Does 14 Promote a Culture of Mediocrity?

[LisSquid]

there was no vibe check, babe.

You know you can just kick bad players and go about your day. No mald required.

[ErryK]

You know you can just kick bad players and go about your day. No mald required.

kicking still enables them. why do you think i'm malding? i'm just trying to disprove your "vibe check" of coddling bads.

[LisSquid]

kicking still enables them. why do you think i'm malding? i'm just trying to disprove your "vibe check" of coddling bads.

The vibe in this thread is people wringing their hands about so and so being bad and so and so being an elitist prick. We have this thread every week.

[Caurcas]

In Heavensward, DRK was impossibly difficult for a casual player to get into compared to now and a handful to take into savage. The tanks were full of pointless abilities like standalone dots, Reprisal requiring parry procs which don't happen much when bosses do magic damage, cross-class skills like Cure and Fracture. You had to level PLD to get Provoke and you had to level Conjurer to get PLD. Trying to explain what an enmity combo is, was enough to convince DPS that tanking seemed complicated and to keep away from the tank role.

The developers want the tanks and healers to be able to be played by a new player at a decent level. That's been made pretty clear in live letters. The 5.0 balance got a lot more people into tanking and they want to keep it in that direction.

This does not mean there is "no skill ceiling and skill floor". If you have tanked for years like I have, the difference between a new or casual tank and an experienced tank is still night and day. I can spot it immediately.

What you call "bad" is usually new or casual players who are either still learning the game or never intend to learn it properly because they are just enjoying the story, roleplaying or normal mode content. It's important for them to have a good experience and not find classes overly complicated.

I was a new player in 3.1, and HW DRK was the job that made me want to see endgame. To learn and to do better. It wasn't even that hard. You took an afternoon to level GLD to get provoke, then you read your tooltips and maybe looked at a guide or two (Xeno had a great one at the time) and you learned. It was the most fun I ever had with the game. Furthermore, I was fine with 4.0 balance, despite DRK being made worst. Atleast there was still some nuance to tanking, but alas that's gone now.

[lulunami]

The game mechanics are probably getting dumber as the OP says. However, the better you play, the more likely you are going to encounter rude, impatient players who are playing for parse number on FFlogs. They are trying to impress strangers with their Internet points.

I remember my first time raiding in this game. Players ridiculed me for failing to heal a raid I had no experience in. Then in another group, I had bad Internet with frequent disconnects one night. One player quit the raid and left the FC. You have to grow thick skin against everyone doubting you. Finally, you are going to have to ask yourself if spending that much time with players that hate playing with you is worth it to you.

[kaynide]

I mean, I get why they reworked the game as they did. From bad experiences in 2.0 either to me as a newbie or seeing other healer/tanks mess up and get hated on, to this day I will never do a new trial/raid etc as a tank/healer u til I’ve done it enough times to know it inside and out. Regardless of how easy healing/tanking has become. That pressure or hesitation to do those roles is a feeling I think the devs don’t want players to feel, this, faceroll.

Now I’m not saying this is a bad call for the main game itself, but it does make certain jobs useless in certain content… like why would you ever bring a healer to treasure hunts?

They certainly need to give healers more utility stuff like protect so that they would be useful at damage reduction or maybe better crowd control like a sleep spell that doesn’t wear off instantly (maybe just reduce sleep time by 1 sec for each hit received, effectively making it an alt stun).

[dapperfaffer]

1. FFXIV doesn't have the same budget as WoW. You can't expect the same output of content. (since it came up in the thread)
2. Can a game that is easy have bad players, wouldn't they just be lazy.
3. Less than or 8% of the NA/EU playerbase cleared the last tiering of Shadow Bringers.

[Katt_Felista]

It does , all is going down the road of making classes less and less meaningfull, they are still playing differently, but the trend is clearly simplification and homogeneisation and unfortunately we aren't keeping SE to their usual quality standards, it's just going the way of simplification, simplification, and simplification ever since HW. The Reaper is a direct result of oversimplification of the Melee dps class. Hey... IT's enjoyable to play, who wouldn't want an easy dps class where you can barely mess your rotation, but it's the simplest melee dps to date, just compare it's braindead rotation and opener to any other jobs like samurai / ninja / monk. It's almost a melee dps on automatic drive / cruise control mode.

[LefeinNoel]

Doesn’t seem like you played ARR. The positional/s were an annoyance. It wasn’t fun to dance around not fun when you did it right either. It would seem to me you have complaints about a road you haven’t traveled.

Let me point out some for you. A shield lob can hold groups in a leveling dungeon through a triple flare.
You no longer have to level and learn several jobs to get the tools you need dropping the barrier to entry.
There is no longer a way I’ve seen yet to rip hate from a tank no matter the size of the pack.
The pull limits are several fold what they used to be, and everything is dead in seconds.
You virtually can’t wipe while learning and progressing through the story, if you can manage it, tell me how. There's no learning curve anymore. Raid geared tanks have no idea how to LOS a pull, or why. They weren’t forced to eat dirt to learn it. There's no need to learn anything. These are the problems I’m seeing and they have nothing to do with the rotations or annoyances from positional/s.

The problem is the content isn’t offering any resistance anymore. How you spin the globals doesn’t matter. It’s what you’re spinning them against, and the players that walked the road to bring us here, apparently aren’t here anymore or are no longer able to be heard from the flood of new people coming in. Who don’t know how the road they’re standing on was paved in the first place and it’s their voices being heard while they guess why things are as they are and the changes are being made to suit them.

Look at my signature, that was the life of a level 50 tank. T5 and T9 for roadblocked most of the player base because the game itself offered more resistance physically than it does now. What it offers now for the most part is mechanical resistance, which can be paint by numbers learned through by patience and effort. I’m sure there’s X super hard whatever, there is no longer a universal difficulty which stood as the always barrier to entry which forced you to learn. I haven’t seen this forum probably since 2015 or 2016, and I probably won’t again until 2025 so I don’t have to deal with the inevitable tripe daring to speak up might bring me.

These are my opinion, as a person whose been around a very long time and actually walked the road of every single change they’ve made. When it got to be more than I could handle, I stopped playing. My sub has been running all these years to keep my house, and my FC house. I last stepped into a raid when Sephirot EX launched after several years away, the I left because I didn’t like the road anymore, I came back for Byakko EX and really didn’t and left again. Didn’t even try past a primal, no need. I’ll keep paying to hold my holdings and keep checking back to see if I like how they’ve progressed.

I love the game, I am happy to support it even when I don’t like it, but what I don’t have to do is play, and I’ll do so until such time I hope, that they’ll reign in some of the actual problems, that people don’t even realize is the problem.

[dapperfaffer]

Don't you have to log in at least once every 45 days for an hour in order for you to not loose a house?
oh, ty Shibi.