My Eureka Concept

[Wintersandman]

The only thing it does is disregard external gear — but there are little to no actual benefits inherent in that.

When you have a mode that is completely void of gear progression the rest relies upon skill. PotD did work for a short time as there was a cap on the gear progressions (30/30) when first released. But you have 99/99 in 40-50 you notice a difference than when it was 30/30. This was a mistake by design.

You could have gear that ranks up but doesn't affect stats/damage or health. Therefore the further you progress the greater the challenge and more dependent on skill. That would be the only way to not exclude upcoming players as well as experienced players.

[Sandpark]

Ok I would like to give some additional enemy tendencies. I realize some of these are in game. But most are in boss battles. I want to see these applied to open world mobs as well. Now when picking up adds, they are usually dealt with in the same way, tank grabs everything and players mow them down. If packs came with different types, the same strategy would not always work the same.

• Juggernaut: These enemies are incredibly dense. When they move, players in their path experience knockback effects.
• Leapers: These enemies jump great heights and upon landing all players in the area are stunned for 6 seconds. Or perhaps they knock players into the air, where extra damage is taken while in flight.
• Flyers: These enemies fly, upon flight they take less damage by non ranged skills.
• Boomers: These enemies exude things from their body at certain damage thresholds. Explosions, shrapnel, poisons, etc.
• Auras: These enemies have properties such as magnetic, sulfuric, gravitation,etc. Example- Fighting a gravitation type enemy inhibits players from running far, a magnetic one slows movement speed from players.
• Reflectors: These enemies reflect certain types of damage. The type and position from which they reflect vary and cycle. Think Calcabrina but more variance and scenarios.
• Colossal: These enemies are gigantic. Hitting them increases weapon wear incrementally at a slightly faster rate. They can also pick you up and squeeze you until someone frees you.
• Planar: These enemies shift in and out of the material plane and spiritual plane.When in material only physical damage hurts them, when in spiritual only magic damage hurts them.
• Bottomfeeders: These enemies can go underground. When they come up they deal big damage and can disable or interrupt actions.
• Leechers: These enemies absorb player resources with successful attacks. They can even feed off enemy allies and become super versions of themselves.
• Absorbers: These enemies build up strong attacks with each skill cast on them and have high hit points. If you attack too fast before the absorbtion count deplete some they can potentially one shot their target.
• Shields: These enemies inflict a permanent dot or debuff like slow and regen health very fast.
• Sleepers: These enemies are sound asleep if a player wakes them by proximity or attacking they have an aoe sleep and typically hit very hard.
• Evokers: These enemies call stronger allies when under attack and on the precipice of death.
• Trappers: These enemies encase players in fields disabling certain skills. They can give an incurable silence, incurable tp drain, incurable hp drain.
• Bullies: These enemies attempt to push you into dangerous hazards like environmental fire or red aoe cast by other enemies.
• Disablers: These enemies lock 3 core player ability when an enemy uses this skill for long durations. Imagine ultimatum, flash, and provoke being unusable for tank, or heal or res for a healer,or buffs for dps.
• Assassins: These are invisible and untargetable until they attack, they usually target the healer or player with the least hit points and use high burst damage.
• Dividers: These enemies mess with your target reticules, they make you target certain enemies, usually the stronger ones.
• Soothers: These enemies heal and remove debuffs from enemy allies.
• Spacers: These enemies teleport around the battlefield doing hit and run burst tactics. Their goal is to separate players. Imagine a stack where one or two players are prevented from joining the stack.
• Latchers: These enemies cling to random players inflicting bleeds and lowering player skill potencies. Think of twenty small spiders jumping and clinging to players.
• Augmenters: These enemies lay fields onto players increasing the damage of other enemy attacks and skills.
• Shifters: These enemies shapeshift into different species to alter the dynamics of dealing with them.
• Creators: These enemies can create fields in the environment. Bodie of water, gasoline, mud, electrical field, lava puddles, etc. Those fields can be manipulated by players or enemies to a positive or detrimental effect.
• Doppelgangers: These enemies can multiply if not killed fast. Perhaps even make a copy of a player, to fool players who is enemy or ally.
• Switchers: These enemies can use random skills usually associated with a unique boss or enemy.
• Voidsents: These enemies can displace players into a void, in here they take damage and cannot be healed until the void time runs out.
• Concentrators: These enemies get stronger and heal when struck by an AoE. These must be killed one by one and killed fast.
• Ravagers: These enemies grow in size and get stronger if a damage over time is used on them. More health, more damage.

This kind of variance makes the game kind of like a basketball game. You call a play and sometimes you have to change the play due to an audible. Call the right play at the right time, but the same play will not always work. A zerg to me is when you can ignore plays called by the enemy and sarge the battlefield. You cannot sarge what you cannot ignore. And as players who struggle with harder content would say is that a mechanic by itself is not that hard, it's when you have to remember a bunch of them in sequence.

Well what if that sequence altered from pack to pack, and each pack had multiple tendencies? Zerg is not a thing anymore in my books at that point. Up the situational awareness.

Your list is very similar to mine (mine is instanced though and yours is open world) and mine focuses more on the enemy AI and how you have to approach them. Yours is more solo friendly, whereas I specifically chose 8 man to ensure good breadth of mechanics.

Aye, solo friendly in the open world sections. I didn't dig into the instanced 8 man stuff because I imagine that will function like 8 man trials or raids. Except you enter the instance from within Eureka instead of a queue while sitting in Limsa.

[Sandpark]

That quite literally sounds like the antithesis of fun having to carry multiple weapons to accommodate this trait. How do you 'synergize' hits in FF14? How do you burst with magic? You just let your melee/tanks AFK while mages beat on it?

The reason I disagreed with this singular trait was because I am still struggling to find any redeeming qualities it would add in a gameplay scenario.

The idea is not fighting dumb lest your weapons do get wrecked.

Currently there is no way to synergize hits, but there could be. I have shown a way to make skillchains work in XIV, if that is too complex, they could go the route of ESO synergies, or lotor(forgot what the name was). Magic burst could work in any of those systems. See below links in the sig if you want to read it.

The encounter would have phases, just as trials do now. But instead of <this skill always works regardless of job composition>, always on, always 100% rotation which rarely changes. The phases would have alternating speeds/changes, where in one your magic casters do the ugly while physical do other things relevant to the encounter besides damage. The other phase would have physical casters do the ugly, while magical casters do other things relevant to the encounter besides damage. If there is worry one side may be standing around on their down phase, they could make buffs syenrgize and empower the other side of the equation so those that can't damage currently can do so.

I could go into many other scenarios, and lay out a whole story for each of those 20 or so skillsets, but I won't because most likely none of the depth you or I are putting forth will come to fruition. The mantra here has normally been to keep it KISS, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

[Wintersandman]

Currently there is no way to synergize hits, but there could be. I have shown a way to make skillchains work in XIV

OMG Magic Bursts and Skillchains.

[KaldeaSahaline]

Because those are 8 mans and I find the PvE community for more toxic than the PvP community when it comes to DF and PF. It takes about a week for new content to have "No first time bonus" in PF and it is everywhere. "MUST SKIP SOAR" must be xilvl, etc, etc, etc. All of these reasons are why 4 man content is more inviting to me. I have 4 less randoms to deal with.

Yes I could static but sometimes there are more important things going on than being on FFXIV at X time on X day of the week. So that eliminates that.

Hypocritical it is then. Aside from the ridiculous circular logic you employed regarding challenging content; If you consider everything toxic around you, there's only one common denominator and it isn't the community.

I say this because none of what you stated above constitutes "toxic" by the way. No first time bonus, must be x ilvl, skip soar, etc. none of that is toxic.

The idea is not fighting dumb lest your weapons do get wrecked.

Currently there is no way to synergize hits, but there could be. I have shown a way to make skillchains work in XIV, if that is too complex, they could go the route of ESO synergies, or lotor(forgot what the name was). Magic burst could work in any of those systems. See below links in the sig if you want to read it.

The encounter would have phases, just as trials do now. But instead of <this skill always works regardless of job composition>, always on, always 100% rotation which rarely changes. The phases would have alternating speeds/changes, where in one your magic casters do the ugly while physical do other things relevant to the encounter besides damage. The other phase would have physical casters do the ugly, while magical casters do other things relevant to the encounter besides damage. If there is worry one side may be standing around on their down phase, they could make buffs syenrgize and empower the other side of the equation so those that can't damage currently can do so.

I could go into many other scenarios, and lay out a whole story for each of those 20 or so skillsets, but I won't because most likely none of the depth you or I are putting forth will come to fruition. The mantra here has normally been to keep it KISS, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Fair enough. I designed this Eureka within the constraints of the existing design paradigm not outside of it. Trust me, if I could have my way I'd change so much about the combat system to make it more robust.

[Wintersandman]

I say this because none of what you stated above constitutes "toxic" by the way. No first time bonus, must be x ilvl, skip soar, etc. none of that is toxic.

It does exclude a vast majority of people who didn't jump on new content the week it was released, which is not beneficial to people just starting out or people trying to catch up. It is discouraging to look at PF groups and see your immediately excluded. Ya I could start my own and say it is a learning party but then people bail on the 3rd wipe. If you don't see that as toxic and non-beneficial to the community than you really haven't been part of a helpful community.

My point is you don't have to make it 8 man to make it challenging. Also PvP is far more challenging than PvE as it is not about memorizing a dance.

[Shurrikhan]

It does exclude a vast majority of people who didn't jump on new content the week it was released...

Far less so than literally any other piece of content that still offers vertical progression that interacts with the rest of the game. All other content has only one level of difficulty, and then speedrunning. Where it would normally turn into speedrunning, you can either do that or up the difficulty, and then again, and again, meaning that the difficulty floor can be lower without penalizing the difficulty ceiling in any way.

[KaldeaSahaline]

It does exclude a vast majority of people who didn't jump on new content the week it was released, which is not beneficial to people just starting out or people trying to catch up. It is discouraging to look at PF groups and see your immediately excluded. Ya I could start my own and say it is a learning party but then people bail on the 3rd wipe. If you don't see that as toxic and non-beneficial to the community than you really haven't been part of a helpful community.My point is you don't have to make it 8 man to make it challenging. Also PvP is far more challenging than PvE as it is not about memorizing a dance.

Excluding people is not toxic. Just because something is discouraging does not mean it is toxic. I've helped tons of new players get into Savage raiding and got a lot of people their O3S clears when they were stuck for weeks so don't try to talk down from your mighty pedestal on me about knowing what "helpful" is.

I think I've asked numerous times now, how would you make 4m content challenging? Cite specific examples for all 4 roles (melee, ranged phys, caster, and tank). I was unable to do it and found considerably better design with an 8m party design.

PVP in general yes, PVP in this game? No. Pick a healer, single-handedly carry your team to victory in RW. Otherwise pick a ranged DPS and single-handedly carry any other PVP mode this game offers. Nothing about it is "hard". Not sure why you brought this up though as it's not relevant to the discussion.

[Wintersandman]

Excluding people is not toxic. Just because something is discouraging does not mean it is toxic. I've helped tons of new players get into Savage raiding and got a lot of people their O3S clears when they were stuck for weeks so don't try to talk down from your mighty pedestal on me about knowing what "helpful" is.

I didn't say you. I said the community isn't helpful. So get off your high horse. FFXI the community was way more helpful and less elitist than the FFXIV community. Night and day differences. There are still people but overall the community isn't selfish and I said "You haven't been part of a helpful community". So you don't know the difference. I am also telling you no matter how you set Tiers people will be excluded.

I brought up PvP and you must have only played 4.0 PvP because it is a little more complex than the simplistic version you put out. I have won RW matches when the other team was stacked with healers. The point was unless you can make something unpredictable no matter what content you design, or put out it is just memorizing a dance.

[Sandpark]

Yeah a mechanic can be just as interesting whether you have 60 people or 1 person.

Stack:
1 Person- Run to specific spot
4 man- Four people stack
24 man- 24 People stack

Gaze:
1 person- Turn away
4 man- 4 people turn away
24 man- 24 people turn away

Proximity run:
1 person- Run away from blast point
4 man- 4 people run away from blast point
24 man- 24 ppl run away from blast point

The only thing more people change for most mechanics is the margin of error is smaller because even if you do 100% perfect, those 4 peeps or 24 peeps have to as well. We all know how people respond to emergency situations or end of the world mechanics.

They go crazy and it's an every man for himself mentality.