Combat system is beyond saving.

[Absurdity]

Pardon me as I only start played FFXIV at the start of Shb, but judging from everyone review about HW's both job and raid design, it seems that HW is like reverse EW. EW has bad job design with okayish encounter, while HW has okayish job design with bad encounter.

A silly take, aye, but I for one is willing to learn more about job design in pre-Shb era.

Not really, Havensward had great encounters and the most complex, if often unnecessarily clunky and punishing, job design.
It does however still suffer from the stigma of it's first raid tier which was such a ramp up in difficulty from ARR's raids that it almost killed the raid scene.


If you even just look at the Alexander normal raids they are so varied in environment and fight design that it's almost depressing compared to nowadays where everything is just a circle in the void that makes you do some variation of exaflares, limit cut, dynamo, chariot, stack and spread.

[Jeeqbit]

Pardon me as I only start played FFXIV at the start of Shb, but judging from everyone review about HW's both job and raid design, it seems that HW is like reverse EW. EW has bad job design with okayish encounter, while HW has okayish job design with bad encounter.

HW encounter design was fine for the most part, except certain encounters like A4S. They were still figuring out good raid design back then, moving from a WoW-like concept to scripted fights that involve brain-training. By the final tier of Alexander (Creator), it was pretty good tbh and I loved all of the fights.

I for one is willing to learn more about job design in pre-Shb era.

I could try to explain it, but it would honestly be easier to just watch youtube videos from MrHappy's retro series or Heavensward generally. You could scroll to the bottom and watch all these videos from 8 years ago: Lost City, Antitower, Thordan, Sephirot, Sohm Al, Final Steps, Baelsar's Wall, Zurvan

Not really, Havensward had great encounters and the most complex, if often unnecessarily clunky and punishing, job design.

This is a good way to put it. Heavensward job design had you tracking lots of stuff, status effects, keeping stuff up, managing cooldowns, but there were no job gauges and it was full of jank, abilities that could be merged or designed better, useless abilities that nobody used, bloat (you think DRG has a lot of damage buffs now?), being careful not to interrupt combos, aiming to auto-attack, aiming to block, combos expiring if you didn't continue them within a few seconds, tiny healer bubbles and effect ranges, less off-GCDs (especially for healers), a cleric stance that meant healers couldn't heal while in DPS mode, odd design decisions like physical mitigation in fights that deal magic damage, RNG mitigation which is useless etc. Little things like this made it way harder and have more depth, but it seemed like it was all a shot in the dark from ARR release so a lot of it was janky or useless and got tinkered with or removed over time.

I don't think HW had bad encounters at all. If anything it suffers from the stigma of A1 and A2 and their savage versions that were extremely underwhelming

Actually, I took some sprouts through A1-A12 MINE once and the only one they wiped to was A1, which took like an hour or so to clear. The rest were one-shots. I've also always found the savage version of A1 fun. I think A2 is what I don't like, not because it doesn't have depth with the whole getting in a robot thing, but because being loads of adds just doesn't make me excited.

It does however still suffer from the stigma of it's first raid tier which was such a ramp up in difficulty from ARR's raids that it almost killed the raid scene.

Everyone says this but I think there were other factors as well. We didn't have cross-world Party Finder, so you had to be on a "raid server" to see anything in PF or somewhere active enough to find 7 people to raid with and often this would be a raid FC on a busy world. Your ability to get things done dramatically shifts when the number of people and parties available to you octuples. It was able to become less FC-centric.

Because I look at all this now and when we get hard fights that make people quit now we just endure because there is this massive pool of players that can mix from across worlds and now data centers, so the people who want to get it done, find other people who want to get it done, and do it.

Oh and we didn't have discord then! Having these big PUG raid discords and static finders is a factor too. Discord came about during Heavensward and it took a lot of time before we really had these sort of large discord servers we have now.

If you even just look at the Alexander normal raids they are so varied in environment and fight design that it's almost depressing compared to nowadays where everything is just a circle in the void that makes you do some variation of exaflares, limit cut, dynamo, chariot, stack and spread.

A1, A2, A5, A8 and A9 are a square; A3, A4, A11 and A12 are a circle, A6 is a series of squares/circles, A7 is a square or circle depending on if you want to consider the spikes and A10 is unique. So out of all of them only A10 is unique. If we compare that to now, P10 is unique as well.

Can we entirely argue that P1S-P7S and P10S didn't use their environments with mechanics such as Pinax, sectioned off areas for certain mechanics in P3S and P5S, the 3 platforms in P7S, the unique platform in P10S and so on.

You mentioned about us just doing exaflares, limit cut, dynamo, chariot, stack or spread, so how about the element mechanic in P1S that also involved flexing, < shaped AoEs with pizza slice safe spots, hot/cold floor areas that sometimes a player decides which one explodes, snakes and HC in P8S, ruby's in P5S which involve narrow safe spots or watching what explodes, Devour?, I could honestly go on at this point.

[Aword3213]

Pardon me as I only start played FFXIV at the start of Shb, but judging from everyone review about HW's both job and raid design, it seems that HW is like reverse EW. EW has bad job design with okayish encounter, while HW has okayish job design with bad encounter.

A silly take, aye, but I for one is willing to learn more about job design in pre-Shb era.

If you’re willing, old content is still available for you to experience it. I completed Coils( including savage), Alexander savage and Omega savage multiple times in minimum item level no echo settings. I posted some screenshots here before. I still do them now.

It’s better for you to form your own opinion than take others’ claim for what it is. I personally think old raids aren’t that interesting as many people claimed. EW raids still have flaws, but I see lots of improvements over the years.

[Maltothoris]

Problems is even with MINE, it's a different landscape now. Take WHM assize for example, back in HW, it was a 300 pot heal and dmg decided by whether you were in cleric stance or not on a 90 sec cd. Now there is no cleric stance, it does 400 heal and dmg on a 40 second cd. Asylum was only 6 yalms back then compared to today's 15. Etc etc

Edit: Also healing spells were generally weaker back then too with the exception of the fairy. Also accessories didn't not have vitality as they do now.

[Supersnow845]

The presence of tank mastery alone basically ruins coils even on mine specifically because the tanks just don’t take anywhere near as much damage as they used to and don’t need anywhere near as much upkeep which frees the healers up to do way more than they did when content was current

It is also just way easier to cheese mechanics with the buffed potency than it used to be. It’s so easy to cheese allagen field these days with shields because you have more free mana to spam shields and the shield potency is higher. I remember in ShB I did a coils run of T7 and we were killing her so fast she desynced then we pushed her phases so fast she somehow managed to resync and we cleared her as normal. That 100% would have been a wipe when current

[KisaiTenshi]

Half of the playerbase hasn’t even experienced the actual final fantasy XIV combat system that had things like:

• Aggro management
• Cleric stance and Multiple tank stances (3.x WAR was the best job in the history of this game)

No. Cleric Stance was the worst feature of combat. You were supposed to play based on the role you entered, not waste time switching.

What would have "fixed 2.0" would have required making all the jobs matter in the MSQ. Instead only DPS matters. So "Cleric Stance" and "Tank Stance" features were for for allowing healers and tanks to be able to play them during MSQ and not have to spend 10 times as much time wearing down monsters while stuck as a healer or tank. When you form a party, you should have been relegated to playing the role you joined the duty finder as, and all the buttons on your bar that deal with non-role functions would be ignored swapped to what you should be doing. Instead players berated non-DPS players for not DPS'ing during content and became an entire hostile thing that overflowed onto the forums, and third party forums, and people mocking players who wanted to play the class they picked, and ignoring the storyline saying otherwise.

Yoshi-P took this mockery to mean all players wanted to do was DPS, so everything got dumbed down to the point that healers had nothing to do once the mechanics were learned. Nice job breaking it guys. This is why we have so many solo instances.

Maybe make those solo instances allow party members to "role play" those other NPC's so we don't have to keep dropping from the party to do it.

[Aravell]

The presence of tank mastery alone basically ruins coils even on mine specifically because the tanks just don’t take anywhere near as much damage as they used to and don’t need anywhere near as much upkeep which frees the healers up to do way more than they did when content was current

It is also just way easier to cheese mechanics with the buffed potency than it used to be. It’s so easy to cheese allagen field these days with shields because you have more free mana to spam shields and the shield potency is higher. I remember in ShB I did a coils run of T7 and we were killing her so fast she desynced then we pushed her phases so fast she somehow managed to resync and we cleared her as normal. That 100% would have been a wipe when current

Minimum ilvl can't be trusted for old fights, the scaling is all off nowadays.

When I did Midas savage with some friends, we actually did it below minimum ilvl for better scaling, I think we did it in i110 gear for the closest experience.

I do think it's unfortunate that new players can't get the experience as it was back then anymore though. If only they had a mode that places you wholesale back into that expansion with kits, scaling and all. If they had the technology to do that, they could also preserve the challenge of old ultimates, my poor boy Golden Bahamut doesn't deserve to be treated like this.

[MsMisato]

If you’re willing, old content is still available for you to experience it. I completed Coils( including savage), Alexander savage and Omega savage multiple times in minimum item level no echo settings. I posted some screenshots here before. I still do them now.

It’s better for you to form your own opinion than take others’ claim for what it is. I personally think old raids aren’t that interesting as many people claimed. EW raids still have flaws, but I see lots of improvements over the years.

the old raids were fine back then, because despite the clunkiness of the skills, we had a complete different skill set than what we have now for the most part back then, the highest ilvl at the time ilvl 120 keep in mind still, no high level food either and we had major mp managemennt, tp management, aggro management it was a totally different beast to what we had back in ARR and HW, even StB was vastly different. But StB i kind wish they kept with the combat direction because honestly to me it really felt like a majority classes had really strong identities and while it required some reading of the tool tips to uunderstand how the job played, it became even more fun once you mastered a job.

[Zadood]

An online rpg will come around and steal their thunder eventually though, just a matter of time.

That's is not going to happen, I afraid, especially If you know how much yearly revenue BDO has make compared to FFXIV, it's like comparing a boulder to a pebble.

If you are a corporate that want to develop a MMORPG to make money, would you invest a tons of money to develop a MMORPGs just overthrow FFXIV for it's dogwater yearly revenue?
Or invest a ton of money to develop a MMORPG that is good enough to compete with BDO in hope getting at least half of BDO yearly revenue?

One of the reason why SQEX is reluctant to increase CBU3's budget by a ton to develop a better FFXIV that could possibly overthrow WoW, because the amount of increased yearly revenue for dethrone WoW's spot for being No.1 MMORPG is never good enough to justify the cost and tremendous increased budget of FFXIV.

[Jeeqbit]

The presence of tank mastery alone basically ruins coils even on mine specifically because the tanks just don’t take anywhere near as much damage as they used to

True, especially since we would often remove tank stance in raids to do more damage, since tank stance reduced all damage (both incoming and outgoing) similar to the adds in Thordan where you focus the one not in tank stance.

don’t need anywhere near as much upkeep which frees the healers up to do way more than they did when content was current

Regardless, when I've done them MINE (which was before the stat squish) I was still frantically GCD healing like crazy due to the lack of OGCDs. I don't think the squish was meant to affect 50 content either.

Minimum ilvl can't be trusted for old fights, the scaling is all off nowadays.

It isn't the same and nobody should think it's the same. But it's similar enough and usually still pretty challenging.

We've had potency increases and stat changes and abilities have been merged at lower levels making the combat less distracting, food doesn't sync properly, so sometimes DPS checks become a joke in certain fights. Often the mechanics, which were new at the time, were subsequently put into normal fights and duties (or done so in easier patterns) so you're more familiar with them than we were then.

But it's honestly satisfying enough and I'd respect MINE clears over all the people just unsyncing everything in this game.

No. Cleric Stance was the worst feature of combat. You were supposed to play based on the role you entered, not waste time switching.

I loved cleric stance just because it's a risk-reward thing but if you have a good feel for things, for timing and which risks are safe, it's never a problem.