This game doesn't do enough to help people clear Ex/Savage content.

[Goji1639]

All the spellcasters Trust AIs (sometimes even the other) aren’t even capable of dodging AoEs consistently in a rather open space and you’d expect them to perform some mech that requires specific, tighter positioning?

Not to mention, they do not attack -at all- while performing/dodging mechanics—something that extreme/savage/ultimates are littered with. This is one of the reason why Trust NPCs has lower damage potential than human player. They can go on performing several succession of mechanics but not damaging anything in that window (if they succeed, at all). This can only do one from two thing: (1) They inflate Trust NPCs offense so much that they’re basically ‘carrying’ the human player or; (2) They will never help player clear anything because they just don’t contribute enough. Neither of those makes the human player feel any better.

Nay man—sorry to burst your bubble—you really -are- overestimating Trusts.

I'm not overestimating trusts now; I'm just telling you what they're capable of if programmed correctly. It's not difficult to have them move out of stuff, or 'do enough damage,' it's just unnecessary in 4 player dungeons. Honestly, making them perfect is probably easier than making them viable, but just dumb enough to not outshine the average party of players.

In a practice environment, however, you're free to more or less make them perfect; scale their DPS to wherever you need it and leave the player responsible for mechanics whenever you can.

[SaberMaxwell]

There's really no reason NOT to have trusts there as a more convenient option. I think a lot of the people here PREFER that most people don't do this content.

If it were convenient enough where most players could reasonably learn it then you'd probably all start realizing how easy this content is. Clear %'s would be way up; PuGs would be stomping it easily even before nerfs and the illusion that this game has ANY difficult content would disappear. I believe you all want this stuff to be gated by inconvenience simply so you can feel special.

There's plenty of reason, it's just reason you don't like so you're disregarding it. You're right by the way, Savage is painfully easy. Heck, even Ultimate is easy. They can just take time to learn, and consistency takes time to build. It took my group ~100 cumulative hours to clear TEA, which is about average I'm told; that said, TEA is easy but finding a group of people able to consistently perform at the level needed and make / have a schedule that allows for 100 hours in a 1 month span? That's difficult.

Part of my post you responded to states that part of the challenge is navigating social spheres, and that as a social enabling tool its fair for an mmo to challenge players to be social. Feel free to disagree, call it dumb, say trusts would be better... Well, it's a good thing FFXIV has a lot of other content.

[ZedxKayn]

There's really no reason NOT to have trusts there as a more convenient option. I think a lot of the people here PREFER that most people don't do this content.

If it were convenient enough where most players could reasonably learn it then you'd probably all start realizing how easy this content is. Clear %'s would be way up; PuGs would be stomping it easily even before nerfs, and the illusion that this game has ANY difficult content would disappear. I believe you all want this stuff to be gated by inconvenience simply so you can feel special.

Duh, even Ultimate's clear % would soar if it could be solo'd, have you ever done harder content before?
8 human players, from the beginning to the end, is part of what makes most of the content difficult (and social, in a mmorpg!), and that's the case for a lot of co-op game, it is designed and balanced that way.

[Absurdity]

I'm not overestimating trusts now; I'm just telling you what they're capable of if programmed correctly. It's not difficult to have them move out of stuff, or 'do enough damage,' it's just unnecessary in 4 player dungeons. Honestly, making them perfect is probably easier than making them viable, but just dumb enough to not outshine the average party of players.

It is completely irrelevant if a bot can in theory be designed to beat savage, because the observable reality is that they can barely make them work in the most basic content.

The fact is that they had to design every single dungeon in ShB to the exact same template of "long straight corridor -> square arena -> long straight corridor -> long straight corridor -> round arena" to make Trusts work correctly at all. And even within that environment specifically designed for the Trusts they either take an incredibly long time to execute those simplistic and easy dungeon mechanics, still regularly fail to execute the 100% scripted sequence of mechanics correctly and they absolutely fail to deal with anything that is outside of that 100% scripted sequence.

If there is one thing that would make me drop this game immediately like a hot potato then it'd be SE starting to design their higher difficulty content with the restriction that it has to function with Trusts in mind.


Fights like E4S would probably go right out of the window, mechanics would need an incredibly generous amount of time to execute them to account for how slowly Trusts react and you can certainly say goodbye to any kind of randomized execution of boss mechanics.

[Raven2014]

eh he's the guy who feels proud he can freely leeching off 23 people in DR without spending effort and call himself smart. No surprise he's mad he can't leech off 7 people in savage.

That's the beauty of this content: you want the clear, you put in the effort. No effort? No clear for you. Another beauty is you can toss out any kind of excuses. Oh it's too hard, too much effort, too much time whatever? Well, that's what the people who already cleared had to put in, so will you.

Again, the rich gets richer because they put in the effort and able to take advantage of every opportunity for improvement. The poor gets poorer because they care only for scrabbling bottom for breadcrumb (like leeching off DR). And there will be time (savage) those who don't want to put in the effort will just have to be content sitting on the sideline salivating when the people who did put in the effort enjoy their feast.

[Nethereal]

Other MMORPGs get away with this because they also offer engaging small group content, solo content, and other forms of engaging endgame progression that aren't gated by ridiculous inconvenience. In terms of challenging/engaging endgame gameplay FFXIV throws all of it's eggs into Savage/Ultimate raids, and then gives the vast majority of players no convenient way to enjoy them. It's dumb.

Fair point, in all the other games I've played I've been able to solo relevant content and been given relevant content for lower group sizes 4-6.

I'm still genuinely curious to know what games offer 'guaranteed legitimate practice' however it's not a big contention.

All the spellcasters Trust AIs (sometimes even the other) aren’t even capable of dodging AoEs consistently in a rather open space and you’d expect them to perform some mech that requires specific, tighter positioning?

Not to mention, they do not attack -at all- while performing/dodging mechanics—something that extreme/savage/ultimates are littered with. This is one of the reason why Trust NPCs has lower damage potential than human player. They can go on performing several succession of mechanics but not damaging anything in that window (if they succeed, at all). This can only do one from two thing: (1) They inflate Trust NPCs offense so much that they’re basically ‘carrying’ the human player or; (2) They will never help player clear anything because they just don’t contribute enough. Neither of those makes the human player feel any better.

Nay man—sorry to burst your bubble—you really -are- overestimating Trusts.

To be fair that's not honestly a big problem considering you have 50% enrage memes, it's everything else.

[Rinhi]

just stop replying to him, it's his gimmick now and he'll run it to the ground because people will keep biting

[ItMe]

If they had to make AI able to execute even EX level mechanics, I imagine the limitations of the AI would shape what mechanics they're able to implement.
Savage and Ultimate would get gimped pretty hard.
I don't want an "features" that lessen the content they're attached to.

[Goji1639]

It is completely irrelevant if a bot can in theory be designed to beat savage, because the observable reality is that they can barely make them work in the most basic content.

The fact is that they had to design every single dungeon in ShB to the exact same template of "long straight corridor -> square arena -> long straight corridor -> long straight corridor -> round arena" to make Trusts work correctly at all. And even within that environment specifically designed for the Trusts they either take an incredibly long time to execute those simplistic and easy dungeon mechanics, still regularly fail to execute the 100% scripted sequence of mechanics correctly and they absolutely fail to deal with anything that is outside of that 100% scripted sequence.

SE could design trust AI to be able to absolutely destroy every Savage fight way more efficiently than any player team could ever hope to. Making an AI perfect is easy; AI can detect incoming mechanics on a packet level and perform the calculations to determine the absolute perfect response to everything in fractions of a second. FFXIV mechanics are basically elementary school levels of math and pattern recognition calculations that an AI could perform thousands of in a second.

Rest assured, there's no issue with creating trust AI that could do everything a player group does 100x better. SE gimps trusts for the same reasons that no game makes the AI perfect... Imagine a fighting game where the AI has perfect defense and perfect input reading; it would be unbeatable. The challenge is making the AI weak and vulnerable enough for players to be able to compete. Trusts are slow and derpy because they were intentionally designed that way.

Creating trust AI that could handle Savage fights would be childsplay. The only challenge would be making sure that most of the onus of successful completion is on the player; meaning you target the player with every mechanic you can and use the players DPS as the barometer for beating enrage.

[Mavrias]

I know what a static is; I'm talking about putting together a practice party on the spot, not finding 7 new BFFs to coordinate my life around. Statics are an entirely different issue people tend to hate for different reasons.

What I'm talking about is people being able to get some C O N V E N I E N T practice in so they can more easily find/create and get into successful PuGs. Trusts would be a perfect way for people to practice on their own schedule and be far more prepared when they finally are able to get a real run going.


This is just a ridiculous argument. If you know the mechanics and know what YOU'RE supposed to do then it doesn't matter if it's a trust or a real group. A trust is more pressure than a real group because you end up shouldering the majority of the responsibility for mechanics, and if you screw up and die you're starting over; no res. If you can perform well in a trust you'll be fine in a real group.

The guy happily getting carried through DR is asking for devs to make an AI to hard carry them through savage?