[Feedback] We need a solution to help players improve... Simple Idea.

[myahele]

I think the rankings in the end of every PvP game is a nice start and easy to implement into DF dungeons/ trials (hopefully)

It shows alot of info like total damage given/received. As well as kill rate and healing given/received.

Although, the mentor system should probably help somewhat. As well as the beginner's hall.

[OmegaStrongtan]

FF14s difficulty spike is ridiculous.
You can get up to level 60 without any trouble regardless how wrong/bad you play. No clue how your jobs works? no problem, heck some guy did not even know about job gems and never had any problem in any instance (I met him in HW content). Everything is so undertuned you just don't have to try hard, you don't have any need to improve, you don't have any need to use everything your class has to offer and many players won't find the need to improve since everything can be done regardless... and then suddenly they are here, fully geared in eso gear and wonder why the can't beat Thordan EX or even Faust (even on normal... yes that happens)

We need a middle ground! And motivate players to improve so they can beat said middle ground difficulty instances.

[Phoenicia]

FF14s difficulty spike is ridiculous.
...
We need a middle ground! And motivate players to improve so they can beat said middle ground difficulty instances.

While you're right as to why people are bad. SE can't really back track and up-tune that content sadly. The best we can hope for is in upcoming dungeons and through the leveling experience in 4.0, SE raises the line up a bit. Up enough that 4 average players can clear, a "good" player can carry and make up for a below average one, but an average party can't carry a below average player. Then you know the line is set "just right".

Actually The Vault was a good instance. I wish more were that "difficulty".

[OmegaStrongtan]

Actually The Vault was a good instance. I wish more were that "difficulty".

Why not have some special 'Ex' dungeon to act as gate for the new primal? For Thordan it would have been the Vault EX. Just up the numbers, reduce trash and add new mechanics to Bosses and big adds like ponies and Knights. Bonus points if said mechanics give you a clue about what awaits you in Thordan EX.
If they feel super generous the can even add ilvl 195 versions of Vault gear on weekly lockout so you are encouraged to come back.
BÄM fun content with 'little' work from Dev side.

[Azazua_azura]

thing is i do always strive to improve, i just don't use numbers. I try use my skills, skillfully. Lancer has a debuff of slow, i try to plant it on all the mobs at start. which helps tank get hit less.
as a monk i tried to put both my dots on all mobs this helps mobs get base damage.

and pheo, how are you giving advice?? are you asking like "hey want some advice?" or are you just giving out the advice?

oit does matter cuz some ppl will think its rude to be force fed advice. Some people like to figure out stuff on their own.

for me i prefer to be asked if i want advice, i much more prefer open communication then any thing.


ya the NA community has no idea what "teamwork" means -_-;;

1) debuff mobs (damage is damage)

2) attack mob tank is focused on

why are ppl ragging on skill use throttling dmg doesn't always help a tank out. buffs have a long cool down stuff like feint does not.

also pheo, i can see why you are getting bad reactions your trying to force your mindset on others. Just ask if a person wants advice and leave it at that, it's rude to just give it.

but ya.. yyou guys need to get off this "solo dps" numbers game and start doing better to play as a group cuz my time in df in the NA community is met with so meny soloist who can't adapt and mindlessly just spam a rotation for numbers and it just make playing in NA community a hassle.

[Phoenicia]

Snip.

Fooling me into thinking there is "more content" by recycling older content? why not? SE proved to be actually good at this. Nice idea. (I'm not sarcastic btw).

But there is also this point, SE stopped gating newer content by older content. There was a time when you had to kill every ex primal in order to get to the new ones. Now Thordan Ex needs you to just clear the story and spend more than 5 weeks gearing a certain job.... Or 3 weeks + some no-longer-on-a-lockout Alexander Normal pieces.

I understand that it's business and that there is a bar SE needs to keep relatively low to keep the average Joe interested in their game. But that bar has to be near a middle ground so the Above-average Joe stays interested. On my server, people I NEVER expected to stop playing dropped out of the radar after clearing A4S. The top FCs stopped raiding after they got their weapons... and their alt weapons... Now they're left with nothing to do.

thing is i do always strive to improve, i just don't use numbers. I try use my skills, skillfully. Lancer has a debuff of slow, i try to plant it on all the mobs at start. which helps tank get hit less.
as a monk i tried to put both my dots on all mobs this helps mobs get base damage.

and pheo, how are you giving advice?? are you asking like "hey want some advice?" or are you just giving out the advice?

oit does matter cuz some ppl will think its rude to be force fed advice. Some people like to figure out stuff on their own.

for me i prefer to be asked if i want advice, i much more prefer open communication then any thing.

Well, usually, I subtly do it. Sometimes, I'm more "direct". In the scenarios in my earlier posts, I'll quote:

The BLM case, "Hey <name>, have you tried using Fire instead of Fire 2 when fighting 2 targets? you last longer in Astral Fire, casts 5 fire 1s instead of 3 fire 2s, and you also trigger Firestarter this way. Will probably increase your overall encounter DPS." Then I got the "You don't tell me how to live my live, you're not my real dad!" reply.

In the tank case: "Nice aggro and CD usage mate. But the mobs spin a little bit more than necessary making the melee miss positionals which causes us to lose some DPS." (It was a 2 melee party btw, me as MNK and a DRG). "I have to dodge AoE, you know?" said the tank. I said: "Well, do you mind stepping back as soon as the AoE marker disappears and before the animation ends, you avoid the damage but the mobs and boss don't move." Then the "what do you know? You're not the tank!" reply.

In the first case I was providing advice without being rude. In the latter I gave compliments of what he's doing right before pointing out what was not done right and how it could be fixed. In neither case did I belittle or "harass" the 'target'.

Most times, I just ask "Would you like some advice to improve so and so?" or something among those lines. With friends and acquaintances, I get positive reactions, but that is not the general populace reactions.

Thing about not using numbers to improve your skills, how do you know you're doing better then? I do not claim you're not good. You probably are. Since you "care enough", you should know what you're doing. But how do you measure how well you improved? I'm interested for personal gain as well. ^^

Yes, at lower levels you can get away with applying the slow on everything. I do not mean to criticize you at all. On the contrary, I want to be objective with you and think about this from both perspectives, yours as a DPS, the tank and healer's perspectives. If I'm looking at this wrong, let me know so I can also improve on myself.

So let's think about this together, on 4 targets that 320 TP you just unloaded on "lower damage" when your main role is doing damage. It is nice that you want the tank to take less damage by slowing the mobs, but the tank can do just the same by just using the short cooldown (or no CD in the last case) Rampart/Shadowskin/Inner beast. You can add 120 more TP total to apply a whole lot more damage in the same amount of GCDs (4) which causes the mobs to die faster (probably within the duration of Rampart) and have the tank take less damage overall. It's not complex math either, just basic 160 potency 4 times on 4 targets (totalling 2,560 potency) is better than 120 once on per targets (totalling 480). Also mobs dying in 20 seconds instead of 30. Also when the tank uses Rampart, he gets an instant 20% less damage over 20 seconds. Instead of 1 target doing 20% less damage (by being slower) while the 3 others still doing full damage, then 2.5s later, the next one, then 2.5s later you have 3 mobs doing less, then 2.5s later you have 4 mobs doing less damage. Only to find out that 10 seconds later the first mob is doing full damage again. And due to diminishing returns on debuffs, reapplying the slow would have less benefits per TP spent.

All the while, being with an arcanist based job at 50, Sacred Soil does a flat instant AoE damage reduction of 10%, and Shadowflare is a 250 potency AoE DoT that also slows all targets by 5% while spending 1 cast affective unlimited number of mobs as long as they are in the circle. Yes it's not 20%, but considering the resource and time cost vs the DPS gain/loss? It is "better optimized" to leave the AoE slow to the SMN/SCH and focus on Heavy Thrust > Ring of Thorns x1 > Dragonfire Dive > Doomspike spam.

Not to mention as I said earlier, it falls mainly on the tank to reduce the damage they take. Helping the others do their job is great and all! Yes, it is also team play and good thinking, but only if it's not detrimental to your performance. Remember the SMN casting Physic vs SCH casting DoTs example in my first post?

[Kolaina]

thing is i do always strive to improve, i just don't use numbers. I try use my skills, skillfully. Lancer has a debuff of slow, i try to plant it on all the mobs at start. which helps tank get hit less.

killing the mobs faster also helps the tank get hit less. trust me, i wish the dps would just finish off those low hp mobs in big pulls so i have less strain when healing the tank. no amount of slow is helping me keep that tank up.
what are you doing with feint anyways? hit every mob, then cycle through the mobs again with feint making sure it doesnt fall off while your dps partner pushes numbers making up for the ones youre lacking? thats not team play, thats dumping your load on another

[zetolious]

No matter what is added in the game to help people improve things will probably more or less be the same. There just is not enough challenging content in game to warrant people to want to improve. It seems like it will always be just the 2 extremes really easy content then hard content. There needs to be more content out of raids that is challenging from 4 players dungeons to maybe even solo content. In my opinion allot of people just do not want to improve be it they may not like raiding or there just isn't anything challenging in the content they like to do. I mean if you like to do 4 man content there should be a harder version of the dungeons for people to do but again that is not a reality at the moment.

The new WoW xpac actually has a really cool idea I would love to see in FFXIV with 4 man content. Basically you get a crystal that allows you to enter a challenge mode dungeon it has a time limit to it and mobs hit hard have more health ect. The cool part is if you complete the dungeon within the time limit your crystal levels up then when you go back into the challenge mode things are a little bit harder and as you complete the challenge modes within the time limit the crystal keep leveling up and the dungeons keep getting harder and even may get special modifiers. The beauty of the system is it will only get the the difficulty you can handle and wont get harder until you well get better. Also as the dungeons get harder the loot gets better and even if you don't beat the timer you still get loot. I really think that would be an amazing system for FFXIV and give people challenge they are looking for and maybe just maybe they will have fun too.

Also I wish each job had it own forums so people could just go the forum of the job they are playing and everything relating to that job will be there instead of all the jobs of the same proficiency just being jammed into the same place. I also think FFXIV would benefit greatly if we had a icy-viens.com type of website that had job specific guides and theorycrafting all in one website so people didn't have to dig through tons of different sites trying to find which one was the most up to date for the job they are playing and it would just be waaay more in depth then what we have available currently. There is allot that can be done but SE has to give us something to strive for then its up to the community to take it up from there and move forward. Hopefully my opinions made some sense at the very least I am not always the best when it comes for me to convey ideas/opinions.

[Twilite]

DPS is only part of the problem..they are just easier for you all to pick on.

[Solarra]

I think this is a poor idea... I'm talking about the leaderboards, rankings and rewards. This is a cooperative game, not a competitive game. If you start injecting more competition into the game, people will cease cooperating, and start playing the blame game when their numbers are somehow held back by others...

...team members who compete with each other, do not cooperate effectively.

I agree with you 100%
I think the notable difference in the performance of JP groups compared to EU/NA at endgame reflects this. NA and to a lesser extent, EU culture promotes individuality and competition. Endgame requires cooperation; it's not just about dps. People who only care about the numbers are not always team players.

As to us 'needing' a solution to help players improve. I think the problem has been blown out of all proportion. In DF you get a random selection of players, some will perform better than others for various reasons. That isn't a problem, it's normal.

I'm all for giving players tools to improve their own performance, but having seen how meters are abused in WoW and having been in raid groups where nobody wants to do the mechanics because, 'Muh dps!' I'm sceptical that it will bring about an improvement in the general standard of play.
I'm also completely opposed to anything that could be used to publicly shame and belittle others.