will midcore encounter design get any better in 7.0?

[grinkdaboy]

back in sb and shb savage and extreme content was good midcore content that was fun to prog. you had to learn how to optimize, how to avoid downtime, memorize how a boss would move so you wouldn't lose any gcds. wall bosses were mostly one per floor, and boss hitboxes weren't the size of a house.

nowadays in endwalker (at least in abyssos, anabaseios, golbez ex, and likely zeromus ex) the boss will either:

a) be wall
b) have a ginormous hitbox so you almost never lose uptime (except in rare fringe cases like in p8 with dog1->snake1->dog2->snake2) and will typically go untargetable during high movement mechanics (dog1,

this has removed almost all nuance in encounter design. mechanics have been reduced to where it's either pass or fail. you are only as consistent as your least consistent player. you are punished with a wipe even if you do nothing wrong. it's not fun, and i don't think this kind of design philosophy has a place in midcore content. keep it in ultimates

[Avoidy]

Ehh I think there're two forces at work here. One is just, fear of losing new players + desire for greater mass appeal leading to them streamlining and gutting a lot of the nuance out of the game. And another is the way this community complains whenever challenging content actually appears. On just about every spectrum, you can find it. People complained here when that EW solo duty was too hard for them. A totally different subgroup complained when the new normal raid tier dropped and had a really basic healcheck. Another different subgroup complained when the savage tier broke their statics and made them consider bringing other jobs (prompting, hilariously, the devteam to admit that they'd cleared it just fine but forgot to tune it for lesser mortals). Then in Ultimates, the content that's just hard for its own sake, another subgroup livestreamed themselves using third party tools in it to lessen the learning curve, prompting immediate staff intervention. I feel like these instances add up and paint a picture for the developers, and that's to say nothing about all the people who complained about job kits like SMN being "jank" in shb or BRD having a 180s buff CD in shb so now they've streamlined and synchronized the jobs even more and you still get people complaining in the class forums about how they just can't seem to make it work.

Don't get me wrong. I played AST and BRD before EW and now I don't anymore because the devs have gutted the fun out of both of them for me. I don't like this new direction at all. But I also can't really blame them for taking this path. There's money to be made from simplifying for mass appeal, and the current player base doesn't appear to want engaging content anyway. So I doubt 8.0 will change the direction of things, since they make money this way and changing anything would mean a risk for no reason that a noteworthy chunk of the community wouldn't like anyway.

[FenyxRising]

I feel like these instances add up and paint a picture for the developers

The wrong picture ?

Heavensward and Stormblood grew just fine. Shadowbringers grew as much as HW and SB percentage-wise. EW didn't grow at all outside of the WoW influx which all left already. Did this new direction actually do anything ? If the game keeps growing 30-50% in population whether you have hard or easy jobs, that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with whether the jobs are hard or easy does it ?

[Avoidy]

The wrong picture ?

Heavensward and Stormblood grew just fine. Shadowbringers grew as much as HW and SB percentage-wise. EW didn't grow at all outside of the WoW influx which all left already. Did this new direction actually do anything ? If the game keeps growing 30-50% in population whether you have hard or easy jobs, that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with whether the jobs are hard or easy does it ?

This discussion's difficult because we don't have the exact numbers for player growth and it's hard to define "this is where they made the jobs easy," but from my perspective Shadowbringers was where the game REALLY took off hard in terms of player-count and new player recruitment and that was also the expansion where we saw a lot of job design philosophy shift into the "just simplify it" route. For example, I remember a lot of ASTs complaining about their card mechanic going away around this time, and most of the brd/mch mains I knew were kind of upset around that era as well because their jobs had changed a lot in a way they felt was "dumbing down." Meanwhile, everyone I knew who played in Heavensward talks about its postgame period as one of the deadest times in the game's history; like whenever I complain about post-EW there's always some HW player pulling up to be like "this is nothing compared to how bad it was back in my day" so to say the game grew just fine during that period might not even be accurate from SE's perspective. It's just hard to say. To be sure, I'm not out here trying to justify dumbing things down for mass appeal; I hate it. But I can see why a dev at square might see the timeline and the amount of complaints over anything difficult and think that most people just want things to be easier.

[Vahlnir]

Don't get me wrong. I played AST and BRD before EW and now I don't anymore because the devs have gutted the fun out of both of them for me.

Maybe I'm weird, but I really enjoy how BRD plays now, maybe more than I ever have. I've never "mained" it, but it has typically been one of my alt jobs to play regularly through the years. The only one they've really killed for me is SAM. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

[Payadopa]

I think extremes are fun as a healer (AST main) but once a fight is figured out it's too monotonous. Savage can be fun but I personally don't like that all it is is DDR. There is no real strategy and if one messes up all die. I'd rather have more interesting RPG mechanics like poison or doom than stand here or die. I liked Silkie because of the bleed for instance. Or Barby for how phrenetic it was. Also pulse damage.

Doesn't change the fact that AST is in absolute shambles. I still believe that I'd you were to transplant the current job design into a single player game it would flop.

[Jeeqbit]

To be honest, I have enjoyed the EW raid content, including your examples of Golbez, Abyssos and Anabaseios.

I think that P5S showed how they can still have space far away from the hitbox because it was quite easy for a tank to drag the boss to a corner for a while, not center it well for puddles and stack>spread, or wreck the party with the TB. P3S is an example of how they can still manage to have boss positioning be a factor because you could tank it anywhere or not keep it faced north very easily. It also made add positioning a factor too.

I don't think hitboxes need to be this big though. There is a middleground between what they have become and them being the size of wedding ring.

The bigger problem I have is with bosses re-centering themselves. It's not solved the problem for novice tanks at all. It's just created a new problem, which is that the boss will often decide to face south regularly (what?? the party is there, Square Enix). The other problem it creates is when I want to keep the boss still. The first boss in the latest dungeon turns around and casts a breath cleave at the party, then turns back to the main tank. I can prevent it turning a second time by running in front of the boss and this is what I would have done up until they started re-centering the boss. Now it re-centers shortly after, so the boss turns twice in total and this is out of my control. Being able to reduce boss spin makes it less annoying for melee DPS.

[FenyxRising]

back in sb and shb savage and extreme content was good midcore content that was fun to prog. you had to learn how to optimize, how to avoid downtime, memorize how a boss would move so you wouldn't lose any gcds. wall bosses were mostly one per floor, and boss hitboxes weren't the size of a house.

nowadays in endwalker (at least in abyssos, anabaseios, golbez ex, and likely zeromus ex) the boss will either:

a) be wall
b) have a ginormous hitbox so you almost never lose uptime (except in rare fringe cases like in p8 with dog1->snake1->dog2->snake2) and will typically go untargetable during high movement mechanics (dog1,

this has removed almost all nuance in encounter design. mechanics have been reduced to where it's either pass or fail. you are only as consistent as your least consistent player. you are punished with a wipe even if you do nothing wrong. it's not fun, and i don't think this kind of design philosophy has a place in midcore content. keep it in ultimates

excuse me the last thing ultimates need is having ginormous hitboxes so you never lose uptime, it's already boring enough

how about we don't have ginormous hitboxes anywhere in the game ?

[grinkdaboy]

excuse me the last thing ultimates need is having ginormous hitboxes so you never lose uptime, it's already boring enough

how about we don't have ginormous hitboxes anywhere in the game ?

you're excused, i was more referring to pass-fail mechanics being used more in ultimates and not savage/extreme where they are now more frequent

[Lyth]

Most of the design direction around raid content dates back to Stormblood.

Generally speaking, there's a longstanding push from the playerbase that the 'theoretical maximum' dps of an encounter should be practically achievable. Forced downtime mechanics are frowned upon because if a boss has a targetable hitbox, players expect to be able to maintain full uptime despite mechanics. RNG elements are equally frowned upon because they're clearly the only thing preventing the average player from achieving the top 1% performance. WAR players complained endlessly about how unfair Crit/DH was on their clears back in Stormblood until it was effectively removed, and SAM players did the same this expansion. The players are the ones pushing for more predictable design elements, as part of a quest to achieving one ideal clear on every fight. If we stop caring about best performances and look at consistency instead, then this won't be an issue.