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

[Magis]

OP nails it with the mechanics problem. I heard someone put it (think it was on Reddit) as "You are not learning your job, you are learning the boss". It makes artificially difficult (oh one guy got killed by an instant KO? Wipe!), and extremely boring once you yourself got it down.

[nokinator]

Ive been around along time.. the OP was the best read I have had in a while and I would hope that whomever monitors and reads the forums on the Japanese side takes that post and posts it to Yoshi Ps and the teams computer screens literally

[EmiliM]

So I created a thread in the Japanese general discussion forum in reference to this:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...81%84%E3%81%A6

I doubt it'll get the same level of response it did here, seeing as how Japanese players tend to be far more stoic than the rest of us. Nevertheless, it should increase the chance of a dev (if not Yoshida himself) at least giving it a read and some thought.

I think most of us probably realize the issue we've raised here is embedded far too deep in the game for any kind of changes to happen right away. And chances are they can only keep churning out new contents and hope to somehow manage to hold people's interest long enough until the "casual" side of the game becomes more filled out, sort or like trying to make the carpet big enough to sweep things under.

I hope it works.

[silentwindfr]

all we can do it's say it enough time for make them realize something is wrong and little by little change it... it's impossible to change all in one time it's a given, however, slowly make change into the game it's what they must do.

indeed the game can please a part of the community and can potentially stay like this. but it's that what yoshida wish for FF14: ARR, to be a niche game? or be a really good game that will keep player.
they need to open more the talk with us. he did say a lot in the past, that mmorpg it's a service, it's time to maybe do some survey about what they people really want. they can't simply judge from what we do. if something is not there we will not try it, if we have only the raid to do... it's what we will do. please Yoshida, do some survey, check what the people really feel about the game and what need to be adressed!

don't forget us, because we don't forget you, we are still there! we are still fighting for the game! don't abandon us

[Raenryong]

I swear to god you guys, if the next Coil is just four fights against training dummies... it's like few people here have actually played difficult games and instead just braindead stuff like FFXI.

[Iriadysa]

Please tell me what's difficult in Coil once you have mastered the mechanics. I'd love to change my point of view.

Also, don't give us the "die-and-retry games were difficult". They were not difficult (ie, possible in one go by some random skilled player), they were designed to be impossible for 99.99% of the people and for the arcade.

Do you know how many times I've seen people die to simple stuff like landslides or twisters, despite being absolutely clear by that point about exactly what they should been doing to survive them? I cannot count them.

Nothing is "difficult once you have mastered the mechanics" unless you start reaching the human reaction time limits, which XIV doesn't even come close to nor attempts to do so, and yet people keep failing on tasks where they actually should've already "mastered the mechanics". Because, really, what's so hard about "mastering a mechanic" like Landslide or Twisters? Nothing. If you die to it, your current skill level for that encounter is poor and you must improve.

But hey, that's all right people, keep on believing everything is easy and you just don't do it because "it's too boring" or fail at it because "it's not asking me to be skilled, it's asking me to have 10ms ping". I'm sure you'll love your gear carried "skill" encounters in the future, shall Yoshida actually listen to the people in this thread.

[Iriadysa]

I'll try to stay calm but...

Twisters or landslide are easy ?

try to listen to it at least once : it's easy for YOU. Doesn't mean it's easy for everyone (don't serve me the "you didn't do it and that's why you say that", I have beaten both T5 and titan Ex, both on a flawless basis, no hit taken apart the compulsory ones.)

The mechanics behind twisters and landslide are so simple that there's no learning time for it. Summed up:

Landslide: move away from the straight rails that come out of Titan's center.
Twisters: move and don't stop moving until Twisters is finished casting. Don't cross paths with anyone else nor yourself.

Are those not easy enough for you? I cannot see anything, anything at all complex about those mechanics. You don't have to even play the encounter once to understand how to beat these mechanics, so this isn't a "die and repeat" case.

So if the mechanics are not complex to understand or hard to memorize, what is the real difficulty behind them?

Landslide: people have poor reaction times.
Twisters: people are not paying attention (for twisters you don't even need high reaction times, as long as you move before the cast is over you are golden).

And people are still asking for easier content. It baffles my mind.

The point here being that the mechanics (which is the main critique through out this post of biblical proportions) are for the most part not complex and the difficulty lies in people simply not being able to execute them correctly, not understanding them.

(I still think the execution is super easy, but I can understand how this differs from person to person)

I have no doubt I would have been able to go at least up to T9, maybe even beat that T9 once before 2.4 comes. But I don't think it's worth my time

This is just gold. I used to know someone like you. He could solo anything in a game I played before XIV.

He just couldn't be arsed to do it because it would "take too much time". And thus he never did it. Not even once.

[Raenryong]

Please tell me what's difficult in Coil once you have mastered the mechanics. I'd love to change my point of view.

Also, don't give us the "die-and-retry games were difficult". They were not difficult (ie, possible in one go by some random skilled player), they were designed to be impossible for 99.99% of the people and for the arcade.

It would depend on how you define mastering the mechanics. By mastering the mechanics of a specific fight, by definition you are amazing at that fight, so it should no longer be that difficult. I will say that T5-9 is content difficult enough that defeat is still a possibility even after you have mastered it. However, it's kind of a trick question.

Well I mean even other MMOs like WoW and Rift are far more mechanic heavy than this, while having a much faster GCD, more complex jobs, and more responsibility in some cases. Anyone who has come from raiding in one of those games (or comparative) shouldn't find any of the mechanics so far jarring or especially difficult at all.

Look, I think one key is issue is gearing up doesn't really effect the fight mechanics. No matter how geared you are, if you eat a landslide its game over. If you eat a twister it's game over. The question is then, where is the gear and echo buff that actually increases player movement speed to help compensate "poor" players with lower reaction time?

To be fair, you're specifically picking instant kill mechanics. Gearing up/echo buff helps with things such as overall fight duration (lower = easier, less time to mess up, DPS burst is more significant, healer MP pools are less likely to be strained), tanking high damage encounters such as Caduceus (to the point you can ignore its slime mechanic); tank swapping in T2 (the penalty for swapping slowly or even not at all is greatly reduced); T4 is far easier by virtue of the fact that its difficulty always lay in the large amount of simultaneous mobs - a dps/hps output check, basically, which was trivialised by Echo; T5 - Death Sentence requires no/less preparation, Conflags die a lot easier, Divebomb=>Asclepius phase (hardest of the fight) is far easier; Titan HM - Tumult damage and DPS checks trivialised; Garuda EX - tank checks trivialised (in terms of survival anyway); Titan EX - this is one of the few fights which Echo does not benefit a huge amount because it was never a massive dps/hps check. It increases the margin of error significantly however; Ifrit EX - tank checks greatly reduced. Higher DPS can actually cause issues here!

tl;dr: some mechanics remain painful, but the vast majority of each Echo fight is much easier, with some mechanics becoming completely irrelevant/trivialised.

I read the OP twice and I really like the post. I have Dyspraxia and I CANNOT memorize rotations, my brain just doesn't let me, so I work on a reaction time basis. I've cleared t5, not yet attempted second coil, I've cleared all the ex-primals so far as well. I wrote this massive post and deleted it because it was a ramble fest.

You don't need to, honestly. As long as you know what a mechanic does and roughly when it is coming, you will be fine in almost all instances.

Mechanics are really ridiculous sometimes, look at the Sunken Temple of Qarn, as a WHM I was getting yelled at for not constantly saving people because of the hornets are doing 3k+ dmg and people, aside from WAR, only have about 2k, but if one person dies before hornets are killed its over, I wouldn't have the MP to finish the battle if I Raise them and there won't be enough dps to kill them off, even if i slept 1. I understand avoidable instant wipe mechanics that a few people can save the raid from or each individual person has to do their part, but never should single target death mean that the group is going to wipe.

The hornets are very squishy and you'd have to be wilfully ignoring them to fail the mechanic. What would then be an acceptable cause of death on that first boss? There is no difficulty in it aside from its mechanics. You could boost its damage and remove the mechanics, but that makes the fight far easier - you'd just stand there hitting Cure/Cure2 every GCD for the entire fight and that'd be it. Losing one member in a 4 man group is a 25% loss in number of members - this should be extremely significant, else the question would be raised - how is it possible to wipe?

Enrage timers were meant so people wouldn't just Zombie run and throw weakened bodies at it until they beat it, it means now that 1 person's death means that you fail because they spent 2 minutes waiting for a safe time to get up and your dps fell too low and now you haven't a chance.

Enrage timers in MMOs tend to be harsh - far harsher than in XIV. They are intended to provide an output goal and prevent you using too many healers. Their role isn't solely to stop zombie tactics, it's to demand a certain level of competence with your job and with the mechanics of the fight. It's not like XI where they were so laughably high that you'd actually have to go afk and eat a pizza or something to fail them - they are now a required part of the fight to beat.