Things Getting Too Obnoxious

[Ayuhra]

Not all the bosses are nuts but some are. I haven't seen anything in FFXIV that compares to, say, Yogg-Saron, the Lich King, Hellscream or even Blackhand. I'm not saying I want FFXIV to be WoW, of course... WoW has good (sometimes excellent) gameplay backed by awful, awful, content (if any content). That's not at all what I want to see for FFXIV but Yoshi P says he draws inspiration from WoW. WoW's approach to encounter design is its best feature and currently its one remaining GOOD feature.

(No seriously don't make FFXIV a WoW clone that game is a sad, sad mess)

I admit some of this stems from selfishness. More dynamic bosses might mean more spectacle. WoW bosses have some great spectacle moments like falling through the floor on Blackhand or Yogg-Saron's Braincase or flying on Alysrazor... Even Madness of Deathwing was a spectacle though it was not a very good or interesting fight otherwise. If any franchise could knock it out of the park in terms of spectacle moments or being generally outrageous it's Final Fantasy. You know, the series that brought us, amongst other things, insanity like Lady Yunalesca, Kefka, and honestly others too numerous to list (Omega, Ultima, Yiazmat, Sephiroth...)

Primal battles can be intriguing but apparently we are moving away from them? Don't quote me on that

[Duelle]

I disagree a lot with the OP's notion that melee requiring positionals is a bad thing, it is part of what has attracted me to melee DPS in this game, it adds some complexity to rotations and some challenge on certain fights to max DPS. Without positionals all rotations would be mindnumbingly boring, in my opinion.

The thing is that for those of us who've played MMOs for a while, positionals are something that rogue classes get. It's sort of their thing since they rely on backstabs and the like. It could have been used as a mechanic to define a job's identity but instead they gave it to everyone that is melee DPS (NIN was the exception). This is something I had an issue with since beta, both as someone who likes classes being diverse and someone who normally stays away from rogue classes.

I hate simple rotations.

See, I'm the opposite. I'm a fan of simple design and gameplay. More because it's straighforward, since I've never cared for overly complicated gameplay.

This said, I do believe in the middle ground. Some jobs being complex to play, some jobs having simple gameplay. Tanks sort of have this diversity between PLD's straightforward design and DRK's semi-jumbled array of skills (including buttons that exist solely for the sake of having an extra button to push). DPS could use it as well, I think.

[SwarleyMcSwarls]

blah, blah, blah

Dude, if you don't like it just play a different game. It's honestly not that hard to learn if you put some time in. Plus, there's a sense of accomplishment for a job done well when it's not just handed to you. I legit wouldn't play this game if I could just press three buttons and not move and do 10k dps. There's no fun in that and no challenge. So challenge yourself to actually succeed in the systems in place or look for a game with different systems that are more up your alley.

[pandabearcat]

Huge rant incoming.

About gameplay

Not ashamed to say that I -do- want FF14 to become WoW. All WoW clones (really, EQ clones) should try to emulate WoW's extremely polished gameplay mechanics. Whether from the great macro system, to the extensive addon system, to the resource system, to the dynamic and proc based rotation, to trinkets and class sets that are not only gorgeous (like our AF2) but also completely redesign how you play your class every tier. Stat sticks are so terrible and that is all our gearing currently is...godawful. People say they want more variance in gearing, trinkets and enchants and gems (materia) are where its at...not grinding for 4 weeks for a slightly different offstat loadout, or slightly more accuracy.

WoW is a fantastic game, despite for some reason many people hating it. I chalk it up to playing the same game for 10+ years. Mechanicswise, not...like contentwise. Hilarious that the more I play FF14 the more I want to play WoW...and vice versa. If WoW became gorgeous like FF14...or FF14 made more interesting design choices...well...I'd be in heaven.

Trinkets...procs, cooldowns, enchants...I never knew how much I missed them. Playing FF14 for me is like eating a beautifully frosted, glazed, fresh fruited...cardboard box cake.

Weird though that you mention WoW as being content difficulty rather than rotational difficulty...I would actually like to say it is the opposite. The reason WoW's rotation is more difficult than ff14 is that...it isn't memorizing a long string of buttons. It has pruned down the large part of its button bloat but kept all of its complexity by adding procs, interesting resources, and above all, giving players something to decide. There is nothing to decide in ff14. A robot would play far, far better than a human would.

About content and grind...

WoW simply gives far more content however...if you think about it, in a typical WoW raid tier...

1. Most "casual" guilds will take 1-2 months to clear normal (now heroic). They will do mythic maybe.
2. Most hardcore guilds will clear normal (now heroic) in 1-2 weeks, and clear heroic (now mythic) in 2-4 months.
3. World first guilds will clear mythic in 1-2 weeks. Sometimes end bosses taking up to a month.
4. This is something like 8 (16) to 13 (26) bosses to deal with.

In FF14...

1. Most "casual" guilds clear normal (everything but Savage) in 1-2 weeks. Farm it...forever. Never complete savage or do savage at some point 1 month down the line.
2. Most "hardcore" guilds clear heroic (savage 1, or 2, or maybe 3) in 2 weeks. Farm forever.
3. World first guilds clear heroic (all of savage) in 1 week, 2-4 weeks for end boss.

You see the problem is that it is too quick to clear content, OR, on the other hand, it is impossible to gear to clear the content. There is a lot of grind here, rather than just getting on there and trying to progress bosses.

Some people maybe prefer the grind...me I sort of prefer only needing to play for raid nights and the grind being completely optional.

So far...being in a mostly casual guild, all it seems I do is farm every single goddamn week for alex tokens and eso...and not get anywhere. This is a very oppressive gameplay.

About melee and combos

I am still on the fence about positionals. On the one hand, they're sort of interesting. On the other, it forces melee to either

1. Suck at all melee oriented AoEs or
2. Not have to deal with any melee AoEs.

Which...I think removes one facet of gameplay that really should be there.

But the combo system sucks butt. Pressing 3 set in stone buttons is the same as pressing one button 3 times. Perhaps thats why I play SMN as my dps class.

About tanking

Tanking is...my least favorite in any game. I played Secret World too, server 1st raid kill, master nightmare mode jacket, etc etc. I tanked there too. Even the 111112 was fun, because of all the passives you could stack and all the weapon combos you could do...stats were interesting as well as impactful. I changed my kit around every single dungeon, maybe one dungeon you can't block, so I put everything into evade, maybe another needed more interrupts, so I put another in, etc etc. That was the challenge there, not the gameplay. FF14 has neither of the two.

No active mitigation, all tanks functionally identical aside from 1 or 2 cooldowns...it is a nightmare. I would highly suggest removing the bloat and putting tank survival in the hands of the tank...active mitigation, a slew of very powerful, all impactful cooldowns (make DA > DD baseline, remove goddamn foresight). A cooldown should be at least 20-50% reduction...make bosses hit much harder, but make tanks have more ways to keep themselves alive.

Healers should be in charge of the raid, and in charge of their mana. Tanks should be in charge of their own survival...right now tanks can do jack all about their survival 80% of the time...so they go to dps stance. Right now healers have 0 mana problems...so they just bomb heals.

About the feeling of power

Heavensward I will say did a GREAT job of making all jobs feel more powerful. Cool stances, awesome nukes.

But it is getting stale because every raid tier is the same. There will be no difference between Alex1-4 and Alex 9-12 if this doesn't change.

We need awesome trinket procs. We need set bonuses attached to AF2 so our gameplay is radically altered and our gameplay changes.

I'd like for AoE to feel awesome. I want to just mow down packs of things and feel fantastic doing so. Unnerf all caster AoEs to do full damage. Make melee AoE's no longer destroy their TP. You shouldn't have to decide whether to AoE or not...simply go ham and watch the numbers fly. I think most players would like buffs instead of nerfs, and feeling good instead of crying at their TP or mana. If adds dying too fast simply make them beefier.

[hallena]

Not ashamed to say that I -do- want FF14 to become WoW.

While i did read your whole post and agree/disagree with some one of it. At this point why don't you just play wow?
wow has more raid boss and raid difficulty setting but it also come at the price of having fuck all to do outside of raiding and getting one patch a year

[pandabearcat]

While i did read your whole post and agree/disagree with some one of it. At this point why don't you just play wow?
wow has more raid boss and raid difficulty setting but it also come at the price of having fuck all to do outside of raiding and getting one patch a year

Mostly ennui. I have played it too long.

I love the content in FF14. Just not the gameplay.

It may come across that I hate the game but I am just passionate about making it better. I have been a FF fan since I was a kid, and would love to see this game be more fun to play.

[Duelle]

But the combo system sucks butt. Pressing 3 set in stone buttons is the same as pressing one button 3 times. Perhaps thats why I play SMN as my dps class.

The combo system gives a sense of structure that most melee DPS in WoW lack. Despite the whole positional business, they are easy to get into because of the combo system. Not to mention it's a sort of legacy system from 1.0, again for the purpose of giving combat some structure.

No active mitigation, all tanks functionally identical aside from 1 or 2 cooldowns...it is a nightmare. I would highly suggest removing the bloat and putting tank survival in the hands of the tank...active mitigation, a slew of very powerful, all impactful cooldowns (make DA > DD baseline, remove goddamn foresight). A cooldown should be at least 20-50% reduction...make bosses hit much harder, but make tanks have more ways to keep themselves alive.

I'll be the first to say no to this. Active mitigation being copied on to every tank beyond Death Knights is what killed my desire to tank in WoW. I was a prot warrior up until WotLK and was pretty happy with how it played (I thought Vengeance was a bad idea so I didn't really tank much in Cata, and MoP as I said killed my desire to tank).

right now tanks can do jack all about their survival 80% of the time...so they go to dps stance. Right now healers have 0 mana problems...so they just bomb heals.

The minimal discrepancy in survivability in and out of tank stance is part of the problem. If DRK and WAR became much more likely to receive a crit to the face when not in tank stance you'd start seeing every DRK and WAR stay in tank stance (PLDs stance dancing is clunky, so by design the job is encouraged to stay in tank stance).

Of course, the developers are also to blame for part of this, since they seemed to want to encourage stance dancing, specially for WAR.

[hallena]

It may come across that I hate the game

It doesn't. But it seems like you would be willing to give up the whole one major patch every 3 months and replace it with a yearly one
As much as i would like more boss and set bonus. farming the same bosses for a year get old. no matter if its 4 or 12

[justinjarjar]

snip.

I find the combos to flow pretty well this sounds like the MK is >\< SF argument (they both flow of you know what you are doing). Wow I think the most dynamic (but lore wise terrible) fight was spine of death wing. The early WoD raid bosses where zZzzzztank and spanks. I guess coming from fighters I would enjoy more level of combos. Once again matters the player.

[IfritReborn]

Don't worry, change will come!

Blizzard is gearing up to remove homogenization from their game come Legion, making each spec play and feel different. If it works out, you can bet your bottom dollar Yoshi P will switch everything around just to copy and give each job an identity