State of the Game: Savage+ Dungeons and End Game Leves

[Delmontyb]

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to sneak in to say, we very much appreciate your valuable ideas and feedback regarding more high-difficulty content! We escalated this thread to the devs, but please note this doesn't guarantee that these ideas will be implemented.

On that note, my Pomander of Concealment is wearing off (who cleared Heaven on High?!) Thanks again!

Thanks for letting us know you send this over to the devs. The goal is hopefully to take what you all have already created and join it together for a bit of dynamic content that hopefully doesn't take a ton of development time.

Really hoping we can see something like this in 5.0 (or sooner, i wouldn't mind)... The hope is that there isn't any cap on the number of times a dungeon can level up, and allow people to even farm Savage Plus dungeons at whatever is the best level they have reached.

More detail and context can be found here: https://youtu.be/5lp8xQ5h3g4

[Bourne_Endeavor]

That comes from gear creep in the game. You start Swallows Compass with i350 or better gear and it literately has no teeth. I've gone into it with my SCH who didn't have an i3xx weapon but otherwise had all i360 gear from my WHM. This goes back to basic JRPG design. You either outlevel the content or you outgear the content or both, to make it easier. The trouble is that, even in old SNES JRPG's is literately the fastest solution when you've outgeared and outleveled the content will sideline the healer. In single player games, it is fine to do that, in a MMORPG it turns every piece of content into "boring" for the healer.

This is precisely why people keep asking for Mythic+ dungeons and harder casual content. Current dungeons are boring—something the developers outright acknowledged. Swallow's Compass is an end game dungeon with an ilvl tuned so low it's invalidated before it even releases. At least in JRPGs, you typically don't overgear new areas unless you powerlevel beforehand yet dungeons are the equivalent of players grinding for several hours despite not actually grinding at all. Put simply, it's poor design because it provides no incentive for players to learn or play their intended roles. Healers DPS because they're bored. Tanks pull the entire room because they're bored. And putting all this aside, I have healed these dungeons near the minimum ilvl with a tank equally low. I still spent significantly more time DPSing because things simply didn't hit hard enough.

Being kicked by raiders once, is one time too many. You and others wonder why I have such a axe to grind against parser users, the first and only time I was kicked without any communication at all from any party, in 2.5 both DPS players had fflogs in their lodestone profiles,which is what made me aware of that sites existence. This was on The Keeper of the Lake during Expert roulette, which up to that point I had cleared plenty of times, and even with a party with a tank who was wearing DPS gear. I'm willing to roll with what I get on DF, the raiders should not be kicking players for "play style" differences, especially not from dungeon content. The impression I get from the forum raiders is that they check players lodestones and fflogs and kick players just to improve their own parses.

Translation: "I am entitled to your time."

You are literally telling raiders to give them their time because you demand it yet you have the audacity to call us selfish? Why are we obligated to carry you through content if you aren't making a concerted effort to try? In a recent o5s party, I had a PLD who simply wouldn't provoke when I got the prey mechanic, which drops a proximity aoe under my feet after roughly five seconds. A tank buster precedes this oncoming damage, therefore the OT, ideally, takes the buster by provoking the boss. He didn't despite being asked before we pulled and twice afterwards when we wiped. He actually argued he shouldn't have to, essentially telling me to do the mechanic myself. Not only does this force me either into tank stance or unnecessarily blow CDs unless I have Holmgang available, it puts more pressure on the healers who now have a heavy amount of incoming damage on the MT all because one person couldn't be a team player. According to you, we're required to adapt otherwise it's selfish? Is he not selfish for demanding I and both healers adapt around his laziness? We tried four times before the party disbanded.

Instead of blaming FFlogs, raiders and everyone else, how about you reflect on why you were kicked? I have seen you heal before. You linked that Anti-Tower video. Considering Anti-Tower released long after 2.5, it's far more likely they kicked you because you couldn't perform even your base role correctly and caused wipes, especially as ACT was not nearly as ubiquitous or accepted back then. Many of us arguing with you now offered advice on how to improve—I, specifically, remembering outlining a baseline rotation you could use that proved effective for me while learning. Don't I sound absolutely toxic? Instead of showing a little humility, you decried everyone who dared criticise you, dug in your heels and insisted it was everyone else's fault. Now if you were kicked for entirely frivolous reasons, so? You think I haven't been? Someone kicked me in an A1S party when we were light farming because they insisted all puddles get stacked middle and I mistimed my movements. Am I going to fault everyone because of one person's actions? What a depressing world to leave in if everyone were that petty.

You have that impression yet I'm currently watching Xeno, notorious "bully," help a PLD with his weekly clear. Over seven pulls, and despite the PLD clearly having little idea how to properly tank God Kefka, Xeno hasn't left.

What makes you think I would ever want to play with a parser user after that? No doubt I've played with people who were parsing everything because they're concerned about their ranking on that site, but I don't want to hear it. It is cheating, it violates the ToS, so I'm objectively right.

You wouldn't, because it's easier to shift the blame onto others. Your arrogance is so profound, you won't even entertain the mere idea you could possibly be wrong. "It must be those evil raiders! I know everything about WHM!" Regardless, cheating would be Ungarmax. A parse simply reveals how much damage and healing you do. The only thing "objectively right" is your bias.

That only means Lucky Bancho theoretically more accurate as they are only counting clears before gear creep sets in. It would be nice if SE posted clear rates for content themselves so we can quit having this argument about clear rates. Right now, I doubt few players have legitimate clears in hard content, be it parser usage, bought carries, or whatever.

You mean more accurate than the random numbers you pulled from your head with no source to verify them? Yeah, that's generally how statistics work.

Why do I even care? How does someone else cheating themselves affect my ability to play the game? Have you ever been at school or a job where your performance is measured by doing things by the book, and you're near the top of your ability, and then you see the scores posted for other people on your team and you end up at the middle or bottom? Then you're the one that is told to improve, meanwhile the people above you continue to game the grading metric by doing things wrong, and creating more work for other staff to fix their mistakes. I have a real bone to pick with people who insist they aren't cheating, when they absolutely are.

And here it is. I am glad you have finally admitted to only giving a damn about yourself. I suppose you're unfamiliar with the concept of "teamwork?" In fact, let's use your analogy! The direct equivalent would be a group assignment where you only perform the bare minimum while your colleagues do everything else. See, you're under the false assumption you do everything correct—refusing to acknowledge a healer who can both heal more effectively and DPS is 100% superior. They performed the exact same task, but contributed more to the party. Therefore, you aren't "near the top of your ability." That healer didn't cheat, they simply found a more effective way to heal than you. But you couldn't care less. So I have a simple, ultimately, rhetorical question. If you "don't even care." Why should I? Why should I care what you want when you refuse to show that same courtesy? Going back to the school analogy, if I discovered a faster means of researching the information, thus my method is better. Would you accept and adapt? Evidently not, since we have long established you'd rather remain stubborn.

The analogy here is that "the meta" is the result of cheating. The meta doesn't play by the rules the system goes by. It only exists because the game doesn't punish "pushing the work to others", in that post I quoted of yours about tanking, if you turn tank stance off, you are forcing the other players to have to use their enmity reduction if you make a mistake. If you are are a healer, and focusing on DPS, you're forcing the players to use their self-heal, and thus reducing their DPS in the process. The healer DPS doesn't count in the content design, the DPS's DPS does.

Heaven forbid everyone contributes in a team game! How dare I expect those dastardly DPS to use an ability that doesn't mess up their rotation or lower their damage in any conceivable way?! I am simply awful.

Dripping sarcasm aside, if you actually did harder content, you would know this simply isn't true. As a melee main myself, I seldom touch either Second Wind or Bloodbath unless I take extra damage either to maintain uptime or because I messed up a mechanic. Neither ability reduces a DPS' damage whatsoever. While Purification/Third Eye do, it's been calculated to be a greater loss for the raid forcing the tank back into tank stance, especially as Seigan's potency is so negligible, some of the top ranked Samurai don't even have a single cast of it. With properly rotated Shirks between the tanks, this is rarely an issue. And if it is, you will often see tanks adjust with a threat combo or Defiance/Unchained.

If the game's regular content "had more teeth", the healer should never have time to throw Stone/Malefic consecutively, the tank or party should be bleeding enough that taking 5 seconds to throw stone twice would result in the tank or the healer's death without the tank using a CD. Yet on the healer forums we keep seeing players asking for more DPS skills as a healer, because they want to be a green DPS, they do not want to be a healer. The tank, likewise, should lose enmity the second they are out of tank stance, and the fact that doesn't happen shows a large blindspot with how content is designed (the content always assumes the tank is in tank stance.) If they are not in tank stance, they are not "a tank", and the healer should become the primary target of any mob that isn't being targeted. If there's only 3 mobs, you can drop tank stance and the DPS can all deal with one add, and the healer can use party healing without becoming the target. Yet, that's not how the game's logic works. Even in the single player content like the MCH level 50 job quest or the MSQ solo duty where you fight the GC's, where there are belligerent healers present, you the player are not going to fight the belligerent tank first unless they're actively preventing you from getting to the belligerent healer. Those belligerent healers are always casting healing magic because you're damaging the belligerent mob group. If you sit there long enough without doing anything, you might see the belligerent healers cast stone.

Has it ever occurred to you people ask for more DPS abilities because healing requirements in this game are extremely easy, thus they find it boring to spam Broil/Malefic III/Stone IV endlessly? There have been just as many threads asking for more healer checks, discussing how healer potency is too high or how healers barely need to heal. Nothing has changed. Therefore, many healers have simply given up expecting to actually be healers in this game, but still want to be entertained. So they ask for more DPS abilities since the devs haven't listened to their complaints about how low healing requirements are. Coincidentally, I once had a situation where our tank was a troll and promptly bailed on us in Kugane Castle. The BRD elected to tank Yojimbo, and healing her was arguably the most fun I've had healing a dungeon boss since I started playing this game. Why? For once, I had to consistently heal otherwise she dies. I could still weave in DPS abilities, but not nearly to the extent I would normally, especially in that dungeon where Assize usually handles everything. I would love seeing incoming damage like that so I would actually need to bother with Cure II and more actively healing.

As for tanks, if enmity gradually reduced whenever you went into DPS stance, tanks would finally have something to care about besides damage. The main reason they focus so heavily on their DPS is because nothing else currently matters. You only need enough mitigation to survive the incoming attacks. If I can live through a tank buster with a CD and maintain enmity while in deliverance, I have no reason to touch Defiance. Higher incoming damage, more frequent damage spikes and a gradual enmity reduction would give tanks actual mechanics besides "press a cooldown during this scripted event before going back to being a DPS." Reducing aggro immediately makes such a change too rigid, in my opinion. The interesting aspect would be tanks weaving tank stance and learning how to get the most out of DPS stance while not being a hindrance. Don't make the reduction too gradual otherwise people ignore it, but too fast and it becomes "just sit in tank stance whenever you have the boss and don't think about it."

For the same reason, healers should still have an opportunity to DPS. That aspect remains fun and engaging. The issue is how one-sided it is currently. Much like the tanks above, make it so you can weave DPS abilities in once damage settles, however you will spend far more time actually healing. 20/30% DPSing and 80/70% healing is a good benchmark to work around as it rewards better skilled players without forcing it onto everyone else. If content hit harder, you aren't going to see PF demand healer DPS nearly to the extent they do now because 20% isn't much whereas right now healer DPS is enormous.

We may actually have some common ground if you came into these discussion with less of an axe to grind. Regardless, it's on the developers to design content where tank stance and healing is more a necessity if they want people to care about it, not on parsers. Raiders will adapt to whenever the game allows. Presently, it allows us to aggressive DPS.

[KaivaC]

Being kicked by raiders once, is one time too many. You and others wonder why I have such a axe to grind against parser users, the first and only time I was kicked without any communication at all from any party, in 2.5 both DPS players had fflogs in their lodestone profiles,which is what made me aware of that sites existence. This was on The Keeper of the Lake during Expert roulette, which up to that point I had cleared plenty of times, and even with a party with a tank who was wearing DPS gear. I'm willing to roll with what I get on DF, the raiders should not be kicking players for "play style" differences, especially not from dungeon content. The impression I get from the forum raiders is that they check players lodestones and fflogs and kick players just to improve their own parses.

What makes you think I would ever want to play with a parser user after that? No doubt I've played with people who were parsing everything because they're concerned about their ranking on that site, but I don't want to hear it. It is cheating, it violates the ToS, so I'm objectively right. If SE's unwritten policy is to ignore parser users, then they are just going to have an arms race escalation between players building tools that reveal more invisible information from the game until someone crosses a line. That FFXIV ACT plugin is also the basis for the radar tools and callout automations, and even that cactbot plugin has the entire combat script for everything, and is used to reveal anything that the game client is told in advance for.

Wait....wait, wait, wait, hold the phone. So you are telling everybody that all this blind hatred, all these rants and raves, all this frustration that you have for the raid community and parsers...all of this anger that you have been showing towards the raiders was because of what?

You got kicked one time years ago in Keeper of the Lake?

I am pretty positive that a huge portion of us who have raided have gotten kicked from parties at least once over asinine reasons, DPS or lack thereof included. Quit generalizing the raid community over something so petty. I'm sorry, but yes, this is incredibly petty of you. One time? One time is not enough to generalize an entire subset of a community. Not especially from one dungeon - not from two bad apples.

[Paladinleeds]

We may actually have some common ground if you came into these discussion with less of an axe to grind. Regardless, it's on the developers to design content where tank stance and healing is more a necessity if they want people to care about it, not on parsers. Raiders will adapt to whenever the game allows. Presently, it allows us to aggressive DPS.

Exactly, in fact I feel that regular content does need more bite to it. Tighter ilevel sync (including at launch of the dungeon), mobs actually hitting harder. I must admit I do like Kisai's suggestions 2 and 3 in her latest post. I think, if she was more willing to try and listen to us, and understand our viewpoints, she'd find a lot of common ground between us.

If they made enmity and healing matter more, we'd be in tank stance and healing more. Right now, dungeons have so little bite, it's essentially forcing our hands to DPS just to feel like we're doing something meaningful. Tanking and healing in this game feels so meaningless.

EDIT: Had chance to re-read ideas 1, 4, and 5, so will give my thoughts on them too:
Idea 1: I like it, but maybe the numbers need tweaking so instead of a straight "no enmity" rule, it instead comes with a percentage dropped in terms of enmity (perhaps say 95% enmity dropped, and a lot less enmity generated). The idea of enmity penalties for swapping out of tank stance is a good one, though the actual numbers are up for discussion. Though in 2 tank content I could see it adjusting the way we handle tank swaps slightly, and that's not a bad thing tbh.
Idea 4: Good idea too, though I wouldn't say it's necessarily unfair to be blindsided by a spawning mob. It'll add teeth to the dungeon, an event we have to work around. It only becomes a problem if it's a scripted event, it'll lose its blindsiding effect. Make it completely random however, and then we always have to be on our guard.
Idea 5: I like the idea of how to combat bots such as RMT. I'll admit, it wasn't something I'd thought about. As for resetting aggro if they move more than 15y away, not sure this is something I can agree with. Tighter ilevel sync and giving trash mobs actual bite would mostly kill the need for this, with only the most skilled groups able to handle bigger pulls. I would therefore not add this full idea in (only the bot combat part), as content with enough bite to it will necessitate smaller pulls for most players by virtue of the difficulty.

Being kicked by raiders once, is one time too many. You and others wonder why I have such a axe to grind against parser users, the first and only time I was kicked without any communication at all from any party, in 2.5 both DPS players had fflogs in their lodestone profiles,which is what made me aware of that sites existence.

I have FFLogs linked to my profile (or at least had, not sure if I removed it or not). I had to link my character by doing so to hide my logs. I don't participate in the arm's race for logs, but unless I link my character, I can't hide the logs. The logs are on an opt-out basis, not opt-in. Were they opt-in, I probably would never have linked my character (since they'd be hidden by default)...

I am pretty positive that a huge portion of us who have raided have gotten kicked from parties at least once over asinine reasons, DPS or lack thereof included. Quit generalizing the raid community over something so petty. I'm sorry, but yes, this is incredibly petty of you. One time? One time is not enough to generalize an entire subset of a community. Not especially from one dungeon - not from two bad apples.

I can top that one. Explaining that it would be worth using ranged/caster LB2 on one of the bosses in the Praetorium (the one after the vehicle bit, I think that's Nero?) whereas the party rushed on ahead so we lost it. I explained after the duty that we'd lost it as a result (albeit poorly). Next thing I know kicked. 5 out of 8 in the same FC. I didn't stand a chance there. I just took a bit of time to calm myself down, and requeued.

[Miste]

Being kicked by raiders once, is one time too many. You and others wonder why I have such a axe to grind against parser users, the first and only time I was kicked without any communication at all from any party, in 2.5 both DPS players had fflogs in their lodestone profiles,which is what made me aware of that sites existence. This was on The Keeper of the Lake during Expert roulette, which up to that point I had cleared plenty of times, and even with a party with a tank who was wearing DPS gear. I'm willing to roll with what I get on DF, the raiders should not be kicking players for "play style" differences, especially not from dungeon content. The impression I get from the forum raiders is that they check players lodestones and fflogs and kick players just to improve their own parses.

You got kicked from a DF run, one time, 4 years ago, and...because of that one bad experience you vilify and generalize every single raider and parser user no matter who they are or if they are in reality innocent and nice players....wow....I mean do you know what the world would be like if everyone had this kind of mindset? A really depressing place.

What makes you think I would ever want to play with a parser user after that?

Because you shouldn't be generalizing everyone based on one bad experience and making everyone guilty by association?

But, whatever, if you must then just don't play with them if you don't want to? That doesn't mean you have to vilify and generalize all raiders or everyone who parses just because of one bad experience. The world doesn't need more of that.

It's like if you had a bad experience at a store chain with one bad employee so then anytime you go to another of those stores you treat all the other employees badly just because they work there too and you had a bad experience before...not caring if they are nice people and completely innocent.

You can't blame everyone for the misdeeds of the few. Nor does anyone deserve to be blamed or immediately treated badly for someone elses behavior with some kind of guilt by association nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization

Your impression seems incorrect to me. I don't know if you mean DF, but I almost never see anyone kicked from DF runs, even you have only been kicked once in 4 years; doesn't seem very rampant does it? I am also a raider and the only reasons I have ever kicked anyone from DF were people who went AFK and never came back, disconnect and never came back, or harassment/rudeness.

PF seems rare as well, but PF is player made parties. The leader has the right to remove anyone they wish from their party for pretty much whatever reason, but they may not disclose that reason so chances are people never know exactly why they were removed.

You can't force a PF leader to keep you in the party, it is just something people have to accept. If you want to have the party your way and not have a chance of being removed then you have to make your own PF.

Why do I even care? How does someone else cheating themselves affect my ability to play the game? Have you ever been at school or a job where your performance is measured by doing things by the book, and you're near the top of your ability, and then you see the scores posted for other people on your team and you end up at the middle or bottom? Then you're the one that is told to improve, meanwhile the people above you continue to game the grading metric by doing things wrong, and creating more work for other staff to fix their mistakes. I have a real bone to pick with people who insist they aren't cheating, when they absolutely are.

Near the top of your ability? You're assuming that a person can objectively measure their own ability level. This isn't a common trait since most humans have their ego and cognitive biases get in the way of proper self evaluation or comparisons of oneself to others. Look up the Dunning–Kruger effect.

If you deem yourself skilled enough to achieve goal A and you fail to achieve goal A, yet other people do achieve it, then your bias towards what you perceive as your skill level might try to find reasons to justify why you failed compared to others which can lead to irrational judgements on the matter like "They achieved goal A because they cheated, their skill level is higher than mine because they are cheating."

You're also assuming that you have factual evidence that the people who "beat your score" are cheating or gaming the grading metric by using something that makes it objectively easier for them to achieve the goal. You are ignoring the scenario that you ended up in the middle or bottom because the others were simply more skilled than you were and earned better scores legitimately. If you have no proof any of them had something that made it easier for them to get a better score then your argument holds no water.

Sadly, you have yet to explain how having a meter, that shows you how much damage per second you are doing in numerical form, makes a savage fight easier to learn and complete. If it doesn't make the fight easier then it isn't cheating no matter how much you want to believe it is. So unless you can explain this you are just wasting your time because everyone can see you have no facts, logic, or reasoning behind your claims.

But, I'm not expecting much since you ignored when I asked you a few days ago "How is it cheating to know how much damage you are doing?"

[Fredco191]

We need savage mode dungeons.



not really but it’d be fun though right?

[ThatQEDguy]

So I'm a bit late to the thread. Is someone really complaining about savage content when they themselves don't do savage content?

[Sigma-Astra]

So I'm a bit late to the thread. Is someone really complaining about savage content when they themselves don't do savage content?

Yes, yes they are.

[Ilenya]

So, what are the issues with current content design?

You know, I was actually curious as to how you would decide what are issues and how you would fix them. As a note, I do not parse, and I do not do the high end raids (No Ex Primals, no Savages), so my responses are based entirely on that.

1) The tank's "tank stance" isn't really mandatory, thus you get blue DPS activity, this is because enmity generation assumes the tank stays in tank stance. If the tank drops tank stance, the enemies should delete the tank from their enmity table. This still allows the tank to do this purposely, but the way it works right now, the tank is getting the benefit of being a tank without being in tank stance. Belligerent mob groups rarely have tanks, and players know to finish them off last because they do less damage to the party and have larger HP pools. Single target bosses pretty much do not need the party tank in tank stance if the rest of the party doesn't generate more enmity than them.
How I'd fix it - leaving tank stance should reset enmity as if the tank was ko'd. After all, there's no longer a tank.

Oddly, I like the suggestion. Granted, most tanks who do the stance dancing wouldn't really be affected by it a lot, because most just...Would never be in tank stance again.

Would make for interesting tank swaps, though.

I do agree damage tanks take is low, but I'm a healer. I *want* the challenge of having to heal a tank who is actually taking proper damage. The rare times it happens is more fun for me than anything else.

2) The healer doesn't have enough to do, and casting high-enmity healing like Medica II to allow for green DPS activity should rip enmity away from the tank if the tank is not in tank stance. With single-target bosses, this ultimately doesn't have any meaningful use since there is only one target, hence most players just spam Medica II without consideration of the tank. On trash, casting Medica II should always be a mistake, and when the Squadron does it, they always follow it with the enmity dump, but they never cast Medica II the way "the meta" assumes.
How I'd fix it - The most obvious thing to do is remove regen/aspected benefic and medica II/diurnal aspected helios from being skills to actions with CD's. But perhaps a better change would be to put the regen effect entirely on a separate skill so that "the next cure/medica/benefic/helios/physick will add X seconds of regen/shield of potency Y to a maximum of (capped) seconds" and then fold Medica and Medica II into the same skill, and Cure/Cure II into the same skill, and benefic/benefic II into the same skill, and Helios/Aspected Helios into the same skill. For Nocturnal AST's that would swap regen for shield. If you have two WHM, or two AST or one of each, then the regen effect is added instead of overwritten. It would at the very least allow healers to benefit from each other's buffs. There are two pieces of content in the game (both in the MSQ Roulette) where the healer is the better tank, because the boss has no teeth, and by purposely creating enmity from Medica II, all the adds are drawn automatically to the healer.

I love the phrase "Green DPS activity", but I disagree healers don't have enough to do. We do, you just seem to be naturally against DPSing healers. Your call, but don't use that as an excuse for saying healers as a whole don't have enough to do.

As to your suggestion...Why? Neuter regens completely because...What? You want to heal personally more? Get rid of stronger heals so you can't actually do emergency burst heals? I really don't get where you are going with your ideas, beyond the fact that I feel you forgot Scholar exists for this train of thought.

Also, healers gathering adds has been a part of many things. Earliest I can immediately think of is Cutter's Cry. While that one is different, it *always* makes sense (To me) to have the healer gather adds for the tank to gather or the DPS to mow down because we can do it so easily.

3) DPS are ultimately allowed to underperform, even in punishing content. The healer and tank should not have time to DPS, they should be performing their role at all times. Which means that if the tank or healer have time to use single target DPS, then all the DPS are underperforming. We already have the gauges, they tell the player what they should be doing, but ultimately there is no imperative to do anything at all. If the tank or healer stops what they're doing, the party would immediately fail. If the DPS stop what they're doing, they can continue to do nothing.
How I'd fix it - Pretty much, as also observed from the squadron content, the fix here really needs to be that the tank and healer DPS be effectively zero relative to DPS contribution. That would not be very fun at all for the tank or healer, so perhaps the mechanic that is needed here is for the mob groups to have their own healers. Thus if the party DPS are under-performing, the belligerent healers will have no problem keeping their group fully healed. The party healer and party tank will not be able to kill the belligerent healer by themselves as the rest of the belligerent party would kill the party healer if the tank tries to drop tank stance to help DPS the belligerent healer.

"if the tank or healer have time to use single target DPS, then all the DPS are underperforming."

No, just no. No no no. That's just not how fighting works in this at all. Taking a group of 3, assuming the two DPS AoEs them down, the variations in damage alone would make it so that all the enemies don't die at the same time, and at that point the DPS are well within their rights to revert to single target attacks to focus down the remaining 1-2 enemies, which at this point do not do enough damage for the healers and tanks to worry about, so why *wouldn't* they do single target damage? Unless we give them teeth as accounted for below, anyways.

But your solution would be basically the death of most healers and tanks in the current game. Not meta. Game. While I would love the ability to have fights where I spend my time healing things that need to be healed and not people just failing to do their dodges, the current way the game works means that, if my DPS contributions were nonexistant as you seem to want, I would be doing *nothing* for large amounts of dungeons. This is ignoring the fact that tank damage ties directly with emnity, so killing their DPS would make them even more useless.

Though I do like the idea of enemy groups having healers, or enemies that do debuffs (Though the game doesn't have strong enough debuffs for that to matter). Reminds me of City of Heroes, where enemy groups did have in them people who could heal, could debuff, could buff, and people knew they needed to go down first. Enemy groups with proper strategies like that could be fun if done right.

4) Mobs spawned do nothing until hit or a few seconds. Okay this really needs to ask the question of why. Mobs are always at the disadvantage because the player is always allowed to get the first hit in, thus they can be stunlocked at spawn. What should happen is that hostile mobs should always LoS (Line of Sight) attack players at spawn.
How'd I'd fix it - This is really a problem of latency, sure it might not be fair to players to suddenly be attacked before seeing the mob spawn, but perhaps maybe the spawning process can make sure that the mobs are not spawned within players auto-attack range to prevent that.

Does this come up enough for this statement to matter? Like...Where are you thinking of that this is a problem? I mean, I assume they don't react right away because the system is going "Step 1 - Spawn in. Step 2 - Verify spawned properly. Step 3 - Preform AI actions", and step 2 is fixed when the spawn is attacked because that verifies that, yes, it spawned in right. Even then, what would moving the enemies do? You say outside of Auto Attack range, but there are ranged people who would still be doing damage to the adds well before they can do what they need to do.

5) Trash mobs are generally toothless, and so is their AI. So? Classic JRPG formula is you outgear and outlevel them, you should be able to sneeze on them and they die. The problem here is that levelsync and ilevelsync doesn't actually bring these anywhere close to having teeth. Sure I may have to use a different strategy for the Squadrons to account for the AI doing stupid things like chasing the invulnerable monster around, but the trash mobs, even the Squadron can defeat quickly with only one DPS. What's the point of having the trash mobs if they're not an obstacle? They're just a few road cones to knock over once you hit the sync point. In an experienced party, the tank can do a wall-to-wall pull of them, and they are stupid enough to follow while ranged players can hit them and they ignore it.
How'd I'd fix it - If the tank moves more than 15y away from the mob's spawn point, the mob will lose interest and resets it's enmity, and recovers it's hp completely if there's nobody else on the enmity table. More to the point, to prevent bots from being able to complete dungeons, also reset the mob if they can't hit the target after 5 seconds without a status effect (eg stun) preventing them. If another player lands a hit on a tagged mob without the tank generating enmity, then the mob should defend itself.

Tethered mobs, really? And your solution to trash not having teeth is...To make them skippable? Remember, most trash mobs can be safely ignored because they don't trigger the next path forward. Heck, people actually run pass some enemies in Copperbell HM specifically because they *do* tether. That doesn't make them harder. That makes them worthless.

But overall, I don't see how your solution to weak trash mobs actually helps the issue you are presenting. Ignoring the fact that, in general, trash mobs are...Supposed to be blown through relatively quickly (They are trash mobs), your solution either just annoys people (Gates between every pull without actually giving the mobs teeth?) or actually gives less work for everyone involved (Why fight trash mobs when we can just run right past them?)

[KisaiTenshi]

Let's skip the rude toxic raider behavior and just skip to the topic.

Dripping sarcasm aside, if you actually did harder content, you would know this simply isn't true. As a melee main myself, I seldom touch either Second Wind or Bloodbath unless I take extra damage either to maintain uptime or because I messed up a mechanic. Neither ability reduces a DPS' damage whatsoever. While Purification/Third Eye do, it's been calculated to be a greater loss for the raid forcing the tank back into tank stance, especially as Seigan's potency is so negligible, some of the top ranked Samurai don't even have a single cast of it. With properly rotated Shirks between the tanks, this is rarely an issue. And if it is, you will often see tanks adjust with a threat combo or Defiance/Unchained.

If the DPS have to stop DPS'ing because of something the tank or healer did, then it's a DPS loss absolutely. It might not be large, but it's an avoidable one when a DPS player has to move and interrupt their combo.

Has it ever occurred to you people ask for more DPS abilities because healing requirements in this game are extremely easy, thus they find it boring to spam Broil/Malefic III/Stone IV endlessly? There have been just as many threads asking for more healer checks, discussing how healer potency is too high or how healers barely need to heal. Nothing has changed. Therefore, many healers have simply given up expecting to actually be healers in this game, but still want to be entertained. So they ask for more DPS abilities since the devs haven't listened to their complaints about how low healing requirements are.

Yet, you provide no solutions other than turning the healer in to green DPS. What could have solved all this in the first place is by deleting Cleric Stance from the pre-SB WHM kit, and leaving the potency of everything that way. Replace Cleric Stance with a “Next (n) Attacks will swap int/mnd”, that removes the reason for the errors, and leaves the cast time intact. Then as I said previously, to reduce the bar bloat, fold Cure/Cure II, Medica/Media II, and move the regen effect to it's own additive buff, so that the next heal casted by you or another player that recovers HP has the regen effect. That removes the issue of HoT clipping/overwrites, and doesn't add regen to full HP players.

The biggest bugbear with healing is that regen effects are too powerful and healers use it as an excuse to DPS more rather than to counteract a non-cleanable bleed.

As for tanks, if enmity gradually reduced whenever you went into DPS stance, tanks would finally have something to care about besides damage. The main reason they focus so heavily on their DPS is because nothing else currently matters. You only need enough mitigation to survive the incoming attacks. If I can live through a tank buster with a CD and maintain enmity while in deliverance, I have no reason to touch Defiance. Higher incoming damage, more frequent damage spikes and a gradual enmity reduction would give tanks actual mechanics besides "press a cooldown during this scripted event before going back to being a DPS." Reducing aggro immediately makes such a change too rigid, in my opinion. The interesting aspect would be tanks weaving tank stance and learning how to get the most out of DPS stance while not being a hindrance. Don't make the reduction too gradual otherwise people ignore it, but too fast and it becomes "just sit in tank stance whenever you have the boss and don't think about it."

Yeah something like that. The game likes the 2.5 second GCD a lot, perhaps it would drop the tank off or to the bottom of the enmity table after X GCD's of not being in tank stance.

For the same reason, healers should still have an opportunity to DPS. That aspect remains fun and engaging. The issue is how one-sided it is currently. Much like the tanks above, make it so you can weave DPS abilities in once damage settles, however you will spend far more time actually healing. 20/30% DPSing and 80/70% healing is a good benchmark to work around as it rewards better skilled players without forcing it onto everyone else. If content hit harder, you aren't going to see PF demand healer DPS nearly to the extent they do now because 20% isn't much whereas right now healer DPS is enormous.

That's why I suggested maybe the belligerent mobs having their own healers. If reducing the healer DPS to less than 20% isn't possible by directly lowering the potency, perhaps new/harder content should be designed where the belligerent's healers can bring the belligerent mobs back to full health by the same measure the players can for their own party. One strategy would involve separating the belligerent healer from the belligerent group to take them out. Another would be stunlocking/sleep/silence the belligerent healer/group and that requires being able to kill the belligerent healer before the debuff time runs out, otherwise the belligerent party will just take a very long time to kill, even by outgearing it.

We may actually have some common ground if you came into these discussion with less of an axe to grind. Regardless, it's on the developers to design content where tank stance and healing is more a necessity if they want people to care about it, not on parsers. Raiders will adapt to whenever the game allows. Presently, it allows us to aggressive DPS.

You still seem to think I'm coming to these threads because “ooh raiders bad”, no. Really it is because so many of the suggestions put forth by the raiders, amount to bigger DPS sponge-mobs and skills to inflict bigger DPS to make the raid take less time. Sure a 2 hour raid is maybe a pain, but reducing every raid boss to 90 second burns is not fun either. Realistically, if a raid has a 90 minute time limit, then it should take a minimum of 1/3rd of that time with an average party, 2/3rds with a weak party. But who really wants to spend a 30 minutes on the same boss. Likely nobody, so maybe cut the time limits to be specific to each phase so they're counting down to enrage. If you hit enrage during M+/EX/Savage, the party gets a prompt to “restart?” and the time resets.

Exactly, in fact I feel that regular content does need more bite to it. Tighter ilevel sync (including at launch of the dungeon), mobs actually hitting harder. I must admit I do like Kisai's suggestions 2 and 3 in her latest post. I think, if she was more willing to try and listen to us, and understand our viewpoints, she'd find a lot of common ground between us.

If they made enmity and healing matter more, we'd be in tank stance and healing more. Right now, dungeons have so little bite, it's essentially forcing our hands to DPS just to feel like we're doing something meaningful. Tanking and healing in this game feels so meaningless.

EDIT: Had chance to re-read ideas 1, 4, and 5, so will give my thoughts on them too:
Idea 1: I like it, but maybe the numbers need tweaking so instead of a straight "no enmity" rule, it instead comes with a percentage dropped in terms of enmity (perhaps say 95% enmity dropped, and a lot less enmity generated). The idea of enmity penalties for swapping out of tank stance is a good one, though the actual numbers are up for discussion. Though in 2 tank content I could see it adjusting the way we handle tank swaps slightly, and that's not a bad thing tbh.
Idea 4: Good idea too, though I wouldn't say it's necessarily unfair to be blindsided by a spawning mob. It'll add teeth to the dungeon, an event we have to work around. It only becomes a problem if it's a scripted event, it'll lose its blindsiding effect. Make it completely random however, and then we always have to be on our guard.
Idea 5: I like the idea of how to combat bots such as RMT. I'll admit, it wasn't something I'd thought about. As for resetting aggro if they move more than 15y away, not sure this is something I can agree with. Tighter ilevel sync and giving trash mobs actual bite would mostly kill the need for this, with only the most skilled groups able to handle bigger pulls. I would therefore not add this full idea in (only the bot combat part), as content with enough bite to it will necessitate smaller pulls for most players by virtue of the difficulty.

The common ground exists, just some people just want me to me wrong, even when I agree with them, and thus don't even read the post, and it gets tiring.

The idea behind 5 was more about about preventing the bots taking advantage of tuning knobs in enmity from the earlier points.


Like if the developers were so inclined, they already have a solution for this in PotD, you have to defeat X many mobs to unlock the portal to the next floor. That can also be the same strategy where killing specific groups of mobs opens different paths, or difficulty scaling, or different reward paths (reminiscent of V1.0.) Right now, you can wall-to-wall pull, right into the boss room of some dungeons. That is just broken. If a tank hits a mob, and runs away, it should lose interest after a few GCD ticks worth of time. It shouldn't be possible to just hit a mob once and keep enmity, but just the same, it shouldn't be possible to just run through the mobs and survive to begin with.

If a dungeon is laid out like so:

(Entrance)-(mob group A)-(mob group B)-(mob group C)-(First Boss room)

Hitting all the mobs from A, B and C, and making it to the boss room shouldn't ever happen, even unsynced. Throwing a door in the middle to require that group B be defeated is sufficient for opening the door, but another strategy could be to lure group A and B into a trap, and thus not have to defeat them at all. The door unlocks, and then you could pull group C into the trap,or just kill them directly. The only place in the game that really has something like this is MSQ's Castrum Meridianum, with the cannons (and was in fact the strategy before it was outgeared.)

But because players don't like obstructions to pulling everything, it makes the content slower. What would be necessary with luring mobs together or to a trap is some requirement that the tank or other party members not run away from them. I picked 15y because that's the WHM Medica distance, and is generally sufficient for mobs to consider a player “too far away” without a door resetting them. It can be farther away, it just can't be “so far away the mob can't hit the tank even once”

It's too bad FFXIV didn't make one DPS role have bombs (eg the rogue would have been the logical one) , because one really fun strategy in Wizardy was to layout layers of bomb traps. Only AST has a trap (Earthly Star) but it's not tripped, so it doesn't quite work that way.

What I'm getting at is that there is literately nothing interesting at all in how trash mobs are killed. It's the same in every dungeon. Having cannons in every dungeon doesn't make logical sense, but a player being able to set one would, or existing bombs (a la PotD), or having a player be able to set bombs. The traps just wouldn't be viable to use in a boss room, but here's a good opportunity to make trash mobs stop hitting like wet noodles by providing .