Is the game shifting into fast visual puzzles?

[flowerfairy]

I've actually been feeling the same way. Specifically the level 99 trial, the part with 2 sets of swords flying at the same time gets me almost always. I have trouble checking one side's safe spots, and then checking the other side's safe spots, all before the attack goes off.

And even if these types of mechanics actually have some sort of easy cheesy way to instantly figure out the safe spots... What's the point of it then? What is it actually be challenging you to do after you learn it? Managing your job's uptime, and that's about it I guess. It just looks like more fancier safe spot dancing to me. Is that what passes as a "mechanic" now?

Instead of the game challenging your job and your party's composition, it's challenging your mind's ability to quickly comprehend the pattern. If you can't get it you instantly die.

But, like others said, it's not like the game has anything left for the devs to challenge you on. I think this kind of visual clutter is the epitome of the game's shift in fight design in Shadowbringers. It most definitely became more difficult than Endwalker, but more in the sense of "you have 5 seconds to find the safe spot instead of 10". If this expansion's focal point is encounter design, I was really hoping that they would replace the "find the safe spot" part of encounter design... Otherwise I can't see the difference between here and the last 2 years.

I'd honestly be fine with visual clutter if it was designed in a way that it imitates sporadic damage to random party members. Like a couple of "ow dangit"s that don't immediately stop the raid but recovery's still possible, and encouraged. The closest example I can think of is Barbariccia.

But most of the time visual clutter mechanics instantly kills whoever messed up, then the party gets hit with a body check and the raid has to start all over again. Personally I don't enjoy this "vision" of difficulty. And I think this kind of design is what makes Party Finder less enjoyable for both the person who understands the mechanic and the person who doesn't.

I admit I'm not a fast thinker. Maybe I'm just slow and I have to suck it up. But this isn't the kind of direction I'd enjoy in an RPG with tanks and healers and supports.

[VioletCatastrophe]

Instead of the game challenging your job and your party's composition, it's challenging your mind's ability to quickly comprehend the pattern. If you can't get it you instantly die.

Using the 99 trial as an example:
Start in a corner. Look at one of the sides. Instead of looking from the swords to your column, look from your column to where the swords are. If you see a sword in the column connected to yours, move one tile to the left/right. Repeat this again. If you've moved twice, you are now safe. If you don't see a sword on the first two tries, you are safe. Turn to face the other set of swords and repeat. If you can solve one side in time, then you'll at most get hit by one sword, and not the overlap of two, and you'll live.

Mechanics like this, that focus on parsing visual information, are intended to feel a little overwhelming, but then get easier as your brain works out a pattern to the chaos and you start to notice similarities. I would genuinely say these fights have very little visual clutter if you have the experience to know what you should and should not look at. FFXIV in general could be a lot better at teaching its playerbase, and I think we are seeing the fruits of that here and there. I think I'd respect the people begging for changes a bit more if they more correctly identified that the game was lacking in the way it teaches the player rather than the content itself being bad.

Generally speaking, you aren't going to instantly die to casual content unless you fail it catastrophically. If you stop focusing on doing it perfectly, and instead try to at least not fail it so badly that you'll die, you'll get faster at the bit you can handle, which gives you more time to do the bits you struggle more with.

And for better or worse, this game isn't about individual performance and party composition any more. Testing party composition just enforces a rigid meta that sucks for anyone playing a non-meta job (see: heavensward). Also, even if the devs did something like visual clutter to overwhelm you to induce sporadic party damage... well... that's the final boss of Zot, and it is probably overwhelming as hell to casual players since it even throws myself off as someone who does ultimate raids.

The only other skills to test are dps (requires enrage timers), group coordination (would not work in casual content at all), random flexing (likely problematic in casual content, as this stuff is often the hardest stuff in savage/ultimate), and probably some other stuff. So yeah, the devs don't have many other options for casual content, but IMO you have enough time, you just may need to accept imperfections at first until comfort and familiarity brings with it speed.