The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[Zojha]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...nk_23_healers/

IS THAT NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU?! ;_;

[RiyahArp]

Let's not. Enrage timers exist for a reason.

"after 18 hours of combat members of the party started throwing up and passing out from exhaustion"
https://kotaku.com/5036371/final-fan...-hours-to-beat

Pandemonium Warden was designed to have a secret way of beating him that you were supposed to find out, similar to how you were supposed to stop Absolute Virtue's attacks in a particular way. In both cases, the way to do it was totally obscured from players in the same way how to make Goblin Drink to spawn the Goblin wolfman was to crafters (it took YEARS before SE gave up and told us). The people who did that run tried to fight them normally, and because just to get to him required something like a month of chained pop items, they kept on and on, until they realize Warden was busted.

And keep in mind, FFXI was one of the most user hostile MMOs in history when it came to stuff like this. For example, there was a mob called argus, which when killed gave a chance to drop the peacock charm, a very good low level necklace you could use till endgame. This mob had a 18-30 hour spawn window, which means he could pop within a 12 hour range from his last appearance. And he wasn't a guaranteed pop! A worthless mob called leech king could spawn instead, and you had one chance to claim argus when he did show. People would be logged into the game staring at the screen for the whole window, which was 12 hours if you knew when he was last killed, but could be 24 (!) hours if you didn't.

Even moderate gear like the moldavite earring had a 4 hour spawn, that's how the game was. It was less about having no enrage then, and more about just how busted FFXI was in general. Even casual endgame you were up in sky 4-6 hours a lot. If you did endgame seriously in that game, you either were unemployed, or you ruined your life over it.

[Tridus]

Because every fight will be reduced to simply be a war of attrition. Bring all three healers, Red Mage and Summoner then just Raise each and every time someone dies until the boss eventually keels over. Without an arbitrary timer of some sort, there isn't any risk. That average group you cited? They wouldn't beat Neo because of skill. They beat him by merely throwing themselves at him long enough with reckless abandon. Dedicated DPS jobs outside the aforementioned would be borderline useless. Why bring a Dragoon when an extra tank will provide mitigation? DPS doesn't matter anymore. So there's no trade off.

The reason DPS is such a focal point in this game has little to do with enrage timers, which are often quite forgiving. The DPS mindset stems from how little you actually need to heal or mitigate. No other MMO I can think of allows a healer to spend upwards of 80% dealing damage. You want to incentivize tank stance more often? Make enmity matter, lessen cooldowns or outright take away immunities. Tanks frequently rotate into tank stance in Ultimate. Why? They don't always have CDs to mitigate the sheer amount of incoming damage. Until tanks need to be in tank stance or healers need to heal, damage will always be the superior option.

This. It's utterly baffling to me that on my not very good PLD, I can do my enmity combo three times, switch to Sword Oath, and never think about it again for an entire expert boss and a shocking amount of a Deltascape normal boss (or all of said bosses if the OT is kind and uses Shirk). Like, what? Isn't that supposed to be my job? When the bar is so low that even an occasional alt-tank that doesn't outgear anything or anyone can beat it that easily, what am I supposed to try and do except more DPS?

Enmity and healing are both fixed quantity requirements. You need X of both of them to hold enemies on you and make people not die. Any extra is superfluous. More DPS makes fights end faster, which means fewer chances for a mistake to cause a wipe. You can always use more of that.

I think you're bang on about the problem here.

[StragoMagus]

Let's not. Enrage timers exist for a reason.

"after 18 hours of combat members of the party started throwing up and passing out from exhaustion"
https://kotaku.com/5036371/final-fan...-hours-to-beat

Good times though if I remember that boss is not meant to be beaten in SE’s eyes (from the bans and buffing PW).

[RiyahArp]

Good times though if I remember that boss is not meant to be beaten in SE’s eyes (from the bans and buffing PW).

I think he was, though I don't know if they buffed him after; the enrage was them saying "do the encounter as intended." I think people did beat him. Absolute virtue tho they hated people beating him, because he was near impossible and the only way people did was through strats that involved glitching on terrain and other things. But ugh, FFXI devs hated their players until TOAU-the person who thought up the promyvions and the whole COP questline believed in "hard is meaningful" to a point of absurdity.

[Tridus]

There's already a solution to that in game that SE has not been scared to utilize. Enforce a strict party composition for those duties, even if you have a pre-made group of 8. Once enough time has passed, the restrictions can be lessened or removed and people can be free to run 8 tanks in Garuda EX: Stormblood Edition at their leisure.

But since tanks and healers can DPS and Red Mages can act as pseudo-healers, what does that accomplish? With no enrage, a group with a Bard and a Red Mage (along with the two healers and healer LB3) could effectively graveyard zerg for a very long time thanks to plentiful MP and raises.

The problem isn't that people can change the comp. The problem is that enmity, damage mitigation cooldown, and healing abilities are so overpowered compared to what's needed on the overwhelming majority of content that those roles can easily overpower them. At that point, you might as well contribute more DPS because what else is there for you to do? Enrage timers are just a medicine for the symptoms, they're not the problem.

[Sebazy]

Remove the enrage timers and you remove a large part of the impetus behind everyone trying to push out as much dps as possible.

I don't think you appreciate the ramifications of what you're asking for.

This kind of encounter design was the keystone for older PvE MMOs such as Everquest, FFXI and early WoW. If you think it's a good idea to go back to that era of design I suggest you take a look back at how these fights typically went. It was very rare to 'burn' anything down unless it was utterly trivial, rather the standard approach was to plan for a fight of attrition. That does not make for engaging gameplay. I used to solo legitimate raid content on my Shaman whilst it was still current. There was little skill involved, just a lot of gear, some sneaky items and a ton of bravado.

I do think SE could do better on this front tho. A flat out enrage timer is a bit of a missed opportunity, whereas this tier's soft enrage aka Neo's punch out was just kind of 'meh?'. A12S and especially ThordanEX are better examples where the fight rapidly ramps up in mechanical difficulty at the end as things drag on. Mid encounter DPS checks that penalise rather than wipe you are much more interesting IMO.

[Zeonx]

Its going to put strain on DPS to pick up the slack of Tanks, then the blame game is gonna happen who messed up who isn't doing the most damage but its gonna be the tanks fault.

Once that happens people aren't gonna even bother coming Tank.
People will choose DPS over Tank to come to those types of fights and Less will try it as Tanks.

I bet they will expect healers to fight after when they already have a rough time trying to keep people alive to do anything.

But to early to jump to this conclusion wait and just see after patch.

[Dzian]

Going to be honest I'd quite happily see Enrsge timers gone. All they do is make things a mandatory speed run.

and it would be an relatively easy thing to do. if you want to limit deaths and stuff in content without enrages. easy bring back a death penalty. enough deaths and your tema starts dropping to 69 and basically have no chance of finishing.

alternatively add more individual dps checks. make susano ex do another massive sword drop on the arena. or do more of them in general. kind of thing. keep the requirement for dps there so ya know if you have 6 tanks and 2 heals you won't make it. if to many dps are dead you wont make it....

Things like this I really don't mind seeing. and would be fine if fights had more of them. especially when most fights typically only have 1. the things I generally hate are the great big screw you's that happen after like 9 minutes and 45 seconds or something when you've got the boss down to like 2% and just need 15-20 seconds to kill.

they could easily add more dps checks to content while scrapping total enrage timers and keep the content challenging / prevent zombying / 6tank setups...

someone above mentioned ifrits nails. that was more a dps check than an enrage. even in extreme from what I remember. as long as you killed the nails every time. and passed each dps check you could practically take as long as you needed with the rest of the fight. in a way I think more fights should be designed like that. more frequent dps checks in place of enrages.

tune the individual checks a bit tighter and add more of them but scrap the enrage timers...

rabanastres first boss for example has dps checks but they're ridiculous. half the alliance can be dead and still clear the dps check. I think that's a real problem that needs to be addressed. same is true in a lot of other content. enrages could easily be scrapped if those checks were tuned up a bit and occurred more often.

[Rasikko]

I don't think anyone wants to spend an hour in a fight. That's what rage timers are for, at least I think so. Boss: Taking too long? Ok folks, time to wipe.