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

[DoubleJustice]

At least in normal dungeons faster mechanics.

Other than that? Nothing.

Were you looking for less to no body checks? Nope we still got those.
Were you hoping for more mechanics for tanks/healers to use more of their defenses/heals? You sweet summer child.
Were you looking for more mechanics other than dodge this and take no damage outside of forced raidwides/stack markers/puddles? I mean we kinda got that but most of the fight is still dodge X take 0.

Only good thing we got was smaller hitboxes.

Boss positioning doesn't really matter still.
Tanks still sit on their defenses instead of using them thoroughly throughout the fight (because auto damage is still low).
Healers can still be replaced even on release because healing requirements are low enough to be covered by tanks/dps.
Mitigation is still king with next to no fights where pure healers shine so the pure/shield split was a wasted effort and destroyed AST for 0 reason (thanks SE).
Bosses still stop dealing damage when casting abilities.
Bosses still don't crit on autos.
To my knowledge there's little to no reason to bring caster/phys. ranged because there's no mechanics for them to bait out.

News flash dev team - making mechanics faster =/= improved design. Its just the same thing we've dealt with for years, just faster.

Obviously this isn't every encounter in the game but, I think m6s incorporates everything you're asking for besides bosses critting on autos and attacking while channeling their spells.

[Amarande]

If you really want to make the jobs "fun" you have to stack layers upon layers of procs so that there's constant decision making for the most opitmal DPS. WoW had this for a long time around Legion through BFA, but then the masses complain about the game being too difficult/confusing.

I don't think it's the masses. The casual masses tend to enjoy playing around with the toys.

It's the raiders.

WoW brought this back with Dragonflight and War Within, where there are actually talent trees even more complex than the original pre-Mists ones at that, with real meaningful choices (e.g. a lot of utility buttons are placed within the talent trees, forcing you to select your build around which ones you need/want).

I want to say this is more of a ... it's hard to put into terse words, but "community breakdown and player patience" issue is probably closest to accurate in that regard.

Give me some Queen instruments folks, because folks want it all, they want it all, they want it all, and they want it now.

They're people with one track minds. Too much to do in one lifetime. Not folks for compromise and wheres and whys and living lies ...

Okay, enough singing.

Trouble is that evaluating a raid member used to be understood to be a process that took time and a careful analysis. Nowadays, too many people want it to be a quick thought-free snap judgment preferably involving a scoring system standardized by some third party.

And this isn't possible with "complex jobs" because too much tends to depend on whether a player got lucky with their procs, and correspondingly little on their skill. (An example from FFXIV was Stormblood Bard, where the DoT crit proc had such a massive effect on overall DPS that a bard artless enough to be swinging around the bow like a baseball bat but who got lots of dot crits could very easily outperform one who shot like Ulysses and played like Mozart but had bad crit RNG ...)

If you (the royal you) want out of this pit of mid and misery, you're going to have to stop streamlining your time so much, folks. You're going to have to be willing to get back to "it's what's inside that counts" and away from this postmodern trend of superficial, often outsourced judgments.

Community, Gatorade commercial voice is IT in you?

[ValynS]

I like the older expansion dungeons where you have to interact with random switches or items, or collect things, or 'solve' something that isn't just move out of the flashing area. Or ones where you can accidentally drag 10 trash into and start the boss fight cos there aren't 3 locked doors in the way. It's just nice to have variety or even for things to go wrong. The current dungeon design is mind numbingly boring

[ovIm]

I like the older expansion dungeons where you have to interact with random switches or items, or collect things, or 'solve' something that isn't just move out of the flashing area. Or ones where you can accidentally drag 10 trash into and start the boss fight cos there aren't 3 locked doors in the way. It's just nice to have variety or even for things to go wrong. The current dungeon design is mind numbingly boring

And the worst part about that is, they are slowly working on removing all those unique early dungeons, all those creative encounters and experiences, to replace them with the same streamlined dungeon we have been running since at least Shadowbringers, just with a different coat of paint.

Edited to Add: I kinda wish they would bring more max level dungeons per patch instead of reworking the old dungeons. Having to see one dungeon for 9 months on expert is draining.

[DoubleJustice]

I would like to say that rather than remove that creative dungeon experience, they've opted to move it to their Variant Dungeon design team. As much as I love puzzles, solving a puzzle you've already solved before very quickly loses its luster. So making it a one time thing in the form of Variant is probably the best way to ensure the content keeps getting created, without being watered down to fit the mold of "content you may end up running 50+ times and will despise"

[Valence]

- 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.

They're literally the only thing that doesn't make me puke in dungeons. Are they interesting? No, not really, but at least they're not DDR slop while hitting a dummy. Wish we had actual engaging jobs to enjoy ourselves over that trash though.
To my perspective it's the bosses that are here to lengthen an instance. At least they quelled this down a little in 7.2, so instead of being infuriating, bosses are now as bland as trash.

I actually don't agree

Dungeons with objectives and non-linear paths get boiled down to optimal paths after a day or two. It's really not as engaging as it seems (try playing WoW and see). What we need is to have square demand us use our kit more (stuns, interrupts, etc) and have to deal with actual mechanics from trash mobs. Also, Mythic+ please.

There is ways to go about it. Take variants for example. They could perfectly have worked as normal dungeons in a normal roulette, where paths there would have been decided at random by the system.
Doesn't resolve the problem of uninteresting trash or bosses or encounter design, but it certainly addresses dungeon variety.

I am relatively certain the twinning has several interrupts - surplus kamilya, the self-buffing quadrupeds, maybe the kettles at the end too? I think heroes’ gauntlet also had interrupts on the white mage and maybe paladins. Since then, I’m struggling to think of any.

Has it really been two expansions?

If interrupt is the pinnacle of what us as a community can think of when it comes to crowd control, in a franchise like FF plentiful already with everything there is to wish for, between heavy, slow, mini, etc etc, then I think we deserve what we're getting.

If you really want to make the jobs "fun" you have to stack layers upon layers of procs so that there's constant decision making for the most opitmal DPS. WoW had this for a long time around Legion through BFA, but then the masses complain about the game being too difficult/confusing.

Finally, someone sees the light

And the worst part about that is, they are slowly working on removing all those unique early dungeons, all those creative encounters and experiences, to replace them with the same streamlined dungeon we have been running since at least Shadowbringers, just with a different coat of paint.

Edited to Add: I kinda wish they would bring more max level dungeons per patch instead of reworking the old dungeons. Having to see one dungeon for 9 months on expert is draining.

Same reason why I can't even bring myself to run the high level roulette since it's gonna be even more of Alexandria, Valley, or even more awful, the infamous luigi's mansion. Ugh.

[BigCheez]

If you really want to make the jobs "fun" you have to stack layers upon layers of procs so that there's constant decision making for the most opitmal DPS. WoW had this for a long time around Legion through BFA, but then the masses complain about the game being too difficult/confusing.

Procs help a lot but they aren't the only thing that can make jobs more engaging. They need to add more things to pay attention to in general with regards to damage rotations.

Procs, so we need to check if we got a proc after using an ability.

Non-30/60/120s cooldowns so rotations aren't the same loop over and over and over again. If we had some 20, 40, 90 and 180s cooldowns, things wouldn't come up at the same point every cycle and you would actually have to pay more attention to your cooldowns. Your opener, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute burst windows would all be slightly different due to different abilities being on/off cooldown. And you'd have your pot back up for the full re-opener at 6 minutes. Amazing. It's almost like the game was actually designed with this in mind instead of being boring, repetitive, 1-2 minute loop slop.

Buffs to keep up and debuffs to keep on the boss are good because they just give us more things to track and abilities that we need to use to reapply them. Not sure why they keep getting rid of these. NIN losing Huton and VPR losing its DoT (that was in the game for such a short period of time that I can't even remember what it was called...) sucked.

Abilities that augment other abilities are good (Kaiten). Imagine having to make sure you have enough gauge to spend on an ability by the time another ability comes off cooldown.

We need more diversity between jobs too. Every job boiling down to "123, build, burst. Press your 30/60/120s buttons on cooldown" reinforces how boring the jobs are. You can't even change jobs to freshen the game up anymore.

TL;DR - they need to make the dev team go play WoW again.

[Alice_Rivers]

Improved fight design? There's improved fight design? Where? When did this happen? I haven't seen it.

[Raikai]

Same reason why I can't even bring myself to run the high level roulette since it's gonna be even more of Alexandria, Valley, or even more awful, the infamous luigi's mansion. Ugh.

Would be great if they scaled the expansion leveling dungeons to 100 so they could add there. If you don't have (or want) jobs to level anymore, you'll almost never see those places again, and some of them are really cool like Vanguard.

[Raikai]

Procs help a lot but they aren't the only thing that can make jobs more engaging. They need to add more things to pay attention to in general with regards to damage rotations.

Procs, so we need to check if we got a proc after using an ability.

Non-30/60/120s cooldowns so rotations aren't the same loop over and over and over again. If we had some 20, 40, 90 and 180s cooldowns, things wouldn't come up at the same point every cycle and you would actually have to pay more attention to your cooldowns. Your opener, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute burst windows would all be slightly different due to different abilities being on/off cooldown. And you'd have your pot back up for the full re-opener at 6 minutes. Amazing. It's almost like the game was actually designed with this in mind instead of being boring, repetitive, 1-2 minute loop slop.

Buffs to keep up and debuffs to keep on the boss are good because they just give us more things to track and abilities that we need to use to reapply them. Not sure why they keep getting rid of these. NIN losing Huton and VPR losing its DoT (that was in the game for such a short period of time that I can't even remember what it was called...) sucked.

Abilities that augment other abilities are good (Kaiten). Imagine having to make sure you have enough gauge to spend on an ability by the time another ability comes off cooldown.

We need more diversity between jobs too. Every job boiling down to "123, build, burst. Press your 30/60/120s buttons on cooldown" reinforces how boring the jobs are. You can't even change jobs to freshen the game up anymore.

TL;DR - they need to make the dev team go play WoW again.

I hate to compare both games but they're right.

Of course, the combat approaches are vastly different, but the idea is still there: In WoW, there's no such thing as a "2min meta" (well, not counting a Bloodlust window, but that's usually in the opener when somebody brings the buff), and classes there only have inwards mechanics - timers, procs, abilities that interact with other abilities, short time and long time cooldown management, utility management, resource management. None of those elements are unknown to XIV, we had them in some capacity in the past.

In short, it is possible to make the jobs work without a collective burst window happening every 2 minutes if they had interesting inwards mechanics. And even beyond that if we still had party buffers like AST, who brings it in short intervals, it would still add a layer of complexity in figuring out the best way to adjust to a card coming at you every so often.