Enrage timer raid design is causing all the problems

[Zerathor]

I find every job fits into these fights if they follow the simple method bellow:

[Vendalwind]

I find every job fits into these fights if they follow the simple method bellow:

Although I like the sentiment as a response to the overall theme of this thread, its not true when associated with the phrase
"I find every job fits"
My Raid group for example that I lead. I am about a 60th percentile NIN right now. Sometimes better, but never worse than 50. My raid comp with BLM, SAM, BRD, NIN is hitting the enrage wall hard on e2. Our tanks are performing well, our healers are performing sub 50 but i definitely think its in part because of mistakes made by others. Theoretically if everyone in our group performed a 50th percentile run we would clear with 1.9k dps to spare. Despite me and the tanks being the best percentiles in our group I have now had 5 members (i first labeled the roles but trying to be more discreet) private message me telling me I need to switch to monk. Why? Because even at my 60th percentile I'm doing less than our BRD at its 40th, or SAM at its 20th, or BLM at their 15th in terms of overall rDPS contribution. That freaking sucks.
And I'm told also that me switching is our only option if I want to keep the group together because they, and I quote: "know you have the potential and skill to grow where some of our other members don't, and you as lead hold the responsibility to carry the team" I also advertised the team when forming it as casual with an emphasis on fun instead of clears, but behold 3 of the people in the static have now threatened to leave if people don't improve by the end of the week or I dont switch to MNK. And its also funny cause they often complain about each other to me and each of course generally thinks they are the fully capable ones.

I want to play NIN, I like NIN, I like the playstyle, I like the skill, but I'm being asked to play MNK.


My point in sharing this story even at the expense of people figuring out who is in my group (please dont look any of us up, despite my rant everyone in my group is generally a very good and nice person, there is no reason to ostracize anyone here) is that some classes absolutely have the shaft right now.

And without a doubt do not "fit" into the fights for anyone except the overgeared or the expert teams.

As conclusion. I love the enrage mechanic, It makes us DPS have to learn to do our jobs. But I feel it is a bit steep to meet the demands right now IF class balance continues to be this terrible.

[Vendalwind]

Also on a screw up I by very nature am most likely to have the whole group call me out. My death ratio, in the last few weeks due to mistakes has been less than any of the other dps or healers, so in short I KNOW its not me Fing up mechanics even close to most of the time. but a healers die and no one says a word but the healer who says My B. I die and literally at least 3 people (because they know i can take a beating and criticism well, and I've kinda become the group scapegoat for people to let frustrations out) always call me out "Oh the freaking ninja dies again, Where's my trick?!"

At first it was a funny joke cause I and everyone else knew SE had Fed me over, but now. Im getting real tired of it. to the point where I'm considering splitting the group and just sticking with the fun calmer people.

Yesterday I had a conversation with one of our reasonable members who finally convinced me to switch to monk, and insisted on Buying me a lvl skip to 70 for MNK. I am exceedingly grateful to this individual, and he listened with reason after i finally blew up and let what I was holding back as the other 4 PMed flow out. But its weird cause I now feel slightly indebted to him after trying to argue him out of it, but he insisted. Again I am super greatful, but if and when NIN comes back I will want to return to it, and TBH I dont really have a ton of free time right now to lvl MNK to 80 when I was hoping to finish lvling SMN to cap out my 5 role quests.

[KageTokage]

I decided to just switch to MNK after seeing that almost all of the crafted pieces are their pre-savageBIS right now.

I'll go back to NIN if 5.08 succeeds in making it not suck.

[Shiroe]

@ Blm, you can not cheese mechanics in E3S or E4S.., you than either die or kill someone..
(those fights especially E4S is hard enough as BLm...)

that said, the enrage is ok the way it is atm (need to execute the mechanics correctly + get as much uptime as possible)

... though some classes do contribute too little / could contribute overall more (nin, rdm and dnc), .. and others almost too much (mnk & pld), .. rebalancing is a bit needed

[Lina_Slayer]

I really think one of the EX Primals and ES1 should be harder to prepare people better for ES2, you go from fights where you can have 2 digit deaths (EX Primals) and still clear with PF DPS to a fight where there is some DPS requirement (ES1) but is still clearable with many deaths (still talking about PF general DPS not static DPS) to a fight where you can actually see deathless enrages, I dunno I feel like Titania, Inno and Eden Prime never ask the player to learn to DPS properly and will be cleared by just dodging mechanics, then when people go to ES2 things just get real and without even an in-game parser people don't even know how they are doing.

[whiskeybravo]

There are a variety of tank and healer checks sprinkled throughout the content, but it always boils down to the boss having X HP and the party have Y amount of time to deplete it.

[Nessiae]

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.

I'm going to have to hard disagree, WRT mechanics, it is good to have 2 games with very distinct ways of designing raids and mechanics that's why I raid on FF and not WoW. WRT to enrages this tier has already been cleared (week 1) by comps containing "multiple bottom tier jobs" where it was believed to mathematically impossible.

[TaiyouSeishin]

I'm going to have to hard disagree, WRT mechanics, it is good to have 2 games with very distinct ways of designing raids and mechanics that's why I raid on FF and not WoW. WRT to enrages this tier has already been cleared (week 1) by comps containing "multiple bottom tier jobs" where it was believed to mathematically impossible.

Its a shame you didnt raid in WoW, some fights werent dps checks at all, just mechanic intensive.

As for clears in this game... if we are talking mathmatics, It was never mathematically impossible, just mathmatically harder. Just some classes felt they were more a hinderance than a help.

There is nothing wrong with 2 games that design raids differently. But WoW had more than one design type (at least in its prime), where as ff14 has.... really 1 now.

Nothing wrong with you being happy that all raiding to you is dps checks, but there is nothing wrong with the opinion that enrage timers on everything holds back raid design either.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Some people like the dps crunch with an add-possible-wipe phase in the middle. Some dont.

[RenoKreuz]

Its a shame you didnt raid in WoW, some fights werent dps checks at all, just mechanic intensive.

As for clears in this game... if we are talking mathmatics, It was never mathematically impossible, just mathmatically harder. Just some classes felt they were more a hinderance than a help.

There is nothing wrong with 2 games that design raids differently. But WoW had more than one design type (at least in its prime), where as ff14 has.... really 1 now.

Nothing wrong with you being happy that all raiding to you is dps checks, but there is nothing wrong with the opinion that enrage timers on everything holds back raid design either.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Some people like the dps crunch with an add-possible-wipe phase in the middle. Some dont.

Thanks for very nicely summarising my point! For all the people saying that DPS enrage is a fine mechanic, i don't disagree! And I am not asking for things to be "easier", just "more variety".

Raid design as of now, no matter how "different" they are, still focus mostly on (1) avoid death, (2) predictable aoe heals and tank busters, (3) maximum uptime. While I think some fights can follow this theme, from a healer's perspective, I find the fights to become rather stale fast as you can see in the formula of 1,2 and 3, healers deal with (2) occasionally, and for (3), press 1 button now. If there were more variety of raid designs e.g. low levels of healing is constantly needed, healers would need to manage mana / healing (e.g. cure being the go-to spell rather than just cure 2 / solace during busters).

From a DPS perspective, having a variety of "things to kill" including multi-boss fights (which has not been implemented before afaik), would also go a long way for different classes to shine and strategise their optimum playstyle.