Too much dancing

[Simaril]

Too much dancing?

When they make a fight that doesn't have the "dance" people cry it's too hard, when they put in the fight with the dance, people cry that they have to stop dpsing and move.

MMO's use to be around strategy and gear checks, but when they went that route, it took a LONG time to get the gear.. a LONG TIME. People complained that it was too hard to get the needed gear for these fights and didn't want to play. So to keep making money, keep the games going longer, the developers had to make it easier to get gear, and people still complained because they couldn't get the gear.. and then it was made easier, and complaints, and easier, and complain... see the pattern?

People expect and want their ideal game from every single mmo, and complain when it's not.

I like what you’re getting at here… Right now it seems like dancing is the only “check” in the game. I would prefer more variety. Perhaps Titan could be an individual avoidance check, Garuda could be a coordinated movement check, and Ifrit could be a gear check. That kind of almost seems like what they were going for, but instead it feels like they’re all 100% dance checks. Gear taking an insanely long time seems like a relic of the past… but getting all ilv 70 before level 50, and LONG before you need it has removed any feeling of gear check. There are gear checks... but the gear is readily available to anyone with crafting and/or gil. Also, other classic mmo mechanics seem to be absent: threat is pretty trivial on most fights, mana is only a problem for healers when people fail at dancing...

ill give my two cents on this one, I have always felt that they tried to mix oldschool tank and spank mechanics, with "true action combat" and it doesn't work. As it becomes less about positioning and knowing when to use certain skill in your chain and how many buttons can i spam till i have to move, especially as playing as a black mage.

Totally agree! “how many buttons can I spam before I move” reminds me of old school Street Fighter, or some lame FPS.

[Viridiana]

Gear taking an insanely long time seems like a relic of the past… but getting all ilv 70 before level 50, and LONG before you need it has removed any feeling of gear check. There are gear checks... but the gear is readily available to anyone with crafting and/or gil.

You do realize that the vast majority of players, unlike you, do not level all of their crafting classes to 50 before getting their first combat class to 50, right? That is to say, most people's first level 50 will not be decked out in full ilvl 70 upon reaching 50.

[Kajidourden]

threat is pretty trivial on most fights, mana is only a problem for healers when people fail at dancing...

10000000000x This.

[Sibyll]

Gear taking an insanely long time seems like a relic of the past… but getting all ilv 70 before level 50, and LONG before you need it has removed any feeling of gear check. There are gear checks... but the gear is readily available to anyone with crafting and/or gil. Also, other classic mmo mechanics seem to be absent: threat is pretty trivial on most fights, mana is only a problem for healers when people fail at dancing...

The only thing I can agree on is the ease of obtaining gear. When you overgear the content the difficulty is going to be reduced to the simplest mechanics because your gear is trivializing the rest.

Take Titan HM for example. It has a hard DPS check that is trivialized by over gearing or building up limit break, a healing check that is trivialized by over gearing, and a personal awareness check that is reduced by over gearing. However, based on your logic this entire fight is just "don't stand in fire".

You realize that nearly every fight can be reduced to tank and spank or avoid AoE when you over gear the encounter enough right? Try running the encounters with a party in ilvl appropriate gear and see if the entire fight is just avoiding AoEs.

[Simaril]

The only thing I can agree on is the ease of obtaining gear. When you overgear the content the difficulty is going to be reduced to the simplest mechanics because your gear is trivializing the rest.

Take Titan HM for example. It has a hard DPS check that is trivialized by over gearing or building up limit break, a healing check that is trivialized by over gearing, and a personal awareness check that is reduced by over gearing. However, based on your logic this entire fight is just "don't stand in fire".

You realize that nearly every fight can be reduced to tank and spank or avoid AoE when you over gear the encounter enough right? Try running the encounters with a party in ilvl appropriate gear and see if the entire fight is just avoiding AoEs .

You can have ilv 70 before you get to lv50 (I did). Gear should trivialize older content, it shouldn't trivialize content before you can even access it... SE trivialized any gearcheck by designing the game that you can so easily outgear content before you reach it. By doing that, SE has (as you say) "reduced this game to the simplest mechanics." If you're not too lazy or stupid to get the right gear, (or if you have the skill such that you don't need it) this has made the game revolve around dancing, and nothing else.


In your Titan HM example, you can't quite over gear the personal awareness check - at least not with gear that's available before you clear Titan. In ilv 70, you do outgear all other aspects of gear check, but not the dance check. Go to DF and I bet you'll have very little success; often players in full ilv 70+ fail just as hard as anyone else.

[Fendred]

I don't think the problem is too much dancing. Honestly, once a player has completed almost all the content in the game, the very structure of the game leads to an unending cesspool of frustration, pain, and anguish. In a single player game, hard bosses like Twintania and the like are a challenging, but ultimately fun experience because once you have mastered the fight, you can feel confident that if you were to do it again, you can be sure you will win. Trying to do the same thing in an MMORPG will only give that sense of satisfaction for the first week. Afterwards, a never-ending conveyor belt of players new to the fight or just the monotony of rerunning the same old thing over and over again will fray away even the most patient of players.

So people try to analyze their frustration and say that there are "too much of x mechanic" or something else, but really what is happening is that they are being turned into victims of a system that psychologically demands that they win all the important raid fights and cap their currency every week. It's the result of taking what is really more of a stop gap measure against players performing a mass exodus out of the game and implementing that instead of something with honest replayability.

[Raestloz]

I do think that there's too much movement with the likes of Titan. CT seems to get the mix of movement and strategy pretty well, especially Behemoth one

[Vesuvias]

ill give my two cents on this one, I have always felt that they tried to mix oldschool tank and spank mechanics, with "true action combat" and it doesn't work. As it becomes less about positioning and knowing when to use certain skill in your chain and how many buttons can i spam till i have to move, especially as playing as a black mage. I will not mention the name of my old game but it was true action combat, I literally had to the bosses attack (actually use a dodge skill, not just walk out of the way) or eat the attack and odds are die. Now in this game they want me to dodge circles occasionally while i am forced to eat certain attacks, yes again that happened in my old game, but it was very rare, and in those instances it was up to the rest of the party to trade a debuff or other such mechanic and we could avoid it entirely. and lastly, IF I was truly skilled in my class i could literally go the entire dungeon dodging attacks and not take any damage.

[Vesuvias]

Now as i stated earlier if they want to do red circles and danger zones, screw the wow combat and give us "true action combat" and i think that this game would get a lot more interesting...

Bloody post limits...

[Lemon8or]

So let me get this straight. You specifically bought items to make gears enough to outgear any gear checks in the beginning of the end-game then complain that OMG I have to dodge and my gears mean nothing at those levels? Try doing AK pre-nerf with AF gears and you'll see your sooooooo desired gear checks. The contents you listed are to be done before you got i70. It's just nerfed now because the current gear check is in Coil. It used to be that if you don't have the gears, you have to work the skills you got to get past it.