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

[AllaganStop]

So I just took a look at the fights on youtube, got really annoyed of what I saw, and decided I would not go there until the nerf, because it was not worth banging my head on it.

I had nothing to gain back then, and now I have nothing to gain from T9 besides the story, which I could eventually watch on youtube if I really wanted to go down that way. Hence why it's "wasting my time", rather than "taking too much time". No matter how hard I try, I can't feel proud to beat a content I've mastered and which became piece of cake (for me, don't make me say anything else) right after. I'll eventually feel relieved for a few days, before being bored and never set feet inside ever again.

So you're just bad. Got it.

[Dyvid]

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?

[ErnestoGiovanni]

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.

I like the concept of people being able to have more bodies to it and have a better chance of win. A brand new FC experiencing titan HM should be able to make a 6-12 man group and try it, 4 elite people should be able to try some harder content too, but not be restricted to only 4! The mechanics will probably still wipe a 12 man group as you see people in their first time will die before heart phase hopefully leaving enough dps alive to kill it or allow more people to see what happens after that. It doesn't mean it should be lol 24 people on a little platform super pushing titan into final phase in 4 minutes.

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. I find it appalling that you can't even try to learn a fight as a new person because if you die once every AOE after will kill you, and then the group won't have enough dps to beat the enrage timer or heals over damage or someone to pick up adds. Look at Titan EX people die in first 2 phases all the time, and the gaols will cause a wipe since there isn't dps and it will kill 1 healer and try solo healing through Tumults as someone who isn't super over geared. Even if you are over geared if 1 or 2 other people of the same role die it will still be a 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.

It took me a month of every day sitting for 2 hours and bashing my head into Titan EX, I could live well into final phase on my first tries but i would need 7 others to do their job and live too if one person died we wiped, and not by choice. This has nothing to do with individual skill, join an EX primal fight now and you will see some awesome new people who learn the fight so fast and you will see 2 people who aren't learning as fast and they will die before the hardest phase but that causes a wipe, every time. I did a Garuda ex to help some new people if the other healer would die, sure i can solo heal it, but if 1 tank wasn't 100% on the ball we'd wipe because of spiny mechanic. This is even with 25% echo maybe 2-4 people would live but then the dps checks would mean we would wipe.

The system as it is now means 6/8 people need to be hardcore and one needs to be a tank and one a healer with amazing gear just to help 2 friends.

[AllaganStop]

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?

While gear doesn't directly help versus mechanics, it does indirectly by enabling you to push phases or survive a few things because of the HP increase you natural get. It's not meaningless, just not as immediately influential as some people would like. I think being able to push a phase is enough to consider better gear as 'meaningful'. Skipping means you not only don't have to deal with the next up coming or entire set of mechanics and saves valuable time when there is a hard enrage.

[Pibz]

It's not so much about nerfing content but more about offering a new end game challenge build around testing players' ability to play their jobs well as opposed to dodging one shot kill mechanisms.

It could be about content that need tanks to know how to put up the best hate best damage mitigation while generating high snap aggro.

It could be about content that need healers to clear debuffs fast. Or DPS using their utility skills to disrupt enemy moves or debuff the boss.

Just do away with the irrecoverable one hit kill.

LOL
You people..
So dodging things that will kill you, while actually performing your job isn't more of a test of your skill than just spamming rotation? mmmkay.

"It could be about content that need tanks to know how to put up the best hate best damage mitigation while generating high snap aggro." - This is in the encounters.
"It could be about content that need healers to clear debuffs fast. " So is this. Actually both of this are mechanics of T7 for example.

This whole thread (maybe not the actual OP, but the majority of what people are writing here),whether you want to admit it or not, could be summed up to one thing:
TLDR; Dodging is too hard, please nerf.
Just straight up say it.

[Pibz]

You're playing on hard mode, you deserve the cool stuff first, that's fine, please realize there are players that never play "any" games on hard, they play on easy, they enjoy playing games, and it's challenging enough for them. They want to relax, not watch YouTube videos, practice and get harassed by you hardcore players, who simply don't understand their difficulties, coming from a non-gamer background. And we need these people to support the game/developers so FF can continue to flourish.

Here we go, i knew this thread would derail into this nonsense "There's not enough easy content QQ".

Here's what players who want to play on easy have:
All 10 LVL 50 dungeons
2 Main scenarios
4 HM primals + Ultima(ok lets say 3 if we assume titan as "medium")
Treasure maps and daily quests
Atma/Novus
CT
Coil T1-T4(don't even try to say it isn't easy, with echo its almost pure tank and spank in all of them)
So let's see we have a total of 20-21 encounters + a variety of other systems

Oh, and as clarification, by easy i mean as long as you have the right gear you can just go in without any previous(or very very little) knowledge.

I'd call EX primals maybe medium difficulty content, not really but let's not get into that.
So, people who want some kind of challenge get 4 bosses, and you're saying that this is too much?...

okay you got me, I confess

Instead of cheesy response please answer this point:
"So dodging things that will kill you, while actually performing your job isn't more of a test of your skill than just spamming rotation? mmmkay."

Edit* just found this while reading through the thread

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

You're commenting on stuff you've never even attempted, yet discard them as silly easy..
Oh and that "i could do it, i just don't want to" do you realize how much of a cliche you are?

[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.

[zPanda]

Agree with a lot of points in this post - it was a good read. Also, I laugh whenever i hear people use the word "skill" to refer to this game. This game is not about "skill" - it's about memorization and repetition , let's be real. The "hardcore" pass content earlier because they have 8 people who can dedicate a set time for a static party - the vast majority of the population doesn't fall into this category. Whenever I was able to beat a turn in coil or a ex-primal , it never felt like I increased in "skill". It simply felt like I had repeated the content enough to finally remember all the mechanics. If I took a random group of 8 people considered "mainstream" with the correct distribution of jobs - told them they would not have to worry about work/school/family/etc. for 2 weeks - and for 2 weeks they would dedicate 10 hours a day to clearing ScoB and nothing else, they would clear it.

Compare this to some other gaming genres that actually require real skill. A few come to mind for me - Fighting, RTS, FPS, Rhythm/Music. What you'll notice in this other gaming genres is that someone who is already skillful at one specific game in the genre can quickly pick up on another game in that same category. People who are pros at Street Fighter can very quickly pick up on another game like MvC or BlazBlue/GG - the skills carry over. People who were pro at Warcraft could quickly pick up on Starcraft - the skills carry over. People who are pros at Counterstrike could quickly pick up on Battlefront - the skills carry over. People who are pros at Beatmania could quicly pick up on Pop-n-music/etc. - the skills carry over. The rules and "mechanics" to these games to these games are actually quite rudimentary - you can very quickly learn how to do all the moves for a character in a fighting game, for example. It doesn't in any way make you "skilled" however.

Another good comparison is sports. Take basketball for example - the rules are pretty simple. However, only people with real skill ever make it to the highest levels of college and pro. While it obviously takes practice, even practice and repetition doesn't guarantee someone has the actual skill to make it to the top levels. Someone could practice basketball daily from a young age - doesn't mean they'll make it to the NBA, you gotta be born with the skills.

Take music as another example - you could have practiced guitar vigorously daily from a young age - doesn't mean you're gonna be the next Clapton either. Some people are born with inherent musical talent/skills.

Now look at FFXIV. So you finally beat Titan-EX ... did you gain any "skills" from doing this that apply to any other game, or even to any other fight in FFXIV itself? No, you just repeated it until you memorized the order of the patterns. So you finally beat Turn 5 - you never die to divebomb/twisters anymore! - good job!... did you gain any "skills" from doing this that apply to any other game, or even to any other fight in FFXIV itself?

Also, how many people (including the so called "hard-core") - used an external app (e.g. Twintania tracker) to beat T5 for the first time? Again - this is "skill" ?

[Pibz]

You're horribly missing his point here. People enjoy the story. Coil has a story. People should enjoy Coil. Sad thing is, they don't. For various reasons, one of them being they may get instant-killed at every step they attempt.

As i said earlier in this thread, i think they should indeed make a easier version of coil(and in turn give us a harder version of ct too) for those only interested in lore.

First, you don't need a perfect rotation to succeed in coil. You need a basic damage output (basic here is adaptable to the fight, of course it isn't spamming 1-2-3-repeat) and you're good.
Second, the actual choregraphy for each fight does let you perform a high enough dps to do anything you'd want to achieve so hmmm, knowing said dance isn't really more a test of skill then spamming combos. It is indeed harder, but only requires more memory, not more skill.
Lastly, since when having a fight "not relying ONLY on mechanics" is a synonym of "having a dummy fight" ? Stop thinking "black or white". Maybe end game content could just stop spamming one shot mechanics every time and just focus on a few of them ?

1- You probably never did the fights undergeared or with just barely enough gear so you never experienced the difference between barely making the top dps you can and not doing it. This was the reason why, when it was released, some people had more trouble passing the dps checks in T4 than others for example(or in any fight that has dps checks really).

2- LOL so moving away from the boss interrupting your cast or simply putting you out of range or simply busying you with just doing something else doesn't influece dps? mmkay then

3 - Fights don't rely only on mechanics, gear matters and so does individual skill i'm tired of repeating this.

And lastly STOP talking about encounters you haven't even tried ffs.

snip

Sigh
Answer me this, why do people who have experience in other MMOs and other games, find mechanics like landslide trivial(from the first few times, not after hours upon hours) more often than those that don't have experience?
Please go ahead and twist logic to evade the definition of skill.
Also, since when is being able to execute a set of actions (be they patterned or not) not a skill?

So you finally beat Turn 5 - you never die to divebomb/twisters anymore! - good job!... did you gain any "skills" from doing this that apply to any other game, or even to any other fight in FFXIV itself?

Yes, you've learned how to dodge crap, congrats.
Oh, and if you did it while there was no echo well let's see some examples:
As a healer you might have learned how to time your shield so that it is applied right before a big attack.
As a tank you might've learned how to properly set up a cooldown rotation.
As a dps you might've learned to save your cooldowns for when a burst is really needed.
This is just off the top of my head, sure some might've had those skills before, but then it'd have been easier for them too.

[zPanda]

As a healer you might have learned how to time your shield so that it is applied right before a big attack.
As a tank you might've learned how to properly set up a cooldown rotation.
As a dps you might've learned to save your cooldowns for when a burst is really needed.
This is just off the top of my head, sure you might've had those skills before, but you might've learned them too.

People can and have used macros and apps to assist with all this stuff. MMORPG often rely on mechanics rather than skill which is why it's possible to implement and use these types of "assists". Also you basically prove my point lol. How do you know *when* to those big attacks are coming or when a burst is needed? - it's because you've repeated a fight enough to know the patterns.

It would be really interesting to get one group of 8 "hardcore" players, and another group of 8 "mainstream" players, and when 2.3 is released, have a real-time stream of the 2 parties in Ramuh-EX practicing to defeat it with no external apps or voice-chat. I would bet the amount of time required for each party to defeat it would be close to the same.

There's nothing like "twintania tracker" or ffxiv-app that will help increase your "skill" in those other game genres I mentioned previously that require real skill.