Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Kiokin]

Well written post, but I disagree with all of it. It's basically saying that a paradigm where skill > gear isn't good, and that gear should trump skill a majority of the time.

[Kluya15]

As others have said, OP presented his points but I basically disagree with all of it. Made me think he wants the game like FFXI where instead of actually learning the mechanics of the fight and applying them, you'd just chainspell stun and go to town with the most powerful abilities, breaking the fight in 30 seconds.

[Gormogon]

snip

Well I'm not a mind reader so I can't tell what the person was actually trying to convey.

To me though when people bring up those points it's not because they want gear handed to them and they want it easier. To me it's more about wanting a more social friendly environment while downing content.

Something that you can't really have when end-game bosses revolve around rotations of 5 abilities going off back to back and then some of those abilities being very punishable. Which leads to players being singled out and harassed. Personally something like DBM would really help out the community instead of parsers. In the end it's all up to every person in the group to decide what they make out of their time spent in there. Be it fun, gratifying, stressful, well spent, a waste, and so on.

[Rose-Wild]

This is extremly wrong because if you make fights easy you will lose both casual and hardcore players. Casual players would quickly finish coil and leave till the next patch and then you will see the same from hardcore players but they would probably not come back to play something that easy.

The solution for people like him is what WoW made. Make 2 diferent modes for coil, normal mode with less mechanics and lower gear as reward, and hard mode with all the mechanics and better gear. But we already have that with CT.

[Kletian]

I disagree that limited attempt rather than limited successes would be a better time gate- it leads to more frustration and intolerance of people learning.

[Garlyle]

I disagree that limited attempt rather than limited successes would be a better time gate- it leads to more frustration and intolerance of people learning.

This exactly. When I was playing The Secret World, this was one of the biggest s***storms among the community - Nightmare Mode raids had a time lockout, win or lose. So everyone insisted that you have to have cleared before to go with them, and it was nearly impossible for those who hadn't already done it to get a group to even attempt it.

At least here I can create practice groups, or even on occasion jump into farm groups after talking to the PF's leader, who'll usually give me an "Okay, but if you screw up twice you're out." Because they're not risking their entire set of attempts for a day/week or hours of effort to do so.

[Kuwagami]

I disagree that limited attempt rather than limited successes would be a better time gate- it leads to more frustration and intolerance of people learning.

I really do hate to break your bubble, but there is no tolerance for people learning already, unless there are 8/8 people learning.

Remember Leviathan Hard Mode? Me neither. But you'll remember Extreme.

hmmm nope. It's the exact same fight with a grand total one 2 new mechanics :

1) adds
2) heal debuff

new spumes are just new spumes. Same, the rails going out are just a "you'll die" thingie. Nothing new.

On the other side, I'll remember Chimera from Cutter's cry, or Brayflox (story) last boss, or Qarn last boss. They aren't that hard, only a few gimmicks, but they are fun. Fun to learn, fun to fight, not THAT unforgiving (read here, no one-shot mechanics) but if you mess up too much you'll die. And no amount of gear can help you.

All in all, I'd prefer more bosses of this type but with synced ilevel.

Like, T1 would be synced down to i75 max. T5 would be i90 max, and so on (i60 max for Hard DR, 70 max for expert DR....), without so many insta death mechanics. It would be hard, but feasible, and echo would have a meaning

[Garlyle]

On the other side, I'll remember Chimera from Cutter's cry, or Brayflox (story) last boss, or Qarn last boss. They aren't that hard, only a few gimmicks, but they are fun. Fun to learn, fun to fight, not THAT unforgiving (read here, no one-shot mechanics) but if you mess up too much you'll die. And no amount of gear can help you.

All in all, I'd prefer more bosses of this type but with synced ilevel.

Like, T1 would be synced down to i75 max. T5 would be i90 max, and so on (i60 max for Hard DR, 70 max for expert DR....), without so many insta death mechanics. It would be hard, but feasible, and echo would have a meaning

No amount of gear will help you in those because they're literally synced to a cap. (Also Chimera is a one-shot on many characters, unless you're being synced down). With that said, if the tradeoff for loosening up execution is to instead cap our strength going into it? I am super okay with that, and have been requesting an iLvl sync for content for a long time.

What matters most is that I have to actually give a damn about the mechanics. When mechanics are easily outstripped and ignored, then they're forgettable to me. It doesn't work. That's why I'm fine with one shot mechanics - you have to care about them. And right now, in postgame content, without any sort of relevant capability cap on 80% of content, we can just ignore the majority of what's going on around us.

[OmniEx]

Was a well written post but if this is serious what people think god help us all. I've seen so many posts from people where they get all upset and call people elitist or whatnot because people judge them based on their gear. These very same people will always argue "Gear does not equal skill" and now there's this post where this guy suggests that the game should be balanced to where GEAR>SKILL. There's really only 2 places where you can't expect to win by overgearing and rolling your face across your keyboard anyway (SCoB and some of the Ex Primals) but apparently that's still too much. If people actually want what this guy is suggesting maybe they should go play MapleStory or some crap like that.

[SirEdeonX]

this guy suggests that the game should be balanced to where GEAR>SKILL.

I don't think he said that at all. I think what he's saying is that memorizing patterns does not equal to SKILL, but mechanics + knowledge on the job = SKILL, and things like iLVL and Echo are not doing what they're supposed to on easing the fight for new players.
And I kinda agree with it, because you have people in SCoB that don't know how to use their jobs, only got to SCoB because they've done T5 so many times that they memorized it. Same in Levi Ex.

Also, he's not saying "let's discard all mechanics and make all fights face-roll and tank and spank".
What he's saying is the mechanics we have now (like the overuse of instant-wipes) could perhaps be changed to be more fun and interesting.
Why must all fights have a dps check that if not met causes the party to wipe? Like someone said, why not deplete the party's mp or sleep everyone or trigger another mechanics that would actually be punishing but still make you do your best to recover from it?
From how it stands, Tanks get to t5 without ever having to tackle anything or even move, and then they get bombarbed with insta-wipes to the whole pt. You, as an individual, stand powerless on a party until everyone is perfect. Not on their jobs, but perfect on the mechanics.

I don't agree with him to full extent, but it was a very well written opinion, and I think we can do a lot better and I see first hand what this unforgiving nature of content we have now does to people.