Enrage timer raid design is causing all the problems

[RenoKreuz]

I would just like to share an insight coming from WOW why I think the tight FFXIV enrage timer is causing all these issues. In WOW, while all "savage" bosses have hard enrage timers, only some of them are very strict DPS checks. Majority depends on coordination and a team's own strategy to beat the boss mechanics.

I find that FFXIV raid design is too dependent on "death avoiding" and "DPS as much as you can", for almost all bosses. In WOW, there are some fights which are tank centric (multiple adds, tank swap/stack, multiple positioning (like brayflox normal poison dragon)), and some are healer centric (heavy sustained dmg on random single targets, raid wide DOTs, debuffs that need healing or esuna), even the DPS fights have variants for many adds (AOE burst), multiple bosses (allowing for dot classes to shine), or short bursts dependent on ranged classes (gaols), etc.

My point is, yes it's true there will always be some classes doing more dps than others, and there are times there are "meta" and "better jobs", but I think if the DPS checks are more forgiving and raid design add in more elements than just "death avoiding", and engage the different roles of the classes: more stuff to tank, more stuff to heal, more stuff to kill, then many of the issues surrounding "DPS is nothing more than total pDPS + rDPS", as well as DPS of tanks and healers being so impt that their other aspects (surviving and healing) are almost ignored in class balance, will naturally be addressed through raid design philosophy.

TL,DR: FFXIV need to balance jobs design around raid designs, rather than hammer their heads on balancing DPS of ALL jobs including tank and healers, they need to relook at current raid design philosophies.

[BarretOblivion]

I would just like to share an insight coming from WOW why I think the tight FFXIV enrage timer is causing all these issues. In WOW, while all "savage" bosses have hard enrage timers, only some of them are very strict DPS checks. Majority depends on coordination and a team's own strategy to beat the boss mechanics.

I find that FFXIV raid design is too dependent on "death avoiding" and "DPS as much as you can", for almost all bosses. In WOW, there are some fights which are tank centric (multiple adds, tank swap/stack, multiple positioning (like brayflox normal poison dragon)), and some are healer centric (heavy sustained dmg on random single targets, raid wide DOTs, debuffs that need healing or esuna), even the DPS fights have variants for many adds (AOE burst), multiple bosses (allowing for dot classes to shine), or short bursts dependent on ranged classes (gaols), etc.

My point is, yes it's true there will always be some classes doing more dps than others, and there are times there are "meta" and "better jobs", but I think if the DPS checks are more forgiving and raid design add in more elements than just "death avoiding", and engage the different roles of the classes: more stuff to tank, more stuff to heal, more stuff to kill, then many of the issues surrounding "DPS is nothing more than total pDPS + rDPS", as well as DPS of tanks and healers being so impt that their other aspects (surviving and healing) are almost ignored in class balance, will naturally be addressed through raid design philosophy.

TL,DR: FFXIV need to balance jobs design around raid designs, rather than hammer their heads on balancing DPS of ALL jobs including tank and healers, they need to relook at current raid design philosophies.

Its because right now everyone is basically at 'minimum' item level for most of the savage encounters. Once we have weeks pass for people to buy tome gear you get alot more wiggle room and can afford deaths here and there.
FFXIV raid design has worked after they figured it out back in HW for the last tier of Alexander. We aren't WoW, I understand you want to use WoW to inspire FFXIV raid design but that's not how the devs have decided to design the raids. This DPS problem happens when Stormblood came out for Halicarnassus (Delta 3) with a good chunk of jobs being under tuned and people getting to that fight much faster than even this tier. The third fight is a brick wall for 90% of the raid community, its called the "static breaker" for a reason.

[geekgirl101]

Its because right now everyone is basically at 'minimum' item level for most of the savage encounters. Once we have weeks pass for people to buy tome gear you get alot more wiggle room and can afford deaths here and there.
FFXIV raid design has worked after they figured it out back in HW for the last tier of Alexander. We aren't WoW, I understand you want to use WoW to inspire FFXIV raid design but that's not how the devs have decided to design the raids. This DPS problem happens when Stormblood came out for Halicarnassus (Delta 3) with a good chunk of jobs being under tuned and people getting to that fight much faster than even this tier. The third fight is a brick wall for 90% of the raid community, its called the "static breaker" for a reason.

Not really. I'm in some pretty shiny 450/460 gear. Ok it's missing some materia, but my damage is being slaughtered by people in 440 gear. It's nothing to do with minimum item level, it's because RDM damage got ignored whilst everyone else got buffed so our damage is the weakest of the lot. It's horribly lazy because I am pushing all I got and doing the very best I can whilst people who are insanely overpowered can out-DPS me without even trying.

Let's not forget this important bullet point of the Shadowbringers live letter:

Which isn't entirely true. You can cheese mechanics as BLM and remain on top. You can push hard like a pregnant hippo and still fail to match the rest of the DPS as any of the other weaker jobs. It's basically this - you come as RDM, SMN, DNC or NIN and it doesn't matter how good you play your role and how skilled you are you will still get benched once progress is done and everyone else has stopped dying to mistakes and relying on you as their res-bot. This expansion has introduced meta classes, something FFXIV was originally trying to avoid.

[KageTokage]

Which isn't entirely true. You can cheese mechanics as BLM and remain on top. You can push hard like a pregnant hippo and still fail to match the rest of the DPS as any of the other weaker jobs. It's basically this - you come as RDM, SMN, DNC or NIN and it doesn't matter how good you play your role and how skilled you are you will still get benched once progress is done and everyone else has stopped dying to mistakes and relying on you as their res-bot.

Pretty much this.

Almost all of the clear groups for ES4 I've seen are excluding RDM, DNC, and NIN because they don't want to have worry about the DPS check when they can get a mediocre DRG/MNK and still beat it while they need top of the line players for the non-meta classes to not have a rough time.

[Taranok]

The biggest DPS problem was Alexander 3. HW's raid design was so tight that it nearly destroyed the FFXIV raiding community. Halicarnassus wasn't nearly as bad as Gordian and Midan. That said, E2S' DPS check is legitimately overtuned right now and needs to be brought down. Not much, but a bit. The design is fine, the health is not.

That said, I do want to see FFXIV copy a little from WoW in terms of encounter design. That is, the triage meta specifically. The buster meta forces the tanks and healers to have their healing and mitigation to be designed functionally identically to each other, which is just boring design on a class-by-class basis when they all do their core job the same way, and it's making fight design somewhat stale. By comparison, the Triage Meta designs allows tanks and healers to be designed in wildly different ways from each other while all performing the same job, and it shows if you look at WoW's absolutely staggering tank and healer differences compared to 14's. The reason for this is that a Triage meta heavily restricts healer power and the design is built around ramping up pressure on the healers until they flat out get overwhelmed, so you can design tanks around blowing off pressure instead of around surviving the unsurvivable. But that's a topic unto itself.

In many respects, the buster meta forces enrage timers. Because you can't really pressure healers so much that they will run out of MP in the current encounter/class design, because if they ever can run out of MP in normal play, you will just wipe for the most part over the course of a fight. Triage means every healer is intended to run out of MP and you can't aoe heal the entire party for half their life without expending massive amounts of resources, typically very long cooldowns. By comparison though, so you can get far more interesting with how you design the classes because of these limitations.

[MaraD_]

The buster meta forces the tanks and healers to have their healing and mitigation to be designed functionally identically to each other, which is just boring design on a class-by-class basis when they all do their core job the same way, and it's making fight design somewhat stale. By comparison, the Triage Meta designs allows tanks and healers to be designed in wildly different ways from each other while all performing the same job, and it shows if you look at WoW's absolutely staggering tank and healer differences compared to 14's. The reason for this is that a Triage meta heavily restricts healer power and the design is built around ramping up pressure on the healers until they flat out get overwhelmed, so you can design tanks around blowing off pressure instead of around surviving the unsurvivable. But that's a topic unto itself.

In many respects, the buster meta forces enrage timers. Because you can't really pressure healers so much that they will run out of MP in the current encounter/class design, because if they ever can run out of MP in normal play, you will just wipe for the most part over the course of a fight. Triage means every healer is intended to run out of MP and you can't aoe heal the entire party for half their life without expending massive amounts of resources, typically very long cooldowns. By comparison though, so you can get far more interesting with how you design the classes because of these limitations.

partly true, and partly not true. I think it should be explained a bit further.
Busters that do more than max HP in damage, unmitigated, require a limited "type" of mitigation. (literal mitigation) fluff mitigation doesnt work on it.
Essentially you can have fluff mitigation be more useful, and the more "normal" type, which tanks need to maintain, and the TB styled mitigation being only there solely for tank busters.
Example: Convalescence, Anticipation, Blood Bath, Equilibrium, Clemency, bulwark, featherfoot, Flash, etc were all methods in which to make life easier for a healer, but werent good enough to survive a tank buster.
Mitigation for tank busters are a form of -X%(rampart/hallowed), +tempHP (Thrill/TBN), cant die (Holmgang/living dead), and "conditional" (Awareness/Stun/Silence)
These can save a tank from an attack that would do maximum HP dmg to the tank.

In short, its possible to make enough fluff mitigation to make life easier on healers, and increasing auto attack dmg from bosses.
Its also possible to up tank buster damage, and tank buster mitigation, so long as its limited for tank busters only. (short duration, and not always available)

This creates a dynamic of changing up how you mitigate dmg through out every encounter. BUT it also limits the methods in which you can base a tank thematically. (Since now all tanks require 2 types of mitigation, and making those 2 types unique amoung all the tanks would either limit your options, or create overlap in mitigation design. But to be fair, there's FAR more stypes of "literal mitigation" thats either never been done in MMOs, or hardly done in MMOs, which FFXIV can still tap into. Fluff mitigation is far more limiting. (Another option is the -5% and -10% mitigation being used for fluff, as long as all tank busters do at LEAST 15%+ more dmg than the tank has in HP, to make sure those options arent enough for busters)

[Kurando]

What causes problems in raids are players that don't learn or struggle to adapt in challenging environments (usually pug so see this a lot). The Savage fights are intended to be difficult for a reason and especially in those first couple of weeks when players are only at the minimal ilvl (or slightly above). Almost everything about Savage is scripted and once a player gets that down, it's very easy to just dance your way through the fight, knowing where to go, what to do etc. If anything casual content should have more soft enrages to encourage players to work harder and use all of their toolkit.

[Nielk]

I would just like to share an insight coming from WOW why I think the tight FFXIV enrage timer is causing all these issues. In WOW, while all "savage" bosses have hard enrage timers, only some of them are very strict DPS checks. Majority depends on coordination and a team's own strategy to beat the boss mechanics.

I find that FFXIV raid design is too dependent on "death avoiding" and "DPS as much as you can", for almost all bosses. In WOW, there are some fights which are tank centric (multiple adds, tank swap/stack, multiple positioning (like brayflox normal poison dragon)), and some are healer centric (heavy sustained dmg on random single targets, raid wide DOTs, debuffs that need healing or esuna), even the DPS fights have variants for many adds (AOE burst), multiple bosses (allowing for dot classes to shine), or short bursts dependent on ranged classes (gaols), etc.

My point is, yes it's true there will always be some classes doing more dps than others, and there are times there are "meta" and "better jobs", but I think if the DPS checks are more forgiving and raid design add in more elements than just "death avoiding", and engage the different roles of the classes: more stuff to tank, more stuff to heal, more stuff to kill, then many of the issues surrounding "DPS is nothing more than total pDPS + rDPS", as well as DPS of tanks and healers being so impt that their other aspects (surviving and healing) are almost ignored in class balance, will naturally be addressed through raid design philosophy.

TL,DR: FFXIV need to balance jobs design around raid designs, rather than hammer their heads on balancing DPS of ALL jobs including tank and healers, they need to relook at current raid design philosophies.

if more people ask for more Boss Design in the official forums there will be something done about it. They Have Stated The More Popular an opinion on how many extra stuff can be added and people on board with it they will look into it.
(Alot of ppl forget the official forums is made to Give the Devs Ideas if Rampant Opinion is the same.)

[Sovasin]

Enrage timers are necessary. How else do you motivate DPS players to improve? Healers receive direct feedback when they suck at their job - everyone dies. Tanks receive direct feedback when they suck at their job - they die to a buster or the boss isn't positioned right for a mechanic. DPS players can afk through a fight and only realise something is wrong when they hit enrage. WOW style raids would just result in certain jobs being "meta" for certain raids which is an even worse problem. I don't get why you want raids to be based around a single gimmick like dual boss fights, adds, gaols etc. You can just have these things as mechanics/phases instead of making the whole fight based around it. And we do have raids with such gimmicks in phases and it works fine. And even if you had fights based around a single gimmick you would still need an enrage. If they made a fight full of adds you'd have to make the adds cast an enrage eventually, or else what's the point? Have two bosses in a fight? One of them has to cast an enrage after the other dies, otherwise you'd just kill them individually. And regardless of how many gimmicks they come up with, people are still going to lean towards the jobs that do the most dps regardless of what the encounter asks of them. The only way you can eliminate this problem is if bosses were like the simon says boss in bardam's mettle where you couldn't even attack.

This game has been around for 6+ years. It's too late to break the DPS, blue DPS, green DPS meta. That's just how the game is and if you dislike the meta you are free to play another MMO that caters to your vision of how each role should play. SE has been rightfully doubling down on this idea by removing tank stance and focusing on DPS rotations for tanks. If all raids had enrages as lenient as UCOB Nael or Bahamut where you could have like 5 deaths and still meet the DPS check without LB there would be no reason to put in any effort.

[nalol]

Enrage timers are necessary. How else do you motivate DPS players to improve? Healers receive direct feedback when they suck at their job - everyone dies. Tanks receive direct feedback when they suck at their job - they die to a buster or the boss isn't positioned right for a mechanic. DPS players can afk through a fight and only realise something is wrong when they hit enrage.

usually the less u dps the harder a fight gets coz the mob repeats the mechanics and it means more chances to fail. SO more dps, less chances to fail. u can also create a soft enrage .. like a spawn of adds .. more and more coming and then et overwhelmed if u don't manage to dps enough.

but u don't necessarily need a hard enrage on all mobs like the is now. if for exemple u are on 3rd savage and the first 2 had enrage, then u know u have the dps to do 3rd even if this one doesn't have such a strict dps check.