And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[ZiraZ]

Disliking dots is peak bad taste

[HappyHubris]

This is the dps role forum. I agree that this conversation will continue to go in circles because you're pushing a false narrative.

Ahh, there's that FFXIV toxic positivity. "The game is perfect; hush!"

As for the broader question, I agree that fight design leans WAY too heavily on DDR and memorization compared to other MMOs. And that everything else is being sanded off (healers that don't heal; tanks that don't need to reposition or generate threat; etc).

[Aravell]

I think the erosion of systems is inevitable when the dev team appears to be trying to remove being able to fail from the game, they're trying to make sure every party will coast through to the finish line without fail. But joy is only found when failure is possible, joy is achieved by avoiding failure through your own actions, removing failure removes the joy and leaves an empty victory (Hey, remember the Nibirun from The Dead Ends?). Now, I'm sure some enjoy empty victories, as long as they win, but not everyone cares for having a win handed to them.

"Why is this guy turning the boss so much? I can't hit my positionals!" > Bosses stuck on the wall or teleports to middle and faces south before long casting
"Why is the healer so bad? We keep wiping!" > Free heals are now very abundant and the healer only presses 1 button for 70% of the fight so they can pay attention to people who eat avoidable damage
Etc etc.

As for the statement that "Bosses have to be boring if rotations are complex", that's provably false. A8S and A12S were fantastic fights back in HW, I don't think anyone would consider them boring, and this was at the peak of job complexity. Many SB bosses are also beloved and not boring to most. And then we have EW, where we have fights like P6S and P7S which are boring for 90%+ of the fight despite our rotations also being boring.

Another thing to note is that fight complexity can be damaging to player creativity, if the dance is complex enough with a large amount of moving parts, then there can only be room for one solution, meaning there's no discovery to make, just follow a guide and win the fight.

[HikariKurosawa]

The devs absolutely are not trying to remove fail from the game. Savage raids and ultimates are still extremely hard content. Normal raids and normal trials are still a fun challenge. If you want difficult content, do it. If you find it too easy with third party tools installed, uninstall them.

We'll see what the direction the devs take for dawntrail, and I'm not really concerned about what you all feel. I just don't want the devs to only hear negativity. People clearly are incapable of playing the game properly since they rely on third party addons that are against the tos. If they're not going to ban people for using them, they should continue to retune the game until people feel like they don't need them anymore. It really messes with the entire experience for people to be abusing addons and this is the real reason for the change in game direction. I think square enix is just tired of people cheating.

[Ggwppino]

I agree, little by little the game is abandoning its old-fashioned mmorpg nature and getting closer and closer to a real action mmorpg.
Which can be good or bad. The problem? that the game is currently somewhere in between and in my opinion it is alienating:
- It's not an old-fashioned mmorpg because the build system is very bare, it's very fine-tuned and very homogenized. Resource management are very few, not too influential or even non-existent.
- It is not a true action mmorpg because it is still too tied to cooldowns and these are very slow, but the rotations of the new classes have become very simplistic making this game very slow and not very action-packed compared to other action rpgs. The boss mechanics are requiring much more movement at the expense of the casters but the game itself is not frenetic and unexpected, it does not require dashes, dodges, true combos, iframes etc.
We find ourselves in this limbo, where not even the designers, in my opinion, have a clear direction.

its core it is a traditional RPG but it is stripped of what could make it a traditional RPG, but in practice you have as many classes with 4 skills as if it were an action game, but without all those action features that create its appeal.

[KenZentra]

Normal raids and normal trials are still a fun challenge.

I mean they really aren't.

They dont have enrages. They could last nearly forever as far as I know, the only Trials/Raids I know that have enrages are Bismark (Island's HP he attacks) and sorta Ravana (walls crumble away due to damage throughout the fight and he does a knockback), both are from HW.

Mechanics get skipped the longer its been available due to gear or power creep from increasing low level action potency. An example of this is Nald'Thal. Its become common to never see them use their Scales mechanic, and everything that comes after that. Not to mention all the other bosses in that Alliance Raid. The first boss will only use his unique mechanic of moving the floor blocks around once. 2nd will show the first Meteor fake out, maybe get started on the 2nd one before being beaten. 3rd dies during or before the Solar flare AoEs (or whatever the AoEs coming from the Orb of fire she makes is called).

Mechanics can be completely ignored due to increase of HP, whether because of gear or again power creep from balancing. I think another good example of this is the difference of HP of someone who just completed the story of an expansion, and someone who's geared up from patches. Nidhogg's Trial for example, a tank who just got to them with gear they got from story or dungeons, has almost a 1/3rd to 1/2 the HP less than someone sync'd down. A sync'd tank doesnt even need to use any mit cooldowns ever, when at the time it was current, you'd have to keep something up from time to time due to non-telegraphed Tank Busters dropping you hard.

In fact going back a bit to too much DPS, older trials such as Ifrit and Leviathan have a built-in safeguard now to prevent them from enraging due to dealing too much DPS to them. Ifrit used to cast Hellfire if his HP reached a certain threshold and if the Nail(s) wasnt killed, everyone would die. Leviathan is similar, you needed to kill the Water adds that siphon aether from the boat's crystal cache, but if you didnt and you dealt too much damage to Leviathan, he would cast tidal wave before you could use the lever to protect the party. Or if the DPS was really insane, he will move to cast tidal wave, before the adds even spawn, also killing everyone.

Barb and Rubicante die before they repeat any mechanics at all. Thordan (never hard though) doesnt even summon more than once, if that. Nidhogg literally flies through phases, you'd be lucky to see more than 1 stack, if he even gets done with the 1 he fires off. Cape Westwind was literally removed from being so super easy (it was fun to do MINE, his TB would remove 90% hp to tanks and his AoE missle thing was insane). Shinryu doesnt get close to using all of his mechanics. I mean, I really could go on and on but to put it all in less words...
Most normal modes are over in less than 4 minutes. Most mechanics are never seen. They are not a fun nor a challenge.

So yes, to an extent the devs do not want you to fail, but also Normal modes are painfully easy. I'd say the only time they are difficult is the first week or two of when it is released.

[AmiableApkallu]

They dont have enrages. They could last nearly forever as far as I know, the only Trials/Raids I know that have enrages are Bismark (Island's HP he attacks) and sorta Ravana (walls crumble away due to damage throughout the fight and he does a knockback), both are from HW.

I would mention a few DPS checks that you omitted (no promises that I myself haven't missed a few):

• Praetorium: Gaius, adds phase, when he's charging up Blade Energy.
• Porta Decumana: The final phase, when Ultima is being cast.
• Alphascape V4.0: When Omega-M shields Omega-F while Omega-F casts Laser Shower.
• Eden's Verse: Refulgance: The final phase, when Endless Ice-Age is being cast.
• Copied Factory: The adds phase, when 9S is charging the Hacking meter.
• Mothercrystal: The crystal adds phase, when the Conviction meter is charging.
• Euphrosyne: Althyk and Nymeia have an enrage at 8min. Halone and Menphina also have phases where they're charging a meter, with a wipe when it reaches 100.

That you forgot or didn't notice them perhaps speaks to how non-threatening they are.

[KenZentra]

I would mention a few DPS checks that you omitted (no promises that I myself haven't missed a few):

• Praetorium: Gaius, adds phase, when he's charging up Blade Energy.
• Porta Decumana: The final phase, when Ultima is being cast.
• Alphascape V4.0: When Omega-M shields Omega-F while Omega-F casts Laser Shower.
• Eden's Verse: Refulgance: The final phase, when Endless Ice-Age is being cast.
• Copied Factory: The adds phase, when 9S is charging the Hacking meter.
• Mothercrystal: The crystal adds phase, when the Conviction meter is charging.
• Euphrosyne: Althyk and Nymeia have an enrage at 8min. Halone and Menphina also have phases where they're charging a meter, with a wipe when it reaches 100.

That you forgot or didn't notice them perhaps speaks to how non-threatening they are.

You are absolutely right, I did not remember those at all. Sorry, I was wrong about that!

Now that I think about it, Thordan builds Limit during the intermission (which for normal is like.... the whole fight) that if you take too long, you all die. I've done this fight on MINE though, I dont even think you need a healer, let alone 8 people to clear it. Even on MINE.

I think you are right to say it might be because they are non-threatening, they might as well not happen.

[mallleable]

I don't mind that fights are more like puzzles, but I wasn't playing back then when the game was a bit more sandboxy from what I've heard. So the game being puzzly is all I've ever known. To me, improving job feel -- especially for supports, better tuned instances in terms of enemy damage, and enemy HP, better trash in dungeons, and improving, and expanding open world gameplay will go a long way in terms of improving the MMORPG-ness of the game.

[Valence]

Mechanic based difficulty is always going to create more unique and engaging encounters compared to rotation based difficulty. I love the direction this game has been heading in personally, and can't really relate to those who want more complex rotations back.

Spoiler alert: people that think that rotations used to be a lot more complex or whatever fancy tale they like to tell themselves to cope with how people have gotten better at the game are living with pink tinted glasses. It's never been about more complex rotations, and in fact, the OP I made specifically took great lengths in talking about the game battle system, and not job rotations. I'll agree that I mentioned them in one item, but the point was again, a paradigm on cast times and tactical choices, not on specific job rotational mechanics.

Also, this is not a binary problem as you make it sound, and again I tried to put forth that it's not about having 100-0 mechanics to rpg systems or 0-100, but a good blend of both. The point of the OP is raising the issue that it's slowly but surely gliding towards the 0 to 100 ratio those days, and it's worrying.

Maybe it's because I refuse to use third party tools and actually have to figure out the mechanics on my own. It would make a lot of sense for people who are cheating at the game to find it boring. When rotations are the difficult component, mechanics have to be simplified and homogenized. Then boss fights have little to no identity or are extremely simplistic.

Maybe it's because I refuse to use third party tools and actually have to figure out the mechanics on my own. It would make a lot of sense for people who are cheating at the game to find it boring.

When rotations are the difficult component, mechanics have to be simplified and homogenized. Then boss fights have little to no identity or are extremely simplistic.

It's much better this way, the solution is to just uninstall all the third party tools(cheats) that most people complaining about the direction of rotations have installed.

Who said that the fights or mechanics are boring? They do a great job in introducing new things. However things have become extremely formulaic and as somebody has pointed out, even if mechanically the coils raids are less stunningly intricate than some of what we have today, the bosses on their own, I'm sorry but they feel a lot more unique and varied throughout the whole series, for the very reason that they're not trying to focus 100% of the time on the same unique thing: having super nice boss mechanics that ultimately always boil down to pair/spread/donut/tethers/etc.

Are you accusing somebody of cheating? This isn't about nasa mods and finding mechanics boring...

I think honestly that you completely missed the point.

Like dance partner, ninja trick attack, samurai dps, black mage dps, bard songs, dragoon eye, rdm and smn revive, smn consistent dps and flashy summons, the list goes on. I don't see a problem at all with what jobs in this game have to bring to the table individually.

I think tons of players in this game just use third party addons that take away so much from the experience that they have become unable to actually assess how the game feels anymore. I'm not saying you do, but too many people abuse cheats in this game.

Individually being the keyword here.

But I do honestly feel that you're trying to push another agenda with another subject with your third party obsession... I'm sorry but that's completely beside the point. You're throwing wild accusations then saying you're not accusing me or the people here of doing it... Then, what is the point behind this?