This game is on a terrible state right now.

[Kaurhz]

Ooo okay yeah they're smoking lol. I think relics just haven't hit a sweet spot tbh. The grind is either too much (AR, HW) or too little (EW). I think SHB had a good amount of grind, the only problem is that it's locked behind sorta dead content (well, dead if you try to solo it. Easier if you go through the Bozjan discords). I don't think I've ever found a person personally to enjoy ARR/HW grind LOL at all.

It was OK, but it came at the expense of it being some of the worst-designed relic systems we've had, the Resistance relics were designed with not an ounce of longevity in mind with the underlying content, being relegated to effectively the same treatment as Bozja wherein you're almost encouraged to use Discord etc., to even have a remotely pleasurable experience with the relic. Was OK on patch, but it very quickly started to show its colours and I can say had I not gone through the process of getting them all in the same expansion as their release then I would not be hard pressed going for them, and this is someone who is actually enticed by achievement points.

ARR I have mixed feelings for. If I were to be told it's the worst relic I'd be inclined to agree with some measure, but if they were to say it had no potential then I'd disagree vehemently. in fact, the books were a great system, they just need(ed) to have a system like Wondrous Tales, aside from that it had people doing almost anything and everything so it was difficult. Relics should be like that rather than FATE-farming simulators exclusively, which arguably Eureka was.

It only seems like ShB/EW was just the same old if you naively compare the content 1-to-1. But they weren't 1-to-1. An HW/SB alliance raid was worth more than an EW alliance raid because you actually need to learn what's going on. Some mechanics, like disorientation, the rotating exaflare etc. were first introduced in alliance raids. By contrast an EW alliance raid felt samey even for the first time. Eureka Orthos is worth less than PotD, because PotD was fresh when it was introduced in HW. Orthos isn't new: people have literally done the same ol' already. If you compare PotD to Orthos 1:1 and you don't see the problem I don't know what else to tell you.

Beyond the copy-paste content we now get in EW, all classes and jobs have been dumbed down. This removes a huge chunk of playtime dedicated to mastering a class, both combat and DoH. It probably took me more time to learn HW MCH than to learn EW SMN, RDM, WAR, DRK, GNB, WHM, SCH, AST, SGE combined, and the latter was also more boring. Only EW BLM counts as real content these days.

People call the predictable content delivery stale but that's only because you can expect the same mechanics, same playstyle, and these days even the same storyline from each patch.

And yes, most of the side content they make is incredibly shallow. But Island Sanctuary has somehow managed to be even shallower than Eureka Anemos, and the only saving grace is the criterion/variant dungeons. You know, if they just stuck to their guns and kept pumping out more Eureka/Bozja style content and used it as a vehicle for making creative 48-man raids and unique job playstyles with actions they could've gone far. The reason they didn't is obviously because it's expensive to do so and "spare no expenses" is a lie.

By the same extension with respect to PotD, the exact same argument could nearly enough be made in the case of Heaven of High, and not only this if you were to actually compare the Exploratory content of HW (Diadem) to that of Eureka Anemos and Pagos, you will largely find that if you were to have slapped HW relic weapons inside of Diadem then you would find an experience not too far from that Anemos or Pagos, so I don't really think you need to look too far from Stormblood to see the pivots made in the copy paste department when HoH didn't really evolve much in the area from PotD, we had, a dog with an AoE buff, and some magicites that were innovated upon. Outside of that, it was a copy-and-paste experience. The same again could be said if you were to look at the original Diadem and how well it maps to Eureka Anemos and Pagos, bar the leveling system behind it.

If I am being frank, I didn't really find much in the way of elaboration or difficulty with respect to the HW alliance raids, and similarly, the SB alliance raids just felt like sponges. I felt more like I was playing the game of 'how long before the lala falls asleep' (Given that was my char at the time) If you think HW crafting was a staple of any form of sophistication then I don't really know what to tell you.

Eureka Anemos is just as shallow as any other content we've had, and similarly is the case with Pagos, as per my earlier paragraph being a system that was introduced as early as HW in the most basic form, yet the only difference, was, what? Stripped of the aesthetic and remodeled with a leveling system included. The fact this was all they could do even with already having Diadem as the base structure (which included an emergency mission), only serves to show how disappointing Anemos and Pagos actually were, and far, far worse than Island Sanctuary, I would argue. With respect to Eureka/Bozjan-style content that should not be the requirement to introduce 48-man content, or content similar. Furthermore, they should not need to keep this rote formula, especially with your acknowledgment that they started crap and ended out fine. There's no reason they couldn't expand this self-same system to Criterion/Variant with the logos etc., Or have it separate from exploratory content entirely. Given you've stated Eureka and Bozja leads me to believe that the exploratory content itself didn't take your intrigue just the fact it had a large-scale raid included, and some nuance with the logos/essences system - Which I'll be frank with you, is a good system, but it is also a system that has come long past the date of being tied to a particular piece of content, and I would argue should be more applicable to the wider scope of content rather than should be part of x.

They should be looking at newer things, now granted, I don't think this should directly come at the expense of all content, e.g., I still think the expansion should have a 48-man raid. But I don't think every expansion should have x and y (e.g., a Bozja and Eureka) that's very quickly just running into a copy-and-paste job, this is why I was highly against deep dungeon, because I think they long, long hit their creativity with that, or are willing., but if they can at least cycle it without, again, necessarily coming at the expense of 48-man raids then that's a good state.

[TheGrimace]

Game's fine, though I do want more exploratory zones and better relic progression.

The forums, though? Yikes.

[Nizzi]

While my post history will attest that I'm certainly no defender of the current state of the game, especially in regards to job design but; say there was an exploratory zone in this game, or even a relic grind that was like "Run Aglaia/Euphrosyne/Variant dungeons lol" or whatever - would people here complaining about 'no content' be happy, or complaining about 'no content' less?

I'm not saying that I don't agree that there's a lack of "casual/midcore" stuff to do, but personally speaking I don't see how this expansion, that has a fundamental flaw at its core with the job design IMO, would suddenly become fun or have "content worth doing" if it got an exploratory zone or had a relic grind that wasn't just 1500 tomes. Of course, more content is always better than "no content" but the content we've gotten, such as Eureka Orthos or Criterion has nobody wanting to do it because "the rewards aren't great", but also in part because they don't find the core gameplay loop rewarding or entertaining, which is something that no amount of battle content will fix.

If you don't find your job fun enough to prog EX or Savage on, is running around grinding mobs or doing "dodge the orange" FATEs in a new zone really going to be any better?

[Reinha]

8 years "plenty to do"? What are you doing, achievement grinding lmao? Getting those 500k points in the Diadem for the mount? That sure is content that the majority of people want to do, that's why the majority of people just do it for fun, right? That's a lot of click on mount --> macro to nearest node --> repeat sort of content that people are looking for!

Were you really so impatient that you couldn't wait a couple of hours for me to respond and had to make something up in your head? No wonder I guess, people these days are drawn to 10 second clips for entertainment. MMOs require a longer attention span and if you lack that then no one can get you to have fun here.

[Incinerator2]

such as Eureka Orthos or Criterion has nobody wanting to do it

That's because Orthos is a copy-paste piece of content that everyone has already played to death over the last 6 years.

If you don't find your job fun enough to prog EX or Savage on, is running around grinding mobs or doing "dodge the orange" FATEs in a new zone really going to be any better?

And I found WAR braindead in ShB but I enjoyed it in Bozja because of Blood Rage. I actually spammed Delubrum normal over and over again just to use Irregular Blood Rage WAR and have fun topping the DPS charts. Your mitigations actually matter and you needed to plan them out carefully since it's literally life-or-death the moment you miss a Rampart. And Blood Rage + Bozjan gear changed the rotation enough that it felt like a whole different job where you needed to chain actions well enough so that you can continue using Blood Rage. It's not even that hard for them to make jobs interesting in optional content.

Yes job design is horrible but it's not the core issue, it's just one of many. They could easily add a few tweaks to optional content to make them feel completely different and act as brand new content without changing much at all.

[Incinerator2]

I think this is the main point people seem to overlook. "Its always been this way" isn't necessarily true. Its not just the amount of content that has changed, but also the tools we tackle said content with. I'm not saying every nuance of classes was good (as I can only indirectly speculate on those as i started in late ShB), but I can agree with those who did play back then that the classes now are very plain and samey. It ruins the replayability of the existing content cycle. Not to mention the content itself has also been simplified as well. TOP/DSR are harder than any of the 70s/80s ultis, but those older fights feel more engaging. You can also see this when you compare 90 savages to current Omega raids. P8s is considered one of the harder savage fights, but it isn't as engaging as say O12s O8s or O4s as an example.

quote from another guy

(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.

[R041]

Were you really so impatient that you couldn't wait a couple of hours for me to respond and had to make something up in your head? No wonder I guess, people these days are drawn to 10 second clips for entertainment. MMOs require a longer attention span and if you lack that then no one can get you to have fun here.

Bro, Humanity has always been attention and entertainment starved. What are you even on?

That is the thing that drives humanity forward in this universe, and thank f*ck for that.

We INVENTED TELEVISION AND VIDEOS GAMES. YOU'RE GONNA SIT HERE AND SAY WE'RE DRAWN TO CONSTANT ENTERTAINMENT THESE DAYS?

YOU'RE ON A FORUM FOR A VIDEO GAME ABOUT ANIME WAIFUS THAT FLY TO OUTERSPACE BY THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP.

YOU ARE CURRENTLY WATCHING PIXELS ON A SCREEN FLASH FASTER THAN YOU CAN COMPREHEND SO THAT YOU CAN FLY THAT IMAGINARY SPACE SHIP.

MY GRANDFATHERS DIED IN THE WAR SO THAT I COULD SIT HERE AND DO THIS SHIT



NOW FEED ME MORE CONTENT OR ELSE

[Tsumdere]

I'm no Endwalker apologist, but people are kidding themselves if they think the game is 'terrible'. I think it's definitely been a step down in raid quality from ShB, but the game is more or less the same as it has always been.

It's hardly the amount of content that is coming out, but the rate that it is coming out at. If Orthos and BLU were released in 6.1x/6.2x like they should have been and relics required more tomes, I imagine there would be a lot less complaints content wise.

They should honestly stop pushing the grinds to later patch cycles. That doesn't make sense.

[Incinerator2]

t was OK, but it came at the expense of it being some of the worst-designed relic systems we've had, the Resistance relics were designed with not an ounce of longevity in mind with the underlying content, being relegated to effectively the same treatment as Bozja wherein you're almost encouraged to use Discord etc., to even have a remotely pleasurable experience with the relic. Was OK on patch, but it very quickly started to show its colours and I can say had I not gone through the process of getting them all in the same expansion as their release then I would not be hard pressed going for them, and this is someone who is actually enticed by achievement points.

ARR I have mixed feelings for. If I were to be told it's the worst relic I'd be inclined to agree with some measure, but if they were to say it had no potential then I'd disagree vehemently. in fact, the books were a great system, they just need(ed) to have a system like Wondrous Tales, aside from that it had people doing almost anything and everything so it was difficult. Relics should be like that rather than FATE-farming simulators exclusively, which arguably Eureka was.



By the same extension with respect to PotD, the exact same argument could nearly enough be made in the case of Heaven of High, and not only this if you were to actually compare the Exploratory content of HW (Diadem) to that of Eureka Anemos and Pagos, you will largely find that if you were to have slapped HW relic weapons inside of Diadem then you would find an experience not too far from that Anemos or Pagos, so I don't really think you need to look too far from Stormblood to see the pivots made in the copy paste department when HoH didn't really evolve much in the area from PotD, we had, a dog with an AoE buff, and some magicites that were innovated upon. Outside of that, it was a copy-and-paste experience. The same again could be said if you were to look at the original Diadem and how well it maps to Eureka Anemos and Pagos, bar the leveling system behind it.

If I am being frank, I didn't really find much in the way of elaboration or difficulty with respect to the HW alliance raids, and similarly, the SB alliance raids just felt like sponges. I felt more like I was playing the game of 'how long before the lala falls asleep' (Given that was my char at the time) If you think HW crafting was a staple of any form of sophistication then I don't really know what to tell you.

Eureka Anemos is just as shallow as any other content we've had, and similarly is the case with Pagos, as per my earlier paragraph being a system that was introduced as early as HW in the most basic form, yet the only difference, was, what? Stripped of the aesthetic and remodeled with a leveling system included. The fact this was all they could do even with already having Diadem as the base structure (which included an emergency mission), only serves to show how disappointing Anemos and Pagos actually were, and far, far worse than Island Sanctuary, I would argue. With respect to Eureka/Bozjan-style content that should not be the requirement to introduce 48-man content, or content similar. Furthermore, they should not need to keep this rote formula, especially with your acknowledgment that they started crap and ended out fine. There's no reason they couldn't expand this self-same system to Criterion/Variant with the logos etc., Or have it separate from exploratory content entirely. Given you've stated Eureka and Bozja leads me to believe that the exploratory content itself didn't take your intrigue just the fact it had a large-scale raid included, and some nuance with the logos/essences system - Which I'll be frank with you, is a good system, but it is also a system that has come long past the date of being tied to a particular piece of content, and I would argue should be more applicable to the wider scope of content rather than should be part of x.

They should be looking at newer things, now granted, I don't think this should directly come at the expense of all content, e.g., I still think the expansion should have a 48-man raid. But I don't think every expansion should have x and y (e.g., a Bozja and Eureka) that's very quickly just running into a copy-and-paste job, this is why I was highly against deep dungeon, because I think they long, long hit their creativity with that, or are willing., but if they can at least cycle it without, again, necessarily coming at the expense of 48-man raids then that's a good state.

Of course HoH was a copy-paste job. It wasn't good. The contention isn't whether there have always been copy-pastes. It's that the copy-pasting has gotten worse in ShB/EW. This applies to every piece of content. Dungeons have become copy-paste since mid-HW. ARR dungeons were unironically the best dungeons this game has to offer. Simple things like Dzemael's Crystal Veil mechanic adds a lot of variety to ARR dungeons. No one needs a labyrinth and my fondness for ARR dungeons has never been due to its non-linearity. And in comparison HW and SB dungeons were all pretty stale. So no, no one is saying copy-pasting never existed. It's that it has gotten progressively worse. Same deal for jobs. HW introduced Whistle which you said added a degree of sophistication. It is obviously not some otherworldly mechanic but it's certainly more sophisticated than ShB/EW crafting. So again, the problem is that it has gotten worse instead of being built upon. Not that it was always some pinnacle of gameplay. And finally, with alliance raids, I certainly experienced way, way more wipes in Mhach and Dun Scaith and Ivalice than I ever did in ShB/EW. So even if it's easier for you the fact that things can go wrong makes it far more exciting for me.

Eureka started off poorly. But there is a place for open-world exploratory content. It builds in-game community, something that basically is relegated to Discord now. There just needs to be something more than FATEs.

[Padudu]

Were you really so impatient that you couldn't wait a couple of hours for me to respond and had to make something up in your head? No wonder I guess, people these days are drawn to 10 second clips for entertainment. MMOs require a longer attention span and if you lack that then no one can get you to have fun here.

I mean, was I wrong tho if you're not gonna answer me? It's not like raiding takes 8 years to do, and also you play a MMO bro, don't act like you're not here for the dopamine hits LMAO.

It was OK, but it came at the expense of it being some of the worst-designed relic systems we've had, the Resistance relics were designed with not an ounce of longevity in mind with the underlying content, being relegated to effectively the same treatment as Bozja wherein you're almost encouraged to use Discord etc., to even have a remotely pleasurable experience with the relic. Was OK on patch, but it very quickly started to show its colours and I can say had I not gone through the process of getting them all in the same expansion as their release then I would not be hard pressed going for them, and this is someone who is actually enticed by achievement points.

ARR I have mixed feelings for. If I were to be told it's the worst relic I'd be inclined to agree with some measure, but if they were to say it had no potential then I'd disagree vehemently. in fact, the books were a great system, they just need(ed) to have a system like Wondrous Tales, aside from that it had people doing almost anything and everything so it was difficult. Relics should be like that rather than FATE-farming simulators exclusively, which arguably Eureka was.

IMO, the game's biggest downfall (and SE's, by extension), is that they leave content to die. I think Resistance relics wouldn't be so badly designed had they planned to come back to the content; they don't, so here we (and Eureka relics too) are, never to return. Relics honestly just seemed design to fail, no matter what you do, because essentially the grind is gated behind content you need outside help for (Bozja, SB), the grind is tedious to point of nauseous (ARR, HW) or we're here at EW, where the steps so far is just.. play the game and you get the relic, so the sense of reward isn't really there. I actually think I would like SB/Bozja relics, but if and ONLY if, SE would actually give it the TLC it deserves.

I think they have potential, but I don't think SE can utilize the potential or have the desire to, so here we are. It's really sad because I think SE CAN make a good relic grind, but have just kinda thrown in the towel at this point.. at least IMO.