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  1. #1
    Player
    Ultimatecalibur's Avatar
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    Jan 2014
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    2,737
    Character
    Kakita Ucalibur
    World
    Siren
    Main Class
    Paladin Lv 86
    Quote Originally Posted by CapricaLangley View Post
    And that problem is the staleness of encounter design. Every single choice in terms of balance, class design and homogenisation was taken just because the devs sticked to the same encounter model from day 1. Imagine a different world: in a world with mob kiting, ranged jobs would be mandatory; in a world where healers are needed to separate ways from the rest of the group, RDM heals and actions like raise would be a hundred times more meta definining than DPS numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I like combat in this game, but I think the current system with circular/square arenas and (interesting and challenging) mechanics is basically gutting class design.
    I want to tell you a bit about a game that released just over 6 years ago. It had the things you are asking for but due to various reasons things did not work out like you would hope they would.

    The game had a fair number of uniquely shaped boss arenas with varied terrain. In fact the game's most difficult fight on release was set on the palm of a gigantic dragon's hand. These irregular arenas while cool had their fair share of problems; things like ranged classes being able to avoid a mechanic because they could stand on top of a pile of sand and players failing to dodge a fight's mechanics because the irregular terrain prevented them from moving away fast enough. From the second update cycle and on the designers ended up changing to flat arenas to prevent these problems.

    Homogenization came about because the designers needed to insure that any balanced party composition had all the tools they needed to complete content. Early on in the games life the first fight of high end content required 2 different characters that could interrupt a mini-boss's attack. There were only 3 classes that could do the interrupt out of the 9 classes the game had. One major boss fight could be cheesed easily (before the nerf) because the boss could be stun locked by the one class that had a gcd stun.

    Kiting used to be a thing in some of the high end fights, but due to their only being one ranged non-caster at the time that class became a mandatory class to complete content.

    For those that have not realized it yet: I am describing FFXIV between patches 2.0 and 2.55. The designers were originally doing what you asked but problems and complaints caused them to slowly stop doing them over the course of their first expansion cycle.

    Every class is tailored around DPS numbers because every activity in the game gravitate towards this dicretion. By patch 5.1 we will probably be playing 3 jobs instead of 3 roles, the differences being just in rotation nuances; the question that worries me is: what will happen in the next patches? Will we ever reach the desired “perfect and purely balanced” world, where in return it doesn’t matter at all which job you choose to play?
    Truth be told the DpS focus of this game is more the result of all high end fights having tight hard enrage timers. Its hard to not be dps focused when completion of a fight is more determined by doing X amount of damage before X minutes are up than being able to repeatably do mechanics.
    (13)

  2. #2
    Player
    CapricaLangley's Avatar
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    Jun 2017
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    Character
    Silent Bay
    World
    Ragnarok
    Main Class
    Reaper Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur View Post
    I want to tell you a bit about a game that released just over 6 years ago. It had the things you are asking for but due to various reasons things did not work out like you would hope they would.
    .
    Good read, I actually remember something about just the first patch because i was part of ARR beta and took a long break afterwards. By the way I didn't want to list down examples of good and bad design. Some of the things you mentioned were good ideas, but flawed or badly executed. Some were just bad. Some other design choices, like world bosses and non-instanced dungeons, or unexpected results, like people tanking with Ninja in FFXI, are just a beautiful magic that happens when you are not tunnel visioning on design rails you yourself built.

    Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.

    This is probably a terrible idea, just wanted to say that we are too biased because of mechanics we know from the past, things we saw succeed in other games or interesting ideas that didn't work as expected.
    (2)
    Last edited by CapricaLangley; 08-25-2019 at 08:27 AM.

  3. #3
    Player
    Ultimatecalibur's Avatar
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    Jan 2014
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    2,737
    Character
    Kakita Ucalibur
    World
    Siren
    Main Class
    Paladin Lv 86
    Quote Originally Posted by CapricaLangley View Post
    Good read, I actually remember something about just the first patch because i was part of ARR beta and took a long break afterwards. By the way I didn't want to list down examples of good and bad design. Some of the things you mentioned were good ideas, but flawed or badly executed. Some were just bad. Some other design choices, like world bosses and non-instanced dungeons, or unexpected results, like people tanking with Ninja in FFXI, are just a beautiful magic that happens when you are not tunnel visioning on design rails you yourself built.
    That "beautiful magic" of emergent play while it can be cool was more often than not part of flawed design. Ninja tanking in FFXI was pretty much a failure of design just like Tank jobs (Samurai and possibly Dark Knight) being better at dpsing than their intended role.

    Instanced Dungeons came into existence because of problems with players arguing over non-instanced dungeon areas after capacity reached a certain level.

    Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.
    That is pretty much the reoccurring version of the Doom debuff that is cleansed by healing the victim to max hp and similar "don't let the victim die or it is a wipe" mechanics have appeared in various EX and Savage fights. Burst healing checks are not that unusual in things like the Extreme Trials, Alliance Raids and Savage Raids.

    This is probably a terrible idea, just wanted to say that we are too biased because of mechanics we know from the past, things we saw succeed in other games or interesting ideas that didn't work as expected.
    That is fair, but I also wish to point out that the other side of the coin is that many changes have very good reasons for being made and being different just to be different is not always good. "Homogenization" sometimes is sometimes a very good thing.
    (6)

  4. #4
    Player
    IttyBitty's Avatar
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    Nov 2015
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    299
    Character
    Kasumi Shirinami
    World
    Mateus
    Main Class
    White Mage Lv 90
    Quote Originally Posted by CapricaLangley View Post
    Even you and I are mostly able to make examples based on things we know or remember; let's try to create something new: imagine a mechanic that marks the two tanks during an encounter, with both their health pools being reduced to one HP. Healers, then, have to heal them to full and prevent them to die to a debuff that hits for a set amound of damage every X seconds. If one of the tanks dies, you get a raidwide AoE that can kill the other one, hypothetically causing a second AoE which would lead to the wipe. Et voilà, we have an healer check.
    We already have plenty of healing check mechanics. They're just not often in the more casual end of content (eg white hole, photon+eternal darkness, charibdys, hellwind+towers, flare+stack, allagan field).
    (0)

  5. #5
    Player
    Shurrikhan's Avatar
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    Sep 2011
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    Character
    Tani Shirai
    World
    Cactuar
    Main Class
    Monk Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur View Post
    I want to tell you a bit about a game that released just over 6 years ago. It had the things you are asking for but due to various reasons things did not work out like you would hope they would.

    The game had a fair number of uniquely shaped boss arenas with varied terrain. In fact the game's most difficult fight on release was set on the palm of a gigantic dragon's hand. These irregular arenas while cool had their fair share of problems; things like ranged classes being able to avoid a mechanic because they could stand on top of a pile of sand and players failing to dodge a fight's mechanics because the irregular terrain prevented them from moving away fast enough. From the second update cycle and on the designers ended up changing to flat arenas to prevent these problems.
    How is this a flaw of terrain rather than a Z-axis in proximity checks? Or is the fact that even now I can be struck from 40 feet in the air by ground mobs still aggro'ed to me similarly an issue of (open world) zone design?

    Quote Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur View Post
    Kiting used to be a thing in some of the high end fights, but due to their only being one ranged non-caster at the time that class became a mandatory class to complete content.
    Only T1 and T5 had kiteable adds (unless stall-stratting T4 briefly instead of doing full AoE), and I did the prior just fine on SMN and BLM with very little potency loss and the latter was doable on any and all jobs, seeing as you could just keep hitting the boss while everyone else dealt with the add focusing you. These weren't an issue.

    Homogenization came about because the designers needed to insure that any balanced party composition had all the tools they needed to complete content.
    The one does not necessitate the other. You can have balance without homogeneity.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur View Post
    The designers were originally doing what you asked but problems and complaints caused them to slowly stop doing them over the course of their first expansion cycle.
    Problems and complaints should not to equate in each case to giving up and taking the lowest common denominator approach to the situation.
    (5)

  6. #6
    Player
    Ultimatecalibur's Avatar
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    Kakita Ucalibur
    World
    Siren
    Main Class
    Paladin Lv 86
    Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
    Isn't that exactly what we have now?
    Nope. Tenacity and Piety are in many cases considered less optimal stats because of this. Taking 10% less damage isn't helpful when content is easier cleared when you can clear with 0% mitigation from Tenacity. increased MP recovery is meaningless when natural recovery and Lucid is enough to prevent you from running out in a fight.

    Or do you want back the 5-tanks 3-healers Extreme Primal prog meta we had when dps checks lightened?
    I never said no dps checks. Add phases, meteor phases and "last 10% burn the boss before it finishes casting a You Lose" stuff is fine.

    In my mind a fight should be designed such that a group should be expected to clear in 10 minutes at intended ilevel but if the tanks and healers are good enough it can take up to 12 minutes.

    Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
    How is this a flaw of terrain rather than a Z-axis in proximity checks? Or is the fact that even now I can be struck from 40 feet in the air by ground mobs still aggro'ed to me similarly an issue of (open world) zone design?
    I was referring to the problem with twisters in T5. The twisters required that you be X distance from them when the spawned or they exploded. Character movement followed the irregular terrain which led to twisters exploding because characters didn't move far enough from the twister over the irregular terrain even though they had enough time to move away on a flat surface. For example the character needed to move 2y away from the twister to prevent it exploding, but due to irregular terrain they only ended up moving 1.8y. This was one of the major reasons they flattened out T5.

    Only T1 and T5 had kiteable adds (unless stall-stratting T4 briefly instead of doing full AoE), and I did the prior just fine on SMN and BLM with very little potency loss and the latter was doable on any and all jobs, seeing as you could just keep hitting the boss while everyone else dealt with the add focusing you. These weren't an issue.
    Was referring more to T7's Renauds and the fact that a Ranged dps needed to kite them into position. They were pretty much designed to be dealt with by a Bard. SMN could possibly handle them but I heard that they often had trouble doing so.
    (2)

  7. #7
    Player
    Shurrikhan's Avatar
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    Character
    Tani Shirai
    World
    Cactuar
    Main Class
    Monk Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur View Post
    ...
    1. Tenacity and Piety
    Tenacity being a subpar stat is due to lack of granular damage. Against the instances of damage we actually receive, there is virtually no chance that Tenacity can save a heal or protect against what would otherwise kill you. Not dying is as much a "test of the tank's ability to survive" without Tenacity as it is with. The stat is simply of inappropriate design in the context of XIV's damage in raid settings. Piety, similarly, suffers from the oversight that (1) MP regeneration is overabundant because most players don't want to be over-dependent on any given stat just to be able to perform actions and (2) it has no other use than the usually superfluous niche of MP regeneration. Turn it into a hidden resource system that is consumed based on %HP damage that would otherwise have been taken and restored over time (while offering proportionately less of its passive mitigation as it recharges) and voila, you'd have a stat that can actually do something. Though, you'd either then be crippling dependent on it or will have simply traded out SCH/AST shields and/or a single CD mistake for it.
    2. DPS checks only as short burst mechanics, and never with an impact across multiple mechanics.
    Removing any lasting impact of how well a party handles a given mechanic, as to have continued consequence over the mechanics to come, only leads to haphazard design and incongruity.
    • Mechanic Type 1: Quality of performance only partly matters in this first mechanic because one need only dodge; they can just as optimally touch no keys except WASD and Duty Action.
    • Mechanic Type 2: Quality of performance only partly matters in the next mechanic because one need only damage; you can stand in as many AoEs as you need in order to focus on your rotation.
    • Mechanic Type 3: Quality of performance actually matters to this last mechanic because it has both damage and survival requirements. You must dodge or you will almost certainly die hereafter and you must deal damage or all will die at the end of the mechanic.
    Hard enrages simply allow any mechanic to be a soft Type 3, allowing consequences to be carried over and recovered against without entirely removing said consequence. Took an unnecessary vulnerability stack? Well, now a healer is going to have to shield you specifically so you can survive the next mechanic. That in turn will cost healer DPS, which in turn means your requirements just got higher.

    I don't understand how people keep mistaking that for some sort of flawed system only to then ask for the very things hard enrages already provide and which the removal of hard enrages would in turn remove. Hard enrages encourage survival. Hard enrages encourage damage. They just allow you to perfect your performance over time without smashing your head against one particular mechanic at a time, all while ensuring that by the time you can complete the fight, you feel like you deserved it, i.e. that you had a decent handle on the mechanics involved.
    3. Alleged terrain-based issues with Twister as precedent for removing any and all raid environments that aren't flat circles or rectangles.
    The Twisters issues were due to an entirely separate and well documented bug. No one dealt with Twisters while standing on the palm heel. The heel was only used to exploit the firepatches. Bug aside, the combination of the two mechanics was technically easier before they flattened out the map.
    4. Renaud adds allegedly necessitating Ranged dps as precendent for removing all kiting and similar special mechanics from fights.
    Across ARR, Ranged were already considered necessary for their access to Mage's Ballad and Army's Paeon, so I don't see why such a requirement would suddenly have broken the camel's back here. That being said, I don't believe it was necessary. I'd cleared several times before the Echo buffs in a DRG, MNK, MNK, BLM party. We just had the boss move clockwise or counterclockwise as the Renaud approached and had the SCH Aetherial Manipulation taxi the BLM. Stone handled the rest with ease. The other MNK and I didn't even lose GL over the Shriek mechanic. It required some creative thinking compared to simply having the Bard take it and Shadowbind, but it was entirely doable. And I liked the fight more for that very fact. Could we please stop pretending that something is critically flawed just because it variably asks a bit more ingenuity for the playerbase?
    (5)
    Last edited by Shurrikhan; 08-25-2019 at 04:33 PM. Reason: Formatting.

  8. #8
    Player
    Acidblood's Avatar
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    Jun 2016
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    359
    Character
    Sylvaria Molkot
    World
    Behemoth
    Main Class
    Black Mage Lv 80
    Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
    I don't understand how people keep mistaking that for some sort of flawed system only to then ask for the very things hard enrages already provide and which the removal of hard enrages would in turn remove. Hard enrages encourage survival. Hard enrages encourage damage. They just allow you to perfect your performance over time without smashing your head against one particular mechanic at a time, all while ensuring that by the time you can complete the fight, you feel like you deserved it, i.e. that you had a decent handle on the mechanics involved.
    Because in reality hard enrages do not encourage survival, they make it binary; either you can survive until the end (hard enrage) or you can't, any boost to 'survival' beyond that is wasted (especially if it comes at the expense of damage). And since failure isn't allowed by default*, and all combinations of jobs must to be viable**, survival stats and abilties generally aren't even a consideration to begin with (expect perhaps at the start of prog where you are just trying to see as much of the fight as possible).

    * And even if failure was allowed by default; i.e. you couldn't beat encounter A without X Tenacity, people would just get X+1 Tenacity and dump the rest into damage stats, which is same issue Accuracy had.

    ** If Job-X had a survival ability that was 'required' (or perceived to be required) to beat encounter A then everyone else of that role would complain. However; if that ability is not required and Job-X sacrifices damage just to have that ability (used or not) then Job-X will be seen as less valuable, or even 'useless', compared to another job of the same role that brings more damage; enter homogenisation, the systematic removal of anything that isn't 'damage', and the death of job identity.
    (10)
    Last edited by Acidblood; 08-25-2019 at 11:03 PM.

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by Acidblood View Post
    enter homogenisation, the systematic removal of anything that isn't 'damage', and the death of job identity.
    If job identity causes one tank to deliberately sacrifice all but 1 hp, then let it die.

    Otherwise, this tank uses a gunblade, that tank uses a sword and shield. This ranged DPS shoots arrows, that ranged DPS dances. This caster summons egis, that caster attacks from near and far. All these melee DPS use positionals differently.

    Those differences are sufficient for job identity.
    (8)

  10. #10
    Player
    Shurrikhan's Avatar
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    Tani Shirai
    World
    Cactuar
    Main Class
    Monk Lv 100
    Quote Originally Posted by linay View Post
    If job identity causes one tank to deliberately sacrifice all but 1 hp, then let it die.

    Otherwise, this tank uses a gunblade, that tank uses a sword and shield. This ranged DPS shoots arrows, that ranged DPS dances. This caster summons egis, that caster attacks from near and far. All these melee DPS use positionals differently.

    Those differences are sufficient for job identity.
    Why? There's little to no additional risk to, say, Superbolide over Hallowed Ground when well managed -- save in that it has a shorter duration. Why should we, their party members, be denied these interactions with these idiosyncrasies? Why should those tanks themselves? I'm not about to defend Living Dead's design, but even it is something that I've learned to work around on any healer, saving Aetherflow, Emergency, and Recitation or Excog to burst heal the DRK back up in the last couple GCDs on SCH, holding every other Bene for it on WHM, etc., etc.

    Differences, so long as they're not abhorrently designed (e.g. Living Dead), are generally fun to play with and around. Do not reduce jobs to simple reskins, relabels, and re-lores of Tank, Healer, Melee, Ranged, and Caster.
    (7)

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