Can we finally get real content / gameplay?

[ssunny2008]

Bumping because I would also like to know what's being referenced.

Probably nothing. Ppl just hear rumors and think they´re correct.
I personally haven´t played WoW that much. I know it got casualized much, but it´s not on the level FF14 is. But i´ve played a bunch of other MMORPG´s and they definately do a better job in case of mechanic designs. Here we´ve stack / spread mechanics, moving to safespots and some debuffs to play around (which mostly last in "move to spot X") meanwhile performing a strict rotation which got already "perfectly" matched into the content by the devs. If i would need to compare the difficulty of dungeons / raids to similar PvE content in other games, FF14 is definately at the last place.

[dreamfisher]

OP, what are some fights/mechanics you recall fondly from earlier iterations of the game that you would consider challenging in a meaningful way?
And I know it isn't your job to design the game, but I'm wondering:

Have you always considered fates pointless, or do you think they were fun at some point? Would you like to see them phased out altogether? With what would you like them to be replaced, if so?

In what vein would you like dungeon content to go?
I know you mentioned exploration, but that doesn't really add content in the long run. The only people who don't treat older dungeons like linear hallways are sprouts who don't know better.
I also know that there were dungeons in ARR that many people dreaded, but that was largely because their party members didn't understand mechanics in a way that I suspect you wouldn't really find very fun, anyway, based on your criticism of the mechanics in other content.

Sorry if at any point, I misunderstood or misrepresented your point of view! If you never thought the game was good, for example, I'd still love to know what exactly you do want to see more of.

[Auryan]

Good luck getting an answer from them going by the absurd levels of reductionism and vagueness displayed here.

[ssunny2008]

snip

If i would dislike the game that much, i wouldn´t have played it that long. The issue is still about the ongoing road downhill to make the game easier and easier. Especially SHB brought a lot of bad and way to easy content, noob changes and class dumbdowns. With Endwalker the route even seems to move downhill again. Healer homogenization and even more casualized pvp is on the way.

I don´t thinks that fates are pointless as the given content. But it´s pointless that the devs want us to do them in any given way.
It´s nice to have them to level up especially as DPS while waiting for dungeon queues. The chain fates or overall fatebosses with some special loot are fine aswell and they bring a bit life to the overworld. But that they are parts of different questlines or hunts is a no go. They have become like 50% of all content, which is just a lazy and stupid design. They´re not even optional overworld stuff, you´ve to grind 1000s of them to unlock vendors in SHB, to finish a bunch of relic weapons quests and you don´t do anything else in bozja or eureka. Ok, in eureka you´ve the elemental design and bozja ones has some mechanics, but it´s nothing deep or challenging, it´s just fategrind over and over again.
That said, i don´t want them to be removed. The devs just need to stop the permanent re-use and spam of them in form of some quests or releveling in alternative content.

With exploration i don´t mean exploration as "exploring the dungeon to unlock the mapshadows". They should just make more use of different pathes or secret rooms, whatever.
As i´ve said for example:

- Different pathings or player decisions could cause different bosses with different loot.
- Sidequests in dungeons could give extra XP / Gil or even open a path to a harder bonus boss right before the dungeon boss. This boss could drop rare pets, special crafting recipes or maybe 1 / 3 token for a mount. The other 2 can be dropped by other bonus bosses from this tier.
- Crafter could be used to open abbrevations, to bring an droid or turret back to life which is following you. Gatherer on the other side might be able to collect raremats here and there.

Overall dungeons should get harder. The challenge is not existend. My latest example would be mentorroulette where i´ve killed 50% of the endboss in amaurot solo as tank. Like wtf?! The current learning curve is not really existent as much as the loot is completely irrelevant. In other MMO´s dungeons made you stronger, you did them for fun on one hand and for the better gear pieces on the other. In FF you run level 60 dungeons with level 50 gear and you get 1 item from the boss for sure. The chests are not really needed and dps / heal a joke. Just pull less adds, bosses are no fear. You won´t even have any issue, you just need more time.
This is a serious issue in their core design. Players don´t grow, don´t get stronger. You´re just getting carried by experienced players with downgraded high-end gear. And good players don´t want to run them again since it´s overall pointless. You´ll get your raidgear via duty finder marks instead of challenging content which prepares yourself in form of difficulty and loot for incoming raid tiers.
It´s ok if normal dungeons aren´t that big of a deal, but they should bring hardcore dungeons with the named difficulty increasing and better loot aswell.

Just take the coinfinder or chimera for example. Both came up pretty new with a text message or just a short castbar. Coinfinder got hard "nerfed" again cause ppl had troubles?! I don´t get it. That´s the point where SE fails completely and forgets that this is a MMORPG. It´s a teamgame, players should help each other and find out new mechanics and how to play around them. But no, they nerf everything into nowhere.
The endboss of Totorak is a good example too or even the overall dungeon. Imagine the endboss and the plants dot would hit harder, so Esuna or kite management is highly needed. Even the addspawns and the idea with the sting are great, but it´s still not a fear since the players are way too strong even with trashgear. Oh and Soft-enrages would be fine too if you can´t manage e.g. to destroy the sting within 20s?!
Other stuff are debuffs or interrupts via silence and cc, ressourcemanagement aswell. While the first stuff is rarely a thing and mostly not even usable on big adds or bosses, the ressoucemanagement is gone completely. It makes the overall class gameplay less challenging and dungeons / raids even worse.

Another example in kind of raiding could be the good old ramuh. Players had to work together and everyone had to had a look at the orbs, debuffs etc. The fight don´t have much mechanics, but a lot of randomness so everyone had to take care. Stuff like alexander with DPS checks on adds, the heal / tank / DPS cages are a good thing too.
We need way more content which forces the player and classes on theirself and not just stack spread aoes. Even playing as OT is more like "please invul this tankbuster" and not to be a tank. We need more double / triple bosses. Adds like Zurvan which needs to be focused down BUT with the boss on the map and not as an extra. Random aggro loss where the boss needs to be taunt back, so the next cast goes onto the tank and not into the group. Kiting mechanics even as DPS or heal. And and and...
What we´ve now are fights, which are perfect matched on class cooldowns who just spam aoes or knockbacks mostly. Even the current E12s with the debuffs is not challenging, just a pain for unlucky melee dps. And on top of that, if 1 guy fails, it´s mostly a wipe.

Sad to say, with all the class dumb downs, we´ve even lost a lot of possibilities in the making of good content. Tanks can´t really protect the group, but are undying by themself. DPS can´t protect themself and even the health / MR / PR balance design is a joke. It´s all about healers in any content. In kind of dungeons, you can solo pretty much everything as tank atleast.
So as i´ve said, while Esuna, silence and cc are still a thing, it´s not even used properly by the devs. Not to say that the most players don´t even know about esuna or silence skills. Why don´t have a boss who wipes the group with debuffs or if it´s not getting silenced? Just for the fact to LEARN something?

Imagine, any new dungeons are like "go in, do big pulls, kill the boss". I personally don´t care for anything there, because it´s wall to wall anyway. Wasted efford in class, content and art design. Meanwhile raids are made of an aoe every 60s together with stack spread / tb between them. Such design like the weapons where you´ve to move onto some obstacles or to avoid splash aoes isn´t that big deal too. It´s all standard and low budget design. It´s stuff you normally learn in the first 2h in any MMORPG.

Overall the classdesign would be an endless discussion too.


Sad to see SE´s route with the game. "Casualisation" isn´t even the correct word, it´s more like "Noobisation". Any casual can run and finish the current content, just the last fights of savage (E12s / E8s / etc.) might be hard without Relic and transendence DPS buffs. But mechanical - wise it´s definately not and reached with SHB the worst state of the gameplay ever.
It just needs to stop. I don´t know how poeple have fun while running braindead content. It´s just a timesink isn´t it? Wouldn´t you have more fun to beat a challenge together with friends?

I really don´t ask for serious elitism content as other games have nightmare options in their raids. I ask for content which is more than just a beautiful environment or a circle arena. Content with variation, which make use of the utility we have on our classes and which still forces us to grow or to find new and different strategies. Content with better and even rare loot instead of some tombstones from a level 15 dungeon. Or even content we can prepare ourself better with a little skilltree like "better shields, dots tick longer, lower gapcloser cooldowns, whatever".

Wall to wall, 123 combos, move to your marker, stack / spread, invul... this shouldn´t be the answer for everything.

Good luck getting an answer from them going by the absurd levels of reductionism and vagueness displayed here.

Imagine ppl would actually concentrate on the topic instead of "playing psychotherapist" or just hunting for some thumbsups.

[rxantos]

The majority of players are not interest on this. They just want to run as flash from one end of the dungeon to the other to get their cookies (experience and tomes). And to do this, they want dungeons to be as linear as possible. To the point that a lot of players do not even know the story, and most only know the spoken parts of it.

How many of you stop to read the notes in the dungeons? And how many of you did it while having other people in the party? How many do the Temple of Quarn puzzles opening all rooms? How many do the full Hakuke mansion?

Square tried to give better dungeons, but players didn't care in the past. The focus of players is in getting the cookies as fast as possible. So why should Square do a non linear dungeon?

[ItMe]

Square tried to give better dungeons, but players didn't care in the past.

Actually, this isn't true.
The devs never intended for players to rerun dungeons, but when they saw we were they adjusted their design to suit what the players were doing and streamlined them so we could have more rerunable dungeons.

Gondai: As I said before, our intention was a system where players could level up through quests, but as we only had two years of development time, there weren’t enough quests. This resulted in players playing through dungeons over and over again, which we never intended for them to do, and we certainly hadn’t planned to implement a level syncing system.

Yoshida: Knowing players would have a need to repeat dungeons, we took various steps to simplify their design, but the ones in A Realm Reborn still bear remnants of their original designs. For example, [...]

Full story here:
https://na.finalfantasy.com/topics/21

Wether we think their adjustment is good or not is one thing, but it's factually incorrect to say we have simple dungeons because players didn't care about the more complex elements.

[True-to-Caesar]

OP don’t just focus on a single game, alternate. I know we pay a sub but honestly from my POV there’s a lot of things to do and collect.

If you want something more competitive or challenging, there are many games which can provide that.
In my case ever since I played MMORPGs I always had at least a second game focused PvP. Changes the pace and all, I think you just need that.

Does FFXIV could improve on some things ? Of course, but there’s no other game without its problems.

[ssunny2008]

OP don’t just focus on a single game, alternate. I know we pay a sub but honestly from my POV there’s a lot of things to do and collect.

If you want something more competitive or challenging, there are many games which can provide that.
In my case ever since I played MMORPGs I always had at least a second game focused PvP. Changes the pace and all, I think you just need that.

Does FFXIV could improve on some things ? Of course, but there’s no other game without its problems.

I´m not focusing on this game, i do play a bunch of games regularly and this successful for many years. But i´ve my hours in it and like it for some reasons. SE just needs to stop to make it a no-brainer.

Of course there are a lot of things to do, but they become stale very fast. Taking care about jobs isn´t neccessary away from savage and even there you can be carried hard. Grinding 99 tokens in the worst case for 1! collectible or whatever is nothing but timesink too. SE got really lazy and doesn´t even try to improve the game anymore. "There is an issue? Let´s dumb it down!"

The majority of players are not interest on this.

I´ve read this claim so often, but where is the poll? Where are the million votes of it? And why does games like Sekiro became "Game of the Year"? Because of the challenge and interesting gameplay.

I´m pretty sure that FF14 is the first MMORPG ever for the most of its players especially PS4 ones. They don´t know any other one or are not confident with games overall. The first impression might be "Wow, cool dungeons!", but even they will get used to them and get bored after a while and its daily roulette. Of course noone wants to run those stuff 24/7 for whatever reason when it´s not challenging, interesting or filled with loot which would help you to progress.

And there are people who´re interested in the story, but once seen?! It´s not like you´re forced by other players to stay with the group anyway. Just look at castrum... the worst experience i´ve had in any MMORPG ever. But if you´ve done it dozens of times, you don´t want to stay and wait for others. The content and gameplay has many flaws and dumbdown should be the solution? I say NO! I´m convinced that players would play content regularly and WITH FUN again if it´s interesting and challenging in some way.

Just look at another hot topic here where someone claims to regret to start raiding so late. Players just need to grow, maybe need a helpful hand and they´ll have fun and get rewarded with a great feeling thx to the success experience. Imo, we either run through dumb content or ppl starts leaving after a fail, especially Mentor players when old EX content appears. It´s sad the those minds got blinded and time has become more important than having fun.
Gameplay is the most important thing ever in any game and i´m convinced that this one here finally needs a turn-around.

[Neoyoshi]

Try playing a really crappy game; that's what usually does it for me to help remind me just how good we have it here in FFXIV.

[DBriggs304]

The game doesn't need a radical change. There are plenty of other options elsewhere for other types of gameplay. Play those.