What is good Battle Content?

[Liam_Harper]

I find it very interesting how often people cry for "shake up the formula, give us something new and fresh".
But every piece of new battle content (content that wasn't present by 2.1 at least) has not been well received.

Hunts, PotD/HoH, Diadem, Eureka, Timeworn Maps.

How exactly does Eureka "shake up the formula"?

You just grind mobs in a big field that don't really do much, with the same old rotation, hour after hour. It features no side quests, no dailies, barely any storyline. It's barely content.

Shaking up the forumla could mean things like relevant endgame savage dungeons, flexible raid sizes, set bonuses, splashing out the cash on fixing server lag and creating more responsive combat, class design that goes further than "put a job guage on everything", a middle difficulty between savage and normal to challenge the causal players and so on.

Enix isn't a little indie company either, they have decades of experience making games. It's not our fault for not making ourselves like the content they churn out. A successful game developer should be able to figure out how to make successful content by themselves.

[Connor]

In my opinion good content is something that allows players actually apply to their skill strategically. I think giving players the opportunity to find out how to deal with mechanics themselves is much better than giant bright red aoe markers that tell you what to do.
Also content that actually involves roles working together instead of all turning into DPS. Healers having to cover healing, tanks doing whatever it is tanks do, DPS all being Bard. Having to actively consider your role and how you’re going to support the party and work as a cohesive team together.
Or I guess we could just keep going with the content design of ‘let’s get 8 players and make them DPS as hard as they can’ with the occasional aoe marker that only ever really serves as a potential DPS loss. ‘But since all they really do is DPS let’s make it extremely simplistic for every job. Except when it’s clunky’

[Duskane]

FATEs fine for a little extra exp 2/5 for normal fates 4/5 for the special ones like fox lady
Hunts enjoyable at launch but power creep ruins them later on 2/5
Dungeons stale and never very interesting unless they have unique glamor like swallow compass or Skall 2/5 for basic dungeons 4/5 for the ones with neat loot
Canals of Uznair (Timeworn map) 4/5 fun content with friends
Primals Really depends on each one
Raid (Normal) 3/5
Raid (Savage) 3/5
Ultimate have no say on this since i don't do them or ever will for ugly recolors (besides death bringer ultima but can do without)
Alliance Raids 3/5 this also depends on the duty itself some are very boring and same reason as the hunt power creep kinda ruins the older ones
PotD/HoH 3/5 cool concept still hoping for one thats man vs machine (tf2) good for EXP can be good for learning jobs at max level but for some its not
Eureka Anemos 2/5 nothing to it besides zerging fates
Eureka Pagos 2/5 light grind actually gave people something to do but took many nerfs to become easily doable
Eureka Pyros 4/5 best of both plus more but still has flaws

[MoroMurasaki]

Using Hyo's rating system...


FATEs - 1
Hunts - 1
Dungeons - 2.5 As they can be interesting at times. A lot of boredom though, if pressed I would lean towards 2.
Canals of Uznair (Timeworn map) 3 The surprise is kinda nice, actual battles aren't anything to write home about.
Primals - 4.5 some like Shinryu are really epic and amazing. Susano and Lakshmi snuck in there though.
Raid (Normal) - 4 great group content. Fun with friends, also fun to laugh about some of the really... interesting people we see.
Raid (Savage) - 5 I love it so much. The challenge is wonderful.
Ultimate - haven't done it. Maybe one day.
Alliance Raids - 4 another great bit of group content akin to normal raids. Quite entertaining especially with friends.
PotD/HoH - 0 - Yes I had to go below one. I hate it with a passion.
Eureka Anemos - 3 It got better towards the end there.
Eureka Pagos haven't done it, heard awful things
Eureka Pyros haven't done it, heard better things
PvP - 1 almost as mind-numbing as deep dungeons.

[Alleo]

I want content without huge amount of RNG layers to make people play it for a time..imo people should want to play it because its fun not because it was made longer thanks to horrible drop rates and huge amount of rewards.

I do like the concept of Palace of the death and the idea behind Eureka (but not what it turned out to be)

Palace of the death:

I liked it because you could do it solo or in different sized groups. This is the basic of a good battle content imo. People should be able to really do it solo and progess and not be forced to search for groups. This way it can still be done when most people went to something else. Problem for me was/is, that I have quite the amount of DCs in PotD thus doing it solo beyond 100 was impossible. Maybe future content should have fail saves for such things to happen.

I liked the use of pomanders but maybe dont restrict them that much. If I take the time to clear all the rooms solo then I should be rewarded by keeping any pomanders that I have found. This can also help against really bad luck with monster spawns or pomanders.

What they could to in the future for such content: Give us more things to do. HoH felt a bit worse than PotD for me because it was kinda just the same. The big rooms and the summonings were nice additions but I wish they had done more. Riddles to open the doors instead of fighting, maybe rescueing a NPC from monsters and you get buffs or rewards. Maybe have floors where you are turned into a frog the whole time and you have to hide from the monsters. (Only if they dont just randomly spawn..) Have rooms that are completely strange (like lava floors where you need to watch your step, ice floors which makes it harder) Just things that make each run truly different.

Eureka like content:


The idea behind it was interesting. Having a seperate instance with his own way to level is not bad itself. But there is no real way to do this solo (which will make it really hard when barely anyone still plays it) and they have completely forgotten level synch for playing with your friends. Instead of making fighting monsters and NM the only way, it should have been just one of the ways..have quests in there, treasure to find thanks to riddles, lore to find and maybe a different way to spawn NM. You could have these NPCs that give you or your group hints about this NM and then with an item you can spawn it. If you defeat it you get another item to spawn another one and so on. These NM could be done solo too but give more rewards if you fight harder versions of them in a group. This way you can do it alone or with others. To make it possible give us something like the Logos actions but instead of having to farm them again and again, once they are unlocked they should stay there thus taking away some of the grind. Also dont force certain activities onto people by only putting certain actions as rewards behind it, just make them drop from all of that thus people can do whatever they like.

If you dont like fighting NM all the time you could also do some daily quests, find treasure chests with bunnies that drop 100% for everyone and that are just there for fun and not necessary for progress. Have events in there that can happen randomly. For example you get the mission that NPCs are gone missing and need to find them. Or have a instance wide event that a horde of monsters are going to attack the base and everyone can come and try to defend it. This way fighting monsters is not something you have to do all the time but only if you chose to do it.

No death penalty because imo this makes this just annoying and can lead to too much toxic behaviour. To make it more interesting give people exp for going into this and doing certain activities. I loved this in PoTD where you leveled up the job again but also got exp outside of it.

So in the end I want content that you can do alone or in groups, that give you rewards for taking part of it without huge amount of RNG layers and that have different ways to do it. Heck then they could even use fates and other stuff in it because it would only be one small part of it. And if you want to, you can also include gatherers and crafters in it.

I find it very interesting how often people cry for "shake up the formula, give us something new and fresh".
But every piece of new battle content (content that wasn't present by 2.1 at least) has not been well received.

Hunts, PotD/HoH, Diadem, Eureka, Timeworn Maps.
Timeworn Maps and PotD/HoH being most well received and being entirely optional content.

It's such a contradiction in itself somehow, the same forumla that so many people complain about is at the same time the most popular content.

Because most of that is not new and fresh. PotD was well received but still had its fault and yet instead of at least changing it a bit more they made HoH nearly a clone of it. Of course then it might get a bit boring, especially if you dont have the group to do this beyond 31. Thus people also only had 30 levels to farm.

Diadem and Eureka are just hunts and fates in another instance. There is nothing really new or innovative about this. Maybe the Logos actions since they seemed to be liked but instead of them being in the first part, they have put it behind the third one and in the end you still just use them to kill monsters and NM.

The maps are probably liked because you can just do them with your friends and they are not really time consuming or that hard. Its just a fun little side activity that can be done by anyone. But its still far away from big new content.

Fates and hunts are fine as long as you dont make them the main point of content. And that is exactly the problem that Eureka and Diadem have/had. There is nothing else to do there.

[KageTokage]

I kind of wish they'd release new hunts through an expansion's life cycle so there's always something somewhat threatening to kill.

As dull as the actual fights are currently, I find the process of spawning and locating them to be interesting enough to make it one of my main pastimes outside of raiding.

[PyurBlue]

I want to see content that is dynamic, benefits from coordination between players, is constantly engaging, and doesn't rely on too many gimmicks.

At the moment raids are probably my favorite thing to do in game, but I don't like their scripted formula. It hurts their replayability and this is made worse by needing to constantly farm them if you want gear in a reasonable amount of time. I would rather see raids that were less predictable where you're not going to figure out your optimal timeline and just repeat that forever. This would also require some changes to the raid formula, most notably the loss of super complex mechanics that you need to slowly progress through. I can see some of the appeal of treating these like puzzles in current savage, at least when a tier is new, but they eventually just become a small hurdle.

I also like open world content in MMO's. FATE's/Hunts are great ideas, but they haven't really evolved at all and leave a lot of their potential untapped. I'd like to see these open world events have more impact on the world and again be more dynamic. Having to repel a hunt mark that is attacking a city for example could make for an interesting event and could provide other goals for players to care about besides just whacking the monster. Say, whatever monster is being fought might start attacking a city gate, and that could require the tanks to stack on that gate to spread the damage and let it hold. Or the monster might be crossing a bridge that DPS could focus on to get the monster to fall and completely change the location of the fight.

Some of my least favorite content is PoTD/HoH. I don't like leveling, and while the sort of random nature is nice it's negated by the really slow build up of difficulty (if starting fresh) and gimmicky traps and random status effects. Those things just don't add anything to the gameplay for me as they are just forced on you (and typically not fun at all) and there is little that you can do to influence them. Higher level PoTD style content without random traps/statuses and leveling as well as more boss encounters would be very interesting in my opinion.

[Lufir]

My idea of good battle content is something that keeps me engaged with fresh ideas and not the weekly/daily run-and-done types that makes it feel like a repetitive routine. So my favorites from top to bottom would be:

Deep Dungeon
Potd
HoH
Eureka
Timeworn Maps
Hunts
Alliance Raids ( Repetitive after the first clear, but the raid feels more scenic)
Primals (Repetitive after the first clears)
Dungeons
Raids ( Repetitive; I don't like the idea of being placed immediately in front of boss, it feels so artificial)

[Alucard135]

Rathalos EX fight was extremely fun. I spent time trying to do it with a full RDM party and had to figure out the best way to deal with the add's tank buster (we almost killed Rathalos before 4.4 dropped out). The fight, although not hard, was more interactive than most of trials and raids we have.

[DevonEllwood]

I tolerate a lot in this game. And I mean a lot. The only time when I felt I was "officially" bored was light farming in pagos on dragons specifically. I did it once and left after 15 minutes. Forge farming and anubys farming was much better for me since I just treated things like a striking dummy that dropped goodies sometimes. the only one dungeon I groan about is Toto. I don't do savage and rarely do EX primals (mostly because my friend isn't interested).

The stuff I enjoy the most in this game isn't really the "best" but one of my favorite things is to duo the Gazelle skin maps with my friend. We have been doing these for a while and the chaos that happens is what keeps it interesting. No one likes wiping in a dungeon or raid, but sometimes I just like how unexpected df is either for the worse or better and a lot of that comes from the human aspect. I guess since I don't have any goals in mind for the game (get "x" done today) and just go with what happens. In ARR I was different, and felt I needed to cap tomestones, I needed to farm this primal, I needed to get so far in coils. I then ended up quitting for over a year and came back for whatever reason. I've been back more than a year and I guess I'm just not bothered by a lot of stuff. I am very self conscious though to the point where I barely do anything without my friend. I realize if my friend decides to quit then I probably wouldn't play much, which mean I just need to make some friends in this game. Which means I need to interact with people. Scary.

tdlr; I don't know what I'm talking about, so...I rarely get bored, all battle content is "okay" for me, but mix in a friend and things improve.