Too much dancing

[Simaril]

SE has managed to gate content almost entirely on "do not stand in fire" mechanics which is rather sad when you think about it. Perhaps it's so they can confidently throw more complex mechanics at the players knowing that the player base has mastered the art of positioning.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. I find it sad for a couple of reasons.

-"do not stand in the fire" mechanics amke the game very one dimensional
-I am not great at positioning, and I would rather see a game that does NOT require mastering that art... When should dancing be an important component of RPGs??? I'd be happy to see some enounters where you don't have to move at all.
-I was hoping Final Fantasy would come up with something new, interesting, fun, and BETTER.

While there are a lot of interesting mechanics you can throw, the issue with the type of design you are describing is there is little replay value. Once people know that you have to kill the adds in a specific order or that using fire spells heals the boss, then the encounter becomes trivialized even though it might be very rewarding to figure it out on your own for the first time.

Replay value is a challange, but not impossible to overcome. Could gearcheck bosses hp/defense/dmg reflect raid members ilvl? Could encounters include more randomness... like sometimes having a caster add you have to burn, but other times having a tank add you're better off ignoring or CCing?

Nearly every primal fight has a DPS check component. The encounter designs stress mastery of class and game mechanics more so than meeting arbitrary gear milestones, and I don't believe this is a bad thing. I regularly see very well geared DPS that can't make simple DPS checks because they understand class mechanics, tanks that melt because they don't know how to use cooldowns and players with relics and full myth tome gear that can't avoid AoEs on Titan HM.

While there are gearchecks, there are few barriers preventing you from getting way better gear than you need (crafted and tomes allow you to bypass gear checks). You might need ilv 70 for titan HM, but you can get ilv 70 crafted gear before you even hit 50, so it's easy to significantly out gear everything through Titan HM - IMO each tier of gear should be gated by gear checks. This probably wasn't true for players who got to endgame quickly, but it is for the more casual players who would actually benefit from some gating and the feeling of tiers.


I had a full set of ilv70 crafted gear before I went to a lv 50 instance... so I trivialized any gearcheck in:

Castrum Meridanum
Praetorium
Ifrit HM
Wanderer's Palace
Amdapor Keep
Garuda HM
Copperbell HM
Haukke HM
Pharos Sirius
King Mog was quite easy in ilv 70
Titan... ok now you need 3,200 hps - so ilv 70 + a few materia
Ultima
Crystal Tower

Maybe part of my issue isn't the instances, but rather the availabilty of gear? Honestly, I think the "dance check" is too harsh, while there are essentially no other "checks."