People don’t realize how easy it is to get into raiding in this game

[Valence]

I can say for me. I don't enter on raiders because:

1. My main job is WHM. I think first thing they'll tell me is to equip AST soul stone. I think raiding guys won't accept a White Mage, specially when he's new at raiding.

2. 200ms lag doesn't help me.

3. I have no experience raiding. So I have no parse in my name, much less an orange parse. And to be even considered viable I must have one of those.

4. Equips: I must have BiS gear. Or I'll be kicked asap. Leniency with gear? Only if I already proved myself.

5. And healer is not even needed depending on the content. Even less the worse of them.

1. There is white mages everywhere, don't worry about it.

2. I've raided with 200ms ping on MCH out of all jobs in SB, it was annoying but fine. Now though? I wouldn't suggest it. Everything has become very fast, about DDR and visual cues. This makes the whole experience a lot more latency sensitive. Your personal tolerance threshold will vary of course, but I think current XIV is extremely latency hostile, more than it has ever been.

3. It's becoming an increasing problem, especially with the emergence of tools like tomestone and whatnot. I have never had to really face those increasing entry needs when I started raiding in SB, but I'd say you can still do perfectly fine by either finding a casual/lightcore static, or just start with friends from your FC, as I still see a lot of those groups among friends that do extremes and savage at their own pace. PF can also be an option, if nothing else. You'll clear things and get logs soon enough.

4. Go in with crafted gear and normal melds at least. Nobody will bat an eye.

5. You need healers for raiding. The game is balanced around savage which includes healers. Without healers, the party dies to party wides, that need to also be mitigated. Is this engaging enough for healers? That's another can of worms, but, the role is definitely needed (on top of required for some mechanics like who gets targeted by what). If you're referring to ultimates cleared without healers, that's a level of effort and skill that is way beyond what is reasonable. Is it a problem in terms of design? Sure, it can be discussed, but that's again beyond the scope of this savage accessibility.

Its more like that its a pointless experience. Its just a single player learned choreography x8 to add artificial difficulty and stretch the content, because this game doesn't have real mechanics like WoW. There's no real group interaction and you don't get better at anything because there's nothing to get better at and then you go to learn the next script from zero.

Pretty much this. You end up raiding for many expansions like I have, only to realize that it's been going down that slope more and more and that the only reason I actually did it was at first out of curiosity, and then out of habit and a fear of missing out on experiencing the content. SB still had the benefit to have some enjoyable and varied encounters that sometimes got out of the formula (phantom train, O11s, etc), but as soon as ShB dropped I actually had a miserable time in raids. I was doing well, but I'm not sure I was having FUN, until EW and its incredibly dull raids came out. And DT has gotten even worse on everything that's just terrible in this game: fast paced DDR and fast paced visual cues everywhere over the same basic spread/stack/donut slop.

The funny thing is that I recently went to learn about that Pirate Software incident in WoW out of curiosity, and without getting into the drama details that are irrelevant here, the very things the man could have done to save his party are things that have become completely absent from XIV over time (past ARR/HW and even there, they were already moribund). Having mana to manage and some left to make tactical choices like casting blizzard or nova to slow down mispulled enemies about to wipe everybody? Or choosing to cast mage armor to save yourself? All of this at a cost in party resources? Having non linear dungeons where enemies also have to be managed?

In short, player agency as simple as this, isn't a thing in XIV (except in pvp, which is why XIV 6.1+ pvp is good actually). That's what a RPG should be about, and not rehearsing a dance performance in a ballet group.

My college once wonder how I can memorize so many mechanics and I was like what? Only then I notice since I did back then a lot of Duty Rouletts I hat learend many many mechanics of Trials dungeons etc. Thing is, reflecting back on then I notice a lot of attacks that are Instant kills or very close to especaly in later stages of the game... but there is no way of knowing the first time you encounter them.
And a game mechanic which biggest chalange it is that you do not yet know what it will do... is not good game design.

I feel it's been a problem in a lot of modern games, including Souls (hate me all you like, souls aficionados). You only learn to recognize patterns by experiencing them first. With experience you get better at understanding them and solving them faster, but the design is fundamentally tailored around you failing and eating shit first before addressing it.

[TheInsomniac13]

I feel it's been a problem in a lot of modern games, including Souls (hate me all you like, souls aficionados). You only learn to recognize patterns by experiencing them first. With experience you get better at understanding them and solving them faster, but the design is fundamentally tailored around you failing and eating shit first before addressing it.

Thing is in a well made Souls like game you still can learn the mechanics without having to die by them, by baiting attacks or looking for tells on the boss and making an educated guss you still have good chances to predict what is coming and even if you mess up it rarley ends in a one shot kill if you went into it at full health.

This I do not have in FF 14 in older content if I messed up a mechanic I would get an Marker which increses the damage I take but do´s not outright kill me. But over the years this was more and more replaced with mechanics that outright kill you if you don´t know what is expected.
I think a good example of this is Containment Bay Z1T9 [Zurvan] near the end of his fight he marks you with fire or Ice and spots apear on the stage with fire or ice... all the debuff tells you you are makred with this element... soo... do I have to stack with the same element? Do I have to stand in the oposide to negate the Debuff? you cannot know you are in a 50/50 situation and if you make the wrong call the entire Party wipes (Honestly I wiped so often on this deam fight simply because 1 or 2 players did not know what to do and recovering from the damage that puts out is freaking hard.