Why the hate with endgame fights?

[Zojha]

Giving these people a larger window to get clear would make it easier for them.

And the issue in using that tuning tool is: The line between "easy" and "hard" is very thin.

Typical human reaction times to stimuli lie in the deci-second area, so a measly half a second more or less can make a huge difference in the difficulty of a mechanic. Add latency to the equation and a mechanic that is meant to be "difficult" to avoid might well be impossible to avoid for some, while designing mechanics with higher latency in mind can make them too easy for people with less.

This makes it a fairly bad tool for difficulty tuning, especially in an online game. You're prone to get it wrong one way or the other.

That in turn is why heavily scripted fights are usually the go-to choice: By having set things happen at set times, you can be proactive about it and cut down on reaction times - If you're already standing in the middle when Hashmal jumps, you'll probably have ample time to look around and get to the safe zone, because the way is short. If you don't, you might be standing too deep in the wrong side and simply cannot make it even if you react instantly. And I wager the main reason why people fail that mechanic is because they simply don't know the script yet and thus don't pre-position themselves, because the timing is very lenient if you do, the timing on most mechanics is from my experience.

This circumvents the issues that come with reaction time tuning somewhat, because learning the script takes most of the reaction difficulty out of the mechanic and this shifts a lot of difficulty to learning the script by heart instead. When I tried out raiding, it was therefore common to assign positions, debuff behavior, add order etc in advance to try and reduce the amount of "reaction" you needed to do as much as possible.

But that's starting to ramble. Bottom line is: Yes, you can try to tune mechanic difficulty via reaction times, but it's iffy.

[Sebazy]

Look, if current endgame, including hashmal, is not teaching people to do well, why is puttng an easier form of him in expert any help? They already do it and succeed or fail.

Because practice makes perfect, and irrespective of the lack of difficulty, Expert is a better place to enforce good play habits than 24 man simply because it's far harder to go under the radar and get mindlessly carried. My 165 DPS BLM from earlier in the thread was reasonably well equipped with several Rabanastre drops. They got the loot, so they must be doing just fine no? People get better with practice, but where are they supposed to practice as is? ARR used the tome dungeons for this and from my experience, it worked well.

Hashmal can one hit with his rush, his red orbs, his tower drops, his hammer drops, and can if someone misses a dust orb if you are closer to ilvl 310 on dps or heals. Others can survive it, but i am paranoid about people bein at full health and shielded after the stack then.

The rush isn't a one shot (It's the dot tick that kills, that's a 50/50 roll of the dice), red orbs most certainly aren't a one shot, it takes 2 to kill you. Hammer drops? You know you get 14 seconds to move away from those right (Not to mention, the damage falls away rapidly, by this logic you might as well call falling boulder a one shot as well)? Dust Orb also isn't a one shot, it's what, 24k before shields? You get a point for Tower falls tho, the other is Rock Cutter as a non tank just incase you weren't aware.

No, it was the first thing to come to mind as a post 60 boss. Yojimbo is different because he is hamstrung by the number of players and mechanics. You can't make yojimbo harder with his existing mechanics

How is Yojimbo hamstrung by the number of players and mechanics in a way that the final boss of Bardams isn't? We are talking about the same thing here right? The Yol, aka the bird boss at the very end with the dives and cyclone wings mechanic at the last few percent?

Sneaky game design tip for you: you can make existing mechanics and make them harder via more than just upping the damage. Upping the tempo, layering the mechanics together and making things more punishing are all methods that SE have used in the past. By piling pressure on players, you can make even relatively simple mechanics highly challenging (A3S is an excellent demonstration of this), but this is missing the point of my comment. Even I don't want Expert to be something like A3S lol =(

Again, you're missing the point here tho, it doesn't need to be harder as such, it just needs to A) Be less forgiving and B) More relevant to the content that follows, I want to have to actually watch the screen when I play. Your comment that adjusting a boss to make it more relevant and challenging is more than just tweaking a few values, but then I'm of the view that this is something better addressed going forward anyways. The damage with current content is done. Wasting time and resources to rejig what we have now would be pointless IMHO. Rather SE need to take a long hard look at where they've gone wrong and adjust accordingly. A significant part of the problem is that a good portion of the player base massively overgears the expert roulette dungeons which makes for a highly polarised view of them. Enter them with the min Ilvl and it's quite a different experience. This is a facet of the problem that needs to be addressed. Captain Sloppy in Baelsar's Wall was one example where they got it right. He didn't just roll over with enough gear, you still had to respect the mechanics.

And the issue in using that tuning tool is: The line between "easy" and "hard" is very thin.

Typical human reaction times to stimuli lie in the deci-second area, so a measly half a second more or less can make a huge difference in the difficulty of a mechanic. Add latency to the equation and a mechanic that is meant to be "difficult" to avoid might well be impossible to avoid for some, while designing mechanics with higher latency in mind can make them too easy for people with less.

This makes it a fairly bad tool for difficulty tuning, especially in an online game. You're prone to get it wrong one way or the other.

Hiya, please appreciate that that comment was in reply to someone stating:

The only way you can make a mechanic hard is if failing it kills you, or if it will kill the whole party unless quick action is done.

I'm not trying to state that it's the best way to adjust things so there's no need to lecture me on it =P

Rather that there are multiple ways to make a mechanic or encounter hard beyond 'does it one shot me'.

Case in point, look at Thordan EX, outside of the post transition spear, it's not a fight that throws one shots at you, rather it overwhelms you, forces mistakes and things tend to snowball hard from there.

[KaldeaSahaline]

While I'd like to see some content that ramps up the challenge towards savage, would it work? The community is all about rush rush rush. Harder content means things will take longer and some groups might wipe. Seeing as the community is intolerant of such things, people would leave. People instant leave aurum vale. They left Pharo Sirius before that got nerfed.

Pharos Sirius was my favorite dungeon. I was crushed when they nerfed it. The only reason the community is all about "rush rush rush" is because that is what the developers have incentivized by having very poor reward structure and dungeon difficulty. People would go slower if they NEEDED to.

If the design paradigm shifted so that people couldn't rush as readily/easily there'd almost assuredly be some growing pains, but I personally think it's for the health of the game/playerbase.

They need to adjust the rewards too. If you make every dungeon give the same reward (irrelevant loot/miniscule currency) then it's only natural that people will gravitate towards the path of least resistance.

I want the sense of danger in dungeons, so I have been thinking about one mechanic to make a hard move dungeon feel truly hard. You know, since I haven't really posted specifics. Anybody remember in most ff games, there are enemies capable of stealing from you?

See where I'm going with this?

Here. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Eureka-Concept

While I crafted this concept for Eureka, you could just as easily pull ideas from it and apply it to "expert" dungeons.

Real enemy behavior and consequences for failing it.

No one seems to get this. The only way you can make a mechanic hard is if failing it kills you, or if it will kill the whole party unless quick action is done. So when people talk about increasing difficulty, they tend to just be abstract about it. Especially when they say the one content that actually does this, shin hard, is still very easy.

if you want to seriously think about this, take one dungeon boss 60 and up, and tell me how you will make it harder. Like take the mol at the end of bardem's mettle. How will you make him gradually harder?

That is 100% inaccurate Riyah. You can make things more difficult aside from damage and shift the consequences to later mechanics thus creating a design where fights snowball out of control, but still allow the ability to recover through good play, gear, and maybe even a little luck.

Here is a link to a Eureka concept I built. http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Eureka-Concept

IMO captures a fairly robust scaling difficulty that would give plenty of room for players to succeed and even more room to grow.

That said - below is a post I made on reddit WAY back. I do apologize that the concept was for an 8 man version (and I'm far too lazy to retool it for 4m atm), I hope it meets your needs.

Compare the live version of Guard Scorpion from to this 8 man version. Mechanics Inlcude:

1. Tank buster is just a raw tail stab. It does fairly high damage and is cast very frequently. Ideal tank rotation would be once a MT runs out of cooldowns to mitigate them you'd swap.
   
2. Tail Laser + gun fire would separate the room in 2 occasionally. Stepping into the void zones deal huge damage regardless, but from laser side could add HP down stacks, and Fire DoT stacks for the gunfire side. In case you had to switch sides, get shielded up and sprint across take 1-2 stacks, but you wouldn't want to do it super frequently and you'd probably want to make sure you alternated debuffs if you did.
   
3. The boss would then summon adds periodically to help take you out (maybe magitek bits?). They'd need to be picked up by a tank and they'd deal fairly high damage per second. The tank would then need to kite through the boss moves described in the previous mechanic, unless LB/DPS is available/super high. in order to help DPS them down. If multiple were left up, it's likely DPS would eventually fall behind or the tank would go down to sustained damage.
   
4. Targeting Reticule: At this time he'd also target 2 people with the targeting reticule and it would lock on and repeatedly fire a napalm that coats the floor chasing the players with the mark. You'd want to ensure you didn't have both debuffs on the same side of the room or you'd likely run out of safe room, and you'd want to ensure you didn't have too many people on one side either to minimize the random reticule spawn.
   
5. AOE Gunfire move. Hits whole room, medium damage. Casts fairly frequently. Nothing fancy.
   
6. Wide Tail Laser. Periodically the tail becomes target-able and any damage done to the tail at this time causes the boss to hit you with a gunfire counter attacking dealing light damage. Fast hitting attackers may find themselves taking considerably more damage than slower ones though. Each time you are hit you get a vuln up stack that lasts for 2s. The idea here would be to manage your stacks by switching targets repeatedly and you can't just burn the tail down else the party wide-damage could be too overwhelming. If the tail is killed, the boss gets a stack of vuln up and takes additional damage. If the tail is not killed it deals bonus damage based on its remaining HP. During this time the boss can use any and all other mechanics except for splitting the room up.
   
7. Enrages at 10%. Just like Ultima weapon, the Guard Scorpion readies a final attack to take everyone out with it. You have 30s to burn the last 10% (could save LB to help mitigate the DPS differential if not needed on a specific add phase). It raises its tail and repeatedly keeps spamming AOE gunfire (think like O3S Gravi wave) that hits hard so it's not just a free DPS check for 30s.

[ViolaCrossfire]

Case in point, look at Thordan EX, outside of the post transition spear, it's not a fight that throws one shots at you, rather it overwhelms you, forces mistakes and things tend to snowball hard from there.

Let's start looking at GOOD expert fights then shall we? An example of a good expert fight would be Keeper of the lake last boss. He throws very basic AOE telegraphs on you but they are large and come at certain angles that can be predicted. He overwhelms with frequent AOE targeted attacks that keep the healer and dps occupied enough so that not every mistake can be corrected. You have a decent dps check in the form of a bird. And you learn the tank some positioning with the adds. Good fight.

[Sebazy]

Let's start looking at GOOD expert fights then shall we? An example of a good expert fight would be Keeper of the lake last boss.

Absolutely, he plays exactly the same overwhelm and distract card as Thordan EX uses. A great example of this is the shield generator click that needs to be used whilst all manner of AoEs are going off around you.

Agreed, it was fantastic boss.

[jameseoakes]

Let's start looking at GOOD expert fights then shall we? An example of a good expert fight would be Keeper of the lake last boss. He throws very basic AOE telegraphs on you but they are large and come at certain angles that can be predicted. He overwhelms with frequent AOE targeted attacks that keep the healer and dps occupied enough so that not every mistake can be corrected. You have a decent dps check in the form of a bird. And you learn the tank some positioning with the adds. Good fight.

While it was a good fight, it did have the issue of healers dying far too often making it a wipe which was frustrating.

[HyoMinPark]

While it was a good fight, it did have the issue of healers dying far too often making it a wipe which was frustrating.

That wasn’t really the fault of the fight, nor of its mechanics, but of an (either) unawareness (or ineptitude) on the part of the healer(s) that kept dying. Practice makes perfect; I’m sure that even those healers that died and caused wipes could have improved with more practice if they had put their minds to it (though, that is also a problem with content: a lot people want the shinies but they don’t want to put forth the effort or improvement needed to get them).



My only issue with the “casual” content of this game is that the “endgame casual” content (i.e., Level 70 content) in no way prepares individuals for harder content; in a lot of ways, the “expert” content at endgame is easier than the content one had to do to get there, and I feel like that’s a problem. There’s a huge jump in difficulty from Kugane Castle to Rabanastre to Shinryu Ex to Neo-Exdeath to Ultimate Savage. There’s an obvious lack of consistency in the way the developers design and curve the difficulty of their content—

For example, Lakshmi Ex/Susano Ex to Shinryu Ex. All three are Extreme primals, but Shinryu laughs at Susano, and even Susano laughs at Lakshmi. Inconsistency in difficulty. That’s why so many people go into ShinEx thinking it will be just like Susano Ex and then get splattered during first phase. Another example: V1S/V2S and V3S/V4S. Massive jump in difficulty, especially from Catastrophe to Halicarnassus. I take issue in the inconsistency in difficulty jumps. I am perfectly fine with the difficulty scaling up as you move up a tier, or even Extreme primals. But to have such inconsistent jumps in it I am not fine with.

[jameseoakes]

That wasn’t really the fault of the fight, nor of its mechanics, but of an (either) unawareness (or ineptitude) on the part of the healer(s) that kept dying. Practice makes perfect; I’m sure that even those healers that died and caused wipes could have improved with more practice if they had put their minds to it (though, that is also a problem with content: a lot people want the shinies but they don’t want to put forth the effort or improvement needed to get them).

While I won't entirely disagree with this, I think this does bring the issue of one group of players trying to force a play style on the others. I'd agree that are big issues with the end game curve, but a lot of that is a lack of casual content making it hard to scale it

[HyoMinPark]

While I won't entirely disagree with this, I think this does bring the issue of one group of players trying to force a play style on the others. I'd agree that are big issues with the end game curve, but a lot of that is a lack of casual content making it hard to scale it

I personally do not see a “lack” of casual content when it comes to endgame, but perceptions are different from everyone. If I had to label the content one can currently do at 70, I would label it as such:

“Casual”: Expert dungeons, 24-mans, normal-mode 8-mans
“Midcore”: Extreme primals (though, I would personally put Lakshmi/Susano in “soft-midcore”), V1S (probably also “soft-midcore”), V2S
“Hardcore”: V3S, V4S (I would personally put these in a more “soft-hardcore”), Ultimate Savage

I think the “balance” of endgame battle content (excluding PvP; I’m not familiar enough with PvP to categorize it) is fine on paper, but each “type” of content has issues with difficulty scaling between the others in each “category” (I say this because of how I scale Extremes and V1S as more “soft-midcore” when they are aimed to be more midcore/hardcore, especially Savage since, well, it’s supposed to be “savage”).

I don’t force my particular playstyle on others. But asking someone to just pay attention in content and contribute as part of a team and just learn from their mistakes is not a bad thing. I don’t think so anyways.

[Sebazy]

While I won't entirely disagree with this, I think this does bring the issue of one group of players trying to force a play style on the others. I'd agree that are big issues with the end game curve, but a lot of that is a lack of casual content making it hard to scale it

Oh I agree, this is why I do thing that it's something that needs to be measured out carefully and as such, why I found some of the examples raised against my comments to be so off the mark. Putting O1S as is into the trial roulette would be beyond stupid. But a tweaked version of it would likely fit in very well.

I don't feel I'm utterly correct in my views on how this game should be balanced. Rather, I think SE have gotten progressively worse at handling this as time has gone by.