FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Kozh]

I think this was a very practical move, and I loved how the stories all came together in ShB and would love to see more of that too~

It is practical, yeah, but I hope endwalker role quest is more about our job. I don't necessarily dislike ShB role quest (hell, I love the healer one), but it was way overshadowed by ardbert's gang story. In the end it just feels like a cover for their background rather than a substitute for job quests. Not to mention that some job just doesn't match with the story since you have at least three jobs for each class, that may have very much different aesthetic.

[Penthea]

This sounds very interesting, but as someone who never got into WoW I'm super lost lol.
What are these add-ons and how can they be basically mandatory for some raids?

So back in the early days of WoW raid bosses were far more simple to now. This was due to Blizzard still being relatively new to mmo boss design and also because of add-ons. In the beginning there were only a handful of add-ons but as time progressed they became commonly used, one of those being boss add-ons. What they do is put timers on the screen showing the queue of boss abilities giving you plenty of time to know exactly what was going to happen and exactly when. Unsurprisingly this made bosses easier to do so in reaction to this Blizzard had to make bosses harder because an enormous chunk of the raiding community were trivialising them with add-ons. Eventually it got to the point that any remotely serious raiding team used boss mods.

And this created a vicious cycle. Players use boss mods to kill bosses faster so then Blizzard creates bosses with the use of those add-ons in mind so that they remain challenging even with add-on use, which means you actually need to have a boss add-on to be able to do the content in a timely manner.

Having a damage meter was mandatory in every team I played with. Not only because they showed dps, but they also showed who died of what and when, what cds were used, who got debuffs, who cleansed them...so much useful information that is a lot more accessible than going through WoW's version of fflogs.

A threat meter is often mandatory so you can ensure that you never pulled aggro off of the main tank by accident. I don't know if this is still the case now but back when I played it was a lot easier for dps to get aggro mid-fight than in FF, so most dps needed to have one especially if they had high burst damage.

Some guilds used player generated currency to divvy out loot. You bid on item drops and you accumulated that currency with raid attendance. As far as I know loot is personal now in raids, (loot is automatically and randomly given to players by the game, you don't roll) I don't know for sure if it is because I never needed to check as I had no intention of raiding when I briefly played again, but if this is the case now then add-ons that managed that are no longer needed.

Some bosses have certain mechanics that have add-ons specifically developed for them. If you're in a competitive team you're expected to use every edge possible to ensure faster kills, so if a boss specific add-on was helpful in clearing it faster you are most times expected to have it.

So the above is what was typically mandatory back when I raided. In addition to this most players needed additional add-ons to make their ui more suitable for the class and role they played. And as I mentioned before in WoW's base ui you can't even move your action bars. It was pretty rare to find someone who raided regularly who didn't use add-ons to make their ui make sense for what they had to do.

Sometimes the author broke their own addon. It was like running a highly modded android, maybe vs FFXIV being an iphone that just works.

Yeap sometimes the dev for the add-on would update it and break it in the process, which was very frustrating if you had a raid before the add-on got fixed, so you had to find an older version of it to roll-back to before it was broken or try to find another similar add-on that worked.

The worst was when you found a great add-on and then after some time the dev, for whatever reason, stopped working on it. If no one picked up that project then you would eventually have to stop using the add-on because as time passed it would become more and more out of date which meant a higher chance for ui errors. And sometimes you can't find another similar add-on that do the things you need from the other add-on...so then you just have to deal with being without something that improved your experience in the game.

Is FFXIV's ui perfect? Absolutely not, but because SE update it regularly and its base ui gives a tremendous amount of options for players to tweak the layout to whatever suits them best, you can still do high-end content without your ui getting in the way of your combat performance.

Personally the only thing that's missing for me is something small about the focus target pane. I wish it showed the target of the focus target...but that's it. Aside from that one small thing I don't ever feel like I need an add-on to be able to play the way I want. FFXIV's ui options fulfill every other need that I have, and that small thing it doesn't has very little effect on me. I can easily deal with not having it, I would just prefer to have it.

[Disappoint]

Ion Hazzikostas is an actual idiot that managed to completely subvert and ruin what was once a titan of this genre. Legion was a fluke, the only decent thing that's come about since he took over WoW was Mythic+ and even then the balance for it is all out of wack currently. The current story team has no idea what they're doing and just hope to cash in on cheap shocking moments and nostalgia to carry their ineptitude. I feel sorry for the art department at Blizzard as they're shackled to incompetents. At least with classic and TBC soon, I know what to expect. Every time someone on WoW's dev team opens their mouth, I dread what will come out.

[Jojoya]

Ion Hazzikostas is an actual idiot that managed to completely subvert and ruin what was once a titan of this genre. Legion was a fluke, the only decent thing that's come about since he took over WoW was Mythic+ and even then the balance for it is all out of wack currently. The current story team has no idea what they're doing and just hope to cash in on cheap shocking moments and nostalgia to carry their ineptitude. I feel sorry for the art department at Blizzard as they're shackled to incompetents. At least with classic and TBC soon, I know what to expect. Every time someone on WoW's dev team opens their mouth, I dread what will come out.

WoW was already going downhill while he was still Lead Encounter Designer, before he got promoted to Assistant Game Director partway through WoD and finally Game Director just after Legion' launch. I think the problems really started when Blizzard dumped the people who screwed up the Titan MMO project back in WoW, which happened midway through Mists of Pandaria.

I still don't think Ion was the right choice for Game Director but people really need to get off his case.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Are we calling XIV a single-player oriented game and saying that it's not a MMO am I reading this right?

Honestly, Until you start doing dungeons, Raids and trials, or big Fates and misc content like grinding tomes/memories/Atmas for a questline...FFXIV is mostly Single-player focused.
Every other player around you is known as an Adventurer who you recruit to tag along

[ItMe]

[a beautiful answer]

God, I can't imagine how hectic this must be now after so many years of attrition against the players.
The "we'll give you something you can't trivialize" of it all also helps me understand WoW's ever more consuming push towards high end content.

For your UI to just break...
Needing to bring your own UI element for even something as simple as loot distribution...
what a nightmare.

[Bright-Flower]

Honestly, Until you start doing dungeons, Raids and trials, or big Fates and misc content like grinding tomes/memories/Atmas for a questline...FFXIV is mostly Single-player focused.
Every other player around you is known as an Adventurer who you recruit to tag along

Even then you're still in a game world with tons of other people in the same world. Even if you could complete the entire MSQ without getting into a party, it would still be an MMO.

[Nayout]

This MMO is just not designed for high end pve raid content...

Not em.
This game is not made for the High End community in PVE due to the lack of development of this content, the amount of bosses that each raid brings in the Wow counts with the amount we have here.

While Wow has the use of mythical + and raid even a "High End" zone like the Maws or the new zone that comes in 9.1 in FFXIV we don't have anything, the closest thing we had was Eureka in Stormblood.

The UI in this game works perfectly and the general content is mostly thrown without the use of addons or anything because coordinating 8 people is not the same as 25 and it is not the same as here, much of the content is intuitive, you can see that is going to make a boss because the animations of the bosses help this, all the fights are made so that you only have to look what happens around and calculate. In Wow it is impossible to predict many abilities because they usually involve RNG, making the fighting a chaos from which you have to solve it, I often still eat aoes in Wow because the animations of these or the bosses are too orthopedic.

FFXIV has a more stable community and content schedule, and we have a dev-team and leadership here who not only actually PLAY their own game but also who treat us as actual people not just wallets with legs. They tell u...

Yoshida is a very good dev, do you know what the problem is? SE
Do you think they charge us 5 dollars for a fucking mobile application for premium functions while in the wow their application can I do everything for free?

That they have not done the same here? That they say that they delay the Ultimate for 5.5 months ago for the same day of the live letter to say that it would not be until 6.1? It was so difficult to communicate it months ago that as much as possible they would not have Ultimate for 5.5 ,?

Seriously, when I read them, I don't know if they deliberately omit information or that they really do not know the problems of this game

On...

Come on, you speak as if in Wow you cannot be casual, we are talking about a game that has an absurd amount of achievements, secret achievements in the world, treasures, reputations and mounts.

For the rest, you talk about Ego as if in this game there was no go when we have people who buy kills for 1000 dollars of an Ultimate and then show the weapon to everyone and give lessons on how to be a good player like a certain clown in Excalibur. People who buy logs to increase their ego in the game and yes, guess this game also has temporary rewards!

I remind you of Garo's rewards? the ones from the 18 seasons of The Feast?

[Liam_Harper]

So back in the early days of WoW raid bosses were far more simple to now. This was due to Blizzard still being relatively new to mmo boss design and also because of add-ons.

Honestly I believe it's more with how gaming has evolved and the impact the internet has than just addons. In the past raid bosses with 3 mechanics worked fine because we were all essentially nubs (in a nice way). Very few people read guides and information was harder to come by, you'd just stumble through, put on whatever gear you scraped together and it was plenty because everyone else was in a similar boat.
Nowadays information on literally everything is available online and people tend to be competitive and want to be good at things, so they research and use this information for almost everything, from dungeon tactics to rotations to where to find items and so on. Thus gaming as a whole has evolved to be far more complex to keep players with all the information suitably challenged. It's also a reason why the divide between the casual who doesn't read up things and the serious players is so wide. Even FF14's bosses, with no addons, are probably even more mechanically complex than WoW's at endgame. I've seen WoW heroic raid bosses summed up in 5-6 lines where Savage bosses are usually several pages. It makes games more complicated to develop too, anything you produce will be analyzed by the player-base and flaws or imbalances picked out almost immediately.

In one way it has positive sides too. I personally find bosses with a whole range of mechanics and factors to watch out for a lot more interesting than 3 mechanic target dummies. Once you've had a taste of advanced raiding and in-depth strategizing, it's hard to go back to simplistic gameplay. Information being available isn't necessarily a bad thing, research is an important part of becoming good at many things in life. I like gaming that tests the limits a bit.

[LisSquid]

I've seen WoW heroic raid bosses summed up in 5-6 lines where Savage bosses are usually several pages.

Not to be rude but it's because WoW's savage is mythic. Normal is meme tier, heroic is for the casuals, and mythic is for statics.