Combat system is beyond saving.

[xivYuiM]

Fun is always going to be subjective. Also, people seem to forget that there are indeed different strategies for different fights, but generally PF will push one to the top. Some mechanics will indeed be 1 solution based, but many others will have different ways of handling them. This includes P12S. Does this mean that every fight is perfect? Not at all. I was not a fan of all the body checks in this last tier. My hope is that they follow through with their stated goal of changing up encounters in 7.0, which will allow them to have more diversity with jobs come 8.0 to try and find a balance with encounter difficulty and giving jobs room to be much more individualized.

It goes deeper than just having a mechanic be solvable by doing "we can dodge this move by doing X formation or Y formation!! Both are viable!!" It was more that doing some mechanics a certain way would often have a cascading effect on multiple things that followed in the fight and came with costs and benefits to each section. Also most of the raids were more than just "stand in circle arena and beat up boss". Not to mention like someone else said earlier, since ShB every encounter has been loaded with mechanics where one mistake from anyone = wipe. Before 4.0 it was (most of the time) possible to pick up the slack of your incompetent team members. If DPS got injured or even died at a crucial time it was possible for others to adjust and pick up the slack. Nowadays every mechanic just ends with a strict "is everyone alive and standing in their spot? no? wipe." and it forces PF to become extremely frustrating when you could literally have 7 people be robots that play flawlessly and all it takes is that one person to make a mistake and everyone fails. Or on the other end of the spectrum you could do 99 flawless runs and never clear because someone wants to drool on their keyboard and ERP while raiding and the ONE time you pass a roadblock then make a single mistake it instantly wipes everyone. Of course old raids had SOME mechanics that were like this but it was often the mechanic of the fight. (T9 divebombs for example)

[Valence]

I must say I disagree. FFXIV never focused on making complex damage rotations - in order to load that complexity on the content.

If the rotations were difficult then the fights themselves can't be complex, reducing the fun aspect of them.

The combat system is deceptively complex and demands perfect execution and optimization in order to compensate for mistakes that happen elsewhere, with harder fights having less room for that.

Damage optimization while doing raid mechanics and coordinating with party is where the challenge is, not the individual aspect of your character.

Bomb Logic, not Sword Logic.

Reducing the fun aspect for you maybe. I don't care about encounter mechanics that ask me to play DDR on repeat and pass body checks that I can't even help others through with my skills. I care however for intricate and fulfilling job designs, and the game currently fails spectacularly at this. Everything is extremely basic.

Note that I'm using intricate on purpose, not complex, because complexity for the sake of it is just intellectual wankery.

[Striker44]

Reducing the fun aspect for you maybe. I don't care about encounter mechanics that ask me to play DDR on repeat and pass body checks that I can't even help others through with my skills. I care however for intricate and fulfilling job designs, and the game currently fails spectacularly at this. Everything is extremely basic.

Note that I'm using intricate on purpose, not complex, because complexity for the sake of it is just intellectual wankery.

Someone could just as easily turn this around and point out "fulfilling job designs...for you maybe." I for one have a blast and find the current designs of many jobs sufficiently complex and very fulfilling. At the end of the day, these are nothing more and nothing less than each of our own personal opinions.

[Valence]

Someone could just as easily turn this around and point out "fulfilling job designs...for you maybe." I for one have a blast and find the current designs of many jobs sufficiently complex and very fulfilling. At the end of the day, these are nothing more and nothing less than each of our own personal opinions.

You're definitely right, they could do that. With the caveat that encounter design vs job design has always been relatively balanced, where now the latter is almost weightless.

I'm happy that you're enjoying it, but unfortunately, your personal opinion goes directly against mine here, so where does this leave us?

[Striker44]

You're definitely right, they could do that. With the caveat that encounter design vs job design has always been relatively balanced, where now the latter is almost weightless.

I'm happy that you're enjoying it, but unfortunately, your personal opinion goes directly against mine here, so where does this leave us?

It leaves us as agreeing to disagree I would guess. It's just a habit of mine to point out that a common source of frustration is people masquerading their own opinions as if they were facts, and then making themselves progressively more annoyed when they don't see things changing to their liking while ignoring the possibility that it's because many others have different opinions and might be the main target audience for the dev team.

[Menriq]

You're definitely right, they could do that. With the caveat that encounter design vs job design has always been relatively balanced, where now the latter is almost weightless.

I'm happy that you're enjoying it, but unfortunately, your personal opinion goes directly against mine here, so where does this leave us?

This gets to the heart of the issue for many developers (not just here). You have different schools of thoughts and both are very valid. The old saying of "If you try to please everyone, you'll please no one" certainly rings here. Having said that, I do think there is some room to try and offer a range. Encounters already kind of do this with the first turn always being the easiest, and then ramping up to the final turn. At the same time, there could be a range of complexity with the jobs. For example, you could have BLM that is complex with SMN as very simple, and then have other jobs fall in the middle. However, going with this route and trying to keep things balanced, the complaint would then become BLM has to "work harder" to get the same output as the SMN who just spams 1-2-3 (for arguments sake). I don't know what the right answer is, but I can certainly see the challenges that can be presented when looking at the whole picture.

[Raikai]

I must say I disagree. FFXIV never focused on making complex damage rotations - in order to load that complexity on the content.

If the rotations were difficult then the fights themselves can't be complex, reducing the fun aspect of them.

The combat system is deceptively complex and demands perfect execution and optimization in order to compensate for mistakes that happen elsewhere, with harder fights having less room for that.

Damage optimization while doing raid mechanics and coordinating with party is where the challenge is, not the individual aspect of your character.

Bomb Logic, not Sword Logic.

The problem is that Encounter Design does has way less 'shelf life' than job design because of how XIV structure is:

- Focus on the encounters: They are complex and engaging until you get your clear and suddenly they are braindead as long as everyone is on the same page. What remains is a bunch of boring jobs to go through those reclears until you don't need to reclear them anymore. Add to the aggravation the small quantity of High End content you're offered every major patch.

- Focus on the jobs: They are complex and engaging, and at some point you master their mechanics, but you still need to be on your toes and be doing decision making constantly. Shelf life is bigger because you need to apply that to different encounters, which lead to different variables. This is exactly why today BLM is the job with the most shelf life imo.

In a ideal world you'd have a neat balance between the two of them, but if I could choose just one to be the 'complex one' would be Jobs, not encounters.

[Gokki]

Reducing the fun aspect for you maybe. I don't care about encounter mechanics that ask me to play DDR on repeat and pass body checks that I can't even help others through with my skills. I care however for intricate and fulfilling job designs, and the game currently fails spectacularly at this. Everything is extremely basic.

Note that I'm using intricate on purpose, not complex, because complexity for the sake of it is just intellectual wankery.

I'm afraid the game engine is too limited to design anything dramatically more intricate and complex. For example: there doesn't seem to be any channeled abilities other than... Flamethrower? There's no parry, dodge or reposition mechanics, there's no aiming, there's no rythm other than the dualweaving GCDs we got, there's no multiplayer abilities or spells (imagine two BLMs casting in tandem). There's a lot that can be done to make combat more interesting but is limited by an old engine, networking and outdated interface.

The problem is that Encounter Design does has way less 'shelf life' than job design because of how XIV structure is:

- Focus on the encounters: They are complex and engaging until you get your clear and suddenly they are braindead as long as everyone is on the same page. What remains is a bunch of boring jobs to go through those reclears until you don't need to reclear them anymore. Add to the aggravation the small quantity of High End content you're offered every major patch.

- Focus on the jobs: They are complex and engaging, and at some point you master their mechanics, but you still need to be on your toes and be doing decision making constantly. Shelf life is bigger because you need to apply that to different encounters, which lead to different variables. This is exactly why today BLM is the job with the most shelf life imo.

In a ideal world you'd have a neat balance between the two of them, but if I could choose just one to be the 'complex one' would be Jobs, not encounters.

I agree, but without the aforementioned examples while keeping the game balanced and working it's going to be difficult to break the status quo on game design.

[Valence]

A rudimentary version of this exists in the early Omega fights, but that is still basically a rectangle arena.

I made a thread somewhere in that same forum about how Phantom Train is the best designed raid encounter by far, not for its mechanics or buffs, but for the whole unique scenery, changing platforms and phases, it's actually trying to tell a whole story saga, and that's to wonder why every other boss ever is a static dummy on a platform with no rails... I don't have the answer to this to that day.

I'm afraid the game engine is too limited to design anything dramatically more intricate and complex. For example: there doesn't seem to be any channeled abilities other than... Flamethrower? There's no parry, dodge or reposition mechanics, there's no aiming, there's no rythm other than the dualweaving GCDs we got, there's no multiplayer abilities or spells (imagine two BLMs casting in tandem). There's a lot that can be done to make combat more interesting but is limited by an old engine, networking and outdated interface.

I wouldn't mind having those, but if you have actually played before ShB, we had a lot of other facets to the game that have been axed, proper and simple. A lot of resource management, teamplay, etc. They had a lot more building blocks to build things upon, unlike today. They need to reintroduce things, whether it's inspired by what we had or your ideas.. This would help both in encounter design and job design.

[Supersnow845]

I made a thread somewhere in that same forum about how Phantom Train is the best designed raid encounter by far, not for its mechanics or buffs, but for the whole unique scenery, changing platforms and phases, it's actually trying to tell a whole story saga, and that's to wonder why every other boss ever is a static dummy on a platform with no rails... I don't have the answer to this to that day.



I wouldn't mind having those, but if you have actually played before ShB, we had a lot of other facets to the game that have been axed, proper and simple. A lot of resource management, teamplay, etc. They had a lot more building blocks to build things upon, unlike today. They need to reintroduce things, whether it's inspired by what we had or your ideas.. This would help both in encounter design and job design.

First coil is another example of a raid telling a story by locations

T3 is a joke but it does add a lot visually to how first coil feels like a single raid of a physical location split over 5 fights which I absolutely love