way to do it. FFXIV doesn't have an alternative like WoW's Heroic Raids for content. WoW has its normal difficulty that people can play through for the majority, while the minority of more skilled people could go through the Heroic raids with limited attempts, but the rewards are better. The common player simply wants to clear the content and may not even want to farm for gear. If you gate content behind a certain amount of attempts, you're going to lose your lesser skilled players (which make up the majority of the player base) simply because they can't experience it. You'd lose your Hardcores too who are trying to figure out mechanics for a fight because there's no alternative for them to do in the meantime.

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To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react. This might help lesser skilled/casual players get through the content faster, but on the same hand they'll be in the same boat as the hardcores (who will clear everything within the first week of it coming out) who get bored after doing content after so long.

(I notice I use "you" a lot in my post, it's not directed at the OP)

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Originally Posted by Iriadysa

In my opinion, games should strive for high difficulty with low tedious factors. FFXIV does this well in many of the end game fights: you wipe in coil and everything instantly resets and you can try again. And again. And again.

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That exact repetition is tedious by definition because the fights are exactly the same every time due to the extremely scripted nature of them.

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Originally Posted by Cap75

That exact repetition is tedious by definition because the fights are exactly the same every time due to the extremely scripted nature of them.

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A fight only becomes tedious from repetition once you master it.

Otherwise you are just looking for blame outside of your own inability to improve. Although... I suppose you could get tired of sucking at a fight. Well, that's the game right there telling you "You suck at this" :)

I wonder if SE will touch this subject between hardcore players that down content vs those that are struggling for 2.3 or their planned expansion in the upcoming live letter.

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Originally Posted by Bizniztyme

So because someone didn't beat turn 5 they can't like the mechanics of all the fights before it? Great logic there. lol

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OP mentions how the fights before T5 are more balanced and the Second Coil is where mechanics start playing a mayor role, he also mentions this for EX Primals where I agree they are somewhat mechanics based but not as heavily based around them so personally it's not as much of an issue. So yes, while they might like the mechanics before T5 they really should experience the Second Coil before forming a solid opinion about what the OP is talking about on that subject, but also feel free to use this argument against myself since I haven't beaten T9 therefore I can't criticize it, which I haven't mind you.

Wow, now that's a good translation!

I can't agree with this post more, it accurately describes what's wrong with this game and I'm glad someones finally been able to put it down in words.

It's funny when you find out that most of the people praising the OP are people who have not experienced the second coil.

Like I've said 100 times, this is the outcome of easy/simple class mechanics. You can type on google "(insert class) rotation FFXIV" and after some practice you're just as good AT THE CLASS as most people. You may not be able to dodge well, you may not be able to keep tracks of lots of things, but at its core, you are as good AT THE JOB as most people.

To make up for such easy class mechanics, you have to make the boss mechanics hard.

Great post OP, unfortunately i have already lost my faith in the development team of ffixiv ARR, i always though this system was here just because of the little time they had to balance the game (the hardest duty), but every update have been disappointing and changed nothing, so looks like they will keep the battle this way.

This post missed a point, lack of hard/group and useful open world content, i can understand party limits (not restrictions) on instanced content, so a good way to make not limited party content would be useful open world endgame content, and those fight would also be free of unforgiving gimmicks.

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Originally Posted by Orophin

Ok, so I'm going to be the detractor here. I will preface this with some of his arguments are good, but many are a conflict of interest for the continued success (measured in subscriptions) for this game.













To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react. This might help lesser skilled/casual players get through the content faster, but on the same hand they'll be in the same boat as the hardcores (who will clear everything within the first week of it coming out) who get bored after doing content after so long.

(I notice I use "you" a lot in my post, it's not directed at the OP)

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Wow, couldnt have said it any better. You win this thread. :)

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Originally Posted by Iriadysa

A fight only becomes tedious from repetition once you master it.

Otherwise you are just looking for blame outside of your own inability to improve. Although... I suppose you could get tired of sucking at a fight. Well, that's the game right there telling you "You suck at this" :)

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Except even if an individual, or 7/8 individuals master the mechanics if there's even one person who doesn't have that grasp of the mechanics the end result is the same.

It doesn't matter if you have 1/8 people who don't understand the fight or 8/8 who don't understand the fight. You'll still be put into potentially unrecoverable positions with one critical mistake. That's basically the point of the blog post, even though people have tried their hardest to twist it out of context. The 7 people who aren't messing up can't carry the one person who is under-performing because the encounter is basically designed to be unable to kill you as long as you know the rhythm of the jump rope. If one person trips though, everyone is forced to fall over.

You can overgear for certain encounters in order to make up for deaths (Particularly fights with echo buff currently in them), but you can (At least currently) not overgear to the extent that you can make up for another player not performing up to task in the cutting edge end-game content. Your only option is to remove, replace, or just wait and hope they eventually figure out. Because people don't want to wait, the former two options are employed. That's what the post is attempting to drag out. There's virtually zero room for individual player skill because you're being evaluated basically on how well your group can respond to the pre-set pattern rather than the ability of three of four players being able to be an exemplar of playing their job and being able to make up for the mistakes of party members who aren't as skilled. This leads to hardcore players being frustrated because they have to find the perfect group who won't make any mistakes, meanwhile other players are basically excluded entirely.

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Originally Posted by Prototype909

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This is completely untrue. There are few mechanics which will outright kill the raid if failed by a single individual. One very good healer can maintain the workload of two for a period of time, allowing recovery. Exceptional DPS can cover for the lost DPS of poor DPS. There is also a large skill component in executing mechanics (especially those involving lots of movement/concentration) while losing as little DPS/HPS as possible.

Tank/spank fights are a prime example of ~zero skill fights though, and why FFXI's skill ceiling was laughably, horribly low (as well as lacking any complexity/speed).

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Originally Posted by Jubez187

Like I've said 100 times, this is the outcome of easy/simple class mechanics. You can type on google "(insert class) rotation FFXIV" and after some practice you're just as good AT THE CLASS as most people. You may not be able to dodge well, you may not be able to keep tracks of lots of things, but at its core, you are as good AT THE JOB as most people.

To make up for such easy class mechanics, you have to make the boss mechanics hard.

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There you go. Another one. I wonder why if the jobs are so easy to play why you can still find HUGE diferences between DPS's in the game or even tanks. Even in the fights that let you dps without having to move that much.

People can't even learn scripted fight and come to forums to complain about it. They also complain about "have" to watch a video in order to understand a mechanic and say that's the only way to even get a grasp of what's happening when they forget that someone just like them went to the encouter and learned it (are they calling themselves "dumb", then?). Put more random in the encouters and we will have twice as much bitching in the forums and we all know people love a RNG (I hate it...). Then we have people saying that gear doesn't matter because of insta-kill skills from bosses, but they're wrong... gear does matter. Gear will inscrease your dps making fights last less, gear will help your tank hold more hits and your healer to be able to save your ass during n "omg!" situation. But all gear in the world means nothing if you don't have the minimal amount of skill to know that you better move out from landslide or else bye bye. All the gear check and scripted mechanics are the almost the perfect balance to test both your raid awereness and your capacity to gear up, being the later the easiest to do in this game.

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Originally Posted by Roris

OP mentions how the fights before T5 are more balanced and the Second Coil is where mechanics start playing a mayor role, he also mentions this for EX Primals where I agree they are somewhat mechanics based but not as heavily based around them so personally it's not as much of an issue. So yes, while they might like the mechanics before T5 they really should experience the Second Coil before forming a solid opinion about what the OP is talking about on that subject, but also feel free to use this argument against myself since I haven't beaten T9 therefore I can't criticize it, which I haven't mind you.

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Mechanics are a major role of almost all encounters in this game, not just Coil. Coil is just alot harder as it should be.

Praise the OP! Let's get the devs to make all the fights like t2 0 click!!!!

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Originally Posted by Raenryong

This is completely untrue. There are few mechanics which will outright kill the raid if failed by a single individual. One very good healer can maintain the workload of two for a period of time, allowing recovery. Exceptional DPS can cover for the lost DPS of poor DPS. There is also a large skill component in executing mechanics (especially those involving lots of movement/concentration) while losing as little DPS/HPS as possible.

Tank/spank fights are a prime example of ~zero skill fights though, and why FFXI's skill ceiling was laughably, horribly low (as well as lacking any complexity/speed).

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inb4 they reply to you with some BS "you are wrong and im only vaguely going to explain why but not really"

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Originally Posted by Rose-Wild

Praise the OP! Let's get the devs to make all the fights like t2 0 click!!!!

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Pls stop i used to have fun with coil T2 :( when it was first released T2 required skill and teamwork and was better for it, then they nerfed it for the causals, now those casuals are complaining that T7+ are too hard and trying to remove all skill from the game, yoshi tried to make a game where you casuals and us could live in harmony! why must you try to destroy this!? (second half not aimed at you btw)

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Originally Posted by Rose-Wild

Praise the OP! Let's get the devs to make all the fights like t2 0 click!!!!

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How about just asking for separate content that will benefit both sides?

Instead of being sarcastic and unhelpful to the situation overall.

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Originally Posted by Orophin

To summarize, I feel this specific writer either can't handle mechanics themselves, or feel they're at the mercy of other players that can't, and want the battle system watered down to where it becomes so simple that people barely have to think or react.

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I took from this the complete opposite. The original author advocates dynamic fights, which would require more thought and reaction than what we have now. What he wants is less fights that require memorization to succeed, that are seemingly unforgiving to new players but are trivial and boring to players who already know the fight.

The thing is there is already 1 casual raid CT, there is 1 hardcore raid Coil. Everything shouldn't be easy mode because that is your playstyle. There needs to be content for hard core players as well. You want easy bosses where the mechanics are simple and you can easily recover from mistakes then CT is your raid. Do you want content that is harder and punishes you very harshly for mistakes and takes several hours to learn fights, but offers the highest level of gear, then Coil is what you want you want.

I would say the devs already do a good job at putting out raids for both the hardcore and casual player.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

The thing is there is already 1 casual raid CT, there is 1 hardcore raid Coil. Everything shouldn't be easy mode because that is your playstyle. There needs to be content for hard core players as well. You want easy bosses where the mechanics are simple and you can easily recover from mistakes. Do you want content that is harder and punishes you very harshly for mistakes then Coil is what you want.

I would say the devs already do a good job at putting out raids for both the hardcore and casual player.

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Again my point, so far the game is keeping a very delicate balance between what the casuals want and what the hardcores want, plus the casuals are getting more content in 2.3+ so why exactly are they trying to destroy the balance this game has done pretty damn well!?

I read the OP and some of the posts.. well, all on this page, and all on first page. Forgive me for not reading the other 11 pages.

No snark intended, but maybe someone could explain to me how a not-mechanics-driven fight would work.

I get that clearing EX-primals, for example is all about memorizing the dance. That would be mechanics-driven. So that in theory, a player w/ worse gear could still clear it if she knows which way to go.

So, Garuda EX rotation is predictable and easy to memorize - after Aerial Blast, it's sisters, razor plumes, and repeat.

Sky in FFXI. Suzaku didn't have a set rotation, but it was largely irrelevant since your tank would just be standing there doing his thing while the healer does his and the DDs do his. At some point in time, it was guaranteed Suzaku would chainspell, and then you shadowbind or chainspell stun him back and continue doing your thing. Isn't that mechanics-driven?

Thing X happen so we all do thing Y - That's mechanics, no?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LilaAquillina

snip

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I THINK that OP was arguing for events to still have mechanics but less....

"every 20 seconds do X"
"every 30 seconds do Y"

It's not the existence of mechanics that he is against its the highly repetitive nature of those that currently exist. And in some events the fact that the whole event is a planned out series of steps makes it even worse.

Again that's what I THINK he was shooting for (less frequent more meaningful mechanics) I could be totally wrong.

Such as the add spawns/bombs on Titan EX or nails on Ifrit. As opposed to things like conflags/fireballs that really have no depth or choice (as in there is no decision making involved you just do exactly what ur told [move to the blue mark] or die) and are just annoyances.


Personally I think events like 6/7 are alright. But I'd like them a lot more if they were say.. Doubled. As in everything happen the same as it does but stretch it out to 20 minutes. instead of super short (annoying) 20 second intervals make it 50-60 second intervals and apply to more people (say 4-5 voices go out.. 2 golems spawn.. whatever just so it wasn't a simple annoyance instead of a real mechanic.) Right now I'm sure the kiter is bored out of his skull since there really is no skill to it... hit the mob then run to the back of the room. I know getting voice to me as a tank is basically "oh alright I'll do 2 more attacks then turn around for 2 seconds.... yep this is a you-lose-1-GCD-oh-no mechanic "