What is good Battle Content?

[Berteaux_Braumegain]

I have more fun doing a Trial or Raid for the first time than I do learning the EX or Savage variant. I feel like what keeps those things exciting is the story context and how each Primal manages to get flashier with how it interacts with the arena.

Similarly, within proper context, I feel a number of things can be fun. Mobs are probably the least interesting thing in the game to kill due to the fact that their EXP yield is terrible compared to dungeons. That said, when I first got into the overworld and got to explore before Sastasha, I felt pretty badass being able to get to Level 12 and kill one of those giant turtles or goobbues.

FATEs can be pretty neat as well, provided you do something with them that's appealing. I went and killed all of the big FATE bosses like Ixion, but also the ones like Cancer. Those were kind of neat given how many players it took to work with in order to bring them down. I preferred things like Dataqi or Attack on Highbridge, though, where you see the overworld change a bit depending on your success or failings. That's what I'd like to see more of.

I feel like combat begins to become stale, though, when I need to continually repeat a fight for some prize or something. Repetition leads to me zoning out and when I'm zoned out, I'm probably not having fun.

[Tharnor]

Quests: generally are extremely boring and are very by the numbers in this game. You see lots of collect 3 of this kill 5 of that with little to no impact felt in the areas you go too. The lack of variation makes the repeatable quests a total slog.

PotD/HoH: Cool concept but felt like they read a pamphlet about what a rogue-like is about without understand or the willingness to make it a true rogue-like experience.

Dungeons: Dungeons are fun for the first few times you run them. After that its extremely by the numbers with little to no variation. I'll give them some free ideas how about random branching paths, sections where you have to split up, and/or enemies and bosses with random mechanics.

Hunts: Die to quickly and as I repeat myself by the numbers repetition after the first few times. Combine that with a lack of interesting things to do with the rewards and that leads to less people running them. An in game chat channel for hunts would be nice as well. Along with spawn protection for about 10minutes.

24man Raids: These can be a blast but being spoon fed easy content breeds bad players and we get things like Ozma which was at least one wipe per run till gear allowed people to brute force it. A couple of bad players can really ruin the experience.

Trials: No complaints they are fun for the most part.

8man Raids: Started out fun with coil. Became elitist only with alexander, and I can not comment on SB since I never touched the savage content this expansion. The biggest gripe I have is SE stepped away from the distinction of trials and the 8man raids. They felt like different encounter types in ARR. The line started to blur in HW and in SB they are pretty much one and the same and just give different loot. HW broke my desire to run savage after shitting all over my two main classes whm/pld.

Ultimate: Looks fun no comment.

Eureka: This is coming from someone that is mid 5th relic for pagos. Eff that place. Not for the concept or even that relics are tied behind it. Purely by not listening to the fan base and making it harder to do the content. While succeeding it making it feel so under used. You can NM grind or mob chain for lvls and light. Good mob chain spots are ultra limited and lead to fighting between groups. While NM's are a huge pain to spawn some times. Trying to mimic an old mob grinding game with a modern gameplay was just a bad idea on so many levels. General APM is way higher and leads to real hand strain. They wanted to mimic ff11 but failed when 11 actually did it better in most areas.

The biggest problem with all of the content this expansion can be boiled down to them following a strict formula for the core game and going all in on content players have repeated told the devs they do not want. Compounding the problem, they refuse to fix major class problems mid expansion.

[Iscah]

Similarly, within proper context, I feel a number of things can be fun. Mobs are probably the least interesting thing in the game to kill due to the fact that their EXP yield is terrible compared to dungeons. That said, when I first got into the overworld and got to explore before Sastasha, I felt pretty badass being able to get to Level 12 and kill one of those giant turtles or goobbues.

I agree with all of what you wrote, but I wanted to comment on this in particular, because it stuck out to me as well when I was leveling up.

I remember looking at those huge Lv12 enemies and being glad they weren't aggressive.

Or looking warily down the path to Fallgourd crawling with Lv25 banemites - or the other where you could stumble straight from Lv5 enemies into a Lv49 dullahan.

It was such a wonderful feeling to finally be strong enough to venture into those places, and so strange now to stop and look back on it and realise I can simply walk in there without fear.


I miss that about the expansions, where areas are much more closely tied to your own level when you visit them. There isn't the same long-term sense of a place being in view but out-of-reach for so long before you're finally ready to go in.