Enrage timer raid design is causing all the problems

[Endariel]

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.

Except, most of the time if you hit the enrage, it's because tanks and healers not doing enough DPS.
You know their "secondary" concern

[GutsyBoozetank]

Except, most of the time if you hit the enrage, it's because tanks and healers not doing enough DPS.
You know their "secondary" concern

Back in my days of raiding it was normal to be fighting the first boss over and over until you had the gear instead of expecting all 4 fights to be cleared in the first week in 450 gear.

[Suniva]

Back in my days of raiding it was normal to be fighting the first boss over and over until you had the gear instead of expecting all 4 fights to be cleared in the first week in 450 gear.

True. But we were also not NEARLY as popular back then as we are now. The player base was far more casual back in the day, and by all accounts, we still have a very large casual player base. I only started doing savage this tier, so I am frankly not all too familiar with it, but if all that is ever required to get past the content is just not dying to mechanics and dps checks, with no other elements added to the fights, I can see that getting pretty boring over the years.

[BarretOblivion]

Except, most of the time if you hit the enrage, it's because tanks and healers not doing enough DPS.
You know their "secondary" concern

Healers... sure secondary concern.
Tanks... DPS is basically an equal concern to us not dying and positioning. Once you learn how hard a tankbuster hits and the timings of them Tanks should start pushing thier numbers because outside of cooldowns everything we do is DPS. DPSing is part of tanks simple as that.

With regards to DPS currently struggling as a job, that is a job issue that needs to be addressed. RDM and NIN are the two jobs right now that are undertuned. In SB I remember it being a variety of different jobs being undertuned, DRG, SMN, MCH were the main culprits that needed time to get their much needed buffs followed by other jobs getting their own buffs. We are at the start of a raid tier, and a new expansion. We have hit the wall where some jobs are indeed undertuned and they need buffs, thats fine it happens. It isn't a problem with raid design, its a problem with undertuned jobs.

When it comes to encounters however, I would argue there are fights that make some jobs more difficult to play than others just because of how they are designed. In E1 and E2 I would argue so far PLD seems to be king in those fights simply because there is quite a bit of time you have to move away from the boss as well as in E1 where you can hit multiple targets to pad your numbers while WAR and GNB feel clunky in E2 from what I have seen. The same can be said for other encounters of what they ask of you, but as some people have stated E2 DPS check feels rather tight and I have to agree... but its not necessarily for the same reasons as others have pointed out.

E2 has a brutal and I mean BRUUUTAL DPS down portion of the fight, especially going into the final push of Quietas where you are getting bombareded with those darn heads. The last push is difficult to keep as many players not only alive but with no DMG downs which is a giant roadblock that teams just have to get over. Everywhere else in the fight feels managable to where people shouldn't be dying or getting DMG downs going into Quietas.

Quietas is going to be where your DPS dies, this is why the DPS check is so strict because its not 1 person usually getting DMG down its 3-4 people sometimes more getting the DMG downs. Remeber these DMG downs are half of your damage output so when multiple people get hit... your raid damage is going to plummet.

[Rockette]

If all these WoW players want FFXIV to be like WoW then why are you here? My god, stop trying to turn this game into the one you left.

The raids are fine, aside from Titan, they're easily cleared in crafted gear. E3s has to be the easiest turn 3 we've ever had. It's barely a step up from e2s unlike Halicarnassus or Omega. Healers dps, tanks dps, dps dps, that's FFXIV. Quit crying.

[Suniva]

If all these WoW players want FFXIV to be like WoW then why are you here? My god, stop trying to turn this game into the one you left.

A person giving an opinion and sharing their feedback based on previous experiences too much for you?

The forums are a place for discussions to happen and there was no reason to attack the OP for expressing their concerns and offering up their own personal experiences as to why they felt the way they felt and provide examples of what they're familiar with. Twas simply a suggestion they had, and it was presented calmly. No one was crying here, well, not until you decided to respond. The only crying on this whole forum topic is coming from you, really.

[RenoKreuz]

If all these WoW players want FFXIV to be like WoW then why are you here? My god, stop trying to turn this game into the one you left.

The raids are fine, aside from Titan, they're easily cleared in crafted gear. E3s has to be the easiest turn 3 we've ever had. It's barely a step up from e2s unlike Halicarnassus or Omega. Healers dps, tanks dps, dps dps, that's FFXIV. Quit crying.

Wow (as in the sound, not the game), much negativity. I did not once said in my post to request for the game to be "more like wow", all I'm doing is providing an opinion into why i think these issues arise.

If you think the raid designs have no issues, good for you, I do think there can be a lot to learn from other games. Notice my point is *NOT* to just remove the enrage, but to diversify the difficulty and hence fun. There can only be so many variations of "avoid death" mechanics.

And as you rightly put. Tank DPS, healer DPS, DPS DPS. There was a post recently about how 70% of a scholar parse was broil. Is that fun design? I don't think so. My reason for posting this is not the raids are "too hard", but because people are posting about "unpopular dps" classes and how some classes are avoided for extreme clears. Do read a bit before jumping to conclusion thanks.

[Rockette]

And as you rightly put. Tank DPS, healer DPS, DPS DPS. There was a post recently about how 70% of a scholar parse was broil. Is that fun design? I don't think so. My reason for posting this is not the raids are "too hard", but because people are posting about "unpopular dps" classes and how some classes are avoided for extreme clears. Do read a bit before jumping to conclusion thanks.

Scholar used to have broil, miasma, miasma2, bio, energy drain, bane and sacred soil right up until Shadowbringers.

Until a bunch of people cried on the forums that healers should only heal and DPSing is too hard. Now you have 70% broil. See what happens when you cry for things to be made pants on head easy?

Which, this savage tier in comparison to a few others, actually is. As others have said, the DPS checks in this tier of raid are not too high, or high at all. Let's not forget this important bullet point of the Shadowbringers live letter:



In terms of job balancing: Yes, we go through this exact thing every single expansion. Jobs are released. Savage is released along with a balance patch. Players progress. Square monitors job balance / Savage clears and releases another balance patch later in the tier.

Crying on forums continue.

[Dyvid]

Well if I remember correctly, when design raids SE doesn't even consider Healer DPS as a factor and Tank DPS is a minimum.

[HyoMinPark]

Well if I remember correctly, when design raids SE doesn't even consider Healer DPS as a factor and Tank DPS is a minimum.

This does not apply for early clears: if you are wanting to prog fights and clear them within the first couple of weeks, tanks and healer DPS have to considered. We’re basically doing fights at minimum item level, with maybe a handful of i460/i470 pieces for people that cleared floors last week and this week.

We are Week 2 into the current Savage tier. Considering it’s impossible for DPS to have enough gear to make checks without the tanks and healers contributing their own damage, it is required for both of the other roles to provide assistance in this area at this time. That said, tanks and healers should always be supplying damage once their primary roles (maintaining enmity—which is a joke now; and healing) have been fulfilled.


I don’t think any of these fights are over-tuned, and I’d honestly say this is one of the easiest tiers I’ve participated in. They’re merely tight in terms of the DPS checks right now due to players not having gear, but any and all jobs are perfectly capable of clearing the fights.

My reason for posting this is not the raids are "too hard", but because people are posting about "unpopular dps" classes and how some classes are avoided for extreme clears. Do read a bit before jumping to conclusion thanks.

While there are jobs that are having issues with undertuning right now, they are still capable of clearing Savage. However, the lower the skill of the player playing a job that is already undertuned is going to cause a bad image and stigma in the eyes of the community. Despite how powerful it eventually became in Alphascape, BLM was actively avoided for a long time due to player perceptions of the individuals who played it not living up to the damage standards the class had or just being bad in general (see: Ice Mages). The same can be said for SAM after its introduction in Stormblood: a lot of bad players picked up the job, and, as such, it got a bad reputation. It didn’t help that all SAM had to go on was it’s “big d damage” and no utility like jobs such as NIN, DRG, or MNK could bring a raid—so, if the SAM failed to fulfill its promise of “big d damage”, it was essentially useless to the raid. AST suffered from a huge stigma throughout a lot of early and mid-Heavensward due to how utterly unplayable it was when 3.0 launched, and MCH has had a stigma up until recently due to gameplay issues that, while not entirely rectified, were particularly egregious last expansion.

I agree that there are jobs that need to be addressed with regards to both gameplay and damage. However, that doesn’t meant that the fight encounters need to change; rather, the jobs themselves need to be adjusted.