Almost into 7.3, what you think about the *improved* encounter design?

Or more likely, one of the main selling points of Dawntrail.

They sold the idea that 7.0 was meant to focus their work on improving their encounters, so and so that they relegated any major job work into 8.0, either because they only could do one at a time, or because they thought both somehow would overwhelm people. I don't really remember which.

Initially at 7.0, I was pleased with the fights, but not exactly impressed. Then it happens that I got it all wrong, they didn't mean to ship Dawntrail with the improvement premise, but only in 7.2. So, the patch is now almost done with. What do you think about everything?

My personal perception is that I like it for what it is... But I don't like it for what I thought it would be. If that makes sense? Through the DT Keynotes, I really got the impression that they would finally step out of their boxes and offer a wildly different experience, even if experimental.

What we got, instead is basically a continuation of the 'DDR design' but really well executed - together with a few rare elements here and there, such as real adds to a fight.

In the end, I ask myself: did we really need to skip the focus on job improvement for this? On a sidenote, given the recent 'costs' fiasco (or mistranslation? Idk) it could actually explain it, because it makes no sense to me that you'll redesign fights without jobs at the same time, as one thing should depend on the other.

Maintaining (2xtrash + boss)x3 while speeding up the DDR isn't an improvement. High-skilled players still find it boring, whereas those at the other end of the skill spectrum find it both boring and too difficult.

Say it with me kids

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design

I've been enjoying the CEs, Extreme and Savage. The hunts are extremely good. The dungeons have been good too but like usual, if you repeat the same dungeon for 8 months to cap tomestones as intended, it makes you physically sick.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Say it with me kids

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design

---

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design!

100% agree. They need more meaningful toolkits and to bring in fresh ideas like actually using duty actions. If blizzard can make an engaging class with a core of 8 buttons and some flavor rp abilities why do I have 36 buttons that are all a variation of eachother in this game? Bring back more procs and rng in rotations. If the fights are going to be boring at least let me enjoy reacting to my class.

This comes from someone who does not enjoy progress raiding any more, so through the lens of someone who plays the game more casually now:

There have been no noticeable changes to the design paradigm of boss encounters.
Everything is still dodging AoE's in a fight with a strict, unchanging timeline.

Adjustments to visual indicators and changes to mechanical speed does not constitute a meaningful change in combat design.
Especially more casual content like dungeons have become incredibly boring because of stale, boring class gameplay.

The only fight in this patch (that I remember) that actually dares to do something different is the turtle guy CE in OC.

The change was a response to players complaining about the lack of challenging mechanics for melee DPS and casters. It's more like they're bringing back a few things they had removed from high-end (and normal, in general) content to accommodate for parsers, and people who wouldn't want to get frustrated (challenged) when playing FFXIV.

Nothing feels innovative, at least in my opinion. It's the same stack + spreads + proteans + find safe spot. They've also amped melee DPS damage and reduced cast times as much as they could, so at the end of the day the result isn't much different, and we have even more boring jobs.

I like it, I wouldn't really call it 'new' because a lot of them just feel like Shadowbringers fights, but faster, but I still like it, and I hope 8.0 continues, and elaborates on the direction. While boss design has been great, they really need to figure what to do with dungeon trash. Dungeon trash design has lagged way too far behind boss design.

Job design still needs work so it better match the pace of fights. I have a hunch they want combat to lean more towards action/spectacle design, but with MMO mechanics, and I think job design will follow suit in 8.0. I'm expecting noticeable changes to job gameplay, but they're still going to disappoint a lot of purists.

i like the add phase in m6s.

it's just slightly faster mechanics and more visual vomit. why this game's community has gaslighted themselves into thinking it's some great improvement is beyond me.

*also it doesn't change the fact that practically all jobs are mindnumbing to play.

I find it crazy that one of the most unique normal mode fights is still Cerberus from WoD.
To this day I don’t understand why they don’t use the mini status more often like a raid you do completely in mini mode while fighting normal sized monsters and have things like “riding a ram into an enemy to stun it” or “one player has to use mini to sneak into another area to do something”.
You know… something else than dodge aoe and press attack buttons the entire time.
A more interactable arena and for the love of Nalthals’s butt face, make jobs interesting again.

Loggers won’t go into cardiac arrest when they can’t press a damage button for a few seconds and if they do… well, don’t revive them.

I think things like the dance fight are a good direction but in the end it’s also just aoe dodging in different colors.

While 7.2 raids are breath of fresh air vs 90% of endwalker stuff, I want to burst everyone's bubble, who think that 7.2 is a "step up".

Where the hell are new mechanics? It is same stack/spread/flare dance as it was before. They did not even try with completely asymmetrical mechanics and did not break "ooh it's either supports only or dps".

Even m8s p2 is a recycled thunder god skeleton and copy pasted mechanic from nier raids with nothing but same lame stack, spread and oh gosh .... tethers.... and pointless towers.

m6s adds is also kinda victim of "must do everything symmetrical" devs.

Barely perceptible.

Dungeons are still 3x3.

Every dungeon is dead content that never wipes and barely kills by the the time of about +6iLvs

Trials were great at release but dead with item level, and basically never came up in rouls with no replayability/rewards.
Raids were great at release but, but watered out with ivlv quickly, still good though
if anything have deteriorated into M5-8 though.
Trial 4 was a total nothing. Again it's all useless by the time of an average +6iLvls. Which doesn't take long.

Role quests despite being job related, non-content.
Chaotic was a non existent dead-on-arrival.
FT ditto.
Fates non content.
Tribals non content.
Cosmic non content.
OC great CEs but, once you've hit level 20 and done the story your done if FT is closed to you. Because at that point your unsubbing and so the relics are irrelevant too.
And FT is closed. I dint want to join a discord much in the first place, I certainly don't want to be with the kind of unpleasant people who want to keep others out. And it especially ruin it for me to have to witness it first hand and be a contributer to keeping others out. (academic though see the former)

LOOK TO ALPHA 3.0 AND 4.0 NORMAL. THAT IS PEAK CONTENT.
It will still wipe a party of experienced players if they've forgotten the mechs. It will still kill players in max gear if they don't do the mechanics.
They've got rhythm and you have to respond. It's not about knowing where to stand ahead of time.
M1-4 still was't as good as those.
LOOK TO DANCING PLAGUE EX. You can prog that blind in an hour in cap gear with nothing but log chat and someone who knows the mechs to make corrections, and see ALL the mechs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Say it with me kids

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design

---

Yup. Frustratingly this was obvious when they first announced it and despite everyone telling them that they still went with it anyway. The job design railroads them into this body check design because otherwise we can just mit and shield through everything.

I think it's a huge improvement. You actually have to be awake for dungeon bosses and the raids/extremes are a blast. I think they've definitely delivered on what they promised and I'm excited to see where they go from here. Now they just need to fix the horrendous job design.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Saraide

Yup. Frustratingly this was obvious when they first announced it and despite everyone telling them that they still went with it anyway. The job design railroads them into this body check design because otherwise we can just mit and shield through everything.

---

SCH breaking the game since 2.0

Here's what the gameplay feels like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLotLNedf1Q

Aoe dance, boss teleports to middle, party-raidwide dmg, lots of glitter and flash vomit on the screen. Different, but same. More same than different. Not being ablw to direct the boss as a tank in meaningful manners is just lazy design.

Its like the overworld again. Oooh so pretty, but look beneath the surface and.. oh. Closed off houses, same fates, same hunts, boring quests.

And yes I agree. Its kind of sad that the class design is better in pvp than in pve. But I guess its another "budget issue" Yoshi P and his multiproject multiyen company apologizes

While I appreciate having faster and more stressful fights, where you aren't just standing around for minutes on end, they haven't addressed the core problem of having deleted all the player abilities that actually allowed them to interact with encounters in a meaningful way.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Hallarem

Aoe dance, boss teleports to middle, party-raidwide dmg, lots of glitter and flash vomit on the screen. Different, but same. More same than different. Not being ablw to direct the boss as a tank in meaningful manners is just lazy design.

Its like the overworld again. Oooh so pretty, but look beneath the surface and.. oh. Closed off houses, same fates, same hunts, boring quests.

And yes I agree. Its kind of sad that the class design is better in pvp than in pve. But I guess its another "budget issue" Yoshi P and his multiproject multiyen company apologizes

---

Funny how with 12 buttons (some shared) rather than 30, jobs can have a unique identity.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mawlzy

Funny how with 12 buttons (some shared) rather than 30, jobs can have a unique identity.

---

SE: "we heard you loud and clear: one more burst ogcd finisher and +5 potency on each healer dot!"

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Saraide

SE: "we heard you loud and clear: one more burst ogcd finisher and +5 potency on each healer dot!"

---

We noticed player dissatisfaction with the bloat to classes so we've removed dots from all healers to save bar space.

It got worse. Current Encounters are just a visual vomit of eyestrain effects.

To be honest there have been Tiny victories throughout dawntrial

Including QoL and encounter design.

The issue this expansion is the content cadence has been fricken awful.

Like people are going to have gripes about content regardless of quality that's just nature of the beast.
But I really think people are ready for content to be more expansive in a patch.

It's nice knowing what you're getting with FF14 that you know what to expect.

BUT like even if I gave you your favorite meal you're going to get sick of it if I keep giving it to you over and over.
It's hard to know how much or where the heck feedback is being brought to the Dev team.
I don't understand their relaxed nature.

I'm gonna keep rooting for them and the game.

It's nothing astounding, but it's definetly better than any dungeon, raid or extreme Endwalker delivered.

When it came to bosses specifically, I do think they delivered really good. The mechanics are more complex and varied, and the overall design is good.

Encounter overall, I don't think there's anything wrong with it..LOL. It's part of MMO and FF14 for a very long time, you get trash adds, and then you have a boss, more trash, and another boss.

It's not unique to FF14,I don't think I've encountered another design in any MMOs that I've played past 10+ years. Every single one of them had a similar thing. Blade and Soul, TERA, Dragon Nest, Guild Wars 2, Bless Online, Closers.. etc.
Even games that are not traditionally or fully MMOs have a similar approach. Star rail, for example, has some instances which have the same pace: trash -> Elite, trash-> Elite, trash -> Main boss.

Is it boring? perhaps, especially if you do it a thousand times. It is bound to become less appealing, boring, numbing experience at some point. Even if you take the same dungeon that would normally be done in 10 minutes and make it 1 hour with multiple paths and lots of puzzles, and variation, there will still be a point where people would just to the shortest and fastest path.

As long as 99% of MMOs place their prime things to do at end game, read as max level, those dungeons' sole purpose exists to be fast, easy, and to offer a way to gear up, nothing else.

I wish they would re-do the rewards for Criterion because those are not the traditional dungeons, and they could offer a place for FF14 to reinvent the wheel, if they would be willing.

Fight design hasn't changed in any meaningful way. Almost all of the mechanics in Dt are mechanics that we've seen before. They just made boss hitboxes smaller again and increased the pace in casual content very slightly.

It's kinda just the same sludge but slightly faster and everything gives you a bleed now so you can't collect vuln like candy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by YovelaLindswood

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design!

100% agree. They need more meaningful toolkits and to bring in fresh ideas like actually using duty actions. If blizzard can make an engaging class with a core of 8 buttons and some flavor rp abilities why do I have 36 buttons that are all a variation of eachother in this game? Bring back more procs and rng in rotations. If the fights are going to be boring at least let me enjoy reacting to my class.

---

That's exactly why I think it doesn't make any sense to not work both encounters and classes together. One is the answer to the other...

So what it is? There's more substance to the encounter design that we'll only find out in 8.0 when jobs get changed?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Raikai

That's exactly why I think it doesn't make any sense to not work both encounters and classes together. One is the answer to the other...

So what it is? There's more substance to the encounter design that we'll only find out in 8.0 when jobs get changed?

---

They were willing to cut a sizable chunk out of BLM's core mechanics and reduce its cast times so that they could speed up the DDR and not worry about its viability, which would make no sense if they intend to actually add more substance to the jobs in 8.0.

After having done hall of the novice so many times on alts, I can't help but think of how there is barely any interactables in fights or dungeons the further I got into the game. Of how hall of the novice teaches you "Hey, see this sparkly chain? Interact with it to prevent reinforcements" which said reinforcements are training mammets but it does teach you fights should have those, at least the ARR ones have interactble objects. Yeah the turtle boss in the crescent is different because the player actually has to interact with coin bags and carry them over to a pile. Which when the turtle boss that feels like something innovative when its actually just ARR fight-design, I think that does say something about how too many fights are variations of heigan the unclean from wow, that is to say they are dance fights.

I can see how the devs may see this as a clear improvement and the players already onboard with the guitar hero playstyle to also find it a great spectacular improvement. Just see how Xenosys rates current savage/ultimate content, for instance. It's hard to deny that nothing has happened at all.

However, for HW players like me, this is just the train going in the wrong direction even more and they've been losing my interest at increasing speed. Not only we lost all job and battle systems when ShB axed everything out of the game, and they continued to dumb down everything further to ensure that everybody sings to their tune without any deviation to the script, but they also doubled down on the DDR so much that the game has all turned about memorizing fights and adjusting your uptime on a spreadsheet while jumping all around like frogs in a blender (©Mao).

Like, I'm sorry but as a player from HW, and even though the changes have been gradual enough for me to have ended up like the metaphorical frog in slowly boiling water and numbed by it enough that it actually took 2 expansions for my unshakable love of the game to really understand that the game was actively hating on what it initially offered me when I got to play it first.

Not only this, but they're actively trying to turn everything in this game into stupid bosses in the middle of a circular arena, with the same guitar hero slop to perform. It doesn't matter if it's rock, metal, rap or classical, because ultimately it's always gonna boil down to their current model of DDR before anything else. And as I said above, for those that love it, they'll love the sudden variety bringing up so many different musical genres, but for me, it's the game mode itself that is actively telling me I'm not welcome into pve anymore.

I thought I was playing a RPG? Where are the dungeons? Where is my RPG gameplay??

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

I can see how the devs may see this as a clear improvement and the players already onboard with the guitar hero playstyle to also find it a great spectacular improvement. Just see how Xenosys rates current savage/ultimate content, for instance. It's hard to deny that nothing has happened at all.

---

What do you feel has changed? I don't see much difference aside from fewer debuffs being used and boss hitboxes not occupying 80% of the arena (which is just reverting an Ew change, not something "new" as such). It's still the same in/out, stack/spread, proteans, defamations, tethers and nisi. I suppose there are fewer puzzle mechanics now, and we get a curtain call reprise instead of a limit cut reprise every fight this expansion, but I'm just not seeing whatever this "new fight design" is that people are talking about.

I have already spent countless hours discussing it in length in many, many threads, and people that do not see it inevitably tell me that it's in my imagination, so forgive me if I don't feel like wasting more time of my life because if you're not seeing it or identifying with it, then odds are you'll probably not understand. Those who know, know already.

Though if it can give a hint, take HW BLM with literally zero movement tools, and see how its gameplay behaved in HW. I feel it's the best example to give without going into whole essays about the technicalities.

I’d rather just point to HW SCH. Can the “dissipation is the hardest button to ever exist” crowd even imagine HW SCH

as someone who skips all story and doesnt give a crap about it: I really like dawntrail more than most other expansions

the raids are great, the dungeons are better (boss design), we even have challenging crafter and gatherer content

Wait... they 'improved' it...? I thought they just run at 1.1x speed and call it a day? Lul...

Oh yeah, also try to clutter the screen and call it increasing stress while giving barely any options to tweak the game's brightness and bloom.

Savage is arguably the best its ever been with the most recent tier.
There's a lot of salty weirdos in this thread.

Dungeons will never be difficult.

I'm looking forward to the deep dungeon content.

The faster pace is a breath of fresh air for me. I really enjoyed the extrem / savage encounters in this extension. On the other hand, there are some things that I think need to change:

- The overall pace of the dungeons MUST be changed. Take away those artificial walls. If the tank wants to pull everything, let it pull. And let the group wipe if that mistake is made... Or congratulate themselves when a particularly daring pull has been handled correctly. Adding artificial walls only serves to undermine a role (tanking) in which one of the main components has always been how many mobs to take.

- Trash packs need to evolve radically. The design of boss encounters is just fine, both in dungeons and in higher-level instances (up to savage. I can't say for ultimate). But the packs could just as easily disappear, they're so uninteresting. They're only there to lengthen an instance.

- For bosses, give me more dmg randoms for dps. As a healer, the rhythm that everything is boring as long as the group is good is... Unbearable. In a dungeon, it makes it impossible to have fun. On higher difficulties, it's even worse:we find ourselves in those extraordinarily frustrating cases where the group dies if a mistake is made. So it's : either the group plays well, or it wipes: there are too few cases where an exceptionally good healer can save his raid through sheer mastery of his class.

- Please invest in the boulevard of buffs, debuffs and dispells. It's extraordinarily under-exploited in this game.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

I have already spent countless hours discussing it in length in many, many threads, and people that do not see it inevitably tell me that it's in my imagination, so forgive me if I don't feel like wasting more time of my life because if you're not seeing it or identifying with it, then odds are you'll probably not understand. Those who know, know already.

Though if it can give a hint, take HW BLM with literally zero movement tools, and see how its gameplay behaved in HW. I feel it's the best example to give without going into whole essays about the technicalities.

---

I guess the configurations of AOEs/cleaves that they use these days force you to move more but that doesn't feel like much of a paradigm shift compared to anything from Sb onwards. Other than the fact that it's forced them to make the casters not be casters anymore anyways.