Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Kotol]

I remember the first few ARR Extremes I did, and just to be a braggart about them, I did them without guides and through matchmaking. Okay, that maybe is a testament to how easy they actually are, but they did have some mechanics involving adds.

Garuda - (only talking about the feathers here) One add needs to die immediately or you get put to sleep, several adds need to be killed before they destroy the stone columns, and one add needs to not die before she does her raid-wide AOE (honestly though, a tank can use LB 1 and the whole raid can tank through it, which is a shame)

Titan - the adds need to be pulled by the offtank and taken to the edge of the arena, probably the most straightforward add mechanic

Ifrit - the adds/nails need to not be killed too quickly or else you get too many vulnerability stacks and wipe, also Ifrit himself cannot get damaged too heavily or else he skips straight to his raid-wide and wipes the party



I dunno, some debuffs in older expansions also changed how you had to fight for a while, like Leviathan reducing healer's cast ranges or that one Alexander boss giving you a stacking debuff if you used combo finishers, and if you would hit 4 you would die. Just something to keep in mind during a fight that, yes, decreases the DPS or HPS, but still forces people to not mindlessly push buttons through their rotation over and over.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I'd argue specifically that the 2 minute meta is what has really fucking handcuffed them on design. How much variation is there in WoW encounter design? Legitimately asking because I haven't touched the game in years.

I can't speak to current WoW, but dungeon and raid bosses when I played (Vanilla to Legion, more or less) were fairly varied even if inconsistent and silly. Very often you're doing very specific things like kiting adds, hitting buttons, eating specific foods off the floor and so on. Some of the earlier raids had specific mechanics for specific classes (Mage Tanking, Priest MC, Hunter Kiting, etc). Dungeons and Raids are also not required for the game - you can level without ever doing a single instance of content* (I think one of the newbie islands forces you into a fake dungeon)

I'm sure they've sanded a fair bit of that down based on the general direction of the game being sanded down but they have a larger variety of stuff to do in dungeons, even if means the game constantly breaks under scaling issues because even the devs forget how they work.

 

[Sheep King]

I remember the first few ARR Extremes I did, and just to be a braggart about them, I did them without guides and through matchmaking. Okay, that maybe is a testament to how easy they actually are, but they did have some mechanics involving adds.

Garuda - (only talking about the feathers here) One add needs to die immediately or you get put to sleep, several adds need to be killed before they destroy the stone columns, and one add needs to not die before she does her raid-wide AOE (honestly though, a tank can use LB 1 and the whole raid can tank through it, which is a shame)

Titan - the adds need to be pulled by the offtank and taken to the edge of the arena, probably the most straightforward add mechanic

Ifrit - the adds/nails need to not be killed too quickly or else you get too many vulnerability stacks and wipe, also Ifrit himself cannot get damaged too heavily or else he skips straight to his raid-wide and wipes the party



I dunno, some debuffs in older expansions also changed how you had to fight for a while, like Leviathan reducing healer's cast ranges or that one Alexander boss giving you a stacking debuff if you used combo finishers, and if you would hit 4 you would die. Just something to keep in mind during a fight that, yes, decreases the DPS or HPS, but still forces people to not mindlessly push buttons through their rotation over and over.

I think the problem is that they've created the expectation of uptime via the 2 minute meta which punishes any kind of going off-script, so now mechs which force downtime just feel bad for a lot of people. I think the best thing they could do at this point is to cut out the 2min party buffs for all roles except Phys ranged and maybe AST, and ideally change the way the remaining 2 minute buffs work to give them a flexible cooldown similar to the way skills like Sonic Break and Goring Blade work, where you press the button twice giving you a window to adjust for drift.
When downtime causes the Ninja to drift Dokumori and makes the entire party lose damage cos the boss decided to gargle his nuts at you from outside the arena, I can't really blame people for disliking it. Fuck parsetrannies tho

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

Couldn't they just use the Timestop gimmick to pause any active timers while a more position based mechanic or downtime happens? If the boss has a random moment of not targetability just make your buffs stop counting down while you handle it. Its a bandaid fix but If they're so dedicated to the 2min burst they should atleast not make you stop before its time for the fun to happen

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

I feel like it would require basically an entire overhaul to make combat into something interesting, but that would take so much resources it's Fait Accompli that it will never happen. Just easier to make everything doable solo than to make it good.

 

[King Of Braves]

They pretty clearly want to avoid requiring tribal knowledge for specific encounters (aka that WoW Dungeon where you ride dragons that everyone hates) and really don't want to design around different gear/class disparities ever again.

It's fine to not want to be WoW, which has it's own problems with tribal knowledge and wild scaling issues - but they've been performing CPR on a corpse for ~3 expansions with the current combat design, which is why pretty much every new addition is just +potency, or extra button after existing button, and so on.

Hilariously, FF11 is nothing but tribal knowledge. Anything and everything except the bare essentials on how to play the game is the result of players collectively sharing data. Of course it also leads to hoaxes becoming mainstream even though there was never any empirical data to support it, like elements having higher crafting success rates if you were facing a certain direction. I look back on it fondly though, as most former players do.

 

[Sheep King]

I feel like it would require basically an entire overhaul to make combat into something interesting, but that would take so much resources it's Fait Accompli that it will never happen. Just easier to make everything doable solo than to make it good.

I think the two most impactful things they can do without changing the basic framework are: take out the 2-minute buffs for everyone but Phys Ranged, and replace a lot of the healing or defensive OGCDs with GCDs (like, say, Second Wind is GCD but you get multiple charges of it, rather than a heal that's free to weave in every 2 minutes). Rather than ripping out the 2-minute meta, stop punishing everyone for drift, provide a carrot and stick to do something other than optimising damage, and give bosses less predictable ways to deal damage to encourage making risk/reward decisions. Then you can start working on tweaking classes towards different playstyles and building complexity.
Game design is too much work though.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I can't speak to current WoW, but dungeon and raid bosses when I played (Vanilla to Legion, more or less) were fairly varied even if inconsistent and silly. Very often you're doing very specific things like kiting adds, hitting buttons, eating specific foods off the floor and so on. Some of the earlier raids had specific mechanics for specific classes (Mage Tanking, Priest MC, Hunter Kiting, etc). Dungeons and Raids are also not required for the game - you can level without ever doing a single instance of content* (I think one of the newbie islands forces you into a fake dungeon)

I'm sure they've sanded a fair bit of that down based on the general direction of the game being sanded down but they have a larger variety of stuff to do in dungeons, even if means the game constantly breaks under scaling issues because even the devs forget how they work.

Yeah, that's generally my experience.

Like you had some gimmick stuff like the Red Riding Hood in Kara, Heigan and Razuvious in Naxx, Razorgore in BWL, or the green dragon in ICC. But a lot of it just comes down similar mechanics you see in the genre as a whole. Even stuff like the Archimonde fight has stuff like tethers.

I would like to see more variety and I think the 2MM has just trapped them to the arena/choreographed mechanics template. You muck with the encounter template and you risk having some jobs be better than others in certain fights.

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Even with the simplicity of their combat system, there's a zillion ways to potentially run fixes and changes to spice it up. The trouble is, so many edges have been sanded off of this game's design because the wrong lessons were learned over the course of time. Debuffs that pumped specific types of damage encouraged stacking too many of the same handful of jobs. TP or threat mitigation tools being given to certain jobs weren't bad because of their concept-space, but were bad because the utility they provided were so strong that it virtually necessitated certain jobs or pairings. Instead of ripping everything out and making the game idiot-proof (and yet somehow the idiots still can't manage this), they could have and should have adopted any other number of ideas:

Proc-based buffs, providing the same overall throughput as 2-minute-buffs but spread over that time period. MP or (dare I say it) TP regeneration tools on almost-every job, and more interesting decision-points at more-regular intervals to achieve peak performance, rather than siloing off everyone into their own little game of Simon-Says. For example, the tanks:

What if Paladin could form a short-duration shield that, when ruptured, would return MP to the party? Perhaps unique among the tanks, in a fashion similar to Cover, it could have a skill to transfer a certain % of emnity from another party-member that wasn't themselves using a tank stance -- perhaps the use of a PLD over other tanks would be that it offers a smooth and reliable set of skills to make encounters more comfortable throughout... as opposed to either being above-damage or below-damage of other tanks, and thus playable or unplayable.

DRK could have a theme of resource management - converting health into damage, paying health for damage-mitigation, expending mana to return health, so-on so-forth. Perhaps the use of DRK would then be that it allows for a bit riskier of play, if things were timed properly: imagine a health-shield generated by ripping some away from the rest of the party that, when burst, applied a debuff on the boss that allowed for steady health return every time it was hit. Of course, you'd need more consistent damage in encounters than 1 raidwide every minute or two for this to have value... But even then, pairing a DRK with jobs that more-frequently provided MP regen might let them convert that into more health or damage, say, but to a degree that wouldn't necessitate hard-locking DRK with just a handful of other jobs.

What if the WAR was all about building up to crits, in the way you briefly have to pool your rage + infuriates for Berserk before it becomes unga-bunga retard? What if each time the war crit, it would lower the boss's damage for a brief period of time, offering up semirandom mitigation? What if the warrior was built specifically around the idea of tank-swapping, of generating extra resources while being focused and then being able to expend them with wild excess (which would mean taking extra damage) when they're no longer the primary target?

What if GNB's cartridge-expenditures provided minor buffs to it and other party-members, but the cartridges that were generated were random? What if the use of the Gnashing Fang combo was to rapidly apply the cartridges, rather than just a button you pressed every 30 seconds? What if some of the cartridges refreshed the cooldown on some of your other abilities, allowing you to more-frequently apply the DoTs?

You could apply the same line of thought and the same weird, goofy ideas to promote 'selfish' or party-support benefits to all of the healers and DPS in turn... if the system were not so lock-step rigid and obsessed with ensuring that the jobs all perform about the same. The only things you're allowed to do within the game's systems are heal damage, deal damage, and prevent damage -- and that's just not enough to support a robust and deep gameplay loop, hence why adopting more and more intricate simon-says sequences is about the extent of tricks in the bag. And all that they're ever going to do for this game, beyond making the core loops and rotations even-simpler for retards who will still fail at the most-basic things.

 

[Well Intentioned]

That's another thing that I forgot to include, yeah, would be some utility or niche type abilities that would just make jobs feel distinct from one another.

This is a massive balancing issue and I doubt Square will ever attempt something like that simply for the reason that they have to cater to the console playerbase and are more worried about button bloat than most.

Even then I feel that even if they did shit like condense the basic 1/2/3 combos jobs have into one button and do other pruning, it'd help a ton.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I can't speak to current WoW, but dungeon and raid bosses when I played (Vanilla to Legion, more or less) were fairly varied even if inconsistent and silly. Very often you're doing very specific things like kiting adds, hitting buttons, eating specific foods off the floor and so on. Some of the earlier raids had specific mechanics for specific classes (Mage Tanking, Priest MC, Hunter Kiting, etc). Dungeons and Raids are also not required for the game - you can level without ever doing a single instance of content* (I think one of the newbie islands forces you into a fake dungeon)

I'm sure they've sanded a fair bit of that down based on the general direction of the game being sanded down but they have a larger variety of stuff to do in dungeons, even if means the game constantly breaks under scaling issues because even the devs forget how they work.

They still the odd encounter now and then, one of the current Dungeons has a segment where you pose as staff in a Tavern and if you get high enough reviews by serving the correct foods, cleaning and booting out rabble rousers you get a 10% damage buff for most of the rest of the dungeon.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

like condense the basic 1/2/3 combos jobs have into one button and do other pruning, it'd help a ton.

I have dreadful thought creeping into my head; what if the actual "combat overhaul" they do is just put the core 1-2-3 on one button like Picto and Viper? I think people would tear Yoshida's head off if that's what they announced.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

Something that'd help a lot is if they restructured all the abilities so you had the basic 1/2/3 combo as well as an 1/2 aoe combo before you set foot in the first dungeon.

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

Something that'd help a lot is if they restructured all the abilities so you had the basic 1/2/3 combo as well as an 1/2 aoe combo before you set foot in the first dungeon.

Fun little fact about that; I loaded into Praetorium as a Sage and found out on the first pack of adds that Sage doesn't have GCD AoE at that level, just the two stack of OGCD AoE. Tank almost died before I realized and switched to single target attacks. Needless to say that I wasn't a happy camper about that, nor that Samurai basically has it's full AoE rotation at 50 but not Dragoon or Ninja.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

I have dreadful thought creeping into my head; what if the actual "combat overhaul" they do is just put the core 1-2-3 on one button like Picto and Viper? I think people would tear Yoshida's head off if that's what they announced.

Mod trannies can already do that like in PVP, i dont think it wouldnt be too bad unless it was the ONLY change as you said, im not holding my breath on any major shakeups to the gameplay, though

Something that'd help a lot is if they restructured all the abilities so you had the basic 1/2/3 combo as well as an 1/2 aoe combo before you set foot in the first dungeon.

It would be nice if they stopped pretending FFXIV was an RPG insofar the skill progression went and just embraced the fact that class expression is the same as a fighting game and they just gave you all the level milestone's tools upon reaching it besides maybe the pre-job classes, just give the entire kit at level 50 when you unlock the class at 30, give you the entire lvl 60 kit at 50, and so on

 

[Xerxes IX]

Fun little fact about that; I loaded into Praetorium as a Sage and found out on the first pack of adds that Sage doesn't have GCD AoE at that level, just the two stack of OGCD AoE. Tank almost died before I realized and switched to single target attacks. Needless to say that I wasn't a happy camper about that, nor that Samurai basically has it's full AoE rotation at 50 but not Dragoon or Ninja.

Sage in Arr is pretty disgusting, in the earliest dungeons (I think pre level 30) you just don't get a DOT because it's locked behind Eukrasia.

 

[SnowBall]

When I was leveling Sage I kept getting Tam Tara and Sastasha in leveling roulettes and it was awful only having 2-3 useable buttons outside of role actions. Eukrasia is obtained at level 30 so getting leveling dungeons before that really sucked.

 

[RIPRhongoBongo]

When I was leveling Sage I kept getting Tam Tara and Sastasha in leveling roulettes and it was awful only having 2-3 useable buttons outside of role actions. Eukrasia is obtained at level 30 so getting leveling dungeons before that really sucked.

I don’t even make an attempt to play Sage in ARR synced

 

[Dorkwan]

Level sync is gay as fuck. It's one thing to not want max level players with max level stats steam rolling beginner dungeons in DF, but for the love of god stop locking skills when level synced. I already grinded up this job to max level why would I volunteer to de-level it? Everything is homogenized and dumbed down enough as it is.

 

[Baron Reginald]

They pretty clearly want to avoid requiring tribal knowledge for specific encounters (aka that WoW Dungeon where you ride dragons that everyone hates) and really don't want to design around different gear/class disparities ever again.

I actually think they failed on this part as well already.
While the game only has a handful of repeating mechanics, people do not name those mechanics straight up in the PF often, and usually use god awful incredibly shit and annoying abbreviations or nicknames to describe them, which whenever I return to the game the hardest part is deciphering what the fuck they even mean in the PF. Or they bundle several mechanics into a single annoying nonsense term or "X strat". There's already a degree of requiring tribal information because even if you know the baseline mechanics you end up needing to look up a guide just to figure out what the terms are actually associated with.

It's an annoying pet peeve, and I know it's "Muh lived experience" but I think there's a reason why whenever i do the blind parties can usually I bash it out and clear in like half an hour to two hours tops, but the moment I try clear stuff solo in PF with a pre-established lingo it's a fucking messy nightmare because you have the in-group who are constantly glued to the meta uptime-strat guides and the out-group who haven't adopted or follow it closesly who just attempt to do the mechanic as it was obviously intended.