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

[Kuwagami]

If fights were to be legitimately hard in the sense that the abilities used by the monster would be truly hard to deal with, your proposal would make for exponentially harder fights. Your little bit there about "less skilled groups hoping to have an easier time" is really wishful thinking.

I'm having a hard time understanding how you cannot see that having a fixed rotation is one of the reasons why the fights in this game are so easy. Everything is predictable. If you know how to react, you don't need to memorize. If you suck at reacting, you can memorize.

If you suck at both, perhaps play a turn based game instead.

As he progression in FFxiv is linear, hard hitting/hard to deal with "cuz randomness included" fights would not create such an exponential increase. It would if stats were the same than back in solo FF, when your damage/HP skyrocket after some stat tiers. In FFxiv it would give fight with gradual increase in difficulty. As opposed to the spikey difficulty increase we have now.

I'd say that current difficulty increase is big step, slow decreasing exponential, back to standard (in Coil). You get ravaged by insta kills, you learn them, they never hit anymore.
If we are being honest, when we master dives and twisters and play with 7 consistent players, T5 is relatively easy : damage spike every 30 seconds, a few adds to deal with and it's done.

Gradual increase in difficulty may not work on every fight (it would not work at all in T5 considering twintania has only 1 attack besides her mechanics), but you could save the spike for the last boss (T5, T9, T13 ?) while proposing a "close to linear" increase in difficulty. The slope can be adapted to fit the challenge too.


As for the fixed rotation, they are only an excuse to justify the overuse of instant kill mechanics. Of course randomized pattern would be disastrous in a fight where 90% of the attacks kill you on the spot. But if it was only 10% of these attacks ? You'd get a "randomisable" fight. And not necessarily easier (you acknowledged it yourself)

So first off I think that most people have some misunderstanding of how the bosses in coil work they're all basically the same as players and they have CD's on all their skills the reason that the fights happen the same way all the time is that the AI uses every skill as soon as the CD is up. The reason that twin can be hard if you push at the wrong time is that as soon as it hits an hp threshold the CD for it's new mechanics starts ticking and twin always uses whatever comes up first, like delaying fireballs cause it needs to plummet or use DS. It's not about it being mechanic > mechanic > mechanic > mechanic (in coil, titan is a different story) it's just an AI using whatever is available. Btw no combination of atk's in this game can't be overcome by understanding the fight and knowing what's actually going on, though some of them can be quite incontinent, so the player base learned what these things were and then how to force the easiest outcome.

When the timers are made so that every skill comes out in a precise order, that's called a rotation (hence the mechanic > mechanic > mechanic > mechanic ). T5 is a bit particular because all the mechanics are timer based and overwrite themselves, it the order DK stun > plummet > DS > whatever else. In T6 (for example), I have never seen mechanics overwriting others. Nor in T2 (except phase changes, but it seems normal right ?)