Current fixes to Forked Tower is not good enough

[Jeeqbit]

I’ve watched some video guides, but I know myself. That’s way too much to keep in my head.

You're not meant to keep it in your head. How it works is you watch the guide, completely forget it, then when you're doing the content the brain will usually be like "what is this mechanic?" then it will search for references to it that you have seen before. It will find a vague recollection of a mention of the mechanic from the guide, and probably it'll click what you're supposed to do. If it doesn't then you learn for next time.

A lot of mechanics will also be obvious in the moment and there are callouts.

The mechanics that matter most to get right you could put into a /echo macro and use it to remind yourself of the key mechanics that aren't super obvious.

[Amarande]

1. They are not locked out of it. They can make a PF and find 24+ people who feel the same way. If they can't find 24 people who feel the same way, then they are probably the only one that feels that way, so they need to adjust their mindset.

Except that people are so used to Discord based organization at this point that you wouldn't just need to make a PF, you would need to make a Discord.

It is incredibly difficult to get FFXIV culture out of the tailspins it sometimes finds itself in, and a large part of that is because with the massively discord based culture at this point, it often doesn't just involve putting up a group finder or making a linkshell/fellowship - you actually have to full blown kickstart and admin a whole new social media community to have any "real say" ...

3. Nobody is vetting others to enter FT; on the contrary the entire idea is to help anyone and everyone go from fresh to clear by carring them with callouts that make it as easy as possible to clear.

There is a huge deficiency in fresh prog parties atm (especially compared to this far into BA's timescale), and a distinct impression that most people are trying to "get theirs" before going back to help (starkly contrast BA, where even people well along in prog still participated in Frag runs).

I'm not sure if this is a difficulty matter, a carrot matter (BA gearing was done through frags alone so it was beneficial to get in as many farms as you could even if they were prior to your prog point, while Sanguinite is likely not nearly so alluring when virtually everything but the fixative and emote are dirt cheap from chest drops and you can't use the fixatives without getting 3 lucky enough outside chests per gear piece along with them?), or if player culture is in fact in sharp decline. Or if it's a combination.

4. Some runs will not be "fresh prog". You might need to have "seen" a certain phase. If you have not seen that phase, you can join a fresh prog group instead. It's not rocket science.

At this point, you almost have to volunteer to host a fresh prog group instead, which is a much bigger undertaking (and I'm not even sure how accessible it is to a green-to-FT player at this point seeing that you're like to be expected to take on the full responsibilities of a Raid Lead as well as trying to learn the content).

6. You're effectively saying High-End raids shouldn't exist. Maybe what you could ask for instead is for the normal modes to 1. exist and 2. be more challenging but not be a phase prog. Extreme trials are pretty good at that really - I can take first timers through them and prog through to the end within the timer in many cases.

Possibly they shouldn't, if players can't be patient enough to wait for later starters/slower learners to catch up (an exception can be made for people who are actively griefing in such fashion that it's obvious they aren't trying to clear the duty. Prog liars, annoying as they are, don't really count here: they may be foolishly going in over their head at the expense of the rest of the group but they still are genuinely attempting to clear the duty).

It's a cruel judgment, and I'm not sure if we're yet at that point, but on many an occasion one gets the vibe that the community is teetering on the point of "maybe we just can't have nice things anymore" ...

Stop acting like FT is high end content for starters, it is not, it is in fact quite a beat mainstream, if anything that is.

OTOH these days many players consider anything that can't be reliably cleared by a fresh group in a single run to be "high end" content.

If the death limits alone as a concept like in criterion is the best they can do when it comes to making content difficult, I think this content is doomed from the start. Exactly like twice/thrice comes ruin (or worse, combined with it) is literally the embodiment of everything that's wrong with the trinity in the current state of the game.
If they design things counting on "braindead cheeses" then it is no wonder that the pve has taken such a nosedive for a while.

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Solely Based on that people is gonna be selective about players using third party sites and software to lock people out of it.

(snip)

a too high percentage is based in stats and if people has passed this or that.

Yes. Passporting needs to go. It requires you to either break the TOS yourself or have someone that does in your party. Worse, it requires you to agree to have your data submitted to a third party MONETIZED aggregator (yep, they make ad revenue and even subscription revenue off your tears) or you start being locked out of more and more groups for more and more content.

I remember I complained a lot about it taking two weeks of head bashing to clear Shinryu Ex back in the day.

... I'd take everything needing two weeks of head bashing over this toxic boxscore system. Again, especially since Those Sites are a literal business. It'd still be fairly toxic if it was an amateur project but the idea that I have to not only submit to this garbage but also DONATE to a specific for-profit business in order to effectively raid is a complete pile of steaming stinking dookie ...

[0blivion]

Nah man, passport has been pretty good at avoiding ppl wasting my time. I think someone's prog point being shown should be a vanilla feature.

[Valence]

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Yes, although I still think that even rez limit ala WoW are lame and arbitrary. If the current MP limiter is too lax that it allows to spam raise everyone then perhaps it should be more stringent. They seriously need to bring back resource management and scarcity baked into most jobs instead of doubling down on body or ddr checks and arbitrary raise charges.

[Taranok]

Omg, 100%. As a White Mage, the sheer number of incurable punishment debuffs literally makes me question the legitimacy of my role in anything other than the most casual of content: healers are kneecapped in their ability to recover the party from mistakes "to maintain difficulty" to a degree that artificial heal check mechanics are necessary to even keep them from being obsolete altogether, ripe to be replaced by additional red jobs instead. (And if you get expert enough this isn't even enough as has been shown several times this Xpac)

Rez limits by themselves are alright (eg WoW gives you a strict limit on how many rezzes the group is permitted during a boss pull) but combined with all the other punishment debuffs seen in raiding it's getting to be much.

Caught this section mostly because Valence responded to it directly, but WHM is truly just the finest example of: "We don't know how to design our healers, so we're going to force encounters to meet what the healers can do, and then force healers to that new standard."

If there's any poster child for homogenization, it's healer design. Every attack is either a party buster or a tank buster->solve with medica 1/2 or cure 2. Every expansion thing healers got are literally variations on those 3 skills. Tetragrammaton in HW is just cure 2 on an oGCD. Asylum is a medica 2, assize a medica 1. You can transcribe almost every single button on other healers back to those 3 skills, outside of things like cards or what little uniqueness exists inside the role.

Fast forward from Stormblood when the devs botched AST so much (in HW) to the point where they realized they needed AST to be a WHM, and we have the modern design of healer where it's a panic-inducing mess of completely overpowered hits with absolutely no flexibility and little in the way of disaster recovery. And some people have the gall to say the design is 'casual,' despite being a hair-pullingly-frustrating set of mechanics all built around the concept that they want healers to heal by numbers and mistakes are just insta-punished.

Unlimited ressing is a problem that shows the devs can make better fights without it (see: BA/DRS,) but healers need triage gameplay. The class just fundamentally doesn't feel good with this binary pass-fail design with heal-by-numbers. Hell, unlimited ressing is a consequence of it, because a proper triage design means MP is a vitally limited resource. Which it kind of was in stormblood, which made things like mana shift much more entertaining and satisfying.

One day, I hope the devs will realize just how awful their support design is at a meta level. Pressing 4 buttons to survive a tank buster doesn't make it anything but a binary pass-fail. Pressing 1 or 2 instant oGCD heals that solve the next party buster on a 40 second timer doesn't make the healing more engaging. This might not even be your point, but 100% of tank and healer design's problems are directly tied to awful fight design and the consequences of forcing all tanks and healers to tank, and heal, almost literally identically to each other. There's no room for variation when everyone is expected to do the same thing.

Furthermore, what we have in Dawntrail is the exact consequence of the bad fight design. Healing has to be done faster, with more precision, with less room for error both on the party and the healer themselves. And if you do die as a healer, there's a good chance you're going to wipe town. It's unbelievably awful design, and it's a big part of why Dawntrail as an expansion is so garbage. When the devs let their worst habits dictate job and fight design, eventually you wind up with a game that no one wants to play. ShB was too big a success that the devs didn't stop to think that the direction they took tier 2 and 3 of the raid series was extremely toxic for the game's future health. So here we are, dealing with the consequences of it.

/rant.

[Supersnow845]

It’s why SCH is the only healer that kinda (big on KINDA) works. Because it’s the only healer that lets you kinda play around with its healing kit and do things a little bit differently, spreadlo can still break the game in weird ways you don’t really expect. Rather than just “which bloated overpowered oGCD should I throw out”

And in true 14 fashion it’s also the healer that casual players hate

[Raikai]

I actually thought about running FT now that I have some max level phantom jobs... But like somebody else said, even Aether is with no ample Party Finder action, instead just a couple of groups referring to a Discord server for an application to join.

The logistic of making a Discord account (I quit it a while ago to 'detox' from it) and then possibly be on a queue with other people for this application that may base which phantom jobs you have maxed, and then having to commit to a schedule (the reason why I always progged Savages through the PF, my schedules are kinda messy)...

Even watching the guides beforehand, the difficulty doesn't seem more crazy than what I'm used to in High End EX and Savages, but the whole prep process to get into action is so full of steps that it made me exhausted even before trying. Maybe I'm too lazy? I think even joining Ultimates through the Party Finder is easier.

Well, for those really willing to go, it's great that the fix at the very least removed the "external factor problem" of getting into the FT.

[Valence]

Unlimited ressing is a problem that shows the devs can make better fights without it (see: BA/DRS,) but healers need triage gameplay. The class just fundamentally doesn't feel good with this binary pass-fail design with heal-by-numbers. Hell, unlimited ressing is a consequence of it, because a proper triage design means MP is a vitally limited resource. Which it kind of was in stormblood, which made things like mana shift much more entertaining and satisfying.

Come play pvp, we have resource sustain and scarcity (and cookiees).

[Raikai]

The above commenter vanished, but the response would be:

I honestly don't think they made the FT for the broad audience - or even casuals like myself who from time to time are invested in High End play through the Party Finder - but more likely to the same demographic to the Baldesion Arsenal back in Eureka.

I feel it worked much better back then because people had already so much to sink their teeth into with Eureka. Going through the lengths to make/join a BA party, which only featured in the very last installment, felt more like a bonus than an integral part of the existence of the zone.

[TeresaFortell]

The above commenter vanished

Not sure why that was removed, but this was the original comment:

With numerous barriers to entry for this content, one wonders if it is genuinely intended for the majority of players, for a significant amount of time is spent on every step of the way before even setting foot into FT.

I honestly don't think they made the FT for the broad audience - or even casuals like myself who from time to time are invested in High End play through the Party Finder - but more likely to the same demographic to the Baldesion Arsenal back in Eureka.

Given how FT's entry system was initially designed, I find it hard to imagine that it was not intended to cater to a broader audience. The only sufficient explanation I could imagine is that they intended for such content to last over a significant amount of time, allowing more players to become involved in FT over time.