The amount of things endgame enemies are immune to is TOO HIGH!

[Seaku]

As i said certain debuffs work on certain bosses because that how they were designed or they make no difference at all, like slow on garuda.

RoH effect is a def buff in form of a debuff, w/o it pld would lose part of it's effectiveness, eye for an eye its like RoH another attk down debuff, and bio was a really usefull skill, until they nerfed it, you can say they are useful but they dont' make a big difference, like stuns, sicelns or pacification would do.

Right but RoH is still a debuff I don't care how you swing it, it's in the normal rotation so in the post I was replying to I didn't consider it a 'tactical' use.
Eye for an Eye and Foe's requiem are buffs that trigger debuffs. Debuffs that are useful, might I add for specific parts of fights that, shock horror, you can use tactically.
Having another 10% damage down for potentially 40 seconds is a big difference, that's 10% less you need to heal. Especially with big hits like in Turn 4 (when it wasn't trivial), Turn 5, Turn 8, Turn 9, Titan HM/EX to name a few.

Pacification as far as I can tell does nothing on most endgame bosses as well as 4-man bosses, so why are you saying that makes a difference?

Also 20% slow (feint) or 5% slow (shadowflare) does do something, it means she swings 20% or 5% less of the time. Potentially saving you damage. Just because you personally don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't there. Look at the flipside, if you get slowed, you notice your dps go down substationally don't you?

SE have proven they don't care about those effects, when one of these were making a big difference they just had to push the nerf button, they are just balancing the game by limiting us, not through true balance.

If you're talking about virus they stopped it from trivializing part of a fight just be pressing the button again and again for a good 40sec of little worry (2x healers, 2x caster dps), wait 50 sec, do it again. It can still be used, and it can be used well.

A good way to design battles would be making resistances just to certain skills that could potentially destroy the battle, giving the bosses resistance builds, and and full resistance while performing certain skills.

Oh, so like Diabolos? End boss of Haukke hm? Siren? Symond? Ifrit HM? Things in the game already?

Now about the ppl saying this would exclude some jobs from battles, we already do so, some battles are deadly for melee, others are for mages, and brds are just perfect for all of them, to the point there are always statics looking for brds when the game is already full of them.

Okay, so garuda EX for melee if you don't use triangle method and blms for movement heavy fights (going to be rectified). Other than that I don't see people being excluded for their class currently.

This game is lacking lots of strategy and personalization because of this lazy balance method, and if you cant see it you're just blind.

You don't need to start insults to make a point. Besides blind doesn't work that well, maybe trying stunning me perhaps?
Personalization yes the game is lacking, does that have anything to do with debuffs? Not really.
Strategy, the fact that you can come up with multiple different strategies for all the current coil says otherwise, debuffs not withstanding. Even then every of the current coil is made easier with good use of debuffs, you know the ones that work on every boss.
Also since when is bosses being designed around use of debuffs a bad thing? If every fight the enemies were able to be hit by all the debuffs save at key points you'd then just have a rotation again for when you use them. Changing nothing much and making the devs have to take more design time with these debuffs assumed.

Why not do the simpler thing and redesign the abilities? Have them all have secondary effects if their debuffs don't work, like a potency increase? Gives you a buff? Causes a different type of debuff if the enemies are immune?

If this is the price we have to pay to have harder battles (i don't think so, this is just trial and error testing) i'm not willing to pay it.

The only way a boss won't have any trial and error parts to it is if you have something like WoW's encounter book that tells you all the bosses abilities before you go in. Most games are the same, you do trial and error to learn a fight. It's a design philsophophy and not necessarily a bad one. Possibly a time consuming one on the players part.

[Alkimi]

Endgame bosses are immune to most stuff yes, but a lot of the abilities that cause stun/silence etc. are linked to off GCD abilities that still do damage, meaning the abilities aren't totally worthless.

Turn 9 still has enemies that will require silencing to prevent a likely wipe so they still have uses, just not on the main boss itself.

[Souljacker]

I agree. It just makes the fight too much simplistic when you make obsolete so many skills. Then you rely only on dodge this, dodge that mechanisms to keep it interesting but that gets old at some point.

You must have never played any other mmos if you think that the fights here are complex and challenging. What you just described is how about 90% of the fights currently are.

I think that XI had a much better handle on debuffing being useful. In this game it's part of a standard DPS rotation but it's not something that really stands alone like it did over there. The skills should either be very useful or not be there at all. People just muscle through lower content and the skills are useless on higher content, so what is the point of all these extra spells that don't actually "do" anything?

[Iriadysa]

You must have never played any other mmos if you think that the fights here are complex and challenging. What you just described is how about 90% of the fights currently are.

I think that XI had a much better handle on debuffing being useful. In this game it's part of a standard DPS rotation but it's not something that really stands alone like it did over there. The skills should either be very useful or not be there at all. People just muscle through lower content and the skills are useless on higher content, so what is the point of all these extra spells that don't actually "do" anything?

Are you seriously quoting FFXI as an example of a useful skill repertoire? I must question your actual familiarity with FFXI. We had complete jobs that were borderline useless and pages of skills that served no purpose (e.g. most of SMN's avatars and their skills).

[Urielparadox]

briarless t6 and stacking t7 is 100% game desgin and not exploiting or using or manipulating anything. It is the way the fight is designed If the Dev's wanted you to 100% use the briars they wouldn't make the flower disappear 4 seconds before it needs to, simple as that easy to fix and program and not something that they would have overlooked. Same goes with renalds they wouldn't just stop spawning once 4 of them are out unless the devs planned this as part of the fight, if the dev's didn't want you to stack the cyclops then they would keep spawning after you have 4, but they don't. It's the design of the fight if SE thought what the players where doing is incorrect they would fix the fight as they have done. Same with T2 enrage. It's not strong enough to wipe a party on it's own, if they wanted it to mean the end of a run, it would be the actual end of a run like every other instawipe mechanic in this game.

[Doki]

if you silent it, you guys gonna wipe

Being able to silence Shriek would make the fight quite different.

[necrosis]

More & more, it seems like every monster I encounter is immune to blind, pacification, stun, and silence. Not even a building immunity, straight IMMUNE. This strikes me as unfair since the number of status aliments enemies inflict on us only continues to grow.

This is exactly why when I do low level roulette I forget I can sleep on WHM because its useless at 50.

[Renik]

snip

Too many answers to quote them all, i'm too lazy...

I'll give preference to this one,the blind part was not directed to you, and it's not an insult, i was blind during the alpha/beta and blindly defended this game to a point where i called myself a white knight back then, some ppl know how much i criticize the game to improve it now.

And to the rest i will just respond that i wanted to expand the discussion about what seems to be a small problem but in reality it's part of a bigger one, we have given up many thing in the name of balance and we will lose even more if SE keeps developing the game this way.

Debuffs like blind and slow are already useless or at least you can play w/o them, and even if we can apply them it's for a very short period of time and with a great resistance build, and we are already missing tons of classic ff status effects, tell me i'm wrong, tell me we have place for improvisation in this game,even if you can find various ways to defeat a boss, all of them have been overseen by the dev team, and if something escapes from their balance claws they will just fix it.

I'm not suggesting facerolls or encounters full of RNG, i just want SE to do real balance work to design battles that are fun and not facerolls after the first win, i don't mind if we have to fight a primal for 30min as long as it's fun.

[Doki]

Having the boss, or other enemy quickly build a total resistance (like the Haukke Manor HM final boss) would be nice at the very least. I mean, I'm not totally against an enemy having 100% resistance, but only if it makes some sort of sense, ie an enemy with goggles or NO EYES being immune to blind, or undead being immune to drain effects. Past FF games have done things like this that made sense and played into strategy in creative ways. If they changed it do bosses had a gradual buildup to immunity, then groups could plan on perfect times to use these skills instead of throwing them out altogether.

While we're at it, why don't I slowly build up immunity to brainjack? Oh right, enemies play by a different set of rules.

That being said, I recall playing a game of D&D where we were arguing with the GM about being able to do certain things that would potentially break the battle system in our favor. His response was always the same: "Well I CAN let you do that... but then the enemies will start doing it too..."

[Seaku]

Snip

Blind is useless, I agree. Slow when it can be applied isn't useless. Yes you can do without, does that mean it's useless? No. You can actually upkeep a slow quite easily, especially if it's shadowflare. There's not much to improve on slow unless you make the % bigger but again that would just mean the designers would have to build around it or people needing certain roles to trivialise the encounter. Basically the design as far as I can see in most MMOs is assume all the debuffs are there or none of them. Take WoW for example where they realised this and made it so multiple classes can provide the same debuff and just take up the same slots so they can design encounters assuming you have all present. Where this opts for some, that being RoH and Storm's path + all the required damage resistant down abilities. I can't see either is bad, just that it's a focus of the design and it works.

I'm not sure honestly how you'd include some of the classic final fantasy stuff like mini and confuse without making it stupidily unbalanced as both of those in traditional FF games are meant as an ability to trivialise a fight. Not sure how fun that would be. Unless you change them from their classic FF counterparts then people would whine that it wasn't the same.

Like I said before though it would be easier if they included the abilities to make them have some other effect if they don't work on the target that way the abilities can still be there. Though things like mini or confuse would probably work similar to sleep, hit them once and they 'wake up'. So mechanically I'm not sure what the point would be.

I will disagree with the "Something escapes from their balance claws they will just fix it" as Yoshi has said if the community comes up with something unforeseen they just leave it alone. The only time the fix it is if it is an exploit. The only circumstance where they haven't is virus. Two examples, they caused a bug which made T2 enrage method no longer work, they fixed it back so it did. SE caused a bug in T5 where the tank going into the conflag would cause twintania to attack someone else, they reverted it back again.

What kind of improvisation are you looking for here? Coming up with strategies against the norm is improvisation, something going awry in your pull and you come out anyway due to a quick change of tactics is improvisation. Though I'm not sure that is what you are getting at. Most fights in most any game once you've figured out the gimmick or how to beat them they become repeatable, the exception being PvP. The only thing I can think of is a boss that has something like let's say 4 different phases that are about the same difficulty. When you enter a new phase the boss picks a phase at random and you do that. That way the fights won't be the same each time and ask you to think a bit to see which phase the boss is in. Maybe to put a twist on it each phase gets more difficult at each phase change? Just spitballing some ideas, though they would probably have to make each phase less punishing that way but I guess it would be a more varied fight.