Stone, Sky, Sea and Me – What does this mean for tanks?

[Mayoyama]

I must say I don't understand people who want a mechanic practice mode.

If you wanna practice the mechanics of a fight, then why not just do the fight itself?

So that I don't have to feel guilty and worrying if I am wasting another 7 people's time just so I can improve my own skills on the class.

I don't want individual training modes for every fight to memorise all the mechanics. I just want a couple of modes where the dummy releases random (or set) patterns of aoes that could be found in the game so I can improve my skills, particularly on BLM, in maintaining things such as enochian while moving

Edit: I dont understand why people are so against having something that can allow people to improve themselves and be more efficient players?

[Akasha_Carnelian]

All I feel it needs is for it to adhere to the accuracy requirements for the challenge it is supposed to represent, otherwise what is to stop people from dropping all their accuracy and just completing the challenge with subpar accuracy?

I know this is supposed to simulate optimum conditions (Full uptime, no mechanics), but what use is doing all that damage when you can't even hit in the REAL fight.

[Gameplayzero]

So that I don't have to feel guilty and worrying if I am wasting another 7 people's time just so I can improve my own skills on the class.

I dont understand why people are so against having something that can allow people to improve themselves and be more efficient players?

because thats asking for far too much and is just lazy. You are basically asking the game to hold your hand at that point. Game is already scripted enough and watching videos and getting information will help you just as easily. With how small the dev team is that is just a waste of resources.

Raids are meant to be trial and error. You learn by mistakes (like irl) and once it clicks and you beat it, the satisfaction is great. You are only wasting peoples time if you are joining a clear party and haven't cleared or haven't watched a video. There are learning parties for a reason.

[Mayoyama]

because thats asking for far too much and is just lazy. You are basically asking the game to hold your hand at that point. Game is already scripted enough and watching videos and getting information will help you just as easily. With how small the dev team is that is just a waste of resources.

Raids are meant to be trial and error. You learn by mistakes (like irl) and once it clicks and you beat it, the satisfaction is great. You are only wasting peoples time if you are joining a clear party and haven't cleared or haven't watched a video. There are learning parties for a reason.

How exactly am I asking for the game to "hold my hand"?

I'm not asking for the game to tell me step by step what spell to cast next (which would be hand holding)... I'm wanting a way to practice my rotation against something more interactive than an idle dummy (in which case they could have just not bothered with SSS at all and left us practicing on training dummies in our houses), in an environment where I am not aggravating/frustrating/holding up a group of people in the event my dps is not up to where it should be (yet).

What you're saying is that it is perfectly acceptable to just go into a bunch of learning groups to dick around with my rotation, at the potential expense of that group failing a dps check or hitting enrage because I am not confident/competent enough yet to maintain acceptable dps WHILE dealing with mechanics. And as I have pointed out in a previous post, the English speaking community in general is not very polite/understanding of people newer to their class or who don't live up to their standards

Its attitudes like these that stopped me from wanting to dps long ago (hence why I heal) but I would like to get better at DPSing, I just would like a way I can do it in my own time without inconveniencing others.. is it so wrong to want to be considerate of others in this respect?

[JackFross]

Gonna be straight up with you.

You learn your Job by fighting dummies. Once you have mastery of your Job and understand all of the skills and how to best use them (how long a DoT skill needs to be on before it's eclipsed by another gcd, how and when your AoE is effective, how your AoE skills work, the base rotation your Job uses during extended periods when you can attack the boss, etc) THEN you go into content and learn the mechanics first. If you're in a learning group, you're gonna be wiping *anyway* so, yes, you should be practicing there. You shouldn't be learning what Heavy Thrust or Enochian do in Sephirot EX, you should be learning how to maximize Enochian's timer or maintaining Blood of the Dragon well through the add-spawn downtime.

You learn mechanics and fuck up *hard* on dps. Then the next time, when you *know* the mechanic, you should be able to figure out how best to use the mechanic to your advantage. You learn timings on things like A5S Glupgloop so you get maximum GCDs before pulling off. You learn the hitbox size for the green circles in Sephirot during the color tethers/towers so you can maximize hits before dodging them.

Giving a special solo version of an instance defeats the purpose of running the instance proper. It's not lazy, it's just... silly? Fights are so scripted and every Job is so "simple" once you've mastered it, that any fight and any mechanic should be easy to solve according to your Job's skillset after seeing it just a few times. It takes some people longer than others to figure these things out, sure, but it's really not as big of a deal as you're making it out to be.

[Gameplayzero]

As JackFross has said everyone goes into learning parties expecting to fail. The only way you are going to hold people back is if you aren't trying. Thats it. Or being ignorant to people's advice to help continue the learning. After I clear/fully complete fights I do learning parties for that reason. Hell I even have a learning party/raiding linkshell. All the time there are "clear/farm" only party finders so a lot of newer players trying to do raids get the shaft. Not really fair since we all have to start somewhere.

If you expect to not let people down at least a few times in your life, then there is no room for improvement....... because there will be nothing to improve on.

Not putting yourself out there means you will never get better. Failure + learning breeds success.

[Seku]

What you're saying is that it is perfectly acceptable to just go into a bunch of learning groups to dick around with my rotation, at the potential expense of that group failing a dps check or hitting enrage

Thats exactly what learning parties are for. To go in and dick around with your rotations to learn the fight, mainly maxing out your up time while dealing with boss mechanics. If you don't know what your normal rotation is and ect, that's what normal dummies are for, as Jack said.

[Brian_]

There is no argument for adding mechanics to SSS.

This is an MMO. The entire point of raiding is to experience content with 7 other people. If you want a solo game, go and play a solo game.

SSS exists to let you know if you are ready to take that first step in joining that group. It tells you if you have enough gear / skill to pull your own weight in terms of DPS which agree or disagree is the fundamental standard of raiding in this game. It's not a substitute for actual content progression or the grouping dynamic.

If you want to experience mechanics, then find a group and do the content.

The only thing that this game currently lacks is a means of teaching people how to apply and adjust their rotation to actual variables so that their dummy DPS is closer to their aDPS and the gap between their aDPS and eDPS is not as large. Adding mechanics to SSS does not inherently fix this. Only more experience in various raiding content will. That is why it's important to get people into learning parties where there are more variables (like trying to better align your burst windows with different TA and litany timings) instead of embracing results from a scripted mechanic dummy.

[Nyalia]

I feel that not having accuracy requirements in SSS is a huge mistake for reasons stated elsewhere in this thread. If you beat the DPS check in SSS, even barely, it's supposed to indicate that you have enough DPS to pass the DPS check in the actual fight (baring too many slowdowns from mechanics). But, if you barely pass and then go to the actual fight and miss 25% of your attacks, you won't be passing your portion of the DPS check in the fight, even ignoring slowdowns due to mechanics.



On a separate note, I've always wanted a way to practice a fight's later phases without going through all the intervening ones every time. My pre-3.0 casual raid group was stuck on T9 final phase because we could get there one in five tries, but we died so fast every time we did that we never had a chance to actually practice the mechanics before it became a mess. So, next time we made it there, we just wiped again, over and over. I wish there was a way we could have practiced just that phase, or some portion thereof. Similar in T5, it took us a while to clear because we wiped so fast the first several times we made it to Twisters that it was quite a while before we could survive the initial bit of the phase so we could learn the phase.

When you're casually raiding and people are dropping every few runs and being replaced, and when you don't have the same group every time, you wind up doing the first few phases over and over until everyone in the raid pool gets all of the mechanics. And then you wipe on the middle phases for a long while until everyone in the raid pool gets the hang of it. And then everyone has to start over a third time to learn the later phases, and so on... I feel like it'd be nice if the people who already know the early phases could practice the later ones ahead of time, especially challenging ones.

I know mechanics practice isn't the point of SSS in its current form, but SSS would be a sensible place to put such a "practice the mechanics of difficult later phases" feature if it were ever added...

[Neophyte]

If it stays a solo dummy challenge you can't really put mechanics in there. At least not the ones causing 'problems':
Earthshakers (don't hit your group), split/share damage, everything where the boss has to be dragged somewhere and dps have to position properly, things where you have to position the entire party without overlapping AoEs, pushbacks, kill adds coordinated with other dps (Midas 4) or healers (Seph Ex), drag adds somewhere, pass a debuff, grab a tether, evade AoEs without indicator, place AoEs like divebombs or skyward leap properly, get grabbed by a helicopter and put in a zone with a individual task for each roll, stun/kill hearts while evading boulders, tankswap, 'Dimensional Collapse + Spiral Pierce + Hiemal Storm'-clusterfck, shield targetted person (spear of fury), etc...

So what mechanics do you expect from a solo dummy fight (which we all knew it'll be)? Dragon's Gaze?