Zepla: The Players Endwalker Left Behind

[Lyth]

Content difficulty matters less than you might think, and you don't need to be handed a fight tailored to your exact skill level. Go to the next hardest fight from where you are at and start learning. You don't need hundreds of difficulty settings to cater to individual playstyles.

No, the problem is that in the process of streamlining gameplay, they've progressively streamlined out the community. If you've got a group of friends waiting to do stuff every time you log on, then you'll do content well after you have all the rewards for it. I know people who still regularly do deep dungeon group speedruns despite having all the rewards, purely for the social aspect of it.

Coerthas fates were good for creating this atmosphere historically, when level boosts weren't available. Hunts were also good for this in ARR and HW, when there was a degree of mystery about spawns, and when players were less organized. Eureka and Bozja were good for this as well. Endwalker does a really good job of making content accessible and easy to jump into as a single player, but it comes at the cost of removing frameworks required for these communities to grow organically in game.

I think the reason why this forum is so popular is because it acts as a form of substitute Barrens chat. If you had a lot of players together in the same zone, a lot of these conversations would happen in-game in shout instead.

[ForteNightshade]

Ma'am, the really casual player avoid responsibility like a plague. They won't play as a tank unless they know deeply how the instance works. See "tank anxiety".

Not only is this not a retort to my argument, DPS can still repeatedly get him by things in casual content without much concern. Sure, they don't have the absurd survival of a tank but you can easily collect vuln stacks and live.

Really depends of your groups, alliance raid day 1 is a wipe fest. You can re-watch ultimate raiders playing and dying in their first try. You are right if you are saying that such content is short lived - as soon as everyone gets higher iLVL, it's harder to die. However, this phrase is objectively speaking, wrong.

You're comparing day 1, hour 1 when nobody knows what's going on to the overall damage scaling on the fight. Of course players are going to die to stuff that don't know is happening. That doesn't change the fact Europhsyne falls over. In fact, my day one experience never saw a single wipe. Within two days, I'd see maybe one or two wipes at best despite running it or Aglaia constantly. The only real things that got people were stuff like Rhalgr's knockback. At least when it comes to potential full party wipes. Hell, day 1 of Paradigm's Breach, over half the party got knocked off and eleven of us were still able to kill the boss from like 40-50% because he does absolutely nothing threatening. All while people who picked up threatened to report us for not wiping and "holding them hostage" because they wanted to reset the fight.

My dude, you weren't getting LB3 for Menphina day 1, hour 1. She simply doesn't have enough health. Nophica doesn't do anything to tanks for almost five minutes. In fact, looking at one of my logs, I needed a run with thirteen deaths just to even see her tank buster actually existed. So no, what I said is not objectively wrong. Both Aglaia and Euphrosyne are absolute facerolls from the second they released.

If jobs are simplified, there is no need for deep in-game guide.

Simplification doesn't necessarily mean completely braindead to the point anyone can play them decently well. Unless it's Summoner we're talking about. That job didn't just get simplified. They straight up lobotomized it. Both the examples I provided are current job design. Sure, in dungeons where you basically can't die, it doesn't matter. What about when those players try doing harder content or demand other players compensate for their inability to play the job correctly. Speaking of Summoner, I just happened to run a dungeon and they were getting doubled over by the tank. I was quite literally doubling their damage. The healer was several thousand above them. This person had absolutely zero idea how to play the easiest job in the game. At level 90.

Dais extreme (requires group coordination, has enrage): 24% clear
Mothercrystal (sometimes requires group coordination, small DPS test): 46% clear
Zodiark (it's so easy that you can clear following a donut, barely has DPS test): 46% clear
source: https://ffxivcollect.com

I don't really know what you aim to highlight with these statistics. First and foremost, that site is opt-in. Therefore, it's wholly inaccurate for the actual clear rates of content considering you need to sign up and link your lodestone to the site—which the majority of players won't do. Regardless, even taken at face value those clear rates are pretty solid for a game that doesn't actively promote any difficult content whatsoever and is very casual focused.

it's not.

It's not what? Subjective? Of course it is. Ask different people to define "Casual," "Midcore" and Hardcore" and you'll get several completely different answers depending how if they view those denotation as skill level, time commitment or hours played. Nevermind the fact, you then have the "semi" prefix and the whole thing gets incredibly murky.

[CidHeiral]

The game doesn't even tell you what an oGCD or weaving is, despite this being essential to high end play. Not optional, not optimal; essential. I started in ARR and didn't figure that out until SB when I noticed getting the Pacification debuff in PotD didn't disable all my attacks (despite the debuff description), some things I could still use. When I started looking up guides for Jobs (specifically SCH) on YouTube, that's when I learned it was actually different, and around 5.0, I noticed (looking at the official "Job Guide" webpages) that there are those little "spell"/"weaponskill"/"ability" tags, and that's when I figured out, for the first time, how to tell which was which on my own. I'd been playing since 2.3. You can mock me if you want, I'd wager that's a fairly common story.

I'm not mocking you but I am genuinely mystified and curious as to how this is possible. You played for years without noticing that some buttons aren't on the global cooldown? How?

[PercibelTheren]

The game can't teach you muscular memory, just practice can do. As BLM, some players like to use ley libes at the middle of Golbez arena, i prefer to use it on the corner. No guide will make me prefer X or Y.

The casual player is also playing a MMORPG, researching for stuff is part of the immersion.

How is having to research stuff out of game "part of the immersion"? A game should do a good job teaching you the mechanics and you should never have to look for outside tutorials unless you're trying to minmax to an absurd degree.

[Tanis_Ebonhart]

Maybe Dawntrail will have something like Bozja in it. It's way too late for that to be added into Endwalker.

[Renathras]

I'm not mocking you but I am genuinely mystified and curious as to how this is possible. You played for years without noticing that some buttons aren't on the global cooldown? How?

Hm...no ofeense taken, then.

Well, for one thing, I played healers almost exclusively, and at the time I think their casts took up the whole GCD, so oGCDs weren't much more than "more responsive" heals (being all instant casts). I also mainly played WHM, which didn't have many oGCDs. Benediction always has had that weird delay and Asylum had to be targeted so it didn't really come across as something you could use whenever. I also came from WoW and I don't recall any of the classes I played in WoW having abilities that didn't work with the GCD system (again, the ones I played), so the idea genuinely didn't occur to me there'd be non-GCD based abilities. I also tend to play by feel (controller) a lot, so I don't usually keep my eyes on my crossbars, meaning things staying lit up or not wouldn't have been apparent at all since my eyes were on party health bars and I healed with (as was the way to do it at the time in ARR and HW) Cure/Regen/Medica spells that I knew the locations of by feel on my controller. It's hard to see something when you aren't ever looking at it.

And think about it, the name is Global CoolDown. Which heavily implies it affects everything. And you can't use an oGCD while a GCD is in progress or within the 0.7 sec animation lock of it.

If you aren't looking for it or don't know about it already, it's not very apparent that it's a thing. Again, I started noticing it specifically in PotD because of Pacification because that DOES gray out everything EXCEPT your Abilities, which makes it stark that there's some kind of difference there. It doesn't really say anything about what that difference is, but it makes it clear there is one.

And as far as I can tell, the game never actually defines the difference between a Weaponskill (GCD disabled by Pacification), Spell (GCD disabled by Silence), and an Ability (oGCDs). It doesn't tell you the difference between them in any way. It doesn't tell you that oGCDs can be weaved, doesn't tell you what clipping is, how many oGCDs can be weaved without clipping, or what Animation lock is, or extended animation lock (gap closers/openers) vs normal abilities, nor the edge case things (RDM's Enchanted Weaponskills having reduced GCD limiting weaves).

Some of these could be considered more advanced topics, but the basic stuff it really should teach in the game. Though I'm not sure how to standardize that, considering many Jobs don't get an oGCD until super late, so Hall of the Novice wouldn't work unless we give every Job an oGCD before level 15.

Now, this might have been different for someone playing Jobs with lots of instant casts, but for healers with 2.5 sec GCD and 2.5 sec cast times, oGCDs not exactly stand out like they do for a melee with all instant cast attacks.

[ZephyrMenodora]

Hm...no ofeense taken, then.

Stuff

I think it's just surprising because you still have insta-casts like Regen, and you can then see that most of our WHM skills go on cooldown and others dont and remain available for pressing.

[ForsakenRoe]

Some of these could be considered more advanced topics, but the basic stuff it really should teach in the game. Though I'm not sure how to standardize that, considering many Jobs don't get an oGCD until super late, so Hall of the Novice wouldn't work unless we give every Job an oGCD before level 15.

This was, to an extent, how earlier versions of the game were, many jobs DID get an OGCD very early on. Like for example, PGL got a crit selfbuff (internal release) at like level 6. Keen Flurry on LNC (parry buff) was somewhere in the single digits iirc. Fluid Aura on WHM was 15. We've lost a great many of those though because... reasons? Like, Keen Flurry is whatever, but a crit buff, on what is now the most crit reliant job in the game (chakra procs)???

[Renathras]

I think it's just surprising because you still have insta-casts like Regen, and you can then see that most of our WHM skills go on cooldown and others dont and remain available for pressing.

I think it's more the underlying mechanics.

I remember thinking in HW, probably, how Tetra seemed - as I put it at the time - "more responsive" than Cure 2. Like I noticed that Cure 2 would sometimes take a minute to (start) casting but Tetra would always go off really fast. I think at the time I chalked it up to being instant cast as Regen was the same way (casts immediately after another action). I probably didn't chain Regen people to notice it wasn't as responsive to ITSELF, and Regen was the only exception back then, right? Or did Cure 1 also have a faster cast time? It's been so long I don't remember.

What I DO know is that I had to go outside of the game to learn:

1) That oGCD weaving is the preferred form of healing,
2) oGCDs are for routine healing, not emergency buttons (games like WoW tend to use CDs as more powerful abilities for emergencies or special situations; ex Vanilla/BC Paladin Lay on Hands with its 60 MINUTE cooldown),
3) Animation lock on all actions is ~0.7 sec,
4) Given a GCD of 2.1 or greater seconds, you can complete an instant cast action (0.7), one oGCD weave (1.4), and a second oGCD weave (2.1) without clipping, but any more cause clipping,
4b) Given a GCD of 2.5, you can comfortably fit one oGCD after a 1.5 sec cast without clipping,
4c) That special cases exist (RDM Enchanted Weaponskills come to mind) where the ability has a shorter GCD that affects this (Eukrasia abilities also do this since they're instant but technically only a 1.5 sec GCD after the ability, half of which is the animation lock)
5) Slidecasting grants a narrow window of movement due to animation lock (the game does not EVER say anything about this other very important technique),
6) At the time (this was SB) how macroing Eos' abilities got around the GCD system entirely due to them being her actions and not on your own GCD or oGCD or animation lock,
7) The difference between Weaponskill, Spell, and Ability.

(7) was the only one of those things I more or less figured out on my own, but it was only after learning the rest through a YouTube guide on SCH (can't remember whose, maybe Momo, but don't recall) and reading the Balance WEBSITE (the Disc is a plague; but once they had the website it had some pretty good info on weaving for both RDM and SMN, as that was during ShB that they put it up, and the RDM one I remember trying to find the picture later since it was a really good visual of what was going on and what was and wasn't clipping).

I know you aren't mocking, but I'm just saying, legitimately, I'd bet money that at least half the playerbase doesn't know the ins and outs of oGCD vs GCD if you had a true cross-section sample of the community, and I'm not a betting person in general. Even people vaguely aware that some abilities are "more responsive" than others probably couldn't explain half of what I just did here. It's a pretty alien concept that most other games I've played (and I have played a lot...) tend not to have. I'm honestly not able to think of one other than FFXIV offhand that I've played that has a GCD/oGCD/animation lock/slidecasting system like FFXIV does.

[CidHeiral]

If you aren't looking for it or don't know about it already, it's not very apparent that it's a thing. Again, I started noticing it specifically in PotD because of Pacification because that DOES gray out everything EXCEPT your Abilities, which makes it stark that there's some kind of difference there. It doesn't really say anything about what that difference is, but it makes it clear there is one.

I see, well thank you for sharing your experience. I must admit I'm still quite perplexed by the whole thing but I suppose that goes to show how diverse the audience playing this game is.

This actually raises an interesting question of how much explanation is too much and how much is not enough. What may be obvious to one person may not be obvious to another, and the more explanations and tutorials you put in may help one player and exhaust another. It's a fine line the devs have to walk, as it is with most things they work on it seems.

I know you aren't mocking, but I'm just saying, legitimately, I'd bet money that at least half the playerbase doesn't know the ins and outs of oGCD vs GCD if you had a true cross-section sample of the community, and I'm not a betting person in general.

I wouldn't expect the average player to figure out that entire list of bullet points without assistance, but I figured out basic weaving at level 2 on PLD as soon as I got Fight or Flight. I'm not a super genius god gamer, it was just obvious I could still push one button while the only other button I had was greyed out. I would be surprised if most people weren't able to piece that together on their own.

This was, to an extent, how earlier versions of the game were, many jobs DID get an OGCD very early on.

I just glanced through all the jobs and it seems most of them still do. DRG gets Life Surge at Lv. 6, MCH has Reassemble at Lv. 10, Berserk on WAR at Lv. 6, Raging Strikes on BRD at Lvl. 4, etc. Even the healers get one pretty early on.