Combat system is beyond saving.

[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.

[KageTokage]

There really needs to be less hard failstate mechanics in general and more stuff where you just lose so much DPS from failing either due to deaths or damage downs that it almost ensures you'll hit enrage, but can still see more of the fight.

It just creates artificial difficulty when you have to keep wiping to a new mechanic until you've properly felt out every single step of it.

[Rekh]

There really needs to be less hard failstate mechanics in general and more stuff where you just lose so much DPS from failing either due to deaths or damage downs that it almost ensures you'll hit enrage, but can still see more of the fight.

It just creates artificial difficulty when you have to keep wiping to a new mechanic until you've properly felt out every single step of it.

Vulnerability stacks and the like. They used this a lot throughout Heavensward; you will notice this in Triad; Sephirot, Sophia, and Zurvan and the in the alliance raids, specially Dun Scaith. Clearly a lot of the Heavensward staff left to make FFXVI; they abandoned all the good gameplay and systems in XIV to go make XVI.

XVI should've been made by a completely different team.

[Valence]

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.

I still do believe our "frustration" or "opinions" are solidly based on facts though. They may remain opinions at the end of the day, but I don't like the idea of dismissing them just because they're opinions. I wouldn't mind if they were baseless, hot air, but I don't think they are. For the major facts usually brought forth:

- Encounter design is tied to the difficulty and type of content you run, job design covers any type of content regardless of what someone runs, and allows to have fun no matter the content, unlike the former.
- Encounter design has shifted heavily toward DDR unique puzzle solutions, where different ways of solving a mechanic is often arbitrarily designed so that only one solution is accepted by the game.
- Encounter design has shifted very heavily toward body checks as a result of a whole removal of party resource management and a scrappy/recovery/sustain based gameplay.
- Role design has progressively removed failure states such as 1) requiring a healer in a lot of scenari, 2) tanks being virtually immortals to ensure such failure states do not happen, 3) the progressive bleedover in mitigation role identity, notably everybody and their moms getting mitigation tools now.
- 2min meta leveling down every damage profile onto an identical pattern of burst spikes every 120s for every job, constraining job design even further to more identical models. No more damage sustain job profiles (like old BRD, BLM) or semi burst designs with more regular but weaker bursts, but also no more extreme burst oriented jobs on the DPS side (like old MCH). On the tank side, a dramatic increase of tank burst now fitting into the 2min meta and able to compete with DPS profiles (notably DRK being something like second highest burst job in the game right now).
- The elephant in the room: healer rotations having turned into 2-1-1-1-1-1 spamm, and overbloated ogcd healing toolkits.

[1313]

They're dumbing down the game so everyone and their 10 year old brother will play, meaning they're straight up sellouts for subs. RIP Final Fantasy, we make animal crossing now, pls pay us. SHB was truly the beginning of the end.

[Zadood]

many others have different opinions and might be the main target audience for the dev team.

But here's the thing, if CBU3 main target audiences are the one that's satisfied with every things what CBU3 has done to FFXIV in general, then what are the odds that these "main target audiences" are going to leave feedback, more so what are the chances that these feedbacks of "main target audiences" outnumbered everyone in this forum combined?

If they didn't complain, then there won't be any feedback at all. Even if they did, they will just unsub the game as a feedback, then they move on to next trending game.

So the whole CBU3 listening to the feedback of "main target audiences" don't hold up at all.

So the question is...
What kind of players will leave feedbacks to CBU3?

I for one have a few answer for that...
Minor vocal players who are questioning the direction the game is heading
Minor vocal players who are completely dissatisfied the direction the game heading
Minor vocal players who simply want the game to include their favourite feature(e.g. Remove role-restriction on glams, chat bubbles, etc etc )

So the question is, which kinds of minor vocal players outnumbered the other kinds of minor vocal players?

[xivYuiM]

Whether you're on reddit or here, aware of it or not, it's just a fact that jobs are homogenized and encounters feel incredibly routine (with some exceptions) if you're doing anything below Savage, and perhaps even Ultimate in some cases.

I'd also say you can argue it is in fact "beyond saving" because what can the devs do? Add a revolutionary mechanic to combat? Players will complain. Make dungeons anything other than a trash mob hallway? Players will complain. Players are now conditioned to accept mediocrity. And it's not even about "time saving" as devs have implied. "We make dungeons easy so everyone can clear them quickly and reasonably". I don't agree. They're too long for that. The dungeons are just boring, and they lean heavily on art and music to even be memorable at all. They're too long for how boring they are, imho.

I hadn't put much thought into it until reading this post but it really is amazing how forgettable all of the post-stormblood dungeons are. I can still easily recall most of the details of all of the 2.x - 4.x dungeons but after ShB I struggle to even remember the existence of 80% of them.

[xivYuiM]

Except there is basically no compensation or correction anymore (same as there is basically no triage healing) you do the dance or you blow up. P12 is god awful for this.

It also reduces the solution down to a single way to solve it. Think coils, their mechanics are way more simple but they have 10,000 ways to solve them in order to change your optimisation flow. Do you overshield allagen field and then release more towers quicker to get an easier next phase, do you bane tech the eggs which skips the enrage but makes juggling FOF in the corner harder, do you solve leafstorm with an LB3 or do the dance, who baits the renalds

With super chain is 1 solution and if you get it wrong we all blow up. That raid design gets so stale because your optimisation is already done by a spreadsheet you just have to execute it

This is probably the best way to articulate exactly why coils is STILL the best raid series the team has ever made and how it is truly sad that most of the people playing this game will never get to see what they missed. Even with all of the QoL changes we have gotten since then, raiding has never been as fun as it was at that time.