What happened to 8-man raids? Binding Coils was so elaborate compared to now..

[sharknado]

A better question is what happened to the actual raid bosses themselves? We used to have to Sleep/bind adds, heavy them, silence/stun them, we had to actually use our entire kit to help clear the bosses. Now a lot of those moves just sit there.

What about using summoner egi to tank the boss? Or having specific tank job like Paladin in ARR to have the appropriate button to do a unique action?

[ArcaviusGreyashe]

You may be sitting there doubting this assessment, but it is true, and if you look closely at every raid/trial in the game and compare where the weight on the mechanics lie, raids punish individual failure while trials screw you on bad teamwork.

It's the actual opposite, though... If someone dies during a bad timing in savage, there will be only 7 people alive for clearing the next mechanic, that won't be enough, since they need 8 people, and you'll wipe. Trials never have that. The only way to fail a trial is if there is not enough DPS (so team-wide issue) or if not enough people can survive the mechanics to provide enough DPS (team-wide issue as well). Raids punish the whole team for a single player's failure.

But let's be honest though : I was there during those early raids, yes, they felt better, since they were basically Savage Dungeons, the first time you did them. The second time, it was a waste of time. The third, it was a pain. Because nobody likes doing the same pack just so you can train on the actual boss. Especially when said boss basically has as much mechanics as the current dungeons' boss.

I still miss the days of stunlocking adds on T5 or Leviathan EX, but it's only nostalgia. Raids are actually far more entertaining now than they used to, let alone Ultimate.

[Hasrat]

Another point to consider, the devs put in a lot of work to balance jobs around raids, and providing trash mobs only leads to having jobs going in with an imbalanced start. Dropped right at the boss, everyone starts at an equal baseline. Trash mobs, or even minibosses, mean some jobs start building resources, or you've got skills on cooldown, or just generally have that extra wait period between where now things aren't in alignment. Adding trash means either players start abusing it to start the boss fight with full resources and/or players just wait around before the boss fight to have everything off cooldown.

Keep in mind as well the difference in jobs between then and now. Almost none of the jobs back then had the job gauges and resources we have now. The raids weren't just arbitrarily changed in isolation. They just happened to coincide with jobs also getting a bit of an overhaul.

[TaleraRistain]

Minus Panda, which I hope was just due to COVID complications and not a pattern, after Alex with Omega and Eden they moved that sort of thing to solo story instances between the tiers. I really liked that, since it works for those who didn't like trash mobs on reclears in the fights but didn't toss the idea out entirely.

[PyurBlue]

It is certainly a "be careful what you wish for" situation. Even back in ARR, groups would send in a member to skip the mobs and get a shortcut directly to the boss, if they didn't just rush it altogether. They used to do that DAYS before raidtime, where there would be parties specifically for skipping the mobs and would then disband with the shortcut, so actual statics could go there later in the week. It was so complained about and skipped that for Alexander Savage the instance would just throw you right outside the boss area anyway.

Basically, yes, now the raids are basically a series of trials, and we can thank the raiders for that.

I think people got exactly what they wished for. The mobs were boring and poorly integrated. If I was given the choice between the old style raids and the modern style, I would pick modern every time. This is not because I want raids to be just a boss fight, but because the mobs weren't done well. They don't add anything just by existing, they have to be interesting. SE needs to figure out how to do that before they consider bringing them back.

And how would you accomplish that?

You could give them more health/more damage, but you can still get through easy enough. Give annoying mechanics to deal with? Find some way to cheese yourself through it. Make them last longer, or have multiple waves? At this point you are turning the trash pack into the instance itself.

You cannot even make a claim that they could do a system like BCoB where you have checkpoints throughout the instance, as you can now go back and redo fights you have previously cleared for that week. If you want to go back to practice a boss, you have to keep going through the trash pack every time.

The only thing people cared about was the boss, so why make trash in an instance when people just want to get to the boss as that is where the excitement is, regardless of what you do in trash.

We know that bosses are generally well received, so I think the answer is to make mobs more like bosses. It's not good enough that they just sit there and soak up AoE damage. They should have mechanics, and provide at least a little bit of challenge. In addition to that perhaps some should be optional to allow multiple paths through a raid, and perhaps some should have effects on the environment or the upcoming boss to make them desirable to engage. The only problem that I see with this is that it sort of goes against the current competitive side of FF14 (fflogs) because it would be more dynamic and less consistent. I'd gladly trade away parsing for more interesting encounters, but I'm not sure who else would. Maybe the real solution is to have more Alliance Raids and add a second level of difficult to them instead of changing the normal/savage raid formula again.

[Raven2014]

We know that bosses are generally well received, so I think the answer is to make mobs more like bosses. It's not good enough that they just sit there and soak up AoE damage. They should have mechanics, and provide at least a little bit of challenge. In addition to that perhaps some should be optional to allow multiple paths through a raid, and perhaps some should have effects on the environment or the upcoming boss to make them desirable to engage. The only problem that I see with this is that it sort of goes against the current competitive side of FF14 (fflogs) because it would be more dynamic and less consistent. I'd gladly trade away parsing for more interesting encounters, but I'm not sure who else would. Maybe the real solution is to have more Alliance Raids and add a second level of difficult to them instead of changing the normal/savage raid formula again.

While the trash in Coil was irrelevant and simply was AOE vendor, they tried to make the Alexander's trash interesting like mini-boss and ... people absolutely hate it.

Interesting is not enough.

[Driavna]

Because boss fights are the only kind of pve content the current team cares about. Just look at the current dungeon design if you still don't get it.

Can't blame devs for this one. What we have now is what FFXIV community wanted.

[TheMightyMollusk]

While the trash in Coil was irrelevant and simply was AOE vendor, they tried to make the Alexander's trash interesting like mini-boss and ... people absolutely hate it.

Interesting is not enough.

Aw, I liked Faust.

[Raven2014]

Aw, I liked Faust.

The fact itself become a meme says something. Even for the rest of the tier they never did anything quite like it ... enough to say, if it was popular, something like that would have been created again. This is why I said this is just nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses effect ... back in the day I saw enough cursing at Faust to last a life time.

[Avidria]

One of the largest complaints about most raids seems to be trash mobs. They're usually pointless encounters that don't really add much to the raid. Now, if they dropped something cool, people might be more inclined to do them, but usually they're just in the way of getting to the good stuff.

Heck, one of the biggest complaints I've heard from WoW players in about the trash in raids and not being able to jump into boss fights.

Yeah pretty much this. My only complaint about trash in wow was that it respawns, but it also drops loot that can actually be good and useful. Trash mob loot is barely even a thing in this game, so trash in raids just feels like a nuisance that's annoying to have to reclear every time you have to reset the instance during prog.

I've mentioned it before, but part of what I think limits raids here is the instance lockout timer. You can't leave the instance and come back, so any progress you make has to happen in one go. That means unless the timer gets boosted back up once you get to the boss, every instance reset and trash or whatever else reclear is eating into actual progress on the actual boss fight. There's ways to design around that (like adding more time to the timer, or cutting that stuff out of the savage versions of the raids) but it in itself puts a clock on anything that's happening during raid time that isn't fighting the boss.