Which two? I'm not sure to see what parameters you're referring to?
Difficulty is subjective. I find DT dungeons a lot more difficult than they've been in any expansion. The "be here by X time" mechanics are tenfold in comparison to what they used to be, and their pace has been cranked up significantly so that the bosses shotgun them at you without any respite, which is the most notable in luigi's mansion and tender valley, but they're merely the extreme end of the spectrum.
There has never been any DPS checks in dungeons, let's be real for a minute. Coordination? What coordination? What was there to coordinate?
I do agree that job kits have made way to encounters, that was my whole point. Tanks cannot die, healers are superficial, there is no mana or resource management left on any job, healing tools are through the roof, no more positioning problems, etc, because that's where the bulk of the engagement used to be, and this is also why trash packs that haven't changed unlike the bosses have become just... a bland afterthought. I can see that some people would find it harder because DDR talks to them more, which is fair. My point has always been that I do think however that the old model is superior not because of my own tastes, but also because it allowed to support struggling players a lot better whereas today you can't do much to help someone that is going to keep standing in the bad and die instantly again and again.
We'll see how it goes with the next dungeon in august. In my opinion it will be a big tell whether or not they rescinded on their dungeon difficulty changes they brought with DT.
WoW's writing isn't stellar but I will say that it does at least know how to maintain a sense of intrigue and stakes in a way that XIV utterly dropped the ball on with EW by opting to terminate as many story threads as possible without actually presenting anything new in their place.
It kind of fundamentally took me out of XIV's setting once I came to the realization that nothing truly major or world-shaking is ever going to happen when we got through a literal apocalypse without any meaningful casualties or visible destruction in places we'd grown familiar with.
OP has a good point yeah.
Instanced battles being solo always felt bad when we were doing MSQ at launch with my friends. I understand some have to be solo, like the famous one in EW, but having multiplayer ones would feel fresher.
Same for Duty Support too, being able to tag in with another player and 2 NPCs would feel great too.
Job kit depth and combat content design.
It is subjective, yes, but for the life of me, I can't think of a boss with above-average difficult outside of the first boss of "Luigi's Mansion", and even that can be easily cheesed.Difficulty is subjective. I find DT dungeons a lot more difficult than they've been in any expansion. The "be here by X time" mechanics are tenfold in comparison to what they used to be, and their pace has been cranked up significantly so that the bosses shotgun them at you without any respite, which is the most notable in luigi's mansion and tender valley, but they're merely the extreme end of the spectrum.
There has never been any DPS checks in dungeons, let's be real for a minute....Have these been purged from memory as well as implementation?
- Reduce boss health by x% from start of mechanic, or mechanic continues applying another vuln stack every few seconds, eventually one-shotting, or to end pursuit phase which would otherwise kill someone.
- Kill adds or they explode, wiping the party.
- Kill add in time to create safety zone/launch pad, or wipe.
- Break barrier in time to stun mob and thereby survive heavy damage.
- Kill thing before it seeks down and kills a random target.
- Kill thing before it apply enough stacks, which explode upon reaching 3 for half your life's worth of damage... as an AoE.
- Can stunlock thing and burst it down to prevent tank receiving 40% more damage taken.
- Mob triples its damage after a cast X seconds into the fight and has untelegraphed cleaves that hit tanks for about 30% of their HP before said buff.
- Or, hell, even just actually threatening full pulls +/- environmental mechanics.
Cumulatively, from original, pre-power-creep XIV across to Shadowbringers? CC. Add gathers. Triggering ICDed environmentals. TTK management around DoTs and TP. Baiting out AoEs and other specials to reduce tank damage intake.Coordination? What coordination? What was there to coordinate?
I said the opposite. I don't think job kits were unique in being simplified, I don't think encounters now are more complex than seen earlier, and I certainly don't think the simplifications were done just to support the shifts (simplifications towards DDR alone) in general combat design.I do agree that job kits have made way to encounters
The simplifications to job design and content design are simply iterations of the same desire to smooth things down, not end and means to one another. DDR-fixation didn't cost us job kits. DDR-fixation cost us the bulk of what all we used to have in content design beyond DDR, while present smoothed-down job kits cost us what idiosyncrasies --the fun, the meh, and the fugly-- we had available in prior kit iterations. They didn't need each other to have narrowed down as they did. Interdependence between them only so far as caster mobility and the frequency & duration of discrete 'Move!' mechanics, which have been used as much as they have only because... we've apparently forgot how to design in anything else that could be of interest.
Last edited by Shurrikhan; 06-28-2025 at 06:01 PM.
If the story was more playable with fun instances and you could bring friends in I'd understand, but like... even if Dawntrail's writing was stellar the problems persist. I loved Shadowbringers story, but I didn't redo the story nonstop for the two years of that expansion.
That's why I split it into FF games in general and modern FF games.
Some people can't get into really old graphics.
To be fair, both equally dropped the ball when it comes to their own lore. XIV in EW with "everything was always ancients" and WoW with...the entirety of Shadowlands.
But now that you mentioned it, the escalation of stakes became a complete mess in XIV. Up until the end of Stormblood the threat was comparatively small scale, maybe a nation in danger, at most a continent.
Then comes Shadowbringers and we suddenly need to save an entire world, even if that world is basically reduced to a few regions.
And in Endwalker we jump from that to saving the entire universe and all of existence.
Last edited by Absurdity; 06-28-2025 at 11:10 PM.
New player experience is really good, as is the free-trial player experience pretty good, to be honest... But this is only by virtue of the fact that it masks the biggest issue plaguing this game which is patch and content schedule/pipeline.
Even then to be honest, it's going in the direction of... Not too great, seeing as they've demonstrated a willingness to devalue older content, and this is where FFXIV is not really a good MMO by any stretch of the imagination... Now obviously some people like that, e.g., being able to take extensive breaks and coming returning like you've essentially missed nothing whatsoever.
Generally speaking the game just lacks that immersive feel, and the substance behind the content absolutely sucks because player inconvenience cannot happen in any capacity.
It's a really common problem in storytelling. The next chapter has to be bigger and better than the last and eventually everything scales to the absurd. There is a similar problem with character traits that become more and more exaggerated over time until they dominate a character's personality and leave them as nothing more than a caricature of an actual person.
Everyone will have their own opinion but I think part of this comes from the story being so firmly on rails to the point where you can't even visit fluff areas like housing until you get to the point where the story says you can. The same repeated formula where you just so happen to unlock the same number of physical locations in sequential order. While ARR was not my favorite expansion, the ability to explore the entire world from the beginning gave it a sense of exploration and immersion that no later expansion could hope to match.
It's a few things really..
Like this is a big one, since it makes the outline of the story extremely predictable, e.g., when hitting new zones, when hitting a trial, etc.,... Now granted, this has been a thing since HW... But it's also where a second point ties into it...
With how streamlined the levelling process is, there's just absolutely no reason to explore the world outside of doing the story, and obviously that can be done anyway, but it's like... When it's that streamlined, where you actually need to make an effort to not out-level the story, then just gets meaningless and hollow.
On their own they are all small things, but when you keep doing more, and taking more away then it just all compounds. It's one of those things where too much Quality of Life just rips the soul out of the game.
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