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

[Zarzak]

While a lot of this post is solid and makes sense one core point he keeps harping on I will disagree with.

Yoshi-P has said that “making the fights scripted is so that anyone can clear it once they have the patterns memorized”, and designed the fights using this philosophy. But because of the “mechanics-driven” problem mentioned earlier, the fights are never really eased/nerfed and remain only beatable by those who can deal with the mechanics.

We can train pigeons to act as guidance systems for bomber planes, We can memorize the route to take through an entire city to get from A to B, we can memorize thousands on thousands of random facts/words/etc/etc/etc.

EVERYONE can memorize the mechanics. Whether they do or not is entirely up to them.


I still agree having EVERY event mechanic driven is a mistake (should be a mix of mechanic driven, brute force, mix, gimmick [considering mechanics and gimmicks different things.. IMO a gimmick is something semi amusing/supposed to be such as if you summoned a giant mongoose to attack Caduceus], etc)


But I can't agree that, with the exception of diagnostically mentally disabled individuals, there is a person playing who can't manage "if a red circle appears under you... move out of it"



Also IMO the "have as many or as few as you want!" is a really unbalanceable system. If they are tuned to 24 people sure skilled players can do them with 20. but suggesting that 8 amazing players should be able to do what 24 average players can just tells me the event isn't tuned right. (dps check for example to keep adds from piling up in an event like Turn 4... that would be saying 1 amazing player is doing 3x the dps of an average player.. say average these days is 200.. they are doing 600?)

Having larger raids AND more raids would alleviate the problem though. Currently it is not realistic to have a bench. Why? Because a bench would need at minimum someone for every role to be able to fill in no matter who misses (so a melee dps, caster dps, bard, healer, and tank)... In the current raid size that's over half a raid sitting on their hands keeping themselves from getting lockouts in case they are needed. Then with the number of raids. With only 4 events we can't realistically cycle the bench in so everyone gets some raid time for the week. The total raid time start to finish is only an hour. "Ok you get 1 event this week!" is not going to fly with anyone who WANTS to raid"

Having 24 man raids would allow a couple things.

1. a healthy bench (4-5 players)
2. allow particularly skilled groups to still run even if they have 1-2 people miss

Having MORE raids would allow a couple more.

1. allow a healthy bench via allowing you to realistically cycle in your bench to get raid time

- Doing a quick search/going from experience this is what current MMOs have compared to FFXIV

Traditional MMOS (ya know.. the ones where you actually group with people to play the game)

---FFXI can't find a list of the current SoA raids. But if it's anything like it used to be then there are several hours worth of relevant content to raid (used to be SO MUCH MORE but I hear they basically reset gear and made the old stuff irrelevant)

---EQ: VoA expansion top tier had 8 raids (total length of all 8 combined.. ~4 hours) but it was still relevant to farm at least the tier before for months after the top tier was cleared.. which is another 3 raids adding an additional hour or so of content

the big "modern" MMOS

---Rift: Tier 2 (couldn't find info on new tier offhand and quit b4 it released) had 8 raids in 20 man and 4 in 10 man. Again guilds still often went and hit up previous tier for an hour or so a week to fill in slots/new members/etc.

---WoW Top tier has 14 raids. Far as I know there are also 2 tiers of difficulty (normal/heroic) and guilds run both? (not sure on that)

2. let you raid multiple nights even during farm so you can do things like have 2 scholars on roster.. One that can't raid every Tuesday/Thurs and one that can raid every night the other can't


Simply put having nothing available but 8 man raids is doing nothing but hurting the raiding environment. Sure do what Rift/WoW did and provide some small scale raids (8 mans) but give us a REAL CT (8-9 bosses tuned for a premade raid like we were expecting) and release alongside the 8 man coil.