Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Iriadysa]

Please tell me what's difficult in Coil once you have mastered the mechanics. I'd love to change my point of view.

Also, don't give us the "die-and-retry games were difficult". They were not difficult (ie, possible in one go by some random skilled player), they were designed to be impossible for 99.99% of the people and for the arcade.

Do you know how many times I've seen people die to simple stuff like landslides or twisters, despite being absolutely clear by that point about exactly what they should been doing to survive them? I cannot count them.

Nothing is "difficult once you have mastered the mechanics" unless you start reaching the human reaction time limits, which XIV doesn't even come close to nor attempts to do so, and yet people keep failing on tasks where they actually should've already "mastered the mechanics". Because, really, what's so hard about "mastering a mechanic" like Landslide or Twisters? Nothing. If you die to it, your current skill level for that encounter is poor and you must improve.

But hey, that's all right people, keep on believing everything is easy and you just don't do it because "it's too boring" or fail at it because "it's not asking me to be skilled, it's asking me to have 10ms ping". I'm sure you'll love your gear carried "skill" encounters in the future, shall Yoshida actually listen to the people in this thread.

[Iriadysa]

I'll try to stay calm but...

Twisters or landslide are easy ?

try to listen to it at least once : it's easy for YOU. Doesn't mean it's easy for everyone (don't serve me the "you didn't do it and that's why you say that", I have beaten both T5 and titan Ex, both on a flawless basis, no hit taken apart the compulsory ones.)

The mechanics behind twisters and landslide are so simple that there's no learning time for it. Summed up:

Landslide: move away from the straight rails that come out of Titan's center.
Twisters: move and don't stop moving until Twisters is finished casting. Don't cross paths with anyone else nor yourself.

Are those not easy enough for you? I cannot see anything, anything at all complex about those mechanics. You don't have to even play the encounter once to understand how to beat these mechanics, so this isn't a "die and repeat" case.

So if the mechanics are not complex to understand or hard to memorize, what is the real difficulty behind them?

Landslide: people have poor reaction times.
Twisters: people are not paying attention (for twisters you don't even need high reaction times, as long as you move before the cast is over you are golden).

And people are still asking for easier content. It baffles my mind.

The point here being that the mechanics (which is the main critique through out this post of biblical proportions) are for the most part not complex and the difficulty lies in people simply not being able to execute them correctly, not understanding them.

(I still think the execution is super easy, but I can understand how this differs from person to person)

I have no doubt I would have been able to go at least up to T9, maybe even beat that T9 once before 2.4 comes. But I don't think it's worth my time

This is just gold. I used to know someone like you. He could solo anything in a game I played before XIV.

He just couldn't be arsed to do it because it would "take too much time". And thus he never did it. Not even once.

[AllaganStop]

So I just took a look at the fights on youtube, got really annoyed of what I saw, and decided I would not go there until the nerf, because it was not worth banging my head on it.

I had nothing to gain back then, and now I have nothing to gain from T9 besides the story, which I could eventually watch on youtube if I really wanted to go down that way. Hence why it's "wasting my time", rather than "taking too much time". No matter how hard I try, I can't feel proud to beat a content I've mastered and which became piece of cake (for me, don't make me say anything else) right after. I'll eventually feel relieved for a few days, before being bored and never set feet inside ever again.

So you're just bad. Got it.

[Raenryong]

Please tell me what's difficult in Coil once you have mastered the mechanics. I'd love to change my point of view.

Also, don't give us the "die-and-retry games were difficult". They were not difficult (ie, possible in one go by some random skilled player), they were designed to be impossible for 99.99% of the people and for the arcade.

It would depend on how you define mastering the mechanics. By mastering the mechanics of a specific fight, by definition you are amazing at that fight, so it should no longer be that difficult. I will say that T5-9 is content difficult enough that defeat is still a possibility even after you have mastered it. However, it's kind of a trick question.

Well I mean even other MMOs like WoW and Rift are far more mechanic heavy than this, while having a much faster GCD, more complex jobs, and more responsibility in some cases. Anyone who has come from raiding in one of those games (or comparative) shouldn't find any of the mechanics so far jarring or especially difficult at all.

Look, I think one key is issue is gearing up doesn't really effect the fight mechanics. No matter how geared you are, if you eat a landslide its game over. If you eat a twister it's game over. The question is then, where is the gear and echo buff that actually increases player movement speed to help compensate "poor" players with lower reaction time?

To be fair, you're specifically picking instant kill mechanics. Gearing up/echo buff helps with things such as overall fight duration (lower = easier, less time to mess up, DPS burst is more significant, healer MP pools are less likely to be strained), tanking high damage encounters such as Caduceus (to the point you can ignore its slime mechanic); tank swapping in T2 (the penalty for swapping slowly or even not at all is greatly reduced); T4 is far easier by virtue of the fact that its difficulty always lay in the large amount of simultaneous mobs - a dps/hps output check, basically, which was trivialised by Echo; T5 - Death Sentence requires no/less preparation, Conflags die a lot easier, Divebomb=>Asclepius phase (hardest of the fight) is far easier; Titan HM - Tumult damage and DPS checks trivialised; Garuda EX - tank checks trivialised (in terms of survival anyway); Titan EX - this is one of the few fights which Echo does not benefit a huge amount because it was never a massive dps/hps check. It increases the margin of error significantly however; Ifrit EX - tank checks greatly reduced. Higher DPS can actually cause issues here!

tl;dr: some mechanics remain painful, but the vast majority of each Echo fight is much easier, with some mechanics becoming completely irrelevant/trivialised.

I read the OP twice and I really like the post. I have Dyspraxia and I CANNOT memorize rotations, my brain just doesn't let me, so I work on a reaction time basis. I've cleared t5, not yet attempted second coil, I've cleared all the ex-primals so far as well. I wrote this massive post and deleted it because it was a ramble fest.

You don't need to, honestly. As long as you know what a mechanic does and roughly when it is coming, you will be fine in almost all instances.

Mechanics are really ridiculous sometimes, look at the Sunken Temple of Qarn, as a WHM I was getting yelled at for not constantly saving people because of the hornets are doing 3k+ dmg and people, aside from WAR, only have about 2k, but if one person dies before hornets are killed its over, I wouldn't have the MP to finish the battle if I Raise them and there won't be enough dps to kill them off, even if i slept 1. I understand avoidable instant wipe mechanics that a few people can save the raid from or each individual person has to do their part, but never should single target death mean that the group is going to wipe.

The hornets are very squishy and you'd have to be wilfully ignoring them to fail the mechanic. What would then be an acceptable cause of death on that first boss? There is no difficulty in it aside from its mechanics. You could boost its damage and remove the mechanics, but that makes the fight far easier - you'd just stand there hitting Cure/Cure2 every GCD for the entire fight and that'd be it. Losing one member in a 4 man group is a 25% loss in number of members - this should be extremely significant, else the question would be raised - how is it possible to wipe?

Enrage timers were meant so people wouldn't just Zombie run and throw weakened bodies at it until they beat it, it means now that 1 person's death means that you fail because they spent 2 minutes waiting for a safe time to get up and your dps fell too low and now you haven't a chance.

Enrage timers in MMOs tend to be harsh - far harsher than in XIV. They are intended to provide an output goal and prevent you using too many healers. Their role isn't solely to stop zombie tactics, it's to demand a certain level of competence with your job and with the mechanics of the fight. It's not like XI where they were so laughably high that you'd actually have to go afk and eat a pizza or something to fail them - they are now a required part of the fight to beat.

[Pibz]

You're horribly missing his point here. People enjoy the story. Coil has a story. People should enjoy Coil. Sad thing is, they don't. For various reasons, one of them being they may get instant-killed at every step they attempt.

As i said earlier in this thread, i think they should indeed make a easier version of coil(and in turn give us a harder version of ct too) for those only interested in lore.

First, you don't need a perfect rotation to succeed in coil. You need a basic damage output (basic here is adaptable to the fight, of course it isn't spamming 1-2-3-repeat) and you're good.
Second, the actual choregraphy for each fight does let you perform a high enough dps to do anything you'd want to achieve so hmmm, knowing said dance isn't really more a test of skill then spamming combos. It is indeed harder, but only requires more memory, not more skill.
Lastly, since when having a fight "not relying ONLY on mechanics" is a synonym of "having a dummy fight" ? Stop thinking "black or white". Maybe end game content could just stop spamming one shot mechanics every time and just focus on a few of them ?

1- You probably never did the fights undergeared or with just barely enough gear so you never experienced the difference between barely making the top dps you can and not doing it. This was the reason why, when it was released, some people had more trouble passing the dps checks in T4 than others for example(or in any fight that has dps checks really).

2- LOL so moving away from the boss interrupting your cast or simply putting you out of range or simply busying you with just doing something else doesn't influece dps? mmkay then

3 - Fights don't rely only on mechanics, gear matters and so does individual skill i'm tired of repeating this.

And lastly STOP talking about encounters you haven't even tried ffs.

snip

Sigh
Answer me this, why do people who have experience in other MMOs and other games, find mechanics like landslide trivial(from the first few times, not after hours upon hours) more often than those that don't have experience?
Please go ahead and twist logic to evade the definition of skill.
Also, since when is being able to execute a set of actions (be they patterned or not) not a skill?

So you finally beat Turn 5 - you never die to divebomb/twisters anymore! - good job!... did you gain any "skills" from doing this that apply to any other game, or even to any other fight in FFXIV itself?

Yes, you've learned how to dodge crap, congrats.
Oh, and if you did it while there was no echo well let's see some examples:
As a healer you might have learned how to time your shield so that it is applied right before a big attack.
As a tank you might've learned how to properly set up a cooldown rotation.
As a dps you might've learned to save your cooldowns for when a burst is really needed.
This is just off the top of my head, sure some might've had those skills before, but then it'd have been easier for them too.

[zPanda]

As a healer you might have learned how to time your shield so that it is applied right before a big attack.
As a tank you might've learned how to properly set up a cooldown rotation.
As a dps you might've learned to save your cooldowns for when a burst is really needed.
This is just off the top of my head, sure you might've had those skills before, but you might've learned them too.

People can and have used macros and apps to assist with all this stuff. MMORPG often rely on mechanics rather than skill which is why it's possible to implement and use these types of "assists". Also you basically prove my point lol. How do you know *when* to those big attacks are coming or when a burst is needed? - it's because you've repeated a fight enough to know the patterns.

It would be really interesting to get one group of 8 "hardcore" players, and another group of 8 "mainstream" players, and when 2.3 is released, have a real-time stream of the 2 parties in Ramuh-EX practicing to defeat it with no external apps or voice-chat. I would bet the amount of time required for each party to defeat it would be close to the same.

There's nothing like "twintania tracker" or ffxiv-app that will help increase your "skill" in those other game genres I mentioned previously that require real skill.