Anybody else got tired of scripted fights?

[Hatfright]

Have you ever been in a fight you've done 10, 20, maybe 39 times but on the 40th you perform the exact same movements as before but suddenly get hit?

More than once. Just this week in Bunker I was nowhere even near the hit range of aoe, teleported to a safe zone in a corner with enough time before the attack and yet got killed. Lying dead under giant doll skirt isn't nice. But, well, my own potato laptop ain't helping in that regard either.

I guess scripts can be helpful in the regard of lag, cuz you know whats coming w\o seeing it. Like, my friend RajNish over here lagged like hell in Cosmos in 5.25, I believe (there and in Amarout, other duties was fine), never even saw trash mobs and bosses didn't move much on his screen. But he managed to clear the dungeon everytime he got it in roulette, not only on tank, but on healer as well. All cuz he knew what to expect and acted accordingly. And while I admire that, I also couldn't stop asking myself, what good of a dungeon is this that it could be completed blindly.

One thing that bothers me as well: trash is all the same. 3-4 autoattacks, cast or aoe, repeat. Again, the only difference is visuals. It was fun to find a mob with different abilities, that made them a priority target just to make our life easier: bees in Quarn, Hellbreaker and Neverreap, heretics turning themselves into dragons in Stone Vigil Hard and Snowcloak, that plants spawning other little plants that gives you poison debuff on explosion in Sohm Al. After that I honestly can't remember anything similar. Maybe Amarout with its bombs and sprites cutting healing outcome, but those are so easy it could be just ignored and killed with everybody else. Now imagine you coudn't heal at all if that mob was active, so you need to CC it or kill it asap, before other mobs kill the tank. I wish something like that occured more often, not millions of aoe in every new dungeon.

[DrWho2010]

even with mobs that have stuff that need to be cc'd people don't stun/silence them. the trash after 1st boss in puppet's bunker would be so much faster if people actually did their job but no, no one cares.

[Gemina]

As a healer, I do wish fights were less scripted that way I can heal more reactively, but I don't have a problem with scripted mechanics as a healer thanks to content like Alliance Raids and Bozja. Even though the mechanics are scripted, those who will dodge and will not dodge are not. High end duties as a healer is a different story since nearly all the of the healing requirements are also scripted. For relevant content when the DPS checks are tighter, there isn't a lot of margin for error.

As a DPS, I favor scripted mechanics because it allows me to actually get better at that particular fight. I may notice things like holding off on slapping a vuln+ on the boss because a mechanic that tends to make DPS lose throttle might line up perfectly with it. There is also what I like to call 'a flashy factor' wherein not only do you learn the fight, but you also add some pizazz to it to make yourself look like a seasoned pro.

In any case, I do enjoy when bosses mix things up a bit, and some fights do have a bit of randomness to it that might divert my attention away from my rotation enough to screw it up. Making fights more random would be a change to encounter design. While I don't oppose this, I just know it would be a ton of work for the devs, and there would be a lot of trial and error, hot fixes, and all that.

[Hatfright]

even with mobs that have stuff that need to be cc'd people don't stun/silence them. the trash after 1st boss in puppet's bunker would be so much faster if people actually did their job but no, no one cares.

Well, if something similar appeared more often or was punished more, I think people'd start pay more attention to it. Years of "you can ignore it all and still make it" doesn't help.

[Chie_M]

I do like scripted fights in general. What I don't like is having to fight as a different character. I don't want to fight as Hien, or Alphinaud, or Renda-Rae, or whoever I'll have to spam a boring single-button rotation on for fifteen sleep-inducing minutes next.

[Liam_Harper]

Have you ever been in a fight you've done 10, 20, maybe 39 times but on the 40th you perform the exact same movements as before but suddenly get hit?

Server ticks are frustrating.

Other things are animation times, like how in WoW you can press an interrupt ability or tank cd at literally 99% of the cast bar and it will work, but in FF you might use it at 80% and take the ability to the face. We all know the "but I pressed Benediction!" memes. Clipping is a big one, you don't really clip oGcds in WoW. There's also the way aoe heals and shields apply to party members 1 by 1, so 6 people might receive the heal and the last 2 die to the raidwide before it gets to them. And then the way Enix only likes to play the attack animation after the damage hit has been registered, so you've ran halfway across the room, appear to have dodged the blast and fall over dead.

I like FF14 but the combat is terribly clunky. Part of optimizing and high end play basically comes down to understanding how the system doesn't work and adjusting to it.

[Cilia]

The scripted fights do get very boring; the over reliance on step by step predictability makes fights a dance, so winning them becomes more or less a matter of memorizing all the boss' attack patterns, where to stand and when.

It's fun to figure them out, but as a casual I don't often bother with EX fights and with only one dungeon per patch these days it gets very dull. Even the big raid fights eventually become predictable and easy; I challenge myself to clear them without getting a Vuln Up debuff and once I manage that it's impressively boring.

I recently jumped back onto WoW in preparation for the next expack; while the world isn't as pretty and the most current expack's story was... lacking to say the least, the boss fights are much more hectic. Even if you know everything the boss can do it still takes a considerable amount of attention to stay alive and win because there's an element of randomness to a lot of it, fights are generally much faster, and the bosses don't telegraph their attacks nearly as much. (The main problem with the game at present is a labyrinthine system of temporary powers that come and go with expacks, intended major pieces of content that fell flat on their face like the Diadem and Eureka, and lots of required daily / weekly content you need to keep up with. Mobile gaming systems are not enjoyable outside of their home environment!)

[Raikai]

The scripted fights do get very boring; the over reliance on step by step predictability makes fights a dance, so winning them becomes more or less a matter of memorizing all the boss' attack patterns, where to stand and when.

It's fun to figure them out, but as a casual I don't often bother with EX fights and with only one dungeon per patch these days it gets very dull. Even the big raid fights eventually become predictable and easy; I challenge myself to clear them without getting a Vuln Up debuff and once I manage that it's impressively boring.

I recently jumped back onto WoW in preparation for the next expack; while the world isn't as pretty and the most current expack's story was... lacking to say the least, the boss fights are much more hectic. Even if you know everything the boss can do it still takes a considerable amount of attention to stay alive and win because there's an element of randomness to a lot of it, fights are generally much faster, and the bosses don't telegraph their attacks nearly as much. (The main problem with the game at present is a labyrinthine system of temporary powers that come and go with expacks, intended major pieces of content that fell flat on their face like the Diadem and Eureka, and lots of required daily / weekly content you need to keep up with. Mobile gaming systems are not enjoyable outside of their home environment!)

Element of randomness in WoW fights? I don't see it, at all... The fights are scripted, that's why they have DBM over there that shows you the timer of all of boss actions. The thing that can add a lot of variables to the fights are not the randomness, but the fact that most fights can be done in different ways, and DPS there have a lot more responsibility than in XIV, which is basically just predict the telegraphs and react to AoE marks accordingly. Basically very linear fights. WoW's bosses also never follow a specific rule, so it's usually harder to be intuitive on what to do, and that I would also think it's an element that make their fights feel less "scripted".

But still yeah, WoW has that over XIV - those elements tend to make the fights more interesting. The downside is that they are much harder to balance, and often a content patch goes through a lot of hotfixes and adjustments.

[Dyvid]

Video Games in general is about learning patterns.

[Absurdity]

Element of randomness in WoW fights? I don't see it, at all... The fights are scripted, that's why they have DBM over there that shows you the timer of all of boss actions. The thing that can add a lot of variables to the fights are not the randomness, but the fact that most fights can be done in different ways, and DPS there have a lot more responsibility than in XIV, which is basically just predict the telegraphs and react to AoE marks accordingly. Basically very linear fights. WoW's bosses also never follow a specific rule, so it's usually harder to be intuitive on what to do, and that I would also think it's an element that make their fights feel less "scripted".

But still yeah, WoW has that over XIV - those elements tend to make the fights more interesting. The downside is that they are much harder to balance, and often a content patch goes through a lot of hotfixes and adjustments.

I think that's exactly it. DBM often only tells you while or after the boss has already started to do a mechanic because on a lot of bosses there is no "sequence" of mechanics, there is a timer on when mechanics could or could not happen, or a completely different mechanic who's timer is ready happens instead.


I think what most people mean with scripted fights in XIV are the fights where you can determine exactly at which minute/second into the pull the boss is gonna do xy mechanic and it will always do this mechanic at the exact same time.

Server ticks are frustrating.

Other things are animation times, like how in WoW you can press an interrupt ability or tank cd at literally 99% of the cast bar and it will work, but in FF you might use it at 80% and take the ability to the face. We all know the "but I pressed Benediction!" memes. Clipping is a big one, you don't really clip oGcds in WoW. There's also the way aoe heals and shields apply to party members 1 by 1, so 6 people might receive the heal and the last 2 die to the raidwide before it gets to them. And then the way Enix only likes to play the attack animation after the damage hit has been registered, so you've ran halfway across the room, appear to have dodged the blast and fall over dead.

I like FF14 but the combat is terribly clunky. Part of optimizing and high end play basically comes down to understanding how the system doesn't work and adjusting to it.

This is pretty much what makes XIV's pvp so utterly unplayable for me, there is no split second interrupt or split second healing to save a teammate, it simply doesn't work.


But their pvp job design would make you think so. Stuns, silences and snares that last maybe 2-3 seconds, very little CC in general and often very high damage spikes in relation to hp, basically exactly the place where you would need to be able to make split second decisions. What you end up with is a pvp design that is actively fighting with the game's combat system.