SQE has the Worst boss design in history

[TristanX]

I miss WoW soccer boss.

Normal - 3 misses wipes
Heroic - 2 misses wipes
Mythic - 1 miss wipes

Add more encounters that needs accuracy!

[Colt47]

Somehow, I don't think the OP has seen truly bad boss design before. Even on a bad day SE's bosses are designed pretty darn well, and my only complaint was probably the first time they introduced the red arrows above peoples heads that was supposed to tell people they needed to stack with one another. That should have been something like a red arrow with a small circle around the player. They learned from that one and did a better job with the "stand in me" pillars by introducing it in the FFXV cross-over event. At least that was the first time I saw that one ages ago.

[Anxin]

I share the OP's dislike for scripted fights. They are fun at first, but quickly become stale. I come from a strategy game background where the AI will try to adapt and counter you. I would love to see bosses do the same here instead of mindlessly going through a timeline. Have a solid pair of healers? The boss will screw with them. Have super high dps? The boss will either turtle up, requiring debuffs, or try to kill the threat. How about a boss that will call adds to heal it if the party damages it too fast? The trick would be to give each boss AI a personality flavor so it has some predictability in your strategy but not enough predictability that every repeated fight plays the same. Have some bosses who live to crack tanks open. Have others who love to murder healers or debuff them. Of course, this wouldn't always happen either.

[Liam_Harper]

you can watch a youtube guide on Dark Souls and still get smashed in repeatedly by that same boss, you have to practice those bosses over and over till you can understand it, that's not the case with this game even slightly.

While I agree they lean a little too heavily on artificial difficulty mechanics that are intended to trick and kill the player until they figure it out, the above statement is a big exaggeration.

Even when you know how all the mechanics on a Savage or Ultimate fight work, you can easily die. Otherwise most farm or reclear groups would be easy kills and Ultimate would be a case of watching a guide, running a few times for the small details and getting an easy clear. It just takes one misstep or mistake and things can snowball into a wipe.

The fact is "dodge the aoe" mechanics are generally too easy unless you boil it down to split second reactions, which would be an absolute nightmare with server ticks or any latency. But any boss with mechanics intended to be figured out on the go, or dodged, are usually considered the "easy" boss. This is often why people ask for "skill based bosses" and complain about puzzle based mechanics, because they're frustrated they die so much on the first few tries and feel they'd do better on a simple dodge-aoe boss.

[RobynDaBank]

Ya'll want unpredictable and unforgiving boss battles with RNG elements and "skill" based encounters?

I highly suggest the monster hunter series.

You can get kind of a taste of it in the MH quest we have.. but it's limited by the engine and ping mismatch of FFXIV.

MH is a great suggestion for such sort of gameplay, big +1.

[Ath192]

They are hiring English game designers. Since you thinks you know better than current SE developed team, why don’t you apply?

I think they are only hiring Japanese speaking ones.

[ApolloGenX]

I agree with the first post. I did like the math puzzle (prime numbers or whatever) on one boss...

However, the entire game is team jump rope with just an escalating number of mechanics to memorize and frankly - there are many bosses that I watch the video for and just say "forget it".

It's like studying for a test, not so much playing well. I think you could easily program a robot to beat the bosses- not much critical thinking happening.

I have been in a couple of runs where a player flagged themselves for everyone to follow - thank heavens for them! Where follow the leader (run here and there) is much more important to success that anything you actually do with your character class.

[Illmaeran]

Why is it that literally every new single boss encounter is a "this boss is insanely hard" until you simply know what the skill does, and then it turns into "this boss is a snooze fest", every single god forsaken boss, there's no skill based mechanics in this game at all, and what's worse is that the hardest content in this game is nothing more than a memory game as well with the difference being you pre-assign everyone to move to pre-determined specific spots to complete mechanics without being 1 shot.

This is literally every boss encounter in every MMO ever designed. The challenge is figuring out the timing of attacks, what type of attack it is, and mitigating damage taken while maximizing damage output. Having standardized, scripted, routines is the only way to keep a level playing field in dungeons and raids. This is especially important for raids, which are essentially events designed to make teams work together as smoothly as possible. Once the choreography is learned, the team moves on to the next boss, and so on. Once all the bosses are fully learned and routinely killable, the raid's on farm, and the group moves to the next new raid.

The increasing trend of mechanic on top of mechanic on top of mechanic in quick succession has gotten to be more than I can handle, but it's still good and challenging boss design.

[Raven2014]

This has been wrong since Heart of Thorns. There might not be clear tank/healer role indicators, but a players who stack themselves with toughness will generate more aggro than others effectively making them the tank, while there are multiple specs that have dedicated healer builds such as Ranger->Druid, Revenant->Ventari, Elementalist->Tempest, along with 3 other specs with strong burst heals/barrier (Guardian, Necromancer, Engineer).

However for tanks, because of the buff heavy nature of the game the tank roles ends up being given to mostly support roles, rather than the typical sword and shield specs.

Which is the way "casual" players play it. For the most part the game was still designed as a free for all, which is what the high power players do. The whole tank/support + healer is considered detrimental because you assume to be taking hit you shouldn't, and dragging the fight out longer than it should be due to low damage output. A team of class cannon can kill Lupis in under 1 min, while a proper trinity team can take like 5 or longer. I was part of the team that did the US first lvl50 of the redesigned fractal back in the day (which was the most difficult content) with DnT and we did it with a team of full class cannon.

Frankly, they re-introduce the soft-trinity to acommodate the players who persistently want to play that way despite its detriment, but as a whole the system is still designed around individual reaction. You never actually need a tank or a healer.

[SeverianLyonesse]

This is literally every boss encounter in every MMO ever designed. The challenge is figuring out the timing of attacks, what type of attack it is, and mitigating damage taken while maximizing damage output. Having standardized, scripted, routines is the only way to keep a level playing field in dungeons and raids. This is especially important for raids, which are essentially events designed to make teams work together as smoothly as possible. Once the choreography is learned, the team moves on to the next boss, and so on. Once all the bosses are fully learned and routinely killable, the raid's on farm, and the group moves to the next new raid.

The increasing trend of mechanic on top of mechanic on top of mechanic in quick succession has gotten to be more than I can handle, but it's still good and challenging boss design.

Agreed. This is just how you balance multiplayer online content.

I think OP is really just complaining that FF XIV isn't an action RPG. Which ... although I would be intrigued to see what an "action RPG" style FFXIV would look like, it has pretty solidly dug itself into a "scripted DDR fights" trench. At this point I think it would be quite difficult for the devs to retrofit an action RPG playstyle into encounters.