Concern on the current state of FFXIV, and future content

[loreleidiangelo]

I respect your opinion, but I could say that wow bosses have become stale in a decade tbh, that said It's maybe just me having played that game for such a long time

They've become stale (debatedly...I still politely maintain that their encounters still feature new concepts and implementations decades later) after like..12 years of raid design. XIV's have become stale after 4. That's not good. We were knocked off of edges from pass/fail pushback mechanics from Titan HM back in 2013 to Kefka now.

Here's some frustrations from a WoW player about the mediocre pile of dog dung that Emerald Nightmare was (which I agree with, BTW). In that thread though there are tons of examples of great raid fights the game has had over the years and what sort of unique mechanics they brought. Blackfuse in particular was a super well-designed and interactive fight, in my opinion, and I don't share the OP's opinions on Antorus - I think some of the fights there are pretty dull (hellooooooo Garothi Worldbreaker, wtf did we even do for you again? dodged some stuff on the ground? idk), but most are pretty well-conceptualized and at least TRY to put unique spins on "stack" and "don't stand in stuff". As I said in my original post, Tree of the Lifebinder and how it interacted with death mechanics wasn't a wonderfully abstract concept that required huge depth of understanding, but it was still pretty unique.

I mean, where's our example of something like Kil'jaeden darkness phase in Tomb? The Paragon fight in Siege? Heaven forbid, anything remotely like the Spine of Deathwing?

Just so I don't seem like I'm crap-talking XIV and sucking WoW's video game wang, I will say that I thought the Cad fight in Coil turn 1 was actually pretty well-designed, if a bit simplistic for the non-kite DPS. You had a person who had to kite this mob, while getting its health low WITHOUT killing it, drag it over to a boss (there were two bosses) and alternate "feeding" this low-HP add to the boss so it wouldn't go off its nut and get a massive damage buff that would murder your tanks. The add did pretty high damage so it had to be kited, preferably with slows or a bind/root from a character if the kiter got low and needed to be healed. But it also had to be brought to the bosses within a time limit or it would just blow up and wipe the raid.

Meanwhile, the bosses are getting increasing damage stacks, making it harder (but not impossible) for healers to win an attrition war. The bosses had to be kept separate, and HP bars had to be whittled down separately - as soon as you killed one boss, the other would ramp up its damage to dangerous levels, meaning the goal was to get both low and kill both within 10 seconds of each other. Glowing floor panels would accidentally spawn extra adds if players didn't avoid them, and the boss both cleaved AND did a backwards-cone tail swipe, making melee positioning and tail swipe baiting pretty important.

At WORST the engagement factor for the non-kiter ranged DPS was pretty low, same with healers (basically only tank healing to worry about for the bulk of the fight), but the mechanics were varied, IMO, and boiled down to a lot more than just "don't stand in this, use a CD for this, kill these when they spawn ASAP" etc. Coil turn 2 was actually pretty decent with the Rot passing as well and the different routes through the raid affecting the vulnerabilities of the final boss, but sadly a.) enrage strat ruined it, and b.) pass mechanisms in this game suck toady wong because of server ticks and overall latency, meaning Rot got screwed up sometimes even with your passer running over the receiver like 5 separate times with it.

Turn 4 was boring AOE zerg with the entire onus of execution largely being on the tanks to grab and position things and use CDs properly, and Turn 5 was the introduction to the synchro-swimming crap we all love to hate today - that one guy screwed up divebomb marker? GG you're all eating the wall. Melee didn't do Twister properly? Ripperonis there goes all your melees, both tanks and maybe other people if they had monkey positioning (shouldn't happen but still sometimes did).

The first two fights of original Coil were great. I'd argue that T7 pre-nerf with the petrify mechanic was also pretty unique, if not a slight variation on T1 kiting. Still, turning an add to stone to make a sort of "pillar" to hide behind a pulse AOE was relatively inspired, and I appreciated the direction of it. Repeated divebombs in T5, T9, T13? Really? That was the best the devs could do? Knocking us off the edge repeatedly in Titan, Levi, Bismarck, Sophia, Exdeath, Kefka? Zzzz. Piles of circle mechanics that have to be dodged in a certain order like Shiva EX, Titan bombs, and God Kefka Trine? Blah.

I think the devs could do more. I know you and I disagree a lot when it comes to WoW, but I just want to clarify that I DO think there are some great examples of raid fight design in XIV, we just haven't seen anything in my mind that sticks out since T7. It's all been "dodge AOEs or get knocked into a fire wall/off the edge/get one-shot".

[Vyriah]

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So glad to find someone else that thin T1/T2 were just damn great.
T1 actually make a lot of sense as gatekeeper. It's not meant to be hard as in "fail the mechanic and every one explode" but was a purely based arround what kind of number was needed to get it down. The idea of getting the adds the lowest possible without killing them is brillant, because burning down an add is only binary, you only can or can't do it in time. But not klling it mean you should know how much damage you deal. Deal too much ? Boss kills every one. Don't do enough ? Boss will kill anyone at some point. That's not flashy, but it's clever. if you're not doing this right your tank will get murder and will let the snake of doom slaps everyone else to death. Killing everyone with the basics is the most elegant thing you can pull of with your first ever raid boss, and it did pull it off.
I actually like T2 even more, first because of the "choose how you will get killed aspect of the fight" but also because alagan rot is dumb simple. So is dodging AoE, there's telegraph anyway. But what about both at the same time ? People touch, everyone explode. It's cool because there's one simple rule : don't touch the alagan rot player unless you have to pass it. That's all there is to it the only thing the boss does is shooting annoying things at you to make you run arround, eventually having player bump into each other. This is top 5 smart way of killing someone, those alagan balls of death sure know their job.
T8 was also pretty dope. Only doing raid damage is boring, everyone knew how to handle this after Ifrit and Titan, so what's next ? Have them choose how damage will be dealt. Have them chose really carefully. Sure the result is confusing as hell, but there's no single "do this or you die" answer to it, you could handle any way you want if you respected every mechanic simple rules (share with or three people, make the mines blow). The way alagan field came back in NeoExdeath after that was amazingly lame.

That's my greatest grip with how the game is played right know. It looks like it's more about cheese-ing wipes out of the party more than creating engaging mechanics to deal with. This right tier is far, far better than the precedent one and there's a lot of good idea in it (God Kefka looks like an annoying mechanic vomit though), but there's a lot of really unwanted trend in general. The two worse are by far the unannonced instant death mechanics like the pushing ghost in O5S and bait then dodge AoE. Those only seem to exist because it consistently kills players off, but is it really all that's needed to make interesting fights ? The second in particular is annoying. It was a Titan thing, and we've seen everywhere since then. I'm not sure I can even remember how much we saw it already : Titan does it, T5 notoriously does it, Leviathan does it, T13 does it, Bismarck does it, A1S does it, Nidhogg does it, all three of the warring triad does it, A8S does it, A11S does it, A12S does it, Susano does it, O4S does it, Shinryuu does it, O6S does two differents ones and O7S does it. I'm not sure there was patch without the thing in it. The joke is getting super old by now and absolutly no one actually like either dying or seeing someone die to this anymore. It only serve to kill people that pressed a direction 0.5 second too late, it's the most boring thing ever and would most of time only get low latency/older PC player. The rest is panicked healer casting something. Not showing telegraph also really feels like they gave up doing something engaging just to slow down progress. But T2 did get that, you shouldn't take the attack if there's a big red marker everyone at this level of play will get out of it. but instead of getting the marker out, they played arround it and made movement the actual point.

I think a good way to find new thing would to think about an encounter that would much slower paced than the current ones. There's only a limited number of thing you can throw at someone face with only a few second to react and it really seem that lately really difficult content goes with breaking the game rules (duty action centered fights, ExDeath's and his max HP down debuff and borrowed gimmick mechanics, Nael's speech only cues, Shinryu untargetable body parts that casts mechanics, Kefka's no heal debuff) wich looks like the game is getting close to a beaking point. A slower fight could rely on how thing that ahppen aerly on the fight can influence thing that happen later, can call for thougher decision making, make the boss act in less predictable way, screw with the order between when mechanics are annouced and when they actually take place. It could ask some puzzle design way of thinking things, set up something i the first few minute and the fight and re-used later in more and more tricky situation. Sophia had a bit of that but everything was predictable, Kefaust does that and it's a really good fight, but it's short.
Alternatively, Ghost Train is a fantastic fight and it's certainly thanks to the fact that it's a gimmick by default. so maybe wilder approach on who and where we fight thing could also be a room from improvement. TSW did have some boss the centered about the place where you fought them (the two bridge fight in the Ankh, the labyrinth bosses in hell eternal). Square and round arena everywhere isn't that interesting. And once again, that wasn't a thing in the very first coils.

Even though I don't dislike Eureka, it's not bad thing that every seem to react that much to it. I do feel less like a rambling madman talking about encouter design right now.

[Remedi]

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It's Highly possible that my memory of wow gets muddied by some factors, like while raids have 12 or so bosses some ends up beign fillers or let's take KJ from tomb, while I garee the darkness phase is innovative, the rest is meh imho which kinda overshadowws the rest, which is probably just my problem.
I mean I kinda criticised cataclysm for having too few bosses for a raid tier, but now If I think about siege for example I could've lived without a couple that felt fillers.
That said I have to say that since they added the dungeon journal I have this terrible feeling that what's written in there actually implies that there's more going on that what really the fight is.
For example I though Aggramar was a more involved fight and turned out imho a bit boring, frankly it was the same thing a streamer I was watching said during testing.

Could XIV take some ideas? Ye for sure, though I kinda feel like that they shot themselves in the foot when they decided to go full nostalgia with omega since they also need to manage a certain level of expectation which was missed during sigmascape with the no suplexing the train

[loreleidiangelo]

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Ha, imagine a Phantom Train where there's some element of having say, the OT actually at one point actually suplex it (instead of killing the stupid chimney thing) to deal damage to the boss? Depending on how they implemented it (ie, not the way they implemented the Susano sword QTE thing) it could have been pretty fun. Like the person turning into the gorilla in A6S, that was pretty neat, and I'm sad I didn't actually get to experience that fight when it was relevant.

Siege had some awful bosses but it had some great ones too, IMO - Blackfuse as I said, the Klaxxi Paragons and Sha of Pride were ones I enjoyed myself. Amalgam of Corruption had some nifty mechanics IIRC. But then you had stuff like Galakrus or the Iron Juggernaut and I'm just ಠ_ಠ. At the end of the day though while they might feel like "filler" I feel like they pretty well encompass the feeling of breadth and size of what a raid should be, compared to the boss hallways we get in XIV (where bosses are literally in a separate instance and you can't even see how the thing you're supposed to be "raiding" in connects these boss rooms to each other at all). Rewards are also better, but that's a whole other can of worms, and I'll spare everyone here my diatribe on it for now.

[Remedi]

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Feels like the last raid I had a feeling of raid was throne of thunder because how it was structured, siege imho while I really like the concept had some problems that probably can be traced back to the fact that it was using a faction city as a baseline.

As for boss design sometimes I feel like that they don't get down enough in the new concept while others they do. Take KJ for example the new darkness tech could've been a much bigger part of the fight instead of just a phase while 60% of the fight was mostly a revisit of the sunwell fight only where this time you stand in the armageddon and the shadowy reflections are essentially a toned down version of them.
Frankly I think that Sunwell KJ was much more epic than the tomb one but I don't know, maybe I'm soured that frankly the wow I liked won't exist anymore and I've no respect for blizzard as a company anymore

[loreleidiangelo]

Frankly I think that Sunwell KJ was much more epic than the tomb one but I don't know, maybe I'm soured that frankly the wow I liked won't exist anymore and I've no respect for blizzard as a company anymore

That's fair, and I likely might be experiencing some of the same burnout from the FFXIV end (I've played since CBT), though as I've said in previous comments I DO try to filter some positive feedback in for this game just so I don't seem like I'm pushing a clear bias. There are some nice examples of raid design and content in XIV, and I will never accuse the devs of "not caring about the game anymore" as I've seen others allude to (Square Enix as a company is a different story, but one we'll never really know), but I won't stop offering feedback on areas that I think are disappointing, and the entirety of Omega's mechanics thus far is pretty high up there, as is the ultimate implementation of Eureka.

On a final note, I respect and sympathize with the fact that the WoW you loved isn't there anymore, even as someone who vastly prefers the version it is now. It's a difficult feeling to reconcile, when the developers constantly change things that you thought were fine, bit by bit, until the game you loved to play is no more and you're surrounded by people you can't relate to because they do love it. There's a good cautionary tale in there for SE in some ways, or people who always criticize their desire to keep content updates "safe and similar" - change things too much, and you risk losing the fanbase who made your entire game successful in the first place. Here's hoping they can find a good balance between "fresh and exciting" and "change just for the sake of change".