Yoshi-P: "If you want more engaging content, go play Ultimate"

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I think it would be great it if the devs pushed themselves a bit more with with dungeon design instead of just defaulting to the usual formulas. I think the bullet hell hallway from The Puppet's Bunker is one of the best unconventional trash "pulls" in the game, and we need more weird trash pulls like it.

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This, more interesting dungeon puzzles to make dungeons feel fresh would be nice (switches that cause monsters to spawn and only one is correct to open a door for example, monsters that ignore damage unless brought somewhere (like the veil eye monster but as a pack), platforms that fall unless the mechanic is taken care of [else you die], monsters that require to be healed to kill, etc). While also changing some monster aggro patterns, maybe? Like monsters that will switch aggro targets at random unless provoked, and just more role responsibility in general (Thinking within the trinity when coming up with actions, like say bosses that will kill the member unless the tank uses their "cover move" [Create the problem, create the solution] or more introduction to things that require certain actions to be used like Rescue). Maybe also some procedurely generated layouts, does not need to be completely random but 4-5 random layouts sounds reasonable based on the constant returning to said dungeon.

I think there used to be some raids where bosses reset the aggro.. can't remember if that's the case.

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Originally Posted by rawker

I think there used to be some raids where bosses reset the aggro.. can't remember if that's the case.

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The only one I remember is Neo Exdeath. He resets aggro after every Grand Cross IIRC. Then he casts a heavy raidwide and then a tankbuster, so healers actually had to watch aggro.

That needs to comeback. And so does other mechanics that split the raid party into smaller light parties... Even that of A4S (I know I am old and love to heal that raid as SCH) where random players are pulled out to deal with adds. Was it A4S though... gosh.. need to think more.

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Originally Posted by rawker

I think there used to be some raids where bosses reset the aggro.. can't remember if that's the case.

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Moggle Mog EX was the first to reset aggro, I think? I was gonna say Garuda EX as well, but that one is more of a "we'll tank swap for you" since Garuda and Suparna would switch places (if people did the "triangle" strat and not the "we hate our MT" strat).

ugh.. good king moogle mog. PTSD overload

The day I realised that the 7 jesters is just a remix of this is Halloween is when my life ended

what the crap.. I didn't realize it until now. :D

I cannot unhear it

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I think it would be great it if the devs pushed themselves a bit more with with dungeon design instead of just defaulting to the usual formulas. I think the bullet hell hallway from The Puppet's Bunker is one of the best unconventional trash "pulls" in the game, and we need more weird trash pulls like it.

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And more, I'd say we need some manner of chaos and rng. Perhaps some segments have a chance to yield specific mobs, or akin to budget variants, sometimes the left path is open and not the right path for the mid section, and sometimes the other way around. Maybe if *things* happened randomly here and here in every dungeon run we'd be less bored "oh, we're going left this time huh? Nice, haven't seen that one for the last five runs".

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Originally Posted by Aravell

The only one I remember is Neo Exdeath. He resets aggro after every Grand Cross IIRC. Then he casts a heavy raidwide and then a tankbuster, so healers actually had to watch aggro.

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A decent amount of older bosses had full aggro resets when changing form, like Omega M/F, which was actually very nasty on some tanks to generate enough aggro quickly to keep up with a team's full resource insta burst.

SoS Ex was actaully a good example. After the lb part, the rotation after that was semi random. It went Specter>Quintessential Cast>Specter>Specter>Specter but the order was random. The first one could of been ninja or war/smn or brd/drk or whm/blm. Heck Brawler was pretty neat too having single cannon, double cannon, single drill, double drill with a randomized sequence as well.

Been a while since I've done one of these but bumping this back up the front page and making sure that this stays visible.

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Originally Posted by Valence

And more, I'd say we need some manner of chaos and rng. Perhaps some segments have a chance to yield specific mobs, or akin to budget variants, sometimes the left path is open and not the right path for the mid section, and sometimes the other way around. Maybe if *things* happened randomly here and here in every dungeon run we'd be less bored "oh, we're going left this time huh? Nice, haven't seen that one for the last five runs".

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I had an idea for this, with the advent of 'story NPCs are in the dungeon with you sometimes', let's take Tower of Babil for an example. The dungeon has you along with Magnai, Sadu, Lyse and others for the train part, then you immediately split off into three different groups. I'm not suggesting necessarily three paths to go along, that'd be a lot of extra work for the devs, but we could have RNG decide that one of the three NPCs comes with us, and that affects something about how the dungeon is tackled. For example, let's say there's a quadruple-pull possible. Magnai might use his crazy AOE Holmgang to lock down half of the mobs, so that you're effectively 'tanking' only 2 of the 4 packs, but you're able to hit all 4 packs at once and clear the pull faster. Sadu, meanwhile, relishes in the thrill of combat, and so she would speed up the pull in a different way, by doing crazy amounts of damage, or perhaps doing the ritual to summon the instant-kill meteor on the quadpull (if you can live long enough to complete said ritual, maybe 15s). Then Lyse might instead notice a keypad to disable the lock on a secret passage, and after a few seconds get angry with it, punch it and break it open, allowing you to skip the pull entirely. Three different ways to approach the task of 'get through this corridor' but each is tackled slightly differently on each run.

The same 'RNG modifies the run slightly' idea could then apply to a Trust run, by modifying the mechanics of the bosses (and perhaps specific trash mobs) a bit. Take Tower of Zot. If you go in as a tank, you'd have a healer and 2 DPS as your trusts. With you, the player, being the tank, the enemies could modify to have more of a focus on Tank related things. Enemies could have moves which latch onto a certain target, until Provoked, which would force them to redirect the attack to the Tank that Provoked. They could have moves which can be interrupted or stunned, reinforcing the idea of Low Blow and Interject being 'actually useful moves'. They could have more skew towards using Tankbusters, to show 'hey you need to use CDs on these', but in a way ideally that says 'don't blow everything at once, ration your CDs out'.

Then for a run where you're the Healer, all of that is either disabled or handled automatically by the Trust Tank. Instead, you as the Healer would have to worry about things like 'more debuffs to Esuna', situations where you would need to Rescue (eg one of the NPCs has a super-Heavy and cannot get to safety to dodge an AOE, but you can Rescue them to get them there in time), more 'you need to be full HP to clear this DOOM' type things to force more healing, or perhaps some adds get summoned which self-destruct upon not moving for X seconds (ie if they're in range to attack you), and so using Repose to put them to sleep means they detonate out of range.

As DPS, it'd vary depending on the role I'd expect, Casters should probably have different things added to 'deal with' compared to Melee. Eg maybe a mini-DPS check could occur at some point (enemy puts up a shield ala Cruise Chaser, maybe), and that phase tries to make it hard for you as a DPS. As a Caster, it'd be hard if there's constant AOEs spawning all over the place to move out of (unless you're SMN). As a Melee, making it so you can only attack the shield from one side (eg the front as with CC) makes it harder, as if an AOE appears in the small window of 'I can actually do damage from this side', you might have to disengage from the enemy to dodge the AOE for a GCD (not-100% uptime for melees, shock and horror). I dunno what would 'test' a Phys Ranged because of their 100% mobility, perhaps something could be done where orbs need to be intercepted by running into them to delay the chargeup of the enemy's gauge for its 'big flashy finisher move', forcing the PhysRanged to make use of their mobility (if the player is not PhysRanged, presumably the DPS-Trust would handle it or there'd be less/no orbs)

Something like that

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

[...]Then for a run where you're the Healer, all of that is either disabled or handled automatically by the Trust Tank. Instead, you as the Healer would have to worry about things like 'more debuffs to Esuna', situations where you would need to Rescue (eg one of the NPCs has a super-Heavy and cannot get to safety to dodge an AOE, but you can Rescue them to get them there in time)[...]

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Funnily enough, none of the NPCs from trust, squadron, and duty support could be Rescue'd as far as I can remember. They'll just DODGE your rescue lmao. I remembered this specifically because I tried to make Thancred run faster to pull next mob XD

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Funnily enough, none of the NPCs from trust, squadron, and duty support could be Rescue'd as far as I can remember. They'll just DODGE your rescue lmao. I remembered this specifically because I tried to make Thancred run faster to pull next mob XD

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Yep, found that out as well because I tried to do the exact same thing.

That is pretty hilarious there. Yet another reason you really don't want to do trusts with healers cause one of your role actions that don't even worse at with it.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I think it would be great it if the devs pushed themselves a bit more with with dungeon design instead of just defaulting to the usual formulas. I think the bullet hell hallway from The Puppet's Bunker is one of the best unconventional trash "pulls" in the game, and we need more weird trash pulls like it.

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I think dungeons exist solely because they're a staple of the mmo genre, because in all honestly they just feel like glorified MSQ solo duties (and they ARE if you use trusts). I don't expect dungeons to become a competitive form of endgame content rivaling raids like WoW's mythic+ system, but come on now, they can put a little more effort on light party-based content.

And when they do try to do something different, they themselves don't seem too sure and there isn't any effort to try and make it permeate at all. Variants and Criterions being the latest examples of this.

Feels like the calm before the storm now. Everything that can be said has been said 1000 times over. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for this livestream in 5 days

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Feels like the calm before the storm now. Everything that can be said has been said 1000 times over. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for this livestream in 5 days

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I personally cannot wait for the "you won't know how it plays out until you actually play it" comments.

As is tradition.

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Originally Posted by Niroken

I personally cannot wait for the "you won't know how it plays out until you actually play it" comments.

As is tradition.

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Ah the beginning of the cycle at the start of the expansion, wake me up when we get to “it’s only been a week” and “just wait for x.1 they will surely fix then”

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

Ah the beginning of the cycle at the start of the expansion, wake me up when we get to “it’s only been a week” and “just wait for x.1 they will surely fix then”

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Nah, wake me up when we get to "just wait for next expac". I'd rather skip until people can stop giving the dev team excuses.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Feels like the calm before the storm now. Everything that can be said has been said 1000 times over. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for this livestream in 5 days

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Will it even be a storm? Call me cynical, because I am, but I believe it will be a whimper of "it's exactly as we expected" when the livestream shows that nothing is going to change.

I can't wait to be told to "just wait and see" both by dev and fellow player(s), just to be sentenced to yet another 3+ years of questionable design on my favorite of the trinity! <3

Call me excessively hopeful (or hopeless depending on your stance) but I do think this is the expansion where if they don’t fix healers they will collapse

ShB it was “give it a try you may end up liking it”, EW it was “hey SGE is the new thing at worst some DPS play SGE and hide the problem”

This time they have no excuse, we are at 5 years of this design, neither the complexity wanters or the sylphies are happy and we are getting 2 DPS this expansion I really do think this is do or die for healer design and “yoshi p said encounter design for 7.0 job design for 8.0” isnt going to cut it

They will use the raids as excuse this time to try healers.

I don’t even think they can actually push it onto raids either because they seem to have no idea how to actually make raids hard to heal

They said the same thing about abyssos and abyssos just ended up being half “DPS you have half the total mitigation why are you barely pressing it” and half “PLD’s block doesn’t block bleeds, this is why we need to buff WAR”

Yoshi P seems to be convinced that only encounter design matters when it comes to player engagement though, so I expect him to continue pushing the vision of simplified jobs with artificially inflated difficulty of content by ramming it full of body checks.

I don't think anyone on the dev team will believe this healer design doesn't work until they see the numbers drop hard.

The question is what are they looking at. Healer numbers already collapsed in abyssos. I remember bring offered money to join peoples parties in abyssos as a healer and im a thoroughly blue savage healer AND I was one break so they were also offering to basically carry me through the fight

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

The question is what are they looking at. Healer numbers already collapsed in abyssos. I remember bring offered money to join peoples parties in abyssos as a healer and im a thoroughly blue savage healer AND I was one break so they were also offering to basically carry me through the fight

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I'd assume they're looking at participation rates across all content.

Remember how they deemed the manderville relics a success because of how many people engaged in it? That's probably their bar. As long as Johnny Curespam continues to queue for dungeons along with all those like him, healer design will not be considered a failure,. The dev team will just look at the empty healer slots in savage PF and tell themselves that nobody is trying healers out in the raids and that they'll surely love it if they just tried it out.

Except there's a backlash to the Manderville relics being too easy to acquire, rivaling that of weapons from end game raids. I think Yoshi-P also mentioned that they will make relics in DT "more challenging"

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Originally Posted by rawker

Except there's a backlash to the Manderville relics being too easy to acquire, rivaling that of weapons from end game raids. I think Yoshi-P also mentioned that they will make relics in DT "more challenging"

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If you go on any casual forum they just praise them for allowing them to get a relic for every class (never mind they can’t play 18/19 of them) and eureka/Bozja were the worst content the game ever made

It's annoying the more I look into it as these "casuals" pay, as everybody else. What they have over us are overwhelming numbers. I am more inclined to think that the game is no longer catering to players who favor depth. Now I am rethinking of coming back seeing how the game evolved from being fun and having engaging gameplay to overly simplistic, boring, and jobs are just a reskin of another.

The thing is, this design doesn't even cater to the casual players either.

Condensing all the potency into 1 DoT and 1 filler means every missed cast on the filler is made more punishing. The forced alignment of all buffs to 2 minutes also makes drifting extremely punishing.

Not a single change is a net positive for the casual player. It all only benefits the players who want maximum performance with minimal effort.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

The thing is, this design doesn't even cater to the casual players either.

Condensing all the potency into 1 DoT and 1 filler means every missed cast on the filler is made more punishing. The forced alignment of all buffs to 2 minutes also makes drifting extremely punishing.

Not a single change is a net positive for the casual player. It all only benefits the players who want maximum performance with minimal effort.

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I don’t support the changes but I’m exactly the sort of person the changes most benefit

The “I parse blue in savage so think I’m top shit and can maybe crawl through ultimate but I’ll probably be the worst member of your static”

This group is the only group that benefits from the changes. FFlogs didn’t exist back then but I was assuredly a grey parser when HW SCH existed, but I still loved it because I wanted to improve and try my hardest, if they reverted the changes my parse number would collapse, but I don’t remotely care I want to be challenged

to Be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if the direction of these changes isn’t intended for casual players at all. Like I really wouldn’t be surprised either if they were trying to make changes for casual players and simply don’t understand the role enough to realize how ineffective these changes are for them. But I think i lean more toward them making these changes to try and get more people trying Savage. The only changes they’ve really made that do anything to make healing easier is the removal of MP (it may as well not exist at this point, with Raise just having a cool down), and making it so if they die, the tank and DPS can just handle the healing themselves. Let the causals who die in a dungeon lie in the dirt while everyone else gets to play the game, basically.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

If you go on any casual forum they just praise them for allowing them to get a relic for every class (never mind they can’t play 18/19 of them) and eureka/Bozja were the worst content the game ever made

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I'm one of those people that hated eureka and bozja and is perfectly happy to just get my relics by farming tomes.

I'm not against field operations mind you if I can just stroll through them and do the story inside before being done with it, and if I have other means to farm relics. If it even requires more tomes (which is a convenient reward you get by doing multiple types of content), then I'm still happy.

The main problem was that neither eureka nor even bozja even tried to balance the content to farm. And we still had to grind fates and crystal tower to top it off /puke

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Let the causals who die in a dungeon lie in the dirt while everyone else gets to play the game, basically.

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This is actually one of the things that infuriate me the most, and it's so new player unfriendly... When the sprout healer just lies dead and watches the group kill the boss for minutes and not only feels terrible for dying, but also terrible for being totally useless.

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Originally Posted by Valence

This is actually one of the things that infuriate me the most, and it's so new player unfriendly... When the sprout healer just lies dead and watches the group kill the boss for minutes and not only feels terrible for dying, but also terrible for being totally useless.

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I completely agree, and what makes it even more frustrating is that there are so many easy solutions to absolving the heavy pressure on the healer to always survive. Something I’ve been saying for years has been to make Phoenix Downs usable in combat, stackable so you can hold more than one at a time, and handed to the player as rewards for doing roulettes and quests. Give them a cast time, and a cool down independent of other items like potions, and then if we feel they are too strong for raiding, make Phoenix Downs unusable in high-end duties. Basically, it’s a function that works the same as silence echo. Once a duty is removed from the high-end category, then Phoenix Downs can be used.

Now, anyone can revive. The cast time makes it suboptimal if your healer is alive, but if they fall, you can revive them. Red Mage still benefits from repeated instant raising, and if we want summoner to retain some form of raise utility, remove Resurrection and give Carbuncle a raise on a long cooldown, or make Enkindle during Phoenix’s summon time able to target and revive fallen party members with the regen. Powerful, yet heavily restricted by timing. Or just leave it as-is and let it benefit from a potential swiftcast as the main advantage over Phoenix Downs. I can understand that the value of a raise can be a sensitive balance topic, and im not partial to any specific solution. I’m unbothered by them getting a powerful, yet restrictive raise, or not.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Enkindle during Phoenix’s summon time able to target and revive fallen party members with the regen

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This can only be done if and only if summoning Primals isn't a rotation and more of an opportunity cost... ergo, reverting to the old SMN where there's a choice for any given situation.

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Originally Posted by rawker

This can only be done if and only if summoning Primals isn't a rotation and more of an opportunity cost... ergo, reverting to the old SMN where there's a choice for any given situation.

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Not true. You absolutely can restrict it to when Phoenix is present in your rotation. Yes, that does make it extremely time-sensitive because you can only use it during a small window with tin your 2 minute rotation, something that you could argue justifies an OGCD raise that also places a regen on the revived party member. It doesn’t suit SE’a current modus operandi, but not everything in this game has to be hyper accessible. You can argue that it “feels bad” knowing your raise isn’t available when someone dies, but that’s exactly why the game is the way it is. Everything always has to be more accessible, more available, more automatic, because we hate situational. We hate adaptive gameplay. We hate limited resources. We want everything to be free and want it now. That’s how this community is. But you absolutely could have a powerful raise restricted to a phase in your gameplay that you can’t always take advantage of, and revel in the moments where your Phoenix phase was at the right time to catch a fallen party member and revive them entirely for free at the cost of not being able to do it any time you want every time you want it.

I would rather have full control of when I am going to cast my spells. Locking a raise, whether it is a GCD or oGCD, behind a summoned primal is already good, I'm not gonna lie, but if said primal is going to be part of a static rotation, then it isn't. We already have BLM, a caster that is following a static rotation to maximize its damage-dealing, and RDM that can chain res for as long as they have MP to sustain. Why can't SMN be the middle-ground caster that has multiple branches of spells suited for specific situations to be like BLM that follows an order to get the full benefits of each branch and like RDM where you can react to a given situation, on the fly? And to make it more interesting, pets need to return as an entity we can manage, instead of it modifying our spells.