Meaningless Battles...

[dspguy]

they should introduce AI to the boss mechanics... would be interesting to never be able to cactbot or write any guides to anything, especially for savage and ultimates, it would be nice when we get to be it that it is the player having to do things and not by some dork with a mic video.

I raided every expansion until part of ShB. I sort of got tired of the scripted battles. Don't get me wrong, they are challenging, but mostly just based on memorization. The name of the game was always being proactive, not reactive. They should really mix up these mechanics more than they do. Instead of just being:

Mechanic 1 followed by Mechanic 2 followed by Mechanic 3 or 4 followed by Mechanic 5 followed by unused mechanic 3 or 4 etc etc

It should be more like...

5 > 1 > 3 > 5 > 6 > 2 > 3 > 4 etc

You get to a point in these savage raids where you are doing your rotation and looking for a certain "tell" every 30 seconds and going where you need to go. Don't get me wrong - when raids first came out, especially as the expansions went onwards, they came up with very unique mechanics. However, things are too scripted. Randomize it.

[Eorzean_username]

You get to a point in these savage raids where you are doing your rotation and looking for a certain "tell" every 30 seconds and going where you need to go. [...] However, things are too scripted. Randomize it.

Tough call. Part of what makes FFXIV stand out as somewhat-unique in terms of its raiding is how incredibly, precisely-scripted almost every mechanic and timeline tends to be.

This makes encounters become stale or "rote" faster, but it hypothetically also allows for more precise rotational execution, and more complex rotational design.

That said, if XIV continues to move in the direction of simplifying rotational execution and refinement, then maybe it would make sense to introduce a lot more reactivity and variation into the encounter designs.

Considerations regarding this include:

• How would it interact with XIV rotational design and the buff-alignment meta-playstyle?

• Would the "high end" XIV playerbase object to losing the ability to (in many cases) precisely-script their rotation, down to the GCD?

• Can the XIV engine / server responsiveness / etc, actually handle truly spontaneous, randomised, or unpredictable mechanics? (ie — How much of the current system "works" because players can kind of "compensate" for it by exactly anticipating many elements ahead of time, or otherwise compensating for erratic responsiveness with predictability?)