What exactly did the improved encounter design do?

[SkankyRoe]

Why has whether someone done anabeisos or not suddenly become some sort of weird benchmark

Because Savage/Ultimate before Anabaseios is "braindead easy". FRU and Light-Heavyweight returning to pre-Anabaseios level of difficulty is why everyone whined that they were "too easy"

[Maltothoris]

The point is, the 'lack of creativity in encounter design' is so fundamental, so 'at the core' of their thinking, that even the end of the fight is the same thing: 9999999 damage raidwide, you died go again

It is kinda sad how the last unique enrage to my knowledge is A11s with the platform health and cruise chaser's move doing damage until you have only one generator left and then it ending the ga-100 that destroys it.

After that, it's either the 9999999 damage or just j-wave style aoes.

[ForsakenRoe]

I could go on and on, but IMO even from SB to ShB it's already a steep drop.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I agree that out of SB and SHB, I'd take SB AST 10 times out of 10. Well, the ideal situation would be 'use SB AST as a blueprint for a soft-reset for the Job's design, and add onto it from there', but I suspect that we won't be seeing that from Evolved Mode

I was moreso just musing on the idea of, rather than OGCDs being the 'replacement' for GCD Healing, what if we had a design where they're more of a 'supplement' to it?

Because Savage/Ultimate before Anabaseios is "braindead easy". FRU and Light-Heavyweight returning to pre-Anabaseios level of difficulty is why everyone whined that they were "too easy"

Pre-Anabesios was Abyssos. The whole complaint about FRU/LHW was that they had no DPS checks thanks to PCT existing, and Abyssos' issue was that it had too much of a DPS check. If you mean in terms of mechanical complexity, perhaps yes, but then the question is 'why are we putting all of the eggs in one basket', when it comes to 'the source of complexity in high end encounters, between Mechanics and Job-Rotation'?

On the Ultimate side of things, in the 'pre-Anabesios' section of time we got TOP

It is kinda sad how the last unique enrage to my knowledge is A11s with the platform health and cruise chaser's move doing damage until you have only one generator left and then it ending the ga-100 that destroys it.

After that, it's either the 9999999 damage or just j-wave style aoes.

It'd be nice if J-Waves style AOEs were the enrage, but they always end those build-up sequences with a hard 9999999 wall too. Like, they just keep scaling up to a certain point in damage (eg 10x the original hit's damage), and then once that point is reached they just keep pulsing until you all die. Healers would be able to power-heal through it with enough Mit to reduce it to a manageable level again, but Mit has a CD and the MP bar is not infinite, so you'd end up dying still. But it'd allow a skilled Healer to extend the fight's duration by a few, potentially crucial, seconds, and that extra few seconds of damage could allow for the damage lost to some earlier mistake to be recouped at the end of the fight, making Savage a little less of a 'one of the DPS got a Damage Down in Orbital Omen, time to reset' sort of design

Like, one of my favourite enrages is Hades, the story mode weirdly enough. The Light safezone gets smaller and smaller, and eventually disappears entirely, leaving you with a fairly sizeable DOT to powerheal through. He then casts a hard enrage raidwide called Black Cauldron, which appears to have a cast time of like thirty seconds (edit: just checked, it's closer to a full 60 seconds). In theory, the threat in the enrage sequence isn't the hard enrage, it's the DOT, and your Healers running out of resources to fight it off. Of course, we never see that enrage because potency values have been increased over the years since, and people like to LB him to further obliterate the DPS check

[Bru_Tus]

Because Savage/Ultimate before Anabaseios is "braindead easy". FRU and Light-Heavyweight returning to pre-Anabaseios level of difficulty is why everyone whined that they were "too easy"

I struggled to actually parse what you mean but I have come to the conclusion that you only mean P1S-P8S, because I absolutely cannot think of any other way to sensibly interpret this when Gordias and Midas exist.

Also, since Creator, the game has followed a pretty reliable trend of having easy first tiers that slowly ramp up in difficulty over the expansion.

FRU is an anomaly though. Before that only UWU was seen universally as simpler than the previous Ultimate (though it had a tougher puzzle).

[DBriggs304]

Nothing OP. Nothing

[MisterNublet]

It was a placebo effect.

If they truly improved encounter design, there wouldn't be so many people second guessing what and where the actual improvements were.

[SkankyRoe]

Pre-Anabesios was Abyssos.

I struggled to actually parse what you mean

I got the name mixed up with Asphodelos(happens to me a lot). And yes I'm aware of the woes of on-release Alexander and the overtuning of 7.0 jobs due to PCT. I was referring to the SB-ShB era of high-end content where savage was standardized and Ultimates began to exist, and how those raids would mostly be considered too easy by the new difficulty standards set by EW raids.

Of course difficulty is kinda subjective, Light-Heavyweight for me felt a bit more difficult than Promise tier and was considerably more difficult than P1s which was easier to me than half of EW's extreme trials.

[Coolyy]

Because Savage/Ultimate before Anabaseios is "braindead easy". FRU and Light-Heavyweight returning to pre-Anabaseios level of difficulty is why everyone whined that they were "too easy"

This is a joke, yes? LHW is the easiest Savage tier of all time considering it was cleared in almost half the time (~9h) as any other first tier with Eden's Gate being the closest (~14h). It's not even an era thing since Cruiserweight and Heavyweight returned to form and took more than 2x the amount of time to clear than LHW which is more on par with the Omega-Pandaemonium difficulty. It's was a great tier because of enjoyability but definitely the easiest of all time which is a legitimate complaint. M2S and M3S literally had tighter DPS checks than M4S, I mean come on that is a clear balancing issue especially when people were skipping Sunrise Sabbath. Not going to criticize the M4S mechanics as I do think they were on-par with M12S anecdotally which is respectable. LHW is proof that DPS check tuning matters when it comes to Savage difficulty as there's simply no reason that EX3 should only be 6k less than a Fourth Floor Savage DPS check. There's no reason why my best clear in PF should be two whole minutes before enrage as that is speed-kill territory for other Fourth floors.

Proof: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?gid=0#gid=0

FRU is at least harder than UWU and similar to TEA and UCOB in difficulty so I wouldn't bundle it with LHW since it's a respectable Ultimate. The most apparent issue with FRU is that P1 and P5 are literal Extreme Trial difficulty and simply not on that Ultimate level. P2, P3 and P4 are actual strong phases and around that Ultimate level which saved the fight from being cleared in under 24h. Compare that with TOP where P1 and P6 are considered harder phases which is good design and pacing for an Ultimate and the main reason why it took so long to clear. Obviously PCT ruining the DPS checks didn't help but everyone knows this by now. I also think part of the reason FRU had a mixed reception was because a lot of players have issues with the actual theming of FRU as it was supposed to be a story based Ultimate but included E11 over E12 despite Eden's Promise having the Primals which is the focal point of EDEN.

[Ankhira]

At the end of the day each fight is just a rote memorized DDR scripted boss in an arena anyway.

We should have more bosses with unpredictable patterns that force you into having downtime.

But that's something the parse brains don't want. They complained enough and this is where we're at with the game's fight design.

[Bru_Tus]

I got the name mixed up with Asphodelos(happens to me a lot). And yes I'm aware of the woes of on-release Alexander and the overtuning of 7.0 jobs due to PCT. I was referring to the SB-ShB era of high-end content where savage was standardized and Ultimates began to exist, and how those raids would mostly be considered too easy by the new difficulty standards set by EW raids.

Of course difficulty is kinda subjective, Light-Heavyweight for me felt a bit more difficult than Promise tier and was considerably more difficult than P1s which was easier to me than half of EW's extreme trials.

I think you underestimate the difficulty of, say, O12S on release. Even if we ignore that jobs were far more difficult back then, current players don't recognize that much of the mechanical difficulty back then was embedded in things outside of positioning. For example Patch was semi-random and required coordination between the team, and you needed to actually time yourself breaking the tether and knowing who to go towards or move away from, while also making sure that your tether break doesn't coincide with a vuln up. You also needed to coordinate with the healers because people need to be topped off at least halfway in. Back then FF14 was a game that required far more communication and coordination unlike the individual responsibility game we have now.

For DPS's they might not notice as much change as supports, other than not really needing to pay attention to things like their own HP these days.