FFXIV: The State Of Raiding

[TankHunter678]

The trouble with raiding is that they are using a broken system that divides the community up rather than bring it together. Old raiding had people who were hardcore to the bone leading people with all different kinds of commitments and they all were necessary to complete the challenges presented by raiding. What we need is an environment that encourages bringing new people into raiding that doesn't punish the people who have been there longer, and the current system just doesn't do that.

How is it broken?

Would it be the DPS checks and 1 person fucking up screws over the whole raid group?

[Colt47]

How is it broken?

Would it be the DPS checks and 1 person fucking up screws over the whole raid group?

It's not even as simple as that. The trouble is we've got multiple raid difficulties dividing up the community at end game and an over emphasis on challenging the player to be what ultimately is an hp numbers machine under pressure instead of utilizing tactics. There is zero creativity in how players can tackle fights: They must be completed by following a strict routine, and messing up that routine means everyone pays.

Changes that need to happen are

1) Fights can be completed slowly or quickly with no enrage timers. People will always work towards speeding up boss kills and there's zero reason to add a big fat stick at the end.

2) Larger, more inclusive group sizes, but optionally fewer than the max may enter the same fight. No changes in difficulty based on number of players or number of loot drops. A large PF group should be able to do the same content that a smaller fine tuned FC party can be exposed to, just they wont have more drops so people will need more runs to get geared. This lets the smaller parties still get geared faster, while also allowing more casually inclined players to jump in and have fun with it.

So in a nut shell: Have trouble with Seph EX? Zerg it to get through all the phases and then move to a smaller group size to improve the chance for loot drops. Can't handle Alex savage? Same deal. It lets players learn in a "more community friendly" environment before pushing into it with smaller groups.

[GavynG]

What I feel is lacking in this game is having fun with stat builds, because most secondary stats suck. Also, having gear that's more than just ilvl. In other MMO's, for example, you get either pieces of gear or set bonuses that'd give you some cool effect such as summoning a mirror image of yourself that'd auto-cast a mage bolt, or an effect to enhance a particular job ability, or lower it's cooldown, or add a small chance for an attack to go off twice. Or to move 25% faster at night. Gosh, anything.

Everything is so same-y and one-dimensional in this game. SE complains about how if there's more variety then things will get more difficult to balance, but I personally think they need to to keep this game fun. As long as I've played this I am just beyond bored with the lack of variety. Give me back my RPG elements. This is what made other MMO's suck up so much of my free time.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

snip

If I'm understanding this correctly, you mean to say people could enter Savage with a smaller than 8 party composition? If so, that would require a massive scale down on difficulty. No matter how good you are at the game, even six people wouldn't come close to completing Midas or Gordias. Hell, even in decked out ilvl 240 gear, you'd still with Thordan EX with less players.

[Warlyx]

imo bosses need to be shorter (less phases) and SE needs to add more bosses.....wiping after 10min+ isnt fun....a6 is frustrating because when learning u have to repeat the whole first 3 bosses....and any other boss ? repeat phase 1 , phase 2...and nail phase 3...wipe? repeat.... T9 was a nightmare because of that almost made me quit at the time...ugh

a3s was the same.... ugh so frustrating the day we killed a3s i wasnt even happy , i was FINALLY FFS! , im not the best player not even close , but come on...breaking 4 bosses into 8 would make the game more enjoyable

[Colt47]

If I'm understanding this correctly, you mean to say people could enter Savage with a smaller than 8 party composition? If so, that would require a massive scale down on difficulty. No matter how good you are at the game, even six people wouldn't come close to completing Midas or Gordias. Hell, even in decked out ilvl 240 gear, you'd still with Thordan EX with less players.

No that would be a normal group. The idea is more people could go into savage at once and thus reduce difficulty. There would need to be a little scaling on the enemy HP, but otherwise the fight would remain the same.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

No that would be a normal group. The idea is more people could go into savage at once and thus reduce difficulty. There would need to be a little scaling on the enemy HP, but otherwise the fight would remain the same.

So essentially a 4-man trial that you could also queue with additional people to make it easier? See, problem with that is 8-man trial content has very specific mechanics that simply wouldn't work with less people. For example, four or six people could never kill the golems fast enough in Turn Nine. The DPS checks alone are far too high if you're not vastly overgeared. You also lose out on certain mechanics like shared damage, tank swaps and etc. Any scaling to compensate for this would render Savage a joke with eight people. I also don't see how this would encourage more of a community feel. Most raid groups would prefer to do it with less people for the challenge, and then stick with their statics.

Savage isn't intended for everyone. While some adjustments could be made, it exists to be extremely challenging. I would much rather see the devs focus on midcore content (Aquapolis, Palace of the Dead, a revised Diadem, more extreme trials), then nerf Savage since that defeats the whole point of it.

[Jetstream_Fox]

Bad idea to get rid of normal mode. It was put in for a reason. I think the mistake they made was locking Savage behind Normal which gives everyone the ability to say "it's the same fight no new story".

Many things would be fixed if Savage wasn't locked by normal.

Not really, they are the same fights with a few tweaks and alterations, just like ex fights. Nothing would be fixed if it wasn't locked behind normal mode, the problem lies with how SE has handled the development of these fights, they're just not fun. Really if you look at a few other fights in 3.0 some of the more fun fights aren't even in the 8 man raid, VA is a good example with Sawtooth and Irminsul, wasn't something we really seen before, Cuchulainn was all over the place, wasn't anything new but it had it's fun. And while Angra Mainyu is from 2.0 that fight was fun and chaotic, and Cerberus had a very interesting twist to his fight. Granted these became facerolls, they were fresh and interesting fights, similar to the Coils.

The Coils had mechanics that were only present in Coils, which set all the fights on a different pedestal than the rest of the game, Alex has nothing like that, as everything was basically all the other mechanics from other fights. While the Son has introduced new fights and made things interesting, it's too little too late, the damage is done and that's the problem with the raids, SE took away the uniqueness and challenging content curve, and dished up us one raid with ridiculous difficulty and the other less tough and more unique. The raids don't know what to be at this point, because SE doesn't know what they want to do with a vast majority of the content.

[Toguro]

.

I agree with all of this. However, no matter how unique the fights are, 2 versions of a fight will still be 2 versions of the same fight. Many people have said they don't like Alex because Savage is the same stuff but more mechanics. They wouldn't be able to say that if they could dive in to Savage at release. It'd be like old raiding again.

[Stanelis]

It's not even as simple as that. The trouble is we've got multiple raid difficulties dividing up the community at end game and an over emphasis on challenging the player to be what ultimately is an hp numbers machine under pressure instead of utilizing tactics. There is zero creativity in how players can tackle fights: They must be completed by following a strict routine, and messing up that routine means everyone pays.

That issue arises due to the simplicity of FFXIV battle system : no matter what you do, in the end, in raid, you're only healing and DPSing.

In order to make a healthy raid in FFXIV, SE would have to first make the battle system interesting when you play with a large number of players (eg increase the number of abilities which have synergies with the other member of the group). But it will never happen as FFXIV is a game designed to heavily favor solo play. In a game like FFXI (where the battle system is made with group play in mind, with little regard to solo play), the gameplay is different depending on how many people are in your group and the raiding used to be very healthy.

That issue is found in the current wow (where players have been starting to desert high end raid ever since blizzard implemented something similar with the wow 3.0 patch) and is ultimately why wildstar failed.