MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Bobby66]

I don’t disagree; but regarding the healing requirements specifically, they have already gone on record saying they will not increase them. It’s the main reason healer mains now ask for more DPS options, since we won’t get the increased healing we had been asking for before.

Funny enough, normal mode raids used to have enrages. They phased them out with Sigmascape’s release. Occasionally one will have a soft enrage (O12N and the Laser Shower spam if you kill one of the Omegas before the other one), but they’re quite rare. Ultima, the High Seraph has one. After 14-15 mins, she will start quickly alternating between her tankbuster and another mechanic. Tanks are unable to keep up with the cooldown requirements to live, and she will eventually tear through a party if not killed. But you would never see that now. Not even in the worst alliances.

That is true, but also haven’t they hinted at not wanting to give healers more dps options either. So at this point are they left flapping in the wind? I would personally love old cleric stance to come back at least on one class, but that is a major pipe dream.

[HyoMinPark]

That is true, but also haven’t they hinted at not wanting to give healers more dps options either. So at this point are they left flapping in the wind? I would personally love old cleric stance to come back at least on one class, but that is a major pipe dream.

I believe the hope is to put pressure on them to make changes or risk more players leaving the role. It has been an effective measure in the past, since people abandoning NIN in ShB led to the 6.1 changes and players complaining about MNK for 6+ years the overhaul in EW. I just think it would be extremely hard to achieve a mass exodus from an entire role versus a single job. AST’s myriad of complaints since its inception did prompt radical changes in both ShB and EW—and now there are plans to change it in 7.0 again. My only fear is how much more will be stripped away from a job who has completely lost its original identity.

I’d prefer for healers to actually feel like a healer and not just a gimped damage dealer, despite enjoying DPSing on one. But I went several years not seeing that change when developers were asked and instead watching the opposite happen; so now I’m with the healers that ask for more DPS options. Unfortunately, I don’t believe they’ll ever be added because the modus operandi now is to strip jobs down to the bare basics and until they play the same as opposed to giving them nuance and actual identity. But one can dream.

They've also said they won't increase DPS options. There's no need to be at pains to respect one decision but not the other.

And personally, I'd much rather ask for something I enjoy than something I'm ambivalent about.

You are mistaken—I don’t respect that healers basically don’t heal in this game. I spent years asking for healing requirements to be increased. I still think they should be because the majority of a healer’s toolkit is overkill for 99% of the content in this game. Reading threads on the healer forums would show you I’m not alone in this opinion.

I’m not asking for things I’m ambivalent about. I’m asking for things I desire. I desired increased healing. I still do; but after asking for 4+ years, it’s clear we won’t get it. Now I desire more damage options since, if I’m going to be spending 80% or more of the fight pressing damage buttons, at least make it interesting and not 111111111111111 until my controller button wears out. I also desire for each healer to feel different and not identical to play.

Don’t mistake people saying “the devs have already said they won’t do x” as being at peace with the decision.

[vetch]

players complaining about MNK for 6+ years the overhaul in EW

I desired increased healing. I still do; but after asking for 4+ years, it’s clear we won’t get it.

Hmm.

What this tells me is that you've reached your personal threshold, not that it's objectively clear that it will never happen.

That's fine.

Reading threads on the healer forums would show you I’m not alone in this opinion.

I've been reading healing threads on the healer and general forums for almost a year now while I was on the free trial. Before I found the official forums I was searching up healer threads on the FF14 subreddit, desperately trying to confirm that I wasn't crazy and alone in finding 14's "healing" "gameplay" stultifying.

Now I desire more damage options since, if I’m going to be spending 80% or more of the fight pressing damage buttons, at least make it interesting and not 111111111111111 until my controller button wears out.

It would be difficult to make DPS interesting for me no matter how many buttons are added without having some clever skill interactions like friendly-targeted damage auras, pet control, punishment mechanics, spell backfires, or something more decision-heavy than 'keep these oGCDs on cooldown and never overcap your job gauge'.

[HyoMinPark]

Hmm.

What this tells me is that you've reached your personal threshold, not that it's objectively clear that it will never happen.

That's fine.

I disagree. Participating in high-end content since Creator and watching it require less and less healing even during progression is what I’m basing my statement on. And if Savage is suffering from lower and lower healing requirements, the content below it will suffer even more. I keep hoping to be proven wrong, and sometimes there’s that one fight that makes me feel like maybe content will become challenging again (E8S, for example, was the hardest Savage fight in ShB—the rest were a bit meh, with the exception of E12S door boss. She was good, too); but I’ve been waiting for several years to see this. One fight that actually challenges you every year or two years just isn’t acceptable, in my opinion.

For healers specifically, I’m only really challenged or engaged during Ultimates when progging them. Most of the time I’m on auto-pilot pressing my one nuke and not caring about much else. I find ways to optimize by mapping my healing CDs to never have to press a GCD; but that’s also in part to mock how little I actually need to go out of my way to heal. If I want to actually heal, I spam old 24-man raids in the hopes of finding that one party that’s a clown fiesta. I don’t think it’s healthy for the role that healers need to go out of their way to find engagement.

I’m hoping Sephirot Unreal will be a real throwback to his original HW fight, which was actually really challenging and hard. He was, more or less, a Savage fight. But again: that’s one fight that will only be around for ~4 months and then go offline when the next Unreal comes out. I wish it didn’t have to be that way. I don’t think the MSQ needs to be Dark Souls levels of hard, but making Extremes and Savage feel like Extreme and Savage again would be nice. Current Extremes are nowhere near as difficult as some of the older ones.

Back in HW, Yoshida went on record telling individuals to better themselves instead of asking for nerfs (this was back when people complained the story mode trial Final Steps of Faith was too hard). Now, things have been simplified in the name of accessibility, but it has gone too far. This simplification goes beyond content design and into job design. Healers see this shift more than others since they are the ones responsible for keeping people alive.

I've been reading healing threads on the healer and general forums for almost a year now while I was on the free trial. Before I found the official forums I was searching up healer threads on the FF14 subreddit, desperately trying to confirm that I wasn't crazy and alone in finding 14's "healing" "gameplay" stultifying.

Then I’m glad you’ve seen that healer mains are dissatisfied with the state of their role. My original point still stands, though: don’t presume that people saying “the devs have said we won’t get x” mean they’re also at peace with the decision. You implied I was at peace with low healing requirements when that isn’t the case.

It would be difficult to make DPS interesting for me no matter how many buttons are added without having some clever skill interactions like friendly-targeted damage auras, pet control, punishment mechanics, spell backfires, or something more decision-heavy than 'keep these oGCDs on cooldown and never overcap your job gauge'.

Jobs used to have skill interactions that were a lot more nuanced than “fill gauge to 50 then press button for big hit”. SB BRD was the perfect example of a job whose kit interacted with heavily with critical hit. Now, there were flaws in this design due to the way critical hit scales as expansions progress, but this kit interaction was completely removed in ShB instead of tweaked to interact with either a job-exclusive mechanic or otherwise.

DoT ticks used to proc Repertoire. I don’t know how familiar you are with BRD, but Repertoire gives you things like Pitch Perfect stacks and Bloodletter procs; and this interaction could be manipulated by snapshotting critical hit enhancing buffs with Iron Jaws onto your DoTs. They also had a raid buff called Foe Requiem that drained mana for the benefit of increased damage to targets affected, and Refresh was used to manipulate and promote using this raid buff more frequently (Refresh was a party-wide mana restore cooldown). A lot of these elements were gutted in ShB, and the job is a shell of itself now. EW took care of the rest, as DoTs have no interaction with Repertoire or the toolkit anymore. Iron Jaws lost its versatility and how you could optimize it, and the concept of double snapshotting raid buffs is gone from the job. Now you snapshot once in 2-minute windows and then at ~3s or less. Foe Requiem and Refresh were outright deleted from the game. There was also synergy between BRD and DRG and SCH back then, primarily because of their crit buffs, but also because DRG offered piercing resistance down, which was a flat 5% damage increase for the entire fight. That said, piercing was flawed and not many physical ranged miss that synergy.

Now? You don’t really have job synergy. You see more anti-synergy because of things like critical hit or direct hit raid buffs not directly benefiting all these abilities they keep adding that are auto-direct hit crits. It is my understanding that they are looking into fixing this, though; but I don’t believe it will bring back synergy between jobs. Which had both its benefits and pitfalls, I will admit.

Pet control has disappeared from SMN with the advent of EW. SCH doesn’t have nearly the same interaction with the fairy that it used to have. The only downfall of pet control in this game is the pet AI being unresponsive and ghosting. I’m not sure if the developers ever attempted to fix this or just decided to axe the interactions/lessen them instead. I miss Carbuncle actually doing something and old pet interactions SCH had. Even SCH fairies having different functions I miss. Eos used to be the “heal fairy” and Selene was the “DPS fairy” because she gave a raid buff.

Mechanics should be more punishing when it comes to level capped content, I agree. Too many things now are inconsequential when it comes to failing them. I don’t believe in making everything a OHKO, but I also don’t think the way to go is to allow players to eat mechanics because they’re literally not threatening. I wish you had done Orbonne Monastery back in SB before they completely gutted the raid. Thundergod Cid actually punished you for not respecting his mechanics. Nowadays, you can disrespect the heck out of him because the developers both nerfed his fight and added the 10% Echo to the raid.

It’s unfortunate how elements of jobs have been gutted in favor of making things “streamlined” and “more accessible”. There comes a point where it’s too much.

[vetch]

I disagree. Participating in high-end content since Creator and watching it require less and less healing even during progression is what I’m basing my statement on. And if Savage is suffering from lower and lower healing requirements, the content below it will suffer even more. I keep hoping to be proven wrong, and sometimes there’s that one fight that makes me feel like maybe content will becoming challenging again; but I’ve been waiting for several years to see this. One fight that actually challenges you every year or two years just isn’t acceptable, in my opinion.

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

I’m hoping Sephirot Unreal will be a real throwback to his original HW fight, which was actually really challenging and hard. He was, more or less, a Savage fight. But again: that’s one fight that will only be around for ~4 months and then go offline when the next Unreal comes out. I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

I don’t think the MSQ needs to be Dark Souls levels of hard, but making Extremes and Savage feel like Extreme and Savage again would be nice.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

Problem being for healers that, when it comes to Extreme and Savage which should be the Medium and Hard to the MSQ's Easy, they end up being 'Easy 2' and 'Easy but you have to press W'.

Jobs used to have skill interactions that were a lot more nuanced than “fill gauge to 50 then press button for big hit”. ...

I've read about most of those, but thank you for the recap.

[HyoMinPark]

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

I can agree that they need dedicated healer mains on the development team. Having devs that actually play the role regularly in all forms of content could help improve the state of them. That said, listening to feedback is also important; and I hope they can also take some of the reasonable suggestions people have made and consider incorporating them as well. Having real healer devs might help facilitate this.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

I agree. It doesn’t. I wish they could figure out a way to maybe rotate them in and out. Kind of the way PvP rotates things like Frontlines, Rival Wings, etc. to incentivize and pull people into each mode. I don’t know how successful an Unreal Roulette would be, but maybe picking one each week that gives you an extra replay on the Fox board or something to keep the older ones alive. I think this could be down without having to upscale the old 80 ones to 90—or the 80 and 90 ones to 100, assuming that’s where we’ll be in 7.0.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

He said they were removing the proximity damage from the earthshakers. I have heard nothing about the removal of the tower mechanic, which is not an exclusive tank mechanic. When the orange and green vulnerabilities are out, it becomes a responsibility of anyone with an orange debuff. When they aren’t, then it’s a tank mechanic. I think the promixity removal is fine. You’ll still need to do earthshakers properly to ensure there’s no overlap that will lead to people dying. I can’t imagine it being the double stack since you technically only need three people to live that (if you’re talking about the two jumps he does during Phase 1). The MT never stacked in that when it was relevant—it was DPS in one and healers/OT the other.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

I kind of wish solo instances could have the opposite options of Very Easy—maybe add a “Hard” option to them so if people find they want a challenge, they can take it. And then leave the “Normal”, “Easy”, and “Very Easy” for those who don’t want it. More options would be good; and I don’t think it would hurt. Especially if you were given the option to choose without having to wipe first.

[vetch]

That said, listening to feedback is also important; and I hope they can also take some of the reasonable suggestions people have made and consider incorporating them as well. Having real healer devs might help facilitate this.

I would go so far as to say that it's required. Without someone who plays healers regularly to parse the feedback, it falls to the current team of DPS mains to do it. Accordingly (if they even take any feedback) they will pick the suggestions that seem feasible to DPS mains.

Crucially, DPS and healer mains often differ on their idea of fun. For example, as a healer main I like to feel like my party is in actual, real danger of dying to damage in difficult content and it's my skillful play preventing it long enough to win the fight... whereas DPS mains probably prefer it when they don't remain at low health, barely alive, one mistake away from death because I'm too busy doing triage healing on people who've been chosen for unavoidable damage.

You really need some healer mains on the design team to reconcile this.

I wish they could figure out a way to maybe rotate them in and out ... to incentivize and pull people into each mode.

Doesn't even need its own roulette entry. I'm in several large discord servers dedicated to re-running old extremes and savages that would jump all over the ShB Unreals.

He said they were removing the proximity damage from the earthshakers. I have heard nothing about the removal of the tower mechanic, which is not an exclusive tank mechanic.

I re-checked what I read and you're right about the proximity damage.

"Earthshakers, where two people get targeted for cones, used to have proximity damage, but it was too mean and so they removed it."
"Also there was a mechanic where Tanks had to position left or right, but they kept getting confused. "Our right? Sephirot's right?""

I don't know what the left-right mechanic they're referring to is.

[Lauront]

I kind of wish solo instances could have the opposite options of Very Easy—maybe add a “Hard” option to them so if people find they want a challenge, they can take it. And then leave the “Normal”, “Easy”, and “Very Easy” for those who don’t want it. More options would be good; and I don’t think it would hurt. Especially if you were given the option to choose without having to wipe first.

Agree with that. The other thing is, if they're rolling out trusts to all trials and dungeons, could they not in principle add such a feature to those too (in the sense of easy/very easy)? At present, they don't seem to have plans to, but it would get around this issue of having to make the MSQ normal content so braindead. I get that the MSQ isn't where the most challenging content is meant to be found, but considering how it's meant to include some very potent foes - and the extremes are mostly just made up versions - I'd like to see difficulty a bit closer to the .3 fights, or even a bit tougher, in the regular trust/DF stuff. It's becoming jarring to me, and tacking on easier modes to the trusts is one way to provide an easy completion option for those who just want to get through the story fast, since SE seems unwilling to demand more of them, to give some flexibility with the difficulty in regular modes.

[Raoabolic]

Hmm.

What this tells me is that you've reached your personal threshold, not that it's objectively clear that it will never happen.

That's fine.

And by the looks of the game, a lot of the modern playerbase's personal threshold was "In from the Cold" and the Dead Ends dungeon. Too bad the game doesn't have a difficulty curve that would teach the newer players concepts like mitigation and mechanics. Eh, not that I have a horse in the race. I enjoy a little spice in my games but who am I to stand in the way of the dev's steamrolling that difficulty curve with the steamroller called "accessibility". lol

[HyoMinPark]

And by the looks of the game, a lot of the modern playerbase's personal threshold was "In from the Cold" and the Dead Ends dungeon. Too bad the game doesn't have a difficulty curve that would teach the newer players concepts like mitigation and mechanics. Eh, not that I have a horse in the race. I enjoy a little spice in my games but who am I to stand in the way of the dev's steamrolling that difficulty curve with the steamroller called "accessibility". lol

Before “In From the Cold”, it was “Will of the Moon”. Tbh, people are still complaining about that instance and they’ve added Very Easy mode…