Remove the wall between the monster groups before each boss so we can pull all

[Kaurhz]

It's not "lying", it's just a matter of not sweating the small stuff. I don't measure my dungeon-time-savings in percentages. If a run takes 20 minutes instead of 15 minutes, I'm not going to pretend my entire evening has been ruined. Otherwise I'd blow a gasket every time someone lost connection or had to emergency-AFK for a few minutes.

From my perspective people are stretching the truth when they claim larger pulls significantly reduce dungeon run time compared to smaller pulls. If I can count the number of minutes saved on one hand when I'm already spending ~20 minutes in a dungeon, I don't see the significance. It's why I don't care if someone requests smaller pulls when I'm tanking, or if a tank only pulls a single group when I'm playing DPS. Large pulls or small, I know the run will be over in around ~20 minutes as long as we aren't wasting time on wipes.

The original post suggested removing walls between pulls as a way of making dungeons less boring. I just fail to see how removing walls will increase my entertainment. Spamming AOE attacks on five mobs or fifteen mobs.. there's no difference, except now there's more circles to dodge frequenting the floor, which if anything is annoying and slows everything down.

Uh, on an individual level, that time save may not be greatly significant, but if you consider many people across their lifetime in this game are doing upwards of around 1000+ duties, that 3 minutes quickly becomes 30, which quickly becomes 300, which becomes 3000 minutes over time.

I wouldn't call it ruining the evening by any stretch of the imagination, but cumulatively it would still be a gigantic amount of time.

[Cygnia]

Those 3000 minutes don't get banked and are usually spent on equally 'fatuous' activities, though. I don't disagree it adds up, but if someone is getting bent out of shape over lost time then they are more upset by the prospect than reality, methinks. No one should disregard if people want to hurry things up, just it seems fairly unhelpful to view time as straightforward currency.

[Doopliss]

I don't understand these replies using a basis of an unhinged what-if personality that doesn't actually regard the point being made. The argument in this instance is about whether or not the amount of time saved is an amount that can be significant, and the matter of the fact is that it numerically is. It's neither minuscule compared to the length of an average dungeon run, nor when compared to the length of one's lifetime hours played. That's all.

How somebody feels about it and uses their time otherwise is a completely personal matter and a different conversation entirely. We don't need to give this fictional guy getting mad about not speedrunning dungeons efficiently mental health tips.

[Miguel85NYC]

100% agree! So sick of these walls.. makes the dungeons extremely boring

[Gyson]

How is it stretching the truth? 5 minutes off of a 20 minute dungeon is 25% faster. That's not insignificant. If you don't want to look at percentages, then other people have done it for you. For literal years there has been concrete proof that pulling more mobs and AoEing them all at the same time makes dungeons noticeably faster, because ultimately you're spreading out the actual potency of your AoE attack all at once (meaning you're doing much more damage overall), instead of having to cut your attack potency in half between different mob packs. The entire reason AoEs exist in the first place is to make taking down groups go faster.

I'd argue that context matters. If you tell me we can shave five hours off a twenty hour crawl through a field of broken glass, then I'd be excited at the prospect of a 25% reduction in suffering. If you tell me we're bludgeoning a game with maximum efficiency to shave five minutes off of twenty minutes of gameplay, then I'm wondering why we're playing something so unappealing that we can't even stomach five extra minutes of gaming.

Yes, I know how AOE works. I also know mobs respect each other's hitboxes and when too many of them are gathered together they become so spread out that our AOEs are failing to connect with many of them. I also know they're dealing out their own AOEs, and larger packs make life annoying for melee DPS who would love to do something other than dodge around constantly. As a healer you feel differently and I can certainly understand why, but you're essentially arguing that your enjoyment takes priority over the rest of the party.

Okay, what is an opinion is that that amount of time doesn't matter to you. That's completely fair. It doesn't matter to most people and people judging you for that would be dumb--but nowhere in my reply did I claim people had to play this way. People were, again, seldom "forced" to speedrun through a dungeon when the option to do so actually existed, and most of the arguments here come down to a matter of pretense that the all-encompassing Toxic Player will harass and dominate the poor, struggling Anxious Player. But the truth of the matter is that the majority of people were more than willing to compensate for other players when these stagnant dungeon walls did not exist for the first 6 years of this game's lifespan.

Comments like that make me wonder if we're even playing the same game. Without those walls we were either at the mercy of the tank who wants to pull everything, or the DPS/Healer who wants to pull everything and pulls for the tank (who isn't pulling enough to keep them happy).

The best is when you get a tank who doesn't account for their current team's limits, pulls too much and wipes the party, and then does it a second (and third) time because they insanely expected a different result. And if you want to turn that 15 minute "maximum efficiency" speedrun into a 20 or 25 minute run, a wipe or two is a surefire way to do it.

Yes, you can also get groups where people behaved like adults, but for every one of those there was someone else having a far worse experience.

Uh, on an individual level, that time save may not be greatly significant, but if you consider many people across their lifetime in this game are doing upwards of around 1000+ duties, that 3 minutes quickly becomes 30, which quickly becomes 300, which becomes 3000 minutes over time.

I wouldn't call it ruining the evening by any stretch of the imagination, but cumulatively it would still be a gigantic amount of time.

I think if we're at the point where we're concerned about five extra minutes in our play session for *an MMO* then maybe MMOs aren't for us. Think of all the time you could save across your lifetime if you just weren't spending it gaming at all.

Maybe it's because I grew up on MMOs where a dungeon run was a multi-hour timesink. It's difficult for me to get frustrated over a dungeon run that takes twenty minutes instead of fifteen. If those five minutes are that important to me I can always make up for it by setting a larger container of water on my desk. Then I won't waste so much time going back and forth to the kitchen for refills during my gaming session.

Now wait a moment.. if I did that AND we removed the walls from the dungeons, think of all that time I could free up across my lifetime. Oh dear.. how deep does this rabbit hole go?

[Zered]

The discrepancy between a good tank and a bad tank is so ridiculous at this point that you simply cannot build future content design on the current tank sustain kits and then give healers more to do without absolutely overwhelming poor healers when they get a bad tank

Like imagine if you went “okay let’s take PLD’s current sustain as the baseline, we expect the tank to do this must sustain and will build future healing design around this”, firstly let’s ignore that that doesn’t fix the current 5 expansions trivialised by tank design let’s just focus on now if you have a bad tank that doesn’t understand their buttons and other expectations on the healer it’s going to overwhelm a less competant healer because they he content is designed with expectation of competency of the tank in mind.

It would be so much easier balance wise to lower the power of a tank who knows what their buttons do than it would be trying to build future design on the house of cards that is predicting a baseline expectation of the tank from the current massive discrepancy in output an individual tanks talent can output

You also have to consider in order to give healers meaningful feeling to their gameplay then tanks have to give up somewhere. Like say you the healers need to heal an NPC that if they die the boss one shots the tank (sorta like old aery final boss), in this case the tank is still reliant on the healer so their excessive sustain allowing self determination is meaningless and may as well be cut, if the NPC dying doesn’t kill the tank then the healers role is still inherently meaningless and the engagement paper thin.

A role with the name healer simply does not function if there isn’t a baseline necessity for a healer to actually heal to keep the party alive. That isn’t healers being selfish and demanding more, that’s simply in a game that has a trinity but also has content that is agnostic to the trinity healer is the role that will suffer the most, they have to have more extended to them to get an equitable experience

They can give ads some mechanics like certain attacks that specifically target the dps, debuffs that need to be kicked or cleansed if not, and then removing walls between packs would add more damage and mechanics for healers and tanks to contend with. They will have to stun or silence certain enemies, dodge enemy skills, cleanse lots of debuffs, have to use their self heal if healer fails to keep up.

[Supersnow845]

They can give ads some mechanics like certain attacks that specifically target the dps, debuffs that need to be kicked or cleansed if not, and then removing walls between packs would add more damage and mechanics for healers and tanks to contend with. They will have to stun or silence certain enemies, dodge enemy skills, cleanse lots of debuffs, have to use their self heal if healer fails to keep up.

With something like that while I don’t necessarily disagree it basically comes down to one fundamental question; what is the punishment for not engaging with these mechanics?

Like let’s say that the mobs not getting stunned hits the DPS, does this kill them or just cause chip damage? If it’s the latter what’s the incentive to engage with the mechanic when the healer can just heal the tank with the ridiculous AOE healing they already are using to heal the tank?

14 has reached a point where people simply don’t want to be reliant on anyone else besides themselves to clear casual content, it’s the most popular defence of current tank design. Would people with this mindset be happy that if the healer or DPS didn’t sleep the mob they would get oneshot? I’m assuming probably not

14 really needs to make a decision, either everyone is responsible for themselves and we dump the trinity as healers will never be engaging in that design or everyone returns to being reliant on everyone else which would lead to these suggestions being quite good alongside some form of agro control

[Doopliss]

[Cut for length.]

I am absolutely not "essentially arguing that my enjoyment takes priority over the rest of the party". This is such a bizarre misread of my posts that I have to assume most people here just skim through things.

My entire opinion in this thread is for the sake of having options. In no instance would I ever force randoms to play the way I want to, but if they were comfortable enough then the option would be awesome. My fun is in variety and getting the chance to even have people who want to test limits.

I do not know how I could imply that any clearer in my replies here. I'm really not trying to goad, but the constant rebuttals that use strawmen as examples and take an ad hominem approach after barely regarding what they're reading are becoming maddening.

I've, again, played this game for an embarrassing amount of hours. All of these points are assuming the worst actors possible will come out and frequently make dungeons unbearable, but the community was much the same back then as it is now, and they will more than likely remain in the minority. Yes, I believe the players you experienced existed. I've experienced them myself. They exist today as much as they did then, and people like that are going to find any reason to signal their "skill difference" regardless of whether or not we keep walls.

Also you keep talking about how people shouldn't be getting worked up making up for lost time in a dungeon (though again nobody really was...it's just, again, the numerical value is significant even if you personally don't care about this particular context and believe it too exaggerated for your tastes), but then you also get concerned about how much longer multiple wipes could make a dungeon run.

If I want to read that under the least generous lens possible, then to me it just sounds like you want to keep things as is so you can have fun your way and give nobody the option to experiment or mess up. After all, the way the game changed happened to align with your preference rather than mine. But if this changed back you'd still have the option to play your way; just I'd also be given the option to play the way I find most fun sometimes. I know it wouldn't align all the time, but I do not see how that is a big deal. The potential is enough.

IMO people should have an option in normal content that actually risks wiping, anyway. Most people arguing for this knows that it would create any risk of wiping in dungeons again, too (because, again, nobody is actually 'freaking out' about the time difference, they're just stating the significance)--which is honestly a good thing. Casual content needs any friction for bridging to return, and this is one decent option to bring back because it's not actually mandatory.

Also, especially with cooldown resets on death since HW...FFXIV dungeons have just never been hard enough for so many wipes to to keep occurring unless both the Tank and Healer didn't know what they were doing in an astoundingly critical way. Unless we're talking about, like, the original Demon Wall DPS check pre-nerf in ARR, then we really must have been playing a different game.

Anyway, replying this much to a thread in such a short amount of time is embarrassing (for me, not you; you do whatever you feel like)!!! I can't hope any harder that my posts and those similar to them won't continue to be twisted in bad faith any more than they already have, but I still strongly implore to consider why small, potential (potential =/= requirement) differences between runs that allow for mild-yet-still-more-than-we-have-now player engagement help an MMORPG continue to feel like an MMORPG. Regardless of how much their PR tries to twist it, this game was not built upon the foundation for a single-player RPG.

[Gyson]

Also you keep talking about how people shouldn't be getting worked up making up for lost time in a dungeon (though again nobody really was...it's just, again, the numerical value is significant even if you personally don't care about this particular context and believe it too exaggerated for your tastes), but then you also get concerned about how much longer multiple wipes could make a dungeon run.

Probably because I find five extra minutes of combat far more enjoyable than five extra minutes of wiping and running back to wherever we left off because someone in the party repeatedly overestimated their team's abilities. Granted, I am weird that way.

The crux of your points seems to hinge on this idea that removing the temporary walls between sets of mobs will not place unwanted pressure on players to pull everything between bosses as a single pull, and that everyone will be free to find their own comfortable pace. I simply don't agree with that. Yes, we can look back at early dungeon design and how FFXIV players played through them ten years ago. But FFXIV attracted a different audience of players back then, and people in general were not so expecting of instant gratification as they are today. The dungeon experiences we had back then are not the experience we often have now, in my opinion. It's somewhat telling that r/TalesFromDF was created in the last ~5 years, no?

Not that it matters what I think, but I'd be much more on board with suggestions to make dungeons more entertaining by adding in more mechanics to the mobs or rooms they're fought in, randomizing routes through the dungeon from a limited and reasonable selection each run, having the bosses dropping in briefly to battle players at various points during the trash sections, etc. I don't much care for the wall-removal suggestion because it doesn't increase the entertainment for anyone besides healers. Five mobs or fifteen, tanks will still cycle through the same mitigation buffs, DPS will still output the same damage rotations; it's only the healer who will really feel the difference as they try to keep up with increased amounts of damage on everyone.

[Valence]

I genuinely don't get the people complaining that they'll lose 2min out of a dungeon run because it's not optimized. Not that it happens much those days anyway, but if you remove walls perhaps it will again yes. So what? You don't like the content? This reminds me of those people that complain they have to do X content because they want the rewards but hate said content in the first place. But they really have to do it you must understand.

How about you don't run the content you don't like if it's so harrowing to run that overshooting the expected completion time by a minute or two becomes insufferable? Meanwhile when I run a frontline game or another pvp mode I regularly get frustrated when the timers arbitrarily ends the game because it always feels like it ends too soon for me. Cause you know, I'm actually enjoying the content. Sometimes less so because of other issues, but I don't feel like I wasted my time in it either and I move to the next game.

If the complaint is that there is no other way to obtain basic currencies like tomes, that's wrong, but I can agree that maybe those need even more options to get beyond roulettes and hunts. Why do extremes and savage pay so little when cleared? Why can't something of that difficulty reward tomes appropriately in comparison to normal storymode content? Why can't normal runs of pvp modes reward more tomes as well (current amounts beyond the single roulette are absolutely abysmal)?

If the complaint is more about why storymodes suck, then sure, I agree, pve sucks. But trying to say that because it sucks you need a way to reduce the time it takes won't make it magically suck less in essence.