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

[noumen0nn]

I started this game in late Shadowbringers and Asphodelos was my first savage tier, so "DDR" fight design is all I've ever known. I used to be really defensive of it for that reason, especially because I was excelling as a raider and didn't want anyone touching the systems that enabled that. But here I am several tiers later, and I have realized that the current state of both job and fight have quite literally left me with no room to grow as a player.

I agree with a lot of the sentiments in this thread. "Enhanced encounter design" cannot be achieved without enhancing job design first. It does not matter how many different kinds of aoe indicators you invent or how fast the mechanics come out or how many 'unique' arena shapes we get, if my only tool for interfacing with the game is the WASD keys and hitting the boss with my incredibly simple rotation. I'm a DRK main, so forget abilities that interact with my party members, or aggro management, or anything else the game had before I joined; they won't even let me position the boss 95% of the time.

M7N, for as cool as it was the first time, for as much as it got away from the 'stand and let thing resolve' meme, is not a well designed fight. It is an action game boss pretending to be an MMO boss, and I do not play ffxiv to play an action game. I want encounters that make me care about the 7 other people in my party.

[ONLYSTEEL]

You announced your intended departure weeks ago already.

You are actually becoming really unhinged when you start attacking one of the nicest people on the forums.

Fight with me all you'd like lol, I'm just an RMT bot, but man, I think that UCOB call-out really fried some circuits in yout brain.

[AllenThyl]

You are actually becoming really unhinged when you start attacking one of the nicest people on the forums.

Awww, how heartwarming, to see you pretend to care about others. Just like when you pretended to care about disabled gamers. Or when you pretended to care about the game while spending years of your life doing nothing but whining about this game like a bitter teenager barely able to regulate their own emotions. Or when you pretended to know anything about the fight design by saying that the Nael phase is truly random because sometimes casters have to switch up their rotation to resolve mechanics

Oscar nomination worthy.

[Valence]

That is some serious level of denial about the reality of the fight design. The "wiggle room" you have in low level dungeons is because they are designed as learning opportunity for new players. Good healers can keep a party alive even through high stack counts. The same is true for nearly all of the normal content, even normal raids. Casters standing in attacks for uptime sake, simply taking vuln stacks. Even dps can often survive standing in boss aoes in normal fights, or exploding towers, or not breaking chains, or not hiding behind the stone pillar with the tether and just taking it while the healer heals the damage in Ampador Keep (hard). That doesn't mean you had much of "player choice", it only means that the mechanics are tuned in a way that you can fail them.



That is simply not true. Every tier different strats for different mechanics have been developed, some feature more widespread adoption than others. Sometimes, bad strats would be stuck on a datacenter, even when better ones came out (p8s snake1 "prio" on Chaos ...). It's not about doing mechanics in a "particular" way, it's about solving the mechanics. And yes, not correctly solving a mechanic should have consequences, especially in higher difficulty content, because that's the whole point of higher difficulty content. If mechanics can be ignored and the encounter still cleared, there would be nothing difficult about it.
In CODCAR, the raid can survive 1 or 2 exploding towers with normal mits, several ones with tank LBs. In m4s, the party can either hypermit the transition or use tank lb3. In the new EX4, groups are opting for one mechanic to just hypermit it and everyone taking a vuln stack over bothering with resolving that mechanic fully. So by your definition, that means these encounters allow "wiggle room" and "player choice", thus invalidating your whole complain in the first place.



Again: The fight design as always been scripted like that. Yes, while the game was younger and the player population less experienced, the fights had a little less going on at the same time. Doing Blue Mage achievements was pretty eye opening for that.

Reading this I'm now pretty convinced that ShB+ players, with very few exceptions, will never be able to even comprehend the magnitude of what they never experienced. Talking with such people is an exercise in frustration because they just cannot relate.

[Stanelis]

I think the devs got things all backwards. We need simpler fight mechanics, and more complex job rotations in 8.0.

What we need is a more complex battle system that makes player choose the skill they use not based on a predetermined rotation but on what is happening in the encounter. I just did the new floors today and while it isn't necessarily difficult, there are too many stuff going on and the need to constantly check the boss for right/left and in/out visual clues makes it exhausting.

[ovIm]

What we need is a more complex battle system that makes player choose the skill they use not based on a predetermined rotation but on what is happening in the encounter.

Thats actually a cool idea - have different situation skills that assist you handling what is currently being thrown against you. Would open up a lot of player skill expression too.

Though I recon people would just yap about how that would be oh so difficult to design and to balance as if we weren't paying Square Enix to figure out these exact things.

[SongOfTheWind]

You are actually becoming really unhinged when you start attacking one of the nicest people on the forums.

Fight with me all you'd like lol, I'm just an RMT bot, but man, I think that UCOB call-out really fried some circuits in yout brain.

That is true tho. The cancellation thread from Mao was in November last year. It was sad and all, but now months passed and… what?..

[Azurarok]

how long do they let us keep posting once unsubbed, anyways? Mine ran out yesterday and I haven't been able to log into the game, but I still can post here

[Kazuke_Miso]

That is true tho. The cancellation thread from Mao was in November last year. It was sad and all, but now months passed and… what?..

There are 6-month subscriptions though. Regardless, I'm always supportive of people who really put their wallets where their mouth is and quit, even if it's just for 3 months every patch cycle, or more. If you look at the cancellation thread, many of those people have indeed quit.

[SongOfTheWind]

how long do they let us keep posting once unsubbed, anyways? Mine ran out yesterday and I haven't been able to log into the game, but I still can post here

I think it requires you to login to the game recently. Even if you pay your sub but didn’t login for a while - forum will ask you to do it before letting you in again.