What does FFXIV lack?

[Valence]

We could ask the same thing of some of the playerbase too, given how many of them just want to skip over the MSQ and leveling and go right to hardcore raiding all day. One might think a lot of players WANT "just a boss gauntlet".

It would also explain why they keep demanding that even normal content becomes increasingly harder, because they literally can't stand doing anything that isn't at least Savage tier and up.

I really don't see what the people you describe, wanting to have harder baseline difficulty and removing trash and whatnot, have to do with people that don't like the MSQ and would like to skip it to access the parts of the game that interests them though. I mean maybe there is a venn diagram somewhere, but that's still a huge stretch as a comparison to make.

Even if they aren't asking for Savage-tier specifically, they're still nonetheless asking for everything to be made harder and want everything to be a boss gauntlet.

Take the repeated cries for no walls in dungeons for example, what is that if not people wanting to boss rush even faster? Hell, there's only a handful of people that want the mobs to be dangerous themselves (I can only name me and Valence off the bat), but there's other people who don't want to deal with trash mobs AT ALL to the point that there's been very little mumbling about removing them from the new Variant that's coming up, or how people seemed howling mad about that one Savage tier that involved mobs and seemed relieved when things when back to normal for the rest. I think Deep Dungeons is the only time people seemingly "tolerate" non-boss enemies, but only because most of them are mini-bosses themselves with how quickly they can destroy you, and people probably still treat the actual bosses as the highlights of their runs, not the stuff they had to "put up with" in-between. I wouldn't be surprised to hear if people dislike mob pack FATEs/CEs in Occult Crescent and prefer the boss types, and I know people miss doing Duels from Bozja which were 1-on-1 boss fights too I believe.

Not to say people can't have their harder content/boss-only modes, it just gets a bit tiresome when some people (including the developers it seems) act like that's how the whole game should play, with little to no breathing room for variation whether its opponent type or challenge setting.

The reason a lot of people don't want to deal with trash mobs at all is because the devs have given up on trash in SHB and beyond where most party resource and scarcity mechanics, as well as aggro mechanics, got scrapped for good. Even in SB raids turned into just boss gauntlets. Is it such a wonder that a lot of players, especially the ones that never actually experienced what it was before, think trash gameplay is... trash, and want a focus on bosses, which is where the developers are actually putting in all of their efforts?

It's exactly like any service, if you want to get rid of it, just stop funding it until people complain and ask to get rid of it in favor of other things. It's a clear design direction. They do not know what to do with trash beyond the basic AoEs to dodge because that's what they made the game all about: dodging crap. If they increased the difficulty trash would become like what we have in higher floors of Orthos and Pilgrim (aka no telegraph AoEs that oneshot). So the difficulty has never been a solution. The solution has always been the re addition of actual engaging gameplay battle systems and mechanics to build something solid upon.

Agreed, I think? but only if you mean general battle mechanics (typical vulnerabilities, mobs just not being outright immune to heavy/bind/pacify etc.) rather than anything specific to those trash in particular.

I've been playing since 1.x, and even as far back as ARR, the only thing allowing for interesting trash was hyper-optimizing among Enmity, compositional variance across earlier levels* (especially, say, levels 30 to 40), party DoTs, and sequenced oGCD stuns, scarcely anything to do with the trash itself (all of which remain unchanged). Even by the time Doomspike could be acquired, most was negligible outside of tank-less runs.

* This included things like mass-DoTing, a BLM AoE Sleep (which didn't break from anything other than direct damage back then), and then nuking enemies one at a time in order so that neither heals, tank stance, nor any further uses of Sleep were necessary, for a gain in total kill-speed on fewer than 4 targets, or fewer than 5 if a member lacked AoE (say, DRG before level 40); having Bards kite the melee units in circles while tank dealt with the ranged mobs; using SCH as DPS for the Cleric Stance and greater Maim and Mend trait while a SMN healed and tanked through/via Titan and/or all party members kited melee enemies via Miasma 2; etc.

What few other things existed were almost solely to activate short casts (such as crocs' caudal swipe) to offer some extra indirect mitigation to the tank or just briefly holding an oGCD stun to use it on a mob instead when they'd attempt a special attack or, lacking any such opportunity, an AoE attack that'd otherwise deny safe access to uptime.

Vulnerabilities yes, but it also goes hand in hand with what they allow us to do with job crowd control abilities, that have been weeded out immensely for most classes beyond some role actions (stun, and rphys useless binds that get removed as soon as damage is done, lolwut). They still have some room left to design around this if the devs were even remotely creative, by bringing back ranged mobs for tanks to manage, perhaps even introduce AIs behind that try to stay at range, or to just have situations like Voidmage expose above with healer mobs (that would stop healing if they get attacked), some mobs with no aggro table, introducing some targeting priorities and mob triaging, etc. Although I do feel that the devs seem to think that even this is too hard for the baseline (as seen in deep dungeons as well, just check story floors, they're no different from regular dungeons). It's sad in a way because I do think you can still have all of those mechanics regardless of difficulty if they don't really wipe the party anyway.

But, we still have lost a lot of other mechanics, notably:
- Enmity management for tanks
- Mob positioning (hits in the back doing crits was removed in SB, ranged mobs and patrols stopped being a thing after ARR)
- General party resource management, because MP behaved differently which introduced different constraints on healers and a balance to reach between damage and healing, and this also meant running out of cooldowns and resources was more likely to happen if the DPS slacked off (no I'm not saying bring back running dry of MP/TP and be left with nothing to do type of gameplay though, not everything was perfect and nobody is saying it was)

I only started in HW so kiting mobs was really not a thing anymore unfortunately. At best we still had casters sleeping a mob in low level dungeons at times although it wasn't really mandatory to do and I suspect was a remnant of older days. Still, could help sprouts back then.

[Voidmage]

We could ask the same thing of some of the playerbase too, given how many of them just want to skip over the MSQ and leveling and go right to hardcore raiding all day. One might think a lot of players WANT "just a boss gauntlet".

It would also explain why they keep demanding that even normal content becomes increasingly harder, because they literally can't stand doing anything that isn't at least Savage tier and up.

After EW, the dungeons being a bit harder was desperately needed and they are in a good spot right now.
One part of the problems is definitely an overfocus on Savage with the balancing bleeding into normal content too much, something I repeatedly say and will continue to say. It basically completely destroyed older content through the job design.
The other part of the problem though was the "free candy nature" of EW and people getting used to not having to put effort in, same as the relic weapons there, especially given that "hard" old dungeons already existed way before.

Like others said, it also wasn't the hardcore crowd that asked for harder dungeons (those don't care for them in the first place) but normal players who actually do not want to step into the harder raids.
Another person was YoshiP himself who straight up admitted that he almost fell asleep in a dungeon at one point.

The DT dungeons aren't hard, people just forgot that older dungeons also were able to kill you. The second boss of Halatali Hard was straight up harder then the first boss of Mistwake and they are basically the same monster.

[Kisshu]

A horde mode of some kind. Sadly, I stopped playing 1.0 before they let monsters in the main cities on repeat to experience it. I'm going to get crazy here, but one of the new main cities should have random attacks like how XI did Besieged and Campaign. If you lost, you have to rescue vital NPCs from captivity from the enemy stronghold. Said stronghold would be an open world dungeon, flying is disabled and enemies are tougher (like having B, A, S, SS Rank monsters). Only problem is this might be bad for low pop data centers, so they'd have to modify the strength of the stronghold depending on who's in the zone.

The number one reason that FFXIV would never have something like Besieged, is that the writers want to resolve all conflicts in each expansion, so there wouldn't be any enemies at the end.
ARR: We break the Garlean legion
HW: We stop the war and form an alliance with the dragons
SB: We push out the Garleans, and then later they are destroyed off-screen
SHB: We defeat most of the threatening Lightwardens so only small, unorganized pockets remains
EW: All over the place, but the crisis is solved and stopped
DT: We make friends with the Alexandrians

For something like Besieged to work, we would need an organized opponent that is allowed to remain in place after the expansion ends.
ToAU's story was never about the player solving Aht Urhgan's beastmen problems, so that conflict remained after the expansion moved on. In FFXIV we would have tried to befriend these enemies.

FFXIV would need to completely change how the story is handled for something like Besieged or Campaign to happen. And it sucks, those are events that could make the game feel more community focused, like with Cosmic Exploration upgrade fates.
But not even Bozja gives this feeling with, even though the conflict is allowed to be kept in place, since it's just fates that have no meaning on the world.

[MonsutaMan]

(This is simply one man's opinion.....it is not gospel......)

It lacks an identity. Hence, XIV is like the less cooler brother, who takes everything from the old brother but it does not hit the same.

XI had an immersive, deeeeeeeeep world. That is what XI is known for. It was like, if Fromsoft made an MMO.

Example, Notorious Monsters within the open world of XI were basically cryptids. They were difficult to find, or claim most of the time. Like other players, I would question if this monster even exist......standing there camping it all day.

That is basically the hallmark of cryptids. They are rare, and ppl doubt they even exist.......Very few "See" them. Some "Do" by happenstance.

Oddly, many encounters of NM are simply ppl passing by. Other times, a NM was deemed a hoax (Fazasher Death Weapon, Yensho, etc).

XI is a beautifully constructed title. I retired from XI retail last year.....but this thread might make me come back lol.......I digress.......

....XIV does not have an identity imo. Just my opinion....One man......

[Connor]

snip

Despite all the issues with it, I think XI embraced its identity and never apologised for what it was. Even with all the changes they’ve made over the years to make it more easily accessible / modernised / etc it’s still more or less the same beast it always was; for better for worse lol.

XIV, conversely, seems intent on doing nothing but apologising for what it is and desperately trying to change that to cater to the widest possible demographic. It feels like they actively seek to undermine any sort of ‘identity’ the game could develop from fear it would negatively affect profit margins. Which ultimately just means it’s a game for literally nobody (but also everyone, somehow lol).

[Myotis]

Everything is pre-scripted what does kill any excitement of the game.

The script after 15 years doesn't work anymore.

There is complete lack of fresh air in this game. - It's too stale...

[Kisshu]

Fazasher Death Weapon.

Man, I remember this one. The myth even went so far that the devs made Shikigami Weapon based on this.

FFXI devs weren't shy of giving no directions in the game for some really obscure events. Still remember the Gobling Wolfman, only reason people knew of it was because of datamining, and they only had a hunch that Goblin Drink was used to spawn it. Yet noone had any idea how to get or craft this drink, so one crazy player tried every imaginable combination based on the drink's description, and after a long time it was created.

[Shurrikhan]

Sorry if these seem nit-picks, but just trying to balance out any nostalgia-farts others might otherwise trigger for themselves:

But, we still have lost a lot of other mechanics, notably:

Mob positioning (hits in the back doing crits was removed in SB, ranged mobs and patrols stopped being a thing after ARR)

This was only on Raw Intuition, which guaranteed parries to the front and crits received from behind (and originally also heals from behind because... XIV and sensible coding have never gone together, apparently). All enemy autos could, at the time, critically strike (and crits couldn't, again because of bizarre coding decisions making them mutually exclusive to RNG mit categories, be blocked or parried), with that chance increasingly mostly just with level disparity, iirc. What was significant was just that you couldn't block or parry attacks from behind altogether.

Enmity management for tanks

True, but this was frankly a pretty awful mechanic except when treated as a party-wide consideration. Unless optimized for, it was 6 buttons of bloat for tanks and 1-2 more for all other roles for, at best, a game of The Price is Right based upon the combination of your DPSs' output and --especially once in Stormblood-- their refusal to use their party tools (among which Diversion was decently important). In early ARR, the choice offered different approaches to small-but-threatening pulls, but... nothing else. Large pulls and very small pulls (so, some 80% of ARR and HW leveling dungeon pulls and then 99% of everything else) offered no real choice and therefore no strategic variance.

General party resource management, because MP behaved differently which introduced different constraints on healers and a balance to reach between damage and healing, and this also meant running out of cooldowns and resources was more likely to happen if the DPS slacked off

The only "balance" it struck was in very rarely preferring Cure over Cure II (and the SCH/AST equivalents of each), since the first healed for 60% as much for just 40% the MP [or effectively 25% for Cure if including Freecure averaged RNG]) and made Regen far more valuable. You still spent no time idling unless oomed by necessary rezzes, and that cost would still be more favorably taken up by the Bard, whose raid buff song at the time only affected elemental magic and whose MP song was a smaller penalty to their own damage than a damage benefit to even just one healer. Apart from that, they simply each further penalized Spell Speed and Skill Speed, since they alone did not increase output-per-resources-spent and meant that a pull could be lost within its first 25s or so even if it took 70s or so to die, simply because lackluster physical DPS meant that they could run out of the ability to hit any weaponskills except every third GCD or so before the mobs died, extending the fight into so late a time that the tank and healer run out of CDs and are inevitably overwhelmed.

On which note, unless it's used as a way to skip ahead on combos and make the GCD more flexible (e.g., by having a GCD of 2s but only being able to sustain an average of 2.25s) AND we start to see reasons to want to stay in or get out as deliberate choices with melee being rewarded commensurately to that increased risk (while casters/rangers get their own due added complexity and variable reward in turn), I really do not at all care to see TP reintroduced. As for MP, I have zero attachment to it, either, and would almost prefer it be used primarily as a shared resource system for special actions (the rest being mostly negligible) instead, akin to HW Ruin III or being used mostly be abilities if we wanted to reduce the frequency of their use without reducing their in-a-given-moment's availability.

/shrug

[Reginald_Cain]

Good tutorials for how to play your job.

How many cure 1 white mages do you see failing to heal thru a big pull because they aren't using cure 2? Hall of the novice is garbage and too many players aren't taught how to play correctly until somebody wrongfully rages at them over it and then they dont wanna play anymore. It is not the noobs fault that the game and community can fail to explain important mechanics.

There's a similar problem with new players trying to jump from brain dead normal mode content into ex or savage. It's a big jump for casuals and I wish there was something to mitigate this.

[Aidorouge]

I wouldn't be surprised, either, but that's because all the ways we could mechanically leverage interest out of trash before via our kits have been removed. We no longer have AoE specialists, burst specialists, opportunities to kite, reasons to focus down certain mobs, etc., even outside of the disorganized churn that is OC FATEs, so why would anyone prefer what is absolutely barren gameplay over merely shallow gameplay?

That's why I would like some of that back. It never ceases to annoy me as someone who mains NIN, MHC, and RDM (and plays DPS in general) that I have "Role Actions" that barely see any actual use most of the time, or how NIN in particular doesn't work at all like stealth classes do in other MMOs where in-combat sneak attacks are an actual thing, instead I somehow I get yanked out of hiding when SOMEONE ELSE pulls aggro in this game. Maybe I'm the weird one for wanting to be a DPS who needs to care about more than bloody parsing all day and my value comes from utility too. Even just having a target to Stun or Interrupt feels like begging these days.
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I really don't see what the people you describe, wanting to have harder baseline difficulty and removing trash and whatnot, have to do with people that don't like the MSQ and would like to skip it to access the parts of the game that interests them though. I mean maybe there is a venn diagram somewhere, but that's still a huge stretch as a comparison to make.

Because the ones wanting to skip all over the MSQ are much like those wanting to do away with mobs; They don't want to deal with what they consider "time-wasting trash" so they can hurry up and get to the only parts they care about, which is mostly endgame raids with a pinch of side content. At which point both groups want mostly the same thing; Hardcore bosses they can prog and farm for hours each week.

The Venn diagram is much closer to being just a circle then you might think, especially when those wanting the hardcore fights need people to "hurry up" past the MSQ to join them in the PFs, and the ones skipping the MSQ require people ready and waiting for them in their interested content.
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After EW, the dungeons being a bit harder was desperately needed and they are in a good spot right now.

Like others said, it also wasn't the hardcore crowd that asked for harder dungeons (those don't care for them in the first place) but normal players who actually do not want to step into the harder raids.
Another person was YoshiP himself who straight up admitted that he almost fell asleep in a dungeon at one point.

The DT dungeons aren't hard, people just forgot that older dungeons also were able to kill you. The second boss of Halatali Hard was straight up harder then the first boss of Mistwake and they are basically the same monster.

For me Stormblood and Shadowbringers dungeons (along with the trials and raids) were hard enough and generally not all that fun to the point I was spending more time with a leaver penalty than doing actual runs, which is why it's been discouraging to be told that Dawntrail dungeons/trials/raids are "even harder" because I'm likely to end up one of those people who get stuck in the MSQ even with Trusts, which ironically keeps me stalled not even doing Endwalker because there's this feeling of "why bother" with the current part of the story if I won't get to see the rest of it? But that's been my problem with a lot of the game's content in general, it starts off simple enough, then stonewalls me with a difficulty spike until I give up and the MSQ its self eventually starts doing the same thing apparently.

Which then leaves me unsure of what group I'm even part of then if it wasn't hardcore players demanding hardcore dungeons but supposed normal/causal players. I just don't understand how all these people find so much content "brain dead" and "sleep inducing" when I struggle on the same things, like I'm just some stupid asshole if I'm the only one dying and failing on "baby mode" content all of the time to where I've left normal content runs halfway through out of embarrassment and cringe at myself because I was the ONLY one who died on something that everyone else always dodges so effortlessly.

In hindsight, asking for harder mobs is dumb of me, because I probably couldn't handle them properly either even if there's no floor crap to avoid.