will midcore encounter design get any better in 7.0?

back in sb and shb savage and extreme content was good midcore content that was fun to prog. you had to learn how to optimize, how to avoid downtime, memorize how a boss would move so you wouldn't lose any gcds. wall bosses were mostly one per floor, and boss hitboxes weren't the size of a house.

nowadays in endwalker (at least in abyssos, anabaseios, golbez ex, and likely zeromus ex) the boss will either:

a) be wall
b) have a ginormous hitbox so you almost never lose uptime (except in rare fringe cases like in p8 with dog1->snake1->dog2->snake2) and will typically go untargetable during high movement mechanics (dog1,

this has removed almost all nuance in encounter design. mechanics have been reduced to where it's either pass or fail. you are only as consistent as your least consistent player. you are punished with a wipe even if you do nothing wrong. it's not fun, and i don't think this kind of design philosophy has a place in midcore content. keep it in ultimates

Ehh I think there're two forces at work here. One is just, fear of losing new players + desire for greater mass appeal leading to them streamlining and gutting a lot of the nuance out of the game. And another is the way this community complains whenever challenging content actually appears. On just about every spectrum, you can find it. People complained here when that EW solo duty was too hard for them. A totally different subgroup complained when the new normal raid tier dropped and had a really basic healcheck. Another different subgroup complained when the savage tier broke their statics and made them consider bringing other jobs (prompting, hilariously, the devteam to admit that they'd cleared it just fine but forgot to tune it for lesser mortals). Then in Ultimates, the content that's just hard for its own sake, another subgroup livestreamed themselves using third party tools in it to lessen the learning curve, prompting immediate staff intervention. I feel like these instances add up and paint a picture for the developers, and that's to say nothing about all the people who complained about job kits like SMN being "jank" in shb or BRD having a 180s buff CD in shb so now they've streamlined and synchronized the jobs even more and you still get people complaining in the class forums about how they just can't seem to make it work.

Don't get me wrong. I played AST and BRD before EW and now I don't anymore because the devs have gutted the fun out of both of them for me. I don't like this new direction at all. But I also can't really blame them for taking this path. There's money to be made from simplifying for mass appeal, and the current player base doesn't appear to want engaging content anyway. So I doubt 8.0 will change the direction of things, since they make money this way and changing anything would mean a risk for no reason that a noteworthy chunk of the community wouldn't like anyway.

I think extremes are fun as a healer (AST main) but once a fight is figured out it's too monotonous. Savage can be fun but I personally don't like that all it is is DDR. There is no real strategy and if one messes up all die. I'd rather have more interesting RPG mechanics like poison or doom than stand here or die. I liked Silkie because of the bleed for instance. Or Barby for how phrenetic it was. Also pulse damage.

Doesn't change the fact that AST is in absolute shambles. I still believe that I'd you were to transplant the current job design into a single player game it would flop.

To be honest, I have enjoyed the EW raid content, including your examples of Golbez, Abyssos and Anabaseios.

I think that P5S showed how they can still have space far away from the hitbox because it was quite easy for a tank to drag the boss to a corner for a while, not center it well for puddles and stack>spread, or wreck the party with the TB. P3S is an example of how they can still manage to have boss positioning be a factor because you could tank it anywhere or not keep it faced north very easily. It also made add positioning a factor too.

I don't think hitboxes need to be this big though. There is a middleground between what they have become and them being the size of wedding ring.

The bigger problem I have is with bosses re-centering themselves. It's not solved the problem for novice tanks at all. It's just created a new problem, which is that the boss will often decide to face south regularly (what?? the party is there, Square Enix). The other problem it creates is when I want to keep the boss still. The first boss in the latest dungeon turns around and casts a breath cleave at the party, then turns back to the main tank. I can prevent it turning a second time by running in front of the boss and this is what I would have done up until they started re-centering the boss. Now it re-centers shortly after, so the boss turns twice in total and this is out of my control. Being able to reduce boss spin makes it less annoying for melee DPS.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

back in sb and shb savage and extreme content was good midcore content that was fun to prog. you had to learn how to optimize, how to avoid downtime, memorize how a boss would move so you wouldn't lose any gcds. wall bosses were mostly one per floor, and boss hitboxes weren't the size of a house.

nowadays in endwalker (at least in abyssos, anabaseios, golbez ex, and likely zeromus ex) the boss will either:

a) be wall
b) have a ginormous hitbox so you almost never lose uptime (except in rare fringe cases like in p8 with dog1->snake1->dog2->snake2) and will typically go untargetable during high movement mechanics (dog1,

this has removed almost all nuance in encounter design. mechanics have been reduced to where it's either pass or fail. you are only as consistent as your least consistent player. you are punished with a wipe even if you do nothing wrong. it's not fun, and i don't think this kind of design philosophy has a place in midcore content. keep it in ultimates

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excuse me the last thing ultimates need is having ginormous hitboxes so you never lose uptime, it's already boring enough

how about we don't have ginormous hitboxes anywhere in the game ?

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

I feel like these instances add up and paint a picture for the developers

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The wrong picture ?

Heavensward and Stormblood grew just fine. Shadowbringers grew as much as HW and SB percentage-wise. EW didn't grow at all outside of the WoW influx which all left already. Did this new direction actually do anything ? If the game keeps growing 30-50% in population whether you have hard or easy jobs, that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with whether the jobs are hard or easy does it ?

Most of the design direction around raid content dates back to Stormblood.

Generally speaking, there's a longstanding push from the playerbase that the 'theoretical maximum' dps of an encounter should be practically achievable. Forced downtime mechanics are frowned upon because if a boss has a targetable hitbox, players expect to be able to maintain full uptime despite mechanics. RNG elements are equally frowned upon because they're clearly the only thing preventing the average player from achieving the top 1% performance. WAR players complained endlessly about how unfair Crit/DH was on their clears back in Stormblood until it was effectively removed, and SAM players did the same this expansion. The players are the ones pushing for more predictable design elements, as part of a quest to achieving one ideal clear on every fight. If we stop caring about best performances and look at consistency instead, then this won't be an issue.

I mean, I'd say we have a plethora of enjoyable midcore content in the game. The problem is that they really never made an effort to future proof it and now everything melts without giving the chance for the bosses to use their mechanics. I mean, do CT and there's still plenty of people who die to Behemoth's meteor, and even MORE in ST who have no idea how to survive Amon's Curtain Call, but it doesn't matter because nowadays they die so fast that the chances of having to deal with the consequences of failure are minimal.

I mean, now that the Tomestone event is up and I'm getting more than ARR Alliance Raids, I am impressed by the amount of times we have wiped, and it surprisingly did the encounter more fun for everyone because people were discovering things they had never seen before and created some fun memorable moments, like being blown away from Deathgaze's arena the exact moment he died because the ice dissapears once his HP hits 0% but the Aero still goes off. Of course things get easier after you understand how to do them, but encounters are hectic enough that they keep you on your toes without risking becoming a wipefest.

I'm still progressing through SB, but the Alexander raids are proof that moderately challenging content doesn't matters if the current scaling makes it so you can faceroll half of it. Alexander Prime is still a challenging encounter for most players and the boss doesn't dies immediately so you actually have to do the mechanics, same with the boss that uses reassembly.

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Originally Posted by Mcg55ss

I mean it wasn't a flop it was a massive success with over 90%+ approval rating across the board. Square enix said it didn't sound enough copies because as normal they overshoot their estimates every game which this is a known issue they always tend to overestimate their sales but to say the game got shredded is delusional.

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To me its more like the game came out and people quickly just stopped talking about it. But in true SE fashion, the game's budget likely ballooned out of control, especially on marketing so there's a high chance the game wasn't actually all that profitable for them.

Final Fantasy as a brand and IP also doesn't really have a lot of staying power anymore. People get more excited to see "FFVII" or "FFXIV" then they do to see "FF", thanks to the plethora of mediocre games and questionable decisions they've made in the past 20 years that split the fan base time and time again. I don't think using the Final Fantasy name in this regard will lead to them getting free critical acclaim status like other companies can do with their IPs. No one really cares about FF as a brand anymore, just its individual entries that remained popular, and they're even ruining that by mistreating the ones that are popular with such wonderful projects like FF7:Fortnite Soldier.

The incredibly mid post release support of Endwalker also isn't helping things.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

To me its more like the game came out and people quickly just stopped talking about it. But in true SE fashion, the game's budget likely ballooned out of control, especially on marketing so there's a high chance the game wasn't actually all that profitable for them.

Final Fantasy as a brand and IP also doesn't really have a lot of staying power anymore. People get more excited to see "FFVII" or "FFXIV" then they do to see "FF", thanks to the plethora of mediocre games and questionable decisions they've made in the past 20 years that split the fan base time and time again. I don't think using the Final Fantasy name in this regard will lead to them getting free critical acclaim status like other companies can do with their IPs. No one really cares about FF as a brand anymore, just its individual entries that remained popular, and they're even ruining that by mistreating the ones that are popular with such wonderful projects like FF7:Fortnite Soldier.

The incredibly mid post release support of Endwalker also isn't helping things.

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I mean you literally just describe 98% of solo player games. Most solo player experiences are you play through it you experience the game complete whatever side quests you want to whether all or none and then once it's done it's done. Very few single player game have staying power past the first few week of release and usually those that do are exceptional. Now has FF had mediocre titles yea...but it's not a new thing FF8 was good for 2 disc then fell flat. Final fantasy 16 only has few problems and that it only released for PS5 is a major one, it will get a second Spike when it comes to Xbox and PC,

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Originally Posted by FenyxRising

excuse me the last thing ultimates need is having ginormous hitboxes so you never lose uptime, it's already boring enough

how about we don't have ginormous hitboxes anywhere in the game ?

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you're excused, i was more referring to pass-fail mechanics being used more in ultimates and not savage/extreme where they are now more frequent

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

b) have a ginormous hitbox so you almost never lose uptime (except in rare fringe cases like in p8 with dog1->snake1->dog2->snake2) and will typically go untargetable during high movement mechanics (dog1,

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As a primarily melee player I really dislike the giant hitboxes. Figuring out how to squeeze in as much uptime as possible for each fight was fun.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

To me its more like the game came out and people quickly just stopped talking about it.

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It's a single player game. It came out, they played it, they beat it. Not much else to talk about.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

It's a single player game. It came out, they played it, they beat it. Not much else to talk about.

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People talked about Tears of the Kingdom for like a month.

People talked about FFXVI for 11 minutes.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

People talked about Tears of the Kingdom for like a month.

People talked about FFXVI for 11 minutes.

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I see, the hundreds of replies in the FFXVI related threads on reddit right now must all be talking about their lunch.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

savage

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Savage is not Midcore.

Savage has been midcore since creator.

I feel like they tried midcore with Orbonne and then saw both casual and hardcore players avoid it at all costs and said forget it no one actually wants this they just want to talk about it.

CLL/DR/Dal is what I'd call midcore.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I feel like they tried midcore with Orbonne and then saw both casual and hardcore players avoid it at all costs and said forget it no one actually wants this they just want to talk about it.

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People also avoid Crystal Tower ?

I see more people dropping the party when we load into LotA, more than people who drop Orbonne.

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Originally Posted by FenyxRising

The wrong picture ?

Heavensward and Stormblood grew just fine. Shadowbringers grew as much as HW and SB percentage-wise. EW didn't grow at all outside of the WoW influx which all left already. Did this new direction actually do anything ? If the game keeps growing 30-50% in population whether you have hard or easy jobs, that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with whether the jobs are hard or easy does it ?

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This discussion's difficult because we don't have the exact numbers for player growth and it's hard to define "this is where they made the jobs easy," but from my perspective Shadowbringers was where the game REALLY took off hard in terms of player-count and new player recruitment and that was also the expansion where we saw a lot of job design philosophy shift into the "just simplify it" route. For example, I remember a lot of ASTs complaining about their card mechanic going away around this time, and most of the brd/mch mains I knew were kind of upset around that era as well because their jobs had changed a lot in a way they felt was "dumbing down." Meanwhile, everyone I knew who played in Heavensward talks about its postgame period as one of the deadest times in the game's history; like whenever I complain about post-EW there's always some HW player pulling up to be like "this is nothing compared to how bad it was back in my day" so to say the game grew just fine during that period might not even be accurate from SE's perspective. It's just hard to say. To be sure, I'm not out here trying to justify dumbing things down for mass appeal; I hate it. But I can see why a dev at square might see the timeline and the amount of complaints over anything difficult and think that most people just want things to be easier.

Honestly, I'm more annoyed Extremes have become Savages with body-checks galore and first boss Savage level mechanics. Traditionally, Extremes were a step down in difficulty, but now they're more or less at the same place. So the middle has been hollowed out.

Extremes used to be traditionally be between the second and third floor.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Extremes used to be traditionally be between the second and third floor.

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Hm...sure about that?

Never tried Savage before EW but been doing Extremes since HW. You telling me I could have been clearing 2 fights of Savages for all these expansions? Extremes used not to have a lot of the things they have now. I'm not sure when they decided body checks were a good idea (Emerald Weapon, maybe?), but they used not to be as much of a focus as they are now. The used to feel a lot more approachable and allowed a lot more room for errors.

Yoshi P said Ex5 was more the traditional design, and it felt COMPLETELY different than the others in EW. (My bigger issue there is long periods of no damage and then a big spike of like 5 mechs at once towards the end then another 3-4 at once right after that). The only ones this expansion that have felt kinda like old expansion Extremes to me were ZodEx and RubiEx. ZodEx and HydEx are the only ones that I don't think had body checks (though Hyd is iffy with the LP stack late in the fight). ZodEx has a semi-soft enrage before the enrage at the end as well. ZodEx is also the only one that really felt like it was between Savage and normal/MSQ content difficulty. And even it had the snakes that were hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.

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Originally Posted by Fourbestintoner

Extremes used to be traditionally be between the second and third floor.

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Not all extremes are the same. They don’t have a fixed difficulty. Some are easier than Savage, others are as hard as the 3rd floor of Savage.

This game dosnt rly have a midcore.
( Ex,Savage pretty much the same difficulity nowdays lol)
And Ex/Savage isnt midcore content...it's hardcore.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

back in sb and shb savage and extreme content was good midcore content that was fun to prog. you had to learn how to optimize, how to avoid downtime, memorize how a boss would move so you wouldn't lose any gcds. wall bosses were mostly one per floor, and boss hitboxes weren't the size of a house.

nowadays in endwalker (at least in abyssos, anabaseios, golbez ex, and likely zeromus ex) the boss will either:

a) be wall
b) have a ginormous hitbox so you almost never lose uptime (except in rare fringe cases like in p8 with dog1->snake1->dog2->snake2) and will typically go untargetable during high movement mechanics (dog1,

this has removed almost all nuance in encounter design. mechanics have been reduced to where it's either pass or fail. you are only as consistent as your least consistent player. you are punished with a wipe even if you do nothing wrong. it's not fun, and i don't think this kind of design philosophy has a place in midcore content. keep it in ultimates

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I won't actually read this post as there is no point. Nothing will change. This is the game. Play and enjoy or play something else. Have a nice day.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Never tried Savage before EW but been doing Extremes since HW. You telling me I could have been clearing 2 fights of Savages for all these expansions?

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Yes. If you can clear Extreme, you can probably clear the first 2 fights of each savage tier. It usually only takes a day to a week to prog each of them in PF.

It's the third and fourth floors that usually make you feel like you need a static.

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ZodEx and HydEx are the only ones that I don't think had body checks (though Hyd is iffy with the LP stack late in the fight).

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When EX1 released, the Ahk Morn was very tight. If anybody was dead, you had to mit very hard or it was a wipe. I'd have to give up DPS and hold my passage of arms out for a while if people were dead just to make sure we had that extra mit and it seemed to make us survive. Even worse if a healer was down, because sometimes the surviving one could handle it or sometimes they couldn't.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Yes. If you can clear Extreme, you can probably clear the first 2 fights of each savage tier.

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Wrong

/10char

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Originally Posted by FenyxRising

Wrong

/10char

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Actually that's true at least in regards to current extremes. Savages are just extremes with a few extra steps... that's really it.

honestly some EXs could be classed as Hard modes like lackshimi

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Never tried Savage before EW but been doing Extremes since HW. You telling me I could have been clearing 2 fights of Savages for all these expansions? Extremes used not to have a lot of the things they have now. I'm not sure when they decided body checks were a good idea (Emerald Weapon, maybe?), but they used not to be as much of a focus as they are now. The used to feel a lot more approachable and allowed a lot more room for errors.

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Nidhogg EX and Shinryu EX on release were harder to prog than P6S or even P7S. Some tiers have absolute stinker 3rd fights. Actually, more tiers than not have stinker 3rd fights, it's like SE peaked in SB and it's been downhill since. Compare Halicarnassus, Guardian and Omega-Beetle to things like Agdistis, Fatebreaker, or god forbid, the E7S bird tornado. 3rd fights in this game have an annoying design tendency to fall into a trap of 'do comparatively simple things for the first 60% of the fight, and then have all the complexity of the mechanics backloaded as hell', making progging annoying (go through 6 mins of sod all to get back to Deaths Harvest in P7S, only to immediately wipe to it again), and farming boring because you skip parts of said backloaded complexity. Like Fatebreaker, Cycles were interesting in earlier farm, but by the time everyone started getting gear, you'd start skipping some of them

You could argue P11S is in a similar boat of 'it's easier to prog than 'NidEX on release', having only 3 'prog points' of Shadowed Messengers, Dark and Light, Letter of the Law, but P10S is the filter of the tier that you have to get through first

Body checks have existed since like, HW. Nidhogg Fang/Claw phase, Zurvan meteors etc. The difference is that the modern body checks are instant pass-fail checks with no chance to make up for the 'failure', eg by overshielding the heck out of a Zurvan meteor getting missed. Body checks themselves are not the issue, SE's reliance on 'you need 8 people alive going into this or you're instantly die' is

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Originally Posted by Duskane

honestly some EXs could be classed as Hard modes like lackshimi

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Thanks to the way ilvl sync works, by the end of the expansion it was faster to kill Lak EX than it was to kill the story mode version, because HM synced you to level 69

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Originally Posted by Renathras

Hm...sure about that?

Never tried Savage before EW but been doing Extremes since HW. You telling me I could have been clearing 2 fights of Savages for all these expansions? Extremes used not to have a lot of the things they have now. I'm not sure when they decided body checks were a good idea (Emerald Weapon, maybe?), but they used not to be as much of a focus as they are now. The used to feel a lot more approachable and allowed a lot more room for errors.

Yoshi P said Ex5 was more the traditional design, and it felt COMPLETELY different than the others in EW. (My bigger issue there is long periods of no damage and then a big spike of like 5 mechs at once towards the end then another 3-4 at once right after that). The only ones this expansion that have felt kinda like old expansion Extremes to me were ZodEx and RubiEx. ZodEx and HydEx are the only ones that I don't think had body checks (though Hyd is iffy with the LP stack late in the fight). ZodEx has a semi-soft enrage before the enrage at the end as well. ZodEx is also the only one that really felt like it was between Savage and normal/MSQ content difficulty. And even it had the snakes that were hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.

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The example I remember was Yoshi P specifically saying that Shinryu EX was designed to be between O2 and O3 - his words were that the weapon drop would help those struggling on.

I believe even patch EX should be a stepping stone to floor 1 and odd patch EX is between 2 and 3. Not sure this time though with Golbez being extremely easy compared to the savage tier, and P11 being easier than P9 & 10

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Originally Posted by FenyxRising

Wrong

/10char

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Agreed. Zodiark EX and Hydaelyn EX were on par with some normal modes from past expansion. Barb EX was so easy we had members clear it on their first pull. You could skip almost 25% of Rubi EX and Golbez was easily progged in 20 to 30 mins with a fresh party.

I miss fights like Thordan Ex and Nidhogg Ex which on release were comparable to todays savage floors

Exploratory Zones filled that niche.
I know some people call them 'casual' content, and they can indeed be cleared by players with casual level skills (mostly freeloaders), but the time investment and all the extras you get for farming the content past just completing the story, or actually pulling your weight in the raids/large scale instances is very much midcore.
And that lasted WAY longer than mere 5~10 min boss fights that come once every major patch.

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

Don't get me wrong. I played AST and BRD before EW and now I don't anymore because the devs have gutted the fun out of both of them for me.

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Maybe I'm weird, but I really enjoy how BRD plays now, maybe more than I ever have. I've never "mained" it, but it has typically been one of my alt jobs to play regularly through the years. The only one they've really killed for me is SAM. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.