FFXIV: The State Of Raiding

[Thayos]

I know this might be hard to believe, but Diadem is end game content and works the way you say it. People will get bored of that faster than raiding.

The Diadem was horribly implemented... probably the worst piece of battle-oriented content since anything in 1.x. It could have set the foundation for filling out the game's endgame scene, but instead it was just a huge zerg fest with no strategies or long-term objectives. It only "works" in that you don't need exactly eight people to enter it. Everything else about the Diadem sucks. It's like a giant, boring, empty dinner plate -- SE didn't even bother to put food on it.

I seriously thought the point of Diadem was to introduce a new type of endgame into FFXIV. Now, I honestly can't even speculate on exactly what SE was trying to accomplish with that content -- it's that directionless.

[Marcellus_Cassius]

Yet it was filled and gave people something to do. I stepped on it on release but looking back now that its gone I want it back.

[Marcellus_Cassius]

To me it was a good 2-3 hours of play every night, never saw it die down till the gear from it was outdated. It was good for us casuals as you'd put it, yes we need shit to do too.

Edit: I would like to see it retooled as something with FC involvement like sky/sea from xi

[Thayos]

As for players creating their own rules and approaches, that might have worked much better if there hadn't been one approach that was at least an order of magnitude more efficient than any of the others.

I was so hopeful that what SE meant was essentially, "We're going to give you some really cool stuff to do and leave it up to FCs, linkshells and statics to determine which objectives they'll complete and how to handle drops."

Nope. They really just tossed us into a giant room with a feeder bar.

Has the dev team even said anything recently about trying to salvage Diadem, or has it just kind of been left for dead? Would be a shame if they've abandoned it, because there's no reason why a repurposed Diadem would even need to be obsolete.

[Synestra]

Has the dev team even said anything recently about trying to salvage Diadem, or has it just kind of been left for dead?

They said Diadem will get major updates trought 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 so it seems they will take it serious thistime, that many updates seems to indicate total overhaul and that sounds promising.

[Velhart]

They said Diadem will get major updates trought 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 so it seems they will take it serious thistime, that many updates seems to indicate total overhaul and that sounds promising.

I won't doubt that SE will utilize Diadem somehow for the new relic quest.

[CookieMonsta]

I also had a thought since the Gordias/Eso gear days. Part of the reason they have so much issue reconciling Raid 240 gear and Alternative 240 gear is their unwillingness to play with Secondaries (never mind the low impact of secondaries). For example, I feel like their gear stat allocation is done pretty much by a random generator with some minor human tweaking around a certain amount of end-values. The result is if you equip a full set of something (Lore, Midan Savage, Midan Normal etc etc) your stats are actually perfectly balanced and tuned with minor variation in the overall number between sets, in fact the balance is so good on DRG you can damn near predict what the A8S accuracy cap will be because a full Lore set gives exactly 700.

With their current system, I can forsee more creative gearing processes where you can ensure the Raid pieces have the best secondaries vs the Tome pieces, even in a full set so the realistic performance gap is bigger than 5%. Ensure that ideal builds are only possible with almost full raid drops. Because as it stands now, a toon with full tome gear actually comes within 2% of ideal BiS.

e.g. Full Tome casual http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/UAC0
2645 stat weight

BiS requiring clearing ridiculous content http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/UABZ
2681 stat weight

[Ibi]

Midas kind of fixing things, but ultimately it should be how 2nd Coil was set up that should be the way to go. Don't have to agree with me, but that is when raiding was set up at it's best, at least the structure, not the execution (not including better items in Savage).

I agree with the basic principle and definitely with the thought that SCoB is the best actual implementation of raiding FFXIV has had so far. I know you and I would disagree on some of the details, but that's just because we have differing philosophies on some things.

The question is, where do we draw the line in if the story gets in the way of proper raid structure too much? [...] We can argue FF is a story driven game, but that gives it no excuse to be a poor MMO for it.

I agree here too. My solution would be that raiding should have no story line that's exclusive to it.

What if Coil's story had been told through dungeons, and the raids had been, say, assaults on the various Garlean bases around Eorzea? They could easily have made the raid encounters just as interesting and rewarding, without the backlash from players who felt that they were cut off from a significant segment of the story (and nobody's going to argue that Coil's story wasn't significant in the game's overall tale).

It felt better to achieve parts of the Coils story working for it than basically having it handed to me like 95% of the game already does. Sure not everyone thinks like that, but ask yourself, did it not feel good to overcome a very hard turn in Coil and get a satisfying cutscene for it?

I'm someone who originally played FFXI for the story (and re-subbed last year to see all the story they added after I originally quit in 2009) and someone who primarily plays FFXIV for the story, but if I'm being really honest, for me personally, I'd have to say no.

The satisfaction for me came from overcoming the hard turn itself. I loved the cutscenes, don't get me wrong, but even seeing T12's outstanding cutscene was just icing on the cake of the exhilaration of clearing it on what would have been our last pull of the second week of FCoB.

People can feel free to disagree with me, but I believe in earning things through hard work.

It was mostly a joke. I was just giving an extreme example.

Fair enough, but my point was more that there certainly are things (mounts, minions, titles, better gear, exclusive dyes, etc.) that people could earn from hard work that wouldn't ruffle anywhere near as many feathers.

FFXIV developers need to know when to make a proper Final Fantasy game and a proper MMO.

I think the biggest thing they need to know is when they can do one without having to step on the toes of the other.

They can absolutely hold true to everything that's iconic about a Final Fantasy game while also making a proper MMO.

IMO they could start by looking at a lot of FFXI's systems, though I'm still holding out hope that maybe Palace of the Dead will (à la Nyzul Isle) be a step in that direction.

WoW did bring an easy mode to raids, but they did not take away Normal/Heroic mode in the process. They did not sacrifice one, but added. Again I don't entirely agree with an easy mode, but I know it is a thing. WoW at least made it work, or at least when I played it a few years ago.

Eh, there's a new "Raid Finder has killed WoW and should be removed yesterday" thread every day on the official forums and MMO-Champion. Together with an accompanying "If you're not even doing Raid Finder, why do you care?" thread.

Not saying Midas is easy, in fact it is quite challenging, but it is easy to see that SE is willing to make it easier just to get more numbers in instead of making proper midcore/hardcore tiers similar to WoW. Ohh yea, shouldn't compare too much to WoW before someone goes "Why don't you just go back?"

On the one hand, shove 'em. On the other hand, there's no denying that WoW's raiding scene (barring the obscene content droughts at the end of each expansion) has a much better structure than FFXIV's.

Unfortunately for WoW, that's about the only thing it's had going for it over FFXIV for quite some time.

[Dalvy]

My only concern is shared with Level 5's CEO, who brought it up in a live letter: when are we going to get more engaging raids like Coil? It's looking more like those really were 'the old days'.

[Ampheni]

Coil were my favorite raid so far. I do still like alexander savage, and I don't think it's too difficult, in fact I think the difficulty is just right for a raid. But the problem is, I don't feel as rewarded as it did when it were coil, like many people said, it's just a dye-able piece of normal mode gears. Where as I work my ass off to get to watch all those wonderful coil story, now they just hand it out to me in normal mode, it just...doesn't give me that kind of incentive to run it anymore. I do still raid, but it's solely for challenges now.

I think they should get rid of normal mode altogether, make savage mode the only mode available like it was back in coil (But keep the current difficulty), use the time not spent working on normal mode to tailor more casual contents to add more diversity to the game instead.