My Eureka Concept

[KaldeaSahaline]

See, I don't see why, given only the same leniency, that would be the case any more than in, say, an 8-man, or even a 4-man. The only significant bonuses are via additional transferable resource or toolkit redundancy (e.g. having more rez-capable people available, or one team being able to fill in for another ONLY if one team is facing a lesser threat than the other). When constraints are already tight, those may reduce the chance for an instant wipe to single- or few-target attacks, but they then come at a cost of resource sustainability, and as the deviation one must account for shrinks as the player count increases, that sustain becomes vitally important. If damage taken potential, for instance, increases with each player added — ToS or A4S levels of if one person fails, everyone's in pain — then necessarily an even scalar cannot be used, but if that damage remains mostly proportionate, it's really not an issue, and you don't need to add exorbitant amounts of leniency just to make the content doable.

I think we're just working off two different assumptions as to the tuning necessary for large-scale content. If one leaves the tuning scalar effectively untouched, and follows a flexible mechanics tables based on the player count (or even gear- or achievement- or whatever-count) per role, I don't see why large-scale content would have to be any more zerg than small-scale. More chaotic-yet-(short-term)-forgiving, perhaps, but no more "zerg".

I'll task you with a project. Develop a 24 man encounter with some example mechanics and a "expected outcome". I.e. how to pass each mechanic ideally based on 'small group, medium, and large'. (4, 8, and 24 respectively).


I am refraining from the scalar discussion bit, because I am unable to work out how I would even tackle that at the moment. I'd prefer to keep that discussion separate (but please know I SUPPORT the concept of flex), I just have no idea how to implement/tune it.

In HW and ARR I could do a bulk of the Relic quest solo. I log into the game to experience the world and I don't necessarily always want to be in a party. Outside of my daily roulettes that I only am currently doing for leveling I would prefer to not have to interact with a PC all the time. Diadem was fun for the first two weeks but then it is the same repeatable content. In HW I had multiple sources of doing the relic for each step, some could be in a group and some could be solo.

While you can some of the relic quest solo, a significant portion requires duties. While I understand your playstyle is that of a single player RPG for the most part, that really isn't what an MMO is about, nor what my content is about. It's fine for us to disagree on this, but hopefully you can see that catering a single player experience in an MMO isn't ideal.

Also Diadem you have to wait for 8 people to queue up to be able to do said content. Once people have their relics the content will die off which will leave several people stranded waiting for the next time SE makes Eureka relevant. Getting 3 other people together is a lot easier than trying to organize 7. I tried getting a dungeon pop for A1-4 during 3.5 and it was virtually impossible. Not everyone wants to go back and queue for old content that they already spammed.

I said to another poster that they don't need to abandon the content. They can easily make it relevant between expansions. Not only that, they could employ a WoW method where they continually retune Eureka based on current game level. I.e. Mythic+ scales to balance itself against each raid tier so that it isn't left behind.

Forced parties.... I don't always want to party which is why I don't touch raids after I complete the story and I only did A1S for light on my first relic. A1S is the only savage content I have ever touched and had the desire to touch. For my PLD relic I did PvP.

Again, I hate to reiterate this statement, but seriously it's an MMO, not a single player RPG. The bulk of the content SHOULD be party content, not single player stuff. That is my personal opinion, feel free to refute it, but you will not change my mind on this.

Relics aren't meant to be heavily mechanic based, they're meant to be a grind, otherwise they would be on par with a major raid and people don't want to raid for their relics or at least the average player base wouldn't.

I haven't done Shin Ex, O1-4S, I only completed non savage of Omega and story mode of the SB primals, haven't unlocked the new 24 man.

They still wouldn't be. You're quite literally the perfect example of what I am trying to convey. A player like you would queue up in DF, pay your 100 tomes, get matched with randoms and go on your merry way working on your 1 star Eureka run to power up your relic.

It'd be equivalent to doing a dungeon with not max ilvl that you don't know the mechanics too. Realistically it'd be no different than your first run of Skalla, but instead of it being once, it'd be everytime you queued into it? Does that sound bad to you?

Meanwhile, a player like me can get my static or a PF group going and tackle a 3 star and work on our relic weapon too and be proportionally rewarded and challenged. We're grinding just like you, but it's not mindless to us and we can get a relic weapon doing content we like, just like you can for you.

Yeah I never claimed it was hard to cap them, I just don't like grinding tomes because well I prefer to earn my gear rather than buy it. aka go through a dungeon and get it as a drop is more rewarding for me than getting a token to buy said gear. Again comes from the old school player in WoW when you earned everything, nothing was handed to you.

You're preaching to the choir here. This content is about powering up (earning) gear and earning other gear via drops (inside the instance). You even spend tomes to get in which further reinforces that concept.

That's a lot to go in but i'll try to sum up the main points.

1. Too much elitism and not enough statics these days from my experience.
2. I don't care about min/max BIS crap, I did that in WoW for years and burned out on it.
3. Gear elevators, becomes worthless after a few months of a higher tier.
4. Lack of helping learn the fights, I play on a console and I don't use discord.
5. SE basically has made the game into dance dance revolution or DPS sponges instead of actual meaningful content.
6. Generally hate the instant KO mechanics, along with too small areas to move...Not fun imo for raiding.

Fair enough, appreciate the insight. I will say that you don't need to min-max BIS stuff (at least I don't and I have 90%+ logs) and I personally haven't seen much TRUE elitism lately; mostly just the nonsensical people who are bad who think x y z is good, when it is objectively not.

You can easily get discord on your phone if you truly were interested in being a part of that.

I agree with the heavy choreographic nature of encounter design.

I also agree instant KO and predictable encounter environments are clear detractors to FF14 raid design.

All in all I love the concepts you came up with just not in an MMO environment, I would love to see stuff like that added to POTD 2.0 or some such, just leave the relic alone, since we're getting relic armor along with weapons it's just too much to handle imo for the average player. SE doesn't have a habit of scaling content down, you can still wipe quite easily on original coil, ARR primals, etc. I love the challenge of soloing back content but SE just keeps the mechanics too heavily in them, to do for the most part.

I am not opposed to pulling my concept out of relic territory and into somewhere else. That said, I hope my response above about your expected experience would help mitigate your concerns about the concept.

I was wondering if I could a bit more context on this from you. This has been something that I've heard a lot, but have trouble putting a finger on, myself, as in many cases even the "deepest" one may think of will still inevitably boil down to optimal positioning over time (or, DDR). What kinds of mechanics or thought processes draw you in, and which sort of push your interest away?

There's a lot more I'd like to ask, but as I'm already being so officious as to stick my nose in your conversation unwantedly, I'd hate to trouble you with any more than this for now (as all else is predicated on it anyways).

I'm going to butt in here with my own input. Not sure if we covered it previously, but my largest gripe with the raid encounter design is that everything is so fixed. Failing a mechanic almost always results in a death, or a full wipe. That's not FUN imo.

Ideally I'd like mechanics to be more organic in that failing the Shin EX heart doesn't wipe you, but maybe it spawns an add, that then channels a cast to break one of the random squares left. or maybe the add pulses AOE damage based on how close you are to it, meaning you now need to be more aware of tethers etc and stay away from it, or kill it when other raid damage dies down. Stuff that allows decision making on the fly, chances for people to excel and recover.