Encounter Design needs to be overhauled at a fundamental level

[Flay_wind]

.

But my argument is that how the game is designed is supposed to ease people into higher difficulty levels so they can learn and get used to playing the job and the mechanics so by the point they hit level cap to do endgame content they're prepared to deal with more complicated mechanics rather than throw them in the deepens.

But maybe it could be resolvable with 2 or 3 difficulty levels on each bit of content with different rewards? It worked in SW:TOR and it is sort of a thing in FFXI endgame.

We kinda have it with Normal and Savage raids. Normal and Extreme.

If we are cutting down dungeons, maybe it's room for the same dungeon with two different versions, normal and challenging. Challenging adds more mechanics but gives greater rewards, normal is what we have now.

Though personally I think 3 modes are better than two because you can do normal, hard and savage/extreme/challenge. Because there are people who sit in the middle who want a challenge but not to be a progression kind of challenge.

I would be one of those people. I dislike the strict formula of Extreme and Savage fights "do the dance or DIE."
I would be all for harder dungeons or rather something like "challenge" dungeons. In their own tier outside of roulettes.

[Recon1o6]

Something most folks won't remember is that Alexander was going to have 3 tiers of difficulty, Story, Hard and Savage
The devs cut hard due to time constraints and beefed up extremes in response

Yet for SB and Shb so far the difficulty jump between extreme and savage is a lot more pronounced due to the ease of the current extremes and Ramuh having some of the lowest margin for error before a party wipe out of most fights in the game. Eden prime wasn't much better at certain points in the fight (eg orbs 1) were it not for the dps checks being very lenient (though it was the entry level of the new expansion)

Another thing that is missing is difficult solo and 4 man gameplay. We have story duties that are genuinely well liked and some early ARR dungeons, but nothing whatsoever after that. The closest was the Eureka snore fest which everybody partied up for mass fate spawning so it was a moot point anyway.

Dungeons are desperate for a overhaul as well given how identical they all are to one another. Most of little to no challenge and no branching paths. People point out that the ARR dungeons had branching paths that nobody did- well no shit they didnt do them, the paths didn't lead to any kind of meaningful reward, nor were they alternate ways to progress through the dungeon.
The only exception was thousand maws, but that was made moot too by having one less orb on the alt path so you had to do the main one anyway.


We need a higher skill floor at this point as its been lowered far too much and more variance in combat encounter difficulty and content type.

There's a thread going round about making the older content have lower Ilvl, its something I've been wondering why it hasn't been implemented yet. I would also suggest a secondary restriction so that you must have your best gear on in order to enter alliance roulette and curb the excess of crystal tower and void ark

[linay]

I'm not even saying to retroactively do it in my suggestion, except possibly for ShB content. I could be a "moving forward" thing because I know retroactively doing it would be a lot of work.

But that said roulettes can get dull, running content over and over can get dull and when there's little challenge to it, it can get dull (especially as a healer, where it gets dull pretty quick because on content stuff is often quite easy for a healer) ...and I don't see why old content has to be viewed as dull and irrelevant. Maybe it's because I come from a background where SE in FFXI were like "Dynamis is old, let's revitalise it" and more relevant now "Walk of Echoes is old, let's revitalise it", same for Nyzul and a lot of the BCNM's have high end versions with difficulty tiers to make them useful and relevant. This means going back to old content without it being dull and a cake walk. Yes, FFXI is at the end of its life but to me it just seems odd to have loads of content but only a handful of it be relevant or interesting...because it ends up feeling like you have less content, when in reality we have a butt load.

The limited job system also presents an opportunity to revitalise that old content too, I had a blast on my BLU trying some of Coils again.

It just seems a waste of content otherwise.

It's not strictly about old content, although that's where the effect is more pronounced. Even current content works the same way. People who are geared via savage have a much easier time to live through failed mechanics on newer content in comparison to someone who wears weaker gears.

Also, the more difficulty level, tho more you have to differentiate. If not done correctly, you can have the lowest difficulty being too easy or the highest difficulty being too hard or the middle difficulty not differentiating enough to again be considered irrelevant as content but still having an effect on gearing.

[AdamFyi]

I see “random” being used in the OP, and I honestly don’t think that’s what people want. Look no further than Urth’s Fount as the epitome of how complete randomness would work in FFXIV. You might get four tank busters in a row to the face, or Odin could randomly decide to lock out melees for 15 seconds. Heck, we even have one example of a somewhat random mechanic that’s current that has been met with a lot of distaste: E8S’s Light Rampant.

The problem with wanting to add pure randomness is that it’s just fluff with the possibility of breaking a lot of things. That’s why the current encounter design has randomness set to specific mechanics — it allows more predictability without potentially breaking things. Random raidwides has the potential to break things significantly. What if it happens during a strong proximity aoe? What about during a heavy hitting stack marker? The current battle system just does not allow for these snap judgements. There’s also just not enough MP sustain to accommodate for it either. It would require a massive overhaul of the entire battle system for it to even remotely work.

[KageTokage]

XIV's encounters being static and the mechanics largely predictable or controllable is good in that it keeps the difficulty consistent.

Several encounters in WoW's earlier days had mechanics that could be easy or completely awful depending on how they decided to play out, as they originally did not have restrictions/rules in play to prevent scenarios like, say, all of your healers being temporarily forced to stop healing because of a mechanic targeting them while the tanks are getting pulverized.

[yukiiyuki]

I would be one of those people. I dislike the strict formula of Extreme and Savage fights "do the dance or DIE."
I would be all for harder dungeons or rather something like "challenge" dungeons. In their own tier outside of roulettes.

We lost that fight already, if you want something hard, you can dance in extremes and savages, dungeons are dead on arrival, people dont want to waste their time on content, 24-man dungeons (raids) being nerfed and even new ones will not have harder difficulty. Just think of this game as life simulator or something, with a story, where you can hang out with friends. We're losing more and more PVE content for other stuff like RP/crafting and people want this, after all, its just final fantasy theme park with a decent story.

[Daniolaut]

Overhaul the game!

No.

Square-Enix literally just ---removed---- a lot of the mechanics core to tanking, and have been doing so steadily over the years, because people fail to perform their tasks as a tank, and constantly encourage your meme nonsense "blue dps."

Look at some famous youtube/twitch users who claim "man mode" to be wise, while the community at large fails.

Meanwhile in Japan, clear rates are higher, as they do not encourage "speed/damage", but encourage party play, and success.

Healers are now failing to perform their healing roles letting tanks and dps die to mechanics they are not failing to perform. When literally they have only 2 single target damage spells..... healing is so simple and they still let tanks and dps die to mechanics they perform correctly. Or in other words, tanks dying to auto attacks or dps dying to raid wide attacks, because healer refuse to cast healing spells.


The more responsibility Square-Enix places on tanks and healers, the more the English community fails.

What they need to do is remove all dps spells from healers entirely and make the damage come from casting heals or off globals. Or conversely make damage spells also heal the party.....



Stop asking for changes when people are failing to perform and have success at large.

People need to realize their failures, accept wipes as learning experiences and ----stop---- failing to perform their role functions and trying to ignore mechanics.

[Billythepancake]

nonsense

Healers will ALWAYS need DPS abilities. Even outside of savage,there are solo story instances where DPSing is required. My class has been ruined enough this expansion, I don't need it thrown any further.down the hole, thanks.

Also, what's with this idea that "people are bad at the class so we need to dumb the class down to where a caveman could play it" I never see this suggestion for DPS, only tanks and healers. So what, if people can't pass a DPS check that's all fine and dandy, but if a tank forgets to CD once or a healer forgets to use a heal, God forbid that can't be a mistake or just a bad player, ruin the entire role.

Anyhow I have no issue with encounter design, I think it's fine enough. What I don't think is fine is that you have 2 roles that aren't designed for it, especially the green role. I would prefer them to design healers that both work and are fun in current content them to try and redesign the entire game.

[QooEr]

There seems to be a misconception about what unpredictable damage entails. Damage can be unpredictable even in scripted fights. Take living liquid in TEA for example, the damage the party takes during jagd dolls can vary depending on how fast players feed their doll and how much hp the doll had. This can be, of course, optimized, but the fact that the damage taken is unpredictable remains.

Back when boss autos could crit, the damage a tank took was unpredictable. Think about the fausts in alex savage or the autos from a9s at min ilv... The fight was easy but the healer had to actually pay attention about tanks hp, rather ignoring autoattacks like we always do now.

if more fights had mechanics where damage varied in frequency and/or intensity, that would make healing more interesting even if the fights are still scripted.

[Shurrikhan]

...

None of this has anything to do with the OP except in that it's asking for a higher difficulty that makes responsibilities a clearer and more frontal issue, rather than something (that appears able) to be glossed over and you're saying that the NA/EU playerbases are, what, forever incapable of doing mechanics, even if they didn't seem so negligible or outweighed by the need for output that people ignore them?