The time has come to get rid of enrage timers

[Quor]

The upcoming WAR nerfs have brought out the usual boilerplate from the peanut galleries;

"Tanks aren't supposed to deal damage! You want to deal damage, be a DPS!"
"Ever think about, I dunno, maybe staying in tank stance?"
"The problem is with the [insert community here]'s obsession with fast killing and efficiency, and this is the devs trying to counter that!"

Bullsh*t. All of it.

Here's the truth; this game is made, by the devs, to encourage as much dps as possible. This is largely as a result of enrage timers and other dps checks. If you don't meet the dps check, you wipe, simple as that. And since we're not all uber gosu top .2% players of our classes, it means everyone has to pull their weight and a bit more. Every GCD not spent optimizing damage is a GCD that could mean Exdeath Meteor's your group instead of transitioning to Neo. So I say, let's get rid of enrage timers.

Why do we even have them any more? Every single encounter in this game is already gated behind either a player level or an item level. Barring certain exceptional circumstances, if you don't have the ilvl or character level to enter a certain duty, then you just can't enter it. So if a person has the ability to enter an duty, why further restrict their ability to complete said duty by imposing another arbitrary hurdle to overcome? SE apparently doesn't want people using DPS meters because reasons, yet they build encounters in a game that implicitly encourage the kind of behavior they say they are against. Fine. Do you want to stop this kind of stuff SE? Then stop it with the enrage timers.

Think about it. How great would it be for a close-knit group of average players, none of them top tier at their class, but all of them competent, to marathon their way through an encounter together. Maybe it takes them 60 minutes of straight fighting to clear OS4, but if they can do the mechanics then why impose the arbitrary hurdle of an enrage timer? By removing enrage timers, you can let tanks tank, healers heal, and dps can dps. The people who want to crush things ASAP with the best efficiency possible can still do so. That side of the game isn't changed. But for people who don't want to (or can't) do that, it would be another path to success that doesn't focus on insane dps optimization. Which, ostensibly, is what SE is trying to avoid.

Remove the enrage timers and you remove a large part of the impetus behind everyone trying to push out as much dps as possible. Right now, there is no choice; you either dps hard enough to avoid enrage/clear the check or you wipe. If SE is serious about not wanting the dps speed/efficiency meta to reign supreme, then they need to remove dps checks and enrage timers and let players choose whether they want to run a sprint or a marathon.

[Darrcyphfeid]

I think the opposite should happen. They need to add DPS checks and hard enrages to more casual content, like the Alliance Raids, so that people are encouraged to perform well.

When Weeping City came out, during the first week, I solo'd Calofisteri down from 5% on WAR. It wasn't even hard; she hit like a wet noodle and her telegraphs were easily dealt with. Things like that shouldn't be possible. It's dumb.

[RiyahArp]

I think the opposite should happen. They need to add DPS checks and hard enrages to more casual content, like the Alliance Raids, so that people are encouraged to perform well.

You can't do this, because unlike savage or ex trials, casual content is designed to be run a lot more, often daily. If you add decent dps checks, and the failure or abandon rate gets high enough, people are going to just pass on doing it if they have to do it for months on end. The only way this would work imo would be to make everything have weekly lockouts, so you only need one clear to get the reward and extra clears can be to help or for fun.

Remove the enrage timers and you remove a large part of the impetus behind everyone trying to push out as much dps as possible.

You could only do this if you severely limited combat raising. The enrage is there to punish too many deaths, and then to punish low dps. You'd have to move the focus to the deaths just triggering a hard reset and forcing you out of the arena beyond so many lives. Idk if this is better or not.

[Darrcyphfeid]

You can't do this, because unlike savage or ex trials, casual content is designed to be run a lot more, often daily. If you add decent dps checks, and the failure or abandon rate gets high enough, people are going to just pass on doing it if they have to do it for months on end.

Bull. I'm in no way advocating for "orange flogging or bust!" here, I'm seriously just saying that the game should encourage some bare minimum of personal responsibility. Almost nothing in this game outside of the EX Primals and Savage raids are actually designed with 4 or 8 people in mind. Do you know how many times my healer has dropped dead to the first Voice attack from Chimera in Cutter's Cry and we've proceeded to clear it? How many dungeons I've tanked the entirety of on a DPS job? How many times I've cleared Titan HM with only 2 or 3 people standing? I've had a Thok ast Thok clear that took 13 minutes because for the last quarter or so there was only a tank, a healer and a DPS. I've tanked Sirensong Sea on WHM up through just beyond the second boss. That, again, I could have solo'd any arbitrary percentage of the final boss of Weeping City once her DPS check transition phase was cleared?

You wouldn't have problems with enrages in EX Primals and Savage content if half or more of the party in virtually every other type of content couldn't just be carried through to the endgame.

[RiyahArp]

You wouldn't have problems with enrages in EX Primals and Savage content if half or more of the party in virtually every other type of content couldn't just be carried through to the endgame.

Problem is people won't stay for that. They go into titan hard, and if they see one or two wipes they are gone. When royal menagerie first came out, I think like 25% or more of runs ended in vote abandon, because people got sick of wiping to it. Everyone talks about making stuff harder, but no one is going to like it being harder. You'd have to change the model to be like ex content in general; you have a learning party, a clear party, and then you do it a relatively small time if you actually need the weapon from it, or a large time if you want everything possible you can get from it. You can't make the whole game like that and force people to run multiple instances of it per day; you'd get enough wipes and abandons it would get old fast.

[Darrcyphfeid]

You'd have to change the model to be like ex content in general; you have a learning party, a clear party, and then you do it a relatively small time if you actually need the weapon from it, or a large time if you want everything possible you can get from it.

You're coming at it from the wrong angle. I'm not saying you just walk up to the closest newbie and flog them with a carp. That would be hilarious, briefly, but ultimately solves nothing. It's a gradual process.

You don't, for example, take Cutter's Cry Chimera and give him all of the mechanics from A Relic Reborn. Rather, you keep him the same mechanically while significantly increasing his outgoing auto-attack damage. You make it so that I cannot, regardless of my skill or gear, survive against him for long without my healer. On any tank job. You also add hard enrages on Titan HM and Ravana HM, in addition to their already existing DPS checks (which should be bumped up a bit more so that two competent DPS out of four total can't carry), so that people aren't sitting there for 10+ minutes waiting for another chance to do the fight and are actively encouraged to participate.

Would the game lose players? Maybe. Would people whine and rage quit more often? For a time. But let's be real here, if you willfully refuse to push your buttons and do even 60~65% of your job's full potential at any given level you're not really playing the game anyway. And that's why things like Final Steps of Faith and Royal Managerie were kind of awful experiences in DR Trials at first anyway; the game didn't provide stepping stones of difficulty to get people into shape and instead just threw them to the wolves after letting them be carried for ages (by nerfing anything with fangs previous into the ground).

[Quor]

I think the opposite should happen. They need to add DPS checks and hard enrages to more casual content, like the Alliance Raids, so that people are encouraged to perform well.

When Weeping City came out, during the first week, I solo'd Calofisteri down from 5% on WAR. It wasn't even hard; she hit like a wet noodle and her telegraphs were easily dealt with. Things like that shouldn't be possible. It's dumb.

If dps checks/enrages are going to remain, then everyone needs to accept that the DPS meta is the meta that rules them all. That means as much damage out of everyone, with only as much healing done as "necessary" and tank stances being used for a fraction of the fight. It also means SE needs to figure the direction they want their game to go. On the one hand they say that there shouldn't be this DPS min/maxing meta that pushes speed and lower clear times, but on the other they push a game design that encourages DPS min/maxing in order to succeed. Either the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, or SE is full of it.

Without dps checks you could do stuff like 6 tanks 2 healers while being under geared. Which would then make the fight easier early on due to tanks being much harder to kill than dps.

There's already a solution to that in game that SE has not been scared to utilize. Enforce a strict party composition for those duties, even if you have a pre-made group of 8. Once enough time has passed, the restrictions can be lessened or removed and people can be free to run 8 tanks in Garuda EX: Stormblood Edition at their leisure.

If a person has the ability to enter a duty, why further restrict their ability to complete said duty by imposing another arbitrary hurdle to overcome in the form of mechanics? Why doesn't the boss just stand there and let us beat it to death?

That's a big contradiction, if your group is competent you're not hitting enrage in o4s in the first place. Hell, you could probably auto attack neo to death in less than 60 minutes.

Hyperbole and logical fallacies have no place here. If you want to take what you're saying to it's logical end, why are any of us here playing this virtual game, killing things that don't exist for items that we don't actually wear?

The answer? Because it's fun. Mechanics and boss fights and even wiping can be fun under the right circumstances. SE has come a long way in terms of creating the correct mix of "right circumstances" more often than not. But by the same token, some of their decisions - i.e. incoming WAR changes and the lack of meaningful DRK changes - are lacking.

Because every fight will be reduced to simply be a war of attrition. Bring all three healers, Red Mage and Summoner then just Raise each and every time someone dies until the boss eventually keels over. Without an arbitrary timer of some sort, there isn't any risk. That average group you cited? They wouldn't beat Neo because of skill. They beat him by merely throwing themselves at him long enough with reckless abandon. Dedicated DPS jobs outside the aforementioned would be borderline useless. Why bring a Dragoon when an extra tank will provide mitigation? DPS doesn't matter anymore. So there's no trade off.

The reason DPS is such a focal point in this game has little to do with enrage timers, which are often quite forgiving. The DPS mindset stems from how little you actually need to heal or mitigate. No other MMO I can think of allows a healer to spend upwards of 80% dealing damage. You want to incentivize tank stance more often? Make enmity matter, lessen cooldowns or outright take away immunities. Tanks frequently rotate into tank stance in Ultimate. Why? They don't always have CDs to mitigate the sheer amount of incoming damage. Until tanks need to be in tank stance or healers need to heal, damage will always be the superior option.

People already do that, to an extent, and much of it with success. The same day Zurvan was released saw the rise of solo tank strats so that people could push past Soar. How is that any different? People who want to clear faster will bring more DPS. People who want a reliable clear won't. But, more to the point, on bleeding edge content SE can just do what they already do with several instances in game; enforce a party composition. See my above response to Zumi.

You could only do this if you severely limited combat raising. The enrage is there to punish too many deaths, and then to punish low dps. You'd have to move the focus to the deaths just triggering a hard reset and forcing you out of the arena beyond so many lives. Idk if this is better or not.

I think the punishment is in the time taken. It's easy to imagine a group of mouthbreathers throwing themselves at something until it dies, but gear durability is a thing, and duties already have a hard-locked timer on them of 60-120 minutes. Besides, internal motivation is much more powerful than any externally motivating force. You can incentivize something all you want (see Limit Break gain reduction for dupe classes) but that doesn't mean people will do it. If a tight group of friends happen to have 3 BLM's as a part of their 8-man, I highly doubt they're going to force one of them to change just for the sake of things. Maybe one will change to help the group, but if all 3 enjoy BLM, no solid group of friends is going to make each other stop doing something they enjoy just to beat a virtual boss in a game. As SE said multiple times, in one form or another, it's supposed to be about having fun. Hell, you could even add an "enrage mode" for people interested in that kind of thing, with unique titles or modified cosmetic versions of that tier of gear (perhaps a version of the armor that's a bit more glowy or something) as a reward. Nothing that impacts gameplay, but still provides an outside motivator for people who enjoy the rewards moreso than the experience.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

People already do that, to an extent, and much of it with success. The same day Zurvan was released saw the rise of solo tank strats so that people could push past Soar. How is that any different? People who want to clear faster will bring more DPS. People who want a reliable clear won't. But, more to the point, on bleeding edge content SE can just do what they already do with several instances in game; enforce a party composition. See my above response to Zumi.

... How is that any different? Seriously? Five DPS allows you to finish a fight faster yet still demands a degree of competency from all players. We're not skipping Soar even with five DPS if two of them can't break 1,500. Comparatively, the lack of an enrage allows you to literally fail every mechanic provided someone is alive to raise. Since we're on Zurvan, let's use him as an example. People fail Soar? Who cares? Just raise them and keep going. There is no punishment because unless Zurvan kills everyone, it simply doesn't matter what he does. This takes away any incentive to improve. Current enrage timers are very generous. Even Ultimate lacks much of a DPS check. If you want to clear harder content... well, I hate to quote a meme but learn how to play your job and "git gud."

I also fail to understand how you think tanks will remain in tank stance with enrage timers removed. If anything, they would outright abandon it entirely. Why lower your damage when the risk of failure is nearly nonexistent? Oh no, both tanks died. Let the DPS tank while we get them up. Doesn't matter if they die, we can take forever and a day to kill this.

[Tridus]

There's already a solution to that in game that SE has not been scared to utilize. Enforce a strict party composition for those duties, even if you have a pre-made group of 8. Once enough time has passed, the restrictions can be lessened or removed and people can be free to run 8 tanks in Garuda EX: Stormblood Edition at their leisure.

But since tanks and healers can DPS and Red Mages can act as pseudo-healers, what does that accomplish? With no enrage, a group with a Bard and a Red Mage (along with the two healers and healer LB3) could effectively graveyard zerg for a very long time thanks to plentiful MP and raises.

The problem isn't that people can change the comp. The problem is that enmity, damage mitigation cooldown, and healing abilities are so overpowered compared to what's needed on the overwhelming majority of content that those roles can easily overpower them. At that point, you might as well contribute more DPS because what else is there for you to do? Enrage timers are just a medicine for the symptoms, they're not the problem.

[Akor]

On the one hand they say that there shouldn't be this DPS min/maxing meta that pushes speed and lower clear times, but on the other they push a game design that encourages DPS min/maxing in order to succeed. Either the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, or SE is full of it.

Two things: first: its JP mindset is telling them not to take risk for saying healers should not just heal but dps secondly: while they want to ppl to do dps in savage. Theres your answer. And this goes many ingame decision they are making: housing, balance issues etc.