Boss Fight Mechanics

Here's a question: what type of boss mechanics would you like to see in FF14? I'm very interested in reading what other people think.

Like any other MMO, FF14's bosses tend to share similar mechanics. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware there are many unique and interesting mechanics in fights like turn 5, 9 and 13. But there are also many, IMO, overused mechanics in them too... for example t13's gigaflare; a AOE move that you deal with by doing the basic stack/put up defensive cooldowns thing, which gets boring.

In my opinion, Steps of Faith was a step (get it?) in the right direction. The only thing that made it less "fresh" feeling to me was the cannons, because they have been used for a boss before.

In the future I'd like to see something similar to SW:TOR's "Terror from Beyond" where you jump between platforms depending on the phase. Here's a video of it. Skip to 4:40 to see what I mean. The original SOA was also very fun, back in the day. It had a very interactive environment.

The reason my examples are from SW:TOR is because I use to do hardcore/server first progression on it. I enjoyed a lot of their mechanics and sometimes miss them. You don't need to use examples from other games...

Honestly I loved ffxi's tp based bosses where it was random and it was all about player skill.

These mechanics are just an automated wash rinse repeat thing. Where the fun dies quickly.

Don't get me wrong. I love ffxiv but there are somethings which become boring quickly. That and rehashed fights.

I would like to see a more TP based bosses instead of Time Elapsed or HP% remaining bosses (ie: ALL of the coil bosses).

I would also like to see bosses that interact with the environment a bit more, I feel like the battlefield is really pretty and it occasionally changes (like when fighting Nael in Coil, or Gilgamesh in the Big Keep) but what I mean is that I want to see something along the lines of making the party split up and have to deal with different mechanics and not be able to rely on the other half of the party's spells/skills directly (like having to go into Cerberus's belly for example). Something a bit more interactive in those regards would be cool.

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Originally Posted by Bracken

Honestly I loved ffxi's tp based bosses where it was random and it was all about player skill.

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People that normally say this in FF14 are the ones that have not cleared coil.

Coil fights require knowledge of the fights just like any other game and actually requires you to know how to play and react accordingly to your group set up, fights have DPS checks, most players are unable to play to the extent to reach the minimum requirement of numbers, if FF14 was so easy then why do so many players fail at the individual level such as raw numbers to start with.

Some Line of sight mechanics wouldn't go amiss, though not the destructible kind you get in Garuda. Some kind of enmity reduction attacks by bosses so tanks actually have to fight for aggro, and boss skills on cooldown timers instead of set to trigger at very specific HP percentages.

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Originally Posted by Bracken

Honestly I loved ffxi's tp based bosses where it was random and it was all about player skill.

These mechanics are just an automated wash rinse repeat thing. Where the fun dies quickly.

Don't get me wrong. I love ffxiv but there are somethings which become boring quickly. That and rehashed fights.

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The majority of fights in FFXI were tank and spanks. They didn't really have mechanics. Their attacks where random but they didn't do much. For example Fafnir

Fafnir had 4 tp attacks
Hurricane Wing - AoE damage that causes blind
Horrid Roar - Removes 1 buff from a player
Absolute Terror - Terrors 1 player for a duration of time
Dragon Breath - Front aoe breath damage.

A 5th attack, Spike flail was casued by someone having hate from behind, but this could totally be avoided by having everyone stacked on his paws for the whole fight.

So the whole fight boiled down to. Curaga when he uses wind, heal the tanks that are tanking Fafnir, everyone else does damage. This took way less skill then anything in FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

People that normally say this in FF14 are the ones that have not cleared coil.

Coil fights require knowledge of the fights just like any other game and actually requires you to know how to play and react accordingly to your group set up, fights have DPS checks, most players are unable to play to the extent to reach the minimum requirement of numbers, if FF14 was so easy then why do so many players fail at the individual level such as raw numbers to start with.

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You forget that this game has always suffered from latency issues and hardware restrictions on the PS3. I used to do T5 with PS3 players that got hit by 8/10 dive bombs because of the delay in loading the DB markers compared to PC players and PS3 players that used an SSD. And that's just 1 legitimate reason. No-one is saying that there's no skill in what needs to be done for raiding in this game, there clearly is, but there are a lot of mediocre and some even bad players able to do content because they learn the patterns and have others make up for their mistakes.

I was just discussing with a friend how I would like a raid boss that had platforming as part of its mechanics. If you fall, you die, but still able to be raised.

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Originally Posted by Zumi

The majority of fights in FFXI were tank and spanks. They didn't really have mechanics. Their attacks where random but they didn't do much. For example Fafnir

Fafnir had 4 tp attacks
Hurricane Wing - AoE damage that causes blind
Horrid Roar - Removes 1 buff from a player
Absolute Terror - Terrors 1 player for a duration of time
Dragon Breath - Front aoe breath damage.

A 5th attack, Spike flail was casued by someone having hate from behind, but this could totally be avoided by having everyone stacked on his paws for the whole fight.

So the whole fight boiled down to. Curaga when he uses wind, heal the tanks that are tanking Fafnir, everyone else does damage. This took way less skill then anything in FFXIV.

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Not just this, but eventually the fights became more of a "How can we buff the hardest and stun the longest before we win?" Most fights, if not all still to this day in FFxi are just zerg fests. The (H)NMs might have a select set of TP moves they use at random or predictably but really in the end it comes down to how long can you as a player survive before you kill the boss or it kills you. I think if anything, I still enjoy Odin and Kirin the most out of the FFxi bosses. At least they proved to your group that you had some kind of communication and organization during a fight.

I'd like bosses that made us think about our skill utilities; having bosses be immune to everything really ties your hands as a player and shows a lack of depth to the current encounter design.

Paladin: Silence, Stun, Pacify, Blind
Warrior: Stun
Bard: Silence, Bind
Black Mage: Slow, Gravity, Sleep, Bind
Summoner: Stun, Bind
White Mage: Stun, Gravity, Sleep, Knock-back
Scholar: Silence
Ninja: Silence, Stun
Dragoon: Stun (x2), Slow
Monk: Dispel, Stun (x2), Slow (Frontal)

Lots of skills listed here either don't get used or they're piled on as free extra damage (if they have a damage component) because the boss is "immune" to status effects and debuffs.