Difficulty of normal content.

[reflettage]

Context: I'm a veteran player who has been raiding Savage/Ultimate for years and have leveled several alts by hand.

One of the greatest failings of FFXIV in its current state is that it doen't teach you how to play. Sure, when you start the game it teaches you how to move your character, the myriad steps involved in doing a basic fetch quest, how to use aetherytes, and more through never-ending "Active Help" text dumps that look like ads just begging for you to close them. But while the game has evolved significantly since its release nearly 11 years ago, most of the early game has not.

Power creep reigns supreme through entire expansions, and is especially apparent in those ancient solo duties whose only requirement for success nowadays is "have a consciousness". Players never learn how to fail until they're eating dirt over and over to newer content and they understandably get frustrated.

Watching the boss's castbar is integral to modern FFXIV fight design, and yet its default position is this tiny little toothpick-sized speck tucked away in the upper-right corner of the target bar. THAT'S why we have people say mechanics are "seemingly random" or "come out of nowhere" -- because they have no idea they should be looking at the cast bar for information, they might not even know it's there. Think the final boss of the lv89 dungeon -- he can cast half-room cleaves called Left Firaga and Right Firaga, where Left and Right indicate what hand he's gonna cast the cleave from. The cast bar is the only indication this attack is coming until it's too late to dodge it intentionally. It's an incredibly basic mechanic, but if you didn't know to look at the cast bar, you'd be thinking "Wtf? How was I supposed to know?"

The game makes almost no effort to teach you how to play your job beyond the most basic of basics. I've been in duties with 0 DPS healers, tanks who don't mitigate, Black Mages who spam Blizzard -- hell, I was in the lv95 dungeon around a week ago and the Red Mage with us didn't press a single AOE attack the entire 23-minute dungeon, dualcasted Jolt more often than not, and never touched half of their oGCDs. Their search info informed me they had somehow gotten all the way to level 98. Likewise, a few years back I watched a friend attempt Pagl'than (level 80) with Duty Support. On the first boss, he didn't seem to realize that standing in the lightning pulses gave him vuln stacks, and due to tank privilege he wasn't in any immediate danger of dying so he didn't move out of them (maybe didn't even realize he was getting hit by an avoidable environment hazard?). He accumulated 8 vulns. When the tankbuster hit him shortly thereafter, he went down like a sack of potatoes, and had no idea why.

The game seriously needs to start expecting more than the barest of bare minimums from players way, WAY earlier, so they can learn iteratively throughout the entire 1-100 leveling experience.

[ElliCat]

Watching the boss's castbar is integral to modern FFXIV fight design...

Agreed on the Amon fight, but with respect to the actual content being discussed here:

It's entirely possible that I missed something, as I only did the fights on the first night (and boy were they fun, even the handful of wipes): but aside from Brute Bomber's green mist breath, it looked to me like most/all of the other attacks had some sort of physical telegraph.

Black Cat's half-room cleaves were prefaced by her claws charging up, mouser had the square pattern in place, the knock-up (whatever it was) was blatantly obvious with several seconds to position, etc.

Honey B. straight-up stole the slash indicator from Barbariccia with the line and donut sweeps.

Brute had the arm charging on the lariats, and the bombs had (fairly) simple, easy to read indicator (*cough*after the first wipe*cough*).

Thunderhorselady was super-telegraphed. Only thing I could think of that might have been difficult was the 4x3 arena-shattering cannon, but that wasn't a "look at the castbar" so much as a "see which 3/4 of the arena was being hit and have plenty of time to run to the safe 1/4."

[Tenebrosi]

Agreed on the Amon fight, but with respect to the actual content being discussed here:

It's entirely possible that I missed something, as I only did the fights on the first night (and boy were they fun, even the handful of wipes): but aside from Brute Bomber's green mist breath, it looked to me like most/all of the other attacks had some sort of physical telegraph.

Black Cat's half-room cleaves were prefaced by her claws charging up, mouser had the square pattern in place, the knock-up (whatever it was) was blatantly obvious with several seconds to position, etc.

Honey B. straight-up stole the slash indicator from Barbariccia with the line and donut sweeps.

Brute had the arm charging on the lariats, and the bombs had (fairly) simple, easy to read indicator (*cough*after the first wipe*cough*).

Thunderhorselady was super-telegraphed. Only thing I could think of that might have been difficult was the 4x3 arena-shattering cannon, but that wasn't a "look at the castbar" so much as a "see which 3/4 of the arena was being hit and have plenty of time to run to the safe 1/4."

If I may, for future reference, she aims the cannon towards the 3/4 she's going to shatter, gives you that extra second or two, and it's accurate, she'll aim either direction. Another is, when she's doing the electrope clones, as the clones slowly start to come into view from top down, you can pre-tell what half is unsafe via the arms and cube, these are on the unsafe side.

But yeah, the cannon at the arena, that was easy to tell, and easy to play with, you can dps inside that affected arena until she stops, and you still have time to escape.

All a model/animation tell, which I love.
Happy raiding with this newfound knowledge.

[MakariaZofura]

One of the greatest failings of FFXIV in its current state is that it doen't teach you how to play. Sure, when you start the game it teaches you how to move your character, the myriad steps involved in doing a basic fetch quest, how to use aetherytes, and more through never-ending "Active Help" text dumps that look like ads just begging for you to close them. But while the game has evolved significantly since its release nearly 11 years ago, most of the early game has not.

Watching the boss's castbar is integral to modern FFXIV fight design, and yet its default position is this tiny little toothpick-sized speck tucked away in the upper-right corner of the target bar. THAT'S why we have people say mechanics are "seemingly random" or "come out of nowhere" -- because they have no idea they should be looking at the cast bar for information, they might not even know it's there. Think the final boss of the lv89 dungeon -- he can cast half-room cleaves called Left Firaga and Right Firaga, where Left and Right indicate what hand he's gonna cast the cleave from. The cast bar is the only indication this attack is coming until it's too late to dodge it intentionally. It's an incredibly basic mechanic, but if you didn't know to look at the cast bar, you'd be thinking "Wtf? How was I supposed to know?"


The game seriously needs to start expecting more than the barest of bare minimums from players way, WAY earlier, so they can learn iteratively throughout the entire 1-100 leveling experience.

I second this. The Smith's "tutorials" are almost offensively useless. Basically, unless you have friends or make friends, the game doesn't teach you the basics. It assumes you know the basics.

Now once you have the basics they do a good job of teaching you mechanics - showing it bit by bit and ramping it up over time and instances - but as for how to play your job? almost nothing.

Yesterday I did an Ala Mhigo with a PLD player who did 0 AOE, hit random cooldowns (like wings/cover) on trash pulls, and Tank LB on CD. He was relatively new, but did not read/reply to chat at all. This play is unacceptable, but someone should have taught him something somewhere.

As for looking at the castbar, that is sometimes difficult when the fight is new or you're on an unfamilliar job, yet nowhere in the game do they give you any indication this is important.

While this onboarding isn't anywhere near as bad as some games (think LoL), it could be improved.