Colliseum/Solo Instances

[RiyahArp]

Going to describe a hypothetical encounter like this

1. You enter the Trial of the Brave.
2. You start fighting the boss. It's just auto attacks, and some easy telegraphs so far, so no porblem.
3. The boss does a cleave for 75% of your HP.
4. You already spent your one self-heal, so you die from the damage after.
5. Okay, I need to get some potions and save the heal.
6. Take two.
7. You survive the cleave! But then the boss does a no-telegraph aoe and one-shots you.
8. Take three.
9. You quickly run to the side to dodge the no telegraph. You still get one-shotted.
10. Take four.
11. You run behind him. Yay! it works. But then he does a quick telegraph aoe that hits you with a heavy debuff, and you get nailed by the next aoe.
12. Take five.
13. You do all this, perfectly...and then boss does an ultimate that one shots you.
14. You turn away from the game in rage, and look at the forums for help.
15. Oh, wait, you needed to have high DPS all the time you were doing that to prevent the enrage.
16. Take six.
17. You try harder, it still isn't enough.
18. Back to the forums. You give up, spoil the entire fight by repeatedly watching a video walkthrough, and downloading or bookmarking guides which tell you apparently you did everything in the game wrong so far, because you need to use these abilities in this precise order to maximize DPS.
19. You give up on the instance a bit, and spend time on a dummy making sure you can even do the damn things. Worst case you change classes because you struggle with doing high dps with your main.
20. You finally come back. after take ten, you beat the stupid thing.
21. ???
22. Huge sigh of relief.

I think solo hard instances would look like this, and you have to bet around #17 players will go on to do 18 and not do:

18. Screw this game, imma play Destiny 2 a bit.

The problem is really with hard content in this game, I guess.

[Lelila38]

A thing to keep in mind: in this game not all classes are equally viable in solo play. For example a Rdm with its strong heals might have an easy time beating such a fight, whereas, say a Drg, even though higher dps, but literally no self heal ability, might struggle. And a tank might be able to survive the hard hits, but probably wouldn't be able to do enough dmg to kill the thing.
It would be impossible to balance such solo fights in a way you could clear them with any class.

[Dzian]

A thing to keep in mind: in this game not all classes are equally viable in solo play. For example a Rdm with its strong heals might have an easy time beating such a fight, whereas, say a Drg, even though higher dps, but literally no self heal ability, might struggle. And a tank might be able to survive the hard hits, but probably wouldn't be able to do enough dmg to kill the thing.
It would be impossible to balance such solo fights in a way you could clear them with any class.

It wouldn't be impossible. Tricky maybe.
If you wanted a solo fight for example they could do something like ffxi had with Pulling the Strings which was an ENM battlefield where the boss changed according to your job.

Something like that could be quite easily workable within xiv I think. If they really wanted to add a solo challenge. But would need more than exp as a reward as If It was considered challenging players would simply get exp from easier methods.

But still stick by earlier comment it's a multiplayer game it's main focus should always be group content. I'd rather see content designed for flexible group's than solo. More things like canals for example where you can go with 2 people or go with 7. Except maybe allow alliances if you have like 11 people.
My main gripe is everything is so strictly 4 or 8 man that so much of them time you either have to many people hat want to come and some inevitably get left out or not enough people so you can't enter anyway.

[Krotoan]

Hi, semi-casual player here.
I say semi because my lack of "hardcoreness" stems from time limitations mostly. I.G: I have little time to play games due to life and so I tend to only do things I really enjoy and cannot afford to throw whole nights at one encounter (totally used to but now I dont).

You have grand ideas but your base premise that someone cannot "git gud" by playing the game is insanity. This is how I learned all of my jobs. Played the game, and partied up. Took suggestions from other players (other than "you suck, kill yourself") and made adjustments. I also asked my friends : Hey, you play ninja, what's the best rotation for dungeon leveling at around 60?. ... with other people. In this game designed around the fact that you will NEED to get others to play with you. This is part of the game and is not skirted around by any advertising. MULTIPLAYER. CO-OP.
You wanna solo stuff? Cool , go do that.

Yes teaming up to do things designed to be done by groups will make them easier than doing them solo. The fact you consider this an argument is odd. You want to have a challenge by soloing stuff, have at it but don't complain just because we don't HAVE to do it too.

This game is designed to be inclusive for players of all skill levels. We have "the echo" for teams that just can't seem to pass older content, and unsynched runs for even further help. This is all meant to seem welcoming to players: Hey! Come play our game! it's fun! there's story and characters and people and mechanics to help you when it gets rough!

and the bottomest of the bottom lines: Spending Dev time developing solo content is not as profitable as catering to the bulk of the userbase who have active groups of friends or FC mates itching to do stuff together.


tl,dr: This isn't a single player game and you're going to be disappointed if you want it to grow as such.

[Aylis]

Healers especially would get barely anything out of this because they're supposed to be taking care of a party. Again good ideas(I like the team battles) but not much practical use.

Sadly I have to agree, while I would adore some interesting and viable solo content and some of the ideas the OP listed were good. I could see balancing issues everywhere happening due to this being a trinity based game, not an action everyone can do a little bit of everything there are no real roles type of game. Being challenged is one thing and all fine and good. Getting into a solo content situation where no matter how good you are, your choice in class is your downfall is another. Running into a brick wall is no fun at all.

[stardrifter]

Damn I was thinking there is plenty of solo content, I want more early FFXI, where open world grouping is necessary. Epic quests, I wish jobs were much harder to unlock and quests much more obscure. Pretty unpopular opinion I know but I liked that way of gaming,

[TristanBlane]

I think this would be a super fun idea. Sometimes when you tired of sitting in ques and working with a team it could be fun to have some type of solo progression type of thing? I was thinking like a coliseum tournament type where you can solo against different FF characters, work your way up the ladder to fight the big baddies and a type of reward system to get cool glamour's along the way.

It'll be interesting to see how they could fit it so you can do it with all jobs, DPS, Tanks and Healers. I like the idea though

[Lelila38]

They could work it into gold saucer. Battle square has been requested for a while. As I recall, Battle square used to have handicaps too, which could be fun. I still think balancing for all classes would be an issue though.

[Shouko]

1. As long as it was more of an alternative to raiding.
2. If they balanced it around non healing jobs as well as self healing ones.
3. Make it have different tiers or progressive (potd style) not just straight out hardcore, (savage raids for that)
4. 70 only content.

Personally I'd rather them make the older content like primals, A1+,C1+, etc more soloable outside of a tank job, say tune it for soloing.

[Selova]

As much as I don't want to use wow as a example, I'm going to because they have completely nailed solo content in 2 specific scenarios. The warlock green fire boss fight and the solo artifact challenges via the mage tower in legion.


Both of these challenges were completely tailored and designed around the class it's intended for and they both push you to utilize everything in your classes kit to complete it pushing you to become better at your class in order to overcome the challenge.


I'd personally love it of SE implemented job based solo challenges. Just my 2 cents on the matter.