Midcore is NOT a Difficulty setting - It's an Investment!

[Shougun]

I just wish their mechanics and structure of mechanics weren't so convaluted. Like the boss raises his right fist and starts casting "big hit," you see the marker, and you dodge it. But then they have the boss lift their fist and have no marker. It still casts "Big hit," but the player doesn't get the same marker structure and dies. Because the marker popped up at the very last second, and they can't dodge it. Now, the simple solution is to focus the boss and watch the cast/boss, but the majority of people aren't going to do that and die. Or the mechanics straight up has no telegraph happens for a minute straight requires you to memorize it and you die to it. I just wish we got more common sense mechanics even if the only solution to making them harder is making them faster.

But I'm a casual. When I do content, I like to learn that stuff and not spoil it with a video. Understandably, people don't want to waste their time. So if we need harder solo content, maybe. I'm not sure, but what I can say is that the current system sucks. It not fun, and it leaves me playing the game less and less as time goes on.

FFXIV does fairly well telegraphing info compared to other MMOs, but I do think we can improve that further.

For example abilities that can't be dodges (but the markers are there for your info) are a different color / visual style. This allows you to know that you could NOT have dodged it at the point of seeing it, stop trying that- this skill requires anticipation.. or lore interpretation it requires you to utilize your echo. They have markers for most concepts (like "thats going to do alotta damage"), just some bosses don't have them (due to when they were made) - assign someone to make those consistent (allow us to help by allowing a report missing telegraph UI).

Some other textures / effects might be interesting. Like one that indicates a sequence / series of actions (not talking #s like the boss target dash mechanics, just means that 'this ground marker has more to it than just this, like eruption on ifrit'), or the speed at which they will occur.


I might suggest that, if they've done it via a way that can use this, the functions for bosses automatically develop this info. "damage player(2, 3, 4, 10, skill effect), etc etc" and the other UI related functions just sees "triggers 8 effects within 2 seconds" means give it a fast animation speed, undodge-able coloring, with a sequence texture. The point of mentioning that, is because I think when content is first new, particularly, hardcore focused content... don't give all that info (also don't put it into machine memory, only server side). This way those players, who like that fresh learning experience, will get it, and once the guides are being made the game just follows suit. If you don't want the info after that, just remove your echo buff .



I am not sure how exactly I'd like to categorize content types, but I am unsatisfied with just one words (casual, mid, hard). I would probably mix in required player, skill requirement and #, and then increments of expected substantive progress.


So for example 8 party group, 4 veteran, 1 hour. Using this as a goal of design but also a metric to look at if I missed the mark. This tells me I want 8 players, 4 of which need to be veteran, and on average players will experience substantive dopamine hits every hour. So like ultimate might be 8, 8 masters, 12-36 hours. My personal preference is probably set at dynamic scaling of 1 to X, 1 to 1/3 * X, veteran, 15 minutes to 1 hour. Where typically the content is either or "also" scaling to size of group, and only 1/3 really have to know whats up (playing 'well', but no memorization required).