The invasion of Monster Hunter / Souls like mechanics

[UkcsAlias]

everything is about gotcha mechanics you have to eat in the face before figuring out how they work

Tbh, some mechanics here are quite hurting, but plenty of them arent. Key is though: normal mode should indicate its going to happen, the first instance the attack shows up. And in some cases: just make it happen slower, to allow adjustments.

A half arena cleave is something you can guess, but beyond that, if the hitbox is larger, show the marker for the first occurance earlier. But even then, i wonder why it doesnt just display it anyway. Its a very good tutorial attack. ex1 did an excelent job at this, it gave a good text indication to show what to look for, and even if you failed it, you just took a good hit and a damage down debuff. Its forgiving. If you then later on at a phase transition boost the boss to insta kill, player at least have gotten the clue, and can reasonably dodge it. They could have learned here by warning players to look for the arms, make it perform the 2 cleaves, and after that not warn about it anymore.

For extremes: being harsh is fine, most of the time it reveals in a decent way what is expected to be figured out. You can easily do extremes blind and get far in the first hour. To me these in DT had some realy good design. they always had very good clues to figure it out quickly.

But in normal mode, its not fun if you struggle to follow mechanics to just repeatedly die. Waiting for a rez isnt fun, and insta kill mechanics feel excessively punishing. Its even better to just show the mechanic 2x in a row in inverse, but very early telegraphed indicators, and before it just plainly warn that the next time it wont mark it (a line of 'look at the boss arms' is fine for this). This warning makes people aware they need to pay attention to some indication from the boss, and the early telegraph means they know which sort of cleave to expect.

It might sound strange, but for casuals normal mode is already fast. Obscuring attacks doesnt help if there is no way they have time to learn it. Obviously, i died to the first half arena cleave, as i didnt expect it to go further, after that, if i noticed the attack, i was prepared, and if i didnt, i died. But at that time it felt justified to die from it, because i knew its how it goes with that animation. This is what makes a fight feel good for a normal player. It makes it feel like they had a chance to survive it, and thats exactly what it should do, its what makes it fun.

[AyumiCosplayGlam]

Optional content stops being optional when there is nothing else new.

This patch in a nutshell:
-Optional Trial
-Optional Deep Dungeon
-Optional Hildibrand
-Optional Beast Tribe Quest

Which means there is nothing to do in this patch unless you do the optional content, this to me dosn't seem like optional anymore.

Btw i strongly recommend doing the deep dungeon now because 2 weeks from now nobody will play it aside from the solo achievement hunters. Get the rewards from it now or say goodbye to them until a random mogtome event years down the line.

[Valence]

Tbh, some mechanics here are quite hurting, but plenty of them arent. Key is though: normal mode should indicate its going to happen, the first instance the attack shows up. And in some cases: just make it happen slower, to allow adjustments.

A half arena cleave is something you can guess, but beyond that, if the hitbox is larger, show the marker for the first occurance earlier. But even then, i wonder why it doesnt just display it anyway. Its a very good tutorial attack. ex1 did an excelent job at this, it gave a good text indication to show what to look for, and even if you failed it, you just took a good hit and a damage down debuff. Its forgiving. If you then later on at a phase transition boost the boss to insta kill, player at least have gotten the clue, and can reasonably dodge it. They could have learned here by warning players to look for the arms, make it perform the 2 cleaves, and after that not warn about it anymore.

For extremes: being harsh is fine, most of the time it reveals in a decent way what is expected to be figured out. You can easily do extremes blind and get far in the first hour. To me these in DT had some realy good design. they always had very good clues to figure it out quickly.

But in normal mode, its not fun if you struggle to follow mechanics to just repeatedly die. Waiting for a rez isnt fun, and insta kill mechanics feel excessively punishing. Its even better to just show the mechanic 2x in a row in inverse, but very early telegraphed indicators, and before it just plainly warn that the next time it wont mark it (a line of 'look at the boss arms' is fine for this). This warning makes people aware they need to pay attention to some indication from the boss, and the early telegraph means they know which sort of cleave to expect.

It might sound strange, but for casuals normal mode is already fast. Obscuring attacks doesnt help if there is no way they have time to learn it. Obviously, i died to the first half arena cleave, as i didnt expect it to go further, after that, if i noticed the attack, i was prepared, and if i didnt, i died. But at that time it felt justified to die from it, because i knew its how it goes with that animation. This is what makes a fight feel good for a normal player. It makes it feel like they had a chance to survive it, and thats exactly what it should do, its what makes it fun.

I don't disagree with you but you're seeing this from the perspective of whether or not duties can be overcome without crummy mechanics or if the design works in terms of accessibility, which is fair, but I'm seeing it from another angle which is that the design has been dramatically altered from what XIV used to be about (a mmoRPG and not an action dodge game). I do agree that some of the fights like Valigarmanda have shown a greater care to guide the players and avoid those gotcha mechanic moments, only for the devs to drop it not long after in post DT anyway.

I'm not a casual, I've raided for a long time at a decently high level until I retired recently because the game obviously has decided to change so much that not only I'm not finding what made it fun to me (good and intricate, engaging jobs and battlesystems), but also because of the rampant invasion of said mechanics that literally made it impossible for me for the first time in my life to actually complete some savage/criterion mechanics on my own: statice dartboard, superchain 2B, half of the sabbath mechanics in M4S, and half of Zoraal Ja Ex which is the most gruesome experience i've had the displeasure to go through, and I could even bring up actual dungeons like luigi's mansion that while a lot less difficult because they're casual, still manage to make my head hurt.

Maybe some of you can't see it, but to me the game has radically changed somewhere for this to happen, and that's just my experience. This is why I've constantly trying to rationalize it and actually analyze what has happened over the years in order not to just come with "this sucks" kind of threads, but threads that also try to point at why it sucks to me and what the game is doing to some of its audience/playerbase, and for that latter point it's all across the board in terms of player profiles, whether they're raiders like I used to or ultra casuals.

[0blivion]

ok having trouble with EX1 has to be actively trolling. there's absolutely no way

e/: if you've raided before, that is. like. this is zodiark levels of afk

[Myotis]

Reading the comments does make me feel that some people might consider accesabillity pushing game to be easier.
However that is not the case it means leading players over the boss fight instead of throwing at them bunch of visual clutter and spam of mechanics what can one shot you.

That is simply not fun long-term each boss mechanic should have at least 2-3 ways to be solved by each player this would deeply promote some skill level.
Each game is based on those circles , and squares they are just not presented in other games in a same way as it is in XIV.
I don't understand why the devs seek to chase after being some Action RPG game where the delay in the game does already prevent that.

Would be cool to plan against boss what does stuff what is properly indicated ( examples valigarmanda, Mh collabs boss does represent what he wants to do quite well too and rathalos was seem to be upset what made the fight quite dynamic )
I wish as the map / area was the part of the boss mechanics kinda like vulcanos from valigarmanda.
Devs should try new things , go out of their sacred formula for everything

Be an brave MMO where players plan a little bit and they are not stupidly overwhelmed with visual clutter and boring DDR patterns.
Make those bosses dynamic , predictable yet random in what they will do.

Make us feel excited about a boss fight. - stop making some math exams out of it

[Valence]

So I finally did this new MH trial. I can see why people think it's less unique and MonHun like than Rathalos because it translated literally everything into bog standard FF14 encounter mechanics. But the reality is that they'd have removed the telegraphs from everything you'd have ended up like in Rathalos, just with much more complicated abstract floor geometry, really. Only difference is the lack of second phase with no healing beyond potions.
I'll say one thing though, this is extremely DDR full of visual cues either way. Didn't like, wouldn't do it again.

ok having trouble with EX1 has to be actively trolling. there's absolutely no way

e/: if you've raided before, that is. like. this is zodiark levels of afk

Ex 1 is Valigarmanda which was a piece of cake so no.

[ShadowNyx3]

This would imply that bosses in XIV do things randomly or as a reaction to the player's positioning, which is not the case at all. Every XIV encounter is still a static timeline that never deviates.

It's because of this that I don't buy that things are harder for casuals now than they used to be because you can quite literally learn what is coming in every single fight in this game by memorization, which has never changed. While you may have to pay attention to which arm the boss raises to know where the attack is coming from, you should know through repetition that the boss will raise that arm at that point in time.

Personally, I think that people are just loudly expressing their lack of desire to spend time learning encounters and talking about the wrong thing, which is some perceived difficulty spike when really, it's just that the reward for learning an encounter is a boring, repetitive dance with jobs that are 2-minute closed loops.

[Valence]

I used to think that until I was confronted myself to things that my brain just doesn't want to learn. Sure, it was not in casual content, but since then i've felt a little more humbled and I don't see why it shouldn't happen at the casual level as well. But I do agree that the core of the gameplay is boring and repetitive and doesn't encourage either.

[Xieldras]

I just finished the normal mode of the fight, and it brought back memories of StB's Rathalos EX. Overall it's not a difficult fight, but boy is it exhausting. The rewards are nice, but I hated this trial.

There's no small break. You need to pay attention 100% of the time and move just as fast. Oh he's there now so turn around, don't get hit as the lines come back 'round. It's very much a "throw everything at them" way of designing an encounter in my opinion. At least I wasn't blinded by the VFX this time so small victories?

For those that know me, yes I use my mouse to click. And those fast DDR mechanics sure haven't helped I'll admit as much.
I don't like doing most Dawntrail content because they're so prevalent for fight design, and I prefer to have a little breathing room available.

I dread the EX, really.

[0blivion]

Ex 1 is Valigarmanda which was a piece of cake so no.

That was mb, I forgot that fight existed lol. But Zoraal Ja is actively a snoozefest though? Like you only have to use your brain maybe once at best.