Redo FFXIV: Remove the dance, introduce RNG encounters

[Amnmaat]

Jojoya. A dance has a pattern to it.
Is rng-based rotation (for the bosses/enemies) still a dance? You will never know what comes next, you can guess but your chances are never 100% until the boss used all their mechanics except that last one they haven't used.

In the history of dancing there has never existed a dance where there's no pattern to it. If there has, please tell me.

[Shurrikhan]

This thread is describing how seat of sacrifice extreme works. Pretty good ex fight imo.

If that were the limit of it, I'd probably be for the idea. Similarly if it were reasonably restricted so that the individual mechanics don't have to be nerfed to hell to cover for the chance of them going off back to back, then the idea wouldn't as likely harm as improve the game.

But, there doesn't even seem to be any attention to bundling (varying specific courses, rather than simply randomizing each part, as to have synergetically higher --but still actively manageable-- difficulty), let alone any consideration of specific interactions or setting up taxonomies/categories of mechanics to resolve the new issues such as system would need to sort out.

It therefore all just feels very 'tossed-out-there' as if surely the details (which matter a whole lot more than the whatever label you slap onto the 'overarching design') will just sort themselves out somehow, so I'mma wait on this one. The idea could be applied more broadly than just the certain fights we already see portions of it in, if the work were put it; otherwise, probably not.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Honestly to me I think the fights need to be a bit less on position of patterns with bosses. Every boss has their own dance but you can hide that formulaic design where every mech isnt about every player being in almost the same position to solve the pattern. Its boring and this is something that Ive quickly noticed regarding FFXIV's savage progs, where its always about each member making sure they solve their mech or else wipe and making sure you dont get enough damage downs to get through the dps check. Which Im also going to say that having every savage boss need a dps check is just...lazy.

To me, this is not fun. I'm not trying to say to make the fights easier, but more as in make the fights be less restrictive, because I cant be the only one who truly believes these savage boss designs where it follows the same formula and dps checks isnt getting stale. Im not an encounter designer so I wont pretend to throw in a solution but I just wanted to express how I felt as somebody who tried to get into the savage raid tiers but gave up because of this and the terrible loot reward system

[Iscah]

I don't know why people on these forum are so against the idea of fun. Doing the exact same fight is just boring.

Different tastes for different styles of game. Correctly remembering what comes next and being in the correct position to deal with it has its own sense of satisfaction.

[Fyrebrand]

You know what I would like to see more of, are encounters where even if you know the mechanic coming up you don't necessarily know the exact AoE pattern you'll have to deal with. Some of the Nier fights are great examples of this, where you have to watch the boss animation for tells of where the attack is going to take place. The bosses in Aglaia have some good moments of this too, especially the last battle where the colour of the background denotes which AoE is actually going to occur. I think a lot of people still don't understand how the yellow stack marker versus the blue circles actually works, lol.

Castrum Abania had that boss who changed elemental attunements, so you had to pay attention to which element you had to charge up with yourself or face the consequences. I still saw players who struggled to figure that out, before they completely changed how the boss works that is.

Another thing I'd like to see, and I say this all the damn time, is to rebalance item level scaling so that you can't just ignore mechanics and stand in AoEs all day long. I see it all the time, where someone clearly doesn't know the mechanics and doesn't care, and by the time the fight is over they still don't know and still don't care. And they aren't even new. This goes for dungeons, as well as raids, and yes I mean Crystal Tower as well. Whole mechanics are literally not ever seen anymore because the boss is dying before it can get to the real "tricky" phase. Again, back to Aglaia, if these bosses live long enough they will start to mix things up and give us more difficult variations on their abilities that WILL consistently get people killed, but we never see these phases anymore because players are so overpowered that the boss just melts long before we're even close to that point.

Different tastes for different styles of game. Correctly remembering what comes next and being in the correct position to deal with it has its own sense of satisfaction.

This is also true. It can be fun to showboat and take educated risks during times when you know it's relatively safe to do so. Maybe I won't hard cast Medica II after a raidwide because I know there's not another raidwide coming up right after, and Assize is coming off cooldown soon. Maybe I let the tank take a few extra hits while I take time to Raise somebody, because I know there's not another tankbuster that could happen randomly. Part of being a healer is planning and thinking ahead. I can't do that if I literally have no way of knowing what might be happening in the next few seconds.

By contrast, most first-timers to any given fight have no idea what the boss can do, or what order it will do it in. So, this whole randomized mechanics order system would literally make no difference to them.

[Soge01]

Hi Titanmen!

[Jojoya]

Jojoya. A dance has a pattern to it.
Is rng-based rotation (for the bosses/enemies) still a dance? You will never know what comes next, you can guess but your chances are never 100% until the boss used all their mechanics except that last one they haven't used.

In the history of dancing there has never existed a dance where there's no pattern to it. If there has, please tell me.

I can remember one taught when I was in school but not the type of dance it was. The class's teacher enjoyed teaching dances from different parts of the world and most of them had strange names that an 8 year old would have a hard time remembering.

She explained to us that the dance was usually done with a live band. Lacking a live band, she had 3 different recordings of the music she would randomly pick between instead. Each music phase had its specific step order so there was an overall pattern. The difference was the phases of the music that could be played in any order and so that would change the order of the steps. Those dances would be more fun because we had to pay attention to the music instead of just repeating the same 4-5 steps over and over in a line or in a big circle for 3-4 minutes straight and we would frequently return to a step order that had already been done.

Even with a RNG rotation for bosses, you're still going to know the steps even if you don't know which one comes next. I don't think any game is going to develop a fight where the boss has more possible mechanics than there is time to do them. Fights will still have a limited number of steps and players will know what those steps are; all that might change is the order in which you do them.

Regardless, I'd support the idea of randomizing mechanics in a fight instead of repeating them in the same order over and over. E12S was a good example of it because a different combination of primals would mean reacting in a different fashion and there was no way to know what combination would be next. There's no reason it couldn't also be done in normal difficulty content though with mechanic combinations that would be less punishing if there was failure.

[Iscah]

I think a lot of people still don't understand how the yellow stack marker versus the blue circles actually works, lol.

It's just one or the other goes off, isn't it? But if that's all it is, then it doesn't really matter enough if three people are standing away from the stack.

The blue circles are always messy with multiple people not trying to run into each other. Needs everyone to agree to a simple "run clockwise" beforehand or something.

Maybe it would be better to have a yellow marker and a blue marker and one is a stack while the other deals damage to everyone in range, or something.

Again, back to Aglaia, if these bosses live long enough they will start to mix things up and give us more difficult variations on their abilities that WILL consistently get people killed, but we never see these phases anymore because players are so overpowered that the boss just melts long before we're even close to that point.

Last I saw, we are dangerously close to not even seeing the Balance phase any more, unless Nald'thal's health stalls at 0.1% before it happens.

I'm also sad that Azeyma never gets to do the "find the one quarter that won't go up in flames" attack.

By contrast, most first-timers to any given fight have no idea what the boss can do, or what order it will do it in. So, this whole randomized mechanics order system would literally make no difference to them.

I think that's a big factor as well. A lot of the people unhappy with the game are the ones learning high-level duties where everything is planned out and everyone has a map of what is happening next in a battle they've rigidly learned over and over.

People playing for the first time, or in roulettes, don't have that coordination and probably aren't pulling off a perfect burst in a perfect window of rehearsed timing. They're just scrabbling along trying to get through the fight and press things when they light up. And healing in non-high-level content is regularly a frantic business because neither the team nor necessarily the healer have total understanding of how the fight goes – and even if they individually do, they're going to have to adjust to the ones who don't.

[Saraide]

If that were the limit of it, I'd probably be for the idea. Similarly if it were reasonably restricted so that the individual mechanics don't have to be nerfed to hell to cover for the chance of them going off back to back, then the idea wouldn't as likely harm as improve the game.

But, there doesn't even seem to be any attention to bundling (varying specific courses, rather than simply randomizing each part, as to have synergetically higher --but still actively manageable-- difficulty), let alone any consideration of specific interactions or setting up taxonomies/categories of mechanics to resolve the new issues such as system would need to sort out.

It therefore all just feels very 'tossed-out-there' as if surely the details (which matter a whole lot more than the whatever label you slap onto the 'overarching design') will just sort themselves out somehow, so I'mma wait on this one. The idea could be applied more broadly than just the certain fights we already see portions of it in, if the work were put it; otherwise, probably not.

The example OP posted describes what they mean and it's basically how SoS ex works.

[Supersnow845]

Ooop time to take a drink based on my “someone describes a way to improve the game that is literally just coils”

But also unironically bring back final coil, final coil is the best raid tier and it isn’t even close