More bosses, less mechanics

This post is in regards to raiding in general (Crystal Tower, Coil, etc.). I believe that some of the community's troubles with content is that the raids are either rendered too easy over time (natural ilevel increase, echo), or are way too difficult for casual/semi hardcore players (Turn 5+, Titan EX).

A possible solution for raiding (in the expansion obviously) would be to create much larger raids with far more bosses in them (like 10-15), and with the raid starting at a much easier difficulty level and increasing towards the end. This would serve 2 purposes: 1 is to allow a sense of progression within a raid, and 2 is to distribute some of the gear in a better way (cause honestly right now the loot tables are way too large and only having 2 drops per turn per week makes it a bit of a stretch, especially for people that are new to clearing turn 5 now and haven't been doing Second Coil for months already).

Many of the current coil bosses could have their mechanics pared down and used for other bosses, some of the phase transitions and amounts of phases per fight is completely unnecessary and doesn't really add to the fight. Twintania's final phase for example could have been used for some other boss which would focus on moving out of fire and not covering the entire arena in flames (and the flames could be far more deadly), instead of just having it tacked on as a breather for having beat twister phase.

In my opinion the Leviathan Extreme fight was perfectly tuned with one main mechanic (the divebombs and boat slamming), and then a dps race mechanic (spumes), and then a control mechanic for tanks (adds). It challenged everyone without being completely overwhelming with phases.

SE has proven they know how to make good encounters, and over the years they have made bosses with fun and memorable mechanics in previous games.

What do you guys think?

I don't believe the loot tables are to large using your examples. Titan EX has a loot table of 5 items. Non-hardcore content rarely exceeds loot tables of 10.

Keep in mind coil t1-5 is hard-core content as it stands currently. That is how they originally designed it and they have not modified it off that path, and changing it would give new and upcoming hard core players no hard core content option in that tier of content. Echo is an ilvl disparity tool it does not affect mechanics (outside of having the same as over gearing which you mentioned above)

Keep in mind the EX primal fights also contain no additional story, spoiler alert they are all "oh no the primal is back and stronger"

The current casual/semi-hard core system is already in place that would be in the current 3 tiers darklight/myth/soldiery. All of which is easily obtained over time, avoids loot tables (with the exception of darklight now), and on par with its hard core content counterpart.

Please don't read this last bit in the wrong tone, I can respect what trying to say above. Your request is when broken down asking for the hard core specific toys (status symbol items) without the hard core effort.

Keep in mind this suggestion isn't for the current content. The systems that are in place right now are what they are, a lot of it being because they had to fix the entire game from before. The suggestion is mainly for expansion content and what I'd like to see moving forward.

With an expansion and level cap increase they have the opportunity to reset gear levels and stats, so there's no reason to move to a more exciting raid approach for the future.

There already is a stready difficulty progression. It's called low level dungeons. If you notice, more difficult mechanics are introduced with each dungeon you unlock. There's also the guildhests which specifically cover battle mechanics.

Let's not make the game easier than it already is.. Not to mention the last thing I want to do is have to wait through 8 bosses for a chance at the drop I want. Let alone be able to auto-attack/AFK and beat him..

Bear in mind that in SCoB the amount of drops has already increased. There's 2 drops on T6, 3 drops on T7, 3 drops on T8 and 4 drops on T9. An increase from what the first turns had to offer.

Next to that, I don't think it'll truly matter for learning purposes on as to whether a raid has 4 bosses or 7 bosses. For those who struggle, the struggle will more than likely remain very similar. I do think though that for other reasons, general fun of progression through content, more bosses could be nice.

Which should go hand in hand with a reduction on time to clear the individual bosses. As as it stands now, quite a lot of bosses are stretched in time due to boss HP. In between tactics applied there's a lot of "downtime" of just mindlessly nuking. And if it does turn into a wipe, it's another 10 minutes down the drain. Personally I've always preferred more short-term fast paced encounters to combat that.

Just a troll boss in between with fairly easy tactics is also always appreciated. Turn 3 was a nice turn in that regard, if it would have offered a reward. Turn 8 comes close, although I think it's probably slightly too complex to truly be regarded as a troll. The gunship battle in ICC in WoW is a nice example. Having downed some more tactic heavy content whilst still progressing it's nice and relaxing to suddenly come by a fight in which you don't really have to think for a change.

A total of about 10-15 bosses in that is also something I wouldn't oppose to.

I understand what you are asking for as future content quite clearly, was just using existing examples just as you did. You are asking for the removal of strictly hard core content in favor of easier "hard core" content.

You used levi EX as your well put together argument as an example. The issue with that example is there is a multitude of mechanics that would make that fight much harder, which are taken off the table simply by having the tanks stand in their respective corners and point then off the boat. Which is a development oversight in my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Fornix

Bear in mind that in SCoB the amount of drops has already increased. There's 2 drops on T6, 3 drops on T7, 3 drops on T8 and 4 drops on T9. An increase from what the first turns had to offer.

Next to that, I don't think it'll truly matter for learning purposes on as to whether a raid has 4 bosses or 7 bosses. For those who struggle, the struggle will more than likely remain very similar. I do think though that for other reasons, general fun of progression through content, more bosses could be nice.

Which should go hand in hand with a reduction on time to clear the individual bosses. As as it stands now, quite a lot of bosses are stretched in time due to boss HP. In between tactics applied there's a lot of "downtime" of just mindlessly nuking. And if it does turn into a wipe, it's another 10 minutes down the drain. Personally I've always preferred more short-term fast paced encounters to combat that.

Just a troll boss in between with fairly easy tactics is also always appreciated. Turn 3 was a nice turn in that regard, if it would have offered a reward. Turn 8 comes close, although I think it's probably slightly too complex to truly be regarded as a troll. The gunship battle in ICC in WoW is a nice example. Having downed some more tactic heavy content whilst still progressing it's nice and relaxing to suddenly come by a fight in which you don't really have to think for a change.

A total of about 10-15 bosses in that is also something I wouldn't oppose to.

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I'm sure raids will see something like the gunship fight in the future. We already have a boss fight that involves a change of ways to kill it in Stone Vigil HM, so I'm sure something else will come along. Although, something like that will most likely only be seen (for raids) in places like CT or whatever the expansion equivalent will be. Thinking about it, we sorta also have that with other dungeons... raid-ish... places like CM, in both trash and boss fights.

why is it always trash > shortcut > boss

and we know they can make "trash" interesting, see Turn 4.

design 3 or 4 of those, string them together and have 1 drop at the end of each. instead of say T7 that drops 4 items.

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Originally Posted by CruxisSeptentrion

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They absolutely NEED to increase raid content by the expansion. 4 raids is far far far from acceptable. They don't need to sacrifice quality to do it.

And as far as the raids being rendered too easy over time. It is because they are tuned WAY too low. People beating T9 without ilvl 105+ should never have happened. Makes it very clear they the events are tuned to be beaten in more like ilvl 100. Which is group gear.

Loot rate is fine. A full build is 12 pieces of loot. You currently get (ignoring UAT since it is redundant with HA weapon) 12 pieces of loot a week. So in theory you could fully gear a static in 8 weeks (2 months).

What would be a AMAZING is along with more content (10-12 events) is larger raids. This 1 group stuff needs to stop give us 24 or at least 16. I mean hell it is bad when FFXIV "raids" are even smaller than all the other WoW clones.

You're basically saying screw the hardcore players who enjoy what little hardcore content we actually have... Let the casuals have it all. I don't think there should be any sense of "this is easy/fun" in high end top tier raid content. It should be as hard as it gets, and more than difficult enough so the casuals either need to shape up and get good or stay away.

I disagree. There should be content casuals can't do, and there should also be casual content hardcore players will never want to do.

Guess it applies here too....

http://cdn.meme.li/instances/500x/53644972.jpg

My two cents? Raiding used to be a lot less painful back in the day because you had to build the organizational skills to do raids from a very low level. Players would inevitably run into people they were compatible with during organized dungeon runs and by end game they had a firm social network to draw upon for raiding. It was just much easier to hook for raids with that kind of social situation than the kind FFXIV has brought to fruition.

The game's design is completely bipolar: It builds itself around ease of access and then leaves its players right at the door of a raiding environment they are ill prepared for both organizationally and relationship-wise. It's social anxiety and fear that have barred players from the content more than anything else.

I agree with the OP. Especially on bosses like T9 where it feels as if you were fighting 4 different bosses in a row. It wouldn't be actually that bad if these bosses weren't merely glorified choreography to learn.

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Originally Posted by Fendred

My two cents? Raiding used to be a lot less painful back in the day because you had to build the organizational skills to do raids from a very low level. Players would inevitably run into people they were compatible with during organized dungeon runs and by end game they had a firm social network to draw upon for raiding.

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You have discovered the issue every dev since Wow was released has been blind to. Funny how something so obvious is ignored.



They let you solo all the way to level cap and then are surprised when people can't find raids.

EQ you were in full groups of 6 people most of your play time by level 5 or 10 at the very latest.

We were forming "raids" by level 20 just to do simple stuff like kill named deeper in some zones. 3-4 groups get together and clear down and fight those super hard bosses (that were meant for 1 group lol.. we were nubs at the time). Even outside of something like this formally being setup often groups would shout and help out each other in a zone for whatever purpose (Dvinn spawning in Crushbone anyone?)

Met my 1st real guild at level 14 or so in Unrest because of one of those "raids". Stayed with them up through the next 3 expansions raiding everything from original through low tier PoP.

But by the time we were in the 40's 50's (level cap being 60) We had guild alliances set up to gather and do raids on end game zone trash (trash often dropped semi raid quality loot as well in those days).

I had prolly lead and participated in 50+ separate raid nights by the time I hit level cap. And there was ZERO transition. We literally just did harder and harder targets from the 1st raid we stepped into.