Too many gameplay restrictions

[Sentinillia]

7.
Cap on raid members: Not much to say about this, I always thought the 8 man "raid" composition was too small, but this is another problem.
What i would like to see instead is the use of the flex raid system like some other games do, i think it's a great addition to MMOs that use it so the encounter scales with the number of people that you have in party.

This is a bad idea as it makes balancing things a lot more difficult. You couldn't have mechanics such as Enumeration if the party size is very variable and it limits the creativity of the designers a lot. It also limits the competitiveness of the raids as it would always favor teams with X players over Y.

8.
Rotations are too much scripted: This happens for both bosses and players, and i think it's more evident for dps and tanks, not sure about healers.
I never found a game where rotation were so much strict and scripted, on every boss you are forced to act like you are doing the usual target dummy rotation or you'll just lose dps, there is no other way to actually do it unless you wanna push bad dps.
3.0 made this even worse, locking abilities behind other abilities (Fire IV is just an example).

As frustrating as they are at times, they add depth to their respective jobs. If you play well you keep your buff and are rewarded with increased DPS. If you do not play well you're punished with the loss of your respective buff and lose out on some DPS. Given these circumstances you're forced to plan your buff and ability usage around the encounter which is directly related to your awareness, knowledge and understanding of your class.

The rotation argument sort of falls into the same category. Simply doing your dummy rotation will often result in a net loss of DPS in many encounters. You have to be able to adapt your base rotation for each situation the encounter presents you with which eventually comes down to knowledge of your job.


+1 Everything else.

[Voltyblast]

This is a bad idea as it makes balancing things a lot more difficult. You couldn't have mechanics such as Enumeration if the party size is very variable and it limits the creativity of the designers a lot. It also limits the competitiveness of the raids as it would always favor teams with X players over Y.

Honestly, I don't agree with that, because they actually made some neat mechanics for 24 man raids: the recent weeping city has Ozma with very well made mechanics, then we had cerberus in WoD which is still an amazing boss in my opinion. Then we have other bosses like Bone dragon in CT which was very intuitive, because it required less of "OMG DPS HARDER!" and instead needed more team work and actual "crowd control". There is barely any real CC or kiting required in this game: the last fight I recall something like that was T7 and even then it all boiled down to "OMG DPS HARDER OR WE WIPE".

The excuse of "Well it's harder to balance" it's old: if anything making a 24 man raid more common would actually be more open to new strategies and would actually encourage more people to raid, as 8 man doesn't allow more than 1 class/job/whatever per group, heavily decreasing the chance for someone to find a raid. Although there's one other major trouble with that: the alliance system is broken as hell and, for example, it won't allow group A to heal group B with aoes and whatnot, making each Alliance separated and on their own. If they ever fix that (they won't), then we would have some nice raiding possibilities.

All I'm saying, there is potential and a lot of ideas, a lot more if you just consider that the 24 raids, while much easier, have some of the best mechanics ever created.
Strangely, the 8 man raids feel lacking in comparison, as it it boils down to "do this 100% correctly or you wipe". But that's just me.

[bass9020]

Honestly, I don't agree with that, because they actually made some neat mechanics for 24 man raids: the recent weeping city has Ozma with very well made mechanics, then we had cerberus in WoD which is still an amazing boss in my opinion. Then we have other bosses like Bone dragon in CT which was very intuitive, because it required less of "OMG DPS HARDER!" and instead needed more team work and actual "crowd control". There is barely any real CC or kiting required in this game: the last fight I recall something like that was T7 and even then it all boiled down to "OMG DPS HARDER OR WE WIPE".

The excuse of "Well it's harder to balance" it's old: if anything making a 24 man raid more common would actually be more open to new strategies and would actually encourage more people to raid, as 8 man doesn't allow more than 1 class/job/whatever per group, heavily decreasing the chance for someone to find a raid. Although there's one other major trouble with that: the alliance system is broken as hell and, for example, it won't allow group A to heal group B with aoes and whatnot, making each Alliance separated and on their own. If they ever fix that (they won't), then we would have some nice raiding possibilities.

All I'm saying, there is potential and a lot of ideas, a lot more if you just consider that the 24 raids, while much easier, have some of the best mechanics ever created.
Strangely, the 8 man raids feel lacking in comparison, as it it boils down to "do this 100% correctly or you wipe". But that's just me.

I think Weeping is probably one of the best raids to date. You can't just ZERG down any boss, you have to actually do the mechanics correctly and rely on everyone in the raid to follow along as well. I hope we see more of these mechanics in all forms of content. Clearly big groups can handle interesting and slightly more involved mechanics so I hope this is a big wake up call to Yoshi and team.

I hope with the add on support or whatever we end up getting there will be a better alliance party menu. Currently I have mine as small as possible and only use it when someone either dies or my groups tank isn't the main and I focus the main tank from another group. Right now its not very functional.

[Lan_Mantear]

I think Weeping is probably one of the best raids to date. You can't just ZERG down any boss, you have to actually do the mechanics correctly and rely on everyone in the raid to follow along as well. I hope we see more of these mechanics in all forms of content. Clearly big groups can handle interesting and slightly more involved mechanics so I hope this is a big wake up call to Yoshi and team.

I think the only reason why people can't zerg the bosses in Weeping City is due to item level. Once everyone has ilevel 240+, alliances will be able to push phases and ignore mechanics. It was the same with the previous 24-man raids.

[Sentinillia]

snip

I should have been more specific, I have no quarrels with having one or two tiers for raid size, I was critiquing the idea of a flexible party size system.

[Voltyblast]

I should have been more specific, I have no quarrels with having one or two tiers for raid size, I was critiquing the idea of a flexible party size system.

If you mean flex raids like the ones in wow, then yes they weren't a good idea I admit, but we've already saw that 24 man raids are a possibility: I just wished that proper 24 man raids would become the real deal. It would definitely attract more people into the raiding scene (we don't have 24 jobs yet so people could stack on more than one job for the raid, like one team made of casters or one team made of melee and so on), and maybe they'd become less about "pure dps" and more about "tactics" (and we've seen some good examples). As of now, it's all about min maxing your dps output and it's just not fun.

On the other hand, I think a lot of people really like 24 man raids mechanics due to how it promotes teamwork.

[NaesakiAshwell]

-snip-

Weeping City of Mhach is a step in the right direction, they just really need to stay on this path and keep improving from there. But whether they do is shrouded in maybes and we'll sees for now.