New 4.X open field monsters will be a shorter fight.

[Kallera]

Have ANY of you actively tried to farm materials for crafting from enemy drops in 3.0? They tripled the amount of skin you need to make a single leather piece, and yet enemies take way longer to kill. Grinding enemies for crafting materials is a horrible waste of time,and the only reason they didn't already nerf it is that it is far more efficient to send your retainer to gather 10 skins per hour while you do more effective tasks.

Deepeye tears, skin, blood, scales... I just use retainers to farm it all. I've tried actively farming it, and its a waste. You don't even get reasonable xp from the stupid overbloated enemeis. I haven't actively fought non-fate, non-daily hunt monsters since 2.0. This change might actually get ME to engage in fighting normal mobs again. And that's good.

Isn't that more a problem with crafting recipies and drops than difficulty?

[Shurrikhan]

You're right, but to frame it from one teacher to another:

All of the players here are college freshmen taking a Gen Ed irrelevant to their major and are going to a party tonight.

I'm sure you've seen it: when something too hard for a player shows up, they don't think "How can I learn to beat this?" They either just want to get carried or cry about how hard it is.

There are exceptions to that rule of course. But, that is far and away most of this playerbase. The Dark Souls community has their philosophy of "Git Gud". Even new players get roped in, rather than spending their days whining. Here, the philosophy is "Stay Bad". And we do a great job teaching it with lovely phrases like "You don't pay my sub" and "Oh, yeah? How do you know how much damage I'm doing?"

Try as you might, you can't make someone care to learn. I've tried. Teaching at university, I learned very quickly when someone was a lost cause. This playerbase is mostly made up of lost causes.

If that's the case, then by the same metaphor, this is a campus where only some 10% of students actually move beyond remedials and into the real deal. And that doesn't seem a shame? That doesn't seem utterly destructive to the point of the whole construct?

Personally, be in school or here, I've seen far too many "lost causes" succeed for that term to hold any significance. In XIV especially, I've seen people who "couldn't be bothered" enjoy difficulty immensely, as long as its introduced in proximal, intuitive steps.

You're coming from a point of view where if people are shown hard content they will learn and start to like to be challenged, that's not the reality.

That is exactly what I've seen here, though, small and anecdotal a sample or not. From what I've seen, it hasn't been primarily individual laziness or disinterest that would hold the playerbase back, but rather the communal idea of competence-irrelevance on one end, and that most people you meet will be irreparably incompetent on the other. And XIV has fostered that outlook. This is not an issue nearly as inherently powerful as it has become. It has been crafted, be that by design or negligence.

[Shurrikhan]

I agree. The mobs and zones should just go instead.

It's a lot of resources we could put into instances. You could turn raids into actual locations instead of 4 boss rooms. 4 dungeons per patch instead of 2. Maybe even a 2nd 24 man raid. We can keep the main cities and housing areas as social hubs - it would be a bit like Fantasy Star online. Far more efficient resource usage IMO.

Ew no. Mabinogi Heroes was like that and it doesn't even remotely feel like an actual game world, just like a single city with a handful of dungeons in a menu.

What's the difference, though? You may as well have a panoramic in your room in front of a re-lootable chest if, as Khalithar pointed out, the entire point of flying is to avoid "inconvenient terrain" and "inconsequential mobs". Wouldn't gathering from home be more "convenient"?

Now while you can certainly argue about how it makes enemies and terrain inconsequential, the solution to that isn't to ground us, it's to actually make us want to be on the ground more. Being able to just fly straight to an objective and skip all that nonsense is why I love flying so much. Being able to just get my exp so I can reach the required level for whatever main story quest as fast as possible is what my playstyle is, flying suits it just fine.

Now that first part I'm in complete agreement with, but probably for opposite reasons. I enjoy interacting with the environment in variety of ways. Flight, especially if includes a decent semblance of flight physics (sadly unseen in most MMOs), is amazing if it doesn't remove all reason to experience danger and to interact with topography. Now, that could be aerial enemies, wind currents, or even just limited flying mount stamina or availability, but in any of those cases, flight adds to, rather than effectively removes, previous assets and design.

[Khalithar]

Now that first part I'm in complete agreement with, but probably for opposite reasons. I enjoy interacting with the environment in variety of ways.

And that is a perfectly fair way to look at things and is absolutely valid, we simply hold a different view on why we enjoy flying. I don't mind interacting with the world either, but my point when it comes to the "inconsequential" stuff, to put it in a more concrete example is this. What exactly is lost by when we have flying vs when we don't?

Example 1 (without flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

Example 2 (with flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

All flying does is speed up the process just a bit and that slightly more efficient process is exactly what *I* want.

But let's look at a way to make it more interesting. In this example, for argument's sake, let's pretend we have flying.

Example 3: You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, but on the way to get to the stuff you want to kill you suddenly notice on your minimap there is a rare spawn enemy that drops a nice piece of gear for whatever class you are when you kill him. However you notice he's in the back of a dark cave. Deciding you want the gear, you fight your way in through his cronies, possibly find a side quest that you can only see if you run in there, and finally you fight the rare spawn that has higher difficulty compared to other enemies in the zone but is still soloable and you get a nice piece of gear for your trouble and fight your way out.

Then you kill X amount of dudes for your quest and run back for your reward. Does it have to be gear rewards? No, obviously not, but if they do SOMETHING to make being on the ground worth our time? You can bet we'd be on the ground more often looking for interesting stuff and fighting rare enemies for gear/achievements/minions/mounts/etc. This most recent patch is good evidence of that, people weren't really in to PVP that much in this game, then Garo happened now PVP is jumping again, even if it's only for a little while.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

One of the reasons why I enjoyed the HW areas was because the enemies were so powerful. If I had to pick a fight, I'd make sure it was with one enemy and I'd tread carefully. I couldn't just run through a pack of 20 enemies like it was nothing.

It also made me appreciate flying so much more. It felt like a relief and a reward for getting through it all the first time.

With weaker enemies, unlocking flying will feel less rewarding imo.

[Natashio]

Pfft..casuals.. Keep it up Yoshida. You're doing a really good job on not convincing me to upgrade my PS3 to keep playing this game.

[Kahnom]

I want all the mobs are as dangerous as the ones around Adamantine node.
My point ain't "you can't fight back" but its the damage they do.
Each hit took around 30% of your max hp so you have to run for your life or pop chocobo and fight back.
And I believe everyone here died at least once to that shit ...

[Shurrikhan]

And that is a perfectly fair way to look at things and is absolutely valid, we simply hold a different view on why we enjoy flying. I don't mind interacting with the world either, but my point when it comes to the "inconsequential" stuff, to put it in a more concrete example is this. What exactly is lost by when we have flying vs when we don't?

Example 1 (without flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

Example 2 (with flying): You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, get to the stuff you want to kill, and kill X amount of dudes for your quest.

All flying does is speed up the process just a bit and that slightly more efficient process is exactly what *I* want.

But let's look at a way to make it more interesting. In this example, for argument's sake, let's pretend we have flying.

Example 3: You hop on your mount, avoid the enemies in your way, but on the way to get to the stuff you want to kill you suddenly notice on your minimap there is a rare spawn enemy that drops a nice piece of gear for whatever class you are when you kill him. However you notice he's in the back of a dark cave. Deciding you want the gear, you fight your way in through his cronies, possibly find a side quest that you can only see if you run in there, and finally you fight the rare spawn that has higher difficulty compared to other enemies in the zone but is still soloable and you get a nice piece of gear for your trouble and fight your way out.

Then you kill X amount of dudes for your quest and run back for your reward. Does it have to be gear rewards? No, obviously not, but if they do SOMETHING to make being on the ground worth our time? You can bet we'd be on the ground more often looking for interesting stuff and fighting rare enemies for gear/achievements/minions/mounts/etc. This most recent patch is good evidence of that, people weren't really in to PVP that much in this game, then Garo happened now PVP is jumping again, even if it's only for a little while.

It seems we are again of fairly equal mind, just with different lengths of expectations for what might all be achieved within a particular mode or setting, given enough mechanical depth. What I'm looking for is almost always some facet of immersion, but one of the key elements to that to me is pacing as something not only appropriate at its typical or habitual level (which I can even agree that the convenience of flight may in cases promote, rather than demote), but that their is also a degree of variation by event and choice. To illustrate that variation, let's take, for an instance, an:

Example 4: Your objective lies near the summit of a mob-encamped mountain path, the skies above which are patrolled by elite flying enemies. The quickest, but riskiest way is to fly (complete with—assuming unlimited resource—the capacity for engaging aerial dogfights, for which you are nonetheless less well equipped than these beasts), as your mount may be wounded or incapacitated. Less risky is to charge through camp on horse or the like, enemies trailing after you for as long as they can keep up but avoiding the aerial beasts above, and having your mount continue on while you dismount to defend it if need be. Safest, you can proceed by foot, scale cliffs and stealth your way through. That is the general tactical situation of one given objective area.

However, quests or events in the area could easily augment or adjust these decisions, such as by granting a defense or movement speed boost to either mount type, providing additional tools (e.g. caltrops or great-nets). These in turn, in seeing that area, that experience, from a different perspective and therefore from a different pacing, allows it a certain sense of the dynamic.

In truth, I think that, say, a great plains area would probably be better experienced from a higher speed than, say, winding paths amid a muddy woodland. As such, I think it would be an improvement to allows for a real choice of mount, rather than each being no more than extra glamours alike to our "barefoot" clogs, providing a consistent doubled movement speed. In Doma, a horse for the plains, with slower turning but greater maximum speeds; for the marshes or lake-lands an eft, to cross the waters and ground alike at some 80% bonus speed; for the crags, a chocobo for greater jump height. So on and so forth. You take one with you, and you keep it safe. Just that addition of physics and unit health can allow for a tremendous growth in engagement in the open world.

With that in mind:

Example 5: This is simply a large, mostly scenic zone, primarily with interactive but non-hostile wildlife. You normally fly over it, but if want to spawn some rather large... wyrms / worms / whatever, you'd need to look for the areas that wildlife is avoiding, and make a racket almost directly above them. Similarly, there are plenty of huntable creatures here that are scared of flying beasts, but have no instinctual reaction to terrestrial ones, even if still much larger than them. If you want to hunt them, you cannot easily do so by air (though you might drop down on them quickly from an obscured line of sight, if fast enough).

Since you mentioned aether currents before, to give a sense of what I thought worked and did not work in that system, I liked that they had us survey the land from a more "grounded" perspective first, but I disliked that the gameplay did not meet the excuse; there were no such wind currents, and rather than being able to leap from a vista to take advantage of having 'attuned' to one, one had to unlock each first to make use of any. One provides a framework for exploration, memorable highlighting so to speak. The other is a gimmick. A restriction. No restriction should ever be only that; if the excuse cannot become more than just an excuse, it has failed.

[Awful]

Why do people care about killing a lvl 63 reskinned ladybug faster than killing a lvl 64 reskinned giant ladybug? Why this is a complaint? No wonder everyone's so entitled in this game.

[RaizeGraymalkin]

http://gamerescape.com/2017/02/18/fr...ss-conference/

Robert MMORPG: Can we see inconsequential monster encounters have battle time reduced?

Yoshida: We do believe with 3.x that some regular field battles were a little longer than usual so with 4.0 they’ll be shorter.

So pretty much if you wanted a harder fight or at least make the world seem dangerous, don't expect that soon, mobs will die just like AAR health style, die in 2-3 hits leaving you with pretty much 95% health. SIGH.

I want the field open world monsters to be MORE of a danger, not a fly buzzing around you.

Disagree. That shit is just a nuisance. No reason for open world mops to be HP sponges. One of the worse things about Heavensward, across the board was trash having too much health. Aside from the fact you fly over that shit 99% of the time anyways. What point is there even to them being a "threat".

Pfft..casuals.. Keep it up Yoshida. You're doing a really good job on not convincing me to upgrade my PS3 to keep playing this game.

Good. Less people with this attitude the better tbqh.

One of the reasons why I enjoyed the HW areas was because the enemies were so powerful. If I had to pick a fight, I'd make sure it was with one enemy and I'd tread carefully. I couldn't just run through a pack of 20 enemies like it was nothing.

It also made me appreciate flying so much more. It felt like a relief and a reward for getting through it all the first time.

With weaker enemies, unlocking flying will feel less rewarding imo.

They weren't powerful though. They just took longer to die. More HP =/= more powerful. Also NOTHING about unlocking flying was rewarding. All I felt was "thank god that's over".