Thread: 4.25 and beyond

Originally Posted by Molic

I guess new types of battle content, all we got right now is basically dodge this and kill that. They could add objectives, massive city wide battles, all sorts of things people have made 1000s of threads about at this point. Eureka might change it up, but not very hopefully at this point.

I would support city FATEs, not instances because been there done that.

Originally Posted by Molic

Really just wish they could make better midcore content and actual raids. All we have now is like a series of boss fights for savage, alliance raids are just big dungeons, and dungeons, they may as well just put us in a hallway. It all looks cool, but meh its just a chore. Nothing new, nothing fun, no puzzles, a literal treadmill.

SE should bring back that questionnaire thing they used a the end of 1.0, doubt they even listen to the playerbase anymore.

The raids are worse than that, there nothing but zone in, fight the boss, zone out. Its like we get 4 primals every 6 months, its very boring. When I think of good raids, I think of what WoW offered, they took time and had lots of bosses that were fun. I don't really care for a 15 minute boss fight where if you make a tiny mistake, its a wipe. I'd rather have a lot of bosses that take 6 to 8 minutes to fight and move on. Clearing trash that had a nice chance of dropping bonus loot also made things more interesting. I want raids to be a nice fun 2 hour dungeon crawl that tells a story and offer a non-linear method of encountering the content.

I believe that the raid team sizes are totally off the mark, 8 players makes mistakes way too punishing where if they upped things to 16 players, it would make things considerably easier. 8 players is great if your at the top of your game but if your a casual and want something more than the story mode, your out of luck. A 16 player mode would offer more opportunities and better tuning possibilities over a 24 player version which is too large and a zerg fest. 2 tanks, 2 to 4 healers and 10 to 12 DPS would work very nicely.

I'm also growing tired of overused raid mechanics such as one shots and falling off platforms or the death wall... it gets old really fast and it feels like a crutch they are using way too much. The other mechanic I also don't like is what I have called the Tokyo rule, if you don't live very close to the servers and have crazy good latency, you can miss a simple mechanic and pow... wipe the raid again. I understand that they don't trust client side processing because there afraid of cheaters but they really need to let that go and accept the fact that they need more client side processing. Deal with the cheaters by better log analysis or just accept that it will happen. It is a small percentage but eventually somebody will brag about what is going on and you can bust the whole lot of them when you catch them. Healers having to DPS and tanks having to DPS a lot also hurt things for me, I miss the old trinity where healers had to heal with lots of different heals and tanks had to tank with lots of different defenses and taunts.

One of the other things that kept me in the game was the music but Solken's work seems to be missing in the latest raids. I'm not particularly fond of listing to the Ultros & Typhon trial music (I know its actually from 6 but never played it so that's my only reference). His works kept the other raids much more interesting, engaging and enjoyable. I miss jamming to his music... Solken where are you!

Lastly, I miss the old relic grinds helped keep me in the game and their absence is painfully felt. It wasn't the best stuff in the world but it gave me something to do while waiting 6 months for new raid content. As it is now, I'm burned out and starting to play other games after 4 years straight of enjoying XIV. As for Eureka, it looks dull, brown, uninteresting and overly complicated. I want bright, colorful zones with lots of beauty and not a bunch of brown scenery. I'm tired of brown scenery, we had 3 zones of it already, yes it may be realistic but... this is a fantasy game... lets have some color like you did in the Othard zones, those were beautiful.

Well, I've rambled and ranted long enough... time for me to get some sleep and resume playing other games. Hopefully I will catch the spark to play this game in the future, but as of now...

Well I wanted large group midcore content that FCs can complete together but thats a thing of the past. I've done everything you can imagine outside of the norm holding to the hope that such content would eventually come. But its been several years and its becoming hard to justify being a constant monthly subscriber. I'm not excited about Eureka, feels very been there done that. I don't think its being burned out, I've just given up that this game can be played on anything but short bursts.

Originally Posted by Ayer2015

Itemization and gear progression is one of the larger issues in this game honestly.

Ding ding, we have a winner.

On top of the same content roll out (new 24 mans, expert dungeons) there is always that lack of itemization and interesting gear that persists while also going out of date extremely quickly, completely executing the contents longevity.

The game does a lot of things right and some things bad, as every mmo does, but we have had uninteresting gear (stats, no set bonuses, no chance on hit effects etc) since 1.0. and I think it's time gearing and content roll out change.

I don't know about the rest of you, but grinding a new tomestone for gear every patch cycle doesn't exactly scream fresh gameplay to me, while grinding the said gear goes out of date very quickly.

I hate to keep going back to ffxi references but in that game gear could last you years, here gear can last you weeks, that doesn't make sense from a development point of view while also leaving the game stale.

Although I still feel like there is plenty for me to do (mostly because I've been too busy since SB hit to level up all my classes), I definitely agree that I no longer feel the drive to stay on the treadmill like I did back in the "old" days. I don't have a real life schedule that allows me to raid anymore, so what is even the point to worrying about capping to get tome gear? You can clear primals with just the gear you get handed free from weeklies like Omega.

I can vanish from the game for months, come back, get gear essentially handed to me because the next tomestone has rolled out, and still go on to beat current content, then rinse, lather, repeat. The only reason I don't unsubscribe when I get busy IRL is my personal house. :/ (Which, speaking of, you'd think if they wanted to secure more consistent subscription income between patches, they'd do something about the housing situation--the more people with houses, the fewer people who can unsubscribe...)

To me, the game just seems to be suffering from a lack of truly fresh ideas. There's nothing wrong with the content we're getting, but it's the same thing every time, reskinned... The formula is always the same: dungeon, 24-man, new primal, new 8-man, new beast tribes, repeat, repeat, repeat. The models and battle scripts are different but the ideas and structure are not fresh at all. Even if Eureka is awesome, it's essentially the first "new" thing we've gotten since SB itself hit almost a year ago. It took us almost a year to get one mostly new thing, and there's no guarantee it's going to live up to the hype surrounding it; it could be a complete flop. Yikesssss.

I agree with the comment about resources; it definitely feels like this game doesn't have the resources to be as great as it could be. They don't seem to have the time, funding, or staff to create truly new content--just giving us the same old, same old seems to already be taxing the team (and the server hamsters) to their limits... Feels bad man.

Edit: As I reflect on "new" content that worked, Palace of the Dead of course stands out. People can complain about speed levelers, but as an entertaining activity, especially the later floors have good replay value and are fun to do with friends. ...But wasn't Palace of the Dead almost entirely designed by a player who posted on these forums, not even originally by the design team? Perhaps instead of useless gear contests, they should hold a "design new content" contest every few months to farm out the idea generation process to the players themselves.