The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[Brill_]

A soft enrage is jsut giving more forgiveness for lackluster mechanics or dps in a group, and I dont mean the DPS role. I mean broadly. A hard enrage is pretty much the "You didnt win in the time allotted, time to die and reset." Soft enrages are like "Well you guys look like your trying so here's a bit of extra time that if your healers are geared enough can live through (and even LB through if need be.)" Pretty much a soft enrage just means youre allowed to die and make more mistakes and still clear. Im not even a great raider and I dont want soft enrages to be the thing. I want hard enrages. I want the boss to say "Tough luck, now die." and one shot everyone.

With hard enrage, there is no chance of making a coming back. If you get behind in dps for whatever reason, you lose. There is no chance to comeback.

In sports, they don't end the game because team A didn't score X amount of points in the first quarter. They can still make that up later and win. The mechanics of FFXIV don't allow you make a comeback. It's be perfect or wipe. Reality is, players are not perfect. Just like Tom Brady does not complete 100% of his passes.

Some of the funnest fights I've had in this game is where things go south and we're able to pull it back together and win. With enrage timers, fights can be done 1 way and 1 way only. This makes them extremely static and cause them to get boring fast.

[Melichoir]

With hard enrage, there is no chance of making a coming back. If you get behind in dps for whatever reason, you lose. There is no chance to comeback.

In sports, they don't end the game because team A didn't score X amount of points in the first quarter. They can still make that up later and win. The mechanics of FFXIV don't allow you make a comeback. It's be perfect or wipe. Reality is, players are not perfect. Just like Tom Brady does not complete 100% of his passes.

Some of the funnest fights I've had in this game is where things go south and we're able to pull it back together and win. With enrage timers, fights can be done 1 way and 1 way only. This makes them extremely static and cause them to get boring fast.

As I said, though, most times people dont hit enrage. It's usually an issue of wiping to mechanics or clearing, not getting to 2 or 1%. If you fall behind in damage, thats an issue of dyign to mechanics typically. Meaning people not paying attention to mechanics died, overall DPS drops, and you cant recover. If you make it to the end of the fight, boss enrages and wipes you. The lesson isnt supposed to be "Can we make a comeback from dying a few times", the lesson is "We need to do the mechanics better." And mind you, being decently geared will mean you can suffer a death here or there and still manage. None of the fights are so stringent you have to not die at all to clear. It's usually when your group suffers 4, 5, 6 plus deaths that you fall so far behind on dps that the enrage becomes inevitable.

To me, soft enrages will ultimately promote people saying "Derp I died, its ok." and allow for people being loose on learning a fight rather than fixing things and improving. Anyone can learn the fight mechanics and learn not to die. That's part of the deal with the savage tier. If we turn it into a slightly harder version of the regular version, it loses meaning IMO. Enrage timers keep people from saying it's ok to die in a fight constantly.

[TaleraRistain]

As a counterpoint, fights can be built to be challenging without involving Enrage timers. Just look to FFXI, the MMO predecessor to this one. There were PLENTY of challenging fights in that game, and only a bare handful had Enrages (and those few cases, to prevent folks from "zombieing" open-world mobs until folks literally started having real-life health issues).

I've never been fond of Enrage as a component to difficulty. It's a relatively recent addition to video games in general, and games were fun before this started to happen. If you can take what the boss throws at you, that should be enough.

EverQuest as well. We took 72 people and it would take us weeks or months sometimes to clear the plane/tower/etc. No enrage timers. Just challenging mechanics, randomized boss attacks, adds, and high damage making healing essential.

I'm not fond of Enrage, either. It just encourages zerg rushing and we used to make fun of people who had to cheese a fight by zerg rushing because they couldn't handle the mechanics of the fight. When I see people who want to skip mechanics with dps, I think of those cheese tactics.

[HyperiusUltima]

EverQuest as well. We took 72 people and it would take us weeks or months sometimes to clear the plane/tower/etc. No enrage timers. Just challenging mechanics, randomized boss attacks, adds, and high damage making healing essential.

I'm not fond of Enrage, either. It just encourages zerg rushing and we used to make fun of people who had to cheese a fight by zerg rushing because they couldn't handle the mechanics of the fight. When I see people who want to skip mechanics with dps, I think of those cheese tactics.

Cue Alexander Creator and A11S.

[Nora_of_Mira]

Some of the funnest fights I've had in this game is where things go south and we're able to pull it back together and win. With enrage timers, fights can be done 1 way and 1 way only. This makes them extremely static and cause them to get boring fast.

I don't think that's 100% true, there is still room for error and you can recover from major mess ups, but the margin of error is just a lot smaller. Like if we had huge DPS in phase 1, and someone accidentally caused 4 dps to die...we can still recover if the healers had been managing their mana well and could get those res's off in time before the next mechanic or whatever. It just really depends on your teams skill. The higher the combined skill of the team, the larger margin of error you can make and recover from without fear of hitting enrage.

[Nora_of_Mira]

EverQuest as well. We took 72 people and it would take us weeks or months sometimes to clear the plane/tower/etc. No enrage timers. Just challenging mechanics, randomized boss attacks, adds, and high damage making healing essential.

I'm not fond of Enrage, either. It just encourages zerg rushing and we used to make fun of people who had to cheese a fight by zerg rushing because they couldn't handle the mechanics of the fight. When I see people who want to skip mechanics with dps, I think of those cheese tactics.

this is a fundamental shift in challenging content, and I like where we are now. I find dying in a tough encounters to RNG MUCH more punishing and devastating than dying to poorly executing mechanics or not optimizing DPS. Dying to RNG doesn't encourage me to go back and learn from my mistakes or figure out where I went wrong...it encourages me to figure out how I can cheese this RNG bull****. Which leads me right to your 2nd point of zerging mechanics.

I want to avoid RNG. The structure of FFxiv's heavily scripted content removes MOST RNG and increases the punishment for failing with enrage and weird mechanics. I much prefer this way.

[Lilseph]

Even if you got rid of the boss enrage timers, y'all would still be stuck with the hidden mandatory enrage that all encounters have that can't be removed: the instance timer. Nothing feels worse than beating a boss down to sub-10% HP and getting a Duty Failed slapped across the screen when the timer runs out. Honestly, the enrage timers are fine as it is. They're very forgiving in most encounters like extreme primals, almost non-existant in casual content like daily experts and story trials, and understandably strict in high-end content like Savage and Ultimate.

[Paladinleeds]

I'm glad for you.

It doesn't make the idea any less horrible. You'd basically be gutting the only interesting parts of the roles, or the only parts that actually give the roles some kind of major agency, or skill ceiling. I could sit here and write paragraphs upon paragraphs as to why I feel this way, as I've done in the past. But it's not going to change anything. I'm not changing your mind. If you care about my opinions just go check my post history. You won't, nor would I expect you to, but the posts are there. I'm not going to re-tread old ground.

This whole argument is pointless. So you keep doing you, boo.

Here's the thing, while I can certainly agree that looking back my idea wasn't the greatest, it doesn't change the fact that I want to see enmity and healing matter more. Right now in dungeons, unless your tank is braindad, you can usually heal a dungeon with just oGCD heals and Regen (if WHM), and thus spend 99% of your time DPSing. At that point you're just a green DPS (a DPS with a few healing spells). And it works in a similar vein for tanks, on bosses I spend upwards of 80% of the fight in Deliverance/Sword Oath, thus I'm just a blue DPS (a DPS with a few defensive abilities). That's what I want to see change. I want to see the primary roles of the healers and tanks to matter more than they currently do. Right now they feel like an afterthought compared to DPS DPS DPS. Sure still allow some DPS to occur. But that should be just that, the skill ceiling. Right now it's literally anything except the very skill floor of the role. And again, that's what I want to see change. I want tank stances and healing to matter more.

In fact, I still think changing Cleric stance to just a straight DPS buff without penalty was a bad idea, and that while the button needed some fine tuning (perhaps changes to a stance swap so you'd go between healer stance and cleric stance with a 5 second cooldown to change either way, instead of just a 5 second cooldown when you went to cleric stance, but non for going to healer stance, hence the double click blunder meaning you stay in cleric stance), it was a great idea. It made it more strategic, it made for more emerging gameplay. That was what my (admittedly horrible) idea was meant to do, put a greater emphasis on tank stance. Right now for most people it's just a simple afterthought.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

If we remove enrage ppl will just bring tanks and heals on clear partys. Tanks can weasle though some botched mechanics.

If you take the only reason of a dps ... whats left. Clear partys dont care about speed only about clearing.

And weekly savage pugging? Id take a clear thats 3 min longer with a better win chance over wiping.

[Vaer]

Let's be real here they aren't going to remove enrage timers without adding something else equally annoying. While true in older games like XI they didn't have these for every encounter (they later added them to things because people were holding them indefinitely (especially RMT) while people sat there and watched unable to do anything due to the claim system, not because people couldn't kill them). They still had a competency check which was your healers/support running out of MP/resources.

It isn't really that great a comparison since every slot in an XIV party is worth something in that the person can't be replaced while you are fighting the boss which means everyone has to pull their weight and a weak link can cause a fail.

In XI most of the stuff was open world, or the instance had such a high player cap that you could bring as many people as you wanted. Even though the claiming group can only be 18 players for open world stuff, if someone died you could just swap them out for someone else. The death penalty in XI was also really harsh (1/4 max HP, and slow) as you ended up mostly useless until your weakened wore off, and if you died again you were literally useless after they added double weak. In XIV, you just get a damage penalty that can be made up through other means like overgearing.

Weakness and vuln stacks are basically XIV's version of the soft enrage. As dying increases the chances of you hitting the hard enrage due to the damage loss.

Without the hard enrage, gear starts to matter even less and since the game revolves around collecting gear it just means they'll just find some other way to ruin your day to extend content shelf life like no resurrections or really bad drop rates like XI where sometimes you spent hours killing a boss only for it to drop a wind crystal.