Enrage timer raid design is causing all the problems

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Nessiae]

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.

What makes you think I didn't raid in wow. I'm very familiar with wows raiding history, enough to know that every major world first wall was literally a dps check. So dumbing down FF to "raiding is beating a dps check" applies just as strongly to wow.

[TaiyouSeishin]

What makes you think I didn't raid in wow. I'm very familiar with wows raiding history, enough to know that every major world first wall was literally a dps check. So dumbing down FF to "raiding is beating a dps check" applies just as strongly to wow.

Hm my bad, i thought that meant you looked at raiding in wow and said not for you. But as for world first, that only applied to heroic end boss of a raid, and no, it wasnt always dps checks, bosses like Sinestra didnt live as long as they did just because of that. The groups had to get through the rest of the raid first. Sometimes it was the "soft enrage" sometimes the fight went too long, so healers ran out of mana. Sometimes it WAS a dps check. If a raid dropped tomorrow, the heroic world first would often take almost a month to be achieved, by hardcore prog raiding guilds.