Combat Suggestions for dungeons, raids, and other group combat

Hello, I've had a few tries talking this over with most of the Novice Network on my server but I felt I wanted to post something here to see what the Devs and others in the community might think. I'm a classic WoW gamer, it was one of my first major MMORPGs and I still try and find similarities in how the game felt back then when I look for a good MMORPG today. Now I love FFXIV very much, the crafting and gathering system is great and only a few tweaks for Quality of Life stuff would be nice, like more space in the inventory for us Omnicrafters. However there is 1 major thing I've noticed in this and other MMOs that I really wish the Devs would do more to push for, and that is the use of Crowd Control skills and tactics in combat.

Now to explain what I mean and what I been seeing I do need to point out that no I haven't made it to "Endgame" yet. I go into most dungeons as a healer as that's what I'm leveling up for my main combat class atm. Now I do have a THM/BLM as well as a PLD. I have seen so many tanks pulling massive pulls, usually 2-3 full groups together if they don't turn and become Invulnerable as they go back to their starting points. Most commonly this is done so that you have the THM, Archer, RDM, MCH and any other class that has an AOE to just sit and AOE grind them down.

Yes I can see the merit in the tactic, however when you look at the way the combat flows it seems massively chaotic, especially if many of the mobs have skills you have to move out of, and more of a chore on the tank and healer. However we have several classes that have some sort of CC ability, THM gets Sleep which is an AOE CC, CNJ gets Repost which is the same but single target, and I haven't levels many of the other DPS classes but I'm sure some might have something for CC. These skills seem to be completely unused for their main intents. In fact my Novice Network is full of people who laughed at the fact of even having it on the bar to begin with.

I think it's become such a commonplace method of just AOE grinding, especially with MCH, Archers, and Melee DPS who have AOEs that have no cast time, and to me it feels like the game's combat has a very pointless flow. Almost to the whole point of thinking we just need to have the dungeons be just a straight boss fight like Trials as that's all that people take seriously, and even then if there are adds in the boss fight it's dealt with by just AOEing them all down and overhealing the tank so he can hold them all.

It just seems like it would make the game more fun if combat had more in it than "spam AOE if there's more than 1-2 mobs" (cause yes I see AOEs spammed with just 2 mobs in the pull), and made it where you wanted to use CC to lighten the load on the tank and healer and focus fired things down instead of trying to do it all at once.

CC things are more for PVP, not PVE in this game. here in dungeons it's Pull big, AOE, boss, repeat ad nauseum.

I agree that using CC could potentially make the game more interesting. Unfortunately as things currently stand, there's no benefit to using CC actions right now, and in what few situations it would be useful, the mobs tend to be completely immune to those actions.

The big problem is, it's hard to tell what mobs ARE vulnerable to crowd controls. Early dungeons they aren't, but as you go on, they tend to have immunity to it "just because".

I'll still use Low Blow to interrupt something I don't particularly want to dodge, or Interject to stop a Dragon's/Ram's Voice, but the way I see it, it becomes a bit too fiddly to try and work around someone using sleep CC.

There is also that annoying feeling when you put a target to sleep and then someone has to go and wake it up, making your attempt to be strategic fall epically....

Enemies that aren't invulnerable to status effects also gain a gradual resistance each time you use that effect on them with a certain timeframe, and it works on party members as well. So if statuses ever made a more permanent comeback in the future, there would need to be some adjustments as each one can sometimes be a DPS loss and currently is not always worth it.

Almost all interesting strategies required like sleeping adds or stuns/interrupts were completely taken out of consideration when the difficulty of the lower level dungeons was nerfed into the ground years back.

So in a sense you already have a response to this suggestion: they don't want players to be inconvenienced by pesky things like learning to play the game while in dungeons.

Have where at end of any dungeon it drop one random gear piece for your class. When run a dungeon over 80 times and still never see boots drop once for your class something is wrong. think at end of raids should give each person a items that can use to trade in for gear and glamour.

As someone who also started in classic WoW, as a mage no less (so CC was a big part of my role), I can absolutely understand where you are coming from... unfortunately in FFXIV there are several factors working against CC being a reality:
- Dungeons are simply tuned too low... even new dungeons come out about 50-70 iLvls below the current cap, so for anyone with (close to) capped gear doing anything less than mass AoE pulls is simply boring.
- Healing is very spike based... by which I mean most mobs (and even bosses) don't hit that hard with auto attack, so assuming the tank avoids special attacks, uses mitigation, and has decent gear, even during an AoE pull a decently geared healer can spend most of their time DPSing.
- Every class has AoE, not every class has CC... BLM is the only class with any real CC (AoE sleep), RDM and SMN also get an AoE Bind (prevents movement), and WHM gets a single target sleep, but that's pretty much it; i.e. CC can't be a 'thing', because if it was, and you didn't have one of the above classes (and preferably a BLM), you’d be screwed.
- FFXIV doesn't have a proper support role, and even the Tanks and Healers are half DPS classes… so yeah, unfortunately the entire 'combat game' in FFXIV revolves around doing as much DPS as possible while dodging special attacks (and doing a few mechanics).
- Pretty much every boss has a hard enrage (i.e. instant wipe); most noticeably in savage raids / extreme trials… so anything that slows down the kill time, even by a second, is considered BAD.

So yeah, in summary, the ‘tactics’ of combat in FFXIV is not ‘slow and considered’ but pulling as much as you can get away with, doing your best to control the chaos (i.e. avoiding all the enemy AoEs / doing mechanics), and doing as much DPS as you can… which has it’s merits (i.e. can be fun at times), but yes, is ultimately rather shallow.

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Originally Posted by hynaku

Have where at end of any dungeon it drop one random gear piece for your class. When run a dungeon over 80 times and still never see boots drop once for your class something is wrong. think at end of raids should give each person a items that can use to trade in for gear and glamour.

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Higher level (50+) levelling dungeons do actually do this... not sure why they didn't put it in for all dungeons though, as yeah, it really helps in extreme cases (and dungeon gear is at best a stop-gap, so it's not like it would unbalance the game).

These is also the sheer amount of dungeons that would make this not really feasible. With 59 dungeons in total so far keeping track which mob group in which dungeon is stunnable/sleepable/silenceable is simply not realistic. Anyone who runs dungeons/roulettes regularly has seen the chat "I don't remember the mechanics for this one" more then enough. Dungeons are meant as casual content, so I don't think this will ever happen.

An idea I didn't think of until now. We probably aren't encouraged to use CC because of the duty finder. Most jobs don't even have any CC actions, so you can easily wind up a situation where CC is impossible. In order to add CC, they would have to change everyone's action set.

Have done this stuff in WoW, SWTOR, ESO, and several other not well known MMOs, not hard to remember that bosses aren't able to be CC/Stun/Bind, and certain Elite Mobs aren't as well. As to the fact that people want to say Dungeons are Casual Content, then I guess the whole game is Casual Content and there is no Normal Content or Hard Content. Just getting tired of game devs thinking their whole player-base is nothing but "ok let's start with this simple thing, level up 1 time, and ok I want ENDGAME content NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!" like a whiny brat. Would like a game where the whole game felt like an effort and not just the last 10 minutes when you get to the final boss.

Completely untrue, take WoW for example, Warrior and Paladin didn't have CC, and I believe still don't as it's been since Cata since I played. Hunters had a short term CC unless specced into it for a bit longer duration, Warlocks had to have their pet be a Succubus and lose pet DPS to have a target Charm CCed. Mages and Shaman had the better of the CCs lasting the longest. Rogue had a CC only usable before the pull and couldn't be re-applied if someone broke it unless you had a skill to get out of combat a few seconds. As to the mention someone else made, yes Diminishing Returns still affect CC, no where in my original post did I say to make it last forever.

However you are correct in that it is because of Duty Finder that we have this mindset of discouraging CC, cause they had to tune down things to the point where it's an AOE grindfest and anything else makes it "too hard to game".

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Originally Posted by Raldo

An idea I didn't think of until now. We probably aren't encouraged to use CC because of the duty finder. Most jobs don't even have any CC actions, so you can easily wind up a situation where CC is impossible. In order to add CC, they would have to change everyone's action set.

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Well, all they'd actually need to have done to accomplish that is to... not remove them in the first place. Every class and job had a form of CC originally. Most had multiple. WHM and PLD each had three status effects usable on all mobs save select (usually final) bosses up until HW, for instance.

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Originally Posted by PretzJG

Completely untrue, take WoW for example, Warrior and Paladin didn't have CC, and I believe still don't as it's been since Cata since I played. Hunters had a short term CC unless specced into it for a bit longer duration, Warlocks had to have their pet be a Succubus and lose pet DPS to have a target Charm CCed. Mages and Shaman had the better of the CCs lasting the longest. Rogue had a CC only usable before the pull and couldn't be re-applied if someone broke it unless you had a skill to get out of combat a few seconds. As to the mention someone else made, yes Diminishing Returns still affect CC, no where in my original post did I say to make it last forever.

However you are correct in that it is because of Duty Finder that we have this mindset of discouraging CC, cause they had to tune down things to the point where it's an AOE grindfest and anything else makes it "too hard to game".

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Paladin has had CC since Vanilla. It still has it. And since when has an AoE stun (which Warrior has had since Wrath of the Lich King) not also been considered crowd control...? Incaps are just one of multiple CC categories.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Paladin has had CC since Vanilla. It still has it. And since when has an AoE stun (which Warrior has had since Heavensward) not also been considered crowd control...? Incaps are just one of multiple CC categories.

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Since when has Warrior had AoE Stuns?

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Originally Posted by Ekimmak

Since when has Warrior had AoE Stuns?

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Sorry, somehow put HW instead of WotLK -- one game's 3rd iteration in place of the other's. The quote to which I was replying said that WoW's Warrior has never had any form of CC, when in fact it's had both mass-fear and mass-slow as of Vanilla (original release), and a conal AoE stun since the 2nd expansion.