Bring difficulty back to job rotations, not just boss mechanics.

[BlisteringFrost]

WoW is an entire different game whether it has similar traces in other MMO's, and you know it, been listening to the same reply for like 20 years?

That you want to beat onto a dead horse NPC boss that has no mechanics but having to bash 20 buttons... then fine with me... I prefer many more scenarios and phases that makes it technically difficult to just beat the boss, and rely much less on meta that people desperately cling to in both wow and ffxiv...

I would rather like that the safe spots in fights is not always preset and you actually have to 'read' the bosses more and move to a position that could be entirely different than from any of your team mates and not job dependent either.

1.) This is correct. WoW takes good aspects from other MMO's and expands further upon them. This is how WoW originally got crowned the king.

2.) This is misinformation. Would you like me to show you the Adventurers Guide from WoW? It's an in-game book that readily tells you what bosses will do in any dungeon or raid.

3.) That's fine. But most players are either apathetic or do not like the DDR design because it grows boring quickly to them.

[Azurarok]

Nope. Classes have never been more balanced than the last two most recent expansions. There were some issues in theory-craft before the Manaforge, Omega raid tier but Blizzard resolved them as quickly as they were pointed to these issues. You have to understand another thing with WoW is some of the balancing is skewed deliberately. They want some classes to shine ahead of others on purpose, so everybody has an excuse to try playing another class sometimes, or so their favored class gets to shine bright every now and again. So there's an average, and an above average. With the above average being whoever they wanted to pull ahead at that moment.

Ah, well my mistake then. Not sure where I heard that from but I might've just imagined that from hearing people say XIV's jobs tend to be closer in balance than most MMOs.

Hell, that might in fact be the biggest problem here. From Square-Enix's point of view, BRD/MCH/DNC ARE the "talent trees" of physical range and if you don't like one of them, they gave you 2 other "choices" and since that "choice" uses the same gear, you should have even less to complain about because nothing is stopping you from "changing your spec". Same with every other role in their opinion.

The fight designers sure do seem to look at it that way, I don't think they even look beyond the melee/ranged and dps/supports brackets considering they keep lumping healers/casters with phys ranged and treat phys ranged as casters but easier.

[RedLolly]

I don't play WoW but doesn't that game typically ignore class balance and let the meta play out naturally while generally trying to make different classes shine in different content?

Not that FFXIV wouldn't benefit from that kind of approach, especially for a game that allows every character to play every class, though parts of the userbase would be screeching and clawing at the devs like they killed their family.

Machinist is absolutely cracked in solo Deep Dungeon challenges. Our job is still collectively considered rat tier because having niches like that doesn't work for FFXIV.

[BlisteringFrost]

Ah, well my mistake then. Not sure where I heard that from but I might've just imagined that from hearing people say XIV's jobs tend to be closer in balance than most MMOs.

Most people negatively critiquing WoW seen to be in a grouping of consumers who haven't played it in many years now. In my personal experience, everybody whose quit seems to have been around Mists or Cataclysm. Or BFA. Or Shadowlands. That's a handful of expansions but all of them came well before Dragonflight when class balancing had reached its apex for the first time in the games history. Dragonflight was launched 3 years ago. Like me and Aiderouge mentioned. There's unbalanced classes. But it's deliberate. It's for the best, I think, since there's over 20 DPS classes. (if we go by class Specializations)

And with the way classes are designed, all of them perform well in any content you bring them to, but some of them shine ESPECIALLY well in specific content. Like Blood Deathknights (a tank) are just unkillable so if you're dead set on clearing something, they can do it. Slowly. But they can. Rogues and (Frost or Fire) Mages have had their rises and falls from grace in raid but they've generally always been the undisputed kings of domination in PvP. Druids and Paladins are usually the best classes for Raiding because they bring a lot of utilities and unique spells that let them temporarily fill any role outside their specialization. (they're both Jack-Of-All, masters of none) You get the idea.

[Azurarok]

Machinist is absolutely cracked in solo Deep Dungeon challenges. Our job is still collectively considered rat tier because having niches like that doesn't work for FFXIV.

That's because no one looks at any other content with the same kind of prestige as Savage or Ultimates, but why is that?

[ForsakenRoe]

It is weak to propose weaker bosses and more difficult jobs to play, and on top of that you even take off quite the amount of additional development time as well as having to constantly balance all the jobs instead of just keeping it simple, but the boss as is much more difficult, and actually having to move much more and the likes.

Be a shame if they had to spend devtime on making a piece of content, and then more devtime because they had to hotfix it after it turned out to be 'so tightly tuned that some jobs literally cannot do enough damage to clear it'. Oh right, that happened in Abyssos. Never mind that they have to adjust Job potencies anyway each patch, because the Raidbuff jobs naturally outpace the Selfish jobs in terms of RDPS, due to the multiplicative nature of Raidbuff stacking (it's why 'WHM Dia potency increased by 5' is the meme that it is). So if they're already adjusting Job potencies each patch, what exactly would be the 'extra dev time' be spent on? 'Adjusting the potencies, but there's more potencies to adjust (which allows for more granular adjustments)'?

Having the encounter be such a source of the complexity of the content works far better in Action games like Monster Hunter, yeh Greatsword has like 3 attacks total but it works there because the monsters are more unpredictable, the environment can adjust your strategy (going for leaping attacks off of ledges to trigger mounts), targetting certain points on the Monster for specific loot tables (or to disable/modify certain enemy attacks, like removing Rathian's tail means the flip has a smaller hitbox to dodge), etc.

It doesn't work so well in a tabtarget MMO like this, for a simple reason: Cooldowns. If a dungeon boss had 'raidwide damage', 'tankbuster' and 'autoattack 3 times' as its whole move pool, and it could select any action in any order, there'd be pulls where it just decides to Tankbuster you several times in a row. So you would have to either just die to the third hit (feels bad for the player), or have the Tankbuster tuned to be so weak, that you don't actually need to use cooldowns (which is what we see ingame now), but that comes at the cost of 'the mechanic might as well just not exist'. When you get up to Savage and such, where the tuning has to be far tighter to provide the challenge the difficulty is known for, because of the CDs on certain tools like Tank mitigations, Healer mitigations like Soil/Kerachole, etc, there HAS to be some structure to what damage goes out at what time. And that structure, inevitably results in what we have now: a script of what the boss will do, at what times. There's some potential for randomness, like phases appearing in random orders (eg M8S could theoretically have had Millenial Decay, Towers (idk the name), Terrestrial Rage and Beckon Moonlight, appear in a random order each pull). But those phases still adhere to an overall 'script', with if:then subscripts dictating what we do for each subphase. If Millenial Decay happened as the final mechanic before the enrage, it wouldn't change the fact that I see the castbar, read the words Millenial Decay, and then get knocked to the NE or get knocked East, depending on if I have the first AOE or not (playing H2 Pos). If Beckon Moonlight happened first instead of Millenial Decay, I'd stand at the assigned places in the safe quadrant depending on if I had to stack or spread, just like if it's the last thing in the fight.

You call it 'weak' to ask for harder Job rotations and easier fights. I am calling for (for Healers specifically, we can look at DPS later) harder to optimize Job rotations (with potencies balanced such that optimizing is not ultimately necessary, even in high end content), and the same difficulty of Encounters as we currently have. For example, if I had my way, SCH would have Broil as its filler (340p), Biolysis as a 30s duration DOT (total of 370p), but additionally it would have Miasmalysis as a 24s DOT in place of Ruin2 (total of 360p), and Shadowflare as a 15s puddle-dropping action (like Salted Earth but targetted on the enemy, total of 350p). Taking M8S as an example fight, you could clear it, with Crafted Gear like it's Week 1, by just using Broil and Biolysis, the same rotation as we currently use. Hell, you could even ignore Biolysis in this version, too. The fight would not need to get easier to accomodate the extra available complexity of the Job. And that's one of the more reductive examples of what I'd do to a Healer. My version of SGE (probably the most 'complicated' to optimize of my fanmade redesigns) would not only still be able to clear Howling Blade without needing any adjustment to his encounter's difficulty, it'd also feel (in terms of gameplay when performing 'optimally', both in terms of damage and healing) that, yeh, he's fast, but you're faster.

That's because no one looks at any other content with the same kind of prestige as Savage or Ultimates, but why is that?

Might just be the reward space? Soloing a DD gets you a title. Doing an Ultimate gets you a title, and a shiny weapon which is A: far more eyecatching and B: can't be disabled in the options.

Alternatively, the structure and systems for each might mean that Ultimates are inherently more prestigious to clear. There's a hypothetical world where the RNG is wacky as hell, and you get a POTD run where you get tons of Pomanders to use a Manticore on loads of floors, skipping a lot of the difficulty. We're in a situation where the game's difficulty is effectively 'how hard are the mechanics of the enemy you're fighting', and for 90% of the floors of POTD, those mechanics are simple things on trash mobs like 'dodge this cleave', 'dodge this Gaze', 'this has a mini-TB so probably don't pull this one if you can avoid it', etc. It's only the bosses on the final floor of each set of 10, that have actual mechanics to worry about. Ultimates are mechanics the whole way through

Finally, when you wipe in a DD solo run, it's your fault entirely. You could have played better in some way. In an Ultimate, there's 7 other players, and you could play perfectly on every run, but someone else could trigger the wipe. So part of the prestige of clearing the Ultimate is not just 'you played well enough to clear', but also 'you had the tenacity, the mental fortitude, to struggle through the wipes where it was not your fault that the team wiped, to not quit even when there was nothing you could have done to prevent the wipe'

Personally, I think it's the shiny weapon that makes people respect Ultimate clears more. If DDs offered something more, maybe they'd be more respected. Doesn't even have to be Solo-specific. For example, I recently thought about how it'd have been cool if, upon clearing floor 100 and doing the epilogue quest for the latest DD (where Feo Ul mentions that our bond is renewed/strong as ever, etc), that we could then use /PetGlamour command to turn Seraph (the SCH thing) into Feo Ul, like how we can turn the Faerie into a Carbuncle. This could extend to other DDs too, like... IDK what if there was a dark edgy set of action reskins, that make WHM into a more sinister, Necromancer-esque vibe as a reward from POTD? What if there was a reskin from Eureka Orthos that makes... some job or another, more technology/Allagan-themed than it currently is (eg SMN summoning DemiClones instead of Egis)? It'd be a whole reward space that SE has never explored to date

[RedLolly]

That's because no one looks at any other content with the same kind of prestige as Savage or Ultimates, but why is that?

Marketing for Savage and Ultimate gives it an enormous level of prestige that other difficult achievements simply don't garner.

That's despite both requiring a lot of time, grinding, knowledge, and determination to complete. Personally because I'm getting really into Deep Dungeons, titles like "Once and Future King" are more impressive to me than anything with Legend in it because I personally know the effort required. But everyone knows about the effort needed for an Ultimate.

I think this might be why the devs are starting to put more hairstyles and mounts behind niche content, and are going back to fill said stuff with things for adventure plates. The "Simple and Clean" hairstyle requires either insane luck or weeks of grinding, and it's going to get harder to earn as Pilgrim's Traverse stops being the hot new thing.

[Amarande]

In PvP games this is compensated by hard countering certain jobs and allowing you to adjust for this. But in PvE, this is not an option, so usualy the results are quite static acros any tier.

I have started to wonder if this is a core sword of Damocles for the whole MMO industry. The vast majority of games that stand the test of time are PvP. The vast majority of co-op PvE modes die quickly, sometimes even with no small community effort to breathe life into them (e.g., people used to make Doom maps with features specifically designed for co-op play, now most of the time they just throw in co-op start spots but you're lucky if the map doesn't even have softlock states in co-op particularly after deaths, lol).

Is co-op PvE in fact an experiment with a finite lifespan? I am not yet convinced it is not.

This community and the dev team's obsession with damage performance on specific bumps on the road is and has always been absolute cinema. What matters is that all jobs provide equal opportunities for output on the average, not that some suffer more than others for specific parts of specific fights. Perhaps they could actually shine in others, you know? if we had other variables than damage that is.

This is a modern gamer problem that makes me grumble every single time I've seen it. Nobody cares about the norm anymore, everything is about how it performs at extreme championship MLG level. Almost every game falls victim to this too. Even though 99% of players are never going to perform at that championship level, top outlier performance ends up being what everything is judged on anyway (and then that 99% get tarred as bad at the game because they aren't esports champions that can or are interested in getting said outlier results) ...

Personally I'm gonna be selfish and state that no, I don't want the difficulty to be on the encounters, and unlike jobs, the problem with encounters is that I can't just pick the one that suits me.

This is hardly selfish. I have even pointed out (and been brushed off usually, especially in Discord) a few times that one of the things I find issue with with the "STORY MUST BE HARDER HURR HURR" SE defense mentality with DT is very simple: Roulettes are a thing, most of the major ones have north of 40 instances you can get put into, most of which people will have seen once when they did it for their MSQ, so even the veterans are rusty if they have not forgotten the encounter altogether.

When was the last time the off tank and the regen healer were “essential meaningful roles”

Off tank depends on whether you need a tank swap or there are separate adds and that is all.

Healer is a fundamentally disintegrating role in FFXIV altogether. This is a core systems design/player interaction issue that is not easily addressed.

That's exactly why M6S is such a wall. Most players are functionally just bots. As soon as a fight is even slightly off the normal script they suddenly can't play the game to save their lives in any capacity.

I expect M6S is a wall because it throws such a complete curveball from deep outfield. As in, literally when has the game ever made complex add management such a front and center matter? For that matter, how often do MMOS AS A WHOLE even do that anymore, for the most part it hasn't been a thing since the "sheep moon, kill skull" days that many of today's MMO players were probably still in diapers during.

Most other major mechanics are at least something you've been being eased into to some degree over your 100 levels. M6S level add management is a "not at all." Unless you had the metagame spider senses to suspect something was up when they made all those seemingly overwrought adjustments to jobs' AOE damage that patch, I suppose ...

They're faster and more movement intensive while also needing more precision too, which also makes trusts leave even less safe space to move to while giving you less time to adjust as well

Plus the matter of whether the netcode even lets you adjust successfully at all due to the movement prediction/snapshot nexus. At fast paced mechanics like DT this apparently can come down virtually to luck, unless you are what would be the competitive speedrunner type of gamer in most other games.

Like how is that amazing “granular difficulty on the encounter” experiment going with quantum hmmmmm? Oh it has a 7% conversion rate on the 10% of people who have cleared floor 100 of the deep dungeon. What about forked tower?……oh it has a 11% conversion rate of people who reached knowledge level 20…….ooooh

Yeah, we're looking at Throne of Thunder levels of bad here.

FF14 lets you be any job at any time, so Square-Enix doesn't have to care if a job within a role is doing poorly "just go play something else", and there's no actual option for the tanks and healers to queue up into a DPS slot directly with a altered kit/stat spread that plays into that, but rather any "side DPSing" happens if the encounter allows for it, such as the off-tank not needing to swap in or a healer not needing to use anything more than their AoE heal.

Yep, and then add in weekly lockouts and how much stricter the PUG community has been getting lately and it's more or less impractical to pivot jobs at all, even for simple reasons like slot availability in groups. "You can just go play something else" but it's clear now SE and playerbase want you to focus on mains, which is probably unavoidable if they're going to keep turning the thumbscrews on difficulty for that matter.

Most people negatively critiquing WoW seen to be in a grouping of consumers who haven't played it in many years now. In my personal experience, everybody whose quit seems to have been around Mists or Cataclysm. Or BFA. Or Shadowlands.

Never understood the BFA or Shadowlands hate. That was actually one of the stretches I've had the most fun in WoW during. Mists and Cataclysm appear to have been because of the giga sharp difficulty spike around then; I know my ICC guild threw in the towel not long after Cata started because the initial raids were soul breakingly hard to even try to get started in. (I have heard that 10 player was initially bugged too?) In Mists even LFR was prenerf Orbonne levels of rough (keeping in mind also that death is much more expensive in WoW) and link-achiev became as strict as Duty Complete in XIV, most likely necessarily given how few guilds even on the megaservers cleared heroic Terrace before it came out. And it didn't get easier with Throne of Thunder either ...

To be honest (I've probably mentioned it before here), I get the feeling WoW only escaped with its skin intact because Discord had not been a thing during Mists; meanwhile, when XIV had its first big moment of this sort (Alexander first two tiers) was right when Discord was beginning to make its meteoric rise.

As a result, the most hardcore players were able to obtain a near iron control of the player culture for years via survivorship bias meaning they were the ones to found the major Discords everyone relied on (especially since Web guides for FFXIV, unlike WoW, atrophied BADLY once Discord took off), and ruthlessly used server bans to maintain it. Evolution away from this has been very slow (due largely to the fact that the old norm from IRC, where if channel ops were toxic people would start messaging each other to come to a new channel without them, is heavily suppressed due to Discord auto blocking DMs between people without an existing relationship via server or formally Friending, so an early strike against dissenters by mods is usually enough to prevent those people from successfully starting a new community as they have been kicked and therefore can no longer contact other players to do this), and is verging on being almost completely ineffective, due to the fact that the longer the ultra-hardcore enforce themselves as the face of the community, the more SE tailors the game to them (meaning that efforts to approach things in a more friendly fashion are largely doomed to fail to meet the game-set bar for success ... See most of the "friendly raid community" which ended up spinning wheels in M6S even well into odd patch).

[Azurarok]

snip

Marketing for Savage and Ultimate gives it an enormous level of prestige that other difficult achievements simply don't garner.

Ah right, the reward of having cleared an Ultimate is definitely a lot more obvious. There being a time where YoshiP personally congratulated Ultimate world firsts also must've boosted awareness tenfold too (Then TOP had that 3rd party tool fiasco).

I guess there's also just the spectacle of it for those watching streamers play. 20-ish floors of similar looking areas for 100 or 200 floors isn't exactly exciting to watch unless you know how it can be yourself.

That might also be why they're focusing less on rpg-like elements and job complexity, it's easier for any non-player to see and get a better gist of what's going on. Think FFXVI was also that, boss fights that are absolute spectacles to watch, but not much gameplay depth to make it particularly fun to control.

[BlisteringFrost]

Ah right, the reward of having cleared an Ultimate is definitely a lot more obvious. There being a time where YoshiP personally congratulated Ultimate world firsts also must've boosted awareness tenfold too (Then TOP had that 3rd party tool fiasco).

I guess there's also just the spectacle of it for those watching streamers play. 20-ish floors of similar looking areas for 100 or 200 floors isn't exactly exciting to watch unless you know how it can be yourself.

That might also be why they're focusing less on rpg-like elements and job complexity, it's easier for any non-player to see and get a better gist of what's going on. Think FFXVI was also that, boss fights that are absolute spectacles to watch, but not much gameplay depth to make it particularly fun to control.

Nobody is taking this sword away from me.