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

[Asari5]

I was doing some Alliance Raid roulettes yesterday and I never realized how they offer more distinctive mechanics that isn't a DDR. And that's ever since forever, back to ARR alliance raids.

yeah. looking at lvl 50 dungeons too. not all mechanics were perfect some were implemented rather bad, but they were certainly more varied than the mechanics in the new dungeons which look differently to each other but are the same.
they tried out stuff back then... yeah i would even say dungeons were better back then xD... at least on the long term. (because more varied and therefore less boring)

[Altina_Orion]

yeah. looking at lvl 50 dungeons too. not all mechanics were perfect some were implemented rather bad, but they were certainly more varied than the mechanics in the new dungeons which look differently to each other but are the same.
they tried out stuff back then... yeah i would even say dungeons were better back then xD... at least on the long term. (because more varied and therefore less boring)

I'm not sure I understand, which dungeons are we talking about? I feel like every time i get into an ARR dungeon there are no mechanics at all and i just site there 1-2-3ing the boss.

[Asari5]

well, nowadays we do way too much dmg in these dungeons for most mechanics to actually matter.

i think the only mechanic that got more difficult is the one frome haukke hard because people have to pay attention to kill the adds before the boss kills the group.

but stuff like the tonberry king in wanderers palace. killing adds gives him a nasty dmg buff. one stack for every add. but the king just dies before the adds reach you nowadays.

in pharos sirius the first boss which gives you crystal stacks. three stacks and they explode dealing big dmg.

tam-tara hard. where you have to aim the aoe on you on the adds to kill them without them exploding.

yeah the turtle dragon in stone vigil hard is annoying and the cannons clunky, but at least the fight was different

there are a lot more, but sadly barely any of them matter nowadays

[ovIm]

I'm not sure I understand, which dungeons are we talking about? I feel like every time i get into an ARR dungeon there are no mechanics at all and i just site there 1-2-3ing the boss.

Just some examples from the top of my head:
Hullbreaker Isle had the banana mechanic in the first boss (boss went into a rage and only stopped if you fed him, allowing players to see how far they could keep it still and raging), and the platforming going on in the third boss (boss would occasionally throw players into different platforms).
Copperbell Mines Hard first boss used to be an interesting race against the clock and a burning floor.
Snowcloak second boss used to make players bait mobs into boss aoes, so they become big snowballs players could kick into the boss to damage it and interrupt abilities (sadly removed from the game).
Sastasha Hard's first boss has a prey mechanic that can be interrupted by a skilled tank, the second boss had a damage rush ability that was interrupted by either enough damage or a critical hit (if I remember right, has been a hot minute since I played it).

A lot of those mechanics are now trivialized because of powercreep mind you, but they exist(ed), and were varied enough to not let you fall into monotony.

Just as a sidenote, pair that with the fact that we got 3 dungeons every 3.5 months and had more varied class gameplay, and dungeons alone were enough to sustain a more casual player base for quite a while during each patch cycle.

[Absurdity]

I'm not sure I understand, which dungeons are we talking about? I feel like every time i get into an ARR dungeon there are no mechanics at all and i just site there 1-2-3ing the boss.

That's either due to the dungeon being "modernized" or powercrept into oblivion.

We have over 2x the potency on our abilities than we did back in ARR, so you just kill most of those old bosses in seconds without ever seeing it's mechanics.

ovIm already named most, but even something early like the last boss in Copperbell Mines originally required you to regularly deal with adds before they break down some stone walls, which would spawn even more adds and overrun the party.
Unfortunately even back in Stormblood you could completely ignore the adds and just nuke the boss before that happened.

Most of the old dungeons weren't great either, often the implementation was where it fell flat. But the ideas were at least interesting and they tried something different instead of "dodge orange circles, stack, spread, chariot, dynamo"-number 25.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

Yes and no. That window isn't on a 2-minute timer and is more subtle, but there is a "pot(ion) window" (5 min), and maximizing synergy between short-lived (e.g., not 1+ minute) external buffs and skills exploiting them have been an important factor for so long as they've been offered -- even if that isn't often or in large numbers. Power Infusion is most noticeable among them today, creating balancing concerns for specs that synergize especially well with its added haste, but tanks regularly play around what external defensive buffs certain healers can offer, Innervation was also a necessity for many fights in the past, Unholy DKs buffed by Augmentation Evokers put a new ceiling on "broken", and even Night Fae Paladins and Priests in Shadowlands were generally selective about their party so they could max out their buffs.

Arguably, so long as tanks don't have stupidly excessive levels of Threat/Enmity generation and DPS have at-cost threat reduction available to them, the same is true of tanking. As long as there are worthwhile greeding opportunities but healers wouldn't necessarily have every GCD free for damage even when dealing with said greed, the same is true of healing. As long as there are DPS checks that are tight enough (in turn requiring a tight enough min to max ilvl range for the content), getting through consecutive precise DPS checks can even mean that your damage CDs are not just your own but must be leveraged as to minimize both excess and holding among those of your coDPS.

It's a matter of interconnectedness and fine tuning that has been lessened or lost in both games, often for its annoyance when mishandled being more frequent and palpable than its joys when well-handled, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and I'd love to see some more consideration of such here.

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.

Certainly, and leaving even a few externalizable buffs at shuffled times (say, 30, 40, 60, 90, 120, 180) wouldn't even limit that despite giving a modest bit more min-max consideration for holding CDs (now that they're no longer naturally synced).

That said, the reason XIV lacks most analogous gameplay is simply because of XIV's "combo" system -- in essence, apart from some small instances of consolidation, the optimal way to reduce the number of choices per button.

While in Stormblood in earlier we were at least occasionally allowed some rotational variance surrounding the time left before the target would die, typal modifiers (can drop Dragon Kick in a Demolish string and only lose a total of 22 potency despite having gained 90 effective potency off an extra Bootshine, since only Demolish's initial/direct damage is modified), and more significant %recast reduction per gear's worth of secondary stat such that we could actually ramp up SkS enough to get in, say, an extra Full Thrust combo per Chaos Thrust combo (objectively worse, but still an option), and DoT timers not quite being auto-synced to rotation meant adjusting other factors to neither lose a tick nor waste a tick... for the most part, combos have always meant that the gameplay ceiling could never offer quite as much as a WoW spec could (even if the result might nonetheless happen into a more cohesive, nuanced, and/or rewarding package).

And for the rest, it mostly comes down to intentional simplification since the end of Heavensward. See, for example, how the likes of Bard was pushed from 57% (WB, VB, SS, level 50) to 43% (+ IJ, level 60) to 25% (longer durations, Stormblood) to 17% (no Straight Shot buff), to eventually EW+'s 6% rotational non-filler casts before Apex Arrow/Burst Arrow (or 13.8% non-filler with an AA/BA per minute). See how the loss of Fracture in Stormblood reduced the rotational strings available to Monk, or how Greased Lighting IV actually made Greased Lightning a far less interesting resource in Shadowbringers.

Now, to be clear, I don't particularly miss Straight Shot being a buff we needed to rotate in, and I was actually pretty happy with Endwalker Monk (it stumbled upon something pretty great, probably the best we'd had since late Stormblood), but there's no doubt that there's a fairly sledgehammer approach to placating what they see as what players will complain about -- an approach that doesn't typically do well, either, with imagining what interesting little flows and stochastics could take a very simple APL as found on Icyveins into an interesting spec/job design.

But sure, if we get rid of the fixation on systems that exist largely just to reduce thought-per-button and can actually imagine out in-the-moment play and purposely offer that more depth that can be held in a 2-minute job guide, yeah, we could definitely see some better job gameplay here on XIV, too. (How likely those conditions are to be reached, though...)

[Mawlzy]

I was doing some Alliance Raid roulettes yesterday and I never realized how they offer more distinctive mechanics that isn't a DDR. And that's ever since forever, back to ARR alliance raids.

This is precisely the reason I feel encounter design has been getting steadily worse, although to be fair it has stabilized a bit recently, but probably because it has hit rock bottom.