The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[KaivaC]

You're usually so calm and cool but this... this is a gem. Thank you ma'am. You've brightened an otherwise boring day. Take all my likes, they're yours. Stand up to those crybullies! It's appreciated by those of us with less patience.

Do I get a real life minion of me? Oh......wait, I just came up with another idea, build-a-bear style.

There's no fault at all. I mean there isn't simply enough players who can reach a level of skill that can populate a game. MMOs cost too much to turn into niche hardcore games that rely on a small playerbase.

MMOs themselves are a niche market. Outside of WoW, there's really not any MMOs that have been able to generate a massive playerbase, and that includes FFXIV. Subscription model or not, MMOs cater to specific groups of players. Triple-A games tend to bring in a huge portion of the player market. And, borrowing from what you've been saying earlier, Ultimate probably didn't have high or moderate production costs. I say probably, because this is SE, so who knows how exactly they divy up their budget, but given that Ultimate is largely reused assets with intense mechanics, the production costs for harder content may not actually be as high as you are implying.

[RiyahArp]

:MMOs themselves are a niche market. Outside of WoW, there's really not any MMOs that have been able to generate a massive playerbase, and that includes FFXIV.

I don't think they are that niche. If we have 800k accounts, that's more than the sales numbers of many games, and if you double it (assuming people who subbed then quit) that's more than any but the best video games. It's also at least double ffxi's population and 4 times everquest's original population. And among MMOs itself, that's huge; niche MMOs barely break 10k subs if they even last. Stuff like A Tale in the Desert, for example.

I just meant that reply for someone who was kind of bewaliling having to support the casuals. There simply isn't enough high skilled hardcore to support this game. If you make it harder to try and focus on them, it really won't work well. Not to say it would die, but this game would be a lot different with 100k total subs than 800k.

[KaivaC]

I don't think they are that niche. If we have 800k accounts, that's more than the sales numbers of many games, and if you double it (assuming people who subbed then quit) that's more than any but the best video games. It's also at least double ffxi's population and 4 times everquest's original population. And among MMOs itself, that's huge; niche MMOs barely break 10k subs if they even last. Stuff like A Tale in the Desert, for example.

I just meant that reply for someone who was kind of bewaliling having to support the casuals. There simply isn't enough high skilled hardcore to support this game. If you make it harder to try and focus on them, it really won't work well. Not to say it would die, but this game would be a lot different with 100k total subs than 800k.

We have, what, Wow, FFXIV, ESO, GW2, Eve, BSO, SWTOR (which is dying)...and that's it for MMOs for the most part as far has having a sizable market at a minimum. While these MMOs do pull in a good chunk of players, that audience tends to build over time. Whereas Triple-A titles are often the ones that break sales records upon release, upon first week of release, and upon first month of release. When I say Triple-A, I'm talking about titles like Call of Duty (before they screwed themselves over), Mass Effect (before Andromeda), Final Fantasy (particularly 7, 9, 10, 12, and 15), and I'll even use a non-Triple A title in the Witcher 3 (CD Projekt Red is still technically an indie studio).

That's why I feel MMOs are still something of a niche market. The MMOs we play don't exactly reach across to a national or worldwide audience in quite the same manner as what triple-A studios are capable of achieving. If I were to use an analogy...think of MMOs as a slow burn, gradually spreading over a number of months and years before finally starting to reach and break peak audience numbers.

On your other part, do you mean purely hardcores, or are you lumping midcore players in with the hardcore crowd? I lean towards hardcore, but I'm a midcore at best personally. To a point, you are right that this game shouldn't put a huge focus on hardcore. But...I feel like this might be bleeding into another discussion at large, so I'll just end this particular post by saying that while it may be true that there aren't a lot of high skilled hardcore players, that does not mean that there can't be content for the casual>midcore crowd.

And let's be honest - enrage is not the only issue that has come out here. It's a mixture of somewhat decent hard DPS checks, player competence vs reality, PUG capabilities, and a lack of legitimate alternatives to how to replace enrage without ruining both lore and the fight itself.

I recall someone saying several pages back that O3S boss pulls power out of nowhere to wipe the party. I meant to respond to that as well. But no, she didn't 'pull power out of nowhere'. She just got bored with you and stopped giving you chances to complete one of her games. And honestly, O3S is not one of those fights that should be endless...healers will definitely run out of MP at some point if she more HP with no enrage timer just because of all the pure burst healing you have to do for lengthy periods of time.

[Alael]

The upcoming WAR nerfs have brought out the usual

where for the downvote button?

[Sebazy]

But no, you did typical Riyah stuff and went straight to an extreme and chose Ultimate.

Literally the truest thing spoken in this thread.

Riyah, I think the fact that you blindly stand by your initial opinion on things no matter how much cold hard truth is put before you is a bigger reason for you to avoid threads like these than any lack of experience. There is literally no point in trying to debate with you as you're just not interested in listening to what's being said.

[KarstenS]

Let me say this again. Memorizing a DPS rotation IS NOT CHALLENGING.

Memorizing is not challanging.

Using it without mistakes is another thing.

Using it without mistakes in an encounter while handling 1, 2 or more mechanics at the same time is also another thing.

Not to forget you can't play down many rotation straight forward beside the trainings dummy without loosing alot of damage. With a summoner in Exfaust for example, you will loose very much damage when yo play the rotation straight forward. You have to audjust for good damage. Thats more than just memorizing.

And exactly this is the reason for enrage timers. Its a test to see if a player can perform its rotation and audjust for the fight while doing other things or not.

Everybody who thinks "Memorizing" is the key to play good is completely wrong.

[Inuk9]

Memorizing is not challanging.

Using it without mistakes is another thing.

Using it without mistakes in an encounter while handling 1, 2 or more mechanics at the same time is also another thing.

Not to forget you can't play down many rotation straight forward beside the trainings dummy without loosing alot of damage. With a summoner in Exfaust for example, you will loose very much damage when yo play the rotation straight forward. You have to audjust for good damage. Thats more than just memorizing.

And exactly this is the reason for enrage timers. Its a test to see if a player can perform its rotation and audjust for the fight while doing other things or not.

Everybody who thinks "Memorizing" is the key to play good is completely wrong.

I can't upvote this post enough. You said it all.

[RiyahArp]

Riyah, I think the fact that you blindly stand by your initial opinion on things no matter how much cold hard truth is put before you is a bigger reason for you to avoid threads like these than any lack of experience. There is literally no point in trying to debate with you as you're just not interested in listening to what's being said.

i don't see truth, i see a lot of people misunderstanding my initial points and responding to what they want to hear. I didn't say anything particularly extreme in this recent exchange. It just boils down to "hey, you can do o1s and o2s and know what enrage means too, and have an opinion on it" and "you can't really build a game on the hardcore." Its just people really hate to hear anyone challenge them without doing so to concede right after, if its unpopular.

[Tridus]

Everyone really should be looking at 50th percentile. By definition 50th percentile is the average player.

No it's not. It's the data point at which 50% of other data points are below. That's it. You can't extrapolate that into the "average player", because you don't have the same players in the same places.

A 50th percentile player on O4S is in no way an average player, because a huge chunk of the playerbase has never been there and thus isn't counted at all. They will likely be far better than a 50th percentile player in Expert and probably Rabanastre, but worse than 50th percentile player in Ultimate (who almost certainly does know about burst windows and isn't just getting lucky crits). Lots of players aren't really counted at all in any of the data and are thus totally excluded from the "average player" with this method.

Getting an "average player" analysis out of the data doesn't work very well. It can give you "the median Hashmal player" type information, but that isn't the same thing, and treating them as equivalent will lead to a lot of misunderstandings of the playerbase.

[KaldeaSahaline]

These people have 30-90 minutes a day/2-days/week to play and just want to log in and play without having to stress, worry about hard-to-play mechanics or such. These are people that will leave a game if their casual content becomes too hard for them to casually beat, they won't go to forums, reddit, guides, etc to try and learn how to play better, they won't seek FC's / LS's / etc to try and improve... they will just up and quit the game.

I play less than 4 hours a week. I cleared all of Omega Savage. Limited time is not an excuse for minimal effort.

ANet suffered a 67% drop in revenue after the launch of HoT expansion. All because they made the casual / story content harder and more like what those wanting hard content wanted. After a while they came out and said this was a mistake, and that they shouldn't have made the casual / story / easy-to-access-parts as hard as they did and nerfed these parts quite a lot - so much so that most of the expansions zones, maps, hero points, etc could be done by a casual player.

Can you try and link some information to this? I scoured GW2 forums, reddit, and google and found no evidence of this. I also don't play the game, but I imagine something as bold as that would have been captured somewhere.

I generally play with friends so i'm not the guy that's gonna boot one of them out because them out because they are able to mechanics perfectly just not fall a fraction short on dps... and generally when you see wipes at 2-3% despite the fact you've survived everything to that point. it's infuriating and generally puts players off wanting to try again....

if they scrapped enrages but had more dps checks the overall difficulty of content wouldn't change that much but it would just get rid of those wipes that screw you over when you've actually done nothing wrong...

In your example they did not do all mechanics perfectly. It appears they failed the DPS mechanic.

Doing poor DPS is doing something wrong. Just like getting a 42 out of 100 on a test is a poor score. You should not get credit because you merely answered all the questions regardless of their validity. That is what you are advocating for.

Now - with that said, I personally agree that the game could definitely benefit from more soft enrage design instead of hard enrages (mercy rulings). However, asking for "more DPS checks" when people are failing the existing one seems counter-intuitive.

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).

Did you actually play Wildstar? I did. It was actually a pretty freaking solid game. Excellent mechanics and gameplay. Where WS failed IMO is not in its implementation, but in its marketing. I'd posit if Blizzard released it with their powerhouse it'd have been a success. Don't get me wrong it had a ton of issues, like all games, but I don't thinks it difficulty curve was one of them. It was actually one of the better implemented ones I'd seen in a long time.

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.

Everything about this suggestion is bad. I don't see an actual good side. Do you? If you'd like me to cite some reasons why this is bad let me know, but since your comment is kinda old I'll only do it if you ask.

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.

Meteors on neo are a hard enrage. If you fail, you restart the fight.

There are 2 types of enrage. Hard and Soft. Hard is any mechanic that instantly mercy rules you. That is a term in game design that says if you're incapable of clearing it, you don't waste any additional time trying the fight. You're simply sent back being told you need to fix xyz before surpassing it. An "enrage timer" is another example of this.

A Soft enrage is something like Titan where he casts 1+x raid wide AOE pulse every ability rotation. Eventually he casts so many healers cannot provide enough throughput or go OOM and the party falls apart. T2 Pug cheese strat is another example of this.

I fully support a blend of both hard and soft enrages in encounter design and I do fully believe that SE overuses hard enrages.

Well, the way the game is set up they need enrage, but it's not a particularly fun mechanic as it is. I wonder sometimes if it wouldn't be better just to have the boss wipe everyone after so many deaths, since repeated deaths are the biggest component, and then have multipel dps checks through the fight. The enrage can make it that you can't recover from a fight, despite overcoming a flurry of deaths.

It's a good example of a viable hard enrage mechanic for sure. Not sure it is what the community wants (personally I think FF14 has plenty of hard enrage design currently implemented, it could use some soft).

That's crap. you can scrap enrage timers. add more dps checks. and thus find all tank or all healer parties will still fail.

look at ifrit ex. no enrage timer on that. but 6 tanks and 2 healers would never have smashed any of the nails down in time and that fight has what 3-4 sets of nails (thus 3-4 dps checks) i think been quite some time since i did it.

removing enrages does not mean the dps role would be useless... people need to stop exaggerating things so much

Ifrit EX nails are hard enrages, much like Neo Exdeath's or Alta Roite. They're just tuned much easier. People are still going to fail them and complain about "dps checks". Whether it's at the end of the fight or in the middle, a hard enrage is a hard enrage.

Nails are a soft enrage, screw those up and party will wipe. Also I'm going to repeat myself once more, enrage timer is a dps check. So what you are suggesting is, remove the dps check to see if you can clear a fight, and replace it with dps checks to see if you can clear a fight (nails of Ifrit etc.). Basically taking off something, and then replacing with a same thing, is not innovation or smart, its what EA does with Fifa games every year.

Nails are a hard enrage. They are just a mid-fight one, not an end one. They do not complicate the fight if failed, they end the fight.

The point is we should not even be talking about Tank's DPS at all, or healer's. That's not their job. The Hyper focus on DPS the problem. Having a 10min enrage time so everyone is focused on the DPS is the problem.

I asked this to you elsewhere. If you remove enrages why bring a DPS at all when you can stack heals/tanks and trivialize all mechanics?

How would you mitigate this?

Oh how I wish we could make people that haven't beaten the last fight of the raid tier not comment on such things... I'm not even talking Ultimate here, just Neo.

Dismissing insight from people with differing/lesser experiences does more harm than good. In my profession, experts are often very biased and lack critical thinking. An average end-user might not understand XYZ, but they're feedback is often invaluable in determining overlooked things that may be trivial to myself or colleagues, but to an uninformed person appears like gibberish.

By ALL means feel free to refute Riyah's claims with actual insight/evidence, but don't DISCOUNT him because he hasn't cleared O4S. I know he's probably a troll, and just plays devils advocate for the lulz, but you hurt your credibility more by not being open minded to his feedback/discussion, than he does by stating it. As someone who frequently butts heads with him trust me I hear where you are coming from. Especially with his grandiose extremes and hardlined stances, but by dismissing him there on that notion, we end up no better than him.

Is that what you want? I sure as hell don't LOL.

"You haven't cleared XYZ, why do you think ABC? What assumptions/insight do YOU have to qualify your position on the topic?"

Vs.

"You haven't even cleared O4S. Get lost."

If someone is going to call any fight in this game "easy" or "not a challenge" then I expect them to have experienced said fights.

How can you say something is "easy" or "not challenging" to do when you haven't even step foot in the fight at all nor have a clear of said fight?

People making claims about subjects they have no idea about or that they've never experienced usually doesn't work for obvious reasons.

See above.

How is this remotely comparable? The actual equivalent would be me giving Scholar advice when it's fairly obviously I don't play it. Bobs is claiming Ultimate isn't hard yet has never even set foot inside it. As someone who has, let me tell, Ultimate is on a whole separate level. For him to make such a remark screams ignorance.

Ask Bobs why he thinks it isn't hard. Instead of discounting his argument on his perceived lack of experience, see if he can defend the statement and qualify it with evidence/insight. Being dismissive is not the correct way to approach.

Literally the truest thing spoken in this thread.

Riyah, I think the fact that you blindly stand by your initial opinion on things no matter how much cold hard truth is put before you is a bigger reason for you to avoid threads like these than any lack of experience. There is literally no point in trying to debate with you as you're just not interested in listening to what's being said.

This 100%. It's not his inexperience that really disqualifies him from discussion. It's his general lack of an open mind. No amount of evidence could ever be sufficient for him to change his mind. IMO of course.