The general player base needs to improve

[KaivaC]

So - i'm really not in a place to call this...
i'm in no way part of the raid scene in this game - at all. But certain people in this thread - and I'm only mentioning this because there is a stupid level of arrogance on display here - post atrocious FFlogs - like really bad. So I would just suggest you get your own house in order before trying to assume you're not part of the problem you're all creating.

Curious. Was this meant for me? In the event that it was, what do my logs have to do with the topic? Especially as I have focused a bulk of my responses toward expert dungeons and 24 man raids. Care to clarify some things for me?

[HyoMinPark]

You'd wind up making healers dps less, and use more globals for healing.

Aren’t healers supposed to be using more globals on healing abilities? Wouldn’t a change that called for healers to actually have to use more globals to heal be a good thing? I’m all for healer DPS, but healing in this game is extremely trivial. There are so many fights were you don’t even have to use HoTs like Medica II or Aspected Helios or Whispering Dawn because the non-HoT providing equivalents (Medica/Cure III, Helios, or Indom) do most of the healing for you.

[Shurrikhan]

Not true. When I'm raiding, I'm very good at mechanic in raid. Because every time a mistake is made in raid, I got punished for it, either I gonna die myself or I gonna wipe the party, both equivalently undesirable outcome. If I don't know my rotation, I will hit enrage, so I have to become good at what I do, there is no choice. In dungeon though, like I said the "if it doesn't kill me I don't have to move" prevail. Why should I move out of that AOE, or get way from that proximity marker if I gonna hit for 33% of my health anyway even if I'm in it or near? Why do I have to try and stack with the group for stack marker, when I know as long as two people in there, it only gonna hit them for 50% HP?

I do believe people learn best via re-enforcement. You can't teach people to avoid AOE by just putting a bunch AOE in the fight for them to 'practice'. In fact, it's actually counter productive to the goal. Because if every time someone got hit with an AOE and it doesn't do anything serious to them, the behavior you're reinforcing is "I don't have to dodge this, does nothing to me anyway", you're not training people to avoid AOE, you're actually training people to stand in it. Now, all you need to have is 1 AOE in the fight, but if they get hit, they die. You'll be surprise how fast people will make a conscious afford on their own even without the pushing of others to NOT stand in that AOE next time.

Right. It wasn't optimal there. But when it doesn't kill you, and you can complete a task or end a fight more quickly -- lost healer DPS included -- by just taking that damage in order to keep dealing damage of your own, then that is the "good play". And this will continue into Savage raiding, even, such as when using Veil and Feint not to flee from Doomtrain's proximity damage knockback, propping yourself up with one of the ghost squares.

It's not just a matter of what you can survive; it's a matter of what you can get away with in terms of throughput and what's worth more. And more damaging effects, by themselves, don't teach that. It's a start, but it needs more.

[RiyahArp]

Aren’t healers supposed to be using more globals on healing abilities? Wouldn’t a change that called for healers to actually have to use more globals to heal be a good thing? I’m all for healer DPS, but healing in this game is extremely trivial. There are so many fights were you don’t even have to use HoTs like Medica II or Aspected Helios or Whispering Dawn because the non-HoT providing equivalents (Medica/Cure III, Helios, or Indom) do most of the healing for you.

Well, we kind of have this with red mage, and red make healing can't really get people to full health from raise without maybe 4 GCDs. That means if they raise and the hit that comes after is large enough, we can't really save them, nor can we really do much if the tank forgets a cooldown and loses 75% health instead of 50%. You get some hard limits to how much you can react since you spend more GCDs/time to do specific levels of healing, and you have less spare GCDS to convert to emergency heals from DPS. That means anyone who screws up is going to be on the floor longer and be more vulnerable when they get up, and be unable to deal with mechanics.

You'd not make healing harder. You'd make DPSing a lot harder and they'd be able to wipe the raid much easier.

[MoroMurasaki]

So - i'm really not in a place to call this...

You probably should have stopped here.

[ViolaCrossfire]

Are you guys ignoring kiting is a thing? Or swiftcast? You do not have to stand still to do damage. And that is ignoring the fact that rotations are not even rewarded that much in dungeons as it is.

[KaivaC]

The thing is though, we are not really getting "gradual" now, with some of the suggestions. A DPS check with potential DPS down...we already have with Nidhogg hard in the add phase. I'm not sure there is any strong infirmity similar. We're talking about fairly hard mechanics with decent timers, and they won't be appreciably different than from ex fights or easy savage ones.

The only way this dungeon can be different is that bosses have HP pools that don't take fifteen minutes to kill, don't have a strict enrage that kills you at 15:01, and have slower mechanics. To be honest, you're probably looking at ARR EX primal difficulty in a boss or so, as if we had full poetics synced. So if you introduce this, you kind of are going to make a big step up in difficulty, based on the casual player's reaction.

I think it's probably better overall if you just kept current ex level trial difficulty, and just required it for story completion if you wanted to do that. Optional experts would just get ignored; there's no real reward that you can't get in other ways in this game from them.

The expert roulette already probably doesn't get used as much as level and 50/60 dungeons. If you increase the potential rewards with harder experts, that's incentive for players to optimize themselves through these. And if players choose not to do it, that's really no different than how the expert roulette is being used now. As it stands, expert is pretty much used as faceroll 5 days a week to cap out whatever the current tomes are for the week.

Much of what was discussed is gradual...it's just that with the nature of the forums, I think your somehow getting it twisted that all of the suggested new expert dungeons should immediately go straight to this. That's not the case at all. You can easily step up the difficulty over a course of dungeons. And again, you wouldn't start seeing truly challenging dungeons until the end of 5.0, which is probably, like, two years away, given the timeline of how HW and SB went. You can hit players with EX/Savage level mechanics without those mechanics being Savage/EX level. Most mechanics in the hard content can be easily stepped down. I mean, shoot, if healing was a major issue, then you could easily have a boss hit a healer with healing potency down at the start of the fight.

You could easily hit all DPS by shaving their current (not max) MP/TP down and throw in some mechanics that gets players used to quick thinking. There are so many tools that the devs could use that wouldn't jump dungeons straight into Savage. I'm not sure why you're not seeing it, or why you're thinking that implementing anything from Savage would automatically be Savage-level mechanics. And on the comment about experts and rewards - I know you saw some of the thoughts I had about how to incentivize players into going into the new Experts. Adjust the rewards appropriately - again, best way to do this in my eyes as I type up this quick sentence without thinking too deeply on it: offer up to 200 current tomestones over the weekly cap, and give gear that is about 5 or 10 levels below the 1st level of the current raid tier. Or better yet, if Eureka is successful, offer up accessories or food that enhances certain stats or skills (naturally make it unique and untradable). Say, right about now - offer up 355 gear in these harder expert dungeons (put a loot lockout on them to prevent farming). Thoughts like that.

Honestly, I really don't see the harm in this at all. These new expert dungeons could create content for the midcore, and for casuals hoping to go to a midcore level as far as player skill goes.

[Raven2014]

Right. It wasn't optimal there. But when it doesn't kill you, and you can complete a task or end a fight more quickly -- lost healer DPS included -- by just taking that damage in order to keep dealing damage of your own, then that is the "good play". And this will continue into Savage raiding, even, such as when using Veil and Feint not to flee from Doomtrain's proximity damage knockback, propping yourself up with one of the ghost squares.

It's not just a matter of what you can survive; it's a matter of what you can get away with in terms of throughput and what's worth more. And more damaging effects, by themselves, don't teach that. It's a start, but it needs more.

No, no, and no: you are only playing this scenario in your head as ideally how you want it to happen, that not what happened 5 years ago, not what happened last year, not what happening this year, and it ain't gonna happen next year. You don't have to talk about optimization to me in raid, I do that a lot, and that's not even the topic being discussed here. This is about how to get people do basic algebra problem, not making the jump to calculus. Again, these examples are what really happening in the game:

- Me and some static mates were doing Sigma normal a few weeks ago. I noticed the O8 we were doing took a lot more time than usual to clear. In the end we cleared it no problem. but during loot roll, a RDM said something "well, that fight is a lot easier than I thought". And one of my static mate immediately burst out laughing over discord. I asked why, and she told me THAT RDM who just said the fight was easy was doing really low DPS, it wasn't below the tank, it was below even the healer.
- That "Shield blob" tank in another thread. Same thing, he did just about every thing wrong, yet after some argument he said he went in with another group and "clear it just fine", and just about any average player reading his thread know it is not fine.

See, the problem here is, from their perspective they are doing "fine", because that's basically what the game is telling them. That RDM saw a clear with no wipe, and believe the fight was easy. Maybe that tank believe "we clear it just fine" because to him, if he can clear the dungeon, than it's fine, and he did nothing wrong. And see, more often than not because this is the belief the game bestow on them, it's very difficult to convince these people they should improve. I don't think telling that RDM to play better will work. That tank made the thread because he basically reject singular advise from his group, and he would have continue to believe he's fine if he hadn't made that thread and 20 other people tell him he's wrong. The players can only do so much but ultimately, they can't swim against the current that is the system.

[RiyahArp]

The expert roulette already probably doesn't get used as much as level and 50/60 dungeons. If you increase the potential rewards with harder experts, that's incentive for players to optimize themselves through these....

You're not really getting my point. I don't know how much clearer I can make it.

If you want to make the players better, and things like rabanastre and shinryu have failed at that, you can't do things that are less difficult than it. Even if it's harder than current expert, you will still have the same problems. To really make players good, you have to make them either perfect the mechanic or die and be unable to complete the instance. But current casual content really doesn't demand this, and only ex primals and up demand it consistently. So the changes you will make will need the teeth of mechanic or die gameplay to teach the players what you want, in the same way Shinryu or Rab teaches you to look for a target outside of the arena and run the correct way or die (although surecast or fully mitigating the attack prevents it too in shin's case.) But they must be harder than those two, and that's perilously close to an easy EX trial or very easy savage. Otherwise it's just bardem's mettle, where it doesn't teach anything and you can carry people through it.

I don't think people care enough about rewards to do hard content. Arguably people stop caring to even do easy content; people stop doing the 8 man stories once they get a weapon for their main, and 50-60 roulette is dead because poetics and creation is worthless to any vet in the game. Carrots only go so far; people aren't going to do an hour of wiping for a few tomes. You'd need the stick; if you don't be hard expert, you can't progress the story.

[Shurrikhan]

snip

Let's review:

Not true. When I'm raiding, I'm very good at mechanic in raid. Because every time a mistake is made in raid, I got punished for it, either I gonna die myself or I gonna wipe the party, both equivalently undesirable outcome. If I don't know my rotation, I will hit enrage, so I have to become good at what I do, there is no choice. In dungeon though, like I said the "if it doesn't kill me I don't have to move" prevail. Why should I move out of that AOE, or get way from that proximity marker if I gonna hit for 33% of my health anyway even if I'm in it or near? Why do I have to try and stack with the group for stack marker, when I know as long as two people in there, it only gonna hit them for 50% HP?

I do believe people learn best via re-enforcement. You can't teach people to avoid AOE by just putting a bunch AOE in the fight for them to 'practice'. In fact, it's actually counter productive to the goal. Because if every time someone got hit with an AOE and it doesn't do anything serious to them, the behavior you're reinforcing is "I don't have to dodge this, does nothing to me anyway", you're not training people to avoid AOE, you're actually training people to stand in it. Now, all you need to have is 1 AOE in the fight, but if they get hit, they die. You'll be surprise how fast people will make a conscious afford on their own even without the pushing of others to NOT stand in that AOE next time.

I would have thought this obvious since you raid as well, but since you've seemingly misconstrued my reply, I guess I'll retouch on this.

At minimal ilvl, avoiding enrage goes beyond knowing your rotation and not dying. It depends on CD sync and uptime as well. And there are absolutely times where taking that extra damage, where still not fatal in the short-term, in order to more safely surpass enrage is absolutely optimal. You make the calculation. But, it's a calculation. It requires weighing TWO things against each other. We need BOTH to be visible to players.

Without that actual calculation going on, you simply trade one absolute for another -- neglect for classical conditioning. "I see AoE; I move." Doesn't matter if it hits for 10 HP or 100,000. Despite all evidence to the contrary based on mob type or locale, it might kill me, so I move and stay out, wasting, wasting, wasting... uptime.

And again, I am NOT saying that the game shouldn't have stronger AoEs. But instant-death damage, especially at random, encourages scarcely, if any, additional game sense nor any additional calculation. Without that other half, damage, one is "fine" in just abandoning whatever they're doing, and running back to the start of the hallway or far end of the arena as not to die. Why should there be a need for a final GCD, or quick reentry? That's not going to kill him. So, like a whimpy AoE, why should he care?

The damage is already sufficient to teach how not to siphon uptime away from your healer. That's not to say it can't be a whole lot more punishing as to be obvious. The balance is certainly tilted too close to leniency, at the moment. But at least, being non-fatal, instantly or effectively, it allows for experimentation. It allows people to learn their reaction limits, the AoE timings, and so forth, without being yelled at by others. And that will actually go a whole lot further towards teaching them how to deal with Savage, ultimately, than being viably forced out of uptime by any AoE that might possibly one-shot them.

That's why I said it's a start, but it's incomplete. Mechanics are only half of Savage, for instance. Doing mechanics WHILE still maintaining proper throughput it what makes Savage... "Savage".

Short of that, you're only replacing one irritating form of blatant neglect with another.

This is why I advocate a proper difficulty curve. It's why, especially in the absence of such due to allowance for especially casual players (or, more accurately, negligent players, as plenty of casual players can learn just fine in those fewer hours), I advocate an official in-game (relative potency rDPS) parser. We need danger, but we also need appropriate context for something real to actually be endangered (which, when you consider what death actually does, can only ever be uptime -- throughput).

The sad thing is that all you really need in order to push even small amounts of damage into bad form even in the present system, is a better understood standard of healer DPS. When you get hit unnecessarily, you slow the run, because now your healer's dealing less damage.