What does FFXIV lack?

[Daralii]

Dungeons are terrible in this game. Trash is boring and it feels like the only thought they put into it is what enemies they want to appear. Almost nothing happens and tanks barely take damage, and that's almost every dungeon nowadays. Some older dungeons actually have enemies that need to be interrupted or enemies that will do raidwides you want to prioritize. Why has the aspect of dungeon design been dropped? Dungeon boss design is at least decent, but I don't think anything they've added in the past few expansions was as good to me as the original Midgardsormr fight, and that's been long gone to ensure everything can completed with bots.

The battle content designers only care about bosses, to the point that the new criterion is removing the trash encounters entirely and will just be a boss rush. If they thought they could, they would probably replace every dungeon with a trial.

[Shurrikhan]

The battle content designers only care about bosses, to the point that the new criterion is removing the trash encounters entirely and will just be a boss rush. If they thought they could, they would probably replace every dungeon with a trial.

The sad thing is that "trash" in the sense of many-mob fights can make for interesting encounters, similar to any "council" fight but yet larger-scale, with even more freedom to break away the enemy's abilities or trigger their enrages, etc., in the order you please, and often without CC immunity cutting away that part of your party's kits (that is, if XIV even had them 1-2 skills per role).

[Valence]

The sad thing is that "trash" in the sense of many-mob fights can make for interesting encounters, similar to any "council" fight but yet larger-scale, with even more freedom to break away the enemy's abilities or trigger their enrages, etc., in the order you please, and often without CC immunity cutting away that part of your party's kits (that is, if XIV even had them 1-2 skills per role).

They used to be interesting, ironically enough. Trash isn't anymore because it's encounter designed for older battle mechanics which have been 99% weeded out of the game at this point.

[Shurrikhan]

They used to be interesting, ironically enough. Trash isn't anymore because it's encounter designed for older battle mechanics which have been 99% weeded out of the game at this point.

Agreed, I think? but only if you mean general battle mechanics (typical vulnerabilities, mobs just not being outright immune to heavy/bind/pacify etc.) rather than anything specific to those trash in particular.

I've been playing since 1.x, and even as far back as ARR, the only thing allowing for interesting trash was hyper-optimizing among Enmity, compositional variance across earlier levels* (especially, say, levels 30 to 40), party DoTs, and sequenced oGCD stuns, scarcely anything to do with the trash itself (all of which remain unchanged). Even by the time Doomspike could be acquired, most was negligible outside of tank-less runs.

* This included things like mass-DoTing, a BLM AoE Sleep (which didn't break from anything other than direct damage back then), and then nuking enemies one at a time in order so that neither heals, tank stance, nor any further uses of Sleep were necessary, for a gain in total kill-speed on fewer than 4 targets, or fewer than 5 if a member lacked AoE (say, DRG before level 40); having Bards kite the melee units in circles while tank dealt with the ranged mobs; using SCH as DPS for the Cleric Stance and greater Maim and Mend trait while a SMN healed and tanked through/via Titan and/or all party members kited melee enemies via Miasma 2; etc.

What few other things existed were almost solely to activate short casts (such as crocs' caudal swipe) to offer some extra indirect mitigation to the tank or just briefly holding an oGCD stun to use it on a mob instead when they'd attempt a special attack or, lacking any such opportunity, an AoE attack that'd otherwise deny safe access to uptime.

Even if they aren't asking for Savage-tier specifically, they're still nonetheless asking for everything to be made harder and want everything to be a boss gauntlet.

The group I've seen most commonly requesting harder normal content over the last 12 years has consistently been those who want dungeons to "feel more like real dungeons" -- a return to the likes of pre-nerf Pharos Sirius and the relative difficulty of Coil rather than something wipe-proof or reliance upon DDR memorization. They're... almost the exact opposite of those who want everything to be a boss gauntlet, and I've yet to see any Savage raider demand that the likes of normal content (the only non-boss-rushes of which are literally dungeons and ARs anyways) be even more like boss gauntlets.

I think Deep Dungeons is the only time people seemingly "tolerate" non-boss enemies, but only because most of them are mini-bosses themselves with how quickly they can destroy you, and people probably still treat the actual bosses as the highlights of their runs, not the stuff they had to "put up with" in-between. I wouldn't be surprised to hear if people dislike mob pack FATEs/CEs in Occult Crescent and prefer the boss types

I wouldn't be surprised, either, but that's because all the ways we could mechanically leverage interest out of trash before via our kits have been removed. We no longer have AoE specialists, burst specialists, opportunities to kite, reasons to focus down certain mobs, etc., even outside of the disorganized churn that is OC FATEs, so why would anyone prefer what is absolutely barren gameplay over merely shallow gameplay?

[Valence]

We could ask the same thing of some of the playerbase too, given how many of them just want to skip over the MSQ and leveling and go right to hardcore raiding all day. One might think a lot of players WANT "just a boss gauntlet".

It would also explain why they keep demanding that even normal content becomes increasingly harder, because they literally can't stand doing anything that isn't at least Savage tier and up.

I really don't see what the people you describe, wanting to have harder baseline difficulty and removing trash and whatnot, have to do with people that don't like the MSQ and would like to skip it to access the parts of the game that interests them though. I mean maybe there is a venn diagram somewhere, but that's still a huge stretch as a comparison to make.

Even if they aren't asking for Savage-tier specifically, they're still nonetheless asking for everything to be made harder and want everything to be a boss gauntlet.

Take the repeated cries for no walls in dungeons for example, what is that if not people wanting to boss rush even faster? Hell, there's only a handful of people that want the mobs to be dangerous themselves (I can only name me and Valence off the bat), but there's other people who don't want to deal with trash mobs AT ALL to the point that there's been very little mumbling about removing them from the new Variant that's coming up, or how people seemed howling mad about that one Savage tier that involved mobs and seemed relieved when things when back to normal for the rest. I think Deep Dungeons is the only time people seemingly "tolerate" non-boss enemies, but only because most of them are mini-bosses themselves with how quickly they can destroy you, and people probably still treat the actual bosses as the highlights of their runs, not the stuff they had to "put up with" in-between. I wouldn't be surprised to hear if people dislike mob pack FATEs/CEs in Occult Crescent and prefer the boss types, and I know people miss doing Duels from Bozja which were 1-on-1 boss fights too I believe.

Not to say people can't have their harder content/boss-only modes, it just gets a bit tiresome when some people (including the developers it seems) act like that's how the whole game should play, with little to no breathing room for variation whether its opponent type or challenge setting.

The reason a lot of people don't want to deal with trash mobs at all is because the devs have given up on trash in SHB and beyond where most party resource and scarcity mechanics, as well as aggro mechanics, got scrapped for good. Even in SB raids turned into just boss gauntlets. Is it such a wonder that a lot of players, especially the ones that never actually experienced what it was before, think trash gameplay is... trash, and want a focus on bosses, which is where the developers are actually putting in all of their efforts?

It's exactly like any service, if you want to get rid of it, just stop funding it until people complain and ask to get rid of it in favor of other things. It's a clear design direction. They do not know what to do with trash beyond the basic AoEs to dodge because that's what they made the game all about: dodging crap. If they increased the difficulty trash would become like what we have in higher floors of Orthos and Pilgrim (aka no telegraph AoEs that oneshot). So the difficulty has never been a solution. The solution has always been the re addition of actual engaging gameplay battle systems and mechanics to build something solid upon.

Agreed, I think? but only if you mean general battle mechanics (typical vulnerabilities, mobs just not being outright immune to heavy/bind/pacify etc.) rather than anything specific to those trash in particular.

I've been playing since 1.x, and even as far back as ARR, the only thing allowing for interesting trash was hyper-optimizing among Enmity, compositional variance across earlier levels* (especially, say, levels 30 to 40), party DoTs, and sequenced oGCD stuns, scarcely anything to do with the trash itself (all of which remain unchanged). Even by the time Doomspike could be acquired, most was negligible outside of tank-less runs.

* This included things like mass-DoTing, a BLM AoE Sleep (which didn't break from anything other than direct damage back then), and then nuking enemies one at a time in order so that neither heals, tank stance, nor any further uses of Sleep were necessary, for a gain in total kill-speed on fewer than 4 targets, or fewer than 5 if a member lacked AoE (say, DRG before level 40); having Bards kite the melee units in circles while tank dealt with the ranged mobs; using SCH as DPS for the Cleric Stance and greater Maim and Mend trait while a SMN healed and tanked through/via Titan and/or all party members kited melee enemies via Miasma 2; etc.

What few other things existed were almost solely to activate short casts (such as crocs' caudal swipe) to offer some extra indirect mitigation to the tank or just briefly holding an oGCD stun to use it on a mob instead when they'd attempt a special attack or, lacking any such opportunity, an AoE attack that'd otherwise deny safe access to uptime.

Vulnerabilities yes, but it also goes hand in hand with what they allow us to do with job crowd control abilities, that have been weeded out immensely for most classes beyond some role actions (stun, and rphys useless binds that get removed as soon as damage is done, lolwut). They still have some room left to design around this if the devs were even remotely creative, by bringing back ranged mobs for tanks to manage, perhaps even introduce AIs behind that try to stay at range, or to just have situations like Voidmage expose above with healer mobs (that would stop healing if they get attacked), some mobs with no aggro table, introducing some targeting priorities and mob triaging, etc. Although I do feel that the devs seem to think that even this is too hard for the baseline (as seen in deep dungeons as well, just check story floors, they're no different from regular dungeons). It's sad in a way because I do think you can still have all of those mechanics regardless of difficulty if they don't really wipe the party anyway.

But, we still have lost a lot of other mechanics, notably:
- Enmity management for tanks
- Mob positioning (hits in the back doing crits was removed in SB, ranged mobs and patrols stopped being a thing after ARR)
- General party resource management, because MP behaved differently which introduced different constraints on healers and a balance to reach between damage and healing, and this also meant running out of cooldowns and resources was more likely to happen if the DPS slacked off (no I'm not saying bring back running dry of MP/TP and be left with nothing to do type of gameplay though, not everything was perfect and nobody is saying it was)

I only started in HW so kiting mobs was really not a thing anymore unfortunately. At best we still had casters sleeping a mob in low level dungeons at times although it wasn't really mandatory to do and I suspect was a remnant of older days. Still, could help sprouts back then.

[Shurrikhan]

Sorry if these seem nit-picks, but just trying to balance out any nostalgia-farts others might otherwise trigger for themselves:

But, we still have lost a lot of other mechanics, notably:

Mob positioning (hits in the back doing crits was removed in SB, ranged mobs and patrols stopped being a thing after ARR)

This was only on Raw Intuition, which guaranteed parries to the front and crits received from behind (and originally also heals from behind because... XIV and sensible coding have never gone together, apparently). All enemy autos could, at the time, critically strike (and crits couldn't, again because of bizarre coding decisions making them mutually exclusive to RNG mit categories, be blocked or parried), with that chance increasingly mostly just with level disparity, iirc. What was significant was just that you couldn't block or parry attacks from behind altogether.

Enmity management for tanks

True, but this was frankly a pretty awful mechanic except when treated as a party-wide consideration. Unless optimized for, it was 6 buttons of bloat for tanks and 1-2 more for all other roles for, at best, a game of The Price is Right based upon the combination of your DPSs' output and --especially once in Stormblood-- their refusal to use their party tools (among which Diversion was decently important). In early ARR, the choice offered different approaches to small-but-threatening pulls, but... nothing else. Large pulls and very small pulls (so, some 80% of ARR and HW leveling dungeon pulls and then 99% of everything else) offered no real choice and therefore no strategic variance.

General party resource management, because MP behaved differently which introduced different constraints on healers and a balance to reach between damage and healing, and this also meant running out of cooldowns and resources was more likely to happen if the DPS slacked off

The only "balance" it struck was in very rarely preferring Cure over Cure II (and the SCH/AST equivalents of each), since the first healed for 60% as much for just 40% the MP [or effectively 25% for Cure if including Freecure averaged RNG]) and made Regen far more valuable. You still spent no time idling unless oomed by necessary rezzes, and that cost would still be more favorably taken up by the Bard, whose raid buff song at the time only affected elemental magic and whose MP song was a smaller penalty to their own damage than a damage benefit to even just one healer. Apart from that, they simply each further penalized Spell Speed and Skill Speed, since they alone did not increase output-per-resources-spent and meant that a pull could be lost within its first 25s or so even if it took 70s or so to die, simply because lackluster physical DPS meant that they could run out of the ability to hit any weaponskills except every third GCD or so before the mobs died, extending the fight into so late a time that the tank and healer run out of CDs and are inevitably overwhelmed.

On which note, unless it's used as a way to skip ahead on combos and make the GCD more flexible (e.g., by having a GCD of 2s but only being able to sustain an average of 2.25s) AND we start to see reasons to want to stay in or get out as deliberate choices with melee being rewarded commensurately to that increased risk (while casters/rangers get their own due added complexity and variable reward in turn), I really do not at all care to see TP reintroduced. As for MP, I have zero attachment to it, either, and would almost prefer it be used primarily as a shared resource system for special actions (the rest being mostly negligible) instead, akin to HW Ruin III or being used mostly be abilities if we wanted to reduce the frequency of their use without reducing their in-a-given-moment's availability.

/shrug

[Valence]

This was only on Raw Intuition, which guaranteed parries to the front and crits received from behind (and originally also heals from behind because... XIV and sensible coding have never gone together, apparently). All enemy autos could, at the time, critically strike (and crits couldn't, again because of bizarre coding decisions making them mutually exclusive to RNG mit categories, be blocked or parried), with that chance increasingly mostly just with level disparity, iirc. What was significant was just that you couldn't block or parry attacks from behind altogether.

Yes, thank you, I was trying to recall the exact details. It was parry/block that stopped working when struck behind. I liked this a lot. It asked tanks and parties to be mindful of positioning and orientation.

True, but this was frankly a pretty awful mechanic except when treated as a party-wide consideration. Unless optimized for, it was 6 buttons of bloat for tanks and 1-2 more for all other roles for, at best, a game of The Price is Right based upon the combination of your DPSs' output and --especially once in Stormblood-- their refusal to use their party tools (among which Diversion was decently important). In early ARR, the choice offered different approaches to small-but-threatening pulls, but... nothing else. Large pulls and very small pulls (so, some 80% of ARR and HW leveling dungeon pulls and then 99% of everything else) offered no real choice and therefore no strategic variance.

I disagree, I liked having to adjust my aggro <-> damage output balance depending on the situation. It promoted skill play for those who wanted it. And it left people that didn't care or didn't know about it just use tank stance with full aggro combos and be done with it. That is, for single target, because AoE was... a mess. It had little meaning with WAR/DRK, and PLD was just a disaster before Total Eclipse in SB. But Total Eclipse having no aggro modifier was actually nice, and I wished back then all tanks had one like this, and another like Flash or something in the vein.

The only "balance" it struck was in very rarely preferring Cure over Cure II (and the SCH/AST equivalents of each), since the first healed for 60% as much for just 40% the MP [or effectively 25% for Cure if including Freecure averaged RNG]) and made Regen far more valuable. You still spent no time idling unless oomed by necessary rezzes, and that cost would still be more favorably taken up by the Bard, whose raid buff song at the time only affected elemental magic and whose MP song was a smaller penalty to their own damage than a damage benefit to even just one healer. Apart from that, they simply each further penalized Spell Speed and Skill Speed, since they alone did not increase output-per-resources-spent and meant that a pull could be lost within its first 25s or so even if it took 70s or so to die, simply because lackluster physical DPS meant that they could run out of the ability to hit any weaponskills except every third GCD or so before the mobs died, extending the fight into so late a time that the tank and healer run out of CDs and are inevitably overwhelmed.

On which note, unless it's used as a way to skip ahead on combos and make the GCD more flexible (e.g., by having a GCD of 2s but only being able to sustain an average of 2.25s) AND we start to see reasons to want to stay in or get out as deliberate choices with melee being rewarded commensurately to that increased risk (while casters/rangers get their own due added complexity and variable reward in turn), I really do not at all care to see TP reintroduced. As for MP, I have zero attachment to it, either, and would almost prefer it be used primarily as a shared resource system for special actions (the rest being mostly negligible) instead, akin to HW Ruin III or being used mostly be abilities if we wanted to reduce the frequency of their use without reducing their in-a-given-moment's availability.

/shrug

I'm not speaking about Cure I / Cure II and freecure or whatever. I did enjoy the resource scarcity in single target and bosses though. Most classes had to manage it. Dying literally drained this, overhealing drained healer and party resources, and a lot of the time when parties crashed back then especially in casual content, it was because of people running on fumes and unable to properly recover, and not just enough people failing to dodge a mechanic.

I'm also talking about healer dungeon experience once you got AoE tools, and this has been taken away entirely from the game — and also what made me abandon healing completely after. That was the whole point, like tanks could balance damage and aggro, healers also had to balance damage and healing in accordance to their finite resources, and this meant adjusting to a lot of variables, like the tank's own skill, their gear, but also your DPS gear and skill at burning down mob packs as you described it. The less efficient it was, the more it drained into resources, and I really, really enjoyed this. I didn't exactly enjoy being left unable to do anything once out of TP for DPS classes though, which was one of the bad parts of the design.

That's why I have felt so alienated by the game's direction since ShB, because it literally changed the whole paradigm of everything and that's not what I signed for nor what I liked about the game. People constantly telling me the game has always been the same are full of s*** (not aimed at you there, no offense intended).

[Aidorouge]

I wouldn't be surprised, either, but that's because all the ways we could mechanically leverage interest out of trash before via our kits have been removed. We no longer have AoE specialists, burst specialists, opportunities to kite, reasons to focus down certain mobs, etc., even outside of the disorganized churn that is OC FATEs, so why would anyone prefer what is absolutely barren gameplay over merely shallow gameplay?

That's why I would like some of that back. It never ceases to annoy me as someone who mains NIN, MHC, and RDM (and plays DPS in general) that I have "Role Actions" that barely see any actual use most of the time, or how NIN in particular doesn't work at all like stealth classes do in other MMOs where in-combat sneak attacks are an actual thing, instead I somehow I get yanked out of hiding when SOMEONE ELSE pulls aggro in this game. Maybe I'm the weird one for wanting to be a DPS who needs to care about more than bloody parsing all day and my value comes from utility too. Even just having a target to Stun or Interrupt feels like begging these days.
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I really don't see what the people you describe, wanting to have harder baseline difficulty and removing trash and whatnot, have to do with people that don't like the MSQ and would like to skip it to access the parts of the game that interests them though. I mean maybe there is a venn diagram somewhere, but that's still a huge stretch as a comparison to make.

Because the ones wanting to skip all over the MSQ are much like those wanting to do away with mobs; They don't want to deal with what they consider "time-wasting trash" so they can hurry up and get to the only parts they care about, which is mostly endgame raids with a pinch of side content. At which point both groups want mostly the same thing; Hardcore bosses they can prog and farm for hours each week.

The Venn diagram is much closer to being just a circle then you might think, especially when those wanting the hardcore fights need people to "hurry up" past the MSQ to join them in the PFs, and the ones skipping the MSQ require people ready and waiting for them in their interested content.
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After EW, the dungeons being a bit harder was desperately needed and they are in a good spot right now.

Like others said, it also wasn't the hardcore crowd that asked for harder dungeons (those don't care for them in the first place) but normal players who actually do not want to step into the harder raids.
Another person was YoshiP himself who straight up admitted that he almost fell asleep in a dungeon at one point.

The DT dungeons aren't hard, people just forgot that older dungeons also were able to kill you. The second boss of Halatali Hard was straight up harder then the first boss of Mistwake and they are basically the same monster.

For me Stormblood and Shadowbringers dungeons (along with the trials and raids) were hard enough and generally not all that fun to the point I was spending more time with a leaver penalty than doing actual runs, which is why it's been discouraging to be told that Dawntrail dungeons/trials/raids are "even harder" because I'm likely to end up one of those people who get stuck in the MSQ even with Trusts, which ironically keeps me stalled not even doing Endwalker because there's this feeling of "why bother" with the current part of the story if I won't get to see the rest of it? But that's been my problem with a lot of the game's content in general, it starts off simple enough, then stonewalls me with a difficulty spike until I give up and the MSQ its self eventually starts doing the same thing apparently.

Which then leaves me unsure of what group I'm even part of then if it wasn't hardcore players demanding hardcore dungeons but supposed normal/causal players. I just don't understand how all these people find so much content "brain dead" and "sleep inducing" when I struggle on the same things, like I'm just some stupid asshole if I'm the only one dying and failing on "baby mode" content all of the time to where I've left normal content runs halfway through out of embarrassment and cringe at myself because I was the ONLY one who died on something that everyone else always dodges so effortlessly.

In hindsight, asking for harder mobs is dumb of me, because I probably couldn't handle them properly either even if there's no floor crap to avoid.

[Voidmage]

The battle content designers only care about bosses, to the point that the new criterion is removing the trash encounters entirely and will just be a boss rush. If they thought they could, they would probably replace every dungeon with a trial.

This is actually what annoys me the most.
The whole game has basically become a boss gauntlet. Raids as well haven't been true raids in along time and even the A-raids feel mostly like boss arena to boss arena in this game.
I would actually go further and say if they could they would remove dungeons themselves and only do raid encounters. It's kinda obvious that Savage is one of the only things the devs care about nowadays and put effort into.
Sometimes I wonder if some devs have ever played a Final Fantasy or MMO before actually.

Making interesting trash mobs is not even hard. One enemy that ignores the aggro table here, an npc that has to be healed while being attacked there. Even something like the last trash mob in Underkeep is at least something.
Pilgrims Traverse feels more like a dungeon than the actual dungeons imo.


What the game needs imo is:
More interesting jobs that allow skill expression again,
a more interesting Overworld in the style of the ARR zones,
more content that isn't just boss fights,
a story that doesn't shy away from dark themes again and having consequences for the main characters.

[Xieldras]

This is actually what annoys me the most.
The whole game has basically become a boss gauntlet. Raids as well haven't been true raids in along time and even the A-raids feel mostly like boss arena to boss arena in this game.
I would actually go further and say if they could they would remove dungeons themselves and only do raid encounters. It's kinda obvious that Savage is one of the only things the devs care about nowadays and put effort into.
Sometimes I wonder if some devs have ever played a Final Fantasy or MMO before actually.

Making interesting trash mobs is not even hard. One enemy that ignores the aggro table here, an npc that has to be healed while being attacked there. Even something like the last trash mob in Underkeep is at least something.
Pilgrims Traverse feels more like a dungeon than the actual dungeons imo.


What the game needs imo is:
More interesting jobs that allow skill expression again,
a more interesting Overworld in the style of the ARR zones,
more content that isn't just boss fights,
a story that doesn't shy away from dark themes again and having consequences for the main characters.

We have 2 mob control role actions that have little to no use. Stun and Interrupt are the only ones needed. Meanwhile as rdps I have options for Heavy and Bind that will never see play (we can throw Sleep in there since I've never seen it used personally).

Nothing else to add. I fully agree with the rest.