Enrage timer raid design is causing all the problems

[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.

[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.

[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)

[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.

[Selova]

snip.

No one is saying that they want this game to turn into WoW, how about you dial back a bit on the dramatic knee-jerk responses. He was comparing raid mechanics.
You can say what you want about WoW, but their raids are top notch and miles ahead design wise over the raids in FFXIV. The OP is right about nearly every fight being too enraged focused around dps instead of interesting mechanics that rely on more than just pushing your groups damage. Its been the design philosophy for every single boss in this game and I honestly believe they need to change it up.

[TaiyouSeishin]

WoW started failing for a number of reasons. One of them started when they starting worrying about "cookie-cutter" optimal specs. (Or some would call it meta) which is dumb, as something will always be the best (highest dps) even WoW had them, but people were not excluded because of a "meta" you couldn't be picky or choosy.

WoW only had a few missteps with its raid design, but otherwise was well thought out and made with a certain degree of care. The reason for this honestly is because rotations for most classes, while can be busy, was more straight forward, so the skill was in dealing with the mechanics, ensuring your dps uptime both physically and your DoTs, tanks managing aggro and boss/add positioning. Healers had to synergize with each other to keep people alive (also a person being able to solo heal in some fights was AMAZING). No one cared about a tanks or healers dps, there was plenty to heal, and any down time you were conserving mana. Tanks had other concerns but they often did some semblance of dps (dps = aggro).

Do i want ff14 to be WoW? No, i dont play ff14 for its raids anyway, if i go with friends....cool... if not... meh, im here for friends...and some pvp >.> i left my more hardcore raiding behind in WoW. but if ff14 DID take some pages out of WoWs book.... when it comes to raid design, id probably be more serious about going to do them.

[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.

[Typhoria]

As much as I prefer WoW raiding, the FF14 environment will never be the same. There is just very little wiggle room that can be applied to encounter design, due to the 8 player restriction. For starters, you can't have at least 1 of every DPS/Healer, so it's harder to carve out a niche role when they are all expected to perform at a certain level.

[ValkyrieL]

The reason people fail DPS check in ES2 is because they fk# up the mechanics, either they die or get damaged DOWN, this is very detrimental.

[KageTokage]

I'm curious as to how tight the ES4 DPS check is vs. ES3 because I'm having doubts that the rampant exclusion of "non-meta" classes like NIN and DNC in PF groups is really that necessary.