When my raid group can blow through all of Second Coil in an hour, give or take 30 minutes due to AFKs and silly wipes, it definitely leaves you feeling like this game could offer a bit more. To compare, my 14/14 Heroic 25m guild on World of Warcraft still takes about two days to full-clear the whole raid but, if I have to raid, I'd rather raid for two days than one hour. Although, my group hasn't been interested in tackling Savage Coil because the titles aren't enough of a motivator to put in the effort.
I feel like it's a lot easier to hit your skill plateau on a Job in FF14 than in a lot of other games I've tried before. Maybe it's because the game is designed around players being able to switch between different Jobs on the fly, and so if every Job had a lot more depth and complexity then it would feel overwhelming? Who knows.
As for overall difficulty, I feel that a majority of the difficulty in this game doesn't come from fighting boss mechanics, but from fighting server and game mechanics. Instant skills that aren't actually instant, enemy abilities that register as having hit when the cast is at 80% (go tap a movement key during Blighted Bouquet at 80%) and not when it actually lands, buffs/debuffs that don't disappear as soon as they're used/expired (leading to the infamous proc munching BLMs have to contend with all the time), and other things. The raid mechanics themselves are simple.
Overall, FF14 is only a year old, and they seemingly want to ease new players into the genre as opposed to a game like Wildstar where they tried to bring back the hardcore days of Everquest and classic World of Warcraft and are now considering server merges. As a result, people experienced with MMOs might find this game a bit lacking. The spell effects are pretty, though.
A Home run is hardly the only aspect of baseball. If you're relying on your batter to get a homerun, then what room is there for teamwork if every hit is a home run and you don't need bases or proper communication for passes?
And this is falling into the variable aspect of humans versus humans. You can't assume that every hit will be a home run if the other side is any competent or adaptable. That's not the case for sequenced AI fights (bosses for example). Everyone ends up studying the mechanic and hope they can all perform to par as an individual, with very little mechanics that requires them to adapt or work with their team (such as gaols, tank swaps).
In the example you gave me, I wouldn't consider that to be teamwork if you're depending on a single aspect (your batter getting a homerun, and vice versa; your pitcher not being bad that every throw is a home run). But imo its a terrible comparison; unlike boss encounters, a game of baseball has you playing against other players, who can be adaptation to pitchers/hitters.
In the end though, I'd like to see different encounters pumped out that put a bit more variance away from the mechanics. It ends up being repetitive for people who clear it, stonewall for people who can't find others (FC or statics) to even attempt it, and diminish the progression of gear and upgrades because they don't really help you fight against one-shot mechanics.
He won't. A lot of the people on this forum that talks about the lack of challenge are the people not actually involving themselves in the challenges already available to them. It's pretty much like the people on here that claims how WoW is "easy face-roll for free lot" yet they've never even seen nor attempted any heroic raiding on progression.
The following is purely my opinions and is based on conjecture but to me, it seems like people like the OP who wants difficult content added to the game are the kind of people who would go tell people that they play a game that can be considered challenging yet would never attempt said challenges.
Have you cleared savage T6-T9? Those are more in line with heroic raiding in wow since they are both the hardest content the game has to offer and enhanced mechanics that are tweaked from the original. I can say doing savage T6 that the difficulty step up is pretty noticeable.
I think this game feels easy (at least for me) cause it has a 2.5 sec gcd. Coming from wow, everything felt like slow motion, at least at the start, but now I've kinda gotten used to it.
Wildstar was a pretty good game, sadly it was plagued by bugs and lack of accessibility. The combat wasn't hard though, avoid telegraphs on the ground and use Iinterrupt Armor when the boss is about to do a special move. If anything, the "dancing" in that game is way more than in here. You even have to "dance" into the healers telegraph there.
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Sigh, well first off I'm not talking about being able to do anything near one shot bosses, also people get kicked for not having a good item lvl, everyone gives a crap. Also no matter how hard it gets, I know that the encounters are still just harder carbon copies of what came before, save a few different designs that stick out from the rest.
smn's are definitely complex to a degree, but not in the way that I'd enjoy and not in a way that I'd say takes any serious skill, it's still confined to the classes basic uses, which are mostly dots.
Honestly, mmos are meant to adapt and change and grow, in multiple directions, they're supposed to be a living world, so my suggestions aren't unreasonable, I'd also like to say that I don't want these things right now, they're just things that will be great for down the road, as in years from now, but if they come sooner great, if not, oh well, still love the game.
I think if someone don't want anything besides what the game already has, then maybe they are playing the wrong genre.
Unfortunately I have not. My group members currently have varying IRL schedules that make it difficult to get together on most days of the week, so we've resigned to just doing our quick clears, especially since we've barely received DPS drops. The spear, staff, and monk fists (just yesterday!) have been our only DPS drops in the past 2 months or so, and everyone wants their weapon before making a real attempt at Savage.
I definitely feel the same about the GCD. I've adapted to it, but it still doesn't particularly feel enjoyable to me.
Wildstar had a lot of potential for sure, but unfortunately you're right in regards to the bugs and inaccessibility. Not only was the game horribly optimized (running through Thayd became a nightmare on the Stormtalon server), but the game itself required too much of a time commitment, especially for me going to school and raiding on both FF14 and progressing through heroic modes on WoW. I played an Esper and I agree that the combat (rotations and whatnot) wasn't exactly difficult, but it kept you engaged and required some pretty decent amounts of coordination with your group even as early as the first dungeon at level 20, which was refreshing considering other games have you playing your own mini-game within your role. Sadly, I think they're in the midst of learning their lesson that "hardcore" players actually are a minority.
Last edited by Adamantium; 09-13-2014 at 09:32 AM.
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But gearing is a joke in this game....if someone wasn't at least wearing full myth gears going into non entry content, it would be considered downright laziness. i90 is pretty much what I see PF generally asking for, and this is with no ST gear , no soldiery gear and actually STILL with zenith weap.
Yh, if you generalise smns to being all about dots, they seem simple, but maximising on them is difficult. So many different timers! Dots ending at different times. Buffs coming off cd at different times. Doing all this while on the fly while handling difficult content is a challenge I assure you.
In all honesty you sound like you're sick to death of mmos mate .
Stormtalon's Lair reminded me of heroic dungeons like shadowlabs and shattered halls in burning crusade. If your shadow priest didn't have enough hit rating and missed a shackle, you would probably wipeTry aoe tanking heroic SH and your tank would probably get his face pummeled into the ground unlike the dungeons here, not to mention tab targetting 5 mobs to hold aggro on all of them instead of spamming overpower or flash.
The word "hardcore" is being thrown around too literally these days. I've been called hardcore when I have a girlfriend, a job and travel quite frequently and only log on for a few hours at a time to raid and do other stuff and then log off. I think what most of the players in wildstar wanted was difficulty, not time sinks. Even the attunements in BC were not as obnoxious as the ones in wildstar. Having to get at least a silver rating (they changed it to bronze recently AFAIK) meant that groups glitched mobs whenever they could and disbanded when there were 1 or 2 wipes cause they couldn't meet the timer. It was pretty impossible to complete if you weren't going in as a full premade. I did really enjoy the dungeons though in terms of its design and difficulty. Stormtalon's lair's first boss was epic, it took us about an hour to down it but the feeling when we did was similar to killing a raid boss. Compare that to stone vigil or tam tara and it's pretty meh.
As for the gcd, one possibility I thought of was that FInal Fantasy has always been known for its turn based combat, even FFXI was kind of that way. So maybe the 2.5 seconds was to allow a more tactical approach to the fight? But then again, many of the mechanics are scripted so tactics get thrown out of the window. So I don't know...
Oh yeah..I also think that they need more raid content. 4 bosses per 6 months just doesn't cut it. I don't think they have to design every fight at the level of complexity as it is at the moment. They could have more bosses, albeit at a easier difficulty level so that the difficulty is not just a jump from dungeons straight to coil. Having a few easier bosses at the start of the raid can not only encourage new players to try it, but gear them up so they can tackle the harder parts later. A little like ICC where you you have easy bosses at the start of each wing and ending with the main boss of each wing culminating in Sindragosa and Arthas.
Last edited by skaterger; 09-13-2014 at 11:02 AM.
Haha yeah. Actually having to actively control mobs is something that's been lost over the years, and something I was pretty glad Wildstar tried to bring back, even if in a different form. A tank's job has gone from making sure they don't lose threat (and the DPS having to throttle themselves) to making sure they pop defensive cooldowns at the right time in order stay alive. Not necessarily bad, just different.
Fair point on what Wildstar players might have wanted. Upon buying the game, I was excited to have challenging content, but never expected the brick wall to get there. I had finished up my Veteran Adventures portion of the raid attunement quest before I stopped playing. Because of my life schedule at the time, I didn't want to put forth the effort to find another group of players just to make it through an attunement chain and potentially raid. Glad to hear that they ended up changing the requirement to Bronze instead of Silver, although I can't imagine just that change making a big dent in the problems that pugging adventures/dungeons had. I lost count of how many groups disbanded because one person screwed up unintentionally and we lost the requirement for a gold medal.
I was also pretty fond of the instance design in Wildstar, and Stormtalon's Lair had some of my favorite bosses. Good memories of having to both heal the tank and DPS the first boss (because hybrid specs work during those levels) because our healer was dead, all the while playing hopscotch around the room. The wind elemental boss (second, I think) also felt like a raid boss in his own right.
As for slowly ramping up the difficulty, I feel like we're slowly seeing that right now anyway. To give Square Enix some credit, Second Coil is a pretty decent step up from Binding Coil, and the difference in difficulty between Turn 6 and Turn 9, while not jarring, is noticeable enough. Would definitely love more bosses in these raids, though.
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