Boss Fight Mechanics

[Bracken]

Honestly I loved ffxi's tp based bosses where it was random and it was all about player skill.

These mechanics are just an automated wash rinse repeat thing. Where the fun dies quickly.

Don't get me wrong. I love ffxiv but there are somethings which become boring quickly. That and rehashed fights.

[raelgun]

Honestly I loved ffxi's tp based bosses where it was random and it was all about player skill.

People that normally say this in FF14 are the ones that have not cleared coil.

Coil fights require knowledge of the fights just like any other game and actually requires you to know how to play and react accordingly to your group set up, fights have DPS checks, most players are unable to play to the extent to reach the minimum requirement of numbers, if FF14 was so easy then why do so many players fail at the individual level such as raw numbers to start with.

[Darra]

People that normally say this in FF14 are the ones that have not cleared coil.

Coil fights require knowledge of the fights just like any other game and actually requires you to know how to play and react accordingly to your group set up, fights have DPS checks, most players are unable to play to the extent to reach the minimum requirement of numbers, if FF14 was so easy then why do so many players fail at the individual level such as raw numbers to start with.

You forget that this game has always suffered from latency issues and hardware restrictions on the PS3. I used to do T5 with PS3 players that got hit by 8/10 dive bombs because of the delay in loading the DB markers compared to PC players and PS3 players that used an SSD. And that's just 1 legitimate reason. No-one is saying that there's no skill in what needs to be done for raiding in this game, there clearly is, but there are a lot of mediocre and some even bad players able to do content because they learn the patterns and have others make up for their mistakes.

[Zumi]

Honestly I loved ffxi's tp based bosses where it was random and it was all about player skill.

These mechanics are just an automated wash rinse repeat thing. Where the fun dies quickly.

Don't get me wrong. I love ffxiv but there are somethings which become boring quickly. That and rehashed fights.

The majority of fights in FFXI were tank and spanks. They didn't really have mechanics. Their attacks where random but they didn't do much. For example Fafnir

Fafnir had 4 tp attacks
Hurricane Wing - AoE damage that causes blind
Horrid Roar - Removes 1 buff from a player
Absolute Terror - Terrors 1 player for a duration of time
Dragon Breath - Front aoe breath damage.

A 5th attack, Spike flail was casued by someone having hate from behind, but this could totally be avoided by having everyone stacked on his paws for the whole fight.

So the whole fight boiled down to. Curaga when he uses wind, heal the tanks that are tanking Fafnir, everyone else does damage. This took way less skill then anything in FFXIV.

[Koenignovi]

The majority of fights in FFXI were tank and spanks. They didn't really have mechanics. Their attacks where random but they didn't do much. For example Fafnir

Fafnir had 4 tp attacks
Hurricane Wing - AoE damage that causes blind
Horrid Roar - Removes 1 buff from a player
Absolute Terror - Terrors 1 player for a duration of time
Dragon Breath - Front aoe breath damage.

A 5th attack, Spike flail was casued by someone having hate from behind, but this could totally be avoided by having everyone stacked on his paws for the whole fight.

So the whole fight boiled down to. Curaga when he uses wind, heal the tanks that are tanking Fafnir, everyone else does damage. This took way less skill then anything in FFXIV.

Not just this, but eventually the fights became more of a "How can we buff the hardest and stun the longest before we win?" Most fights, if not all still to this day in FFxi are just zerg fests. The (H)NMs might have a select set of TP moves they use at random or predictably but really in the end it comes down to how long can you as a player survive before you kill the boss or it kills you. I think if anything, I still enjoy Odin and Kirin the most out of the FFxi bosses. At least they proved to your group that you had some kind of communication and organization during a fight.

[Catsby]

stuff about fafnir

You aren't wrong but you boiled it down a little too much and left out important mechanics inherit to all fights, which excluding from any fight in particular will make it seem shallow.

Other important points:
Fafnir was very early boss in an early expansion.
Resource management in XI was extremely intensive compare to XIV.
Enmity was far more complex in XI than XIV.
Bosses weren't immune to most status effects.
Many more that I'm too tired to remember.

So while many bosses felt like tank and spank they still had a lot of challenging things to be mindful of.

I think what OP and other people in this thread are looking for are fights where you don't mindlessly go through your rotation while occasionally avoiding some environmental hazard.

[Zumi]

You aren't wrong but you boiled it down a little too much and left out important mechanics inherit to all fights, which excluding from any fight in particular will make it seem shallow.

Other important points:
Fafnir was very early boss in an early expansion.
Resource management in XI was extremely intensive compare to XIV.
Enmity was far more complex in XI than XIV.
Bosses weren't immune to most status effects.
Many more that I'm too tired to remember.

So while many bosses felt like tank and spank they still had a lot of challenging things to be mindful of.

I think what OP and other people in this thread are looking for are fights where you don't mindlessly go through your rotation while occasionally avoiding some environmental hazard.

Fafnir was added in the Zilart expansion which was the first FFXI expansion almost the same point were are now with FFXIV with the first expansion about to come out so it is a fair comparison to what we see now. Almost every fight in FFXI were tank and spank and heal. Because the game was made on PS2 so they don't have a lot of the dodge aoe mechanics there really was no rotation in FFXI it was auto attack until you got 100 TP to use a WS, with the ocassional 3-5 min job ability like beserk, warcry, thrown in.

[Catsby]

To me the game is most fun when a fight doesn't spiral out of control because 1 person died. There are too many encounters where success hinges on everyone doing their thing properly.

[RyuDragnier]

To me the game is most fun when a fight doesn't spiral out of control because 1 person died. There are too many encounters where success hinges on everyone doing their thing properly.

This. I really don't like fights where the entire party must pay for 1 person's mistake, though this mostly applies to Coil. Still haven't seen a T9 clear due to groups being unable to pass Meteors or Divebombs.

[Wournsfeik_Untawhasyn]

... FFXI Boss snip ...

I find it interesting when folks compare ARR to RotZ, when ARR is really more like Vanilla in XI's lifecycle. But I digress...

Most bosses in XI were a matter of invalidating their random mechanics. "Proto" Omega, as a for instance, was where Shadow-tanking got it's teeth cut. Omega would positively ruin a meat tank, and so they had to work out a way to not take the massive damage that Omega could dish out. Enter the NIN/WAR, who was so good at holding Enmity a good one was way more preferable than any PLD (the defacto tank class for a long while) could ever hope to be. And even to this day PLDs are only brought along to meet tank only if they have Aegis/Ochain because without those they take way too much damage to justify not bringing a NIN.

And bosses weren't immune to most status effects because for the most part they didn't need to be. Most of what the players could do to them were piddly effects or their resistances were so huge it took Elemental Seal + The Debuff to stick for any real length of time. Anything you could stick easy used to be so bad that for a while there RDM's were laughed out the door because besides En-spells and Refresh which anyone could now SJ, that's all they were there for. When your debuffs are so laughable that people would be like 'Chainstun? Hah, that's just cute, go level a real job' you've got to wonder.

That all being said, the point in FFXI wasn't really the fights per se, but the prep for the fights. Without prep a boss would positively destroy you, with prep however, content usually wasn't super hard, just very technical. The onus then became for players to put forth the time to be prepared, where the closest we get to that is 'eat your food' (which was mandatory in XI due to it basically being as good as another piece of gear)