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

[Shurrikhan]

Actually there maybe a way to make the dungeons more interesting, I don't know why I never thought about this until now since you brought it up.

Open up new routes with different monsters and bosses via Extreme Mode that were previously blocked in the normal route with better rewards when you complete the duty depending on the routes that were taken (calculating which bosses were defeated in the route you have chosen in extreme mode), this could also make Roulette a bit more interesting too with these new additions.

The bosses will always be the same though, but with higher stats and faster mechanics to really test the players aside from new bosses if you choose to battle with them.

Each Extreme Route Dungeon can have a drop that ultimately leads you getting a mount, gear, title, etc.


Of course certain past dungeons from previous expansions and 2.0 will need a bit of name-changing (changing the names like removing Hard from it, etc) to make the dungeons their own thing.

Two brief critiques:

If there's a solution that doesn't require further work specifically in undoing past work, that will generally be preferable.

Moreover, generally, people don't like to sign up for duties only to then have to decide (and likely compromise) on what actual duty they want to do, i.e., the "Extreme route" or normal route.

The concept might still be fun for a different concept type entirely, though -- call them, idk, Dungeon Delves/Dives -- outside the daily streamlined grind.

[Ignithe]

I think what the OP has suggested might better fit into the 'new game +' mode. If they decide to develop this into anything. But unless it becomes necessary to include difficulty as a major feature, I doubt we'll see anything like what has been suggested. History has shown me that mmorpg games tend to simpler design over a game's life.

[Controller]

Except you're relying on conflation. The problems most people have with M+, for instance, are rarely anything core to M+. It's keys. It's the vault. It's the drop rates. It's the reward scaling. All things exterior to the gameplay itself.

And it's not that no one ever talks about the idea of progressive or player-chosen or scaling difficult in dungeons. I have. Forte has. More than a dozen threads by now have. The problem is that the conversation is so frequently derailed by those who go out of their way to ignore the contexts of the requests and harp on already-known problems external to other iterations of the system in question. At this point, a quarter of all avenues likely ever to be available to an MMORPG can be condemned merely by half-understood association to WoW. It's stupidly reductionist.

I don't want to give off the wrong idea, I myself liked it when the game was harder. I LOVED ninja and monk when they had openers that took and made me want to train like I was training for Evo for a Street Fighter. But I've watched countless things get nerfed so bad it's not even depressing anymore. I dunno if I want even the idea of Mplus if I'm honest. I'd rather have just a true expert. Like a 5 man dungeon or something that's got an extreme setting. No sliding scale. Just a new context where we do 5 man or 7 man content that's ONLY extreme setting for dungeons. I don't want dungeons to have easy,hard settings... I think it'll be better if we just had a new mode for it and ONLY it.

That way the people who can't beat story bosses can keep their stuff and we can get something for us. like how Ultimate , savage, extremes are already are.

[Cebo]

I don't want to give off the wrong idea, I myself liked it when the game was harder. I LOVED ninja and monk when they had openers that took and made me want to train like I was training for Evo for a Street Fighter. But I've watched countless things get nerfed so bad it's not even depressing anymore.

TBH, I was in the same boat as you. These were changes I was hoping for even back when I was playing Heavensward in 2015/16. But after not seeing any improvements or advancements to endgame dungeons/raiding for 6 yrs, and jobs getting further simplified and homogenized in SB and ShB, I basically resigned myself to play this game solely for the story and the world only, even though I really enjoyed the difficulty and gameplay of Savage raids/Extreme trials. So I'd come back each expansion, immerse myself in the story, enjoy the first tier of Savage, max out a few of my favorite jobs...and then trail off as I pick up other games.

This post may not have been timely considering the boom FFXIV is experiencing with all the WoW refugees. And for relatively new players, there is a TON of content the game still offers, especially with min-iLvl syncing. But for players like me who've been playing since ARR, and enjoy the dungeons/raiding the most, the endgame content drought is real.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't want to give off the wrong idea, I myself liked it when the game was harder. I LOVED ninja and monk when they had openers that took and made me want to train like I was training for Evo for a Street Fighter. But I've watched countless things get nerfed so bad it's not even depressing anymore. I dunno if I want even the idea of Mplus if I'm honest. I'd rather have just a true expert. Like a 5 man dungeon or something that's got an extreme setting. No sliding scale. Just a new context where we do 5 man or 7 man content that's ONLY extreme setting for dungeons. I don't want dungeons to have easy,hard settings... I think it'll be better if we just had a new mode for it and ONLY it.

That way the people who can't beat story bosses can keep their stuff and we can get something for us. like how Ultimate , savage, extremes are already are.

I feel we're actually in a very similar boat on this. 5.0 NIN (apart from some tuning issues, and wanting the later TCJ change and ONLY that change) and 4.3 Monk (and 3.x high-SkS Monk just behind that) were some of the best combat experiences I've had in a tab-target MMORPG, and I loved that even if not everyone felt up to optimizing them, that depth was there and available to all. Content, unfortunately, cannot be quite so accommodating, as by the time it allows for those who are only looking for minimal engagement their clears, it makes higher ends of engagement seem far less pertinent (not that a speedrun can't be fun in and of itself, as wonderfully useless as it is for anything but saving time).

And I completely understand that preference towards a single, higher difficulty. While I have to very much appreciate the sheer development time granular difficulty settings save for hours of fun at one's preferred levels of challenge (as happens to be seen, despite some less than ideal trappings, in WoW's M+), I'd be okay with just having some real stand-out, optional dungeons at one, higher difficulty level each. Heck, there are some challenge concepts you can only work with basically from scratch, or with them being intended from the start. Imagine, for instance, the old "Hmm, is that a boulder coming down this way?" concept. Apart from some very handy coincidences in design, environmental mechanics like that aren't something you can just add in later, and it'd often be hard to quite fit them along cohesively along other scalars.

My point was merely that it's really bad practice to talk through concepts only by association with some past trappings they may have carried. It reduces our criteria, priorities, value sets, etc., down to something only seen by reflection from something else -- "Not WoW" or "Not XI".

Removed from those trappings, the question of "To M+ or not to M+?" instead becomes simply: "How many difficulties do we want available to our dungeons?" and "To what extent do we want to allow meaningful gear progress via light-party play?"

Therein, we may note a couple things:

• the more difficulty settings you have, the more people can play at a level neither dull nor oppressive to them.

  An Extreme-only dungeon, for instance, will feeling nicely iconic to those able to do it, but to those who cannot, it will feel like content from which one is excluded, more so than any Extreme trial or Savage raid. Similarly, basic-difficulty-only dungeons will rarely feel like more than a grind to a large portion of players. Meanwhile, if you design a dungeon around the Extreme experience first and carry just a clever selection of those challenges over to a Normal mode, you've wasted almost zero development time while increasing the pool of content for all players. That leaves us with a further decision: Do we want to isolate the dungeon to a specific difficulty, to give it a more iconic feeling, or do we want to be more efficient with our development time?

• As we open up more gearing paths, we broaden the sense of who all or what interests are considered as an intended or central part of the game.

  That, in turn comes back to that same question of how much we wish to accommodate/isolate. If we want the only way to fully progress gear to be through raids, then that's that. But if we want, instead, for it to be progressible through anything of similar (or higher) difficulty, then now we're accommodating more areas of player interests, but we might have sacrificed some part of something iconic, depending on how much the game's identity hinges on some common experience.

[Controller]

I feel we're actually in a very similar boat on this. 5.0 NIN (apart from some tuning issues, and wanting the later TCJ change and ONLY that change) and 4.3 Monk (and 3.x high-SkS Monk just behind that) were some of the best combat experiences I've had in a tab-target MMORPG, and I loved that even if not everyone felt up to optimizing them, that depth was there and available to all. Content, unfortunately, cannot be quite so accommodating, as by the time it allows for those who are only looking for minimal engagement their clears, it makes higher ends of engagement seem far less pertinent (not that a speedrun can't be fun in and of itself, as wonderfully useless as it is for anything but saving time).

And I completely understand that preference towards a single, higher difficulty. While I have to very much appreciate the sheer development time granular difficulty settings save for hours of fun at one's preferred levels of challenge (as happens to be seen, despite some less than ideal trappings, in WoW's M+), I'd be okay with just having some real stand-out, optional dungeons at one, higher difficulty level each. Heck, there are some challenge concepts you can only work with basically from scratch, or with them being intended from the start. Imagine, for instance, the old "Hmm, is that a boulder coming down this way?" concept. Apart from some very handy coincidences in design, environmental mechanics like that aren't something you can just add in later, and it'd often be hard to quite fit them along cohesively along other scalars.

My point was merely that it's really bad practice to talk through concepts only by association with some past trappings they may have carried. It reduces our criteria, priorities, value sets, etc., down to something only seen by reflection from something else -- "Not WoW" or "Not XI".

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Actually reading this post and rereading it and letting the idea sink in.. I think you might have a better system then the one I purposed. If I'm being honest my only worry with a sliding scale is that the few we have has been towards the easy side. I know that's not what you're proposing.. it's just a fear I have based on what has happened in game already. And it's why I would rather have a mode that's only set to one setting. But I'd be lying if I said I don't see where you're coming from so I guess I can say I do agree... I'm just scared of how it can be mishandled. Tho like I said rereading what you just posted I am abit more warm to it then I was before.

[VippidyP]

Honestly, I think FFXIV can learn a lot from WoW regarding encounter design and class design.
From what I can tell, both classes and fights are very static, almost everything is designed around a boss doing a set rotation of mechanics then enraging. Almost all arenas are just a flat, symmetric shape...
Very few fights focus on environment interactions, space management, add management, reactivate game play etc.
Almost all classes seem to have a set rotation, minimal procs, zero item effects beyond flat stats.
Even utility: that seems to just mean "% number increases".
There are minimal movement tools, minimal tools for moving and controlling adds, seemingly zero CC beyond role actions, zero kiting, zero off tanking...
I was blown away that BLMs ice magic has no CC, not even a slow attached to it.

It's all just so damn "sterile". It feels like, in terms of bosses and class combat, the game really lacks a "soul", any lump of uniqueness or specialist use being hammered out in the name of balance. In my option, being so balanced just isn't worth it.

And, while I'm ranting, so many of the ingame systems and external websites feel so clunky and janky to interact with. It's like the game can't decide if it's a huge budget MMO or not.

[Jojoya]

Good ideas can be extracted from WoW. This shouldn't be novel nor surprising. So I don't get the allergy to the idea. Specially when you never brought an argument against the concept of a job altering stat other than "hurdur it came from WoW"

There are also a lot of bad ideas that can be extracted from WoW.

What was good in WoW may not be good here. This is a Final Fantasy game, not a Warcraft game. They have different focuses.

Personally, I always found Mastery to be just another boring stat (at least when I Was playing). It rarely had an interesting effect. It was usually just additional throughput on a specific ability that existed solely as a cheap balancing tool for the devs to use mid-tier when a specialization ended up overpowered. Either I wanted more of it or I didn't. It was just another obstacle on the gearing treadmill to overcome.

Would it work better here since a job is just that job with no talent trees to mix up how it's played? Maybe, maybe not. But I would also end up questioning how having it as a separate gear stat would be an improvement over simply adding it as a trait with a set effect.

You can have balanced secondary stats without the game turning into WoW.

You can have secondary stats be more impactful without the game turning into WoW.

The more secondary stats that get introduced, the harder it is to keep them balanced and especially if that stat works differently for every job.

I'm not saying it can't be done but it's also not as simple as you want to make it sound.

[Jojokomoko]

From what I can tell, both classes and fights are very static, almost everything is designed around a boss doing a set rotation of mechanics then enraging. Almost all arenas are just a flat, symmetric shape...
Almost all classes seem to have a set rotation, minimal procs, zero item effects beyond flat stats.
It's all just so damn "sterile". It feels like, in terms of bosses and class combat, the game really lacks a "soul", any lump of uniqueness or specialist use being hammered out in the name of balance. In my option, being so balanced just isn't worth it.

I Think you need to look at FFXIV from a different perspective as to why classes and fights are design in such a way.

It is true that FFXIV gear is extremely linear. Jobs are pretty static. But what you get in return is the player being able to choose what to play and not worry about being a "bad" class. You get to play what you enjoy.
It also means devs don't have to worry about balancing every single possible spec, and instead on designing fun combat encounters and raids.

It is infinitely easier to balance based on FFXIV's systems and jobs than in WoW. Which ultimately also seems to fit with their philosophy, that the great barrier for entry into the content of the game, isn't suppose to be maximizing your class, it is suppose to be interacting with the mechanics of the encounter.

Of course then you have savage and ultimates where they can be more demanding in both regards of ALSO asking you to maximize your class and push everything you got, which again, is easier to tune towards, because you have a very defined image of what classes bring and how they fit into the game.

Imo FFXIV does a way better job than WoW there, gives you "different options" to customize it's probably the reason why WoW it's a NIGHTMARE about Classes Balance (not to mention how stressful and boring it is to obtain the gear you really wants). And what's the point to have "different options" if people are always going to aim the best ones for Damage?, "Multiple options" it's just a facade and a false variety. FFXIV had more options before and still have some with 4 different gears, materias etc. But in the end of day everybody goes to which one deals more Damage.

And hey, this game does have broken powerful systems, but they're in the side content such as BLU, Bozja/Eureka. There players have the freedom to change Lost Action specs or think of the most busted Blue Mage spell build.

Very few fights focus on environment interactions, space management, add management, reactivate game play etc.
There are minimal movement tools, minimal tools for moving and controlling adds, seemingly zero CC beyond role actions, zero kiting, zero off tanking...

Most of these can be found in extreme trials, savages and ultimate fights tho. I guess you want normal content to be more challenging? Also I don't understand what do you mean in terms of "minimal movement tools". We have jump, gap closer, back dash, rescue, sprint etc. A lot of mobility and movement to go around in the fight.

And, while I'm ranting, so many of the ingame systems and external websites feel so clunky and janky to interact with. It's like the game can't decide if it's a huge budget MMO or not.

Now this I absolutely agree, we could use a bit more variety in terms of boss arena, not to mention that crappy website need a complete overhaul for a long time.

[Shurrikhan]

But I would also end up questioning how having it as a separate gear stat would be an improvement over simply adding it as a trait with a set effect.

Which is a fair point. Personally, the best use I can imagine for something like "Mastery" is if you had a mechanic which you really need for a job to be cohesive, but beyond a certain critical juncture, it's more likely to turn players away from the job than further engage them. You therefore set the trait's potency (and thus one's obligation to play around it) low enough that players who aren't trying to perfectly optimize their damage can, to some crucial degree, ignore it, while those who do like it can bank into it further, with some notable capacity differences from Crit and Haste (let alone pure %throughput modifiers like Det).

It gives you a faint but notable lever of customization by which to broaden the zone of attraction available to a job, similar to past FF's iterations' unique gear effects by which one might accentuate any other feature/constraint (for features and constraints, rewards and penalties, are always just two sides of the same coin when you approach optimization) of a given job or character.

And hey, this game does have broken powerful systems

The problem with "broken powerful" systems, though, is they give very little effective choice. They mostly come down to visual fluff -- big numbers in place of having more numerous options, if one were ever to optimize among them.

BLU, for instance, has a painfully stale playflow when played at its full potential. Admittedly, that's because cohesion and depth were never a priority; it's a mini-game in which progression rewards the ability to break, or at least greatly quicken, FATEs and old content, albeit often to the detriment of other players or reward balance.