Redesigned Test/Practice Mode for harder fights

[Goodberry]

Thanks for the compliment. Much appreciated ^^

Maybe my idea of fun is not clearing content one week after release? *shrug*

My idea of fun is to have to think in a game. Not what you elitists consider "challenge": everything braindead easy, except some encounters requiring lightning reflexes, no lag and no latency (but still no thought process).
Hell, I'd like you elitists tried to complete a game like Myst 4. THAT was a challenge.

[Kyana]

My idea of fun is to have to think in a game. Not what you elitists consider "challenge": everything braindead easy, except some encounters requiring lightning reflexes, no lag and no latency (but still no thought process).

qft

We have a few members with a bad connection in our FC and one of them has some kind of medical problem slowing his reflexes.
But our members want to play together regardless.
Things like Landslides, Plumes, Dashes and Divebombs make things alot harder for us, and the echo buff does nothing to make this easier.
Most "strategies" for endgame content just involve overgearing and burning through. For example Coil T2.
Sometimes it feels more like a FPS than a RPG.

I'd welcome fights which require more puzzling than quick reflexes and burst dmg.
Where you still can burn through and kill faster that way, but where you can also use mechanics to beat the encounter.
Examples for fights with a bit more than "tank+heal through everything while burning the boss down" are Diablos, Bone Dragon, Behemoth, Caduceus, Copperbell hard Spriggan or Copperbell Slime.

[skaterger]

My idea of fun is to have to think in a game. Not what you elitists consider "challenge": everything braindead easy, except some encounters requiring lightning reflexes, no lag and no latency (but still no thought process).
Hell, I'd like you elitists tried to complete a game like Myst 4. THAT was a challenge.

I also enjoy turn based games like Disgaea, Anno series and Total war series, although I would have to try Myst 4! Actually I was arguing against scripted fights and wish they would incorporate more thinking into fights instead of just memorization and team rope jumping. So I guess we agree on at least something? Again, I find it a little funny you calling me an elitist when I'm not even that good but whatever lol.

snip

I know someone who has a similar condition when I played Wow so I get what you are saying. Mechanics like divebomb and plumes certainly require precise timing but like I replied to the poster above, the fights are highly scripted so memorizing what is coming next can help deal with a large portion of that problem. I would also advise you and your friends to stick to FFXIV, seeing that it is one of the few games out there with a 2.5 sec gcd, making fights a lot more slower and more forgiving than a lot of other games out there. (i.e. wildstar)

[Colvin]

I wonder if this idea has been run by the devs yet?

[Mayoyama]

I personally feel a segregated "phase selector" would not be the solution because
1) If your DPS is higher in one group over another you may end up skipping parts of a phase. You then learn to expect a "set" amount of moves in the phase, instead of learning to just deal with things as they come up (reflexes and actually paying attention)
2) Being able to handle transitions BETWEEN phases is vitally as important as the phases themselves.
3) There is no guarantee that you will even find a group of 8 willing to practice ONLY that particular phase over and over, making the feature pointless (incoming 90+ min queues to just try practicing a specific phase in a specific fight)
4) People who are not confident on their class outside of trashy dungeons will always struggle more than experienced players

I believe that a simulator dummy would be much more beneficial overall. The dummy could use a variety of moves allowing people to practice dodging mechanics (especially DPS who have a bad habit of dying by focussing too hard on DPS and not enough on actually doing the fight). This would be especially helpful for black mages to help improve casting AND dodging (and actually getting a spell off).

I saw someone mention the Golden Saucer. You could make it a mini-game with varying difficulties where you have to do a certain level of damage without getting hit :P.

[Ryel]

We kind of already have "Practice/Training Simulators." They're called Guildhests, and I love the ones we have now, haha! It wouldn't be hard to implement these either, simply have us fight powerful monsters with similar abilities to certain Primals.

Honestly i think this pretty much nails it.

Guildhests were and are perfect for this sort of thing and the lower level ones should have been a mandatory part of the main scenario starting out.

The best solution for this sort of thing is to add more / varied Guildhests that get players accustomed to themes they'll see in endgame encounters; group dodging mechanics, DPS checks, player lockdown / removal, tank swapping, stacks etc.

I don't think players need "save spots" to practice certain fights if they're trained in a large range of varying mechanics.

This better prepares them for future content in the long run when they can enter a fight and say "Oh this has X or a similar move like X in that one Guildhest we did, i know how to deal with that!" rather than "okay guys we practiced X phase on X mob X amount of times, we can finally kill it now"

[Malamasala]

Asking for a save spot in the middle of a boss is a ridiculous idea. Thats like asking for a save spot in FF7 against Sephiroth because you want to practice it.

But nobody seem to pay attention to the even more ridiculous idea that someone can just say "I'm fed up with this group, I'm leaving". That is like if you die against Sephiroth and reload, you lose one character in your party that may not appear again for another 1 hour of real time waiting.

If you actually had checkpoints in boss battles where you got to resume from with full health and mana after a wipe, then much fewer people would have a reason to leave because they know that at least what they've already cleared stay cleared.

Another comparison for primals is to say that if you die, you start at the beginning of a dungeon with all monsters respawned. Because that is how primal fights work, you have to redo everything. It makes quite a lot of sense to not force people to redo the entire primal fight every wipe.