Thread: Boycotting Warrior 4.0 (Let's do it!)

Originally Posted by Reynhart

What's important is not how many people managed to do it, but that stance-dancing is necessary for optimal result. It's not a gameplay choice. If you can't do it, then it means you lack something.

This is a good thing. In a game with near zero character growth (usually found in other MMORPGs as gear), you have to at least have player growth. Weaker players who can't use stances properly do lack something - knowledge and ability. This gives them something to try to acquire that won't be obsolete in the next raid patch. Just as an example, my group tweaked our cooldown/tank swap setup a whole lot on Brute Justice in order to optimize some things to make the whole fight easier/raise DPS and some of the lessons we learned there carried over to other fights. Another good one is Living Liquid - early on it was really important to really optimize your cooldown timing so that you could absorb multiple cleaves on one cooldown, etc.

There is still only one optimal way, and that could discourage players.

You seem to think that people have the default attitude of "if there's someone better than me out there, I'll never catch up to them. If something has a little complexity, I cannot learn it." Does the existence of Tool Assisted Speedruns discourage people from playing games normally? Even if there was a group of players out there that played 100% optimally, the game isn't balanced for them, so why would the existence of optimal play discourage the average joe?

Originally Posted by Reynhart

I care that there is only one way to be optimal and that I don't find that particular way fun.

The optimum, by definition, is a single thing. The *best* result. I changed my example in an edit while you were posting it seems, but the existence of tool assisted speedruns doesn't stop people from enjoying games normally. The fact that the best way to kill something involves using stances well shouldn't discourage you if you can't (or don't like to), because the fights are still able to be completed even if you don't use stances.

As for the whole pacifist/murderer example - different actions lead to different results. If you want to kill a raid boss in 7 minutes you're going to need to do different things than a group that kills it in 9 minutes. If you want the golden murderer ending, you'd better get to killing. If killing is the only way to beat the game, but I only want to play a pacifist, then it turns out I actually don't like that game and it'll probably sit abandoned next to all my other incomplete projects.

Like I get that you apparently don't like how raid tanking works in FFXIV, but it's been this way for like four years now. Maybe you just don't like tanking in FFXIV.