Thread: Almost into 7.3, what you think about the *improved* encounter design?

It got worse. Current Encounters are just a visual vomit of eyestrain effects.

To be honest there have been Tiny victories throughout dawntrial

Including QoL and encounter design.

The issue this expansion is the content cadence has been fricken awful.

Like people are going to have gripes about content regardless of quality that's just nature of the beast.
But I really think people are ready for content to be more expansive in a patch.

It's nice knowing what you're getting with FF14 that you know what to expect.

BUT like even if I gave you your favorite meal you're going to get sick of it if I keep giving it to you over and over.
It's hard to know how much or where the heck feedback is being brought to the Dev team.
I don't understand their relaxed nature.

I'm gonna keep rooting for them and the game.

It's nothing astounding, but it's definetly better than any dungeon, raid or extreme Endwalker delivered.

When it came to bosses specifically, I do think they delivered really good. The mechanics are more complex and varied, and the overall design is good.

Encounter overall, I don't think there's anything wrong with it..LOL. It's part of MMO and FF14 for a very long time, you get trash adds, and then you have a boss, more trash, and another boss.

It's not unique to FF14,I don't think I've encountered another design in any MMOs that I've played past 10+ years. Every single one of them had a similar thing. Blade and Soul, TERA, Dragon Nest, Guild Wars 2, Bless Online, Closers.. etc.
Even games that are not traditionally or fully MMOs have a similar approach. Star rail, for example, has some instances which have the same pace: trash -> Elite, trash-> Elite, trash -> Main boss.

Is it boring? perhaps, especially if you do it a thousand times. It is bound to become less appealing, boring, numbing experience at some point. Even if you take the same dungeon that would normally be done in 10 minutes and make it 1 hour with multiple paths and lots of puzzles, and variation, there will still be a point where people would just to the shortest and fastest path.

As long as 99% of MMOs place their prime things to do at end game, read as max level, those dungeons' sole purpose exists to be fast, easy, and to offer a way to gear up, nothing else.

I wish they would re-do the rewards for Criterion because those are not the traditional dungeons, and they could offer a place for FF14 to reinvent the wheel, if they would be willing.

Fight design hasn't changed in any meaningful way. Almost all of the mechanics in Dt are mechanics that we've seen before. They just made boss hitboxes smaller again and increased the pace in casual content very slightly.

Originally Posted by YovelaLindswood

You can’t improve encounter design on the back of awful class design!

100% agree. They need more meaningful toolkits and to bring in fresh ideas like actually using duty actions. If blizzard can make an engaging class with a core of 8 buttons and some flavor rp abilities why do I have 36 buttons that are all a variation of eachother in this game? Bring back more procs and rng in rotations. If the fights are going to be boring at least let me enjoy reacting to my class.

That's exactly why I think it doesn't make any sense to not work both encounters and classes together. One is the answer to the other...

So what it is? There's more substance to the encounter design that we'll only find out in 8.0 when jobs get changed?