Has it Been Mentioned? -- Guildhests

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I havent Played all of this week, until Today, Sunday: Aug 20th 2023
(Work, life, sleepy, hanign with friends, playing other game Blahblahblah)

And I did all my Dailies.
One of these struck me with Nostalgia, as I did it quite alot when I was raising all of the Jobs from Lv1....Guildhests.
These Teach You some pretty Neat Mechanics for Fights later......but it hit me....we never get fights like these in the actual content!
Or at least not to this Caliber.

Annoy the Shadow and Ward Up are some fights that would be very neat to see in Newer and much harder Raid Series.
Or even Solemn Trinity where you have to Defend some Objectives while fighting the Enemy.
We have some FATES like this, but never Dungeon or Raid Mechanics like this.

Or maybe I just dont remember them. Might need to have my memory jogged if we already have this.
Last time I recall these types of Mechanics to a degree, has been Bozja, and The Diadem: before it became a Gathers Paradise

I like alot of our raids, but we should definitely get more Objectives and Responsibilities. Id love to see more Raids like Old School Diadem and The Baldesion Arsenal. Some real Hardmode Large-scale Raids.
Thoughts?

[Amnmaat]

Unfortunately, most of the guildhest mechanics are relegated to open world content like fates and maybe hunts. Dungeons kinda had/have a few like Aurum vale; where you need to kill the morbol eggs or you get overwhelmed, but you know how people feel/felt about that dungeon. A Realm Reborn is the height of XIV's content design in my opinion; the jobs just needed Stormblood-level mechanics.

Ever since heavensward every dungeon is 2 mechanics-less pulls between 3 bosses. That's the height of cbu3 creativity and quality.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Unfortunately, most of the guildhest mechanics are relegated to open world content like fates and maybe hunts. Dungeons kinda had/have a few like Aurum vale; where you need to kill the morbol eggs or you get overwhelmed, but you know how people feel/felt about that dungeon. A Realm Reborn is the height of XIV's content design in my opinion; the jobs just needed Stormblood-level mechanics.

Ever since heavensward every dungeon is 2 mechanics-less pulls between 3 bosses. That's the height of cbu3 creativity and quality.

Deal lord I will never be able to explain to one of my friends how Bad Aurem Vale was back in the Day.

And, well I think its reflected in the Playerbase, because people complained about difficulty, and so the Devs responded by making things Easier. I think we all need to come together, and demand/ask for Harder content, and not just Ultimites, but rather harder content in general. If we request it enough, maybe we will get it.
Which I THINK they are TRYING to do with Criterion and Variants, but we need more Varying Fights and Mechanics. Not just more AOE Markers.

My Thoughts at least.

[Renathras]

Deal lord...

I feel like people consistently don't understand that the game is what it is today because of people asking for it. And not "casuals" asking it be "dumbed down".

1) The 2 minute meta came from raiders complaining about Jobs having different personal CDs that didn't align.

2) MOST homogenization came from players complaining some other Job got a thing and their Job either didn't have it or had a worse version. This is especially apparent in Healers, but also in Tanks (one of the few things they have distinct now, their Ultimates, we see DRKs constantly be asking theirs become more like either WAR or PLD's, despite these same people complaining about how similar DRK is to WAR).

3) Encounter design moved away from interesting mechanics because raiders complained about it. Think back to the Alexander raid where someone has to become a monkey to punt the bombs or pilot the gobwalkers. In the modern era, people would be complaining about their parse taking a hit when they have to do it, or what happens if that mechanic comes up right into a 2 min burst window? Now you're a monkey for 15-30 seconds and have to start your burst after everyone else and can't realign for the rest of the encounter. While part of this IS the fault of the 2 min meta (see the (1) above), it's also part of the damage >>> all parse mentality.

4) People want to "get in and get out". The community would ill stomach launch Orbonne. I remember my first ever run of it, we cleared just 10 mins before the timer ran out. My later clears were faster, but it would still be an hour in there. As much as people complain about people stripping to do CT only, there's a reason for that - many people don't want adventures when they que for roulettes, they want tomes. And this INCLUDES hardcore players. A Savage raid team doesn't want to spend 2 hours in Orbonne with a bunch of people failing mechanics and wiping the raid. People consider 24 mans novel launch week, but 4-5 weeks later, don't want to be in them for hours at a time. This is also true of dungeons. The reason there are walls in 4 mans due to 2 pack-wall-2 pack-boss;repeatx3 designs are because PLAYERS WERE DOING THIS. Players would run and grab half the mobs, burn them down, then the other half, boss, rinse and repeat. It got to where really high end players could pull everything between bosses in some dungeons...and would berate any new Tanks or more casual players that didn't want to pull that big. So the Devs stepped in with the walls. The Devs didn't design this gameplay, THE PLAYERS DID.

...if people would realize that most of the things they complain about we have because they literally asked for them, it would help.

"But they were different people!" SOMEtimes, yes. But many times, no. What matters in the end is that we should be more measured in what we ask for and how we behave in game, since that's what the Devs base future design around.

.

EDIT:

Tanks should get a required "how to do wall to wall pulls" tutorial, as that's what tanking in xiv boils down to, unless you're a hard content raider.

Wait, what?

NO! XD

THIS IS PART OF THE PROBLEM.

We shouldn't be instilling the "wall to wall" mentality. THAT'S why dungeons are hallways now. BECAUSE of players having the incessant wall to wall mentality. We need to break from that, NOT enshrine it!

[Amnmaat]

Wait, what?

NO! XD

THIS IS PART OF THE PROBLEM.

We shouldn't be instilling the "wall to wall" mentality. THAT'S why dungeons are hallways now. BECAUSE of players having the incessant wall to wall mentality. We need to break from that, NOT enshrine it!

Haha! Don't blame me, that's cbu3's award winning game design. But I agree, it's time they start leading with creativity instead "what worked before."
xiv's stagnant, just because it worked in heavensward doesn't mean we should have the same game design 3 expansions in a row.

While they're at it get rid of the scions, I'm sick and tired of seeing them again.

[Iscah]

As much as I would like variation...I can see myself getting really annoyed when I tell people "Hey you have to split the damage up and try to finish them off in quick succession or else they just keep coming back forever" and somehow what I said was unclear...so they keep focusing one at a time.

I hated getting that in my mentor roulette grind so much. If someone is capable to keep you all hostage in there if they want, it's a bad mechanic.

The saving grace of Ward Up is that eventually the smaller demons spawn a single large one and you just have to defeat that.

But yes, a remarkable amount of people don't read the instructions, either from the game itself or from teammates. It should be straightforward but isn't.

It seems to be getting brute-forceable now, which is... convenient, I guess, but also disappointing. Same for some other guildhests like Stinging Back. I'd like to see them retuned a bit.

[Shurrikhan]

Wait, what?

NO! XD

THIS IS PART OF THE PROBLEM.

We shouldn't be instilling the "wall to wall" mentality. THAT'S why dungeons are hallways now. BECAUSE of players having the incessant wall to wall mentality. We need to break from that, NOT enshrine it!

And from where did we end up with that "wall to wall" mentality? Because the devs removed virtually all danger involved in mass pulling, then realized they could just pull mobs to the boss (first to lock them out, then to AoE them with the boss) which they "solved" by creating walls that were impassible until the nerfed-to-hell mobs were dead.

Player-chosen variety depends on tuning; if risk can be ignored, it will be ignored. By replacing any difficulty and player chosen difficulty with solely unavoidable/unmanipulable ways of pace-setting via walls, they not only made "wall-to-wall" the norm but also made runs of the same dungeon feel less varied/variable.

I'm sorry, but the community isn't worth blaming for its simply having adapted to the changes given to it (as opposed to, what, RPing that a threat remains / purposely doing runs half-naked for no reward?).

Does some part of that blame lie with a portion of the community who insisted that Amdapor Keep, Pharos Sirius, and the like be hugely nerfed (with some of its bosses even losing a good half their mechanics)? Maybe. But it's also on the devs to take their feedback with a grain of salt and a margin of foresight.

Kinda wish they'd gone with the "flashes right before the hit" type of telegraph for the Coincounter, like Omega's Starboard/Larboard cannons. Too late to dodge, but at least you can see what happened for next time. Some of those attacks are a bit oddly shaped.

That'd be fine, too. I prefer to also have 'edges (very subtly) marked only' before the hit, since it allows for minimalistic movement without needing to quite to the whole level of precisely eyeballing distance from mob, but whatever allows players to quickly learn the mechanic without relying on covering the floor in gaudy AoE indicators (or, just as bad, devolving the mechanic to just responding to those indicators instead of engaging with the ability names or readying animations) sounds good to me.

(I also wouldn't mind having a soft %HP based damage cap on some skills, like Coincounter's radial swing dealing at most 99.9% of HP, as that'd then be recoverable... so long as we accelerate a follow-up mechanic to demand immediate healing instead of thereby making Swing effectively zero threat.)

Yeah I agree that I liked when I had to watch the body language of Coincounter to see what was up. Yeah if it's your 1st time you may get nailed with an attack but only one of them was punishing. I mean if you see a 10 ton attack that's an AoE and get hit with that and it hurt but you survived...it's safe to say when you see it again but it says 100 ton...that you should not be there.

Pretty sure the Ten-Tonne radial AoE one-shot clothies back in the day unless they had the food buff and good gear or a Stoneskin/Succor. Heck, I think it was usually a one-shot to Monks, too, with only DRGs being able to survive, outside of the circumstances above.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I feel like people consistently don't understand that the game is what it is today because of people asking for it. And not "casuals" asking it be "dumbed down".

Maybe Im being Slow, but isnt that kind of what I said?
Or...kind of the same thing?

, because people complained about difficulty, and so the Devs responded by making things Easier.

Ok so maybe I didnt use that Exact Wording, but I feel like it kind of Equals the same Argument.
Im not even disagreeing with it. As I said ""we all need to come together, and demand/ask for Harder content, and not just Ultimites, but rather harder content in general""

But Ive given my thoughts on an idea of HOW they could do that, but as seen in alot of posts here my General Idea has some Holes that would probly meet pushback.

[Jojoya]

Ok so maybe I didnt use that Exact Wording, but I feel like it kind of Equals the same Argument.
Im not even disagreeing with it. As I said ""we all need to come together, and demand/ask for Harder content, and not just Ultimites, but rather harder content in general""

But Ive given my thoughts on an idea of HOW they could do that, but as seen in alot of posts here my General Idea has some Holes that would probly meet pushback.

So let your ideas meet pushback. That doesn't mean you won't also have supporters for your ideas. They may even think of ways your ideas could be improved. That's why many companies have brainstorming sessions. One person's "meh" idea can spark an improved idea in someone else.

But definitely don't expect "all" players to come together to demand more harder content. Some are happy with the way things are. It's those who want that harder content to come together.

[Shurrikhan]

Unfortunately, most of the guildhest mechanics are relegated to open world content like fates and maybe hunts. Dungeons kinda had/have a few like Aurum vale; where you need to kill the morbol eggs or you get overwhelmed, but you know how people feel/felt about that dungeon. A Realm Reborn is the height of XIV's content design in my opinion; the jobs just needed Stormblood-level mechanics.

I never understood the hate for Aurum Vale. Since mob EXP existed at decent levels back then, you could farm the first room with friends to level-grind, and the dungeon as a whole gave greater %EXP for its level than Darkhold or Cutter's Cry did for theirs.

So casters didn't want to stand in front of vents and you had to ranged pull some pats first to be safe if you had an especially bad tank and/or healer... boo hoo? Coincounter could have up to 10 mechanics cancelled by PLDs or WAR + melee DPS and the attacks were pretty damn intuitive regardless after you'd seen each once.

(Coincounter's before-and-after makes me wish we'd just subtly demark the edges of most AoEs instead of going full red terrain on/for everything.)

And yeah, wholly agreed on ARR having, by and large, the most interesting dungeon designs. Pre-nerfs AK and PS, Amdapor Keep HM, Halatali HM... good times.

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As for Guildhests... honestly, some of them made the content type feel like it had promise. I would have liked to see them creatively continued.