Former WoW player: Suggested changes to FFXIV Raiding end-game

[Cebo]

Disclaimer - I actually quit WoW back in Cataclysm, and have been playing FFXIV since day 1 of ARR 2.0. Sorry for the clickbait title! I absolutely love this game for its story, its world, and much prefer the gameplay over WoW's combat system.

But I wanted to give my thoughts as someone who was part of a semi-hardcore raiding guild in WoW, and where I feel FFXIV's end-game raiding falls short. My static cleared all of Coils pre-nerf, but with each successive expansion, we usually get bored after clearing the first raid tier, drop off from the game, only to come back prior to the next expansion's release. I know Yoshi-P has stated he doesn't mind if people take breaks like this, but it's a detriment when end-game content droughts can create such quick burnouts like this. I think the reasons for this are as follows:

1) Dungeon design has become more boring with each successive expansion. I am not talking about the aesthetic or music, which has improved tenfold. I am strictly talking about the design. Whereas in ARR we had unique dungeons like Haukke Manor and Qarn, with multiple side/secret paths and mobs that had to be interrupted or prioritized quickly (ie. bees), SB and ShB dungeons have become incredibly linear with wall-to-wall pulls to each boss. While I understand that over time people would speed run dungeons in the most efficient way, the current formulaic dungeon design leads to a stale experience.

2) Raid design too has simply turned into boss arenas, with no dungeon to actually explore. The boss encounters themselves are great, but I have not felt the same sense of wonder exploring a raid, as I did in Coils. It's sad that after 8 years playing this game, nothing has topped the experience of first venturing into Icecrown Citadel in WoW.

3) 4-man dungeons and Savage raids need scaling difficulty. Savage is challenging, but since they are now designed to be cleared in initial crafting gear, they are completed rather quickly in a patch cycle, leaving very little to do for months on end. SE can take a page from Blizzard's book and introduce a scaling + system; ie. if you clear a dungeon/raid, you can then attempt a +1 version that scales enemy health/damage (eg. reverse echo), and then +2, and so on. Rewards for these challenges could include additional tomestones, titles, minions, and mounts.

4) Gear stats are very boring. Besides glamour, there is no excitement to end-game gear when it's only a slight stat improvement, and every materia meld is prioritized for Crit. I would love for more interesting materia options (new competitive sub-stats or enchant procs), set bonuses, or even a trinket slot. I understand balance is an issue. But I also don't think that should excuse SE from not even attempting to make more interesting gear options. They definitely have the creativity in them, as Bozjan has shown. We lack that carrot on a stick to keep playing end-game.

[Nothv13]

1) Dungeon design has become more boring with each successive expansion. I am not talking about the aesthetic or music, which has improved tenfold. I am strictly talking about the design. Whereas in ARR we had unique dungeons like Haukke Manor and Qarn, with multiple side/secret paths and mobs that had to be interrupted or prioritized quickly (ie. bees), SB and ShB dungeons have become incredibly linear with wall-to-wall pulls to each boss. While I understand that over time people would speed run dungeons in the most efficient way, the current formulaic dungeon design leads to a stale experience.

2) Raid design too has simply turned into boss arenas, with no dungeon to actually explore. The boss encounters themselves are great, but I have not felt the same sense of wonder exploring a raid, as I did in Coils. It's sad that after 8 years playing this game, nothing has topped the experience of first venturing into Icecrown Citadel in WoW.

3) 4-man dungeons and Savage raids need scaling difficulty. Savage is challenging, but since they are now designed to be cleared in initial crafting gear, they are completed rather quickly in a patch cycle, leaving very little to do for months on end. SE can take a page from Blizzard's book and introduce a scaling + system; ie. if you clear a dungeon/raid, you can then attempt a +1 version that scales enemy health/damage (eg. reverse echo), and then +2, and so on. Rewards for these challenges could include additional tomestones, titles, minions, and mounts.

4) Gear stats are very boring. Besides glamour, there is no excitement to end-game gear when it's only a slight stat improvement, and every materia meld is prioritized for Crit. I would love for more interesting materia options (new competitive sub-stats or enchant procs), set bonuses, or even a trinket slot. I understand balance is an issue. But I also don't think that should excuse SE from not even attempting to make more interesting gear options. They definitely have the creativity in them, as Bozjan has shown. We lack that carrot on a stick to keep playing end-game.

1 & 2 are the results of actual player activity during content. Players began ignoring much of the extra stuff and even complained about it. So really why make it when the players no longer bother with it? I do wish they would, I even loved hard dungeons being a new route and story of a normal dungeon. I'm not a fan of the simplification, but completely understand why they did it.

[Cebo]

Yeah I understand the reasoning too, but I do miss the sense of exploration of a new dungeon or raid, that several other MMO's (and FFXIV used to) provide. I feel the complaints about trash in raid content could easily be solved by giving you access to the shortcut immediately once you've cleared the boss/quest once in your journal. So you only have to do the trash on your first run. Instead, they just homogenized every boss encounter into a similar circular/square arena. It's kind of telling that Caduceus, our first turn 1 of Coil had the most unorthodox boss arena of all.

[Nothv13]

Yeah I understand the reasoning too, but I do miss the sense of exploration of a new dungeon or raid, that several other MMO's (and FFXIV used to) provide. I feel the complaints about trash in raid content could easily be solved by giving you access to the shortcut immediately once you've cleared the boss/quest once in your journal. So you only have to do the trash on your first run. Instead, they just homogenized every boss encounter into a similar circular/square arena. It's kind of telling that Caduceus, our first turn 1 of Coil had the most unorthodox boss arena of all.

I think more varied boss arenas would be the way to go currently as the boss fights are the focus.

[Shurrikhan]

I think more varied boss arenas would be the way to go currently as the boss fights are the focus.

That'd be a better expenditure of resource, imo, than "trash", but that's assuming the "trash" is as braindead as, well, trash.

For my part, I'd actually really like to see a more cohesive raid, as per the alliance ones, so long as the "trash" can be made interesting (and, ideally, CDs are all reset upon entering the boss arena proper). But yes, I'd take some variety in boss arenas over even good "trash" fights any day, despite loving ​the sense of exploration to a raid.

The part that doesn't quite sit right, in any either-or discussion of the two, though, is how much the two seem connected. True, we lost unique boss arenas (a la T1, T2, and especially the original T5) well before we lost trash, but it seems like there'd be some wasted opportunity or break in cohesion in introducing those boss arenas if not for some efforts meant to situate it prior, even, to the boss fight itself. Idk. It's just a nagging feeling.

1) Dungeon design has become more boring with each successive expansion. I am not talking about the aesthetic or music, which has improved tenfold. I am strictly talking about the design. Whereas in ARR we had unique dungeons like Haukke Manor and Qarn, with multiple side/secret paths and mobs that had to be interrupted or prioritized quickly (ie. bees), SB and ShB dungeons have become incredibly linear with wall-to-wall pulls to each boss. While I understand that over time people would speed run dungeons in the most efficient way, the current formulaic dungeon design leads to a stale experience.

I don't think it's the pathing that makes dungeons feel formulaic. If it even has a impact, it's probably notably less than well, almost everything else. While I'd enjoy a dungeon that actually takes advantage of its multiple paths -- such as by having a series of bosses available through multiple routes, each granting some bonus that carries over with designed intent into the fights after it, or even a dungeon in which we attack an Imperial base and it actually feels like an attack (franted, as a fresh PuG nightmare, I would not put that on a roulette) -- Haukke, like Matoya's Reliquery or w/e it's called, only feels worse to me for its backtracking.

2) Raid design too has simply turned into boss arenas, with no dungeon to actually explore. The boss encounters themselves are great, but I have not felt the same sense of wonder exploring a raid, as I did in Coils. It's sad that after 8 years playing this game, nothing has topped the experience of first venturing into Icecrown Citadel in WoW.

See above. I miss that exploration component, too, and the ocassional actually good trash fight, but I wouldn't sacrifice much for it.

3) 4-man dungeons and Savage raids need scaling difficulty. Savage is challenging, but since they are now designed to be cleared in initial crafting gear, they are completed rather quickly in a patch cycle, leaving very little to do for months on end. SE can take a page from Blizzard's book and introduce a scaling + system; ie. if you clear a dungeon/raid, you can then attempt a +1 version that scales enemy health/damage (eg. reverse echo), and then +2, and so on. Rewards for these challenges could include additional tomestones, titles, minions, and mounts.

Agreed. I'd love some replayability there, especially just to give some sort of content for those who like playing with friends but don't have enough simultaneous logged on to do 8-man content on the regular.

4) Gear stats are very boring. Besides glamour, there is no excitement to end-game gear when it's only a slight stat improvement, and every materia meld is prioritized for Crit. I would love for more interesting materia options (new competitive sub-stats or enchant procs), set bonuses, or even a trinket slot. I understand balance is an issue. But I also don't think that should excuse SE from not even attempting to make more interesting gear options. They definitely have the creativity in them, as Bozjan has shown. We lack that carrot on a stick to keep playing end-game.

Just keep it within reason, apart from balancing out the secondary stats we have now. FF7R, for instance, seemed to do a decent job with the amount of choices it brought. I certainly wouldn't want gearing to feel convoluted, though I suppose one could already make the case that the illusion of choice in our stats (worse, in some regards, than even in modern WoW), especially for how stale their effects are, is already pretty unintuitive.

[Vahlnir]

Some of it might appear bland on the surface but sometimes less is more. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. They've stuck with the same formula for most things since ARR. I don't see them ever shaking things up. Unlike WoW they don't reinvent the wheel every expansion (though they do make some major job changes if they feel they are needed) and that's a good thing. The predictability is one of this game's biggest benefits.

[dezzmont]

1) I think this would be better done as something you select going into the dungeon beforehand, or as one of those 'split the party' mechanics in raids, rather than in dungeons. As others noted, this really doesn't work in 99% of implementations because unless the side rooms are so ridiculously rewarding that they match the rewards at dungeon's end its more efficient to just rush to the finish. Other MMOs like GW2 and WoW allow 'dungeon exploration' by you pre-selecting a path and then getting locked to it, but that just results in people not being able to queue for what they want.

2) I agree with this to some extent. There is room for branching in full alliance raids at least that is a bit under-explored at the moment.

3) This is what Unreals are for (with the bonus of you getting all your actions). I would love for Unreal to become a standard difficulty mode personally. The WoW refugee wave has resulted in the benefit of lots of min-sync PF parties, so I could see them expanding the unreal system to account for the demand of this content. A lot of people also want WoW's scaling system (minus that key BS of course), and I think there is room for that as the much needed 'onramp' to high end content.

4) This sooorta existed before but it was actually not a great system. There is potential room for preference based customization, and there is a fun difference you can notice with BIS gear and your cast/skill speed, but its such a tricky tightrope due to how often "class customization" really just means "newbie traps." Your game basically needs to be designed around it (like Path of Exile, for example, which spends 99% of its dev time on balancing different builds and their purposes) and even then it can be extremely hard for new players.

Pretty much every MMO that allows some sort of stat customization (WoW, PSO2, GW2, ect) basically has one, maybe two, 'default' builds you are heavily punished mechanically from deviating from. If anything preforms way out of line, either that becomes the new default or it gets nerfed/removed. RIP Cat healer druid.

I was hopeful BLU would be a customizable main class, but sadly they made it side content only. While understandable, this strongly hints we are not going to see much job customization outside of hypothetical job action glamours that people are theorizing about.

[Puremallace]

IF they EVER EVER listen to you on point number 4 I promise you that is the day I quit FF14 for good. You quit WoW in Cata but some of us kept playing passed that and watched Blizzard listen to guys like you who wanted to spice up gear because they get bored and want to make the end game a living hell for the other 99% of the playerbase who does not raid log.

Yoshi P said multiple time in the last few months we are not going to see hard 4 man content because put simply people are bad and it puts too much responsibility on healers to carry the groups and then reinforces the need for META comps with DPS builds.

I strongly suggest you go check out WoW and see how your suggestions have all but destroyed that MMO. Also most of coils was basically a hallway with some trash and then a boss. That sounds like pure nostalgia talking there.

They have tried to give us stuff like that recently with the bigger 24 man raids but I doubt it is going to happen on the 8 man raid size.

[Vahlnir]

IF they EVER EVER listen to you on point number 4 I promise you that is the day I quit FF14 for good. You quit WoW in Cata but some of us kept playing passed that and watched Blizzard listen to guys like you who wanted to spice up gear because they get bored and want to make the end game a living hell for the other 99% of the playerbase who does not raid log.

Yeah, that has been one of the bigger issues with WoW. It's all about the raiders. That's all they've cared about for a long, long time.