FFXIV: The State Of Raiding

[Warlyx]

Dunno what changed , maybe is the new mentality or the new generations , but i remember playing Eq and watching a High lvl Magician in awe because he had an awesome staff and a cool pet , same goes for FFXI/eq2/ect , i remember watching High lvl players with that awesome armors , and thinking i will strive for that! , it helped newbies , or fresh high lvls, now ppl watch geared players as scum that only want to show off and be "special snowflakes"....if u have something rare or something cool is normal wanting to show it off , we do it on RL too....what i have doesnt make what u have less important , and there is nothing in this game that u cant get if u work for it ....

if u dont give meaninfull rewards for the HARDEST content ingame ....then u are doing no favor to your playerbase.

Raiding have issues , and one of them is casuals not even WANTING to attemp raiding , why should do they? , there is no carrot on the stick ,only the same gear as normal but dyable? meh , all that time wasted , all that gil invested (food potions , raiding time , wiping , repairs) ....and for what?

[Synestra]

i remember watching High lvl players with that awesome armors , and thinking i will strive for that!

I dont usually care who has what but oh boy when i first saw Warglaives in TBC, i was like "whoooaaa! what are those! D:" then googled and found out that those drops from lastboss from last raid instance so my "fate" was sealed on that moment, fast forward 1.5 years and there i was standing next to Illidans corpse and i must say feeling was something i propably never will feel again eventho Warglaives never dropped for me after countless kills.

I feel sorry for yonger players because feelings like those are next to impossible to get nowdays, it was insanely epic journey that i will never forget specially when i did it with awesome peoples.

[Aleo]

Would much prefer if they went for more bosses over making a midcore difficulty. With more bosses the developers would keep the total completion time for the raid the same but to fit more bosses in that time they would reduce the difficulty of each boss thus making it more accessible and having no need for a midcore difficulty. This would benefit more players as they would experience a greater variety/creativity in the raid overall.

[Marcellus_Cassius]

Dunno what changed , maybe is the new mentality or the new generations , but i remember playing Eq and watching a High lvl Magician in awe because he had an awesome staff and a cool pet , same goes for FFXI/eq2/ect , i remember watching High lvl players with that awesome armors , and thinking i will strive for that!

For the generation that played XI, EQ - we were younger and fresh to the mmo scene. For the most recent generation, they don't know what they're missing because the scene has changed. Taking years to obtain a rare set of armor became two to three months before its do it again city. Its hard to be fond of items that change often so the connection between labor and gear is lost. Now its about the raid in itself that is supposed to keep people going, but look where we are. I could say the novelty kept me subscribed for more years than XIV's had patch cycles but it won't give you 5 million subscribers, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

[KrenianKandos]

I do feel some form of hybrid horizontal progression could benefit the game. Perhaps gear that boosts abilities by 3-5% or slightly speeds up cooldowns just to offer a little change in flavour. Although that wouldn't help mitigate the feeling of running the same content over and over again. A personal gripe is how short the story has been. 3.1 lasted maybe 90 minutes or so?

In a strange way, I actually like the idea of LoV in theory. If they streamlined it into an almost Pokemon style mini-game where you could "level" your minions it might have worked. Diadem fell into a similar problem with them not really knowing what to do with it. There is still some potential, but it needs a full overhaul. Way I would like to see it handled is a more meaningful sense of exploration. Hell, toss in some fanservice like us getting to see bits of other Final Fantasy worlds. And make it so enemies scale based on the amount of people actually fighting them.

They seem to be exploring other avenues. We'll have to wait and see whether this attempt turns out better than LoV and Diadem. It really needs to for them to keep the whole variety MMO theme going.

Instead of content in the form of dungeons and raids, I would love to see Merit points or quests in order to heighten your skills to do something similar to your idea of horizontal progression.

So follow me on this:

Next expansion, you get quests that allow you to do epic adventures. These adventures allow you to learn something in a new form of experience bar, and when you hit the experience bar max, your skill 'heightens' to a new ability or a new addition to the skill. You could get one of three choices that allows you to change your playstyle a bit.

So as I play a Dark Knight, let's go with Souleater, one of the key attacks. This could then branch off to three things:

Souleater 1) Damage multiplier goes up to x%, a flat dps increase for people who want the easy way.

Souleater 2) Health restoration skill is active even outside of Grit, giving a constant heal to the class no matter what they're doing.

Souleater 3) Adds a debuff effect to the Souleater attack of a main stat.


Something in that regards. Furthermore, that would allow horizontal progression as your skills don't go up in power due to your gear, but with other methods of endgame progression to maximize your character.

See? Something as simple as allowing skill growth would greatly change endgame components and allow flexibility in your classes to do multiple things. You'd make different classes do different things no matter what. Of course, this would come back to people who min/max and make it so that you pretty much are stuck wanting to maximize their potential, but it still allows people to benefit and choose three unique skills to tailor their needs and wants.


A skill progression endgame is a lot more interesting, to me, than a gear progression. You build the bar up, then do some epic quest to 'unlock' the skill. Then you can add onto this some more.

This serves two purposes too: 1) removes the need to add extra abilities every expansion because of skill bloat; in my opinion, we are already there. 2) Allows another form of progression instead of gear/raid.

This would come with a catch though: people who raid will feel like they have to do this progression to maximize their potential. Which is a fair argument for those who 'just' want to raid. But either way, raiders and hardcore raiders at that will maximize their potential so i don't see it as much of an issue.



This is just one simple example where we are going 'away' from vertical progression such as raids and ilvls and gear and offering a different, horizontal dimension to the game. And it isn't something that is really seen in the current MMO genre. I doubt some people would like this as it sounds too much like 'Light' grinding but you can't just do quests all the time either and stick it with raiding like we did with the Zenith weapon. Some people don't want to raid.

So, this allows everyone to do their own thing and still feel like their character has room to grow, without the absolute need of raiding. Some people can do the gear, others can expand on their skills and make their characters even more potent in certain areas.



For LoV, I would have preferred a simple, straight up Pokemon like fight with skills. I like the idea they tried to do things differently but I didn't really care for a strategy based game where you send minions to destroy buildings as a goal. The allure of Pokemon was to be able to level said creatures and get new skills. While that would have taken a lot more work on the devs' part, it would have been pretty neat. I don't hate it but I don't really care for LoV.



I hope that if they decide to reintroduce Diadem, that they take the first part of the mission objective and expand on it: Make it a 60 or 90 minute of objectives and goals to explore and delve into the caves and the surroundings. Let us explore the area, like it should have been, and give us goals and achievements. The faster we complete the goals, the more rewards at the end. This would allow a speed run to happen and challenges in order to get better rewards that way. That way, people who don't want to spend 90 minutes doing their stuff can leave.

So you tier it:

Your minimum requirements to get tomes/min items is this this and this.

And then you have bonus objectives that add to tome amounts + items and increase the chance of getting a rare item the more time you're there. This would push people to explore and be in the area because they simply just can't afk and not explore for 90 minutes; they have objectives that add to the rank system.

So make it LIKE a rank system:

C - Mininum
B - 1 bonus done
A - 2
AA - 3
AAA - 4
S - 5+

I dunno, I'm just shooting off ideas here. Some might be hated, others loved, but still. The essence is to show that there is SO MUCH MORE they can do instead of what they've delivered us, and this is just me brainstorming!

[Zenji]

I think people raid for the wrong reasons. It's less about gear that will be replaced soon or how fast you complete content and more about that fun you have when your running it with a cool group of people. Wiping, making jokes, wiping, improving, WIPING. and that awesome feeling of accomplishment and comradery when you clear difficult content together. Yeah man. That's what it's all about.

[CookieMonsta]

I think people raid for the wrong reasons. It's less about gear that will be replaced soon or how fast you complete content and more about that fun you have when your running it with a cool group of people. Wiping, making jokes, wiping, improving, WIPING. and that awesome feeling of accomplishment and comradery when you clear difficult content together. Yeah man. That's what it's all about.

Problem is, people like this are too rare. The vast majority of the game is complete face roll, the only time you have to perform at the peak is Savage content.

Intangible rewards like heightened rotation skills, raid awareness, improved communication protocols are not as valued, thus the raid community becomes tiny and cannot sustain itself.

[Velhart]

The problem with this entire game's structure in general is that they do not remotely attempt to balance Casual, Midcore, and Hardcore playstyles. All three need to be in a healthy state for an MMO to be successful in the long run. Right now the one taking the beating is the midcore audience, which is actually a decent amount of players. Currently the content midcore have is one primal, and Savage raiding. It is debatable rather if Midas(Savage) is considered hardcore content, but currently midcore groups are hitting walls and quitting similar to the first tier of raids.

It is sad that SE believes that a story mode for casual players was much more important than making balanced content for midcore/hardcore players in the -one- piece of content in the game that is actually challenging. You can bring the pitchforks at me if you want, but story mode should of had no priority over making a Coils level difficulty raid tier and a Savage mode one. Similar to how 2nd Coil worked. Actually, 2nd Coil did it almost completely right. All they needed to do was put actual better gear in and more people would of been influenced to take it on.

I am not necessarily saying that a Story mode shouldn't exist, despite not liking the concept of it. However, this is content built in the mind for midcore/hardcore players and they should of been catered to first before casuals were. Sorry casuals, but you own 95% of the game, I think you would live if you have to wait for an echo buff to beat the content for the story. You dealt with it before, you can now. There has to be a balance in end game content, and right now it is broken.

Feels pointless saying all of this however. SE is intent on keeping this imbalanced structure going and making sure each piece of content in this game has a hold-my-hand mode to the players who cannot feel compelled to hit anything more than one button. They need to better manage their resources.

Of course I will get the incoming, "Casuals have the right to get all the story the game has." I will argue that you shouldn't get everything handed to you on a silver platter, even if it is story content. Coil's story to many was a major reward in completing the content. Even myself, I cared more about what happens next and farming gear as a secondary thing. You can either do two things. One, wait till the content is accessible enough with gear/echo to take it on. Two, you can watch it on YouTube, assuming it doesn't "ruin your immersion."

Again, I am not saying casual content should not exist, and it is understandable it is the majority of content. However, when you do add the challenging content in, you really need to make it count and not cater to the casual side UNLESS you can manage resources for three modes.

Since everything I said above won't happen because SE does not know how to balance anything right, can you at least add achievements in Savage for doing content in a certain specific way like WoW does? Something for people closer to max ilvl. Something that makes them change strategies around to earn the achievements. Can reward things like mounts, minions, titles, etc. Something to show bragging rights. Oh wait never mind, can't reward those things or you will make the casuals angry. Well scrap that idea, because if the casuals are not happy about it, it is a no go.

tl;dr - The balance of casual, midcore, and hardcore content in this game is horrible.

[FoxyAreku]

On a semi-related note, I've been thinking about this more and more recently.

I think the Midas model was a great one time thing, but if this continues it's going to be absolutely terrible and put raiding in an even worse spot than it was in Gordias.

Mainly, I'm talking about how gordias savage gear was made useless the INSTANT the patch dropped. What was even the point for getting it then? In coil, you would use that gear to move on to the next. This makes raiding feel even more pointless and will make even less people do it.

It's just...weird. Why can't we go back to the Coil model? Surely they can see that people were happier then. All putting in an easy mode did was hurt the raid scene, and even though I made millions off of it, having crafted gear be better than the previous tier the instant the next section comes out just isn't healthy. Maybe delay the crafted gear a month or two, and make it so there's only one mid-core difficulty again. (This would give them more time to put content in other places as well, maybe give us 3 dungeons in EX roulette again?)

[loreleidiangelo]

In regards to the gear...I don't really care if it performs better than the faceroll tome gear after the catch-up period is over, but by god it sure better LOOK better than the same gear that people can get for semi-afking a dungeon a day for 20 minutes 6 days out of the week.

Second Coil was the best example of this, IMO. All the gear was so superbly designed and different from other gear...you really stood out wearing it. Right now all my raiding friends are wearing glamour of actual cool stuff over their Midas Savage gear, which is just sad.