Hey guys,
After raiding Shadowbringers and a little bit of Stormblood, I've noticed that a lot (if not all) of the extreme/savage fights have hard enrages. Some fights (such as Hades EX) have multiple hard enrages (AKA: DPS Checks) and it seems to be the go-to method of increasing a fights difficulty to being a "Beat the Clock" challenge.
It seems odd to me that they are all relatively short hard enrages, as opposed to soft enrages or a soft followed by a hard enrage after a fairly long time (like 30 sec-2 min after soft enrage starts).
For those who don't know the differences. (Taken from a FF Wiki)
"A hard enrage is designed to wipe a group if the battle is not beaten fast enough. The purpose of this is to prevent turtling and undergeared groups from beating the battle."
vs.
"A soft enrage is designed to gradually increase the difficulty of the battle. Soft enrages take many forms, ranging from a specific point of battle to failing battle mechanics."
That being said, I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about this sort of difficulty tool. Do you think it the current hard enrage fights are fine? Would you like to see more variety in how a fight ends/progresses with soft enrages? ((Such as Shiva Extreme)) Maybe more of a combo?
Personally, I'm not opposed to hard enrages, but it is getting a bit tiring to me that almost every fight has a fairly tight version of it. Some of the best memories I have from raiding previous games have been from soft enrages, where the boss just becomes unbearable and it's a fight for your life/clear.
TL: DR - Savage/Extreme has a lot of relatively short, hard enrages and no soft enrages to end current content fights. (Such as Shiva EX) What are your thoughts and opinions on this? Would you be ok having more soft enrages or would it make the game too "Easy"?
Thanks!
Savage Raids & Hard Enrages - Should there be more Variety?
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03-21-2020, 02:50 AMTohsySavage Raids & Hard Enrages - Should there be more Variety?
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03-21-2020, 03:19 AMRokkuEkkusuIf I am reading your wording right, you're implying Shiva Extreme has a soft enrage instead of a hard enrage. For those who does not do Shiva Extreme synced, she in fact has a hard enrage Diamond Dust, but the enrage timer is relatively lenient (around 11-13 minutes).Quote:
Originally Posted by Tohsy
There are different enrages back in the old Coil turns (turn 2 and turn 4 room wide aoes come to mind.) -
03-21-2020, 03:35 AMEaMett
We have had some variations over time. Things like attacks that remove one player at a time in TEA or o7s, o6s' tight heal check before the hard enrage, neverware heal check in o4s, etc.. The issue with soft enrages is that it's often essentially just a heal check and it gets old fast, just as much as hard enrages do. The difference being that hard enrages are probably a little friendlier on your healers, because nobody want's to be an endless heal bot. Throwing one in every now and then would be nice, but use in moderation.
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03-21-2020, 04:04 AMMakedaA hard enrage causes a community to prioritize DPS over all else. It's why we have tanks and healers trying to maximize their DPS - because the group needs to beat the boss before the hard enrage.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tohsy
The problem with this is that it is a 'one trick design' - ALL fights are about maximizing DPS. Once you learn the mechanics of where to stand when... all you do is just spam your DPS rotation as hard as you can...
... that is just too repetitive... and these days, most MMOs do this... but it wasn't always true.
A soft enrage, as you describe it, is actually a superior design strategy. It can be more nuanced and some fight might want DPS, others might want heals, orhter mitigation, others tighter mechanics (the safe spot keeps getting smaller or something).
But this is harder to design for.
You could for example... have a fight just start doing 5% more damage raid wide everytime the boss's "rotation" starts again...
- now doing more healing could become more vital... but how do you prevent players from just trying to 'out DPS' the time before healing can't keep up? There some old bosses a decade ago in many MMOs that did this... but it's been too long for me to be able to say "they did X, Y, Z... and it worked".
You could start waves of adds....
You could start applying debuffs...
You could speed up the pace of tank busters...
You could start adding 'armor' to the boss...
...
Essentially you need to find tricks that cause groups to prioritize healing or tank mitigation instead of damage. So that you can go from a 'one trick combat engine' to a 'three trick combat engine'...
- The problem is that it seems like in the last decade, every attempt to do this has been overcome by players figuring out that they can still just focus DPS to overcome it...
I am not sure that can be solved... but if it could, soft enrages would be better than hard enrages...
Maybe it's not that they used to have better tricks, but that they used to have worse players... When Classic WoW came out people complained it was undertuned, but it wasn't - it was the original difficulty... but the players had now been playing WoW for almost 15 years... so that old 'hard' game was easy because the players knew how to master it more...
- If this is the case... there is NO SOLUTION to the idea of soft enrages... players are, as a whole (but not so much me... :O ), just too experienced with MMOs now for any tricks to work anymore... -
03-21-2020, 10:01 AMMixt
Personally, i prefer enrages to have some sort of in universe justification, rather than being just game mechanics.
Like O11S, where Omega is all "Test finished, no further data to be gained, terminating test group" and then uses the "DELETE FROM EXISTENCE!" thing it had demonstrated and threatened the group with all the way back at the start of Deltascape when they first entered the rift.
Or E5S where Eden Ramuh is all "They broke my spears the last two times by using the knockback effect of my charge against me, lets not do that this time, NO ESCAPE!" and then blows everyone up by just not doing the thing the group used to keep it from working previously.
Or E6S where the boss basically goes "They dodged my Conflagration Strike by getting behind me, let's ensure they can't do that again!" -
03-21-2020, 10:05 AMVenKitsune
After Turn 2 in coils, where people cheesed the Soft enrage ala "Enrage strat", i think SE are scared of doing soft enrages.
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03-21-2020, 11:27 AMAomine1992
I think the savage encounters are just boring at this point, idol of darkness is literally leviathan with a different skin and adds...E8s is honestly the only fun fight this tier with some variety with some complexity.
On to your topic I wish the raid design would change but honestly what would it be, I don’t know too many MMOs where dps isn’t the most important thing lol, hopefully someone will break the mold one day but I’m sure it won’t be SE as they like to reuse a lot of stuff which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s definitely not a good thing or helping the game in any way. -
03-21-2020, 04:02 PMUltimatecaliburI am more of less in agreement with you. The Eden Raids have been very derivative (though 5 of the fights were intentionally remixes from the start) and feel very much like sets of 4 Trials rather than 4 sections of a raid on a dangerous local. Both the Coils of Bahamut and Alexander felt like we were exploring dangerous locations a fighting the residents living within. Omega and Eden have felt more like a series of independent trials loosely connected by a story.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aomine1992
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03-21-2020, 06:29 PMLambdafishThe game has suffered so much from SEs fear of repeating mistakes. It's like they haven't learned what went wrong, and are aware of that and avoiding it again. The ranged role suffered because SE overbuffed BRD and MCH in the past and they are scared of doing it again despite neutering their toolkit. Pharos siris was poorly designed, so all dungeons are now faceroll etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by VenKitsune
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03-21-2020, 07:34 PMWalielIt also didn't help the boss stopped doing every other mechanic so the fight turned into a pure target dummy with some pulsing AoE damage. Titan HM also kind of had a soft enrage with how he increased his stomps by one every time, but I don't know if it increased indefinitely.Quote:
Originally Posted by VenKitsune
But yeah, people just used to run with three healers and outlast everything that didn't oneshot the whole raid on the few occasions when we didn't have hard enrages. -
03-21-2020, 10:13 PMVaer
Hard wipes/enrages are pretty much necessary when combat resurrections are as abundant as they are. It's their way of enforcing mechanics. If you die but it isn't a hard wipe and you raise, you get penalized with weakness which makes beating the hard enrage more difficult each time you mess a mechanic up/someone dies. LB3 doesn't give weakness, but you are giving up actual LB damage in exchange.
These types of mechanics are one of the few things that keep a semblance of difficulty if the goal is to keep it from being completely faceroll. Look at LotA, you just kinda steamroll the entire place, except you will still die if you don't stand on the panels. Soft enrages are easily overgeared as gear levels increase (a lot of them are at the end of fights, but you start skipping them completely when you have enough DPS), but the hard wipes pretty much keep you honest as even easier fights have trip spots that will wipe you if you don't know how to do them properly. That is until you overgear them so completely that you can solo them years down the line. -
03-22-2020, 01:59 AMUltimatecaliburNot really. Hard Enrages exist purely to give a fixed duration to a phase or fight. Having a Hard Enrage does not necessarily make a fight harder. You could have a mechanically difficult fight with a fairly loose Enrage timer. It is the tightness of the DpS check that partially determines difficulty.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaer
Ancient Flare is not a Hard Enrage. It is a mechanic check with a wipe condition.Quote:
These types of mechanics are one of the few things that keep a semblance of difficulty if the goal is to keep it from being completely faceroll. Look at LotA, you just kinda steamroll the entire place, except you will still die if you don't stand on the panels. Soft enrages are easily overgeared as gear levels increase (a lot of them are at the end of fights, but you start skipping them completely when you have enough DPS), but the hard wipes pretty much keep you honest as even easier fights have trip spots that will wipe you if you don't know how to do them properly. That is until you overgear them so completely that you can solo them years down the line.
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03-22-2020, 02:45 AMVaerI only lump them together because they have the same end result. Would you consider an add phase with a dps check a hard enrage if you fail to kill the adds in time? I guess not? Honestly, they seem the same thing to me. The dps check is just in the middle of the fight. The one at the end in which you would typically call the literal "hard enrage" is just a gear check, overall fight benchmark and to make sure you just aren't using a ton of tanks/healers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur
Sure, standing on platforms isn't the same thing, (it's really team jump rope) but to me it is similar in that the fight immediately ends.
As I said, when you can just chain raise players like other games don't allow you need these jump rope mechanics to prevent turtling and ignoring of mechanics.
In exchange, they use weakness/damage downs as something similar to make the fight harder if mistakes continue to occur.
They've also tried the other two extremes with Gordias and Midas, and settled with an in between with Creator which is what they're doing now. -
03-22-2020, 04:44 AMUltimatecaliburMany Add phases do have phase Hard Enrages, but that does not make an add phase or dps check inherently a Hard Enrage. A Hard Enrage is completely "Fight/Phase is taking to long. Time to reset/end the fight."Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaer
A Mechanic wiping and reseting a fight does not make it a Hard Enrage, it is just an instant kill mechanic. Hard Enrages and Soft Enrages are mechanics that are there literally to put a clock on a fight/phase and prevent things like FFXI's 12+ hour Absolute Virtue/Pandemonium Warden battles.Quote:
Sure, standing on platforms isn't the same thing, but seems similar in that the fight immediately ends. The dps check is just in the middle of the fight. The one at the end in which you would typically call the literal "hard enrage" is just a gear check and overall fight benchmark.
One of the main reasons for the confusion is that SE has liked to turn the last 10% of a boss' health into a dps check by initiating the Enrage rotation early because clearing just before a wipe is a very addictive Endorphin rush.
Enrage is a term that originated in WoW. World Bosses were given the ability to Enrage where the would be given a speed and damage buff if they were in combat for a certain period of time in order to prevent characters from running around kiting/terrain locking the bosses until they died/despawned.Quote:
As I said, when you can just chain raise players like other games don't allow you need these jump rope mechanics to prevent turtling and ignoring of mechanics. In exchange, they use weakness/damage downs as something similar to make the fight harder if mistakes continue to occur.
The "jump rope" mechanics are there to make each fight interesting and not just a bunch of tank and spanks (which LotA and ST have pretty much turned into).
No... Gordias, Midas and Creator all relied on pretty tight Hard Enrages and soft phase transitions. Starting with 4.0, pretty much every Raid fight and Extreme trial has been on very fixed timelines with very tight Hard Enrages and unskippable phases.Quote:
They've also tried the other two extremes with Gordias and Midas, and settled with an in between with Creator which is what they're doing now.
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03-22-2020, 04:56 AMVaerYes, my original point was that the jump rope mechanics/enrages and similar mechanics are in the game to mitigate chain raising and other forms of turtling in FFXIV. You get limited resurrections in other games. I'd rather not argue what is considered a hard enrage or a soft enrage here. I'm saying they all serve a purpose to punish players for playing incorrectly and they are needed because of that if the goal is for difficulty.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur
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03-22-2020, 05:23 AMBarraindMechanics that absolutely 100% kill you if you dont handle them within a certain time period are literally hard enrages.Quote:
A Mechanic wiping and reseting a fight does not make it a Hard Enrage, it is just an instant kill mechanic.
14 has problems with soft enrages due to healing througput and availability of tank cooldowns. If you're going to make a soft enrage that will tax healers, you're going to be toeing the line of a hard enrage unless its designed to be in burst phases.
It was a thing long before WoW was a game (and before that, Enrage was a boss ability that melee bosses [and some casters] would use at ~10% HP and is why enrage is called enrage). Soft enrages were built into almost every EQ raid in one of three different forms.Quote:
Enrage is a term that originated in WoW
Hell, some fights in era were designed as soft enrages from 100%. See: bosses that did more melee damage than you had HP every 1.3 seconds, hope your tanks are good at tank swapping and your healing rotation is ready to land as much healing as you have hp every 1.2 seconds. -
03-22-2020, 05:50 AMHyperia
I'm ok with them changing enrages, its easily done by randomizing what happens next instead of a totally scripted fight. If a group can clear a boss fight and deal with randomized mechanics over 22 minutes, let them have the kill. Think of it this way, imagine if the JSDF is unable to force Godzilla to retreat in 11 minutes, he explodes in a nuclear cloud wiping out all of Japan.
I'd enjoy an endurance option rather than a hard enrage as I am getting bored with the glorified DPS race every fight we have. -
03-22-2020, 06:03 AMUltimatecaliburNot trying to argue that the mechanics are meaningless or don't make things difficult, but your belief that the Hard Enrages/Forced Wipe mechanics are necessary because the easy of resurrections is pretty off base. Right now the only real way to tax healer mp is to force them to chain raise and DpS requirements to clear are tight enough that needing to do so means that the attempt was a failure even before then.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaer
In my mind, a well designed difficult fight would be tuned to be cleared without mistakes by above average dps in, say, 11 minutes with an Enrage at 12 minutes that above average dps might see if they make to many mistakes and below average dps might see with perfect play. The current round of Savage fights are designed to be cleared at 11 minutes with perfect play and have a hard enrage at that point. -
03-22-2020, 06:19 AMVaerTotally disagree, it would make the fights easier without team jump rope mechanics and the hard enrage. Can you have really hard fights without them? Sure. But in my experience removing them when healing kits are so strong that you are DPSing most of the time would be going in the wrong direction if difficulty is the goal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur
I've wiped many times sub <1% or around 2% when content is current. Usually because of mistakes or accidental deaths. It obviously doesn't feel great to be in that situation but if I played slightly better, or the group played slightly better we would have cleared it. So we tried again, did it with 0 deaths and we cleared. If the enrage wasn't in place or even slightly more lenient we would have cleared it easily.
Even some recent mechanics can be cheesed with healer LB3. The 2nd portal set in E7S, can be completely cheesed with LB3 if you have at least one healer that survives it. That means 7 people can fail this mechanic and you will still clear. The E7S hard enrage is actually really lenient if no one dies and everyone does all the mechanics properly. They gave some consideration due to the annoying mind jack and portals. I even did this with Grand Cross Omega last expansion.
Also certain mechanic logic breaks if there is one dead person when it selects targets. We somehow got through LR in E8S with only 7 people up by accident. If we went all the way, the hard enrage would stop us from clearing due to the lost dps from weakness.
That's just my experience though. I'm gonna have to agree to disagree. With the way the game is designed removing them or giving more time without compensating for it would make fights easier. Overtime, savage hard enrages get nerfed anyway as people get gear. Honestly, I think the value of gear would drop if you lower the DPS requirement even more. I'm not even that great of a player, so those that are at the top would clear the entire thing even faster if it got dropped more as they would be alotted more mistakes and deaths since their DPS is already so high above average players. -
03-22-2020, 06:34 AMForteNightshade
The issue is healers can typically brute force heal through soft enrages for a long time unless the boss' deal obscene levels of damage all at once. And at that point, why even bother when the heal check is so high, it may as well just be a hard enrage? On that note, it's become quite clear SE does not want too much responsibility placed on only one or two players. Range mechanics are practically non-existent. Even Savage this tier now targets two DPS at random. I suspect it's so Range players don't feel like they have to do every mechanic while Melee ignore them. A soft enrage usually boils down to "get the healers heal through this? No? You die."
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03-22-2020, 05:59 PMServerCollaps
A boss in tera used to have an enrage mechanic that periodically turned off the light in the arena... at some point, the only thing visible were some lasers and people usually died very fast by not being able to react to boss attacks anymore. That was a really cool enrage mechanic and sometimes ppl even got some last second lucky kills.