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

[Eraden]

Mao been thinkings. Is well known to lots peoples that Mao nots like DDR-style boss fights. Now Mao knows DDR-style boss fights always been in game since beginnings. DDR-style boss fights back in ARR and HW, nots as fast as thems is in EW and DT though. Also, old boss fights sometimes has some more randomy elements in thems. Mao likes thems old fights buts hates all the new fights. Mao also believings newer boss fights whats gettings faster and faster is responsible for jobs being made more and more mobiles and samey.

Mao nots so sure now, though, that Mao view towards newer boss fights, is view of most peoples. Mao wantings to know if peoples likes or dislikes newer more extreme DDR-style boss fights. Is oks if peoples answer with yes. Is no wrong answer to question. If turns out most peoples like newer fights then maybe game is goings in right direction and is just Mao whats being left outs. Mao can accept thats and move on to differents game (Mao already playings WoW and has much funs). Mao just want know if Devs truly doings whats in best interests for players.

[Mawlzy]

I've stopped doing any fights that are not required to progress the MSQ due to the monotonous DDR design fetish. The same is true of everyone in my FC.

And yes, it's also having a negative impact on jobs. We're going to need mobile casters in 8.0 apparently. Sorry BLM.

[ovIm]

Mao also believings newer boss fights whats gettings faster and faster is responible for jobs being made more and more mobiles and samey.

That unfortunately has been confirmed by the developers themselves:

Magical Ranged DPS
We anticipate that future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells. Keeping this in mind, we have increased attack potency of roles other than pictomancer to achieve a better balance between magical ranged DPS jobs.

Black Mage
Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells, so we have shortened the cast time for a variety of actions.

Its fascinating that for all the criticism about the rigidity of the pve combat system, CS3's solution to that was to simply make the fights faster and the classes simpler. I have not seen any new mechanics from yesterdays patches (still have to try out the new ex, but presumably its the same as anything else), its all still variations of the usual suspects. That design paradigm has diminished my own interest in the PVE side of this game, and after being with it for over 10 years, its sad to think that its original customer base may not be the one the devs want to appeal to any more.

[DiaDeem]

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.

Either way, Mao. I hope you're doing well. It's always nice seeing you.

[Taranok]

My answer is that I hate the direction EW and DT has been taking encounter design. It's crushing job variety, crushing people at higher ping or with less stable internet (me, that is,) and is likewise leading to the destruction of jobs. But the thing I'm specifically intent on drawing attention to is the 1/2/4/8 mechanics design. 1 (everyone spreads.) 2 (stack with a predesignated partner.) 4 (lite party stacks) 8 (full party stack.) Every single mechanic that has come out since mid shadowbringers has been a variation on this. Every. Last. One. And instead of trying to make unique, new, or interesting mechanics, they started shoving more and move movement into the mechanics they had. This first started with E7S and tornado phase. Just an absolutely ridiculous amount of movement as people constantly spin around the room. The difference between leviathan savage and tornado phase was night and day, a stark difference in how fights were approached.

Then in Endwalker the devs decided to make every arena absolutely massive, and force people to work in these massive awful arenas. It doesn't matter that the mechanic is easy to solve if it takes 4 GCDs worth of movement to solve it. That's a triplecast+swiftcast worth of movement, that's a lot of pressure on healers and casters. E8S shows this off really well. High Complexity is a fun mechanic, but it takes 8+ seconds just to go from spot to spot and you had all of 2 seconds of wiggle room once you get there. My friends started making a pretty important observation. If sprint makes the mechanic significantly easier, it's a badly designed mechanic. Unfortunately, this litmus test has been a resounding positive on almost every mechanic in EW and DT.

When you force this much movement on every single mechanic, the natural conclusion is: "The devs hold cast bars in contempt."

But casters are just the most recent thing to get homogenized. Mitigation has been homogenized throughout all of EW and DT as well to the point where addle and feint are basically tacticians, concurrent with casters being destroyed. Before mitigation, healers were destroyed. When every single mechanic is a party buster that hits for 130% EHP back to back, it's no surprise every single healer has about 15 variations of medica 1 and 2 split between them. They all heal the same way whether players realize it or not. And, of course, the first role to be destroyed by homogenization are, oddly, tanks. When WAR couldn't tank twintania/death sentence without getting straight up deleted, the solution the devs chose was to give them PLD's completely overpowered mitigations. Now every tank tanks identically, save for things like TBN vs HoC or holmgang vs hallowed ground. What does homogenization have to do with this? Well, classes have been following encounters, instead of the other way around. Instead of fixing twintania so a (slightly reworked) WAR could survive, they turned WAR into PLD so it could tank twintania. That is why it matters.

When mechanics design is pushed to this extreme, the only way to make things more difficult is to make mechanics faster (E.G. Less time to react/less room for error) or more tedious (I.E. running across giant arenas.) The mechanics stop getting harder, they just get dumber. Which is what DT is doing.

If this is the direction the devs want to take the game, sure. But I want stormblood fight design, with class expression closer to stormblood. BLM timers don't need to come back, but having a caster that sits still and casts absolutely should. That's the standard for caster gameplay. Also preferably with healers and tanks having the chokehold on their class design removed. Something that can only be done with a massive redesign of the game and a philosophy shift in how to actually diversify jobs.

Focusing on encounter design in DT was a massive mistake if this is their solution to it. The actual issue is much more fundamental to the core design philosophy.

[Loggos]

I think it would be great if we had variety.

I do think fast DDR boss fights have its place but I think the same goes for more creative/gimmicky and more "slow-paced" and "technical" fights (technical in the sense that you can focus more on deliberate strategy than nonstop quick reactions, perhaps also going back to FF's roots a bit and give you more of a pseudo "turn-based" feel - this could also open up the possibility for a new type of complexity. Right now complexity comes from how having to react fast to many hazards in quick succession. Slower fights could be more about ""deeper"" decision making (and group communication)).

I don't think this has to be mutually exclusive with more complex job design. Personally I would even enjoy it if DDR fights are designed in a way that you just cannot pull off your complex rotation perfectly and that the fun lies in getting as much as possible out of your kit while playing in an enviroment of well-paced chaos. More slow-paced and technical fights could then allow super optimised rotations. (DDR fights could also be designed in a way that they have some DDR-heavy phases and some less intense sections for more rotation-focused gameplay to break up the structure and create a good pace.)

But I think parts of the community would never allow the former ("non-optimisable" DDR fights) given how sacred uptime and wasting not a single GCD is... Which I think is sad because in my eyes this strife for "perfect numbers in a table/perfect parses" can contribute to holding fight design back.

This variety of approaches would also introduce an element of surprise that is now missing. Right now we always know it'll be some form of DDR. But if you know you could be getting anything then maybe this will also change how you feel about a certain genre of fights. If DDR fights came in limited doses next to other fight designs than maybe they'd be appreciated more because right now, with it being pretty much the only approach, it's DDR overkill.
Sure not everyone will end up loving them all of a sudden, just like not everyone will like slower tactical fights but on the other hand you'd also know that there are fights for you in the game and it might lead to a more balanced appreciation of the battle design within the community as a whole while also enabling complex and engaging job design again.

[Valence]

Mao been thinkings. Is well known to lots peoples that Mao nots like DDR-style boss fights. Now Mao knows DDR-style boss fights always been in game since beginnings. DDR-style boss fights back in ARR and HW, nots as fast as thems is in EW and DT though. Also, old boss fights sometimes has some more randomy elements in thems. Mao likes thems old fights buts hates all the new fights. Mao also believings newer boss fights whats gettings faster and faster is responsible for jobs being made more and more mobiles and samey.

Mao nots so sure now, though, that Mao view towards newer boss fights, is view of most peoples. Mao wantings to know if peoples likes or dislikes newer more extreme DDR-style boss fights. Is oks if peoples answer with yes. Is no wrong answer to question. If turns out most peoples like newer fights then maybe game is goings in right direction and is just Mao whats being left outs. Mao can accept thats and move on to differents game (Mao already playings WoW and has much funs). Mao just want know if Devs truly doings whats in best interests for players.

I just got the thought after the new patch and especially the new raid tier that now they're actually doubling down on other things than just DDR, namely visual cues to catch and decipher. The new tier is literally choke full of those. I think the first time they introduced those as a new emerging thing to watch out for was for the Nier raids where Yoshi sold it in PLLs as looking all around you as danger can come from everywhere in the arena. 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.

What this implies is that the player must have their attention riveted to their environment and screens more than ever, and that a dps class will naturally have a harder time than a support, especially a healer. What this also implies is that adjacently to this, the multitasking requirements are higher, and since on top of DDR this draws in the player's focus and attention to the encounter exclusively, this also tends to explain, at least to my view, why they choose as a result to simplify jobs.

[Nero-Voidstails]

I miss when the fight were more mechanic focus then burst focus. Olds fight are the best in my book Ravana is a good exemple of how fun and simple it is yet impactful. Newest boss are often a bar that fill faster like some fight are good yes but I miss all the interaction we all used to have like in some dungeon you can have a debuff call misery and you can /comfort to remove it. Stupid for sure but felt natural. I miss those old fight an wish we could see them back again well the concept of those fight I am sure it would be health for the game and playerbase

[Kandraxx]

As long as you keep eating up they will serve you more of the same. Some people who are out of real-life clout participation by default are happy to spend another 50 hrs of their one life learning a pattern to get the next meaningless glowing stick in a video game.

[TheInsomniac13]

I think it is time to be honest with one self and face the fakt that FF14 is not the game most of us remember it being.
As it stands the main appeal of the game was it´s story... a Story that finished with Endwalker and then for all I heard nosedived into the ground with Dawntrail.

So having finished Endwalker what remains keeping me in the game?

Jobs are Lobotomized left and right. Monk is Push the next glowy button. Viper got dumbed down not even a month after it´s release. Astologian is in most peoples opinion in it´s worst state it ever was in.
Healers bein crying over what was done to there playstle for years now. And now Red Mage which when I first started it feeled like the easy accesible Caster class... is suddenly the most complicated because Summoner got reworked and now Black Mage has a freaking White Mage Rotation... and ther coming from a White Mage main!
The only really complex class that remains is Ninja and ant this point it is not a question of IF but when they gonna ruin this job too.

So story is a no... Job gameplay is also a no... what remains are Dungeon encounters... and I am really really sorry... But if I wanna play Dance Dance Revolution. I go an play Dance Dance Revolution.

I wish everyone as much joy as they can get out of the games they decide to play but for me I have singed up to play an MMO!RPG! so with nothing keeping me I will help a friend finish of Bozja and get them through Eureka... but then I will drop out.
I wish you all a good time with what ever games you decide to play but for me FF14 endet with Endwalker and there is no sense in staying.