Randomised/Dynamic fights - can we have 'em?

I was just chatting away to some friends in our FC about 1.x and what kind of things I miss about the open world battles. It was mostly the dynamic nature of it - not completely dynamic, of course, but you could pull that extra mob or a spriggan might run along into your battle, or something will go wrong like that. That moment where, having fought a certian number of mobs at once for a while, you get that one more mob so you can level faster... and it links with another mob or two or something, and you end up overrun and the entire party reacts. I love that!

Even when we died after being overrun, we all had a great laugh about it. When we won despite being overrun, it made it feel all the more an achievement and we bonded from it. Because the dungeons at the moment are the same every time, there is no time for a quick stop to chat, saying things like "Oh, wow, I did not expect that! Ha! That was pretty crazy - can't believe we got through it." Instead, every time it's the same, which means nobody ever feels like they did any more than "followed the instructions well".

The "Set List" mentality of the fights in major dungeons (particularly bosses) is what annoys me the most about this game these days. Not only does it make the fight a little boring, but people new to the fight are often lambasted ruthlessly by others for not doing things in precisely the correct way. I feel that either more open world content or perhaps a primal that has a bit of a random nature as to what it's going to do next would be really beneficial.

What do you guys think?

EDIT: Just for clarification, I don't mean for this to force impossible odds vs. repeated one hit kill moves such as those seen on Titan. I mean for this to be used when dealing with bosses, trash mobs and open world mobs alike as a means to offer an alternative source of difficulty. Instead of forcing people to learn split second reactions (or predictions, when dealing with latency), this would teach people to react to situations and alter their tactics. Lower the intensity of attacks, give them time to react, but allow for more creative fights with the reliance of adaptation rather than scripted moves. For example, there will be times when, having been suddenly overrun by mobs out of nowhere, the party would adapt by having a WAR suddenly start to tank instead of the PLD due to WAR's (hypothetical situation, hypothetical stats, bare with me) better AOE-ennity moves. The PLD starts backup healing alongside the two healers to make up for the increased amount of damage being dealt to the WAR, while the DD start chipping away at the mobs to get things to a more manageable state. More thinking on your feet! :)

Approved.

pattern is boring in fight .___.

Wasn't something like this the reason for the accidental T5 changes in 2.16? I could have sworn that they accidentally patched in some experimental system to mix up battles a bit more... or something.

http://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/commen...onal_and_will/

"the monster AI is called the Contents Director, and the algorithms controlling their actions is the Gambit system."

If so, that's great! Although it would be nice if they did such a thing in the lower level dungeons so the rest of us "little folk" with iL75 gear can enjoy it too ;)

The issue with randomised movements is we dont have the kinda rollback, Dodge abilitys for classes other mmos have (well im refering to directly to 1 in general here) & even if we did have some added (other than DRG's jump) theres the issue of the cooldown timer & then theres the ovbious Latency issue we have all noticed, that causes these not to work in time much of the time for a certain amount of players. hallowed ground for the best example still has up to 8 seconds before it works for some players & Thats when you can get it to work without dying.

Not saying i disagree with the idea in fact i'd like the game to be acutally be playable for all to the point that we could have those types of battles. But thats not going to happen & im sure most of us are fine with that. Sorry to be the person pointing out the pink elephant in the room. I suppose if they made a low level not nessassary to clear dungeon then all the players near the server could enjoy randomised battles.

People are horrible at reacting to mechanics when it's already set in stone in a pattern. They'll simply be chastised more since they'll likely be incapable of reacting to a randomized attack pattern even more.

Considering how there's people who still can't beat Titan HM when lag isn't an issue...I don't know. The turn 2 and turn 5 changes were nerfs, actually - They were supposed to go live in 2.2 not the previous patch.

We don't need action movie dodging and stuff to have proper randomized mechanics because other MMOs prior to the "action" generation had randomized encounters just fine.

I'll just say this. I have a friend who I would say is an exceptional player. He has latency issues, but deals with it by learning rotations and counting down to seconds then move, without relying on the markers/cast bars being shown on his screen. If it's easy for you with close to no latency issues, great. But asking for fights that include 1HKO mechanics to happen randomly when the casts happen very quickly would kill off a large portion of players.

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Originally Posted by OPneedNerfs

I'll just say this. I have a friend who I would say is an exceptional player. He has latency issues, but deals with it by learning rotations and counting down to seconds then move, without relying on the markers/cast bars being shown on his screen. If it's easy for you with close to no latency issues, great. But asking for fights that include 1HKO mechanics to happen randomly when the casts happen very quickly would kill off a large portion of players.

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That's good - Because once you learn the script in this game you'll never die again unless you lag out. It's akin to overleveling in an offline FF game and one shotting every boss including the final boss.

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Originally Posted by OPneedNerfs

I'll just say this. I have a friend who I would say is an exceptional player. He has latency issues, but deals with it by learning rotations and counting down to seconds then move, without relying on the markers/cast bars being shown on his screen. If it's easy for you with close to no latency issues, great. But asking for fights that include 1HKO mechanics to happen randomly when the casts happen very quickly would kill off a large portion of players.

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Fights that rely on mob AI to determine attack sequence (semi-randomized) very rarely use OHKO mechanics, and when they do, they are usually telegraphed in such a way that gives you ample time to dodge them. Sort of like Titan's Landslide. It's an OHKO mechanic that has a long enough cast time that you don't HAVE to memorize the rotation to dodge it, even with latency. Randomized fights would still have 1-shotters, but not as many as frequently.

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Originally Posted by OPneedNerfs

I'll just say this. I have a friend who I would say is an exceptional player. He has latency issues, but deals with it by learning rotations and counting down to seconds then move, without relying on the markers/cast bars being shown on his screen. If it's easy for you with close to no latency issues, great. But asking for fights that include 1HKO mechanics to happen randomly when the casts happen very quickly would kill off a large portion of players.

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Exactly. In the current state of the game, for me, I have to move BEFORE circles or attacks appear in order to dodge, due to latency, bad servers or whatever (say all you want it's on my end lol, I know it's not. I have a tons of online games on my PC this is the only game I have to do this).
If attacks were to be randomized they would have to be super easy and boring in order to allow players like me to dodge.

If latency is fixed, sure. But as long as it's not, don't see that happening, game is just not build for that.

Edit- FATE bosses are randomised, are they not? lol

To be honest, it's not that hard to put a Randomizer in anything. Just get the list of moves the mobs use and stick a randomizer to it. I would approve if they did it. However, I fine with what we got as well.

i just want less boss fights wit 1 hit guaranteed killed

95% of the player base are casual players. This will never happen anytime soon.

if they slighten up on the 1hit kill moves then it could work just nice the way the game is now after 1month everyone will finsh new content.

So many people cannot avoid scripted mechanics, can you imagine having them react to randomized abilities?

I would love randomized bosses.
Titan Ex:
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
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http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000...2318.strip.gif

Everyone saying people can't handle randomised moves puzzle me... as per many posts in this thread, one hit kills are the problem when dealing with that kind of thing, not randomised moves. I see two ways of adding difficulty to a fight: You randomise the moves or you force people to have precision timing. Right now they're opting for the latter, which is actually less latency-friendly than the former. This change would not force one hit kill moves killing every person with latency - on the contrary, it would allow SE to create difficult fights without the reliance on one hit kill moves to create difficulty.

Also, this doesn't only have to happen with bosses having randomised moves. There can be a larger number of randomised variables than that. Moggle Mog, for example, is a fight I haven't even tried but I imagine with the number of enemies involved it's rarely the same fight twice in a row. In the open world, enemies can spawn while you're in a fight and aggro you immediately. These are not scripted events, these are events that simply happen because of the various mechanics involved all working together. The problem with single-enemy fights is that you end up focusing on the move list so much that it becomes a scripted fight. When dealing with the open world, with roaming mobs, with respawn rates being slightly varied, things like this can allow players and parties to think on their feet instead of relying on memorising a set move list. I think this would make the game considerably more fun for everyone involved, regardless of difficulty.

Left4Dead is a great example of how dynamic, seemingly randomised events can allow people to enjoy themselves. It doesn't generally make the game that much more difficulty (although it can), but it does make it that much more fun. In the long run, I think fun is the most important part of a video game - perhaps with FFXIV, allowing people to have fun instead of following a set move list (or even having one-hit-kill moves in the first place) could be seen as a good thing.

EDIT: Added to the first post in the thread for clarification.

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Originally Posted by Tupsi

Considering how there's people who still can't beat Titan HM when lag isn't an issue...I don't know.

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The problem with the Titan fights is that because they don't have a dynamic/random system to provide difficulty they instead went with set pass/fail events to make the fights difficult.

There wouldn't be as much of a difficulty issue if getting hit by a random move knocked off a good chunk of your health rather than getting hit by a set move that one shots you or takes you out of the fight completely.

Would it be wrong of me to ask for a sort of compromise by this?

Here is the thing, truely random mechanics are either highly difficult and frustrating and wind up relying on a form of luck. Or they are as such often too easy as any bad luck can be compensated by with ease unless you get a really unlucky chain of circumstances. It also often can be boring and frustrating at the same because it really isn't so much about skill as it is shorter pattern recognition.

And there is the crux of it - anything repeated enough times becomes routine, no matter how many dice you throw at it.

That said, I'd like to see a form of randomized content, not unlike FFXI's Nyzule Isle, but more variant, show up in FFXIV. However, I'd also like to see a form of dungeon creator content for players to try to construct their own little monstrosities for fellow players to try out. Those, however, are both very large endeavors and not to be expected as anything more than a very-long-off-concept as a maybe - knowing how many assets that would require to program, design, balance, and then effectively host.

The Random Encounters idea, however, could likely be it's own little side path for progression, so long as we do not flatly replace the ideas we currently have with them. I'm all for adding more, rather than taking away something and replacing it with something else. This is why I don't mind the Echo buff for older content, actually, as it fits within this philosophy.

Yeah, Hyrist, this is something I hope to see more of, not only. :) I think there is a place for Titan, but I just feel that every dungeon mob/boss and it's uncle seems to follow a set move list these days. Also, you can be dynamic without having it so that it's so bad luck that you simply can't manage. There will be easy times, there will be hard times, but impossible times would be rare if not non-existant. Personally, I prefer rare... I like the idea that losing can be fun. Sometimes you need even the best players in the world to be able to laugh and go "Holy crap, did you see that? That was insane. Ahahahaha, we would never have made it. That is freaking crazy. xD" I like these moments. One of my favourite moments in my history at FFXIV is when we inadvertently ovepulled a bunch of wolves at the Natalan wolf pit beyond that which we could handle. We struggled for a moment but slowly we all died off, and the last to die was a guy called Mattias. A BLM, he just stood there over our dead bodies with the remaining wolves eating away at him as he repeatedly hit the /laugh emote, and we were all laughing with him. It was funny. "Oops" moments are great if they are rare. It's all about having fun while you win - or lose.

I woul like a scripted party wipe mechanic, where at certain percentage/time interval is triggered and it one member failed is instant party wipe. Should also include a RANDOM single target instant death mechanic if member fail to dodge. Several dodge checks like titan ex. Plums. Basically something like shandra manaya (prenerf). In TERA.

I wouldn't mind having randomized boss fights, actually a fan of not knowing exactly what's coming next, but the only thing that would turn me off to it would be scenarios like posted below:

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Originally Posted by UBERHAXED

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000...2318.strip.gif

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I want an alliance entering a zone that has randomly spawning FATEs. Clear as many as you can for more rewards. Currency system anyone? :D

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Originally Posted by UBERHAXED

I would love randomized bosses.
Titan Ex:
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
Mountain Buster
.
.
.

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i'm assuming they would make it so they couldn't do the same skill twice in a row or tacking on a cool down to each ability.

I would like to see bosses have a bit more randomness to their attack patterns. If they do add more randomness though, they need to get better at telegraphing attacks before they happen - Wicked Wheel in Garuda Ex. is a good example of a very poorly telegraphed ability.