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

[KarstenS]

What OP (and myself) want is to be able to say "I know I'm a good Paladin/Dragoon/Scholar/etc because I fulfilled my role appropriately and lended to us clearing the content in a fun manner." What currently happens is, "I watched a video and have better reaction skills. I'm must truly be skilled."

That is not correct. In the current not nerfed or echoed endcontent you must have reaction skills AND fulfill your role at the same time.

Its not fair to the game to talk about issues in content you have not played yourself.

[Luvbunny]

LOL it cracks me up, everyone complaint about the scripted moves... but they will not be able to deal with "random fast pace" move, period. I mean small numbers of people will be able to deal with it, the majority will quit. Case point, Ultima Hard Mode which is a mix of random and scripted - and it is one of the most challenging battle, with so many wipes, and nerd rages. If scripted moves is already hard enough because your reaction time is just not up there, random moves will wipe the entire alliance within seconds because people have no idea what to do. Unless you want the slower pace battle style a la FFXI.

[Jynx]

Ultima Hard Mode which is a mix of random and scripted - and it is one of the most challenging battle, with so many wipes, and nerd rages.

What about ultima hard mode was random? asides the mentioned beams...we might as well call Ifrit random as well as he doesn't always charge the same side of the arena...

[Tiggy]

Ultima hard mode random elements? Lol, what? Maybe where the beams point but the rest is pretty straight forward.

[zlotjko]

Ok am gonna tell you a little story with a little battle log. 2 Weeks ago my fc downed T9 for the first time. The log goes something like this:

We were all alive and well till the second behemut's claw.
Extra fire stacks killed the healer.
Tank survived the nuke due to a proper planned and timed cd with ofc help of the other healer.
We got the healer up, then she died again cause the fire stack didn't go away.
Then i, as a mnk died on divebombs.
Healer was ressed, i was ressed.
One bard died, i died again, healer died again.
The poor sch who did everything properly was running out of mana even thou the second bard was playing the mana song as much as he could.
I was ressed again with double weakness (and the healer too) to use the lb. Bard was ressed. Then the blm died. Healer died again. Other bard died.
Last 4-5% of boss hp the team was with 1 tank (pld), 1 healer (sch), 1 dps with double weakness (le me, a mnk), 1 bard with 1 weakness and a smn.
My weakness passed on 2% on the bosses hp.
Sch didn't have mana for ress and was poping a second pot for mana just to be able to heal the bosses autoattacks and was willing to sacrifice a lala for more dps crits before the next behe's claw. On 30k hp on the boss, shouts were started to go out of control ("Kill it!!!Kill it!!!!).
10-15 sec later (maybe was more, seemed like eternity at that moment), boss was killed, and the shouts of joy (for some, through tears) could be heard on ts.

And you want to take that from us?

ps. we have a recording of that kill on youtube, messy as 3 hells

[Colt47]

Well, the only stop gap I can think of for now to mend the community would be to increase the new member benefits to something actually worth the time investment those people are going to have to put in. If we use Expert roulette as a base, the reward would probably have to be around 13500 gil, 200 soldiery, a lot of myth, and probably a bonus item or pet.

[DishSoap]

Worth the read.

[Dashuto]

"No new players allowed" is the system

"Please link gear to join"
"Please link proof of previous win"
"If new player message, reform"

And then you'll say "but just make your own party!"
And then the instant wipe mechanics have you messing around for 3 hours because 1-2 people can't clear it. Then you break apart
So you make another party and the same things happens.
And another and the same thing happens.
And you know the fight so well you dont screw up at all, and you try to join a team that you can tell knows how to clear it.

But they want you to prove you've already won!!!



Stop saying there is nothing wrong with this system.
It is absolutely awful.
They put in the myth reward to encourage people to help newbs and its done nothing but been used as a weapon against newbs. Because apparently being a sociopath is hip in 14.

[Zyrusticae]

At this point I have to point out some parts of the OP that you seem to have glossed over or otherwise ignored:

http://ffxiv-fan.com/endcon225

First of all, a word regarding perspective

This blog post is not written from the perspective of what I think about the game based on which contents I can or cannot clear. It is primarily written from the standpoint of "how can we prevent players from leaving FFXIV, or to gain more new players?"

You often hear comments from people saying they personally feel the game is fun or not fun. My goal here is to explore how we can maximize the number of people who thinks the game is fun.

After all, the less people we have subscribed to an MMORPG, the less money there is to go towards future development costs, the game will begin to die out and then it's Game Over.

So, from the perspective of how we can keep people entertained and playing, the following is my own opinion on the current state of end-game contents.

Once again, this is not a post about making arguments like "well I think the game is fun because I can clear the contents" or "you just don't think it's fun because you can't clear the contents" .

To make such an argument is like having someone say to you "I have practiced, reviewed and studied hard to learn English and now I can read and write English at the top-university level and have no problems with daily English conversations so it's fun for me. A ton of people in the world also speak English, so if you work hard at it you can be just like us too!" (You'd think "what a snob!")

I do not intend to write about the end-game contents from such a one-sided standpoint.

Also, for those of you who think the current state of FFXIV is awesome, reading this might feel like a bit of a downer, so maybe you should not read any further if you're happy with things the way they are now.

Let's take a look at the first Coil as an example:

In Turn 1, you no longer need to feed the slimes to Caduceus, so that's a huge easing of difficulty.

In Turn 2, Allagan Rot is (still) the faster method. However, anyone who cannot properly handle the mechanic will still die and possibly wipe the party. The mechanics has been eased to the point where even if one or two people mess up you may still be able to clear it. Nevertheless, the enrage method remains the mainstream strategy.

Turn 4 has been unquestionably eased.

In Turn 5, if you cannot deal with the mechanics of divebombs, twister, etc., you will not be able to win no matter what your character or equipment level is, with or without Echo. In fact, if your DPS is too high, you will actually run into trouble with Conflag/Fire Balls.

So despite the first Coil being nerfed to cater to the supposedly mainstream crowd, the "if you cannot deal with the mechanics, then you can't win" principle remains unchanged.

In T5, there may be situations where you can recover from a poorly handled mechanic. But if you were to ask someone whether you can still win if the tanks died to a divebomb, the answer will always be "no".

Nevertheless, there are probably people out there who thinks it's not that bad and that it's easier to get people carried through.

What about the Second Coil then? Now that everyone has more HP, more DPS, more healing power... do you have any chance of winning without handling all mechanics perfectly?

Personally, I believe this "mechanics-driven battle system" that makes character level, item level, and Echo all feel more or less irrelevant is what's going to drive many players away.

In the future, even when the contents get nerfed, they don't actually get "eased". You will still have your Allagan Rot mistakes and your Voice/Shriek mistakes. For those players who dislike dealing with such mechanics, the contents will become no less annoying and no more entertaining even after a nerf.

I noticed this myself for the first time when I easily cleared T6 on my Scholar, despite White Mage being my main job.
I have only limited experience with my Scholar, and only cleared T5 with it a couple of times. Suddenly I'm clearing the Second Coil with it easily.

And this is precisely because the battle system is tuned to be heavily driven by mechanics. The fights are designed so that you can probably clear it as long as you have a basic understanding of your role and know the mechanics of the fight. Experience and gear only comes after that.

In a mechanics-driven battle system, an understanding of the mechanics makes the fight easier, not higher character or item levels.

Your character or item level is nothing but a measurement of the "minimum requirement" necessary for clearing the content.

That's why many end-game fights in this game - including Coil - can be cleared quickly if everyone fully understands and can respond to the mechanics. On the other hand, if you cannot adequately respond to the mechanics, then you will never be able to clear those contents.

It doesn't matter if they raise the level cap or increase the ilvl of your gear, if you cannot address the mechanics, then you cannot hope to clear the Second Coil.

If the development team changes the instant-death mechanics of these fights when the time comes to nerf the Second Coil, it will only serve as proof of how unbalanced the battle design currently is.

(emphasis mine)

It's worth noting that Square Enix can be wrong about their ideas of how many people should be able to clear certain content. Making it difficult for "mainstream" players to simply find groups to do initial clears and making it literally impossible for the majority casual playerbase to complete the content AT ALL is not good for business.

Remember, this isn't about ME, PERSONALLY being unable to get clears - though that certainly doesn't help my impressions of the system as it stands. The original Japanese poster himself has already cleared the content. This is about the long-term health of the game and how the current system may be self-defeating.

Anyway, the OP did a very admirable job of touching on all of this in the one post, so I won't keep reiterating their points here. Just try not to approach it from the perspective of "oh, they just want to clear it more easily!" and instead look at it from the perspective of the long-term health of the game and the difficulty for new players of getting into the endgame.

[Edli]

After so many pages I'm still struggling to understand what the solution to this "problem" would be. Complaining about mechanics? Every game has mechanics. Always did since the era of arcades. You would play a level over and over again until you became familiar with enemy positions, the tactics of the boss, the layout of the maps. Eventually you became good at the game and beat it. That's what a game is.

I've played on raids with no mechanics on old MMOs and it was so boring. I would just park my healer in a corner and click on names to heal. I would park my DPS on the feet of some giant boss and go 123, 123 for 10 min. Is this OP's answer to the "problem"?