Mao has question for everyones about DDR-style boss fights.

[Mikey_R]

It's true for sure that in Stormblood, it was rampant to see people share MP, help manage aggro and regen TP for eachother, or affect others' GCD Speed (Astrologians). This happened in dungeons and roulettes constantly in Stormblood, ..

No they didn't. Unless this is a stark difference between the EU playerbase and the NA playerbase that noone is aware of. Most jobs hates AST's Arrow as yo ujust ran out of resources faster, coupled with the fact noone used the party resource generators, made content feel incredibly bad when you just have to stop attacking due to no fault of your own.

As for the topic as a whole, I am still in the camp of all fights have been 'DDR', whatever that happens to mean, how people define it is so vague, it can apply to everything. At a set point in a fight, you do thing, welcome to everything ever. Let's have something that is a bit more descriptive to actually narrow down what the issues are, what mechanics in the past did not follow this 'DDR' format and why they do not count towards 'DDR'.

As for some things said in this topic, let's go through them, remembering all of them happen at the same point throughout a fight:

Forsaken 1 in O8S, the whole shielding before the debuff goes up to soak the meteors is not needed. If you have the correct number of players in each AoE, the meteors do ZERO damage. The reason for the pre-shielding is so that you can more quickly soak the damage from the tethered heads for more uptime, but you do technically have time between the meteors and the heads to sort it out. The pre-shielding is just an optimisation for the mechanic.

As for the other videos in that same post, that says nothing and doesn't prove or disprove a point either way. You need to explain why they are not classed as a 'DDR' mechanic so that an actual discussion can be had.

There was something fun about dealing with Chirada and Suparna in different groups, or fighting in Bahamut's giant hand and doing that weird Neurolink/Conflag mechanic. Always found some of those weird mechanics to be interesting and thematic. Not sure we'll have those again in the future.

But in the definition of 'DDR' that everyone uses, these things happen at set points and you deal with them the same way.

It was done moderately so far but I do feel that recently those have seen a wild resurgence, notably in Criterions like with Moko the Restless or Statice (those two bosses absolutely destroyed me, I am genuinely unable to follow which is something that has never happened to me before in challenging content), but also the new NM raids.

But isn't changing how things are telegraphed a good thing? By getting rid of environmental tells you are restricting how these things can be communicated. In a way, this would 'simplify' fights and make things feel samey. If you want things to be different, you need to mix things up. Even similar mechanics can feel different depending on how they are presented. Take M4 and the front/back laser memorisation and then take M5 with the 8 frogs on the edge. Both mechanics tell you what is happening before it goes off, the difference is, you have to memorise the canons but not the frogs, as the frogs stay around. They are still ultimately the same thing, stand either here or there, but I bet they do feel different to parse and execute because of the difference.

How about line AoEs that cross leaving safe squares between them, compared to, again, M5 where alternating squares on the dancefloor are the danger zones. With the line AoEs, you tend to want to go to the areas diagonally from your current safe square, with the dancefloor, it is the adjacent ones. Same concept, slightly different execution.

This also leads into something that bugs me a lot and that is the 'all fights are just mechanics X,Y Z etc.' Of course they are, those are the basic building blocks of any fight, it's like me complaining that all jobs are composed of GCDs and oGCDs and are therefore all the same. They aren't. They all use the tools in different ways and this has always been the case. As for some mechanics that don't get used often or at all in recent times, you have to ask why? Is it because they were bad mechanics, is it because the players didn't like having to stop their rotations to deal with it? (which would be a bigger issue in today's job profiles than it was back in HW).

TL;DR, Let's be more specific about what we actually mean when we say 'all fights are DDR', how and why, so that the actual issue can be addressed and not the vague sentiment that means nothing.

[Jeeqbit]

No they didn't. Unless this is a stark difference between the EU playerbase and the NA playerbase that noone is aware of.

Oh, well I am saying the NA experience. Maybe EU just didn't use their abilities much?

Most jobs hates AST's Arrow as yo ujust ran out of resources faster

I mean yes, but the point is you could use it and affect eachother and ASTs did use that stuff.

[xbahax92]

Part of me likes DDR based battles, because they allow amazing battles such as M5, where you're just grooving and it's pretty fun.
They shouldn't be mandatory however. There should be a mix of all.

Most importantly, I also do not wish to see Jobs suffering from this design choice. Jobs should be the foundation and battle encounters sbould be build around them.
It's sad but true, FFXIV is changing. I will miss battles like Kefka Savage, the heartless mechanic was truly something else.

And honestly, I blame the Trust system for this. Dungeons and Trials were designed for solo experience and the easiest method was turning battles into DDR style.

[Mikey_R]

I mean yes, but the point is you could use it and affect eachother and ASTs did use that stuff.

I think the thing to take away from increasing the GCD speed was that not everything was beneficial in all circumstances and in the case of Arrow, it depleted resources fast. If it didn't do that, it wouldn't be as much of an issue, though in todays metagame, it would misalign GCDs and make things not line up, making things feel bad that way. In my opinion there does need to be a massive shift in how they want to design jobs so that things like AST cards can come back, but making sure they are all a benefit in some way or another without a downside.

[Kazuke_Miso]

Forsaken 1 in O8S, the whole shielding before the debuff goes up to soak the meteors is not needed.

If you're going to spread misinformation you should at least have cleared the fight back then. The towers do very light damage.

And since you conveniently dismissed the whole post about DDR raids by laser focusing on a (non-existent) minor error, I will do the same to your idiotic post.

Most jobs hates AST's Arrow as you just ran out of resources faster, coupled with the fact noone used the party resource generators, made content feel incredibly bad when you just have to stop attacking due to no fault of your own.

This is a complete skill issue except on jobs like MCH. Fey wind and Arrows were optimal play and good players knew how to exploit them effectively.

Honestly I don't even understand why people who clearly have not done the content that people are discussing (O8S) chime in.

[brinn12]

Improved encounter design:
Bloom 6x
Witch hunt 3x

[Mawlzy]

I have 150 ping and have no trouble with these fights from a ping perspective. To be honest, I have even done mechanics on much higher ping data centers without a problem.

SE typically gives you about 3 seconds to do each mechanic. If for some reason you don't have that long, then you are probably meant to be in position for the mechanic already by that time.

Normally when people say that ping stops them doing mechanic, they actually just don't understand how that particular mechanic snapshots or its order of snapshot.

A really good example of this was in P9S, where rockbreaker seemed like it had lots of crazy stuff going on, but if you recorded it and played it back slowly, the mechanics resolved one at a time, with 3 seconds between each, and by knowing this order you could simply do 1 mechanic at a time. Once you were used to this order, it became super easy to execute, even while half asleep.

I don't actually like how fast the new raids are, but even those, with enough repetition, was able to anticipate and execute with my ping.

The thing is, it's not just formal ping that creates problems. I think you're right that if an individual has a stable ping and no other latency issues, they develop an inner timer that allows them to handle snapshotting and the other oddities it produces. And if everyone was using high-end rigs and GB fiber that would be the end of it. (Although even here, the "ghostly" snapshotting experience is sufficiently weird, I'm not sure why people would play 14 for its combat, particularly when solutions exist to make it much smoother that SE chooses not to implement.)

In practice, additional sources of latency create perceived variations in snapshot and other timings. I'm fortunate to be near the US servers, but an FC friend who has a 8 timezone offset tells me alliance raids play completely differently to dungeons. Moreover, within an instance, they experience significant changes in latency.

As we know, this is much less of an issue for those in Japan.

[Khutulun]

TBH I am tired of them too, I've sort of hit a wall recently where I simply don't care to do the raid progression anymore and am forcing myself to do them rather than actually enjoying it. I also hate this queue'ing for individual bosses instead of having a cool raid dungeon to go through. I am hoping this is the design simply due to the setting of this raid series, but I want to go back to more traditional raid dungeon design after this expansion.

Unless I'm missing something, for normal raids haven't they been single boss fights since Stormblood? HW has a bit of a hike + adds + a few cute things here or there... the subsequent three (now four) expansions are just boss + arena.

Now mind you, I agree with the sentiment that there should be a bit more of a dungeon element to the normal raids... although I think we'd need to start off by making the dungeons feel more like dungeons since right now 80% of FF14's dungeons are just hallway loading screens between precisely three boss fights. Exceptionally boring, the in-between trash mobs have largely no substance outside a set of ARR dungeons and five other dungeons across the remaining expansions (Castrum Abania, Swallow's Compass, Qitana Revel, Tender Valley / Qitana Revel 2, Deadwalk).

[Mawlzy]

Unless I'm missing something, for normal raids haven't they been single boss fights since Stormblood? HW has a bit of a hike + adds + a few cute things here or there... the subsequent three (now four) expansions are just boss + arena.

Now mind you, I agree with the sentiment that there should be a bit more of a dungeon element to the normal raids... although I think we'd need to start off by making the dungeons feel more like dungeons since right now 80% of FF14's dungeons are just hallway loading screens between precisely three boss fights. Exceptionally boring, the in-between trash mobs have largely no substance outside a set of ARR dungeons and five other dungeons across the remaining expansions (Castrum Abania, Swallow's Compass, Qitana Revel, Tender Valley / Qitana Revel 2, Deadwalk).

Dungeons themselves would be far more entertaining if the mobs had a role other than "round 'em up, mow 'em down."

[Jeeqbit]

an FC friend who has a 8 timezone offset tells me alliance raids play completely differently to dungeons. Moreover, within an instance, they experience significant changes in latency.

One way to potentially combat this is a VPN.

See, all those YouTubers promoting VPNs to watch streaming services from different countries, are missing out on advertising what they are actually useful for: stabilizing ping and reducing ping, or potentially avoiding nodes that are getting a DDoS if it's not the server itself.