Dungeon Mechanics are a little repetitive [[Spoilers]]

[Lunalepsy]

[[Spoilers]]

I mean, this game is kind of bad when you actually look at its mechanics, compared to other MMO's.

Endwalker's dungeons are honestly some of the worst I've ever played. Not only is the 2 packs, boss, rinse repeat format rather stale but the bosses are not really that fun to fight either, their mechanics feel rather stale...

The whole "Do X, Dodge X or DIE" is a little bit too much. Punishing players in such an extreme way for the slightest mechanical error is a little too much.

This is where the divide between eastern and western design philosophies come in. Eastern games tend to be more mechanical, dance, dance revolution based then western MMO's and for such a visually stunning game, the Endwalker dungeons have been so stale... its a real shame.

Can we at least have one dungeon that is not just "Do X, Dodge X or Insta-death". I am not complaining about dungeons being "too hard"... they are just very boring, to the point where one person on your party makes the smallest mistake, they die.

I do think that the developers are using this as a crutch a bit too much to cover up the fact that they are out of interesting designs. FFXIV takes itself way too seriously, where is the Karazhan?

Where is the weird boss battles? Shadowbringer gave me a lot of hope with the Temple Splunking with Ysh'tola, that was really fun and the Fairy Castle dungeon with the Frog man but this expansion is just dull...

I'm sorry, maybe its me but Endwalker seems to want to take itself super seriously and when it segways into wierdness or fun, its all to do with those horrible space rabbits... honestly, the quests for them were terrible and felt like complete filler.

Welcome to modern MMOs!

[HyoMinPark]

That's not true at all. For example, why was healers balance so obligatory that they completely gutted healers in SHB? Did it matter if x or y healer had z or w quirk while they were grinding dungeons, FATEs, daily beast tribe quests or whatever? It only mattered for savage.

I disagree with all of your post, but this especially. Healers didn’t lose their quirks because raiders complained. They were simplified because people found Cleric Stance dancing too hard. Juggling two DoTs was too hard. Healer openers from HW were too hard. The simplification of healers had zero to do with raiders asking for them to be dumbed down.

The same can be said about boss mechanics, DPS uptime is now the most considered thing while designing mechanics. Bosses like what we had in Heavensward and A Realm Reborn where they go untargetable, either due to mechanics or the boss literally being invincible while they do a thing, also became extremely rare.
Casuals didn't complain that Leviathan would hide in water, or that they had to control the Gobwalker or become a Gorilla to push out bombs, or get jailed by Quickthinx...
It's not a coincidence that all of this changed one expansion after FFLogs became a thing.

You use uptime as example—all the while ignoring the myriad of bosses that do go untargetable in SB, ShB, and current Savages and all three Ultimates—but you’re failing to realize the major thing that happened to Extremes and Savages. They got easier because players complained they were too difficult and not accessible enough. I’m not talking about the mess that was Gordias. I’m talking about Midas onwards.

Even normal content has suffered this. There are people complaining now that the EW MSQ trials are too hard and should be nerfed. Alliance raids are constantly complained about with regards to nerfing—Weeping City, Dun Scaith, Rabanastre, Orbonne Monastery, the NieR raids. Orbonne Monastery has the horrible honor of being the only alliance raid with automatic echo now. All because people complained TGC was too hard.

That’s not the raiders complaining.

Gearing too is dictated by hardcores. It was hardcores that complained about every little thing that the dev team made for casuals. I remember very well the drama over Mythology gear in ARR being the same ilvl as Coil, which prompted them to extend the grind for casuals by nerfing tome gear and adding upgrade items exclusive to Coil. The Diadem that could reward BiS if you were lucky, also bad because potentially better than Gordias. Oh, and what about the relic grind... I've read so many predictions on relic being like "it won't be better than (x raid)". When the old Relic + 1 (later renamed to Zenith I think) was potentially better than Allagan weapons, until they bumped Allagan because... well, guess who complained.

I won’t speak on Coil since I wasn’t around when it was relevant—but original Diadem was a horribly designed mess. Raiders complained about the RNG pink gear being better because, back then, Gordias actually took immense skill to kill. Gear actually mattered for it, since you couldn’t kill A4S without tome weapons. To release better gear in Diadem that also had the agony of RNG substats was bad design. The complaint there was completely justified, in my opinion. I started playing in HW and even I thought the OG Diadem gear was stupid. And I wasn’t a raider back then.

Another fun fact is, the i280 Coven weapons that dropped from Diadem 2.0? People complained they were stronger than the relics—and in those complainers were non-raiders. The raiders were the ones actually saying the substats were so RNG and the weapons so rare they literally didn’t matter in terms of BiS. Ignore them, and continue to use your Alexandrian weapon or i275 relic.

Now gear barely matters because most content is so easy, you can wear the base crafting set released every other patch cycle and clear everything just fine. Tome gear doesn’t matter because the content doesn’t call for it. Savage only matters to gear for Ultimates. That’s it.

Most of this game's battle content is designed around high end raiders first. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, I really don't care, but I really dislike seeing how casuals are blamed for all of this game's shortcomings after seeing so many things become worse because they pandered to hardcores... hell I've seen them release a DoA extreme just because they were afraid of displeasing raiders and then rushing to fix him because nobody was doing him.

Very hard disagree here. You say hardcores are pandered towards, but jobs are simplified because people complain about having to press X button to mitigate a raidwide when they’re a barrier healer. That’s legitimately a complaint I’ve seen on here. Or they complain managing DoTs or procs is too hard. Or too many oGCDs is too hard. And then, you have the content people constantly say is too hard and needs to be nerfed because “MSQ stuff doesn’t need Savage-level mechanics in it”. And the content gets easier. Thankfully, some things manage to get through unscathed, but the majority of content nerfs aren’t at the cry of raiders. That’s not pandering to hardcore. I’m sorry, but you are entirely mistaken if you think content in this game is designed around raiders first and non-raiders second.

[Elleia]

I just think the FFXIV needs more light-hearted new content as all this Endwalker stuff has been edgy, depressing and a bit "crawling in my skin", if you get the reference. Sometimes this game seems too "anime" for its own good. The best content for me personally, story wise was the contextualised inter-state politics, it felt more mature rather then lapsing back into this "Shadow the Hedgehog", end of the world rubbish.

I think you mentioned FFIX was your favorite Final Fantasy game? For me as well, though FFXIV rivals it.

I really don't see what you mean. There were plenty of very anime and dark, depressing moments in FFIX too. As well as light and comedic moments in FFXIV -hanging out with the Scions, the Loporits, etc.

It feels pretty par for the course as far as Final Fantasy games go. Regardless I'm guessing we'll be getting something of a fresh start now that we've saved the world, so maybe you'll enjoy what comes next.

[ForteNightshade]

That's not true at all. For example, why was healers balance so obligatory that they completely gutted healers in SHB? Did it matter if x or y healer had z or w quirk while they were grinding dungeons, FATEs, daily beast tribe quests or whatever? It only mattered for savage.

Because they designed Healers to be accessible to everyone, even the lowest common denominator. Do you really think Raiders, especially Hardcore raiders, enjoy this incredibly simplistic design? There's a reason Yoshida specifically mentioned they aren't going back to the Heavensward design. Guess which demographic has been asking for that? Hint: It ain't the casual playerbase who struggles to keep up buffs like Heavy Thrust and Straight Shot.

The same can be said about boss mechanics, DPS uptime is now the most considered thing while designing mechanics. Bosses like what we had in Heavensward and A Realm Reborn where they go untargetable, either due to mechanics or the boss literally being invincible while they do a thing, also became extremely rare.
Casuals didn't complain that Leviathan would hide in water, or that they had to control the Gobwalker or become a Gorilla to push out bombs, or get jailed by Quickthinx...
It's not a coincidence that all of this changed one expansion after FFLogs became a thing.

This is primarily due to the fact most jobs in this game are extremely rigid and feel awful to play with prolonged downtime regardless of your skill level. Likewise, most players, especially melee, don't like essentially sucking their thumbs because they're unable to actually press their buttons since the boss jumped. Keep in mind, range attacks broke your combo until Endwalker. Therefore, they were rarely worth pressing. Put simply, it isn't fun watching a boss do pretty animations instead of you killing them... while doing pretty animations. That being said, we still have plenty of downtime fights. In Shadowbringers alone, Titania, Hades, Ruby, Emerald and Varos all have varying amounts of forced disengagement or straight going untargetable.

Casuals did complain, incessantly, able Leviathan. Nobody liked the Gobwalker because it meant you basically weren't playing your job. Which, again, isn't fun. I can tell you right now how mechanics like that will be handled both in Normal and Savage equivalents. Everyone makes a healer, tank or the Prange do it depending on whether other mechanics necessitate the former two's responsibility. Why? Because you either don't need two healers/tanks for mechanics or you do, thus you naturally opt for the weakest DPS. Guess who that always is? Casual players are also why fights as a whole are considerably easier than they once were. Hardcore players weren't upset over Thordan and Sephirot's difficulty. In fact, many raiders even at the midcore level still lament how challenging those fights were. It was the more casual centric players who quite literally couldn't clear them. And the demands for nerfs were numerous. There's been threads each expansion that the Normal modes are too difficult.

Gearing too is dictated by hardcores. It was hardcores that complained about every little thing that the dev team made for casuals. I remember very well the drama over Mythology gear in ARR being the same ilvl as Coil, which prompted them to extend the grind for casuals by nerfing tome gear and adding upgrade items exclusive to Coil. The Diadem that could reward BiS if you were lucky, also bad because potentially better than Gordias. Oh, and what about the relic grind... I've read so many predictions on relic being like "it won't be better than (x raid)". When the old Relic + 1 (later renamed to Zenith I think) was potentially better than Allagan weapons, until they bumped Allagan because... well, guess who complained.

Because it invalidated that content. What's the point of clearing the hardest content in the game if someone spamming Expert Roulette can get equal or even better gear? Case in point, Tome pants are BiS for tanks. So I have literally no reason to even look at P3S as a tank main were it not for Savage having exclusive upgrades until the follow up patch. You mention Diadem but ignore that a sizable portion of complaints came from casual players whose relics were also outclassed by those same Diadem weapons a mere nine days after the final step released. Most raiders didn't actually care all that much since the raid tier was long over. Several people simply criticised how desperate it made SE look they threw a RNG BiS weapon in content that was received so poorly, they've redesigned it three times.

Most of this game's battle content is designed around high end raiders first. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, I really don't care, but I really dislike seeing how casuals are blamed for all of this game's shortcomings after seeing so many things become worse because they pandered to hardcores... hell I've seen them release a DoA extreme just because they were afraid of displeasing raiders and then rushing to fix him because nobody was doing him.

If that were the case, we wouldn't have the current job design. Healers have been screaming for years to increase outgoing damage; tanks have wanted more responsibility like boss positioning, and DPS want complexity in their rotation. All of these are requests and criticisms from the "high end raiders." Considering Hydaelyn and Zodiark can be killed without even bringing a healer on the day of their release. Guess which demographic the dev team catered towards?

[Kandraxx]

Essentially every dungeon and alliance raid in this game is just a one-way theme park ride through an imaginary hose, with things outside of the invisible guard rails you can never interact with, ironically the same what FF7 Remake is.

These dungeons have no real soul, flavor or niche, the few cringe “mechanics” they tried to add like the keys in Hauke Manor were seemingly quickly discarded in following expacs, as it was almost an insult to the intelligence of the player. And that’s also my biggest gripe with the game: it feels too guided and guard railed.

I’d like to see dungeons like the Sunken Temple or BRD from WoW, but that likely won’t happen. It’s still a japanese game for the domestic market and we simply play the dub, it’s designed “quick in and out” for japanese and their tight schedules (no sarcasm here), where they have to spend 3 hours at an Izakaya with their co-workers after work and indulge in meaningless chit-chat just too look good.

[Ririta]

Because they designed Healers to be accessible to everyone, even the lowest common denominator. Do you really think Raiders, especially Hardcore raiders, enjoy this incredibly simplistic design? There's a reason Yoshida specifically mentioned they aren't going back to the Heavensward design. Guess which demographic has been asking for that? Hint: It ain't the casual playerbase who struggles to keep up buffs like Heavy Thrust and Straight Shot.

Heavensward was notorious for excluding certain jobs for Alex, first it was astrologians and then white mages after they overbuffed astrologians. They specifically said that they wouldn't be adding a new healer in Stormblood because they wanted to fix healer balance first, and then they came with this design that we have now in Shadowbringers.

None of this mattered in any content outside of Savage, them throwing their hands into the air and balancing healers around two spells, being clones of one another, doesn't means they're pandering to casuals. It means that it's exactly as I said, they're designing the game around raiding first.

This is primarily due to the fact most jobs in this game are extremely rigid and feel awful to play with prolonged downtime regardless of your skill level. Likewise, most players, especially melee, don't like essentially sucking their thumbs because they're unable to actually press their buttons since the boss jumped. Keep in mind, range attacks broke your combo until Endwalker. Therefore, they were rarely worth pressing. Put simply, it isn't fun watching a boss do pretty animations instead of you killing them... while doing pretty animations. That being said, we still have plenty of downtime fights. In Shadowbringers alone, Titania, Hades, Ruby, Emerald and Varos all have varying amounts of forced disengagement or straight going untargetable.

Regardless of you considering it fun or not (that's subjective, personally I liked having to only focus on mechanics for some moments), it is a fact that uptime is the most important thing they consider now and thus, greatly limits what kinds of mechanics they can add to the bosses. Mechanics like the examples I gave are almost gone from the game.

Casuals did complain, incessantly, able Leviathan. Nobody liked the Gobwalker because it meant you basically weren't playing your job. Which, again, isn't fun. I can tell you right now how mechanics like that will be handled both in Normal and Savage equivalents. Everyone makes a healer, tank or the Prange do it depending on whether other mechanics necessitate the former two's responsibility. Why? Because you either don't need two healers/tanks for mechanics or you do, thus you naturally opt for the weakest DPS. Guess who that always is? Casual players are also why fights as a whole are considerably easier than they once were. Hardcore players weren't upset over Thordan and Sephirot's difficulty. In fact, many raiders even at the midcore level still lament how challenging those fights were. It was the more casual centric players who quite literally couldn't clear them. And the demands for nerfs were numerous. There's been threads each expansion that the Normal modes are too difficult.

Outside of being thrown out of the stage and being unable to be raised, I've never seen anybody complain that Leviathan dived. As for mechanics like the Gobwalker and offloading that work to healers and tanks, you vastly over estimate how much the common player in DF optimizes their gameplay to maximize group DPS. Sure it's the best way that raiders will certainly do, but most groups won't.

And if a mechanic doesn't exist in savage or extreme, it sure as hell won't in normal mode, thus, it's (almost) dead. Yet another less possibility for OP's desires.

Because it invalidated that content. What's the point of clearing the hardest content in the game if someone spamming Expert Roulette can get equal or even better gear? Case in point, Tome pants are BiS for tanks. So I have literally no reason to even look at P3S as a tank main were it not for Savage having exclusive upgrades until the follow up patch. You mention Diadem but ignore that a sizable portion of complaints came from casual players whose relics were also outclassed by those same Diadem weapons a mere nine days after the final step released. Most raiders didn't actually care all that much since the raid tier was long over. Several people simply criticised how desperate it made SE look they threw a RNG BiS weapon in content that was received so poorly, they've redesigned it three times.

If bribing players into certain content takes precedence over everything else, then it proves what I said, right? (nevermind the implications for the content's quality if it relies on bribery to get people to play it).

Either way, in that case, Coil wasn't even invalidated. I still geared up twice as fast as somebody who didn't do it even if my group couldn't clear Turn 5 yet. It's not like anybody was better off not doing the content (this also counts for the extremes that dropped i90 acc), but just the thought of some casual doing Pharos Sirius and getting i90 riled up some feathers and SE rushed to coddle them over everybody else.

On the whole relic being outclassed thing, nobody would have cared if relic wasn't such a massive grind, which was in itself a product of people complaining about +1 being i90 just like Allagan weapons.

[HyoMinPark]

Heavensward was notorious for excluding certain jobs for Alex, first it was astrologians and then white mages after they overbuffed astrologians. They specifically said that they wouldn't be adding a new healer in Stormblood because they wanted to fix healer balance first, and then they came with this design that we have now in Shadowbringers.

ASTs were excluded in early HW because they barely functioned as a healer. And this wasn’t even at just a Savage level. I had non-raider friends tell me people would leave dungeons if they saw that their healer was an AST. One even said she got kicked a couple times for being one. It had nothing to do with raider complaints and everything to do with AST being borderline unplayable and unfunctional as a healer.

Healer balance still doesn’t exist (at least between WHM and AST), and a lot of that has to deal with the design philosophy the development team cling to regarding WHM. Giving it a buff to compete with AST back when AST had the old card system would have closed that discrepancy a lot more, since WHM had no answer to Balance. Now, it’s WHM has no answer to the myriad of tools in AST’s kit because they want to push the Lily system that hard. And it also has horrible MP economy due to the Thin Air changes.

Reading any healer balance discussion would show you raiders advocate more often than not for the healers to be balanced. And none of those discussions involved stripping them of the multiple DoTs and giving them 1 nuke + 1 DoT. When jobs get dumbed down, it’s usually always because “some players found X thing too difficult, so we removed it”. Or “the gap between skilled players and not-skilled players was too large, so we lessened it”.

As for other jobs, that was 100% the fault of the development team. They were the ones who kept repeatedly buffing BRD and MCH in HW until they ousted casters in Creator due to simply being broken. It also didn’t help that they outright admitted they never balanced either around the fact that piercing resistance down gave them +10%—later +5% in SB.

None of this mattered in any content outside of Savage, them throwing their hands into the air and balancing healers around two spells, being clones of one another, doesn't means they're pandering to casuals. It means that it's exactly as I said, they're designing the game around raiding first.

Please see above. Also job simplification for ALL roles has been to close the skill floor and skill ceiling. The developers have gone on record saying this. And it’s not because of raiders. They literally removed DoTs and buffs like Straight Shot and Heavy Thrust because players complained it was too difficult to keep those buffs up. Again—that wasn’t the raiders complaining.

Regardless of you considering it fun or not (that's subjective, personally I liked having to only focus on mechanics for some moments), it is a fact that uptime is the most important thing they consider now and thus, greatly limits what kinds of mechanics they can add to the bosses. Mechanics like the examples I gave are almost gone from the game.

Except you aren’t acknowledging the myriad of forced downtime mechanics still prevalent in fights since HW. All three Ultimates have them—you know, content explicitly designed for the hardcore. Raiders come up with uptime strats but depending on your data center’s PF, they aren’t the norm unless explicitly stated. That’s not proof the developers cater fights with uptime in mind. If they did, there would be zero forced downtime mechanics—yet, they still exist. And “uptime strats” would have no reason to exist because uptime would already be guaranteed.

Outside of being thrown out of the stage and being unable to be raised, I've never seen anybody complain that Leviathan dived. As for mechanics like the Gobwalker and offloading that work to healers and tanks, you vastly over estimate how much the common player in DF optimizes their gameplay to maximize group DPS. Sure it's the best way that raiders will certainly do, but most groups won't.

Yeah, they got rid of perma-death in fights because people complained it was “unfair”—and a lot of those complaints came from non-raiders. A2S in and of itself was nothing more than Trash the Fight a la T4. Not a very well-designed fight and I’ve heard even casual raiders complain about it. Kind of boring to be sitting in a mount not pressing your buttons for a fight, wouldn’t you think? The fact that no other fight like it has been made probably stems for way more than “whiny raiders complained”. Such as “this encounter design is actually quite bad”.

And you’re underestimating casuals with the rest of this. It wouldn’t be just the hardcores that would shove their healer in a Gobwalker. O6S Typhon was a healer mechanic, and no sane group was throwing their DPS in there to blow the Easterlilies out of the way. Especially not in Gordias where damage was way too important to clearing because the developers didn’t tune the fights properly.

And if a mechanic doesn't exist in savage or extreme, it sure as hell won't in normal mode, thus, it's (almost) dead. Yet another less possibility for OP's desires.

Incorrect. Exdeath’s normal mode Doom mechanic that requires Esuna says hello. That’s not in Savage. Omega’s Duty Action isn’t in O11S—you don’t destroy fists or charge up for his Delta Attack: you simply dodge (or have 4 players getting punched by the fists) or tank LB3. It might be less common to find Normal Mode mechanics that don’t exist in a more extreme form in EXs and Savage, but they do exist.

Mechanics are taken out of Normal modes because most players that prefer to play at the casual level—or players in the lowest common denominator group, keep in mind I am taking about two separate groups of “casual” here—would whine that they were too hard. Again, they already do that with MSQ trials and most Alliance Raids. I have no faith in regular DF being able to do things like Limit Cut in A11N (they already struggled with Optical Sight), Electric Slide in O12N, Tsunami or Black Smokers in E3N. And most players would probably complain those mechanics were too hard to belong in a normal mode anyways.

If bribing players into certain content takes precedence over everything else, then it proves what I said, right? (nevermind the implications for the content's quality if it relies on bribery to get people to play it).

No. It just proves that the content is poorly designed. Has nothing to do with “the developers catered it towards the hardcore crowd so we need to bribe the casuals to jump in here somehow…” and has everything to do with “if we don’t put a shiny carrot in here, people probably won’t do the content…”. See: Eureka and Bozja. Without the relic in both, I highly doubt participation would have been that high. But they threw the relic into both—something that all players like to do, not just raiders—to incentivize it.

Meanwhile, I do think it’s worth pointing out that a lot of raiders do the Ultimates beyond getting their weapon tokens because they simply enjoy the fights. And don’t care nearly as much about the rewards as people want to believe most Ultimate raiders do.

Either way, in that case, Coil wasn't even invalidated. I still geared up twice as fast as somebody who didn't do it even if my group couldn't clear Turn 5 yet. It's not like anybody was better off not doing the content (this also counts for the extremes that dropped i90 acc), but just the thought of some casual doing Pharos Sirius and getting i90 riled up some feathers and SE rushed to coddle them over everybody else.

And on the other hand, the lowest common denominator player feathers get riled up anytime an end-of-the-expansion boss isn’t Thordan normal mode levels of easy, and rush to the forums or other social media sites to complain that the game is getting too hard, that “Savage-level mechanics” have no place in the MSQ, that they play the game for fun and it shouldn’t be walling them, etc..

You are so busy focusing on the few instances where raiders were given something because they had complaints that you’re ignoring all the instances where non-raiders complained just as loudly about something else. The only difference was that content nerfs weren’t given to the latter group because there’s no reason to nerf the content they wanted nerfed. It wasn’t hard, it just required them to pay attention and push buttons.

On the whole relic being outclassed thing, nobody would have cared if relic wasn't such a massive grind, which was in itself a product of people complaining about +1 being i90 just like Allagan weapons.

And these complaints about relics also come from the non-raiding side. You can’t cherry-pick and choose to present only “the raiders complained” when non-raiders have complained about relics being outclassed as well.

[ApolloGenX]

The team jump rope is getting a bit....tired.

It reminds me of the scene in Hairspray where she tells her daughter to dance...

"Mash Potato! ..... FASTER!!"

[IdowhatIwant]

I always said this game will fail because the devs are doing the opposite of blizzard and listening to the fan base. Sadly about 70% of this games player base is hyper focused on casual play, aesthetics, and entitlement to access all content.

[Mika_Zahard]

Page 3 and still no specifics about what you'd like to see in dungeons beyond not understanding the story and how you hate rock music.

Surprised u waited till page 3 to realize OP was trolling, lol.