The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[Tridus]

IF YOU CAN ONLY PLAY FOR 3 HOURS A WEEK WHY IN THE NAME OF HOLY HELL ARE YOU PAYING A SUBSCRIPTION FOR A GODDAMN MMO?! You barely have time to watch a movie!

Because they want to? Maybe they play on Saturday with friends. Maybe they like the story. Maybe they fill their house with stuff. Who knows. It's really none of your business why they decide it's worth the money to them.

It's not the community's fault these people are trying to shove their fish into our peanut butter. Square should absolutely not be trying to cater to people like that, and if they do then the game will die.

Impressive. Every word you just said is wrong.

SE caters to them right now, with the entire story being accessable in easy content, with no features being gated behind difficult checks, with the mechanics designed to easily catch people up on gear at endgame so they're never far behind being able to do everything, with roulettes tossing experienced people in their groups to guide them through group content, and with the hand holding the game does.

The game has always been friendly to these people since 2.x. It seems to be pretty not dead.

So your stance is that they can only play 3 hours a week if they're lucky, they don't have any desire to learn about the game whatsoever (even if Square put in some tutorials, gameplay or text-based), they don't have any desire to make friends, annnnd they just want to push the "win" button to either see the story or something. Is that correct?

I'm not sure those people exist. But if they do, **** those people and good riddance. Go watch a movie and be happy instead.

SE management likely disagrees with you. Those people pay the same sub. They use fewer server resources. They don't complain on the forums. They've got a model that largely keeps them happy. That subscriber money gets used to fund things like ultimate, which those folks are definitely not doing. So it's working out pretty well.

I've seen games that decide that ZOMG HARDCORE CUPCAKE! is the way to go. Wildstar tried that. They listened to their echo chamber forum group of hardcore endgame raiders and focused on that too much in their marketing and at late/endgame in general (there were some downright brutal dungeons at higher level at launch). Those were very quickly the only players still around as everyone else ran out of stuff to do that wasn't overtuned for the casual market and quit. As it turns out, the hardcore raider market isn't big enough to sustain a MMO anymore. Which is why the large scale ones don't do that.

The gap between the people doing savage and the people who can barely do Rabanastre is certainly higher than I'd like, but keep some perspective. The high end tryhards are vastly outnumbered by the people who aren't them. From a financial PoV, if you have to cut one group it's pretty clear which one it is, but a smart game wants to keep both because people enjoy watching top players struggle against stuff they couldn't possibly do themselves. Which is why ultimate was such a success on Twitch compared to how the game usually is on there (basically non-existant).

[Hyperia]

As a compromise, they could have it so that if you don't beat it by the official original enrage time, you loose a chest, after a bit more time, the next chest goes and so does any titles / rewards. You got a clear but you got just that a clear only, no rewards or anything else. It has a similar effect as an enrage, punish poor performance but it would allow people to just get through it. It would also make for some very interesting specialty runs where people try to do the encounter with the fewest people possible.

But if we do want to keep the enrage timers and address the people who say "well why didn't the boss attack us like this in the beginning", just make up some lore like the boss is powering up or the ceiling will fall or some other deus ex machina reason.

Anyhow... I'm fine with the current system, it works. Yes it sucks that you get 1% wipes but the victory feels all the better when you do clear it. If we did away with enrages we would loose the nerd screams when clears do happen and who doesn't love a good nerd scream?

[Tridus]

As a compromise, they could have it so that if you don't beat it by the official original enrage time, you loose a chest, after a bit more time, the next chest goes and so does any titles / rewards. You got a clear but you got just that a clear only, no rewards or anything else. It has a similar effect as an enrage, punish poor performance but it would allow people to just get through it. It would also make for some very interesting specialty runs where people try to do the encounter with the fewest people possible.

Isn't that going to lead to people deliberately wiping once they hit the chest timer? Clearing it 15 seconds later for no loot is a terrible outcome.

[Awful]

The problem is there's really no urgency in any of the regular content, what I mean by that is you're not even penalized for failing mechanics (if you can call them that) during main story or anything. The only time that you die maybe to a very very generous "enrage" is Nidhogg story where you gotta kill all the dragons before he 1 shots you other than that there's nothing. Honestly there should be more challenging things besides enrage timers for content while keeping players who are leveling to keep improving, as it stands current content sets the bar pretty low and even in Savage content you'll find people doing the bare minimum.

One of my favorite fights was The First Final Steps of Faith before it got nerfed wanna know why? It had all the mechanics for group play, you had tanks tanking adds, people on cannons, DPS killing adds and bosses, dodging AoEs and there was an enrage timer. If you didn't do the mechanics right or DPS as well as you should have you'd wipe and have to do it all over again which created a great challenge for people wanting to get into HW as it is a proper challenge, at least to me.

Enrage timers aren't the issue here in raiding, if you've been practicing and putting the effort into your class, whether it be tank, healer, or DPS, you'll beat the enrage timers while doing mechanics which makes a great raider, it's about optimizing and working as a team to get the most out of your raid group. I just feel SE needs to go back to tuning harder content to prepare people because as the game is at the moment people still don't know what they're doing at max lvl because of how the difficulty shifts from super easy to super hard, there needs to be preparation for max lvl content.

[Darrcyphfeid]

Because they want to? Maybe they play on Saturday with friends. Maybe they like the story. Maybe they fill their house with stuff. Who knows. It's really none of your business why they decide it's worth the money to them.

It becomes my business when that's the excuse they want to use for why they're in my PF. Or why I'm having a harder time carrying them in some random DF because they're constantly on the ground or otherwise doing their impression of a corpse with regards to how many buttons they're actually pushing in any given encounter.

That being said, I'd like to believe you're aware that I don't actually care what they do with their money and their time. And I'd like to reiterate that I'm not sure the people described in Kamatsu's strawman actually even exist.

Impressive. Every word you just said is wrong.

Really? Come on. I deserve better than some throwaway Star Wars quote. I pay me sub and do the gud deeps! I do the gud deeps! :|
Kylo Ren is a punk.

SE caters to them right now, with the entire story being accessable in easy content, with no features being gated behind difficult checks, with the mechanics designed to easily catch people up on gear at endgame so they're never far behind being able to do everything, with roulettes tossing experienced people in their groups to guide them through group content, and with the hand holding the game does.

The game has always been friendly to these people since 2.x. It seems to be pretty not dead.

Obviously the game is friendly to casual players - except when it's not, I mean - but that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it is in SE's best interest to not cater to the whims of people that don't want to put any effort whatsoever into their game, that for all intents and purposes will never be a reliable revenue stream on an individual level, else we wind up with the current PvP combat system in PvE and encounters that never rise above a mildly-pitched yawn.

Let's not act like people weren't/aren't peeved at Steps of Faith, The Chrysalis, Garuda normal, etc. being nerfed. That people weren't adamant about Ozma, Nidhogg and Shinryu not receiving mechanical changes to appease the vocal backlash. That people weren't happy that 2.x had actual endgame progression structure - even if just as many, if not more, were happy when it was eventually abolished.

SE management likely disagrees with you.

Don't get me started on that group. Anything they want is definitely the last thing I want, XIV and especially otherwise.

From a financial PoV, if you have to cut one group it's pretty clear which one it is, but a smart game wants to keep both because people enjoy watching top players struggle against stuff they couldn't possibly do themselves. Which is why ultimate was such a success on Twitch compared to how the game usually is on there (basically non-existant).

Balance is indeed the key. While I have no quick and dirty example like Wildstar on the hardcore end, I can't imagine many games can survive solely off of their fickle and unreliable casual audience. I've gone down the rabbit hole a number of times weighing theories for what the game would look like if the higher end of the skill spectrum vanished.

[Kaonis]

Enrage has always been a cheap thing to do. It's not bad for some fights, but they abuse the hell out of it in their designs. They should just stick to most fights having a DPS check in the fight like meteors on neo instead of every fight being a DPS check to prevent a hard enrage.

[Aniond]

I see the problem is that its become the norm for people to have healers and tank make up for people are not not performing well. FC that clear content easier can do so without a tank or healer pulling good dps. Its the friend paradox that make it a fail. " He is my friend and I want him to raid with us" Even though that friend may have sub-par DPS or inferior gear and is holding the FC back from success.

[Bobs]

It's an ongoing theme. The game had gone so heavily into DPS that Tanks and Healers are now criticized for not doing enough DPS. There have been threads on that subject and I fell this falls into the same root cause.

Can we just take a step back for a second. A Tank and a Healer who already has a full time job of tanking or healing is being criticized for not doing enough DPS.

The game is going into an odd direction.

Maybe it's just the old mmo player in me but "End Game" should take more than 10min. It makes it feel more like a side project. I'm hoping that new Relic gear when ever it comes out actually takes time to complete. Really not into the idea of microwave mmo experience.

[Llus]

This has got to be the biggest troll thread ever. So if we don't have enrage timers and we don't have dps checks; then we just stand there and auto-attack the boss until it's dead and only worry about mechanics and healing. What would be the point of even bringing DPS at that point. Just go 2 tanks, 6 healers.

[DrWho2010]

sure you can have enrage timers removed. you just don't get any loot after the fight and it doesn't count towards an actual clear.