My instincts tell me progging shouldn't be this horrible

[Reaver1236]

I have multiple week 1 Savage kills, all Savage were week 2 or before + UWU/TEA/DSR on-patch kills. I'm a retired raider and haven't done 6.2 or TOP but hopefully this gives me credibility (despite the char i'm posting on).

Here's the thing:

(1) I don't know what job you are playing on but on most jobs you are really just memorizing a script. And with DSR and TOP being so long, really that script is just like playing the same piano piece repeatedly for a month or more. With FF14 jobs becoming so gutted and braindead, it's almost trivial to optimize your job well enough by a fair margin even during Ultimate progression! This is frankly absurd to me. It took me less time to optimize in DSR than it was to optimize during HW/SB Savage fights, because job complexity meant that there's always something to think about and play with even if I'm not messing up the mechanic and am just waiting for others to get it. Now, without that much to optimize even during prog, there seriously is nothing to think about and you're really just repeating the same motions again and again.

(2) In line with the piano recitation theme of modern FF14 raid design, the only skills valued today in current high-end content in FF14 today is job optimization and the ability to solve Hello World, Grand Cross Delta, Intermediate Relativity-esque mechanics. Why do we still call so many mechanics in Ultimates "trios" to this day? The current designers rely too much on instant-failure states. It sure makes for hard content, but it is not in any way engaging or fun. It feels like a chore and a grind. A grind where you're just waiting for everyone to get it 2 weeks after you already digested the mechanic. Much of the focus has shifted from raw skill and problem-solving to piano-recitation-in-Carnegie-Hall-like flawless execution. Which, if you enjoy that kind of thing, more power to you, but a lot of people, like me, don't. Because a lot of people like me remember the "good old days" when healers are able to think on their feet and react to novel, surprising situations and salvage the team and still get the team to limp to a clear. With the mechanics either giving you a damage down that might as well be a death or... a death, that type of problem solving is just much less useful and you derive much less satisfaction from being able to save your team that way. This is just one example but little things like these add up. There just seems to be fewer surprises during raiding and fewer unscripted fun moments.

(3) And it's also not fun to know how to solve the mechanic but have to wait forever to execute it flawlessly. Back in HW/SB, there were fewer instant-fail states, even in on-patch UCOB/UWU. You can make mistakes here and there and still succeed. This means that the gap between the level of execution needed to clear the mechanic and the intuitive comprehension of the mechanic was narrower in HW/SB. It felt like in HW/SB more time was spent on actually struggling to learn the mechanic whereas in DSR it felt like most of the time was spent on trying to get a perfect execution, even if, by my count, I cleared all of them within a similar time window. This to me is just not fun. In UCOB-TEA I felt like by the time when the static really finally "got" the mechanic after like a dozen pulls or so, we can then quickly move on to the next mechanic in the fight. In DSR it felt like you can get the mechanic in 2 pulls but you'll still fail it again and again for the rest of prog. The ratio is off to me.

(4) I didn't use to care about that logging website but now I do. I competed on it back in SB and it was fun for a while. But the corrosive impact of that website on this entire game is crystal clear. Encounter designs cater way too much to the people who scream and cry about not getting 100% uptime for their log epeen. We now have an absolutely boring 2-minute meta on every single job that started all the way from HW when people cried about how triple piercing ruined everything, but the proposed solution was to remove piercing and not to balance it. SE's version of balancing and addressing the logging-raider's concern is to homogenize everything and to make everything as smooth as possible. Getting uptime in DSR on melee is unironically easier than getting uptime in O8S. That is frankly ridiculous. This makes even Ultimate progging feel like you're just doing yet another log run. It doesn't even feel like prog since the mechanics aren't hard enough that you need more than a few pulls to get (most of prog time is on execution these days see point 3). It literally feels like crit farms.

tl;dr Ultimates now feel like a grind: a grind of repeating the fight until everyone executes it perfectly despite comprehending the mechanic eons ago, and a grind of beating the enrage that feels more like crit-farming on e7s than doing an ultimate.

I don't entirely fault the devs though. Players have gotten so good and have seen so many mechanics that the way they make fights harder is now by making fights longer (in effective "thinking" duration) and more punishing, rather than develop mechanics that players will be surprised by or struggle to learn. The latter is much harder for a game this old. There's no reason to expect this to change though, so there's no point of sticking around if Ultimates are the only thing keeping you.

[Saraide]

snip

How is it that you of all people are the only serious poster in this thread?

The approach to make parsing easier fundamentally can not make sense. If you are a mid player the fight being easier doesnt improve your color. People who are better than you also have an easier time. And even then the approach isnt even consistent as seen with the p3s add phase. Which was just yeeted from fflogs because of how much of a shit show it would be to parse. A while ago I did kefka savage with a MINE group and while the fight was still eviscerated by potency creep it did provide a very interesting perspective into fights with tiny boss hitboxes and no free uptime whatsoever. Meanwhile hesperos was essentially the size of the entire arena. I want to give a specific negative shoutout to high concept because there can only ever be one way of solving it. There cant be strats optimized for either safety or uptime on mechanics like that.