What is good Battle Content?

[BillyKaplan]

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.

You're confusing correlation with causation. New content hasn't been well received because almost always, at least one key element of it falls horribly flat. Hunts are very popular (at least for a niche content) and they're almost always relevant. What's not well received about them is the disconnect between what they became (server-wide community content) vs. what the devs want them to be. It's situations where people work an hour to spawn Nunyunuwi in Southern Thanalan only for someone to be able to pull it once it pops before everyone who actually spawned it can make it there in time. That's what's not well received about hunts.
PotD/HoH are very fun but they're stale and uninventive. HoH tried to shake things up with the big floors but at the same time made them irrelevant because you pop a magicite and it's gone.
And there's already been enough talk about Eureka.

New content =\= guarantee for complaints and rejection. But it's enough to look at things like the glamour dresser to get a better feel for this thing. The devs try, I can't say they don't... they just don't get it right. And if we try to work around it like in Anemos, they'll design the next step so we can't do it like that anymore.

As for good battle content, I'm a filthy casual. I'm satisfied with most of what we have here but agree with the general gist - I enjoy more the high-end trials and raids. Alphascape is very enjoyable to me, esp. 11 and 12 which I often run as a healer. And I've been throwing myself at Suzaku ex lately, which is actually a delight. Forces me to use my kit smartly, and unlike most content gives me motivation to improve my rotation and playstyle, reevaluate my stats, etc. I personally don't need much more.

[Aeilyi]

I am a masochistic weirdo so I want my opinion on what's fun and not, be taken with a grain of salt. Maintenance is happening and I'm bored, so I just wanna throw what I think out there anyway.
Out of 1 to 10, with 1 being least fun and 10 being most fun.

Open World
1 - FATEs - It's a nice alternative for leveling, but most of the time, it's just killing mobs so that's not very fun.
7 - Rare FATES - Rare FATES as in Ixion or Fox Lady. This is rated higher because probably of the rarity and nice rewards, like mounts or cute fox minions. It actually feels rewarding to finally get these things.
5 - Hunts - These are not very fun because they're giant sandbags, but the rewards makes them worthwhile.

Dungeons
3 - Dungeons - These are rated lower because most of the time, dungeons are really easy in mechanic. I can have YouTube on the other screen and still beat these easily. But I also rate them lower because there's not a lot of rewards except Verdant Partitions, minions, a mount, and glamour (Which most of them, imo, doesn't look good).
5 - Canals of Uznair (Timeworn map) - I would have rated them at 3, the same as dungeons, but the rewards from them makes it more interesting.

Trials
4 - Trials (Extreme) - It's fun the first 5 times (rated at 7) but after that, it becomes a snooze-fest for me.
7 - Shinryu EX - This fight is an exception. I wished I was here when it was first released but sadly, I didn't buy the game until December. I cleared this while vastly overgeared and it was still a challenge. It pipes my curiousity on what kind of a fight it was on release. I wasn't here for Heavensward but I can imagine some fight being equally interesting such as Zurvan ... but all of them feels boring now that we're over geared for them.
5 - Rathalos EX - This is not a primal or a dungeon so it gets its own special place. I would have rated this fight a 7 if things didn't one shot or nearly one shot you. The MHW Rathalos feels so much better, probably because there's more than 1 way to handle annoying mechanics/attacks. But in FF14, the only way we have to dodge is just run around in circles. ** But I also don't mind if SE wants to experiment with more 4-man trials but in FFXIV style.

Raids
5 - Raid (Normal) - They're fun when you go in blind on the first run but after that, it's boring and repetitive.
9 - Raid (Savage) - I want Final Omega to step on me. <33333 ... I hate Middy and Guardian though .. boring scenery and pugs ruined it for me. O11S Pantokrator 1 and 2 is probably the most fun mechanic I've ever experienced even though it shits on my dps as a Summoner (Lots of movement and I still need to work on optimizing). I love that it looks as if Omega is panicking and is just throwing all that he has at us.
? - Ultimate - No idea but looks fun, gonna give it another shot when I have time.

Alliance Raids
1 - Lv50 Alliance Raids - SE PLEASE STOP GIVING ME LABYRINTH OF THE ANCIENTS FOR ALLIANCE ROULLETTE!!! I've gotten it literally every day for the last 3 months and I am so tired of it. Every day I hoped to get Weeping City of Mhach or Rabanastre but nope. Another Labyrinth of the Ancients.
5 - Lv60 Alliance Raids - They're all pretty fun especially Weeping City of Mhach. I like that you can fall off the platform which can get pretty interesting with new players.
1 - Void Ark - This is an exception. It's pretty much like a dungeon but in 24-man form. Everything feels like a striking dummy.
6 - Lv70 Alliance Raids - It's pretty fun, watching all of the chaos. The second/fire boss in Ridorana drives me nuts though. I have to be ridiculously careful with how my Dreadwyrm Trances lines up before he teleports which is super annoying and he teleports way too much.

Deep Dungeons
1 - PotD (1-50) - I am dying from boredom.
4 - HoH (1-30) - I rate it higher, probably because our rotations are more fun at level 60+, plus it feels a tiny bit more challenging then PotD.
6 - PotD (50+) / HoH (30+) - There's a sense of danger and potential of wiping. Keeps me on my toes and make careful decisions on the fly.

Eureka
3 - Eureka Anemos - I sometimes joke if I have sleeping problems (which I chronically do), I'll just go to Eureka to fix it and it actually does. Practicing rotations on mobs over and over again is not fun.
1 - Eureka Pagos - Killing mobs over and over again is not fun.
? - Eureka Pyros - I heard that it's more fun than Pagos. I'll consider trying it but kinda meh about it. I dread having to go through Pagoes to try and catch up on level though.

TLDR; Overall, boring content can be fun if the rewards are good enough. My incentives would be mounts, gil, spiky hairstyles, and decent housing items like the Verdant Partition.
As for how to make combat content fun, I guess don't make the fight feel as if you're beating on a striking dummy that occasionally sneezes at you for 8-20 mins.

Since combat in most instances here is static, what might feel impossible at first becomes easier, and then later becomes stale.
It fills that desire momentarily but due to the static nature. It too will become stale and the desire will begin in an endless cycle that no developer can satiate within that rule of static.

This is probably the case for me and why I find most of the battle content not very fun. It gets boring really fast doing the same scripted dance for the 50th time.

At the same time, throwing "randomness" into a fight can be a hit or miss. Lol. I still see people failing Lar/Starboard and Middy's flip/spins consistently. Clearing O7S was hell with pugs because of the "random" phases and missiles.

But I wonder if adding randomness in a fight would make it more fun as long as it is less punishing. Like the worse punishment that one can get for failing a mechanic would be a damage down debuff or getting turned into a rabbit. That way, only the person who failed the mechanic gets punished, instead of putting stress on the healer or the rest of the party.

[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.

[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.

[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)

[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.

[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.