The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[MoroMurasaki]

Honestly why is that a bad thing? Coming from behind is arguably more satisfying in the end than just perfect play start to finish.

Having the timer limits the amount of people willing to even try the "hard" content. Is that what this is about? A few people wanting to feel like they are better than everyone else? Play a MOBA if you want that, really. You get a rank of just how good you are after every match. No need to guess.

Part of the tool kit IS Raise by the way.

Do you think everyone should be able to go into all content in parties of 6 healers and 2 tanks and clear through sheer persistance?

Would the encounter clock actually be the enrage timer then?

[Bobs]

Do you think everyone should be able to go into all content in parties of 6 healers and 2 tanks and clear through sheer persistance?

Would the encounter clock actually be the enrage timer then?

WELL, Like i said in other thread(s) TANKS and HEALERS should NOT be DPS. So that would solve your first hypothetical.
And yes, I think a 10min "perfect" fight is less interesting than a 60min "struggled" fight.

Currently the system is Pass/Fail. Without enrage timers is would be a Graded System, SSS, SS, S, A, B, C, D, F.

Sure some people would pass with a C but why is that SO bad? A SSS clear might give more gil or a mount chance drop, something as a reward. You are all just limiting yourselves because you choose to narrowly define success.

[Sebazy]

WELL, Like i said in other thread(s) TANKS and HEALERS should NOT be DPS.

The community has proven time and time again that they don't care about SE's 'opinion'. If we can get around something via some means that isn't properly enforced, we will.

Plenty of respectable entry level raid content in Everquest fell to my hand alone with most mid to high end content falling to my guild of 5, this was in an era when raids were tuned around 40 people and frequently involved more. I can promise that I'm speaking from experience here. You may well have some glamorous visions of an epic 60 minute struggle, but that's not how these things pan out. It's either a slow horrible grind or a frustrating zergfest where the only real pressure is on the raisers. Neither example makes for compelling nor rewarding encounters.

There's a reason why MMOs have shifted in the direction they have whilst those that have tried to emulate the core values of the old guard have invariably failed.

[WilhelmWhite]

Plenty of respectable entry level raid content in Everquest fell to my hand alone with most mid to high end content falling to my guild of 5, this was in an era when raids were tuned around 40 people and frequently involved more. I can promise that I'm speaking from experience here. You may well have some glamorous visions of an epic 60 minute struggle, but that's not how these things pan out. It's either a slow horrible grind or a frustrating zergfest where the only real pressure is on the raisers. Neither example makes for compelling nor rewarding encounters.

I couldn't agree more. Going through an encounter where DPS players aren't avoiding AOE and dying constantly, tanks aren't using the proper stances, and all while the healers are raising everyone multiple times? That's not rewarding at all. You don't get through that encounter and think, "Wow, we did it! That was awesome!". You think, "Thank God, it's over."

[TaleraRistain]

Plenty of respectable entry level raid content in Everquest fell to my hand alone with most mid to high end content falling to my guild of 5, this was in an era when raids were tuned around 40 people and frequently involved more. I can promise that I'm speaking from experience here. You may well have some glamorous visions of an epic 60 minute struggle, but that's not how these things pan out. It's either a slow horrible grind or a frustrating zergfest where the only real pressure is on the raisers.

40? Holy shit, when did they slash it that low? It was 72 in my time. And they weren't epic 60 minute struggles. We would raid for hours in a night, clearing trash to the boss for our chance to tackle it. They also weren't just zergfests, as bosses had random attacks and attacks that needed to be countered by specific roles. While I enjoy doing Extremes and 24 mans here, I felt raiding was a lot more rewarding there. Even if I was staring at the wall to avoid lag while timing my AoE mez spells with the other enchanters, I felt that my role was important.

[Sebazy]

40? Holy shit, when did they slash it that low? It was 72 in my time. And they weren't epic 60 minute struggles. We would raid for hours in a night, clearing trash to the boss for our chance to tackle it. They also weren't just zergfests, as bosses had random attacks and attacks that needed to be countered by specific roles.

I had 40 in my head, it's been a long long time so I guess my memory is deceiving me there (Raided from launch to early planes, my Magelo is 9093, rerolled from a barb to Iksar with Kunark's release) =(

And yeah, whilst raids were typically an entire evening's work (I used to reserve PoG by getting in there solo and just parking those two annoying adds with my VP snare spear), most bosses weren't. It was the trash and prep that bulked the time up.

It's also worth noting that as part of the mez team, you had one of the more varied and interesting roles within raids as different encounters would often require a completely fresh approach for you, be it charm tanking giants, mezzing snakes etc. Remember that a very significant portion of the raid didn't share your fortune. Mod rods are mod rods regardless of if you were in Naggy's lair or NTOV.

I really do think you're overthinking the complexity of these bosses, it was the surroundings that typically made the challenge, not the boss themselves. Boss damage was a weird thing until Planes came along with partials slows and I'm struggling to think of many bosses that truly did anything unique beyond a few gimmicks that didn't add up to much (Dane's teleport? Meh, Rak Ashir's fire aoe? Soloed).

Rose tinted glasses have a lot to answer for =(

[Nestama]

And yes, I think a 10min "perfect" fight is less interesting than a 60min "struggled" fight.

A 60 minute struggle fight in this day and age is less likely to happen, especially in a SE MMO. Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden are infamous for a reason.
Also, all it would take is 2-4 good/decent healers to carry a team of two tanks and 4-2 DPS. As I said before, I'm not a fan of enrages, but they are necessary.

[KaivaC]

WELL, Like i said in other thread(s) TANKS and HEALERS should NOT be DPS. So that would solve your first hypothetical.
And yes, I think a 10min "perfect" fight is less interesting than a 60min "struggled" fight.

Currently the system is Pass/Fail. Without enrage timers is would be a Graded System, SSS, SS, S, A, B, C, D, F.

Sure some people would pass with a C but why is that SO bad? A SSS clear might give more gil or a mount chance drop, something as a reward. You are all just limiting yourselves because you choose to narrowly define success.

Can you let us know when you clear V3S? Or any of the Sigmascape Savage runs? If you want a 60min struggled fight, why don't you actually clear V3S and tell me if it's interesting dealing with her mechanics for a full hour. Pass/fail is simpler because either you win...or you lose. No, the only limiting factor here is your inability to even clear any of the actual difficult fights, and then taking about it as if you have been farming these fights for so long. Tanks and healers should not be DPS...no, they shouldn't be. But they should DPS during downtime, and every fight has plenty of downtime for both classes to DPS - heck, tanks have about as much uptime as DPS for dealing damage, so I'm not sure what your point even is.

[Nora_of_Mira]

so I'm not sure what your point even is.

their point is insanity. can you imagine a DPS keeping their rotation going for 60 minutes with no breaks? You simply can't. I'm pretty sure everyone's TP would dry up eventually and everyone will be doing 1 gcd every 3-4 seconds. that's not interesting, that is torture. a "struggled" fight? This isn't monster hunter where comebacks can happen and feel rewarding by turning the tide, FFxiv is about completely scripted fights every single time and nothing changing. SE defines the success and they set the bar, no one is "limiting themselves".

[KaldeaSahaline]

I'll be the one to defend Hyo Min there and say that jobs, as of Stormblood, have been greatly changed to work differently in PvP than they do in PvE, not entirely for the better. And given how widely people hate PvP as if it's a mark of pride among the community, only those who actively WANT to PvP seek out the information on it. On top of that, nothing beats practical experience. Even if you've seen the job played, that doesn't mean you can play it to that same level from that alone. I might perhaps make PvP MCH look easy (and in fairness, it's a bit braindead in comparison to 3.x PvP MCH), but I've seen and defeated plenty of other would-be MCHs in PvP, attracted by its flash and damage.

So, I have not PVP at the highest echelons. I've only dabbled in it for brief periods at a time over the course of the game.

By most peoples metrics here I am not qualified to discuss PVP because I did not earn Feast rewards, or farm xyz mount/# of wins.

Even though my PVP insight is significantly less than yours (as I know you're a huge PVP advocate) I can still discuss it.

For instance. I actually hate PVP in this game. I absolutely abhor how awful the netcode is and it is my prime offense to PVP. I hate that it's been overrun with bots at times, and I've had games where it was literally just me. It wasn't a fun experience running around in an empty pvp instance picking off people who are autorunning into walls, or attacking ice crystals solo.

I hate the ridiculous imbalance between melee and ranged DPS and while I strongly dislike how powerful healers are in PVP, I haven't seen many other games do it right either so I have no idea how to improve upon it. It's always they're far too powerful or they're not fun to play as.

The reason I am able to reason out my points is because I do have some experience in PVP, even if it's not as much as a seasoned vet. I have plenty of experience in other MMO's PVP, and numerous other PVP experiences across other genres.

Now - you would be able to use your insight/experience to refute my points if you believe my points are shortsighted, flat out wrong, etc. What I have been advocating for is you simply not say to me (or anyone else) "LOL you haven't even earned feast rewards, come back when you know what you're talking about".

I hope that clarifies it.

Some mechanics sure, but in harder fights you still have to play a job properly in addition to coordinating with 7 other people. Calling it literally missile command is really oversimplifying it. Blanket disregard sort of happens when you start making fun of people and try to defend your viewpoint with silly data (claiming a job is OP using min percentile logs) that makes no sense.

Sorry I still disagree, if I haven't done Ultimate I'm not going to pretend like I'm qualified to talk about the difficulty of it since I'm not IMO and I've cleared most of the content in this game from the beginning. That's just me though. My ego ain't that big.

Like I said, I'm not defending Bob's approach or all of his arguments. In fact, I only actually partially agree with one of them. The rest I've previously responded and refuted.

You're plenty qualified to talk about it, what you're not qualified on is discussing something without reproach. There is a difference and one that I'd like to see the community understand.

You did kind of put words in my mouth since you quoted me then directed me to you explaining that people shouldn't say "you have no experience so get lost"

Fair enough - rereading your posts I may have meant that for someone else and not you actually.

My apologies.

There is a difference from having an opinion on something about the fight and actually claiming said fight is easy without having done it.

He claimed the fights were "not challenging". Whether you played other games with similar fights, read guides, watched videos, is irrelevant to my point.

I'm sure I'm going to ruffle some feathers here, but for an experienced raider, honestly executing mechanics is not hard. What is hard is learning mechanics. However, UCoB doesn't need to be learned anymore. The mechanics have been discovered and their solutions are widely available online.

If I could convince 7 of my WoW buddies to take a break and play FF14, I think we could clear it in fairly good time. We'd simply need to execute each phase independently. All of us are 95%+ players in WoW so I'm not super worried about the dps check.

I mean to use the piano example my boyfriend used earlier...say an acquaintance who has been taking piano lessons for 5 years comes and vents to you about a decently complex piece of sheet music they are practicing to learn to play and are struggling with, and you don't really have any practice playing piano at much higher skill level than beginner...

And you say to your friend who is struggling to learn this: "Oh, that's not challenging"

Your example is dismissive. If the person says that's not challenging ask them WHY they believe that, offer them ways to defend their viewpoint. Outright dismissal like in your example is exactly what I've been advocating against. You're assuming because they are a beginner that they have no insight that can help you. That is a ridiculously flawed assumption.

I play tennis at the USTA 4.5 level. I've had bad games and struggled and had a worse player (be they lower ranked, older, etc.) say you were really slow getting to your backhand on the deuce side so I abused that.

If I were to follow your notion I'd tell him sorry you don't know what you're talking about come back when you're 4.5 rated. That'd be stupid of me.

My previous example was professionally related. As someone who works closely with IT and the front end-users, if I dismissed the uneducated nonsense that came out of end-users because they didn't understand the technical side of things I'd be doing my job a disservice. I can't say to them, come back when you have a database design degree.

I have to look at their feedback, analyze it, and if necessary adjust, or refute. Outright dismissal? Dear god, that's how companies make catastrophic mistakes in IT design.

I mean hell, we've seen it in game design too. Look at WoW: Legion. We told them for 500+ pages in the Ret feedback thread:

1) That no matter how powerful you make Equality (a talent), no one will use it because it encourages bad decisions (i.e. stand in bad to do more DPS).

2) We also said please remove "Retribution Passive Buff" when someone dies because we do not want to be balanced based on other people dying.

3) We begged for the decoupling of our damage away from blessings (so when a person with our blessing died we lost DPS), but if we didn't use them or the people we put them on were bad, we did less DPS too.

They told us we were wrong (because they're devs they clearly know more right?) and low and behold they said we were right and removed/updated them all.

I could add some FF14 examples too if you'd like, but I suspect you get my point.

Mostly though I'm using the phrase "hard enrage" to refer to all bosses in this game being on a timer rather than creating more interesting DPS checks throughout. Even if the hands were TECHNICALLY a hard enrage, it came in the middle of the fight and still served the purpose of forcing teams to do enough DPS, not just turtle with tanks/heals. Whereas I feel like the "timers" we have on every fight are a little uninspired when it comes to forcing teams to do decent DPS.

The Byakko tiger is another example of an okay DPS check, but sadly it can just be ignored with a cheese strat that ALSO serves the purpose of letting mediocre players do extra damage on the boss so that they also make the boss enrage check. In my ideal world the tank LB3 strat for that fight would go the way of the dodo but in return the boss enrage would also disappear. So long as people can meet that add DPS check, I don't see the harm in the rest of the fight turning into an attrition war slightly (healer mana isn't infinite, after all).

It's 100% ok if you want to advocate for more frequent mid fight DPS checks. In fact this is something I very strongly support, but those checks are still hard enrages. If we're ok with hard enrages what's the difference between it being at the end vs. the beginning/middle?

Personally, I wish it was more soft enrage design.

Here's a good example. Blackhand Mythic.

His 1st phase was a hard enrage. You had to get him to x% before the lava fills the room. Periodically he drops mines on the ground. If the Mine is touched, AOE damage. If the mine touches lava, HUGE AOE damage (I think like 2 or 3 is a guaranteed wipe) which is why it's a hard enrage if the lava fills the room.

The second phase has some soft enrage elements design to overwhelm you. You have adds that spawn periodically on a balcony. The only way up there (not counting the Lock cheese strat) was to have people stand in the tank buster. The boss would channel a very brief cast of like 1.5s and then smash the ground splitting damage between all players in it. You needed to angle yourself to hit the balcony and the tank needed to position the boss so the knockback would send people to the right places and not into the ceiling.

Up in the balcony you needed to not die, but kill as many adds as you possibly can before you get too low and need to drop down to get heals. Over time more adds keep spawning eventually overwhelming healers throughput. A good soft enrage mechanic that is contingent on DPS and healers working together.

In the last phase, his smashes knockback sharing massive damage to all hit, and leave fiery AOEs on the ground. There is a staggering amount of raidwide damage and eventually people start falling. As more people fall, less people share the stack thus more fall and so on until eventually you run out of people. This is coupled with danger zones that you need to not get knocked into, A cliff you need to not get knocked off of, and various mechanics eating up the rooms available space. You either run out of room (slow DPS) or you run out of people (slow healing).

A good soft enrage design that felt great when we finally eekd out the clear.

The point I was making is, unless you have experience in the content, and an understanding of it, I don’t think you really have the right to tell people what the current state of said content is. Bobs’ understanding of the more difficult Deltascape Savage tiers seems to be limited to “watching videos”...which is vastly different from actually experiencing the fight itself. He has no experience in Ultimate either, yet he wants to tell people that have actually stepped into that content what the content is “actually like”. I disagree with such behavior. I think people should have a little bit of credentials if they want to talk about things like they know about them.

Remember I'm not saying Bobs is right and you are all wrong. I am saying that you guys are dismissing him without holding his statements accountable. That is directly contradictory to discussion.

Because everyone is dismissing him and not discussing with him (granted I personally think he's a troll because I've tried getting him to answer some topics and he always seems to miss them) we don't know where he comes from when he says these things. He may have more insight than you think.

I said this up above:

I'm sure I'm going to ruffle some feathers here, but for an experienced raider, honestly executing mechanics is not hard. What is hard is learning mechanics. However, UCoB doesn't need to be learned anymore. The mechanics have been discovered and their solutions are widely available online.

If I could convince 7 of my WoW buddies to take a break and play FF14, I think we could clear it in fairly good time. We'd simply need to execute each phase independently. All of us are 95%+ players in WoW so I'm not super worried about the dps check.

WELL, Like i said in other thread(s) TANKS and HEALERS should NOT be DPS. So that would solve your first hypothetical.
And yes, I think a 10min "perfect" fight is less interesting than a 60min "struggled" fight.

Currently the system is Pass/Fail. Without enrage timers is would be a Graded System, SSS, SS, S, A, B, C, D, F.

Sure some people would pass with a C but why is that SO bad? A SSS clear might give more gil or a mount chance drop, something as a reward. You are all just limiting yourselves because you choose to narrowly define success.

So you believe Tanks and Healers should not be DPS. Ok that's a start.

You need to detail how that will work though. You can't just say that incredibly superficial statement and not back it up with examples.

How would Tanks/healers work outside instanced content? How would tanks/healers work inside instanced content? I mean if both did 0 dps, (because if they can even do 1 point of damage, they will maximize that given that encounter win conditions are dictated by enemy HP = 0, so that would need to change too).

So your intention is to implement a graded system for instanced content success.

What metrics would define your rating? Is it personal? Is it teamwide? Would it simply be time to victory? If so you're replacing an enrage timer, with a reward timer. I'm not entirely sure that's better. Please take some time and iron out this thought. Go into detail so we can analyze your suggestions.