And the slow death of the RPG based battlesystem

[Valence]

Personally, I consider Baldession Arsenal and Delubrum Reginae Savage to be the best pieces of content the devs have made because they limit ressing, which allowed the devs to make easier but 'mess up and you might lose your ability to progress,' mechanics. This, in contrast, is about 20000 times more interesting than Endwalker's endless body checks at a frenetic pace where one death = wipe. DRS' philosophy also allowed for actually fun gameplay for casters and still produced actually interesting fights and mechanics.

Staring at the UI to make sure you're not messing up is not, and has never been, good game design. The only interesting threat-related gameplay is tank swaps. The only reason I'm mad about threat combos/threat management going the way of the dinosaur is because Power Slash has a fantastic animation. This design philosophy can die in a fire.

I took aggro so many times as a Black Mage in stormblood not because I didn't use my threat reducers, but because tanks didn't do their own job. This added nothing to the game, I am glad it's gone. This is speaking as an omni player who has played all roles in all forms of content, including ultimates.

And sometimes you die even when you're using all your personal tools to stay alive because the healer is not doing their job. That's part of what a team game is, casual content or not btw. We can also let healing die in a fire, that's literally one of the last remnants of the old battle system.

Look, I'm not saying that things that were removed were perfect, I'm definitely not one of those rose tinted glass enjoyers. The UI in this game has always been notoriously mediocre to terrible depending on what you look at, be it weird ass menu behaviors, inventory, gauges, buffs/debuffs, etc. Nothing is clear and you constantly have to strain yourself to decipher what's up. I do relate to this when I say that I hated BJCC (TEA) with all the fibers of my being because the game asked me to literally browse every party member in the party list, sort their debuffs, and find the correct NISI letters/icons painfully under 10s while continuing doing my rotation and the fight. The UI is a whole other can of worms that is not much related to my original point imo.

I don't hate BA or DRS, but while it's an alternative way of creating content (which I applaud as trying new fresh things is what the game desperately needs instead of staying glued into a formulaic, necrotic pattern of identical content), it ultimately remains part of their new design which doesn't make any room for RPG mechanics. In fact, like criterion as I said in the OP, it does remove even more of those by deleting raising for healer roles and making their MP totally irrelevant to manage. Not that it's a big issue in current savage or especially ultimates anyway, if people die it's probably a body check or mechanical death penalty, so raising or not will not help to begin with.

Which is what makes me say that it's tomato and tomato in fine. Less and less player agency. Just follow the music sheet, don't do a mistake, rehearse again and again until you get it perfectly. And I don't want to play guitar hero, but an actual RPG.

This game already has punishing DPS checks in all tiers, especially on fresh prog. TP was a massive "Kicking you when you're down," mechanic. It was insult to the injury of weakness/brink.

It was a different type of wipe global mechanic, essentially amounting to running out of juice/resources. This is similar to what happens with low DPS due to too many deaths vs dps checks. Was TP an interesting resource? Not really, it felt crappy at times, and needlessly punishing for AoE due to outrageous costs for some reason, but it was a resource to manage as a team. I understand that it feels less interesting for somebody that doesn't play support roles, but again so is healing when you're not healing. Do we want to turn this game into a solo team based game where nobody interacts with each other anymore because it feels bad when somebody fucks up?

MP management is very much a: "What system are you in?" MP management doesn't work in FFXIV's buster meta. But it works exceptionally well for the triage meta. As for DPS MP management, see above. What applies for TP also applies for MP, with the added caveat of in-combat ressing. If the devs moved to a triage system, and moved away from in-combat resurrections as standard, I wouldn't care as much because fights are better with easier mechanics that are extremely punishing of repeated mistakes, but also lacking body checks. This is very much a philosophy thing, however, and I would personally like to have Triage healer/tank gameplay, since I think it allows for more interesting and varied healer and tank gameplay.

I have no idea what triage or buster means?

I call this type of gameplay 'Disaster Recovery Gameplay.' Personally, I deeply miss this, and find Endwalker fights the worst fights the game has designed since Gordias because they've destroyed disaster recovery. Hell, DRS has its own strats designed around disaster recovery, such as healer LB3. Losing this gameplay, alongside losing gameplay that was good and fun for casters, is why I will quit the game if Dawntrail continues this design philosophy.

And do you remember why it was based on that type of gameplay? Because of limited party resources, negative resource rotations, inter role support and synergies, and literally all the points I listed in the OP. That they were not perfect was not the point. They were not. But they were there and the very fact that we had that type of gritty gameplay meant that at least it worked on the global picture and what it tried to achieve.

But, you brought up long cast times.

The main reason I brought up those was mostly because I loved playing BLM (mostly casually, this one, touché) before EW made it so incredibly fast compared to what we had, especially on AoEs. I liked the tactical nuke feel it used to have, and today it just feels like any other job, just because of cast times and potencies. It's pretty sad tbh.

I only accept this argument in the context of a class that actually has a pet that does its own thing 100% of the time, but also requires no pet health management. Dropping GCDs to heal a pet sucked. Having a pet break encounter design (Ramuh Extreme says hi to chicken nuggie-egi,) was interesting but unhealthy for the game. Everything about old-SMN's design sucks, including how carbuncle is still implemented in EW. The old pet-queuing system also sucked and could be very frustrating in modern fight design because of boss jumping if the pet did something especially stupid.

I mean, you can continue malding about the details and jank, that's valid, and that's why I said countless times already that not everything was perfect, and a lot of things would have had to be changed or improved upon. They chose to nuke everything instead. But however, I'm talking about the bigger picture here.

Sustaining your pet HP could have been done instead through an oGCD, and one of your problems is already fixed. Not saying again that it's the best, funniest gameplay ever, but it's just to say that honestly, I don't care much about the details. They're just trivia, and they just become problematic when the devs refuse to fix them, but they don't invalidate a concept or a gameplay facet of the game.

Also losing pets to raidwides was just never fun gameplay.

Pets were incredibly resilient to AoE (like squadrons) and never required babysitting much from it, since they were healed by your healers' party wide heals anyway. When pet died, it was usually for other reasons.

Do we? I can go on an entire dissertation about how every single healer more or less heals and mit plans the same way, as well as how every single tank tanks fights the same way, with the only notable exceptions being the immunities and the slight texture difference of Rapture vs Celestial opposition, or the more significant difference of before-the-attack healing (barriers) vs after-the-attack healing (medica 2 and other similar placement abilities.) Hell, at this point, even WHM has before-the-attack healing while SGE/SCH has after-the-attack healing.

I saw this coming from miles away, and yes, that's a problem, and this ties back to what I wrote above on the loss of a lot of those RPG based mechanics. The ones that generated a lot of what you call disaster recovery. The resource limitations, the old MP system, if you recall how it worked for healers, etc. It's not just a matter of homogenization. Diurnal AST has always been WhM 2.0 and it was meta for 99% of the game until EW. Tanks had identical base combos, and identical base aggro combos with some potency variations. etc. Homogeneous support jobs is NOT new.

But it sure feels a lot more tedious now that everything else has been stripped away and this very fact laid bare.

It's not just Endwalker fights, it's been there since SHB, the actual culprit. EW just added more homogenization to the mix and it was the last drop that removed all pretense of variety that was still there in SHB. But just a pretense.

On the other hand maybe we're not the main audience of the game anymore. When people get out of MP even when their MP neutral healer rotation isn't negative, they whine because that other healer there doesn't have that issue. They whine because they would have to meld piety. People whine as soon as we have something even remotely close to going back to a scrappy based battle system. People don't want any resource scarcity anymore, yet they complain about homogenization, etc, but what's left then if not homogenization?

This is why current pvp is infinitely superior even though it's kinda crummy of me to compare it to pve. But pvp does a lot of things right: crowd control is a thing, resource management is a thing, aggro management is a thing, tactical positioning is a thing, tactical mitigation is there, tactical rotation and cycling between members on frontline duty is a thing, and more than anything else, player agency with actual choices to be made instead of rotations hard set in stone is a thing. Even if a lot of jobs have optimal burst combos or rotations, they have a lot of variants as well, because sometimes your shit just doesn't align properly, and you have to adjust on the fly. You have to make things work with what you have at a time.

• Every mechanic is multiple GCDs worth of movement across absolutely massive arenas. Screw you for being a caster, screw you for not using sprint. Seriously, if sprint makes a mechanic substantially easier, it's a badly designed mechanic.
• Made every mechanic extremely tight. From Dungeons all the way to Ultimates, the precision of movement is so tight that a ping of 100 with slight instability can cause you to see mechanics out of order and wipe because someone messed up somewhere. It is beyond dumb.
• Made every mechanic a body check. It is extremely easy to mess up mechanics due to the raw precision involved in both timing and movement, and if anyone fails, everyone dies.
• There's a long-running joke in basically every group I'm in. All prog is snakes prog (P8S.) It's not even just that every mechanic is DDR, it's that every mechanic is functionally identical with very slight differences. Hell, I had trouble on P12S Limit Cut because it was so similar to TEA's various limit cuts that I kept going 12/56 24/78 instead of 13/57 24/68 on movement. I've even said to statics I'm in that "Wormhole in TEA is easier than this limit cut," in reference to P9S, because it actually is. They can't make new mechanics, they just copy old ones and refurbish them without tearing the old stickers off.

I get it, FFXIV is limited and they technically ran out of ideas back in Stormblood for the most part, but they're just making things frustrating, not fun, in their efforts to, I don't know, turn FFXIV into an action MMO?

Sure, I do agree with those points. I definitely do, but that's kind of not the point I was trying to make, the real destroyer that came before. Those issues have been made possible only because ShB razed the way to make it possible in the first place.

[Valence]

Honestly, the best thing they could do for dawntrail isn't necessarily to bRiNg bAcK tHe bEtTeR dAyS or whatever reactionary nonsense we can read. It's just to bring NEW things into the battle system. It's become way too thin and onesided, and every expansion doesn't even try to do anything else of ambition besides reshuffling some actions and little details here and there. Nobody cares if you adjust Feint and Addle to also bring a 5% mitigation on the other damage type, yet that took at least 15min in the Endwalker presentation back then. That's how insignificant it has gotten.

[SieyaM]

Absolutely. You could do the same thing with any game though if you read the right guides. What a silly argument. Want a solution for your problems in this game? Stop reading guides and learn to think for yourself.

Like rofl, you will appreciate the impact way more if you take the time to learn why your rotation is the way it is and what each skill does. If you're not interested in that and just want to read a guide to get by, what's the issue? That's your choice. A well designed rotation will just work that way though.

I know I am coming back to this really late, but why would it matter to know why your rotation is the way it is if there is no reason to. There is no instance where you will want to change it or deviate, there is nothing to be gained from knowing every word of the tool tips if you never need to change the order in which you use abilities. I appreciate the experience much more when I need to decide what tools to use for what situation, and I have to know what they do in order to use the correctly. Honestly it sounds like you would like it if the skills didn't even have names, just numbers telling you what order they go in.

[Valence]

Less than 0.00...0001% of the playerbase could actually theorycraft a rotation anyway. Calculators and math are infinitely better than use to achieve this for us chimps, who can then proceed to memorize whatever result came out of the calculator and play it while we do DDR.

You know what calculators suck at though? Predicting the unpredictable.

[Valence]

There is another thing that is also directly tied to the problem at hand, however it's not specific to ShB razing down the battlesystem. It's always been there in a way, and it's how 99% of the boss mechanics don't tie into the battle system, often AT ALL. What I mean by that is that every mechanic you'll see on a boss most of the time is self contained. It appears within the fight design, and is resolved exclusively through the fight design. Even complex mechanics like, I don't know, High Concept, are a series of buffs/debuffs that appear, and everything related to its resolution is where the player has to stand and move, and how those buffs and debuffs resolve (I love high concept, I know it's subjective, but I just love it, and yet...). I'll be free to admit that it's not entirely true however since a lot of those mechanics generally can damage the party, and therefore involve mitigation and/or healing. And, to be also perfectly honest, since ShB, there is nothing else left to the battlesystem so even if the fight designs tried, they wouldn't find much else to play with.

However, if you go back in time, the problem was still there even though we had a lot more meat to it. If you still don't see where I'm getting at, then let's remember a relatively simple and unassuming mechanic from O11S, which is Blaster. Blaster does target a player with a tether, and somebody has to pick it up and eat the blast, which deals damage and inflicts a big HP down debuff, which means that the following hit (here a party wide) is going to delete that player no matter what you do unless you omegashield the player or use cover on them. This type of mechanic directly/indirectly interacts with the battlesystem because it specifically requires players to find creatives ways to deal with it with their toolkit. Back in O11S the default was to dedicate your off tank to the task, picking up the tether, drawing the huge AoE of blaster away from the party, and then being tough enough to survive the following raid wide. The savvy strat could be however to have your rphys take it instead, and then proceed to cover them, and not lose tank uptime in the process. I liked omega because it had a lot of little things like that one could do, like giving an actual role to your rphys baiting all the AoEs in Pantokrator. Hello World also had funky uptime strats with rescue strats used on tanks.

Now then you're gonna tell me, we still have uptime strats and mechanics tied to it, and I'd agree, since uptime directly ties into the battlesystem since it plays on certain classes being only melee, or having to use their ranged tools, etc. And in a way, perhaps too much those days due to everything else being removed over time, casters (SMN is not a caster) have to deal with mobility and movement during mechanical resolution as well, yes. I'll admit that it's still there, even though it's starting to look very unstable, what with those boss position resets, huge hitboxes, etc. Anyway, not a new debate there.

One type of mechanic that I actually was very, very positively surprised to see appear in the last tier, which was one of the worst DDR based tier design ever (or maybe I'm just too biased and jaded comparatively to the past), we had actual uses for Warden's Paean. I know right? P10S where you can save people fucking up towers, and P12S p2 where you can alleviate healers GCDs by removing the crush helm debuff on a tank. That's literally what I'm talking about, and those are extremely basic. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine more intricate new ideas of those, but for that the battlesystem will actually need more than the little it has going for it right now. Else yeah we'll be stuck with interrupt based mechanic and esunas when it comes to fight mechanics tied to the battlesystem.

Another type of mechanic that felt almost alien and refreshing happened ironically in one of the most annoying DDR fight of the whole tier, P10S: Harrowing Hell. That was awesome. Legit, give us more Harrowing Hells. We can use tank LBs, we can use other strats, and the mechanic is actually trying to outright delete you and it doesn't pull up punches. You have to ensure the mechanics are covered, yes, but everybody in the team also needs to make sure they survive and use their toolkit into doing so. It's a far cry from absolutely finicky or obnoxious mechanics like Bonds 3 or Superchain Theories.

Point is, even as basic as they are, those mechanics require the party to talk and offers OPTIONS and AGENCY. If there was more rng accompanying them as well, we'd have actual plays that aren't scripted as well. Who's to say some of those can't come at non fixed timers?

[UkcsAlias]

let's remember a relatively simple and unassuming mechanic from O11S, which is Blaster. Blaster does target a player with a tether, and somebody has to pick it up and eat the blast, which deals damage and inflicts a big HP down debuff, which means that the following hit (here a party wide) is going to delete that player no matter what you do unless you omegashield the player or use cover on them. This type of mechanic directly/indirectly interacts with the battlesystem because it specifically requires players to find creatives ways to deal with it with their toolkit. Back in O11S the default was to dedicate your off tank to the task, picking up the tether, drawing the huge AoE of blaster away from the party, and then being tough enough to survive the following raid wide. The savvy strat could be however to have your rphys take it instead, and then proceed to cover them, and not lose tank uptime in the process.

The problem with certain mechanics here is that failure of 1 player causes the death of another. Which is often deemed a problem at lower skill levels (note that most mechanics are shown in normal mode in a basic form). If these mechanics cause deaths in normal mode, it causes the toxic situation and made a skillfull player unable to do anything to survive. Even more since it takes a specific player to do the task (with a hp based stun more team members can do damage, its not just 1 player causing a death then if they refuse).

For extremes however, such mechanics are fine to have, but how do you teach the basics at normal mode? Thats the design approach i think they went for. And you are quite limited here as you have to assume normal players are terrible when a mechanic is specific to their role. Such tethers in a current design would mean the boss is not in the arena, giving both tanks free roaming capabilities. And a clear indication of what the tank needs to do (probably a tank marker somewhere). Making the mechanic trivial. But this also becomes dull quickly if repeated, and also make resolving it a bit trivial. Most mechanics we see while they are often the same, still face many diffirent ways of announcing and visual cues.

The current extremes are often more of mixing the normal mode mechanics into diffirent ways that often are a bit more complex to resolve, and not show AoE makers on the ground with them (except when they hit). Which does often do a fine job for 75% of the fight anyway. Its tried and tested, and generaly liked.

But mechanics depending on specific abilities is what i definitely would like to see more. For example esuna could also benefit a lot here.

[Commander_Justitia]

Tbh what you explained would fit well for bluemage, bluemage is overpowered and has crazy good and strong abilities that is why it can clear mechanics with its skillset. Normal jobs cant because all jobskills in this game are tuned to be "weak", just exist to chip off boss HP % a bit at a time. I miss those smart plays too, those we know from other games. Maybe you can find something in deep dungeons or eureka/bozja, where you turn a bad situation into a good one, because you have good niche skills to pick from for the situation. But SE is afraid to bring those skills into the main game - they are kept for "fun side content".

[Valence]

The problem with certain mechanics here is that failure of 1 player causes the death of another. Which is often deemed a problem at lower skill levels (note that most mechanics are shown in normal mode in a basic form). If these mechanics cause deaths in normal mode, it causes the toxic situation and made a skillfull player unable to do anything to survive. Even more since it takes a specific player to do the task (with a hp based stun more team members can do damage, its not just 1 player causing a death then if they refuse).

For extremes however, such mechanics are fine to have, but how do you teach the basics at normal mode? Thats the design approach i think they went for. And you are quite limited here as you have to assume normal players are terrible when a mechanic is specific to their role. Such tethers in a current design would mean the boss is not in the arena, giving both tanks free roaming capabilities. And a clear indication of what the tank needs to do (probably a tank marker somewhere). Making the mechanic trivial. But this also becomes dull quickly if repeated, and also make resolving it a bit trivial. Most mechanics we see while they are often the same, still face many diffirent ways of announcing and visual cues.

The current extremes are often more of mixing the normal mode mechanics into diffirent ways that often are a bit more complex to resolve, and not show AoE makers on the ground with them (except when they hit). Which does often do a fine job for 75% of the fight anyway. Its tried and tested, and generaly liked.

But mechanics depending on specific abilities is what i definitely would like to see more. For example esuna could also benefit a lot here.

I already explained it, but I guess I can do it again. The problem with certain mechanics like healing is that if the healer fails, it can cause the death of others. Do we delete healing too?

And if you're speaking about normal mode, it's like literally every mechanic in the game. If the OT doesnt handle adds properly, it will wipe parties in savage, but it will not in normal mode, unless things start piling up enough for it to happen. NM mechanics aren't supposed to be designed around absolute lethality upon simple failures there. For instance, check out how blaster plays out in O11 NM, and it's a far cry from the savage version.

I'll also probably die on that hill but I think ex fights are some of the fights (not all of them) where the DDR syndrome / react to visual shit is the most insane. They seem to think that having heavier debuffs and things like in savage is not something you'd want in extremes.

Tbh what you explained would fit well for bluemage, bluemage is overpowered and has crazy good and strong abilities that is why it can clear mechanics with its skillset. Normal jobs cant because all jobskills in this game are tuned to be "weak", just exist to chip off boss HP % a bit at a time. I miss those smart plays too, those we know from other games. Maybe you can find something in deep dungeons or eureka/bozja, where you turn a bad situation into a good one, because you have good niche skills to pick from for the situation. But SE is afraid to bring those skills into the main game - they are kept for "fun side content".

I'm not asking SE to bring crazy imbalanced crap into standard pve content though...

[HappyHubris]

I took aggro so many times as a Black Mage in stormblood not because I didn't use my threat reducers, but because tanks didn't do their own job. This added nothing to the game, I am glad it's gone. This is speaking as an omni player who has played all roles in all forms of content, including ultimates.

But it strips a dimension of play from tanks, giving them one less facet of play to master. Now they're simple DPS that occasionally have to throw a cooldown. Just like how healers no longer have to manage mana.

As you strip more and more from roles, you end up with something like GW2 was, where everyone would hit their abilities on cooldown and dodge mechanics. Except without the active dodge.

[ThorneDynasty]

I mean that sentence is completely self-contradictory, regardless of whether you agree the aggro management was bad or not. "[You were punished] because tanks didn't do their job. This added nothing to the game"

Clearly it did then, if there was something in the game that had to be done properly or there were consequences. That's quite literally "adding to the game".