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

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.

After having done hall of the novice so many times on alts, I can't help but think of how there is barely any interactables in fights or dungeons the further I got into the game. Of how hall of the novice teaches you "Hey, see this sparkly chain? Interact with it to prevent reinforcements" which said reinforcements are training mammets but it does teach you fights should have those, at least the ARR ones have interactble objects. Yeah the turtle boss in the crescent is different because the player actually has to interact with coin bags and carry them over to a pile. Which when the turtle boss that feels like something innovative when its actually just ARR fight-design, I think that does say something about how too many fights are variations of heigan the unclean from wow, that is to say they are dance fights.

I have already spent countless hours discussing it in length in many, many threads, and people that do not see it inevitably tell me that it's in my imagination, so forgive me if I don't feel like wasting more time of my life because if you're not seeing it or identifying with it, then odds are you'll probably not understand. Those who know, know already.

Though if it can give a hint, take HW BLM with literally zero movement tools, and see how its gameplay behaved in HW. I feel it's the best example to give without going into whole essays about the technicalities.

Originally Posted by Valence

I have already spent countless hours discussing it in length in many, many threads, and people that do not see it inevitably tell me that it's in my imagination, so forgive me if I don't feel like wasting more time of my life because if you're not seeing it or identifying with it, then odds are you'll probably not understand. Those who know, know already.

Though if it can give a hint, take HW BLM with literally zero movement tools, and see how its gameplay behaved in HW. I feel it's the best example to give without going into whole essays about the technicalities.

I guess the configurations of AOEs/cleaves that they use these days force you to move more but that doesn't feel like much of a paradigm shift compared to anything from Sb onwards. Other than the fact that it's forced them to make the casters not be casters anymore anyways.

as someone who skips all story and doesnt give a crap about it: I really like dawntrail more than most other expansions

the raids are great, the dungeons are better (boss design), we even have challenging crafter and gatherer content

Wait... they 'improved' it...? I thought they just run at 1.1x speed and call it a day? Lul...

Oh yeah, also try to clutter the screen and call it increasing stress while giving barely any options to tweak the game's brightness and bloom.

Savage is arguably the best its ever been with the most recent tier.
There's a lot of salty weirdos in this thread.

Dungeons will never be difficult.

I'm looking forward to the deep dungeon content.

The faster pace is a breath of fresh air for me. I really enjoyed the extrem / savage encounters in this extension. On the other hand, there are some things that I think need to change:

- The overall pace of the dungeons MUST be changed. Take away those artificial walls. If the tank wants to pull everything, let it pull. And let the group wipe if that mistake is made... Or congratulate themselves when a particularly daring pull has been handled correctly. Adding artificial walls only serves to undermine a role (tanking) in which one of the main components has always been how many mobs to take.

- Trash packs need to evolve radically. The design of boss encounters is just fine, both in dungeons and in higher-level instances (up to savage. I can't say for ultimate). But the packs could just as easily disappear, they're so uninteresting. They're only there to lengthen an instance.

- For bosses, give me more dmg randoms for dps. As a healer, the rhythm that everything is boring as long as the group is good is... Unbearable. In a dungeon, it makes it impossible to have fun. On higher difficulties, it's even worse:we find ourselves in those extraordinarily frustrating cases where the group dies if a mistake is made. So it's : either the group plays well, or it wipes: there are too few cases where an exceptionally good healer can save his raid through sheer mastery of his class.

- Please invest in the boulevard of buffs, debuffs and dispells. It's extraordinarily under-exploited in this game.