Normal Raids aren't exactly Raids, are they?

[ReiganCross]

Yeah people hate trash. They took trash out of Savage Alexander raids entirely. I'd much prefer a Binding Coil Turn 1 style depth exploration with bosses laid out across a map with their own arenas...

You can blame Turn 10 of Binding Coil(Turn 1 Final Coil). It this turn they incidentally made it possible for Ninja or DRG to skip the entirety of the trash segment, and so a lot of people would skip that trash segment entirely. And basically, SE doesn't want to make challenging trash, because no matter how challenging they made trash it'd always have to be weaker than the boss anyway, and you wouldn't get rewards from it. No rewards means players don't want it. I guess some people were complaining as early as Turn 3 of Binding Coil, since it had no rewards as well, but it was mandatory.

They also used to have waiting lobbies in between boss floors in Coil and Alexander, but eventually decided that those weren't being utilized very much for rest breaks or anything, so they did away with them too. They were really small, like the lobbies between the Deep Dungeon floorsets. Not much to see, but they did add a little more space and flavor and made the raids feel larger to me.


It's one of the game's weaknesses, but it's still around in the 24 man raids and the 100 man instances like Eureka/Bozja style places. Baldesion Arsenal/Delbrum Reginae etc. They are still trying to implement it. It's just not going to be in the main line raid events, probably ever again.

Yeah, maybe making challenging trash is something they're still trying to do. Like, the latest dungeon Paglth'an has a boss that is just a bunch of Trash Mobs and beating on a cube for a while, Alliance Raids still have some rooms that is just about beating a wave of Chocobos or Robots, so it still exists.

It's just Normal Raids that I guess got complained into just being a collection of boss fights without any exploration to them. Maybe Binding Coil was too much but I truly believe Alexander had the best balance out of it. But then, once again, I'm just saying "Heavensward best expansion" yet again...

[Vidu]

Yeah, maybe making challenging trash is something they're still trying to do. Like, the latest dungeon Paglth'an has a boss that is just a bunch of Trash Mobs and beating on a cube for a while, Alliance Raids still have some rooms that is just about beating a wave of Chocobos or Robots, so it still exists.

It's just Normal Raids that I guess got complained into just being a collection of boss fights without any exploration to them. Maybe Binding Coil was too much but I truly believe Alexander had the best balance out of it. But then, once again, I'm just saying "Heavensward best expansion" yet again...

So, here is the thing for me: Exploring and trash fights are nice - the first time you run the raid in question. The second time, you might notice a few little details you missed the first round. The third time its okay.
...and then we're on week 4 of running this raid for weekly loot, I already did this one raid 15 times in one single day and I've explored everything the raid has to offer, I've fought this trash 15 times today already when the only thing I want to do is kill the boss. It doesnt add anything anymore, it doesnt drop anything, its just an annoyance and frankly a waste of time.

I actually liked how the Omega raids did it: We had trash fights in there - but they werent parts of the actual fights, you did them as solo-content while unlocking the next duty.

In regards to challenging trash... non of your examples is challenging.

[Frizze]

So, here is the thing for me: Exploring and trash fights are nice - the first time you run the raid in question. The second time, you might notice a few little details you missed the first round. The third time its okay.
...and then we're on week 4 of running this raid for weekly loot, I already did this one raid 15 times in one single day and I've explored everything the raid has to offer, I've fought this trash 15 times today already when the only thing I want to do is kill the boss. It doesnt add anything anymore, it doesnt drop anything, its just an annoyance and frankly a waste of time.

I actually liked how the Omega raids did it: We had trash fights in there - but they werent parts of the actual fights, you did them as solo-content while unlocking the next duty.

In regards to challenging trash... non of your examples is challenging.

Agree wholeheartedly with this. Exploring and trash in raids is the sort of thing that sounds better in theory then it feels in practice.

[ReynTime]

Responses like the ones in this thread almost me want to quit before Endwalker.

Why don't we just remove trashes, period? After all only bosses matter, and the game's combat is way too static and lacking depth without enemy/boss mechanics because you do the exact same things in every fight otherwise.

Let's remove monsters from the overworld unless they're quest spawns, hunts and fates. No one likes them because they're too much weaker than bosses. All 4~24 man dungeon should consist of boss arenas with tiny paths connecting them but no enemies.
No time for trash, no time to look for chests, no time to read notes, gotta hurry up and cross these pesky duties off my checklist asap so I can log off and do something else. I enjoy the pve content I swear.

[Vidu]

Responses like the ones in this thread almost me want to quit before Endwalker.

Why don't we just remove trashes, period? After all only bosses matter, and the game's combat is way too static and lacking depth without enemy/boss mechanics because you do the exact same things in every fight otherwise.

Let's remove monsters from the overworld unless they're quest spawns, hunts and fates. No one likes them because they're too much weaker than bosses. All 4~24 man dungeon should consist of boss arenas with tiny paths connecting them but no enemies.
No time for trash, no time to look for chests, no time to read notes, gotta hurry up and cross these pesky duties off my checklist asap so I can log off and do something else. I enjoy the pve content I swear.

Let me try to explain my point a bit "better", because you jump to extreme conclusions quite fast:

For me there is a fine line, a certain balance to all content - a balance between battles and rewards; between difficult and easy encounters; between exploring/scenery and battles. For each kind of content I expect and want this balance to tip to a certain side. I need to add here that FFXIV is my first MMO, Coil was my first raid, I have no experience in regards to "the good old times" from other MMOs and how they handled raids.

So for me, in this game, the mainpoint of the raid always was the bossfight "at the end" (since it actually was "at the end"). We'd spent hours just with this fight, the raid was this fight. Running up to the boss and clearing the trash took a couple of minutes out of an evening with hours of wiping, teleporting back to the bossarena and just... fighting that boss. The focus was: Kill that boss! And which each week that passed, that focus grew stronger. With limited time to raid, you want to spent as much of it as possible with actual progress - clearing the trash takes time out of your limited budget, but you dont progress - so you find ways to skip the trash, such as forming parties dedicated to clear the trash for 8 groups (1 person from each static, makes 8 people from 8 statics, clearing the trash, then returning to their statics and jumping the rest ahead).

...now this is obviously for savage raids (and Coil), but it coloured my impression of raids as a whole and is bleeding into the NM-raids aswell. I'm sorry, but "atmosphere", "story" and "lore building" arent good enough rewards to clear that trash in NM over and over again. Please dont get me wrong here: I love those things, I play for those things. And they're great... the first time around. Maybe the second and the third. Which is why I liked the Omega-approach: You get your trash, you get your "exploring" (as much as there was to explore anyways...), but you go through that once, as part of a story that you can enjoy in that moment and that doesnt get tainted by repeating it over and over again.

For dungeons my expectations and my "wants" are different - for me dungeons and raids are two different types of content. If they werent, why do we have both of them anyways? In dungeons trash has a place for me, its closer to the "main event", the time spent in a dungeon is more split 50:50 between trash and boss, it feels more like part of the experience and less like a hinderance on the way to the fight you're actually looking forward to - if that makes sense?

Oh, and I love the notes in dungeons - but I read them once, after that I dont really need to look for them again (...maybe a year later or so...). I'll always wait for new people to read them, if they want to - but I dont need to read them on a daily basis, should I run a dungeon with notes on a daily basis. Its not about "no time", its about "I've done this once, I'm done".

The reason not to remove those things period is - at least for me - that they do have a place. Just not always, everywhere and all the time. And you have to find a balance between "it adds to the experience" and "it doesnt add enough to the experience in the long run".

[ReiganCross]

In regards to challenging trash... non of your examples is challenging.

Yeah, I said they tried. The best example I can think of is what they did on that room after the first pair of bosses in CLL, and that's also not a challenge.

But it's an attempt. It means they haven't (nor shouldn't) give up. My only point in pointing those out is saying that there's still a place for them.

And somehow I don't get tired of doing the trashpulls in Alexanders, and while I was on the HW Endgame (Which I spent a month on.) And they weren't even challenging, people just breeze past those parts, doesn't mean the fight is worthless.

[Vidu]

Yeah, I said they tried. The best example I can think of is what they did on that room after the first pair of bosses in CLL, and that's also not a challenge.

But it's an attempt. It means they haven't (nor shouldn't) give up. My only point in pointing those out is saying that there's still a place for them.

And somehow I don't get tired of doing the trashpulls in Alexanders, and while I was on the HW Endgame (Which I spent a month on.) And they weren't even challenging, people just breeze past those parts, doesn't mean the fight is worthless.

(Uni over for today, time for the second post here...)

I dont think that making the trash more challenging would be the answer by itself - they need to make these fights somehwat more engaging, to make them feel like a valid part of the overall experience (even on run 50), not like a hinderance. As I mentioned in my previous post: For me, the bossfight of a raid is the intresting part, the part where progress happens and the part you want to get to - anything on the way is amazing the first time, nice the second time, okay-ish the third time and just a drag past run 30.

Making it more challenging would only make it more of a hinderance, not necessarly more intresting.
They'd need to ask "How can we make sure that this adds to the overall experience of the content?" - so the question would also be "What do we - or the playerbase - want the overall experience of this content to be like?"

For me, trash doesnt add much to the experience of the raid content after the first few rounds. It wouldnt add much if it would be more difficult, since there isnt any benefit to gain from it anymore - I got all the lore and exploring in Omega with the solo-duties, I havent really lost that experience of the first runs, I just dont have to go through it again and again.
So that would be one way for me - to have them in solo-duties. They could also go down the route of T2 and give you certain benefits during the fight at the end if you defeat certain mobs before.

Bottomline is: I dont think adding trash just "to have it" is the way to go. It has to be tied to the gameplay aspect of the content, it has to be something intresting and something people would actually want to do - currently thats not it and has never really been it.
They'd have to find a way to make sure that those trash fights add something to the content - not only on day one where it obviously adds story, atmosphere and lore - but also on day 50.