Thread: Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

And saying that they should make things recoverable is not saying that they should change things? Again, if you weren't referring to Savage, what were you referring to? You already gave an example of how content in the game is recoverable. So, you were clearly referring to some other content. The pussyfooting is real.

You were either just blatantly wrong because the content is very recoverable or you're talking about Savage. I don't care which way you go. You are wrong about something either way.

And you bring up DS3. What happens when you mess up repeatedly in DS3? You die and you have to start the fight from scratch again. It's punishing you for failures. You learn the fight, you learn the patterns, you execute your strategy, hopefully you don't make too many mistakes, and you win. Sounds familiar.

Nothing is unfair in FFXIV's raid content. Mechanics have a clear, and often simple way of dealing with them. No damage -- early progression or not -- will just kill you when dealt with properly. You can have a bad strategy and many clearing statics do. You can make mistakes -- just not too many and not on crucial mechanics.

Actually it is a bit unfair that you can do everything right and wipe because someone else screwed up.

Pussyfooting, OK. My points were directed at end game content Savage is part of that but it was also directed at other things, like Ex primal's (some of them) but it's main focus was the philosophy in general, a lot of content is designed around "Mess up and you die" and I'm not saying you should be able to fail and make as many mistakes as you like. As you pointed out even though I literally put that in my example you can mess up in Dark Souls and it will kill you. However Dark Souls is as reactive as it is predictive, yes you can dance the perfect dance and win without a scratch or mess up royally but recover and make it through, one is not more skillful than the other as both take a different kind of skill.

As Cakekizyy has said above me, MMO's do also have the issue of not only relying on yourself, you need to rely on others, making things harder but with a greater sense of recovery would help pugs a lot, it would allow for mistakes or one person not being as good as others, the fight doesn't need to be easy, but by allowing others to compensate for mistakes and weaknesses in the team would encourage more people to think "We can make this work" As opposed to "Johnny keeps dying to phase 4 screw Johnny! We're never going to clear this!" If designed right this doesn't have to lower the overall difficulty or make statics feel less useful, they can still preform their perfect dance and clear things easier.

So yes, for this next part I am talking directly about Savage, no need for you to assume this time. This can be applied to Savage as at the highest end most/all content can be cleared with ease, perhaps even with only 7, I'll take your word for that one. But the whole point a lot of people were talking about was about getting more people into/sticking with Savage, some suggested better ilevel or glamour, I was simply agreeing with/suggesting the fights themselves as a means to do that.

Oh and you've been pretty condescending to me in every post since we started typing directly, you don't need to be so passive aggressive to people, you can point something out without it.

You can have both, I'm also not saying I have all the answers, I'm not a game designer but here's my attempt at an example. Before that though, I'm not only considering one aspect, I never specified as I was simply saying generally an area where you could improve something not how it would be implemented. I do believe you could have both, something more challenging while being more recoverable. You also wouldn't have to ease up the checks, you could also try to redesign them to allow the fight to go on even if you fail them but give a punishment for doing so that doesn't end in a wipe. I'll try my best to give an example of such.

Here goes:
OK so you have a DPS check, you need to pop a shield on the boss before X amount of time. if you don't it blows up pretty much killing you all. OK how about if in place of that, failing the check now places rotating aoe's that do masive damage/outright kill anyone caught in them, theses will remain for the rest of the fight, you've not failed but you've got one more thing to worry about.
Lets' try a healing check next, one party member is dropped to low hp with a healing debuff, you've got X time to heal them up or the debuff pops and wipes you, instead failing this suddenly reduced the arena by 1/3 again you've not failed but now you've a lot less space to work with and even less if you failed the above dps check. Mechanics after this could still wipe you for failing them, as the fights given you your chances and recovery and any further failing is game over.

Now you could argue that people will just fail both and win anyway, "Why bother dealing with theses if we can just win and ignore them?" That's true, but at the same time if designed right, you'd be risking a lot by letting theses checks fail and it becomes more a choice, what's best for you? Letting them fail to just dps the boss/rezing someone/deal with some other mechanic that might also be going on. Or play the checks to keep the mechanics more manageable, The extra recovery would be nice but it's still hard and still can be danced perfectly if that's the play style that works for you. Again someone will always do what's easier but that happens now, so, as long as this could be done without lowering the difficulty nothing would chance there.

I never said this was the right way or best way to fix the issue, just voiced it as an idea, feel free to rip the above example apart, it seems like if balanced it could work but I could be very wrong, if I am I apologise for wasting your time with it.

OK then, I'm just going to shut up now.

Easier or not, mistakes making the fight harder instead of hard wipe seems more reasonable.

Add in some achievement rewards for perfect execution and broader part of the audience can be happy in one level of set difficulty.

You don't really want to say me, thats not "make it easier".

That's just a nerf for the content^^

Not true, it's a combat design change, from memorization skills to strategy skills, which actually can be much harder.