Giant boss hitboxes and constant mid teleports make melee less fun.

[CidHeiral]

Endwalker has made a couple boss design philosophy changes that, while well intentioned, have made raid fights actively less fun in my opinion as someone who mainly plays melee DPS/tank.


1. GIGANTIC boss hitboxes.

I understand the logic behind this change and one of the fight designers confirmed as much in an interview, saying he believes players have more fun hitting the boss with their abilities than not. I get it, but I think what he failed to account for is the fun that comes from "solving" your uptime for a given fight as a melee.

It's fun to find just the right place to use a mobility action to reduce downtime, it's fun finding little gaps in mechanics where you can squeeze in another hit or two, it's fun using your brain to get every drop of uptime that you can.

Now the boss hitboxes are absolutely enormous and AOEs always drop in the perfect configuration to give melee a clear uptime spot. In Weapon's Refrain you can squeeze into the corner of Titan's landslides for some extra uptime without getting knocked into the wall if you know what you're doing. Would it really be more fun if his hitbox just covered the whole arena?


2. Constant teleports to the middle of the arena.

Bosses now often teleport to the middle of the arena after nearly every mechanic. Some mid teleporting is fine since there are mechanics that just wouldn't work otherwise, but now they are so frequent that, combined with the enormous hitboxes, an entire facet of tanking has effectively been removed.

This is especially bizarre because tank positioning has been an integral part of the role's whole identity in nearly every game I can think of with tanks. Not only does it require knowledge and skill on the part of the tank but also coordination with the rest of your party. This plays into point #1, as a good tank working with a smaller boss hitbox can increase uptime for the melee DPS with effective positioning around mechanics. Not to mention it feels rewarding to drag that giant monster around. Without it you're just another DPS that hits a mitigation occasionally.

Sure, you usually want to position the boss mid anyway, but there's a difference between doing that of your own volition and the game just TPing the boss there for you every ten seconds. Although personally I find fights where you have to move the boss to odd locations much more fun to tank.


tl;dr

Bosses having giant hitboxes and constantly teleporting mid makes playing melee and tanking less fun. Yes I get to hit my abilities more but it feels like I'm fighting a training dummy with mechanics, not a sentient fearsome enemy. I would like to see Dawntrail revert this design philosophy to that of pre-EW fights.



But what do you all think? Do you miss this gameplay as well or are you thankful to not have to deal with these things anymore? I am interested in hearing how others have felt about these changes.

[Sparkthor]

I don't really care about melee uptime or so, the sole thing i'm pretty sure is Bosses are curently way more active than some years ago, with longer and usually more complexes mecs to deals with.

We can also thanks the dev team to put a lot of hint on the arena to help delimitate aoe spot, attacks ranges or even good positionning to resolve mechs, and this is something i didn't want them to go back on.

[ZiraZ]

Small hitboxes are more fun and wall bosses are boring.
But you need to buff melee even more than they already are to compensate, look at the latest crit dungeon to see how even a little downtime kills the huge melee number advantage that exists in savage raids, but I don't know if the devs are even competent anymore to adjust for things like this without hurting other raid modes.

[Jade_Tyrant]

Small hitboxes are more fun and wall bosses are boring.
But you need to buff melee even more than they already are to compensate, look at the latest crit dungeon to see how even a little downtime kills the huge melee number advantage that exists in savage raids, but I don't know if the devs are even competent anymore to adjust for things like this without hurting other raid modes.

Wasn't the whole point of melee's "huge number advantage" supposed to have been because they had to deal with disengaging from the boss? To my knowledge, their higher damage was meant to compensate for that difference, and the reward for fight optimization was that you could reduce your downtime in order to get higher damage.

I don't know if that fight optimization properly exists in Criterion dungeons or not, but I wouldn't think that melee would really need much buffing just because bosses would be harder to have full uptime on.

[ZiraZ]

Wasn't the whole point of melee's "huge number advantage" supposed to have been because they had to deal with disengaging from the boss? To my knowledge, their higher damage was meant to compensate for that difference, and the reward for fight optimization was that you could reduce your downtime in order to get higher damage.

I don't know if that fight optimization properly exists in Criterion dungeons or not, but I wouldn't think that melee would really need much buffing just because bosses would be harder to have full uptime on.

The problem is as fights get more complicated you also get mechanics that would be absolutely impossible to ever get uptime if the boss was not a giant hitbox that covers the entire room, Aloalo is full of this and it shows how modern complex mechanics would be a snoozefest in 8 man content for most melee.
I guess just saying buff melee is a bad way to put it, if hitboxes are shrunk I would like for melee to gain range abilities that allow them to keep their rotation flow in some capacity while not in melee. Instead of just low potency range attack spam while waiting for the boss to resolve the mechanic you solved 10 seconds ago in your head but cannot go back to melee without killing everyone or because the mechanic made you lose complete control of your character's movement as it slowly resolves in slow motion.

[Sequora]

As a caster the giant hit box thing frustrates me. If they’re balancing damage around ranged DPS being able to hit the boss from a distance, than that should actually be a thing.

Melee in the last few expansions have just as much uptime as casters and physical ranged. Melee also don’t have cast times like casters do.

[Lyth]

I think the term 'caster' is a bit of a misnomer nowadays. I'm fairly sure that SMN involves fewer actual cast bars than even SAM and RPR at this point. Probably better to use the term 'Magical Ranged DPS' instead.

It's important not to conflate large hitboxes with wall bosses. Wall bosses are always uninteresting because they completely eliminate positional gameplay. Larger hitboxes aren't a problem in isolation. It's the lack of forced disengages that's the real issue, because they want to design fights to be 100% uptime when executed perfectly. You could equally have an uninteresting fight with a small hitbox, if mechanics don't actually force you off the boss.

Smaller hitboxes actually provide you with a greater movement advantage if you're playing a job with a gap extender, simply because a smaller movement arc lets you displace yourself to a greater range of end positions. There's not really a one-size fits all solution to this. You just have to think like a melee when designing fights.

The teleport to center is really more of a tank problem rather than a melee one, since this game doesn't trust tanks to position anything correctly. The tank community has been complaining about auto-positioning, self-tanking bosses since Stormblood, but that's a different story altogether.

[Asari5]

i mean... if we follow the path further we will soon have only one dps role left. casters dont cast anymore. range doesnt matter anymore... its all the same.

[Supersnow845]

The problem is as fights get more complicated you also get mechanics that would be absolutely impossible to ever get uptime if the boss was not a giant hitbox that covers the entire room, Aloalo is full of this and it shows how modern complex mechanics would be a snoozefest in 8 man content for most melee.
I guess just saying buff melee is a bad way to put it, if hitboxes are shrunk I would like for melee to gain range abilities that allow them to keep their rotation flow in some capacity while not in melee. Instead of just low potency range attack spam while waiting for the boss to resolve the mechanic you solved 10 seconds ago in your head but cannot go back to melee without killing everyone or because the mechanic made you lose complete control of your character's movement as it slowly resolves in slow motion.

Yes but that doesn’t change the fact that melee aren’t supposed to just do more damage because, it was meant to be a compensation mechanism for downtime, they do 10% more damage but in exchange have 10% of the time when they can’t hit the boss

Melee currently just do more damage completely arbitrarily while the casters/range/healers get left to the side feeling like glorified cheerleaders for the melee/BLM/tanks

[Lyth]

A difference like that won't ever be visible when you balance around average player performance in current content. If you have a mechanic that forces every melee off the boss, the average dps for that fight will take that potency loss into account. The same is true if you had a mechanic that forced every Magical Ranged DPS to lose casts. It's the same reason why Healers aren't awarded bonus dps to compensate for the downtime of hardcasting GCD heals or leaving to grab a coffee when they're not needed. Difficulty is subjective, but it all comes out in the wash if you balance around averages.

No, the reason why melee does more damage is to encourage a 2/2/2/2 comp at baseline. A flex ranged can clutch save positioning errors without a DPS loss, so people will naturally migrate towards a 2/2/1/3 or 2/2/0/4 format if you let them. This is also a reason for moderate-sized hitboxes, because it also means that you can still have larger spread AoE mechanics while keeping two tanks and two melee on the boss. If you shrink the hitbox size and shrink the AoEs to allow for melee uptime, then you suddenly open up the outside of the arena to ranged/healers. I think if you reflect on the fight format that has been standardized since Stormblood, you'll see some clear patterns to the design.