Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Job kit depth and combat content design.


It is subjective, yes, but for the life of me, I can't think of a boss with above-average difficult outside of the first boss of "Luigi's Mansion", and even that can be easily cheesed.

  • Reduce boss health by x% from start of mechanic, or mechanic continues applying another vuln stack every few seconds, eventually one-shotting, or to end pursuit phase which would otherwise kill someone.
  • Kill adds or they explode, wiping the party.
  • Kill add in time to create safety zone/launch pad, or wipe.
  • Break barrier in time to stun mob and thereby survive heavy damage.
  • Kill thing before it seeks down and kills a random target.
  • Kill thing before it apply enough stacks, which explode upon reaching 3 for half your life's worth of damage... as an AoE.
  • Can stunlock thing and burst it down to prevent tank receiving 40% more damage taken.
  • Mob triples its damage after a cast X seconds into the fight and has untelegraphed cleaves that hit tanks for about 30% of their HP before said buff.
  • Or, hell, even just actually threatening full pulls +/- environmental mechanics.
...Have these been purged from memory as well as implementation?


Cumulatively, from original, pre-power-creep XIV across to Shadowbringers? CC. Add gathers. Triggering ICDed environmentals. TTK management around DoTs and TP. Baiting out AoEs and other specials to reduce tank damage intake.


I said the opposite. I don't think job kits were unique in being simplified, I don't think encounters now are more complex than seen earlier, and I certainly don't think the simplifications were done just to support the shifts (simplifications towards DDR alone) in general combat design.

The simplifications to job design and content design are simply iterations of the same desire to smooth things down, not end and means to one another. DDR-fixation didn't cost us job kits. DDR-fixation cost us the bulk of what all we used to have in content design beyond DDR, while present smoothed-down job kits cost us what idiosyncrasies --the fun, the meh, and the fugly-- we had available in prior kit iterations. They didn't need each other to have narrowed down as they did. Interdependence between them only so far as caster mobility and the frequency & duration of discrete 'Move!' mechanics, which have been used as much as they have only because... we've apparently forgot how to design in anything else that could be of interest.
I see where you're coming from and we have indeed lost the examples you gave which in my opinion are characteristic of ARR design for the most part. There was still a couple here and there in HW though, but nothing as harsh as Tam Tara Hard, Sirius, etc. I think they noticed because you can still find some of those mechanics in HW dungeons but they're so watered down in power that they don't really matter and people just bruteforced through them (see for instance the 2nd boss of the Aery and how nobody knew its actual mechanics, and they're super interesting actually... or were, since they changed everything with duty support anyway).

But that's the thing. All of what you listed, I find interesting and never considered it remotely hard. I've never seen people struggling with it like I've seen people struggling with what you say is not above average difficulty. The expansion where I've started to see people struggle and hit walls in dungeons was in ShB. It's been of course ten times worse when DT hit. And the main problem is that the majority of the players do those perfectly fine, leaving the people walled by it completely behind because the gap is night and day. I do remember older dungeons with their battle design, and more people had troubles being optimal or playing well, but I don't remember a lot of actual walls. The difficulty was more organic and a lot less binary and that's why they were infinitely superior to my eyes. You could wipe as a party because a mechanic wasn't done properly (see the most egregious cases like Sirius, etc), which doesn't happen much those days, but i'd argue this was healthier than having that one singular player that keeps face hugging the floor because they're the only one that can't deal with the DDR, and will feel extra bad because of it.

The current model doesn't promote teamplay and interplayer support. The current model that seems to pride itself into thinking it is more welcoming to players by looking mechanically easier, actually pushes people away.

I'll however disagree on that last part, as it is absolutely obvious with a lot of job changes notably the latest BLM patch that they do this specifically to accommodate for increased pacing and DDR.