What exactly did the improved encounter design do?

[Bru_Tus]

Kind of do agree with this. There is a limit to how much the devs can keep raising difficulty just because some players have gotten extremely good. At some point it stops being sustainable for the wider player base.

These kinds of threads invariably tumbles into a discussion on difficulty but that's not really the main point. It's staleness. Stormblood extremes are far easier than the extremes today. O8S had literal minutes of nothing happening relevant to the DPS except Trine and front/back.

There's been nothing new put forward by the encounter design team in 6 or 7 years at this point.

[Ankhira]

These kinds of threads invariably tumbles into a discussion on difficulty but that's not really the main point. It's staleness. Stormblood extremes are far easier than the extremes today. O8S had literal minutes of nothing happening relevant to the DPS except Trine and front/back.

There's been nothing new put forward by the encounter design team in 6 or 7 years at this point.

I get what you mean, if you’ve been playing this game for years it can definitely start feeling same‑y. I just think it’s also one of those things where what feels stale to one person is still fun or fresh to someone else, and that’s a difficult middle ground to find for developers I guess

[Supersnow845]

Why has whether someone done anabeisos or not suddenly become some sort of weird benchmark

I’ve done second coil, can I dismiss yall all as noobs because of it?

The fact that the design of savage has gotten so stale that I as an example have zero design to pick savage back up after dropping it in the abyssos/anabeisos area itself should be a relevant data point, if you only consider people who completed a narrow hand of content as being allowed to have an opinion on said narrow band of content you are just making an echo chamber

[ForsakenRoe]

While this wouldn't solve anything, I do think it's a little symbolic of the 'afraid to do things even slightly differently' issue the game has had for a while:

In M9S, the boss's Enrage is a raidwide that does 9999999 damage. Why not have it be 'the Tankbuster AOE is now so large, there's nowhere on the arena left to dodge it'?

In M10S, the boss's Enrage is a raidwide from each of them that does 9999999 damage. Why not have it be that the Fire guy covers the arena in Fire, and the Blue one uses a Tidal Wave (with the knockback) to cover the whole arena in overlapping circle AOEs that kill you, giving the chance for Healers to keep the team alive for a few more seconds while the Tidal Wave comes in, by AOE healing through the ticking burn damage?

In M11S, the boss's Enrage is a raidwide kick that does 9999999 damage (after 3 of the same where they're stack markers). Why not have the platform visibly crumble under the impact of each of the previous stacks, with the final kick breaking it from under you, instead of 'boom 10m damage you all fall over'?

In M12S p2, the boss's Enrage is pretty cool, as he splits over and over, but after two splits, the 3rd and final raidwide does 9999999 damage per clone. Why not have the clones still do how much they previously did, and with enough mitigation you could theoretically keep surviving them, as they multiply more and more until you run out of mitigation? Would it really be so bad if a group used Tank LB to get through a 3rd raidwide at the end, and instead died to the 4th?


Even going back to M1S, raidwide instead of 'the boss breaks every platform of the arena during Mouser 3', or M4S, raidwide instead of 'the boss starts breaking the platform apart with the Sword Dance cleaves and eventually there's nowhere left to dodge'. I'll give them credit for M3S's funny bellyflop and M6S's 'Artistic Anarchy' or whatever it was called, because while those were still 'raidwide for 9999999' they at least looked thematic. I also liked M8S p2's 'you run out of platforms', though it being 30% of the phase was definitely a choice of all time

The point is, the 'lack of creativity in encounter design' is so fundamental, so 'at the core' of their thinking, that even the end of the fight is the same thing: 9999999 damage raidwide, you died go again

Just another example of lack of innovation at a high level, not just the building blocks: we no longer have anything other than linear timelines now. You'd think O7S and O9S are first steps towards something much more interesting, but it seems that they have completely abandoned the desire to try anything other than linear timelines.

I'd love to see them mark certain 'mechanic blocks' as a 'block' and have them interchangeable in the fight timeline, to add more variety to each pull. For example, you could theoretically break M8S P1 up into four such 'blocks': Millenial Decay, the Tower bit (IDK the name cos it's a bit nothing-burger), Terrestrial Rage, Beckon Moonlight. So, have the four in a random order every pull, with it being two of them, the add phase, then the other two. Similar thinking with M6S, have Desert as a 'phase', Forest/Lava as a 'phase, and then randomize which is before the Adds, and which is after

[Bru_Tus]

I get what you mean, if you’ve been playing this game for years it can definitely start feeling same‑y. I just think it’s also one of those things where what feels stale to one person is still fun or fresh to someone else, and that’s a difficult middle ground to find for developers I guess

I don't think it's a difficult middle ground for the devs. Instead, it's a management issue. It's not like they didn't try new things out in HW/SB, and it's not like they don't have ideas. But seem to be constrained by management to be able to do nothing other than sticking to an extremely tight script and workflow, so everything comes out as formulaic. Sometimes you get a feeling that a factory churned out some of these fights. Yoshi P himself is a micromanager...

[Ankhira]

Idyllic is also not this giga-complex mechanic that raiders wish it was. It's always stack defam stack defam or defam stack defam stack. There's no other variation besides defam and stack, which is boring. There could've been so much more variation to part of the mechanic. The tower phase is really cool, it's the best part of the fight. The second half of Idyllic is not fast enough, they give you way too much time for the mechanics particularly when you have to dodge. Idyllic felt more like them showcasing "yeah we can still make cool fourth floor mechanics" rather than being this actual amazing mechanic. It's a really cool puzzle mechanic that was awesome to learn during the early weeks, but the actual execution is undercooked and way too simple for a Fourth Floor. It's very similar to the Pandaemonium Phase 2s in that regard. Three whole minutes setting up mechanics and then one minute actually doing it is engaging design if the one minute is not super engaging. If a mechanic takes three whole minutes to set up that one minute of gameplay needs to be the hardest Savage gameplay in the entire game, which it's not even close to that. It'll probably get improved on a lot in Ultimate, but right now there's so much better Savage mechanics not even exclusive to Fourth Floor. Bru compared it to Hello World which is absolutely a more engaging and scary mechanic and doesn't need three minutes of set-up to achieve these qualities because the gameplay is interesting. O12S is a much better fight than M12S, this is probably the weakest 12 of all time honestly.

Sorry to come back to this but I've been thinking about it a bit more and I can't say I fully agree with this. I have said I hated cruiserweight before, but I think the only fight I truly hated was M8S. We disagree on this, and that's fine, but I'd like to give you the perspective of someone who prefers m12s over m8s.

As for Idyllic I wouldn't say its gigacomplex, but I think remembering all the stuff from before puts a lot more strain on your brain than whatever m8S was.

M12s not really anything but memory stuff, so taking one part like that and not considering how the player is thinking "ok which side am I, am I going first or second set, which was it first defams or stacks?" Thats like kind of a lot to think about, and THEN you go to to the towers and have to swap or not swap, whichever pattern you get, compared to m8s where you kind of didn't need to think at all. Just go to positions raidplans/guides set up for you and that's mostly it. The fight was very strict in timeline and super predictable, there were very few patterns to learn and so forth. Whereas in m12s you have a lot of positions to learn and memorize.

I actually think making Idyllic take forever makes it harder, more time for short term memory to lose track of stuff and so on. In my opinion M12S is more difficult to execute than M8S. The only thing about M8S was the stupid snapshots on millennial and the fact that there was way less room for recovery than m12s if one person made a mistake.

I think M8S was not a fun fight in any way, and m12s is a lot more fun.

[Absurdity]

I think we’ve reached a critical mass of people who simply didn’t play anything before ShB and even didn’t engage with that much high end content in ShB so to them “best ever” simply means “better than EW” which is a low low low bar to clear

ShB was spotty especially towards its back end but DT IS collectively better than EW and for so many people that’s all they have ever experienced

It's pretty much the exact same reason why people think the only valid mechanics are DDR (or synchronized swimming, or "stand in this spot at this exact time to not die") mechanics, the only way to increase difficulty is more instant wipe bodychecks and the only functional job design is the thoughtless burst spam so you can focus on ever "harder" mechanics, they have never experienced anything else in XIV.

I feel like they were trying to lean too much on people forgetting how expansion launches always are, so that they can attribute it to things like 'improved design' or 'harder difficulty' or 'more stress'.

Reminds me very much of how they claimed to have increased healing requirements. And sure enough, healing at the start of Shadowbringers felt harder, but not because they actually increased the frequency or amount of damage. You just had new players eating more unnecessary damage than usual and everyone had terrible gear, to the point where a pre-savage BiS geared level 80 healed maybe 2-3k more per cast than an Alphascape BiS geared level 70 did, but HP values had almost doubled.

And these supposed harder healing requirements were pretty much gone at the end of the first Eden tier, with all the new free healing tools they were arguably even lower than in Stormblood.

[ForsakenRoe]

Reminds me very much of how they claimed to have increased healing requirements. And sure enough, healing at the start of Shadowbringers felt harder, but not because they actually increased the frequency or amount of damage. You just had new players eating more unnecessary damage than usual and everyone had terrible gear, to the point where a pre-savage BiS geared level 80 healed maybe 2-3k more per cast than an Alphascape BiS geared level 70 did, but HP values had almost doubled.

And these supposed harder healing requirements were pretty much gone at the end of the first Eden tier, with all the new free healing tools they were arguably even lower than in Stormblood.

Thinking about it, those AST potencies on 5.0 launch (ie the ones so low that they had to literally DOUBLE some action potencies before the Raid came out), that short span of time actually felt great as AST, there were times where we could get some damage in, and times where you had to GCD heal because the OGCDs weren't enough. If SE REALLY wants to have 'Healers focus on Healing', then I'd say that those 2 weeks of AST were actually pretty close to the right balance of DPS/Healing GCDs, to accomplish that goal. Of course, there will be a lot of loud voices complaining that 'its too hard', 'my tools are too weak', etc. And SE will likely panic-buff action potencies, putting us right back where we currently are, spamming Glare or its equivalent (but now our DOT's gone too)



Look at the state of that Celestial Opposition buff. Halved CD, doubled potency, regen potency almost doubled. I wonder how different things would be about Healing, were they to have designed SCH/WHM to be of a similar HPS level to AST from the start of SHB, rather than bringing AST up to WHM/SCH in a patch loaded with correctional buffs?

[Karminae]

This is one thing I liked about coils and part of why I haven't raided since ARR days. You can't player skill your way out of 999999 damage. I know there were a handful of instakill mechanics but for the most part it was resource management. Being able to pull weight for others sub performing in content also felt really good and provided a type of leeway that the 2 minute everyone must burst at the same time or if anyone dies just give up gameplay the current game is. I'm cautiously optimistic about the Evercold changes because it will be the expac that make or breaks me. I can't put it into words as fluently as some others here have but hopefully the criticism makes its way to the devs.

[Bru_Tus]

I wonder how different things would be about Healing, were they to have designed SCH/WHM to be of a similar HPS level to AST from the start of SHB, rather than bringing AST up to WHM/SCH in a patch loaded with correctional buffs?

I genuinely do not think it would have made much of a difference outside of Savage/Ultimate. SB AST is already unrecognizable in ShB.

The first is that Earthly Star shouldn't be just dropped as soon as it's off cooldown because of the relative scarcity of free healing. This makes ES much more immediately high-skilled.

The second is that, pre-4.3, you are rewarded for knowing the exact Star timings so that they naturally pop when they need to, such as right before a Heartless Archangel in O8S. Since 4.3, and especially in modern FF14, there is not much benefit in having precise Star timings.

The third is that AST used to have severe MP constraints and you would need to adjust your strategy and gear depending on whether you have double phys ranged (which means you can drop to close to min piety) or whether you have triple melee and a crappy mana shift.

The fourth is that cards used to take far more strategy, it really isn't just sifting for expanded balance at 2-min like most people imagined it to be. You need to constantly be thinking about tradeoffs and consider your composition with each draw and royal road. For example, sometimes it's optimal to burn a unspreadable balance with an expansion at 3:10 because your composition has, for example, bard and monk, which had 3-minute bursts. If you go back to guides in those days no one has actually mapped out exactly what the right approach is for cards outside of 2-min bursts (and no, lord of crown gambling is theoretically suboptimal.)

The fifth is that SB AST was not even solved. Legitimately, I think people don't realize that back then jobs can be complex enough that the optimal play is not even known. One is card play, and another is drift limitation; back then, every top AST had insane burst drifts. You could see like literal 10 seconds of drift across a fight even in the top 5.

And finally, there's just no healer healing-type mechanic anymore since ShB. There's nothing like White Hole or Heartless Archangel since ShB. (People who have actually experienced those on patch know that Charybdis-type mechs absolutely is nowhere near the healing requirement of those two mechs).

I could go on and on, but IMO even from SB to ShB it's already a steep drop.