The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[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.

[Vaer]

"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."

Disagree, anyone who over simplifies things (he basically said the entire game is missile command) and brings up min percentile logs as proof a class is OP is not going to get the benefit of the doubt from me. It would be different if he approached it in a different way but he was pretty much indirectly making fun of people and said that we're "defending non challenging content" by not wanting enrages removed. Maybe if he approached it in a different way people wouldn't be discounting him so readily. That's just me though. (I'm talking about Bobs).

[Miste]

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

Excuse you, but I never told anyone to "get lost" so don't put words in my mouth. If you notice my post DID ask him a question: "how can you think that way?" and basically explained that from my point of view his stance makes no logical sense to me. So, that's interesting... didn't I do what you asked? He has simply not replied.

He said we are defending "non-challenging" content. His statement includes all of endgame IE Omega 1-4S and also Ultimate since they all have enrages. So he is including fights he has never experienced yet seems to think he can call them "easy", how would he know they are easy?

His other example about the minimum fflogs is just factually wrong so ain't no saving that one.

Look, I get it. Everyone has a right to an opinion even if said opinion is based on no actual experience. No one can stop you from having an opinion about something even if it makes little to no sense for you to have that opinion.

Thing is though naturally other people are going to call you out on opinions which have no base. Like if you told someone "I hate Sushi" and they are like "Well, have you tried any of it?" and if you answer "No, none." ...do you really think that person is going to take you seriously? Chances are they'll probably say something along the lines of "Well how can you hate something you haven't tried?"

Do you not understand this is normal behavior?

[HyoMinPark]

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.

To be fair, it’s not a perceived lack of experience; Bobs has said that he hasn’t done anything past V2S; since he hasn’t cleared Neo, it’s safe to assume that he’s never set foot into Ultimate. He also equated Savage fights to a game of “Asteroids” in another thread, yet has only seemed to do the two most easiest of the fights. Hence why everyone keeps saying things like “If it’s so easy, go clear Ultimate” and “You have no experience, so how can you speak on the difficulty/state of the content”.

I have no Rival Wings experience; that doesn’t give me any sort of perspective to judge or make comments about the current state of the content. By equivalent, Bobs has no experience in Ultimate Savage; that doesn’t give him any sort of perspective to judge or make comments about the state of it.

[Tridus]

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.

Yup. At launch. Once they made it work on the ATI card I had at the time it was pretty great, right up until it wasn't. And that was where the problem was. The marketing was hardcore focused, and the endgame was extremely hardcore focused (aside from housing, which made XIV look like a sad joke). People got to a certain point, hit a brick wall of "oh hey, now you need to do the 20 person raid to get attuned to do the even more people raid", and bailed out en-masse.

Was a shame, really.

[Valknut]

I'm a fan of the idea, it would be cool if some fights in 8 man roulette were easier with 6 tanks and 4 healers or something crazy like that.

But that doesn't have to be a thing for every fight, its just something that could happen with out a enrage timer or DPS Wipe marker. A lot of old school mmo players didn't have enrage timers on anything they fought or player caps. A bit more freedom in a fight here and there could be cool, more world boss content would also be nice

[Tridus]

But that doesn't have to be a thing for every fight, its just something that could happen with out a enrage timer or DPS Wipe marker. A lot of old school mmo players didn't have enrage timers on anything they fought or player caps. A bit more freedom in a fight here and there could be cool, more world boss content would also be nice

A lot of old school MMO players also had hour long fights, graveyard zerg tactics, and many other things that we don't really want back. Enrages are a natural development to block those sorts of things.

[TaleraRistain]

A lot of old school MMO players also had hour long fights, graveyard zerg tactics, and many other things that we don't really want back. Enrages are a natural development to block those sorts of things.

Enrages encourage zerg rushing. As an old school MMO player, I can tell you that fights didn't come down to zerg rushing because there were mechanics that didn't easily telegraph what was going to happen, so you had to have situational awareness, and all roles were important and necessary to beating the boss. I was *not* using my offensive spells as an enchanter back in EQ. I was using my crowd control abilities to keep the mobs from eating the healers. XIV's huge problem is that they're making roles outside of dps unnecessary.

[Tridus]

Enrages encourage zerg rushing.

Worth noting that I said graveyard zerg, which is a specific thing where pepole just constantly raise and come back from the graveyard (or get raised seven times in one attempt, as my cohealer on a Lakshmi normal did last week). Lack of enrages absolutely does enable that, because so long as you can keep enough people there to not reset the boss, people can die and get back into the fight all they want.

As an old school MMO player, I can tell you that fights didn't come down to zerg rushing because there were mechanics that didn't easily telegraph what was going to happen, so you had to have situational awareness, and all roles were important and necessary to beating the boss. I was *not* using my offensive spells as an enchanter back in EQ. I was using my crowd control abilities to keep the mobs from eating the healers. XIV's huge problem is that they're making roles outside of dps unnecessary.

Agreed, but that's a separate issue. It's all DPS, all the time in XIV because tank enmity generation and healing people back to full after damage don't require a monopoly on the time and resources of people in those roles (and CC basically has no reason to be used aside from Holy spam). Far from it. My not terribly good PLD can spend most time in Sword Oath and be at no real risk of dying or losing aggro. Given that, why wouldn't I? When Moro and I heal Rabanastre together, any of the bosses can do their big AoE attacks, and we've got our group back to full in one button press each (2.4 seconds). Then what?

Tanks and healers aren't DPSing as such a large part of their game play because of enrages. They're doing it because doing more tanking and more healing beyond what you need is redundant and what else are they supposed to do for half the fight?

[TaleraRistain]

Tanks and healers aren't DPSing as such a large part of their game play because of enrages. They're doing it because doing more tanking and more healing beyond what you need is redundant and what else are they supposed to do for half the fight?

I absolutely agree there. I'm a big proponent of SE strengthening the roles in this game, and giving tanks and healers abilities that will still keep them busy and contributing to the party, but without having to segue into the DPS role. Which is the only choice right now.