Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[Tridus]

I actually hate that knockoff mechanics now just mean you have to wait a few seconds before you can be ressed. Falling off should mean falling off and you're out for the rest of the fight. When they changed that in Sophia I was baffled. To this day I STILL hate that change.

The problem with that is that it's not interactive. If you fall of early because of lag or a mistake and it's a 10 minute fight, what are you now doing? Playing on your phone, alt+tabbing to something else, getting up and leaving the game entirely, or in the worst case scenario, the group calls for a wipe and restart because you now can't beat enrage and will fail in 8 minutes (granted this one can happen in some fights anyway if you're very tight on DPS already, but this would make it far worse).

All of those, frankly, suck. Telling people to stop playing the game for extended periods of time is flat out poor game design as you're encouraging people to leave the game to go do something else. You're not allowing them to learn from mistakes by getting up and trying it again, and you're excessively punishing the rest of the group by dramatically increasing the cost of a death to the party. If a healer dies, should the outcome of that really be to punish the other healer by forcing them to solo heal the entire thing?

[Paladinleeds]

All of those, frankly, suck. Telling people to stop playing the game for extended periods of time is flat out poor game design as you're encouraging people to leave the game to go do something else.

I did push out a response for that. Just make them like the walls in T5/9. If you land in it you die instantly, maybe even with a debuff that blocks resurrection for a time. I agree that the falloff mechanic is overused, and that it should be used less. But please make falloff actually mean fall out of the arena for the attempt. In its current state, what's the difference between a falloff vs a wall that simply instagibs you? That's what baffles me. The falloff is just a death wall with a different coat of paint.

Like my preference would be something closer to much longer timeout (eg 30 seconds) before being returned to the platform, and it could be done cheekily with Midgardsormr just tossing you back onto the platform with 1hp, so the healer has to get you right away or you're going to get ko'd by the next thing and need a rez anyway. But you need to also make sure it's not a way to cheat an enrage mechanic, so "everyone jump off" = reset.

Yeah, I hear you. Hence the "Resurrection Blocker" debuff to keep you from being able to be immediately ressed. I do like that idea of Middy throwing you back on with 1HP. That's an idea I could get behind. But now I'm reminded of Lakitu in Mariokart just cheekily chucking you back on the track with that smug grin on his cloud... The idea is I want falling off to not just be a death wall with a different coat of paint, but the only way I could think of was "Out = out". Your idea of chucking them back on after 30 seconds with 1HP would achieve making falling off be something different. Good out of box thinking.

[KisaiTenshi]

I actually hate that knockoff mechanics now just mean you have to wait a few seconds before you can be ressed. Falling off should mean falling off and you're out for the rest of the fight. When they changed that in Sophia I was baffled. To this day I STILL hate that change.

Just make them like T9 where the walls instagib you but you don't fall off so you can be ressed. Maybe even add a "Resurrection Blocker" debuff for some time if you want to stop them being able to be instantly ressed. Maybe save the falloff mechanics for Ex versions only as well?

I suppose there was probably outcry about how that "fall off" mechanic works, seeing as it originated in Titan, and newbies would get a quick carry just by screwing up. Don't reward screwups with a carry that way.

Like my preference would be something closer to much longer timeout (eg 30 seconds) before being returned to the platform, and it could be done cheekily with Midgardsormr just tossing you back onto the platform with 1hp, so the healer has to get you right away or you're going to get ko'd by the next thing and need a rez anyway. But you need to also make sure it's not a way to cheat an enrage mechanic, so "everyone jump off" = reset.

[Kaitoo]

I disagre, with the introdcution of ultimate is perfect and there is something for everyone

[Luin]

I disagre, with the introdcution of ultimate is perfect and there is something for everyone

I strongly disagree.

Ultimate is far beyond Savage, not even comparable. Most won't even enter Ultimate, much less clear it.

The primary complaint is there's nothing between standard face-roll content and Savage.

We aren't asking for ultimate to be the standard; that would be nonsense. We're asking for standard content to actually be designed properly, in a way that prepares players for the real content.

I think people don't get that 4 man parties don't allow you to have hard mechanics.

You don't have an offtank or cohealer, so you can't have any meaningful adds. DPS have zero offtank capability and are made of paper; even in normal trials single hits can be 50% of a dps health or more. The burden in 4 man is on the healer first; a bad healer will make things impossible when even a bad tank can be compensated for to some extent. And if you have group mechanics that kill, a DPS will be impacted less than a healer for the most part. They gave us bardem's second boss, which essentially made class not matter.

You have a DPS check in it that's tough, you need everyone 100%. There's no compensating for a bad dps save for kicking them. The tank needs to do every boss perfect because if they go down, chances are both DPS or worse will go down too and then its just a wipe if it reaches the healer.

8 man parties build some redundancy in, and even then hard 8 man content is a pain for most of the playerbase to do and complete. 4 man everyone will need to be perfect all the time, and one person will make it wasted time. The closest analog is the Feast, which is probably the hardest 4 man content we have in general, and people know that if one class is not on point it can easily be a lost game.

They'd probably be better off just making 8 man dungeons or something. We do have varied mechanics in experts; baeslar's wall for example actually has decently complex ones including healer gaols. But making them harder is going to really make it start and stop gameplay with a lot more player kicking.

First of all this is ridiculous. 4mans cant have hard mechanics? No, 4mans just can't have exact carboncopies of 8man mechanics. Exactly what would change about like, Phantom Train or Chadarnook, if we made that a 4man? Absolutely nothing. You would need to scale the Prey damage down slightly because you wouldnt have offhealer shielding or healing after Prey for the next Rain but besides that, it's exactly the same, but with mechanics targeting 1/2 of the players. Lights target 1 instead of 2, and with the 1 tether. If tank is caught in a ghost, you wipe, because you failed the mechanic and you should wipe.

As for 8man dungeons, this has been a point of contention since 2010. It was bad idea then, is bad idea now. It's not practical for 8 people to put in an hour to do a dungeon, much less the hours and hours of progression to learn it, if you actually wanted it to be meaningful content. Even organizing 8people is difficult.

It's lazy to say 4mans cant have mechanics. They can, they just need to be designed for 4 players.

And then to say "oh we cant have mechanics because players will actually need to do them"

That's the point. What in the world did you think we were talking about? You need to say NO.

No, Black Mage. You need to do your rotation. Ice will not work. Dragoon, spamming Heavy Thrust is not enough. White Mage, spamming Cure isn't enough, and tank, spamming Flash isn't enough.

Nobody is asking for ultimate to be the standard. But we're sick and tired of players that have NO idea what to do in this game. And since the game has done literally nothing to enforce some sort of standard of quality upon players and teach the players, we can't expect everybody to go out of their way to learn to play the game using 3rd parties. The blame is not 100% on the players here.

I cannot say the game has done a poor job teaching players to play the game, because that would imply that the game has even attempted to do so.

[KisaiTenshi]

As for 8man dungeons, this has been a point of contention since 2010. It was bad idea then, is bad idea now. It's not practical for 8 people to put in an hour to do a dungeon, much less the hours and hours of progression to learn it, if you actually wanted it to be meaningful content. Even organizing 8people is difficult.

It's completely practical to put in an hour+ to do a dungeon, you just have to design the dungeon so you can come-and-go, which is how dungeons work when they aren't instanced. People want to explore, not just kill things mindlessly and endlessly. Version 1.0 let you explore, but it was ham-handed by not having the ability to jump, not allowing people to fall to their death, not letting players enter "completely built dungeons", gated off by a door or NPC.

A way to do 8/16/24 player dungeons , as main story content, is to design it so that the area is not gated off (eg you seemlessly enter it from the overworld, or can pick it from a teleport list) and can thus are always entered solo, and anyone else who is on that part of the story, enters the same instance and auto-partied until the maximum number of players is hit. If you don't meet the requirements to complete the dungeon (eg under-leveled, under-geared) you get dropped into the "auto-fail" instance where you are thrown out of the dungeon early on without wasting more than 3 minutes, and given some kind of message like "Perhaps you should come back later when you're stronger/better equipped", where as if you meet the requirements, you can proceed.

Once you clear the story part, you only join other non-cleared instances as long as there are ones. If everyone has cleared it, then the game creates a default "already won" instance to bleed off players who already cleared it (to avoid the mess that MSQ roulette creates.) It automatically becomes non-story "hard" mode if there are no non-cleared players,. Hard more scales the monsters by the combat power of the collective players in it, so when the boss spawns and locks the boss room, you can't just zerg the boss, or keep throwing yourself at it. You can also force a hard mode once completed by manually creating at least a Light Party of players who have already completed it. If players leave during the boss fight, the boss will not rescale until a wipe.

If players need to go, they always come back to the same one if the instance for the dungeon hasn't been cleared yet. If players don't like the people they're paired with, they have to sit out the dungeon for a week.

And if the content becomes "stale", eg nobody joining it, both normal and hard mode can still be completed solo, just it will take 8 times longer. During solo runs at the boss, if you're the only one in the instance, the boss will be scaled directly to what job you're playing so there are no "easy solo" jobs. Unlike "undersized party" options, the dungeon is always level synced regardless of the number of players, as the combat scaling considers the collective number of players and their jobs.

Of course SE wouldn't do that because that would require more server resources to keep instances open all week instead of open for the 10-15 minutes most duties can be completed in.

[RiyahArp]

Exactly what would change about like, Phantom Train or Chadarnook, if we made that a 4man...If tank is caught in a ghost, you wipe, because you failed the mechanic and you should wipe

You wouldn't be allowed to make any mistakes, mostly. You answered yourself. The healer gets caught by a ghost, you wipe because he can't kill it fast enough before people die. The healer makes any mistake at all, and you are all dead. Essentially we are talking landsides and being knocked off arenas, but one person getting such would just make it a fast wipe instead of a slow limp to the finish. If you get nailed once, game over.

I don't think a lot of people would be into that kind of content. If its decently hard, combined with no real redundancy, its going to be worse than ex trials. I mean, at least in them you can recover from a mistake either with your cohealer or cotank, or 3 dps can cover for a fourth. It's not easy, and may not always be possible, but you can. In 4-man, healer missed the mechanic? wipe. Healer dies to a specific mechanic but gets the rest? Wipe, instead of being able to finish.

I mean, everyone here talks a lot of junk about wanting hard content, but noone here is going to love 45 min dungeons or 20 min vote disbands because no one can drop the meteors correctly.

Based on what I've seen from pugs and PF I walk into everything expecting to wipe until we disband because people are bad and lazy. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment. The idea that people expect perfection in a game where 0 dps healers are clearing endgame/tanks who don't leave tank stance are common is laughable.

Yeah you probably suck, with that attitude. And you like to berate non raiders about being elitist.

[HyoMinPark]

Yeah you probably suck, with that attitude. And you like to berate non raiders about being elitist.

That’s uncalled for. Moro has a point—just today there was a tank in the Aery (I had queued in to help a friend level their SCH, which was level 56) that was wearing i90 green gear (not the AF gear) and was using an item level 45 (level 45) NQ greatsword. When it was said that they could go to Mor Dhona and easily buy an i120 weapon that would make their holding aggro much easier (because everyone was tanking the trash mobs, including the SCH just from ripping hate through sheer healing, not DPS), they responded with snark. No one was even rude about it either. And the sad thing was, they had a level 70 job, and multiple level 60s. They weren’t a new player, and they probably knew that what they were doing wasn’t a good thing.

I did a God Kefka clear tonight, and the MNK in there with the i375 Diamond weapon could not deal more damage than a RDM, and were barely doing more damage than me, a BRD that is still wearing an i350 body piece and didn’t have a DRG. The SCH also had extremely low HPS, rarely made use of their oGCD heals, and when we pointed out that they needed to time some Indoms for when the DPS had to eat skulls during First and Third Forsakens (this was after the 6th wipe to God), they tried to blame the AST for not healing, whom had almost double the HPS they had in the previous pull, and almost as much DPS.

There are plenty of people in all forms of content that do not play at any level of perfection. To insinuate that everyone calls for perfection is proven wrong just by the existence of people like the two I have described here.



Aside from pointing out this uncalled for comment, I also want to point out the irony of you calling someone elitist when your comment is far from nice, and it has its own type of elitism built into it.

You wouldn't be allowed to make any mistakes, mostly. You answered yourself. The healer gets caught by a ghost, you wipe because he can't kill it fast enough before people die. The healer makes any mistake at all, and you are all dead. Essentially we are talking landsides and being knocked off arenas, but one person getting such would just make it a fast wipe instead of a slow limp to the finish. If you get nailed once, game over.

It’s my opinion that the Landslide mechanic (and any other mechanic that knocked you permanently off an arena and out of the fight for the rest of its duration) is an excellent mechanic because it teaches you that, if you fail, you’re going to be punished for it. The story mode (and Hard Mode) of Titan have more forgiving/less complex landslides, corresponding with their intended difficulty. Titan Extreme, by comparison, has far less forgiving Landslides in that they happen faster, more frequently, and, later on, more than one landslide occurs at once.

The mechanics can be slowed enough to give people time to react in easier forms of content. But they should still be punishing if the individual fails, so that they can learn “Hey, I probably should dodge that, because this 90% Damage Down is awful” or “I should move faster out of that Landslide, because it sucks to be knocked off the platform for the rest of the fight”. Again, see what I said before in that there are tanks in Kefka Normal Mode that get up to 8 Vulnerability Stacks, are finally one-shot by a tankbuster (with AND without a cooldown being used, save for an immunity), and then opt to cry to the healer about dying as opposed to accepting responsibility for the fact that they failed mechanics 8 times, and got 8 stacks of vulnerability that essentially sealed their demise when Kefka decided it was time to Hyperdrive them again.

It’s already forgiving enough that it takes multiple stacks of Vulnerability to even make something tickle in normal mode, much less it finally taking 8 to do a tank in.

[Sebazy]

I honestly don't remember people complaining about the difficulty of AK in 2.0, rather that it was simply faster to grind WP mainly due to the ease of which you could skip large swathes of trash via boss lockouts.

Demonwall was great because you couldn't rely on simply zerging your way through it, the Bees acted as a great DPS check usually making things rather messy if you couldn't dispose of them quickly with early groups usually LBing the first set then aiming to kill the wall before the second set wiped you.

Pharos Sirius was a different kettle of fish. I'll go out on a limb and just say that the first boss was outright lame. The adds and stacking bomb mechanic were fine, the super fast ground aoes tipped it over the line though and whilst it didn't really cause me trouble as a healer, I can imagine that it must have been horrible as a melee.

The bird boss was a great example of a difficult 4 man boss done right. Whilst the mechanics were a little confusing at first glance, paying attention to debuffs, tooltips and animations cleared things up pretty quickly and the fight was actually pretty easy going if you did the mechanics right. Ignore them and it would quickly punish you by way of a thorough curb stomping that hasn't been seen in a 4 man since.

Not really sure what the deal was with the 3rd boss with the zombie adds, even early on with a sub par group it typically died before enough adds spawned to cause any real trouble. /shrug.

Siren was another great boss too IMO. Choreographing her divebomb/circle aoes would have been the perfect fix to tone her down rather than the outright neutering that SE eventually settled on.

It’s already forgiving enough that it takes multiple stacks of Vulnerability to even make something tickle in normal mode, much less it finally taking 8 to do a tank in.

I really cannot +1 this point enough. The biggest problem with end game 4 man content isn't that the mechanics are too simple, but that you can safely ignore almost everything with little to no risk. Even when you do step over the line and actually manage to get yourself killed, the only real penalty is a chunk of your healers MP to get you going again (Which is only really a penalty in itself if your healer is DPSing fairly hard). Whilst proceeding to kill the boss that bit slower can be an annoyance, it's certainly not going to cause a wipe on the current crop of bosses. I'm fairly confident the current crop of expert dungeons could be cleared by a Warrior and WHM or SCH duo with relative ease with the only question marks being the particularly generous DPS checks on both final bosses.

We don't need to see ultimate grade mechanics or even the return of the likes of Pharos Sirius to be honest. Rather I suspect most would be happy with dungeons that actually legitimately punish you when you repeatedly sit in the fire/cleave/spinny death thing. People can and will adjust to stuff like that, they managed it with AK in 2.0, they managed it with Garuda HM and most even managed it with Titan HM.

Healers messing up or sleeping up might cause a wipe? Good. Healer's shouldn't get an easy ride because they are special snowflakes. On the contrary, whilst I think it's fair not to expect huge DPS out of the average healer if they have mechanics or legitimate damage to keep an eye on, they should still be tested and made to work all the same, be it via forcing them to heal or move.

I did a God Kefka clear tonight

I got curious and stalked the log

That SCH was pretty much flogging themselves to death by way of frighteningly excessive succoring coupled with missed potential out of Lucid Dreaming and Aetherflow. They flatlined in MP 5-6 times in that clear. No surprise they had no mp to do much of anything else. Madness.

[Tridus]

It’s my opinion that the Landslide mechanic (and any other mechanic that knocked you permanently off an arena and out of the fight for the rest of its duration) is an excellent mechanic because it teaches you that, if you fail, you’re going to be punished for it. The story mode (and Hard Mode) of Titan have more forgiving/less complex landslides, corresponding with their intended difficulty. Titan Extreme, by comparison, has far less forgiving Landslides in that they happen faster, more frequently, and, later on, more than one landslide occurs at once.

It's funny because I loathe that mechanic. As a healer main, I'm... irrelevant. The game forbids me from doing my job. Not only can I not prevent it (which is the point), I also can't recover it. Whoever failed it gets to watch the game for a few minutes and do nothing (or more likely: get up and get a drink) and I get to not do what I'm there to do. It's not fun for anyone.

The revised version on something like Ravana/Bismarck (or Hashmal's tower crushing) are IMO far better. They clearly punish anyone who fails tremendously, but not in a "you're watching the rest of the fight and I'm powerless to do anything about it" way.