Redo FFXIV: Remove the dance, introduce RNG encounters

[Amnmaat]

Your OP does not specify those boundaries; your wording goes slightly out of its way, even, to imply that your example was arbitrary, rather than being applied solely to the past-levelcaps / Alliance Raids from which you drew that example.

People need to read beyond the OP, as I replied to valkyrie, I was talking about regular casual content like crystal tower. If cbu3 is too apprehensive to go back and introduce this programming script to past non-High level content then they could introduce it with dawntrail content.

[Shurrikhan]

People need to read beyond the OP, as I replied to valkyrie, I was talking about regular casual content like crystal tower. If cbu3 is too apprehensive to go back and introduce this programming script to past non-High level content then they could introduce it with dawntrail content.

Mate, people are not obliged to read through your every further reply across the whole thread just to glean details that you, having forgotten to include them earlier, could have taken 10 seconds to edit into the OP.



Now, as for why people like "the dance":

It's because, especially in terms of positioning, the dance is the actual player-felt mechanic, rather than the individual mechanics themselves.

Consider, for instance, DRG positionals. Ostensibly, it has the highest portion of positions of any melee, with 5 positionals for every 10 GCDs. In practice, though, unless the boss is very frequently turning, its repositioning requirements are perfectly average, at just 2 times it actually needs to move per 25 seconds, as compared to SAM's twice per 18s. Similarly, Ninja only needs to use its Flank attack once per roughly 15 GCDs, but if the boss is moving a ton, just chaining in an Aeolian every 3rd GCD between those Armor Crushes may still require a lot of repositioning. It's not where you to be so much has the movement required to get there.

Mechanics work similarly. If mechanic A requires you to be at position A and mechanic B requires you to be at position B, the player experience is effectively just in moving in timely fashion from A to B, complete with banking mobility tools to be ready for over that period, knowing when you can first move and by when you must arrive, etc., etc.

Rather than feeling mechanic A or B in itself, we tend to feel the transition, wherein A->B is effectively just Dance Step [1]. And most good fights have what feel like interesting, well-paced (not too lenient, but too tight) transitions. Make them entirely random without any modicum of bridging conditionality and you lose that, leaving you with just the quality of transitions seen on fights typically not considered at well-designed.

You can do randomization, and a degree of it --if well-situated-- can often help make fights more interesting, but you can't pull it off by JUST throwing randomization into the mix without regard for how those mechanics would sync up.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

More emergent gameplay is always fine.

[Amnmaat]

Mate, people are not obliged to read through your every further reply across the whole thread just to glean details that you, having forgotten to include them earlier, could have taken 10 seconds to edit into the OP.



Now, as for why people like "the dance":

It's because, especially in terms of positioning, the dance is the actual player-felt mechanic, rather than the individual mechanics themselves.

Consider, for instance, DRG positionals. Ostensibly, it has the highest portion of positions of any melee, with 5 positionals for every 10 GCDs. In practice, though, unless the boss is very frequently turning, its repositioning requirements are perfectly average, at just 2 times it actually needs to move per 25 seconds, as compared to SAM's twice per 18s. Similarly, Ninja only needs to use its Flank attack once per roughly 15 GCDs, but if the boss is moving a ton, just chaining in an Aeolian every 3rd GCD between those Armor Crushes may still require a lot of repositioning. It's not where you to be so much has the movement required to get there.

Mechanics work similarly. If mechanic A requires you to be at position A and mechanic B requires you to be at position B, the player experience is effectively just in moving in timely fashion from A to B, complete with banking mobility tools to be ready for over that period, knowing when you can first move and by when you must arrive, etc., etc.

Rather than feeling mechanic A or B in itself, we tend to feel the transition, wherein A->B is effectively just Dance Step [1]. And most good fights have what feel like interesting, well-paced (not too lenient, but too tight) transitions. Make them entirely random without any modicum of bridging conditionality and you lose that, leaving you with just the quality of transitions seen on fights typically not considered at well-designed.

You can do randomization, and a degree of it --if well-situated-- can often help make fights more interesting, but you can't pull it off by JUST throwing randomization into the mix without regard for how those mechanics would sync up.

Feels like you're treating casual content like it'll lead to mass wipes. Most casual bosses won't lead what you're suggesting. I fail to look in my mind's eye to any casual content boss where randomization would lead to "bad transitions." There might be a handful, but a handful out of hundreds isn't worth derailing the conversation.

[Shurrikhan]

Feels like you're treating casual content like it'll lead to mass wipes. Most casual bosses won't lead what you're suggesting. I fail to look in my mind's eye to any casual content boss where randomization would lead to "bad transitions." There might be a handful, but a handful out of hundreds isn't worth derailing the conversation.

It's not about which will cause a wipe. It's about whether they be designed to feel appropriate.

Mechanics A, C, and E require you to be near the boss. Mechanics B, D, and F require you to be far away from the boss.

Normally, A->B would require movement and, being bundled in a fixed sequence, can have a time between them that is neither too long (too easy) nor too short to be worth doing in casual content (ehh, healers adjust and we'll just AoE heal through it).

But now you've randomed A->E, so you've got this 5-second period from which to go from the edge of the arena to the middle of the arena... for which apparently nothing is happening because you're already there. Or, you remove those periods of movement, and now every "go in" mechanic is replaced "AoE heal here".

Tl;dr: The mechanics the players actually interact with are NOT the mechanics on the boss's script, but rather the transitions between them. You don't account for that merely to futureproof some possible rare issue; you account for such because it's literally the whole of the player experience in boss fights.

[Amnmaat]

It's not about which will cause a wipe. It's about whether they be designed to feel appropriate.

Mechanics A, C, and E require you to be near the boss. Mechanics B, D, and F require you to be far away from the boss.

Normally, A->B would require movement and, being bundled in a fixed sequence, can have a time between them that is neither too long (too easy) nor too short to be worth doing in casual content (ehh, healers adjust and we'll just AoE heal through it).

But now you've randomed A->E, so you've got this 5-second period from which to go from the edge of the arena to the middle of the arena... for which apparently nothing is happening because you're already there. Or, you remove those periods of movement, and now every "go in" mechanic is replaced "AoE heal here".

Tl;dr: The mechanics the players actually interact with are NOT the mechanics on the boss's script, but rather the transitions between them. You don't account for that merely to futureproof some possible rare issue; you account for such because it's literally the whole of the player experience in boss fights.

Your statements are not persuasive; provide ingame examples. You can state a bunch of hypotheticals, but without examples they're leading nowhere.

[AmiableApkallu]

Rather than feeling mechanic A or B in itself, we tend to feel the transition, wherein A->B is effectively just Dance Step [1]. And most good fights have what feel like interesting, well-paced (not too lenient, but too tight) transitions.

What? No. What I feel is nothing, because I'm impersonating a simple-minded, if not completely mindless, robot.

[Absimiliard]

Gonna be real. At this point I just kinda turn my brain off and do the dance without even thinking. Every fight boils down to being where I'm supposed to be and pressing the buttons I am supposed to press. I don't even pay attention to what the other people in the raid are saying, although I do keep an eye on what they're doing for when one of them inevitably tries to kill me.

I don't hate the dance, but I do hate the fact that's all there is to it. Once you've memorized a fight, that's that. I would like fights to include just enough randomization (i.e. set mechanics, but you don't necessarily know what order they're coming in or how fast they'll come out) that getting them "on farm" is impossible. Having to go hard each and every time, or you aren't getting loot that week. They'd gradually get easier anyway as your gear improves and you start learning the tells for each mechanic -- and they would need some kind of tells for players to have any hope of reacting, but preferably not telegraph markers.

And no more vuln debuff. Just make people take horrendous amounts of damage when they screw up. For many, getting deleted by that mechanic they failed would send the message a lot clearer than "oh no, I messed up and will now take marginally more damage for 60 seconds." We didn't get vuln stacks in Coils, my dudes. You know what happened if you screwed up while fighting Twintania or Nael during their respective tiers? You either died or gave a healer a heart attack.

[Shurrikhan]

What? No. What I feel is nothing, because I'm impersonating a simple-minded, if not completely mindless, robot.

I never said those "good" fights were many, or even found in Endwalker. (Only that making a good experience isn't about what the boss does so much as what it makes the players do.)

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[Payotz]

Might as well be playing a disney game.

Pretty much yeah. FF14 is literally a disney game, and that's what the audience wants.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but the ship has sailed and they're never gonna steer towards the direction that we want. They're too arrogant for that.
You will play your 2 min meta with predictable mechanics, and you will like it.