this game relies too much on instant death attacks to make endgame harder

Called it from the very beginning~ This insane simplification of the combat system would eventually lead to either 1) players being literally unstoppable in most if not all situations or 2) cheap battles in which you'd simply die right away or else, well, refer to point 1. I guess it was the latter, after all. So far it's all about creating artificial difficulty by either throwing 50 bajillion adds at you (even during solo quests) or simply adding a lot of 1-shot attacks, and any boss that fails to do either of these is just a complete pushover (see Ultima). Yay. :D

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Originally Posted by Rydin

Your analogy is flawed. The OP is commenting on the product itself, not how it is arranged in the store (which would be very trivial to take issue with)

Its more like eating at a restaurant, taking one bite and saying "This food tastes awful." Then you abruptly leave the restaurant.
At no point are you obligated to go into detail about how the food specifically tastes. You aren't required to fill out an exit questionnaire. Your noted disapproval is enough.

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I didn't describe what the old man had an issue with, or did you miss that? My analogy was only that he HAD an issue, and that there was no attempt on his part to even reason out the problem in its context, or provide one.

I think most things are ok but if they keep putting in fights like titan i wont be terribly happy.

I mean pretty much the entire fight is just follow the script perfectly or you die and if you lose one person you won't have enough dps and you die
I don't consider a fight that demands perfect script following fun

I'll help you raise your bar. Instant death, is really nothing. Imagine a mechanic, when you do something wrong, someone else dies. Or there's a line linked between you two so if either of you do something wrong, both dies. Or even further, the line between you two is also an instant death laser that kills all other players passing through it, so when both of you try to get to a safe spot, you have to make sure the line between two doesn't slice through any raid member. That's WoW. FFXIVARR right now is still in elementary school.

And @Nihility, when it comes to this level of skill check I mentioned above, there's ZERO script to follow, every thing happening has to be dealt with differently or you wipe and it will surely be different everytime. That's when you WISHED, there was a script.

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Originally Posted by Rydin

Nothing in this game reacts to the player at all. ALL bosses are scripted. The only reactive thing they do is trigger phases based on their HP. This game has a lot going for it, but enemy AI is at the very bottom of the list. "What else can they do in an MMO"

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I can't believe it took someone this long to mention how poor the mob AI is. I mean, seriously, this guy is 100% right in saying the enemy AI has no reactiveness.

Why would a boss just let me buff up my party with stoneskin and regen effectively nullifying his next uber attack? Where's Dispell, that Final Fantasy staple? Why can't bosses change targets to pick off lower HP players? Why can't bosses react to whatever skills you use? Why can't a boss try to mitigate your next attack?

I mean, the flaws with the enemy AI is long; it needs work. At the minute, seemingly, mob's react solely to their HP rate, but where's the reaction based on: debuffs, buffs, the amount of people DPSing it, the amount of slaves/adds it has, when certain skills are used, if a player is close/long range, direction of attack, etc. and that can apply for the mob's allies as well. Ever play XII with those annoying-ass bunnies in the Giza Plains who went around protecting other mobs? Why not here? :<

But to OP: I would say the insta-death attacks are fine and not actually a problem but they appear overused due to a lack of imagination from the mob AI.

If you played EverQuest years ago, you know about one shots. If you started playing MMORGPs recently, you'll find a lot more cases where even the toughest mobs do not have a kill maneuver and the ones that do are scripted to where you can determine how to avoid or prepare for it. The main difference between the old school way and the new school way is that back then you only had personal experience to teach you and even then RNG was big. You never quite exactly knew when you were about to get squashed - which made it thrilling.

Games like ARR are watered down 90% outside of boss fights and thus we become accustomed to it.
I don't mind the increased difficulty(even though it's not) that instant death provides, but it has to be used sparingly. Being one shot, after spending an hour beating down redundant trash mobs, is demoralizing and makes you not want to play. Being one shot by a boss that you fight straight away and can try again without any penalty or time delay, is acceptable.

I feel like hooking up my ps2 and playing star ocean again. :(

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Originally Posted by Tigerwong

I'll help you raise your bar. Instant death, is really nothing. Imagine a mechanic, when you do something wrong, someone else dies. Or there's a line linked between you two so if either of you do something wrong, both dies. Or even further, the line between you two is also an instant death laser that kills all other players passing through it, so when both of you try to get to a safe spot, you have to make sure the line between two doesn't slice through any raid member. That's WoW. FFXIVARR right now is still in elementary school.

And @Nihility, when it comes to this level of skill check I mentioned above, there's ZERO script to follow, every thing happening has to be dealt with differently or you wipe and it will surely be different everytime. That's when you WISHED, there was a script.

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Pretty much this.

But what ARR has over WOW is the server delays and lag spikes, to add some more challenge they put the servers in Canada.
When people progress they just up the crap factor after a 12 hour maintenance so you get 3sec freezes.

I'm the first to admit after the maintenance dodging anything is very very challenging.
Perhaps for all the wrong reasons but hey it does add difficulty when everything stops for 2-3 seconds.


I'm pretty spoiled though during my RTS/MMO/FPS/MOBA days I became very used to what is shown on my screen is what is happening.
Most games mask the latency very well and I assumed this was the industry standard in 2013.
Might also be because it doesn't matter what connection I got here, with SE snowflake servers it just doesn't work atm.

Like in SC2 when I place an AOE on the ground, I aim at the spot where the rest is or slightly before.
I don't need to calculate where the units are 3 seconds later because of the delay.


But as said I'm very spoiled.