Does anyone else miss coils raid design

Now I’m saying this rather broadly and including most aspects of things people would generally consider aspects of coils raid design that fell away in Gordias and never really returned (just as a side note here I did coils on patch you don’t have to tell me that jobs are extremely different now and a lot of transition would be messy)

For me there are three things coils raids did that they did better than anything after it

1) pre fight mechanics- coils raids actually felt like what you would imagine when you think of raids, they had mini bosses, they had trash packs, they had hidden treasure chests, less so in final coil but the raids felt like they had a real sense of progression in physical space, in eden and omega specifically you just feel like you are being teleported around randomly but in coils you feel like you are making real descent into the depths of the coils; this is somewhat made both better and worse by T3 but I’m willing to overlook T3, however for most other fights it really adds to their scale. Think something like turn 11, the giant dalamud replica you have to traverse to get to the boss gives the boss a far larger scale than say just teleporting into shadowkeepers arena that looks like it’s in some random ruins in Lakeland

2) interesting and different mechanics- now you can make the argument that every mechanic is a new mechanic in the games first raid tier (I’m not counting original rivenroad here) but coils has a lot of mechanics we have never seen again and mechanics that do not fall into the traditional mechanical sense we know today, think mechanics like turn 11’s boss hitbox being a death field forcing you to rotate around him, or T6 leaf storm these mechanics are just so different to the dance we have today and they rarely felt like they got as boring as the raids we have now

3) adds phases- what is it about post HW design that means square cannot make good adds phases anymore, coils had fantastic adds phases and they were all Meaningful with unique mechanics that made them worth doing

So yeah coils just feels so different to anything after it and I feel like 14 is missing that kind of uniqueness in design, however I know coils completion on patch is rare these days so most people probably never experienced it and like our current system, I just think it could add some more diversity to 14 raiding to have more T1/2/6/7/8/11/12 style fights we really see nothing of these days

Isn't that basically just what Criterion is now?

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Originally Posted by Oizen

Isn't that basically just what Criterion is now?

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Criterion is more like DRS than coils, I’ll give it that criterion branches out in its mechanics more than traditional savage which is definitely a point in its favour (though it’s hard to replicate coils mechanics with 4 people)

I wouldn’t be against more criterion since it’s about the closest to coils we have; but it’s still quite different

I've only done normal modes, and Coils and the tragedy that was Eden's Verse, but yes I do miss it, IMO it should be prevalent especially in normal mode when you are primarily doing it for a story - For it to have that element of intrigue.

I wouldn't say they feel like true raids, but Coils were the closest that you got since it felt like you were progressing through something, in that you would have some element of exploration, especially with the Avatar turn, and the first 2 turns in the Final Coil. For me, it was still present in Gordias but it feels like they wanted to be very minimalistic, I guess to cater to the 2-tier difficulty.

I mean I'll be a little bit contrarian and say that I don't really think FFXIV has ever had anything close to a raid outside of BA, DR, CLL, and Dalriada, everything else from my experience has just been an over-glorified trial. I mean for something to be a raid for me it needs to feel like I'm actually venturing into something. It's just so poor quality for me these days that I haven't even done the normal mode. It starts dreadfully slow and you don't even have that thrill of feeling like you're exploring something. At least with Coils, it had a small taste of it. Could at least have the courtesy of making story-mode version feel like a venture.

As far as I am concerned trash packs can stay where they belong: in the trash.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

As far as I am concerned trash packs can stay where they belong: in the trash.

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Trash is definitely a controversial subject (nobody likes turn 3) but I think it worked well in turn 1, the trash was dangerous and played into the fight (as did the mini boss) you could even elect to fight some extra trash for more chests which could hold interesting upgrade materials

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

1) pre fight mechanics- coils raids actually felt like what you would imagine when you think of raids, they had mini bosses, they had trash packs

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That's intentional though. They know that raiders aren't going to struggle with trash packs and would get annoyed going through them every time they re-enter, so they kept trash in the story version for Alexander and then put them as part of the quests and battle instances for Omega so that you only defeated trash once.

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the raids felt like they had a real sense of progression in physical space

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Even the earliest coils are still split up into instances though.

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this is somewhat made both better and worse by T3

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T3 is one of the best for "progressing through a raid", actually. Because progressing and fighting trash is almost all you do.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

That's intentional though. They know that raiders aren't going to struggle with trash packs and would get annoyed going through them every time they re-enter, so they kept trash in the story version for Alexander and then put them as part of the quests and battle instances for Omega so that you only defeated trash once.

Even the earliest coils are still split up into instances though.

T3 is one of the best for "progressing through a raid", actually. Because progressing and fighting trash is almost all you do.

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Well that’s sort of what I mean, when people say “yeah but trash is trash” can’t you apply it to say E9’s opening, who dies to anything prior to brambles, should we remove stuff like that because nobody is ever going to die to it, the trash and the long instances (like physically long) make you feel like you are actually “raiding” a space, rather than just being teleported into a spot that may or may not make sense from a lore perspective

Yes they are split up into instances but you feel like you are making motion due to the size of the instances (T3 helps here despite its other weaknesses) or T4 being on a moving elevator that reaches the bottom in the cutscene of T5, or the fact that each of the areas’s zone names include how many yalms deep the current location is

Idk it’s just the little things that make them feel like “raids” not just over glorified trials

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Trash is definitely a controversial subject (nobody likes turn 3) but I think it worked well in turn 1, the trash was dangerous and played into the fight (as did the mini boss) you could even elect to fight some extra trash for more chests which could hold interesting upgrade materials

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People don't like dealing with add phases or mobs because it hurts their fansite numbers, like a lot of things is how we ended up with every savage being a mix of Spread/Stack/Lookaway with very little variance.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

That's intentional though. They know that raiders aren't going to struggle with trash packs and would get annoyed going through them every time they re-enter, so they kept trash in the story version for Alexander and then put them as part of the quests and battle instances for Omega so that you only defeated trash once.

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Problem with this approach is that it doesn't help sell the 'raidyness' of the raid unless the trash is actually dangerous. Normal mode 'raid' trash in Alex/Omega is even easier than some MSQ battles -- and this is optional content! Enemies that die effortlessly are forgotten effortlessly, too.

The only raid trash that makes you feel like you're breaching a facility is in Coils/A2S/Exploratory Zone raids.

For Normal? Yes
For Savage? No

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Now I’m saying this rather broadly and including most aspects of things people would generally consider aspects of coils raid design that fell away in Gordias and never really returned (just as a side note here I did coils on patch you don’t have to tell me that jobs are extremely different now and a lot of transition would be messy)

For me there are three things coils raids did that they did better than anything after it

1) pre fight mechanics- coils raids actually felt like what you would imagine when you think of raids, they had mini bosses, they had trash packs, they had hidden treasure chests, less so in final coil but the raids felt like they had a real sense of progression in physical space, in eden and omega specifically you just feel like you are being teleported around randomly but in coils you feel like you are making real descent into the depths of the coils; this is somewhat made both better and worse by T3 but I’m willing to overlook T3, however for most other fights it really adds to their scale. Think something like turn 11, the giant dalamud replica you have to traverse to get to the boss gives the boss a far larger scale than say just teleporting into shadowkeepers arena that looks like it’s in some random ruins in Lakeland

2) interesting and different mechanics- now you can make the argument that every mechanic is a new mechanic in the games first raid tier (I’m not counting original rivenroad here) but coils has a lot of mechanics we have never seen again and mechanics that do not fall into the traditional mechanical sense we know today, think mechanics like turn 11’s boss hitbox being a death field forcing you to rotate around him, or T6 leaf storm these mechanics are just so different to the dance we have today and they rarely felt like they got as boring as the raids we have now

3) adds phases- what is it about post HW design that means square cannot make good adds phases anymore, coils had fantastic adds phases and they were all Meaningful with unique mechanics that made them worth doing

So yeah coils just feels so different to anything after it and I feel like 14 is missing that kind of uniqueness in design, however I know coils completion on patch is rare these days so most people probably never experienced it and like our current system, I just think it could add some more diversity to 14 raiding to have more T1/2/6/7/8/11/12 style fights we really see nothing of these days

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Not really? Years of other MMO's making their raids just larger dungeons filled with trash mobs that you spend more time avoiding than fighting made me heavily appreciate 14's newer raids just using the trials format of jumping right to the boss. I do raids for the boss fights, I don't care about the filler crap.

Edit:
Maybe like the poster above me suggested and have something that is dungeon like with normal mode I can be ok with, but savage mode I like just jumping right into the boss fight.

I do miss the bit of exploration and mowing down mobs but it was expected that the design was gonna be streamlined. Just like how everything is with this game

I vastly prefer the current Raid design over the Coils design. I would never want to go back.

For an experience that's closer to the Coils: Alliance Raids.

I don't precisely know what i would love for normal raiding but i wish it was less formulated, it's really similar to trial when you think about it : One arena, one boss x 4, the only difference is the reward which is not really relevant gameplay wise.

I wanted more 'gimmicks' in normal dungeons like in ARR optional dungeons, but that's not the point of this thread...

So about raids, I do miss when they were more than just a series of Trials with a story. The mini-dungeon aspect before the final bosses were great, and even though people whine now about some of the Coils pre-boss mechanics I liked that aspect too, it made them stand out from trials, alliances and dungeons entirely by requiring something from the players besides just killing trash with AoEs.

It was neat but given the amount of times you need to pull over and over and over to get the Savage dance down, that would wear teams out a lot faster. Not to mention what would happen in Savage PF. I kind of like what they have now where they still have that feeling of progressing through something like oldschool MMO raiding with the alliance raids but keep the things you need to repeat more limited.

If they wanted to implement trash they'd probably need some sort of checkpoints because it would be a lot more difficult to get back to your prog point if you had to go through all the trash again. But checkpoints could make Savage PF a bit of a mess trying to coordinate those. So probably best to stick with the current design.

I think having trash mobs and traversing in the way of alliance raids would be pretty good for the normal modes to enrich the story, however for extremes and up I prefer getting straight to the boss.

More than the old raid design, I miss the varied Job design. It did have it's issues and duds but the current way they are pushing things is not very fun. DPS still have options, Tanks to lesser degree but Healers are starting to border abysmal.

Hopefully they revise the roles if they are keeping the current boss design, that has pretty clear burst windows, boss auto positioning and big hitbox etc.

More than anything, I miss an actual good story. None of the other 8-man raids had as good a story as Coils.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Trash is definitely a controversial subject (nobody likes turn 3) but I think it worked well in turn 1, the trash was dangerous and played into the fight (as did the mini boss) you could even elect to fight some extra trash for more chests which could hold interesting upgrade materials

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Wait hold up


I love Turn 3.

Just changing the jump arrows the last second sending someone the wrong way, laughing as they get flung to the wrong end of the area it great!

I really enjoyed the winding route to the raid bosses that ended in a big fight. The journey told a story that otherwise is not being told. Coil had huge epic zones that always wowed me.

Trash really didn’t take all that long and if they had a chance that a loot page or token dropped, then the objections to trash would ease.

Current raids feel like we get 4 harder primal bosses in a round or square map. At the very least, let’s have better map variety, Rhalgar’s hand was great.

Anything's better than shbew raid design where nothing happen until the last minutes.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

I really enjoyed the winding route to the raid bosses that ended in a big fight. The journey told a story that otherwise is not being told. Coil had huge epic zones that always wowed me.

Trash really didn’t take all that long and if they had a chance that a loot page or token dropped, then the objections to trash would ease.

Current raids feel like we get 4 harder primal bosses in a round or square map. At the very least, let’s have better map variety, Rhalgar’s hand was great.

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^that is kinda what I realised after the fact I don’t think I conveyed well in the OP

Now I know again that T3 is T3 but think of first coil for a second

The garlean research facility is an overworld location, you fight your way through just to get to the door to turn 1; turn 1 involves descending through the tiny progress the garleans have made and then storming the first line of allagen defences to find a way down, the second turn is in the main descent and both starts and ends at a lift, turn three takes you from the lift in turn two down through the ragnarok starship unlocking its defences to reach another elevator; this elevator is turn 4 itself and is in motion during the entire fight, then finally the opening cutscene of turn 5 involves the lift from turn 4 reaching the button and you stepping out onto bahamut’s arm, on top of these each of the coils lists the depths you are at during that point in the fight

Sure there is more to raiding than storytelling but damn if coils doesn’t do a fantastic job in making it feel like you are raiding in a physical space and making progress: rather than say eden and omega (I know omega has lore reasons why it is why it is but I don’t think it makes up for them)

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

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Coils of bahamut was the XIV 'wow' raid, when they wanted to be like everyone else. XIV had no identity, it was trying to be everything WoW was, but would never work out.

Player feedback during the time resulted in the complete flip in heavensward when it came to raid design, and the Alexander Savage raid tier has forever been one of the best raid tiers the game has.

Don't get me wrong, i love Coils in general, it is a really fun raid tier, mainly because it IS different. But it shows where the game started, and the developers vision evolved from that point, to what we have now which is by far better in every single way.
If i wanted mayhem and chaos, i would just raid on NA because they seem to turn every raid tier into Coils.

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

Coils of bahamut was the XIV 'wow' raid, when they wanted to be like everyone else. XIV had no identity, it was trying to be everything WoW was, but would never work out.

Player feedback during the time resulted in the complete flip in heavensward when it came to raid design, and the Alexander Savage raid tier has forever been one of the best raid tiers the game has.

Don't get me wrong, i love Coils in general, it is a really fun raid tier, mainly because it IS different. But it shows where the game started, and the developers vision evolved from that point, to what we have now which is by far better in every single way.
If i wanted mayhem and chaos, i would just raid on NA because they seem to turn every raid tier into Coils.

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I mean the first Alexander tier destroyed the raid scene, I liked living liquid but I would never consider gordias a good tier, if anything gordias determined Midas which determined creator and creator is the foundation they use now

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I mean the first Alexander tier destroyed the raid scene, I liked living liquid but I would never consider gordias a good tier, if anything gordias determined Midas which determined creator and creator is the foundation they use now

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I quote Alexander as a whole, as the overall raid tier was fantastic even if it did have its moments.

I cannot call Pandaemonium garbage because P3S was absolutely terrible, even if i think that fight was a mistake on all levels of design, Where as the entire raid as a whole is absolutely fantastic.