Unreal vs Extreme

[Picker]

I agree 100% with op about the utter state of the game. Next xpac there will b no more hitboxes, positionals or mitigation, just a bunch of lobotomized jobs like summoner or sage standing around pressing 3 buttons, and then moving to another spot and doing their rotation because the only mechanics in the raids is stand here then move over there for a bit then stand in another spot for a bit for 10 minutes hooray. Remember when mmos had crowd control, kiting, talent trees and specializations, interacting with objects, teamwork and synergy, boss positioning, weaknesses, resistances, debuffs, no battle res, trash packs, puzzles, healer classes, challenge, a meta that’s not just 4 melee attacking Hephaestus or tree from anywhere on the map it doesn’t actually matter where you stand anymore cuz you can do the whole fight without even looking in the boss’ direction yadda yadda, I still love the game cuz im an addict but it’s definitly time for ff17, 10 years for this game is stretching it and now it’s too popular so they’re making it real dumb to cast the widest net

[Saraide]

I do like sophia's way of telling you to deal with boss position on your own, although I would argue she isnt the best example of this because her positioning really isnt that deep. I think kefka savage is a really good example for this however. When I did that fight it really felt like melee uptime wasnt free.

[Amarande]

The quality drop off in bosses and raid mechanics is really sad because everything is being sacrificed in the name of uptime, damage balance, and accessibility.

Honestly the game feels stale now a days not because we've been playing for a long time. It actually is becoming stale and people have less and less things to do in game because the game does it all for you.

I expect it's really both. We've been playing for a long time, and because of that, it's getting harder and harder for devs to find novel challenges - especially with such a small group size meaning that not every job can be included (the 8-man format is a real downer in a number of ways, between this and the lack of wiggle room for error which is a heavy contributor to the culture issues that have developed with raiding in recent years), but somehow every job more or less has to be viable (especially if we are going to continue having gearing systems where even though you can "play" every job, you can only gear up one or two per tier due to the shared weekly locks, and you more or less lock this in the moment you spend your first weekly tomestones).

Then you add the fact that many types of mechanics turned out during the early experimental days of 2.x to be unviable within the XIV's engine limitations (for instance, T5 and T8 showed that complex terrains are too exploitable), making it hard for SE to do much besides basic AoE dancing, debuff juggles (which themselves are problematic because of the server side system, often ending up feeling drawn out because of presumably the need to give the server time to register each step), and DPS races (which really bring the small group size and needing to keep jobs tightly balanced to the forefront).

Add to that the sheer number of jobs we have, and it's getting hard to keep everything balanced without succumbing to the "you must play meta" that almost every other game with small teams with large numbers of options tends to fall victim to.

Sophia is a much better fight than Rubicante for other reasons imo: She introduces all of her mechanics early into the fight and then remixes them, rather than backloading the actually fun mechanics as hard as Rubicante or for that matter Zurvan.

Yeah, reminds me of the difference between Stormblood and Shadowbringers fights. StB fights were almost always front loaded in this manner, and it led to a situation where things kept you on your toes while still being reasonably chill (the main one that I recall that did not was Shinryu Ex, and there's a reason this fight was a notorious salt mine).

But apparently, hardcore raiders whined about the fights being boring after halftime, so ShB decided to go with backloading, and it led to further inflaming the negative aspects of the community, because who wanted to deal with the likes of Black Smokers or, oh Twelve, Cycles?

[Wolwosh]

I haven't really been enjoying this expansion Extremes at all.
Heavensward and SB had the best Extremes imo, its been going downhill since EW.
Same for this Savage tier.
I find P6S and 7 so annoying and dull that I taxi passed them and I've never done that before and I've raided all tiers basically.

[Coatl]

Bosses teleporting themselves has kinda stifles how much you can interact with the raid. If the boss is going to be planted in one place there should be a good reason for it, like refurbisher or doom train.

[angienessyo]

I've been playing since Heavensward and I don't know, I didn't think Sophia is really all that interesting as a fight? It's of course not a bad fight (the music, aesthetic and scales mechanics are cool)but it's never been in my top 10. I've been farming every single EX for their mounts since Susano EX and from my POV SB had the best EX trials and Shadowbringers had the worst trials. (SoS+Hades were great but that's it) Endwalker's have been superior to Shadowbringers thus far with Barb EX being one of my favorites they've ever done. But Endwalker's biggest flaw is they really want to do puzzle mechanics now and those tend to only have a few solutions so we end up with boring follow the leader situations like the newest EX+Zodiark. I never got bored farming Barb because it was so fast paced and I was always on my toes. I want more of savage+EX to be like Barb and less like Zodiark/Rubi.

In terms of savage raiding stuff has gone downhill though. I did think P8S was really great even if snakes were jank on controller, but I can think of more fights I dread in the past 2 savage tiers than ones I love. And the flaw with the big hitboxes on everything isn't that melee gets free uptime. I'm telling you as someone that's been doing serious content as NIN since Stormblood that getting 1 extra GCD and then walking away isn't really interesting fight design. The problem with the big hitboxes is it actually robs jobs with gap closers of cool moments. It was really fun doing E5S, getting the perfect greed and then doing the perfect corps a corps on RDM into the boss. Giant hitboxes mean things like corps a corps have 0 purpose because you're just going to awkwardly move 2 inches. I don't think I've really touched my shikuchi macro that puts me onto the target a single time in Endwalker because outside of Ultimate there aren't many times I need it.