Mao has question for everyones about DDR-style boss fights.

[Kazuke_Miso]

There's no real 'cooperative' play or synergy.

It's so sad that they actually used to have it. Little moments like seeing the monk saying "thanks " in chat after I send him a goad made my day.

That's just completely gone these days.

The DDR raid design is honestly also just bad for actually playing together frankly. By Endwalker, I felt that raiding is just waiting for the slowest player to pick up the mechanic. It really breeds a toxic mindset because the game punishes you for other players' mistakes. In HW and SB I remember raiding feeling like trying to contribute to coordinate and play as a team. There's a lot more "wholesome" team gameplay with all the synergistic actions that jobs had. It felt like coming together to defeat a boss by helping each other. Body checks have honestly ruined raiding for me.

[Carin-Eri]

Whilst feel am very probably in a minority here, I don't really enjoy the faster-paced fights. My reaction speeds (and ping for that matter!) are sub-par and I'm not very good at avoiding fast-paced attacks.

[Khutulun]

The DDR raid design is honestly also just bad for actually playing together frankly. By Endwalker, I felt that raiding is just waiting for the slowest player to pick up the mechanic. It really breeds a toxic mindset because the game punishes you for other players' mistakes. In HW and SB I remember raiding feeling like trying to contribute to coordinate and play as a team. There's a lot more "wholesome" team gameplay with all the synergistic actions that jobs had. It felt like coming together to defeat a boss by helping each other. Body checks have honestly ruined raiding for me.

Tbth, I can't move past my thought that the lack of toxicity in your earlier experiences was more due to the people around you than the difference of mechanics back then vs now. From my experience with other games and genres, ANYTHING that's functionally related to the concept of "team play" will breed toxicity. Now it's someone floor tanking and dragging down the party's damage dealing, back then it'd be someone un-optimally performing their rotations or using their buffs wrong and dragging down the party's damage dealing. Just more of the same, rudeness or cruelty come naturally.

Ofc, I don't mean to invalidate your experiences. Just making conversation. I wasn't playing FF14 in those times. This is more a personal thing that I can't parse your experience due to how I normally see people act.

[Azurarok]

I mostly don't like that they keep changing jobs to make it work, especially when they were still doable just fine without needing to and their solutions have typically been removing points of friction entirely.

[Misutoraru]

Tbth, I can't move past my thought that the lack of toxicity in your earlier experiences was more due to the people around you than the difference of mechanics back then vs now. From my experience with other games and genres, ANYTHING that's functionally related to the concept of "team play" will breed toxicity. Now it's someone floor tanking and dragging down the party's damage dealing, back then it'd be someone un-optimally performing their rotations or using their buffs wrong and dragging down the party's damage dealing. Just more of the same, rudeness or cruelty come naturally.

Actually I found it better these days, players seem to more calm. Compare to HW era, Alexander Savage, HW EX trials were the worst time I seen in FFXIV. Guess the design now if someone make a mistake it is less likely to wipe the whole party, so players seem to be more forgiving

[Jeeqbit]

It's so sad that they actually used to have it. Little moments like seeing the monk saying "thanks " in chat after I send him a goad made my day.

That's just completely gone these days.

The DDR raid design is honestly also just bad for actually playing together frankly. By Endwalker, I felt that raiding is just waiting for the slowest player to pick up the mechanic. It really breeds a toxic mindset because the game punishes you for other players' mistakes. In HW and SB I remember raiding feeling like trying to contribute to coordinate and play as a team. There's a lot more "wholesome" team gameplay with all the synergistic actions that jobs had. It felt like coming together to defeat a boss by helping each other. Body checks have honestly ruined raiding for me.

It's true for sure that in Stormblood, it was rampant to see people share MP, help manage aggro and regen TP for eachother, or affect others' GCD Speed (Astrologians). This happened in dungeons and roulettes constantly in Stormblood, and it felt good that you were all affecting eachother. And let's add to that, that healers actually mattered in dungeons and you still relied on them as a tank. It was for sure a thing that made normal roulettes actually fun then, because of those dynamic factors where everyone was buffing eachother. A big one was Mana Shift, where people lent their MP to rezzers to help recover from a near-wipe.

It had become such a big thing that SE obviously saw it as a problem and cracked right down on it, and hard, I assume "because a casual player might not understand how to do all that and find it too complex" and to make it easier to balance jobs be reducing external influences.

It's pretty true that almost all that's left of that is lending a tank buff to people to save them before a cast completes. Raid-wide mit or Reprisal is fun too, when the party survives with 1% HP and you know that decision saved them. Regardless though, it does still feel like we're all working to overcome a raid, since healers are doing their job healing/mitting, tanks are doing their's tanking/mitting, etc.

Personally for me, the biggest effect of them removing all that was making roulettes less fun. I always felt like raiding was waiting for the slowest person to pick up the mechs even back then. People joining my party when they weren't at the prog point I asked? They did that. People joining my party and being unable to heal well? They did that too.

But what helped make raids feel more synergistic then was also just having different responsibilities more of the time. I mean, if you have 8 towers and you all stand in them, you're all doing the same mechanic. Yet it was widly different from that in the past. Each role had a unique job and had to do it well.

A5S had MT handle the boss, OT handle the adds, and people assigned to monkey duty. A9S had people handle the adds, the alarum, dragging batteries to adds, the tank had to take the boss and aim it right, the OT had to take the add, and those autos hurt so keeping up the physical damage down helped. A10S had people assigned to passing preys, the MT taking the boss and the OT taking the add, someone on spike button duty.

In contrast, everyone's doing basically the same thing in M1S and M2S.

Actually I found it better these days, players seem to more calm. Compare to HW era, Alexander Savage

Gonna agree. I mean, there have always been lots of chill players, and there will always be toxicity, but my PF experience in Stormblood was "1-3 wipes disband". Now it's more often the case that if we wipe for an hour they are still there. Something just kinda shifted in Shadowbringers.

[ReynTime]

Their pursuit to make a tab target game highly sensitive to ping into a wannabe-action game is one of their worst design philosophies .
"Faster fights" in this kind of game is punishing on ping that until a couple years ago was very manageable.
I don't keep contact with dozens of XIV players but the few I know cite the latency versus speed of newer mechanics as one of the reasons they don't log in much anymore.

[Mecia]

I actually dont mind the 'DDR' design by itself, i just wish they hadnt killed an entire playstyle for it. Some combination of SB/ShB job design and encounters would still be my preference to this travesty.

[Jeeqbit]

Their pursuit to make a tab target game highly sensitive to ping into a wannabe-action game is one of their worst design philosophies .
"Faster fights" in this kind of game is punishing on ping that until a couple years ago was very manageable.
I don't keep contact with dozens of XIV players but the few I know cite the latency versus speed of newer mechanics as one of the reasons they don't log in much anymore.

I have 150 ping and have no trouble with these fights from a ping perspective. To be honest, I have even done mechanics on much higher ping data centers without a problem.

SE typically gives you about 3 seconds to do each mechanic. If for some reason you don't have that long, then you are probably meant to be in position for the mechanic already by that time.

Normally when people say that ping stops them doing mechanic, they actually just don't understand how that particular mechanic snapshots or its order of snapshot.

A really good example of this was in P9S, where rockbreaker seemed like it had lots of crazy stuff going on, but if you recorded it and played it back slowly, the mechanics resolved one at a time, with 3 seconds between each, and by knowing this order you could simply do 1 mechanic at a time. Once you were used to this order, it became super easy to execute, even while half asleep.

I don't actually like how fast the new raids are, but even those, with enough repetition, was able to anticipate and execute with my ping.

[Tatiana]

TBH I am tired of them too, I've sort of hit a wall recently where I simply don't care to do the raid progression anymore and am forcing myself to do them rather than actually enjoying it. I also hate this queue'ing for individual bosses instead of having a cool raid dungeon to go through. I am hoping this is the design simply due to the setting of this raid series, but I want to go back to more traditional raid dungeon design after this expansion.