Encounters aren't everything

[ForteNightshade]

It also saved the game later with Midas and confirmed it with Gordias, and the game was still running on the same battle system, so take that as you will...

( aka to spell it plainly, it was encounter design that was problematic, not battle design )

Midas, to date, is the lowest cleared content in the game's history. Yes, worse than Gordias. Despite being praised, it contributed just as much if not more to utterly burying the raid scene. Creator is when things turned around due to them severely nerfing Savage difficulty and introducing cross world Party Finder.

On the whole though, despite liking Heavensward, it's hard to argue jobs were well designed back then. Several were more than a little janky and balancing as a whole was laughably bad. Stormblood is about when they hit a good compromise, albeit with poor job balance still being an issue.

[Valence]

Clear rates =/= the health of the endgame, else ultimates would be a catastrophic failure (and that's coming from someone that isn't a huge fan of them to begin with).

Current class gameplay:

Here's 2 minutes worth of button presses, press them in this specific order at these specific times, and the more you can do this like a robot the better you're doing. Enjoy the occasional proc that maybe mixes that up a bit.

Current encounter gameplay:

Keep pressing your class buttons, broadly speaking we're not going to get in the way of that. Just stand in these places at these times and you'll be good.

Personally, I think the biggest problem with FF14's combat is that there is not enough interplay between class gameplay and encounter gameplay. Broadly speaking, they each tend to exist in their own realm. One hand dodges, the other hand rotations, and rarely do they ever meet.



When I think of other games with combat that I enjoy, at any given moment the player can generally be offensive or defensive, but not both. In such systems, being defensive risks lowering your damage output, while being offensive risks your well-being. This system of risk-vs-reward means the player is constantly making strategic choices of how much risk to take based on ever-changing context, and that's generally pretty engaging. In FF14 most classes are overwhelmingly able to be both offensive and defensive simultaneously, and I think this is a primary factor of what makes combat underwhelming.

Like in turn-based FF games, you can sometimes Guard, but if you're doing that you can't attack. Or you can switch to the back row, but that costs your action. And if you're attacking, you're not doing those other things, so hopefully you chose a good moment to do so.

I love the combat in Elden Ring. Even just with the basic soldiers at the beginning of the game, I have spent dozens of hours in that first enemy camp because the bread and butter combat is a joy. When I attack I'm taking a risk, and when I guard or evade I'm not progressing the encounter. There are times when it pays off to dodge instead of attack, there are times when it pays off to block instead attack, and there are of course times when it pays off to attack. But at any given moment I need to analyze the context of the fight to determine what feels like the best choice, and when my enemy acts I need to respond accordingly.

There are rare moments in FF14 when you can get greedy and find a way to take a risk that either does or doesn't pay off. But in my experience, the payoff is usually meager (you didn't slightly lower your DPS, congrats!) and generally only applies to a subset of classes. Overwhelmingly, enemies change where I stand, but not what I do.

And I think that's a shame. It would be nice to see enemies impact the player more, and the player impact the enemies. To have dances that are less scripted and more improvisational and reactive. I don't even think that requires that the game become more difficult, just more engaging. Give players meaningful opportunities to exploit, and those who want to will take them.

That would probably mean that both enemies and player kits would need to change, so maybe that's more than the dev team can do without alienating the player base. I don't know. But it's something I think about a lot.

I am glad that some other people are nailing it. This falls specifically under the umbrella of what I call resource scarcity gameplay and scrappy runs. The fact that resources were a lot more finite back then and had to be managed meant that a failure/wipe was not always coming from people messing up mechanics. The encounter itself was applying a certain amount of pressure onto the players/parties to various degrees, and one part of the fights was also to fight back in order to alleviate it.

There is indeed no tactical choice left anymore beyond what to use tank LB3 for or tank invulns, and that's not by much. Mitigation plans are braindead because there is just so much of it. And even when it is, it's still on a script, neverchanging. It's just us rehearsing choreography again and again and again. Once could say there is still some strategical choices made outside of combat with what you choose to bring, what macro/strat you want to go for in how to solve the mechanics, but the tactical choices once inside are nill or irrelevant, and that's why it's mindbogglingly boring.

[Valence]

So rewatching the PAX announcement and how it was specifically mentioned at some point that they meant to focus on encounter and battles variety, versus jobs and level progression that they want to keep the same for this one, I'm getting more depressed. I mean sure, way more variations and making encounters a lot less boring or tedious is always good to take, but it's like no new rphys for me. I feel like this isn't going to be the expansion for me, because they only care about their damn encounters and nothing else.

[Raikai]

So rewatching the PAX announcement and how it was specifically mentioned at some point that they meant to focus on encounter and battles variety, versus jobs and level progression that they want to keep the same for this one, I'm getting more depressed. I mean sure, way more variations and making encounters a lot less boring or tedious is always good to take, but it's like no new rphys for me. I feel like this isn't going to be the expansion for me, because they only care about their damn encounters and nothing else.

This will only do for me if this allegedly 'less boring' is a change in the encounter design itself that makes those fun on reclears. Especially for healers.

Right now a high end encounter is actually really hard (for my skill level at least, and considering that I'm a PF raider atm), but as soon as I complete the fight, it goes from 'struggle bus' to 'snooze fest' on reclears. It doesn't help that we realistically can only complete 1 fight per week. We can't even help others without possibly messing up their loot table.

[Vyrerus]

Yes, worse than Gordias.

That's simply because of its final fight. Midas's first three fights were comparable and easier than Gordias, for the most part. You see a lot more clears in Gordias because it became easier to overpower it unsync'd sooner, as it has nothing as cockblocky as Gavel (Nisi kinda close though). That, combined with the fact that they've never nerfed Midas's bosses afaik, while they at least nerfed Living Liquid at some point = more Gordias clears.


Also I wouldn't say that Creator was a severe nerf to Savage difficulty. It was Savage difficulty without any stone wall mechanics. i.e. Late phase mechanics intended to wipe you for the slightest mistake on anyone's part. Whereas Gordias and Midas had fights with many phases, each phase ramping up as harder, and more intricate, Creator ramped up and then leveled off. It largely mirrored Binding Coil of Bahamut, blow for blow.

Binding Coil had: Two mechnically oriented bosses. A "trash" fight. Then Twintania, as a far and above leg up in all aspects over its previous encounters.

Gordias had: A mechanically oriented first boss. A "trash" fight with a unique crowd control machine. Living Liquid as an extreme leg up in all aspects over those encounters, and then The Manipulator. Manipulator had some obtuse mechanics, but was chiefly gatekept by insane damage check and Nisi (which was largely cheesed with Healer LB3 strat, though some groups did beat it by executing the mechanic). Most groups never made it past Living Liquid, and of those that did, most of them stopped being able to clear Living Liquid after the tank nerf in 2.2.

Second Coil had: Four mechanically oriented bosses, all with many rough phases, and all with some form of stonewall mechanic. These being:

T6: Blighted Bouquet (pre-nerf), Hypercharged Slug enrage, and Slimes enrage if not eaten by slugs.
T7: Cursed Shriek, Petrifaction, really the whole original fight. OG fight saw Petrified players instantly die to next instance of damage, meaning anyone clipped by any Voice, Shriek, or Petrifaction = Dead.
T8: Allagan Field - Literally impossible to live through without a shield healer cutting the damage from towers
T9: Pretty much the whole fight, even more so than OG T7. This had everything.

And this doesn't even touch on the salty dev response where they created Savage because people actually did beat Second Coil by like week 2 or some shit.

Midas had: Four mechanically oriented bosses. The moblin with his alchemy potion mechanics. The Combaticons reference gauntlet fight. Illuminati Leader and his jails. Brute Justice (Bruticus reference).

A5: Moblin didn't slow many groups down. Biggest thing was making sure your OT didn't self-heal and draw the pig rats to the minotaur. Some simultaneous mechanics thrown out at the end to cause a hiccup, rather than to stonewall.

A6: This is where the fun begins. Gauntlet against the 4 Combaticon reference robots. Blaster (Blast-off), Swindler(Swindle), Brawler(Brawl), and Vortexer(Vortex). You fight each robot, each taking a few minutes, each with a sort of enrage of their own. Each with something comparable to a stonewall mechanic. Fail any one robot, you start over from the beginning. Hard enrage timer that kills you outright if you fail to kill all robots in the time limit that starts on engaging first robot. Biggest stonewall mechanic was the juggling of the lightning and water debuffs against Vortexer as far as I remember. Instant wipe upon mechanical failure by people juggling. Remember these mechanics, because they all come back in A8

A7: A rough fight, but not comparable to Living Liquid. Phases were segmented and notable by which role was the initial target for imprisonment. It put out a lot of damage, while also requiring a lot of movement around its modular arena. This arena would condense from a large square into a tight circle surrounded by spikes. Stand in spikes = die to raid wides. GIANT BALLS. When spikes go away.

A8: Harder than Living Liquid and perhaps harder than Manipulator as well. An incredible amount of phases, all mechanically able to stonewall. All A6 mechanics make a return. The final Combaticon, Onslaught appears here as the first boss. Includes a gauntlet of the A6 bosses where their mechanics are now mixed. After all that they fuse, of course, and then you get several phases against Brute Justice. The hardest bit and the stonewall mechanic is Gavel. It's an obtuse Team Jump Rope style mechanic where everyone has different mechanical checks they have to meet that have a Rue Goldberg machine style interaction with one another.

Final Coil had: Four mechanically inclined fights, however, the mechanics mainly rely on outgoing damage vs. mechanical pass/fail. Lots of wiggle room.

Creator had: Four mechanically inclined fights, but sort of the same deal as FCoB.

All in all, I may have forgotten some things, but I hope you get what I mean. Midas wasn't worse than Gordias until its final fight. And the middle turns/tiers for raids in XIV tend to be where they shove the most mechanically inclined pass/fail mechanics anyway, historically. I think they put these spikes, even if they're just one fight or one half of a fight, mainly to make raiders feel accomplished when the next tier feels easier to them. It's not a nerf, it's a design. And I know they said something like, they eased off the gas for Creator or something like that, back then... but I think, of course, they'd say that. After all, their battle design team essentially, "Won" the rat race vs. the week 1 clearers they'd been salty with since Second Coil.

[Maltothoris]

That, combined with the fact that they've never nerfed Midas's bosses afaik,

Correction, they nerfed Midas a total of three times.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...974.1709095906 This was the first one with mainly nerfs to A6s since it was deemed harder than A7s at the time.


The second time was when patch 3.4 showed up. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...e18865b70097a6

The last time was 3.41. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...974.1709095906

[Allistar]

I agree with you here, with everything scripted it becomes boring and tedious as all you do is memorize placements. I want to truly prepare for an encounter by maximizing my jobs strengths and minimizing it's weaknesses.

[Vyrerus]

Correction, they nerfed Midas a total of three times.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...974.1709095906 This was the first one with mainly nerfs to A6s since it was deemed harder than A7s at the time.


The second time was when patch 3.4 showed up. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...e18865b70097a6

The last time was 3.41. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...974.1709095906

Ah, I guess I wouldn't have noticed to remember. My group at the time was getting by A6S fairly easily, and I have a log screenshot of me killing my best friend while charmed(confused I guess) from one of our attempts. Fun to know!

[ForteNightshade]

That's simply because of its final fight. Midas's first three fights were comparable and easier than Gordias, for the most part. You see a lot more clears in Gordias because it became easier to overpower it unsync'd sooner, as it has nothing as cockblocky as Gavel (Nisi kinda close though). That, combined with the fact that they've never nerfed Midas's bosses afaik, while they at least nerfed Living Liquid at some point = more Gordias clears.

Also I wouldn't say that Creator was a severe nerf to Savage difficulty. It was Savage difficulty without any stone wall mechanics. i.e. Late phase mechanics intended to wipe you for the slightest mistake on anyone's part. Whereas Gordias and Midas had fights with many phases, each phase ramping up as harder, and more intricate, Creator ramped up and then leveled off. It largely mirrored Binding Coil of Bahamut, blow for blow.

As already noted, they nerfed did A6S because it walled the raid community even earlier than Living Liquid due to its sheer difficulty. Furthermore, Living Liquid was never nerfed on content but only after Midas released. Likewise for Manipulator. So no, the survey data from Lucky Bancho was not bloated by subsequently nerfed clears.

As for Creator, not only did Yoshida deliberately say they scaled Creator significantly lower due to how poorly received both Gordias and Midas were but looking at the fights themselves and it's a night and day difference. Alexander deals noticeably less damage, has significantly less HP relative to the ilvl and the mechanics are more forgiving. On the whole, it's a massive step down from Brute Justice and Manipulator. The same can be said for 9-11 but not to the same extent since the differences between each comparable turn weren't as notorious, Living Liquid and pre-nerfed A6S nothwithstanding.

Regardless, I didn't say Midas was an inherently worse tier but rather the least cleared. Between it's mechanical difficulty, especially Brute Justice, pre-nerf A6S and Gordias, the raid community was completely burnt out. Hence why they completely changed focus from Creator onward.

[Supersnow845]

If I remember correctly wasn’t at least one of the nerfs to A6 actually them fixing the fact that the lighting debuff didn’t pass properly so the lightning/water mechanic was technically impossible to properly do day 1