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

[Mikey_R]

If you're going to spread misinformation you should at least have cleared the fight back then. The towers do very light damage.

And since you conveniently dismissed the whole post about DDR raids by laser focusing on a (non-existent) minor error, I will do the same to your idiotic post.

Try again. I checked the mechanics by reviewing Mizzteq and Mr Happy. Mizzteq never says you have to shield before hand and Mr Happy specifically states that the meteors do no damage if you have enough party members in them:

https://youtu.be/pZD7pOd4Gzg?si=lH7yTGaII5hXZE3J&t=905

To further this, the guide you linked can be interpreted as the heads doing damage, but I'm not here for vague wording, conveniently, there is also a video attached, a Ninja PoV as it happens. Go to Forsaken 1, the only buffs on the Ninja are Protect and Plenary Indulgence, the Path of Light hits and it does ZERO damage. Here is that point in the video, starting at the point just before their HP reduces to 1.

In this case, I do believe I have provided enough evidence to say, without a doubt, The Path of Light does ZERO damage.

If you don't want to provide explanations as to why your other videos are not classed as DDR, I am just going to ignore them. Evidence without explanation is not evidence at all.

This is a complete skill issue except on jobs like MCH. Fey wind and Arrows were optimal play and good players knew how to exploit them effectively.

Honestly I don't even understand why people who clearly have not done the content that people are discussing (O8S) chime in.

The problem is, you are clearly looking at things from the point of view of a static group, where players know what they are doing. However, these things also need to work in a random group setting and being unable to attack because your TP regener didn't regen your TP, or you just did not get randomly matched with one, was a problem. This is only made worse by the fact random groups are, by their nature, going to do less damage than a static group, so fights take longer, which gives more chance for this to happen.

[Kazuke_Miso]

Try again. I checked the mechanics by reviewing Mizzteq and Mr Happy. Mizzteq never says you have to shield before hand and Mr Happy specifically states that the meteors do no damage if you have enough party members in them:

https://youtu.be/pZD7pOd4Gzg?si=lH7yTGaII5hXZE3J&t=905

To further this, the guide you linked can be interpreted as the heads doing damage, but I'm not here for vague wording, conveniently, there is also a video attached, a Ninja PoV as it happens. Go to Forsaken 1, the only buffs on the Ninja are Protect and Plenary Indulgence, the Path of Light hits and it does ZERO damage. Here is that point in the video, starting at the point just before their HP reduces to 1.

In this case, I do believe I have provided enough evidence to say, without a doubt, The Path of Light does ZERO damage.

If you don't want to provide explanations as to why your other videos are not classed as DDR, I am just going to ignore them. Evidence without explanation is not evidence at all.



The problem is, you are clearly looking at things from the point of view of a static group, where players know what they are doing. However, these things also need to work in a random group setting and being unable to attack because your TP regener didn't regen your TP, or you just did not get randomly matched with one, was a problem. This is only made worse by the fact random groups are, by their nature, going to do less damage than a static group, so fights take longer, which gives more chance for this to happen.

You are right on that particular minor point that the towers don't do damage, but you still literally ignored the entire point on how they used to make more than mere DDR mechanics. The Forsaken 1 heal check isn't just about soaking towers. You seized on that minor point to ignore the entire example and post.

Maybe if you have ever actually done any Savage content you would intuitively understand how encounter design has changed, but there's no point in trying to convince a white knight when they peddle in debate parlor tricks like using an irrelevant mistake to discredit the whole argument. You are clearly not arguing in good faith, and your posts on this forum have been white knight defense after white knight defense, so I encourage EVERYONE to not bother responding to you in good faith either.

[Mikey_R]

You are right on that particular minor point that the towers don't do damage, but you still literally ignored the entire point on how they used to make more than mere DDR mechanics. The Forsaken 1 heal check isn't just about soaking towers. You seized on that minor point to ignore the entire example and post.

The whole point of the original post was that it was an interesting heal check, in that you had to pre-shield before incurable was applied. This was due to the fact the shields were needed to soak damage that you had no, or very little time to heal between incurable falling off and the damage being taken.

The initial point that the pre-shielding was necessary is not true. Taking damage in a tight timeframe from incurable falling off was not true. The only damage going out after the HP reduction was from the tethered adds and the damage from those can be delayed, giving healers time to heal and shield as needed.

Granted, it is a good strat to try and preserve uptime for melee DPS or allowing casters to stand still for longer, but that wasn't the point being made. The point being made was the pre-shielding was the intended solution for the mechanic, which is not the case.

However, this still doesn't explain why it is not a DDR mechanic. Healers heal, you stand in the safe spot, mechanic resolves itself, heal ready for tether heads (which are just AoEs at the end of the day). What I have just described can be attributed to many things in the game, so why is it different to something else?

Now, it has been a while since I have done an on release savage fight (Back in ShB if you must know), but this also brings up another point, why it is only savage content that apparently has mechanics that are being classed as 'not DDR'? What about other pieces of content? If it is the case it only appears in savage content, then why are we judging the current fight design based on normal and not on the savage version? Surely, if it is only savage that gets the non DDR mechanics, then it is only fair to wait until then?

I am also not trying to trick you. My main thing has always been to try and get a definition of what it means for a mechanic or fight to not be classed as DDR. We obviously aren't seeing the same things, so you need to tell me what you see and why you see it, otherwise, this discussion is going nowhere and I can only conclude you have nothing to back up your statements.

Also, I am fully aware this guy is likely to be a Titanman alt (showing all the classic signs), however, I am using this as an opportunity to highlight how not to do things. It is fine to disagree on things, it is fine to have a discussion, infact, disagreeing on things and explaining why you have your point of view. This helps to dig into what the actual issue is and give more meaningful feedback as opposed to the vague statement of 'DDR', which could mean anything.

[Dahlinea]

The game definitely always had flat DDR mechanics, to keep sliding around AoEs and all that, but also had more creative ways to implement less direct "dancing mechanics", like soaking certain attacks so they don't explode and wipe the party, kiting adds for specific reasons, or the boss leaving for a period of time and we doing other things during that time, like in the Doom Train fight, for example. Lately, even though they may be replicating some of these mechanics, it's happening in a more simple, fast-paced manner, and coupled with the simplification of the jobs, it feels like the PvE battle system declined a lot since Shadowbringers.

I prefer the old style encounters, like in ARR, Heavensward and Stormblood. They were more slow-paced, had more variety of actions/responsibilities to do in those fights, and we had more engaging jobs.

Making the fights more fast-paced and simplifying jobs were a mistake.

[CCheshire]

Honestly, I'm not too into it after the first few times. Yes, I found the entire spectacle during raids to be fun and unique, but then I kinda dread it during my dailies for gearing up alts.

FWIW: I've already turned off spell effects to limited options for everyone else but still a bit of a headache to see the entire arena shining.

[PyurBlue]

My issue with combat design is mainly how predictable it is. After two or three runs there are no more surprises and nearly everything becomes a memory test. I don't mind the fast paced, reaction based mechanics, but they don't always work well in this game. It also makes it hard to balance content for first time experience and replayability. Mechanics need to be fast to maintain some kind of challenge after players have memorized everything, but then this makes failing almost guaranteed on first attempts. If the timing is tuned to be friendly to blind players, the difficulty vanishes with experience. There are also occasions where latency throws everything off, like the first boss of Strayborough.

[Mawlzy]

One way to potentially combat this is a VPN.

See, all those YouTubers promoting VPNs to watch streaming services from different countries, are missing out on advertising what they are actually useful for: stabilizing ping and reducing ping, or potentially avoiding nodes that are getting a DDoS if it's not the server itself.

Yeah it helps. Equally paying for extras in a subscription-based game when the game itself can solve the problem strikes me as... typical SQEX.

[ONLYSTEEL]

However, this still doesn't explain why it is not a DDR mechanic.

This helps to dig into what the actual issue is and give more meaningful feedback as opposed to the vague statement of 'DDR', which could mean anything.

Just warning everyone who might be tempted to respond to this white knight that he came in with an agenda. He doesn't actually care about how you can define "DDR". Because he comes into this thread with his own strawman, extreme definition of "DDR" and wields it as a cudgeon to beat every dissent down.

Why would anyone in good faith curious about how people define "DDR" argue that "NO YOU'RE WRONG ACCORDING TO MY EXTREME STRAWMAN DEFINITION OF DDR"?

So, try not to respond to the concern trolls.

[Valence]

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.

"It works on my machine"?

The true fact is that latency/ping as a metric is partially irrelevant in that game. This is also incidentally why Yoshida is still puzzled when we tell him there is problems past a point with server latency and tells us the exact same thing "it works on our machines when we simulate 200ms ping". Now you need to actually have tried playing through different setups and servers to actually understand. You need to have raided with high latency, and fiddled with a lot of VPNs. I happen to have done that especially during SB when I raided on NA with 180-200ms ping on SB MCH.
- At some point early in the expansion they tried to do something against the constant DDOS (yes, it was already a thing in SB), and changed the routing somewhere, and my ping jumped from 170 to 180ish, which is not much, but in result it was night and day and I had delays of over 1s every minute compared to what I had before their changes. This was not tied to latency as a metric.
- The 80-100ms ping I had when the servers was still in Quebec in HW had servers so trash that we had micro stutters and freezes all the time for no particular reason. This wasn't tied to latency numbers either.
- A VPN like battleping back then dropped my latency down to 140ms during SB. 40ms gain, that should be great right? No, it was as bad as normal. Meanwhile another VPN that worked for me was pingzapper, with barely a latency drop, but suddenly proved a lot better in play, smoother, more reactive.
- The icing on the cake, which made me understand what we were truly dealing with when I played through eureka: suddenly I had a way better experience out of nowhere in there. It wasn't stellar, but it felt playable in comparison. Then I tried to play serious openers and rotations not on stone sky sea but on housing dummies... And I was able to pull off the low ping MCH rotation. Barely, but I could there. A rotation that was indicated impossible with over 40-50ms ping. Meanwhile when comparing it to actual duty instances, there was approximately a 2s difference of delays and clipping between both. Same ping, same latency, but different instances.

Yeah, "it works on my machine".

[Valence]

No they didn't. Unless this is a stark difference between the EU playerbase and the NA playerbase that noone is aware of. Most jobs hates AST's Arrow as yo ujust ran out of resources faster, coupled with the fact noone used the party resource generators, made content feel incredibly bad when you just have to stop attacking due to no fault of your own.

Even if Kazuke already addressed that bit, I'll do it too because sometimes I do actually wonder if you played through anything before SHB, or if we played into a different timeline.

I played on NA during HW and SB and statics or people used the Arrow all the time, same as they opened with Fey Wind all the time, etc. Obviously there were limits like Enhanced Arrow which was kinda trolling someone, but that's an outlier.
In SB Arrow was a gain on almost all jobs (bar MCH), and they didn't run out of TP.
In HW some were definitely a big no-no (MNK, PLD...), but some could take it, probably more than we think depending on the comp, notably having a rphys (like in all parties, some had double rphys due to the meta) would allow a lot of TP sustain, which was required past a point in any fight lasting longer than a dungeon's. The actual reason ASTs dodged Extended royal road cards like Arrow and Spear was that Balance was just better, and Spear was absolute garbage in HW (but solid in SB).

I don't remember running out of resources that much due to other players failure even in casual content for the very reason that casual content was also a lot more forgiving than savage on resource management (except AoE in dungeons but that's another trivia). I do even remember complete randoms in dungeons manashifting away, or even goading. Uncommon, but not totally non existent either, and that was just a bonus, the run worked perfectly fine without. That's frankly a skill issue.

This also leads into something that bugs me a lot and that is the 'all fights are just mechanics X,Y Z etc.' Of course they are, those are the basic building blocks of any fight, it's like me complaining that all jobs are composed of GCDs and oGCDs and are therefore all the same. They aren't. They all use the tools in different ways and this has always been the case. As for some mechanics that don't get used often or at all in recent times, you have to ask why? Is it because they were bad mechanics, is it because the players didn't like having to stop their rotations to deal with it? (which would be a bigger issue in today's job profiles than it was back in HW).

And how many more blocks have we lost over time? All the ones that aren't about players running all over the place and jumping into the safe spot. You keep asking the question, we keep giving you examples, but you always come back to ask the same question anyway. Why should we bother more?

The problem is, you are clearly looking at things from the point of view of a static group, where players know what they are doing. However, these things also need to work in a random group setting and being unable to attack because your TP regener didn't regen your TP, or you just did not get randomly matched with one, was a problem. This is only made worse by the fact random groups are, by their nature, going to do less damage than a static group, so fights take longer, which gives more chance for this to happen.

The random group excuse is literally why we got where we are today, with the complete removal of skill expression. What's next, we removed tanking/healing failure points in casual content, what is left to remove, since the only thing that remains to trip people up is encounter mechanics?



Edit: I already gave other examples of non DDR mechanics or fights in another thread. I do not especially expect you to engage this in good faith beyond obtuse denial, but here you go. I don't think SB encounters are great examples of it, since SB is precisely where they started seriously remolding encounters to their modern solutions. The DDR was less a matter of "is this DDR?" rather than a matter of scale, and uniformity/homogenization/macdonaldization, which was a lot less prevalent back then.