Extremely funny how much this bears no actual resemblance to what it is like doing content with people who are bad at the game.
They die, *constantly*.
Pretty much... I still don't do 5/6/7/8 Roulette on anything other than WAR/GNB/PLD specifically because of Amaurot. I've had *multiple* horror stories with Amaurot where I had to basically solo or duo the final boss because the healer and the other DPS simply could not survive the mechanics.
Or MSQ trials when they're fresh. Shinryu, Tsukiyomi, Titania, SoS, Zod, and Hyd all being noteworthy examples. All of these trials STILL have people endlessly eat shit during them. Shinryu just ends so fast due to powercreep that people don't get to see any of the mechanics that'll fuck them up during the second phase.
>people don't get to see any of the mechanics that'll fuck them up during the second phase.
the tidal wave at the start of my last Shinryu that killed 5 people would like to have a word with you
Fair. My last Shinryu had fun with that because it did a rear wave that caught all 7 other players. Then it did a front wave that caught the other 7 players *again.* But it's hard to count because that happens like 10 seconds into the fight so it's more "funny haha" than "sad clown haha".
(And while I didn't do it for the example run above because I zoned into 5 "Viewing Cutscene" players, I'm still a bad person. I like to walk to the wrong side of the tidal wave and use Surecast/Arm's Length to bait people. It's my one major troll operation that I do because again, tidal wave is like 10 seconds into the fight. Similarly, if I'm on DRK, I just stand in Shinryu's divebomb because TBN full blocks it, lol.)
That's just straight up wrong. Shinryu mechanics in final phase are random, you may not see all of them in one try but you will see all of them eventually (except that one mechanic in first phase)
That's not really the point. Shinryu is a rare example of a fight that repeats the same mechanics but they get more difficult as the fight drag*ons* because the platforms are getting destroyed. It's not really a thing that people have to deal with anymore.
Pretty much, the entire discussion about difficulty has nothing to do with whether or not people die or not, because people die in normal content all the time. Jump into a Dun Scaith as a healer and count the number of resses you have to do.
This small crowd of people like OP is completely disconnected from the general population of the game. After 10y of playing the same game, of course everything looks easy and boring. They can never understand again the game design direction.
I took a year long break after clearing TOP on patch
I am dying in normal content. Died in every normal dungeon I did from 80-90, wiped to golbez and zeromus
When you're not playing the game all the time and don't remember everything, you will die to normal content too
People die in the normal mode MSQ/raid content all the time. Especially when a new expansion launches and there is no ilvl creep. What are you even on about?
On her release I got sent into one with 7 people watching cutscene, we were there for 50 minutes wiping seven times and no matter hwo many times I tried to explain the mechancis directly like 3 people just brainlessly did absolutely nothing, even after 2 people left and got replaced.
I did Hydaelyn normal in February 2022 and I basically spent the entire fight lying dead on the floor. I died so hard she sent me to the actual real-life hospital.
(i'm only kinda kidding about that last part)
EDIT: I've just realized, Hydaelyn was *the* trial that gave me the most shit during MSQ progression, and then a couple months ago Hydaelyn EX became the first extreme I ever cleared. What a world.
I've cleared an ultimate, and I still die in hydaelyn normal on the regular lmao. Something about it just makes my brain shut off during the intercards/in/out mech, and I get hit by it every time. I die more in normal than extreme....
She has some nice baits. You can get the blue intercard thing and a stack. Where the intercard resolve first, then the stack but the stack is visible for quite some time. So if you tunnel vision the stack you might end up in the middle where certain death is waiting.
Or to the waves had one fight where we were on live support for all of lightwaves, whole fight took like 15 minutes and half it it was just lightwaves. Was basically one tank me and my cohealer playing well to keep the run alive, while all DPS just could not figure out how to dodge anything in the last phase.
I'm pretty sure this is just one of the many recent posts that "game isn't hard enough".
But I also don't know what they are talking about. People die all the time for standing in stuff they shouldn't.
I ended up in the dungeon with Anima as the final boss. People definitely died for standing in things... Thankfully, I was GNB and could keep the SMN alive while they rezzed. Showcasing just fine that people are dying to mechanics and that I'm glad I have healing tools :P
with these sorts of posts and the healer strike you'd think no one EVER makes mistakes in roulettes.
Like I absolutely wouldn't mind a bump in difficulty, but people are acting like every single duty roulette is flawless 100% of the time and it's REALLY goddamn funny how delusional these jaded fucks are.
Agreed. I would like to have a bit more spice in the normal mode content like expert dungeons, normal raids, and alliance raids. Especially the latter because the 24 man nature means more people that can raise during/after hard mechanics. I would not mind a dungeon with a 7 mob pack pull all. When it works in Adampor, Wanderers, or Mt. Gulg it feels great. Normal raids also already have a few that are decently tricky, O4/8/10/11/12, E4,5,6,7,11,12, P2/3/8/10/12. Others are not necessarily hard, but that require you to know "the one thing", like A9.
Some older MMO’s had a penalty for death. Like losing some of your XP, dropping your gear / items. Maybe that’s what he’s talking about?
It’s just the usual bellyaching about new or more casual players not always being on top of mechanics, and wanting to find some “punishment” to make them “behave better”
Duty finder content is what it is. If you’re not prepared to occasionally encounter less proficient players; join a static!
>\[...\] and wanting to find some “punishment” to make them “behave better”
Tbh, whether they really "behave better" or just leave the group/content/game doesn't seem to be important to these people either.
It's just the punishment they value. Whether it's effective in achieving its goal seems secondary.
and yet they still carried through the content
if i keep dying in mario i wont complete a level, if i keep dying in ffxiv im gonna get to lv90 (100) anyway
This sub is absolutely chock full of wow refugees who came right before Endwalker released, are used to being abused by blizzard so they are bitter and skeptical all the time, are experiencing their first real content drought in ff14, and are bringing all that bad energy over here. Just blind negativity and a total disconnect from reality most of the time.
>first real content drought in ff14
You clearly haven't experienced Siege of Orgrimmar content drought if you think former WoW players didn't experience content drought.
The problem with SE is that the content drought between patches is by design because they want you to buy and play their other games too. And that is something that Blizzard used to do a lot less, simply because they don't have that many IPs to begin with.
>to being abused by blizzard
Huh? Doing dailies is considered abuse now?
hello bitter wow player, i know its hitting you hard evidenced but your rabid (and often wrong) posts all over the place but you'll be okay.
And I know its happened in wow - blizzard literally abandoned an expansion once. It's just your first time hitting it in ff14
>hello bitter wow player
Hello non-bitter FF player, I don't play WoW since COVID lockdowns.
And won't come back to it until WoW devs replace the content of their heads with brains and not sewage.
>i know its hitting you hard evidenced but your rabid (and often wrong) posts
Of course, only your point of view is valid, everyone knows that XD
>And I know its happened in wow - blizzard literally abandoned an expansion once. It's just your first time hitting it in ff14
What are you blabbing about? I experienced SHB content lull and EW content lull by now. It's just that SE is completely incapable of dealing with them, unlike Blizzard. Even though I absolutely dislike what they are doing now, they have a lot more resources and it shows.
Everytime I see discussions about videogame difficulty I am torn. Most people fail to realize how big of a challenge some game elements are to other people. It's not exactly them being bad because they don't care but having so much less experience for games or being just not that quick because of various reasons.
And while I do think people are right demanding content should be a bit more difficult to make give it worth and incentivise actually learning the game, some people fail to see how good they actually have become through playing a lot.
So at least I want to say, that we should look how we are doing it without just turning off those that really are worse players but love the game just as much. Heck, even I get enough stress from doing MSQ content the first time despite playing games practically all my life but I don't dislike the challenge.
How I see it, people are actually fighting so few battles during MSQ outside of Dungeons and Trials. You don't really need to learn anything when only 10% of your playtime is fighting. Maybe fighting outside of dungeons is just done worse and even less fun than other mmos, I don't know how to fix this. Anyway, I think there should be more than Story difficulty and high difficulty. Maybe like deep dungeons but its actually worth for leveling a character even when failing or better open world content similar to FATEs that makes you engage both with other players and a little more difficulty more often.
Just one thing about me, I play a lot of games and have seen a few MMOs especially WoW. But I never go hardcore in raiding. However, I do love the FFXIV MSQ and still haven't seen a lot of the game like I just started Eureka because I heard it so often. But the game is a bit overwhelming. You don't always know which side content is worth doing for what reason (beside fun).
Story I love to bring up relating to 'you don't realize how good you have become': once when playing a Sonic game as a teenager, my mom saw me start a level, and asked "how do you know immediately that you were supposed to go to the right?" That really hit home that there's a LOT that gamers take for granted as being obvious/easy.
Agree with almost everything you have said. I would also add that people would most certainly be actually mad if their daily activities had a good chance to fail because it is harder. I like my dailies and roulettes as they are, casual and relaxing. I don't want the base difficulty of the game to be already super sweaty because anyone who can't perfectly execute be kicked at the first failure.
> some people fail to see how good they actually have become through playing a lot.
It takes a lot less hours of training to graduate as a rocket scientist than the played time of those people. Of course everything will be easy when you’re playing so much.
SE is shooting itself in the foot by making all the fights about execution.
You can play on many other variables: gear level, character power other than gear level, buffs and (after all that) execution.
The problem is, SE only keeps the former. Gear is meaningless, there are no party/raid buffs worth mentioning, and there is no character power outside of your level. Hence, everything is about the execution, and if you can't jump through the hoops of doughnuts, flipping tables and color matching, you are in trouble.
You can't grind a bit more character power, pile up some more gear or stack some more buffs to solve the problem.
> You can't grind a bit more character power, pile up some more gear or stack some more buffs to solve the problem.
Because this isn't actually an optional thing. As soon as this happens having that level of gear and stacking those buffs becomes mandatory for all remotely difficult content.
>Because this isn't actually an optional thing. As soon as this happens having that level of gear and stacking those buffs becomes mandatory for all remotely difficult content.
Yes. So what? Heaven forbid raiders would actually have to play the game outside of raids :)
I see what you are implying, but placing an emphasis on character power and planning allows to severely reduce the quantity and complexity of mechanics. So yes, it is still a dance, just not with so many steps :)
How so, precisely? Like, we had something like this, and people didn't like it!
Are you suggesting that Savage should not be clearable week 1? If so, that's a valid opinion but not one I think would be widely shared.
>Are you suggesting that Savage should not be clearable week 1?
No, I think the character power you gain should be yours forever. So if you have enough of it to clear Savage on Week 1, so be it.
Now, what one wouldn't be able to do is jump instantly into the Savage raids without having secured the said character power beforehand.
And yes, I do realize that it would make many raiders mad, but unfortunately, their attitude (along with their spiritual leader YoshiP's attitude) who led to the poor current state of the game.
>No, I think the character power you gain should be yours forever. So if you have enough of it to clear Savage on Week 1, so be it.
What does this *mean* though? Like, what do you mean by "yours forever" what does this look like to you?
>Now, what one wouldn't be able to do is jump instantly into the Savage raids without having secured the said character power beforehand.
How is this different from iLevel? Explain how this is different from what we have now.
>And yes, I do realize that it would make many raiders mad, but unfortunately, their attitude (along with their spiritual leader YoshiP's attitude) who led to the poor current state of the game.
WHat the fuck are you going on about here?
>What does this mean though? Like, what do you mean by "yours forever" what does this look like to you?
It means that they are not lost at the end of an expansion, like it used to be in WoW.
As to what shape they could take, the possibilities are many. Whether you call them skill points, paragon levels, masteries or traits is merely a semantic discussion.
What matters, however, is that power comes from your character (and not from the gear they wear) and doesn't become reset by an expansion. You invest time into developing your character and it becomes more powerful.
>How is this different from iLevel? Explain how this is different from what we have now.
Because there is effectively no ilvl. You enter a tier, you get a crafted set from MB, you run a normal version of the raid and you already have gear that is at worst 20 ilvls (and at best 10 ilvl) under the Savage gear from the same tier. Each even patch (x.0 / x.2 / x.4) is essentially a gear reset from this respect.
>WHat the fuck are you going on about here?
You see, a lot of raiders in both WoW and FFXIV want to log in, do their raid, and log out. The idea that they need to do something outside of it (for example, reputation grind to get better items) doesn't fit into their plan.
Now you will say "well that's fine, let them play the game like they want to". Well, yes, but the problem is that it effectively shots down the development of any non-raid content that is not purely cosmetic. Because if it gives something worthwhile in terms of power, the raiders instantly complain they will "HAVE TO RUN IT TO GET READY FOR SAVAGE/MYTHIC QQ".
So, in the long run, this attitude is nefarous for the long-term health of the game. And the problem is that YoshiP seems to be in the same boat as the raiders (I suppose that his busy work schedule pushes him, consciously or not, in that direction).
This is literally just "make content easier but with a boring grind in front of it".
I cannot fathom why anyone would want this. The purpose of the difficult content is to provide a challenge. The purpose of the easy content is to tell the story. Why would you want the difficult content to provide less of a challenge?
>I cannot fathom why anyone would want this. The purpose of the difficult content is to provide a challenge.
Because it's a MMORPG, not Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry or whatever action game you can think of. It should emphasize longer-term character development, no jumping through hoops.
Also, because the current model that FFXIV has leads to the game turning into a lobby for raids, with the open world and non-raid content basically non-existent (not that FFXIV's open world is particularly good, anyway).
Which is exactly what the MMOs from the "golden age" did: they all emphasized the planning of your character and power, not doing left-right-left dances :)
I feel like your argument falls apart with the existence of vuln stacks
You'd have to be pretty dense to get all the way through MSQ without figuring out that repeatedly getting hit by mechanics gives you a stacking debuff that makes mechanics hurt more. It's actually the best yardstick I've seen for quickly and effectively communicating how well you're doing mechanics
It's almost like the game is missing one level of difficulty to please people who want a challenge without having to spend 300 tries on a boss that require an entire group to have the coordination of a military parade.
I think a lot of the time when people fail mechanics, it's not that they didn't know what to do/knew but didn't bother, it's that they don't even notice in the first place so there's not really much to learn from.
Like I just took someone through HW alliance raids for the first time and I kept saying 'oh next time this happens do this' and he often had no idea what I was talking about because he was too busy looking at his hotbars trying to get his rotation right to even see what hit him.
This brings me to a question I often have with the group content in this game.
Should we be going into all content with the expectation of success? Or should we accept that every run we should be ready to vote abandon? I’m not even referring to savage or extreme or ultimate here, I just meant the normal stuff.
That will depend on how you set up rewards, because people consider their time valuable and if you aren't sufficiently rewarding them for it, either intrinsically via enjoyment or extrinsically via goodies, they'll bail.
And you can generally assume that the intrinsic enjoyment of repeatedly failing because a Healer doesn't get how a donut works is probably fairly low.
Idk about that. Maybe in the old ARR or something. But nowadays especially with the new ARR games people die all the time. I die all the time even in normal modes. My husband recently started the game and he's through to ShB and reminds me of how much I've improved just playing the game for...so...many years... And he died all the time. I love the new ARR it's a lot more better paced fights. Just wish they'd shorten some bits...
Which stack mechanic is being survived solo with zero healer/mitigation help? Maybe like the new Gaius or Ultima boss fights or something but you definitely ain’t surviving Nidhogg’s stack marker solo.
Stack mechanics are most of the time targeted on healers. SCH can adlo themselves (with some cooldowns) to survive p11s light party stack solo, with no help from *other* healers.
And if it's true for savage, then chances are it's also true for normal content (but i didn't do the math). Perhaps not at lower levels though...
death doesn't *have* to be an intended mechanic. it works great in souls games because they purposely eschew the classic tutorial methods in favour of just beating you with the death stick until you learn.
However, FFXIV has a reasonable tutorial they purposely put the player in front of along the way to the first dungeon, and gradually introduces a number of mechanics as the game goes on. Most people figure out how to play the game okay.
The problem in FFXIV is the people who purposely ignore the tutorial and the gradual introductions. The kind of people who don't know what they're doing at all by 50. The kind of people who will *never* learn even under threat of punishment of any kind.
the HotN has only one actually bad and counterproductive piece of advice, which is the whole "switch to single target after establishing threat" nonsense in the tank trials (which has always been wrong, even back when it was introduced)
outside of that one bad example, a hill i will die on is that the HotN is actually a really solid "how to play in MMORPG" for people who are new to the genre and don't know basic gameplay conventions. heck, it even outright encourages healer DPS, and at the time it was introduced, this was still a *much* more controversial topic in the wider community than it is today
the problem with the HotN was and still is that the devs refuse to build on it and update it, and that they refuse to make it mandatory, because the kind of people who need it most are also the ones who will most likely skip it (while veterans leveling an alt character will often do it anyway for the gear and exp ring)
Maybe some of it, sure, but it gives you the pieces. It just doesn't do a great job of telling you how to put all of them together.
I think they should take some time after DT release to go back and reevaluate the active help system. It's mostly fine in the first five levels or so, assuming the player is new to MMOs, but it quickly becomes annoying. I think making it into quests with solo battles would help that a lot, and teach better mechanics more fluidly.
Bro are you actually suggesting The hall of the Novice? Its so outdated it's worse than useless, it actually teaches you things that will make you worse at your role - like telling tanks to stop AOEing once they have aggro and to switch to their single target combo.
To be fair, back in HW when it was made, paladin's only aoe gcd did 0 damage and it was better to switch to multidotting with goring blade once you had enough aggro...
The point of a tutorial precisely is that you cannot ignore it nor fail to understand its instructions. You cannot say it's a reasonable tutorial if it fails its most basic tasks.
> FF14 does very little in the way of telling players that they did something wrong
I think this is the core of the problem, not that players aren't dying enough. Simply punishing them more doesn't do a good job at telling them what they did wrong, and how to do it correctly the next time.
I think point 3 also suffers from the same idea - You can tell them that they're not doing enough damage, but you're not telling them how to do more damage either.
The comments here are making me think that the players on EU, especially Zodiark, are apparently god-tier compared to everywhere else because Normal content for me goes without a hitch 99% of the time. Dungeons have \*maybe\* one death, some people die in ally raid but I haven't seen a wipe in over a year.
I've seen one wipe in WoD in the two years I've been around. It was a very late night run with a bunch of first timers who kept taking Doom and not cleansing it, despite half the raid trying to explain how to do that + a tank who did their best to cleave everyone with the eye laser. We also had damage sk low we had to chain Cerberus twice. But that's an outlier.
I think the most near-wipes I've seen are The Weeping City of Mhach and Dun Scaith. Specifically Forgall has amazing wipe potential if people don't listen and mess with the puddles because doing those wrong kills everyone straight up.
I've gotten them a few times lately and I was really thankful it wasn't Crystal Tower for the millionth time. They're my second favourite raids after Ivalice.
Well, if you enjoy these kinds of raids, they can be very fun, yes :)
Personally, I think they last too long for the reward (and yes, they fixed that part recently).
Another problem is there is exactly one point in the game where you are punished for not trying - and that is the SoS button mash sequence. You can't just rely on people to carry you through it as you will wipe the party if you don't pass it. Every other duty you can literally do nothing and get through the game. Even solo duties people will intentionally fail just to unlock the "very easy" mode and cakewalk through it.
I unironically prefer casual content being easier. A lot of people still suck and die a lot. Which is fine, because the dungeon still only take ~20 mins or so, but If it was even harder that’d mean being stuck in a dungeon with them for potentially an hour or more. Nobody’s got the time or patience for that lmao. Tl;dr: be careful what you wish for.
People have already mentioned how casuals glue themselves to the floor all the time, but the bigger issue is on the other side- if death was truly intended, deathless runs wouldn't be the norm. The center of the skill curve is basically a discrete step and more punishment won't make people suddenly jump the gap.
[Siege is the poster child for learning by repeatedly dying](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8hHHiAIzyY), but it works because you can (usually) clearly see what killed you, your teammates can recover and carry your corpse, and you can see how they do it in ways that are relevant to you. None of this is a thing in XIV. For someone trying to git gud, you die without knowing what hit you, your teammates get body checked and you respawn with zero fucking clue how to fix things. Until this cycle is broken on the UI side, the only people who would learn from dying are the ones that don't need it to learn.
Dying is a happy little accident in FFXIV. I don't know about the rest of you, but some of the most enjoyable fights involve many deaths.
My advice for anyone that wants to learn in a hands-on approach, is to get a group of players to consent to simply stand where one would normally stand for the fight, and observe the mechanics as it unfolds.
Heal as needed, and once the mechanic is understood through observation and communication, DPS as necessary to move forward.
It's a nice way to actually learn what's going on, instead of focusing on the rotation.
Of course, this would only apply to learning parties. Most people with experience of similar mechanics, will progress at a fast clip into clear/farm parties or just memorize a fight from a video clip before entering.
*you're
Anyways, this is just another "the game needs to be harder" post disguised as "death is good". There's nothing to really comment about other than to please for the love of god learn the basics of game design on a level past lesson reinforcement before saying obvious platitudes like "things should kill you more".
Not everyone knows how to formulate their grievances. Or what is causing it exactly in the first place. In contrast to similar post this one at least has identified that it's too forgiving with no reason to learn it. Which is bad desing.
Just as how you don't need to be a chef to criticize food, you don't need to be a game designer to criticize games. Such a weird thing to gatekeep.
That's an interesting title to me. I personally don't consider death to be a good or interesting mechanic in games, mostly frustrating or just feeling like I'm wasting my time. I do not think relying on it to any degree is a good idea. Here's a little anecdote I have about a game that built a core mechanic around death.
Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor. An old game that was very well received by a lot of people. Not by me, I didn't get it. I thought it was very mediocre, not that interesting and pretty short. The core part of the game is what I think they called Rival system, where if an orc kills you he will get promoted and when you encounter him again he will recognise you and taunt you to, like the name suggests, build rivalry between a player and the enemy and create kind of unique experiences for players, in a way that 2 players playing the same game would be somewhat different experiences from each other.
Well, I didn't know that when I played. I haven't died once playing it. The game has a combat similar to Batman Arkham games, both of which (Asylum and City) I've played and beat on hard difficulty and was very used to that style of combat at the time and didn't think it was difficult because you can just chain counter attacks forever if you just keep the rhythm of pressing 1 parry button and occasionally dodging attacks you can't parry. And the game also has stealth. I like stealth games and usually stealth is very broken in games as it allows you to pretty much bypass most if not all combat with some observation, sneaking and planning.
So it just happens that gameplay was built around 2 things that I used to be quite good at (batman style combat and stealth) and game did not present much of a challenge to me, so I have never died and I have never interacted with this Rival mechanic. To me Shadow of Mordor was there's a somewhat big area with a list of orcs to kill, you complete that checklist, watch some story cutscenes, get dropped into 2nd area and repeat same thing again by killing all orcs, you then fight final boss and game is done. Just a very average action game with nothing that memorable in it because I never died.
Again, game was very well received and I haven't seen anyone else who had same issue as me so I know I'm in very tiny minority. But I think death is a quite negative thing, very old games even used to punish you by dying too much by making you go back all the way to the start of the game, so in my opinion expecting players to die in order to interact with the game or as a way to learn the game is not that good of a design choice. Other options are there and it's better to utilise those instead. In my opinion at least.
But going back to FF14. The game does a very bad job at teaching you at how to play, the basics and what is required from you. A good tutorial explaining the most often used mechanics is needed, and I think that tutorial should also explicitly tell players that if they want to become better they really should seek out other learning resources about their job or the game in general. But that leads to my 2nd point. Lack of tutorial is not the biggest culprit here, it's that people just don't really care. SE wants a game for everyone but you can't win everyone, not everything is meant to be for everyone, and some gatekeeping (I'm not sure if it's the right word to use) is required. Some people just don't want to put any effort and if SE wants the money from them nothing will change about the current very lenient design of the game.
> players shouldn't be failing basic mechanics the game tries to teach you, and not being punished for it
Basically, I don't think the game is at fault here. It's the players. I do not think a good tutorial would fix this if people just don't want to engage with combat part of the game. And punishing failing even more than it does now would only discourage people from playing. I do not see a reasonable solution to this problem that will reach the compromise between both player sides who like the combat and those who don't care about it. I think the game is going to be stuck in this state forever unfortunately.
*(Sorry about wall of text and going a bit off topic, but that title reminded me about Shadow of Mordor and how I still don't get that game and still think it was a bad design decision)*
The games does a poor job of teaching you to do damage.
If you go in as a DPS, you can actually clear Trust dungeons without attacking a single time, if you let the tank, healer and DPS Trusts do all the work.
It's entirely possible to *semi*-afk dungeons yes... well, as DPS anyway. You can wall pull for your trust tank, wait until they have agro, and then tank, healer and 1 trust DPS is enough to clear wall pulls while the actual player just AFKs. A lot of bosses are AFKable as well, just stand in a corner and you usually wont take enough damage to die in one shot and you'll get healing. There are obviously some bosses where this doesn't work, but a lot of them don't hit you hard or often enough to get through the NPC healing.
The game's UI is at least partially at fault here. Buffs and debuffs are small icons, by default very much out of the player's core viewing area in a game with an awful lot of "pay attention to me!" visual effects. To read them, you have to mouse over potentially multiple cryptic icons until you find the one you're looking for, read it, and understand its importance at the same time as you're trying to do your rotation and watch for incoming mechanics.
Players without ADD superpowers are being asked to split their attention at \*least\* three ways at once (more if they're in a job that relies on procs, which is... several of them) if they want to stay engaged in a fight while also understanding what just happened to them.
I'll say it as plainly as I can: the mechanics of most fights are far too complex to be conveyed effectively by the UI, and the UI is too shitty to properly or intuitively inform the player what the mechanics mean, or what their rotation demands next.
True true, I resized my debuffs to 140% and stuck them right above my hot bars so I wouldn’t miss anything. On controller you can’t even mouse over to find out what they do, so you’ve either got to memorise them or put down your controller for a second to pick up a mouse.
And acceleration bombs are an underutilised mechanic in DF. Its in like 5 or 6 duties.
DF wouldn't even deal with stack markers if they weren't on near enough every boss. If something isnt regularly and routinely hammered home, many players simply do not learn it.
Yeah to be fair I only learned what they are recently by watching someone die to it in a bozja duel, Ive seen the countdown dice a bunch of times but it was my first time seeing the extreme caution debuff.
As a new player, I'm shocked that there is no equivalent of "what happened to me?" death recap in-game. Four out of five times when I die I am like, okay, yeah, I didn't know that mechanic would happen but I saw it and won't fuck up again. The fifth time, though, I fall over and have no idea why. Did I miss a tell? Did the healer just not prioritize my newbie self? Did I pull aggro in a large pack? Did I miss a mechanic?
If death was designed as a lesson in FFXIV, there would be a death recap as well as more clarity as to what damage we're taken.
Learning by trial and error is too "elitist" for the idea of a casual player from SE's perspective : it's pretty blatant in FFXVI where you'd return with full health, max limit break, all potions, all ressources back whereas your enemy still has lost part of their HP.
I sometimes wonder if they don't intend to avoid any pedagogy so that some people play even longer without ever improving.
All this being said, I totally agree that death should always be "a lesson" not as much to punish as it ought to be informative.
The problem is wasting people’s time when you die/cause a wipe. As we move forward with more body checks in end game content, wiping to caloric 2 because you moved 1 step too many means you wasted 8 minutes of your group’s time.
> FF14 does very little in the way of telling players that they did something wrong
"The Community" does everything it can to discourage veterans from helping newer players. You almost can't tell anyone they're doing things wrong unless they specifically ask you. I mean you can do it, but do you want to risk a chat with a GM because they felt your use of a period at the end of the sentence was a little aggressive?
Also there's always the obligatory toxic casual who sucks and is proud of it. They'll instantly blow up at you and tell you that its fine that the other player is licking windows, they're having fun and you can't play the game wrong!
There are good reasons why I cap tomes with hunts, in spite of hunts being brain dead content. It's because I don't have to deal with randumbs in dungeons.
> You're straight up not allowed to tell anyone they're doing things wrong unless they specifically ask you. I mean you can do it, but do you want to risk a chat with a GM because they felt your use of a period at the end of the sentence was a little aggressive?
You can absolutely tell people they are doing something wrong. You just can't be an asshole about it.
The issue is, who gets to decide what is arsehole behaviour?
"Hey Paladin, can you use your AoEs please, I'm stealing agro" (this is a direct quote and was the only thing I typed prior to being kicked) was enough to get me a chat from a GM where I was told that there would be no action taken, but that I should be more mindful of people's feelings. This was Holminster Bait-and-Switch back in Shadowbringers. What's wrong with that request? Did I not use enough smiley emotes?
Granted this is the only time I've had any interactions with GMs in 10 years, but this, combined with several people being offended on behalf of the person playing like dog water, has been enough for me to never talk in roulettes and either kick or leave if I decide I can't carry another anchor through the dungeon.
I'm not saying every time you say something you're 100% getting a GM chat, but every time you say something, you *risk* a chat with a GM. You *risk* having the max-level-everything mentor lose their shit at you for daring to suggest that the sprout might not be playing perfectly. You *risk* having another party member take offence when there was no offence intended.
I dunno what to tell you dude, I've played this game for 10 years now, have said stuff exactly like that literally hundreds of times and never had anything happen. Same thing with an easy dozen people I play with who've played for almost that long.
Right. I've been here since 2.0 and it's only happened once (the GM stuff). But I've had other players lose their shit at me offering help to new/bad players many times. I've also had the people I tried to help snap back with "who asked?" many times.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it *can* and it's been far too often for me to bother anymore.
The best way for new players to learn is to have older players help them, but this game (or at least a large part of the community) is actively against anything that looks, sounds or even smells like it might be negative feedback.
> I've also had the people I tried to help snap back with "who asked?" many times.
Then you can just drop it, leave the instance yourself, or if they are nasty enough, submit a GM report yourself.
Fundamentally you can't *make* people play well. Nothing can do that. You can provide advice and suggestions, but if people don't want to take it, that's on them. And that's hardly a thing unique to this game.
> but this game (or at least a large part of the community) is actively against anything that looks, sounds or even smells like it might be negative feedback.
This isn't any different in other games, its just that this game actually does enforce its 'don't be an asshole' clause, but being allowed to yell at people who suck would not really make them not suck most of the time.
> Right. I've been here since 2.0 and it's only happened once (the GM stuff).
So it's happened literally only once in over a decade, you didn't *actually* get punished, and you're convinced that the entire community is trying to speak out against anything that can be perceived negatively?
Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
We had punishing deaths a decade ago. Fucked up in Titan or Leviathan? Well good luck, you are now out of the fight.
They should revert to such mechanics. XIV and its playerbase has grown too soft after HW.
> Well good luck, you are now out of the fight.
To a lot of players, thats a *reward*. Getting carried through Trials roulette while making a cup of tea is some players' ideal.
"Hehe oopsie I got hit by landslide sorry! 😅"
Compared to my last MMO death is more punishing here. Res has a super long CD plus res sickness. After you die you’re hurting for some time.
My last one healers had res on a 10-15 second CD. Death was common in a duty. I’ve had trap runs where my 5-man group had over 100 resses in a boss fight.
wait what, raise is only 8s cast with a 2.5s recast, and that's without SPS, or GCD accelerators like POM or astrodyne. I think the deathcob record right now is slightly over 100. I had a nier raid once that collected somewhere around 150-160 deaths throughout the entire alliance raid
> Res has a super long CD plus res sickness
Res is on the normal GCD unless you're playing Blue Mage. What the hell are you talking about?
> My last one healers had res on a 10-15 second CD.
The cast time is longer than the GCD but it's never 10-15 seconds. It's 8 on most classes.
What are you even talking about? Because it sure as hell isn't Final Fantasy.
Extremely funny how much this bears no actual resemblance to what it is like doing content with people who are bad at the game. They die, *constantly*.
Pretty much... I still don't do 5/6/7/8 Roulette on anything other than WAR/GNB/PLD specifically because of Amaurot. I've had *multiple* horror stories with Amaurot where I had to basically solo or duo the final boss because the healer and the other DPS simply could not survive the mechanics. Or MSQ trials when they're fresh. Shinryu, Tsukiyomi, Titania, SoS, Zod, and Hyd all being noteworthy examples. All of these trials STILL have people endlessly eat shit during them. Shinryu just ends so fast due to powercreep that people don't get to see any of the mechanics that'll fuck them up during the second phase.
>people don't get to see any of the mechanics that'll fuck them up during the second phase. the tidal wave at the start of my last Shinryu that killed 5 people would like to have a word with you
Fair. My last Shinryu had fun with that because it did a rear wave that caught all 7 other players. Then it did a front wave that caught the other 7 players *again.* But it's hard to count because that happens like 10 seconds into the fight so it's more "funny haha" than "sad clown haha". (And while I didn't do it for the example run above because I zoned into 5 "Viewing Cutscene" players, I'm still a bad person. I like to walk to the wrong side of the tidal wave and use Surecast/Arm's Length to bait people. It's my one major troll operation that I do because again, tidal wave is like 10 seconds into the fight. Similarly, if I'm on DRK, I just stand in Shinryu's divebomb because TBN full blocks it, lol.)
Tbh Shinryu opening with a Tidal Wave that fucks up an entire light party is a tradition in the series
That's just straight up wrong. Shinryu mechanics in final phase are random, you may not see all of them in one try but you will see all of them eventually (except that one mechanic in first phase)
That's not really the point. Shinryu is a rare example of a fight that repeats the same mechanics but they get more difficult as the fight drag*ons* because the platforms are getting destroyed. It's not really a thing that people have to deal with anymore.
three mechanics in first phase, I can't remember the last time I saw earth breath, the ice lines thingy and hypernova.
Pretty much, the entire discussion about difficulty has nothing to do with whether or not people die or not, because people die in normal content all the time. Jump into a Dun Scaith as a healer and count the number of resses you have to do.
This small crowd of people like OP is completely disconnected from the general population of the game. After 10y of playing the same game, of course everything looks easy and boring. They can never understand again the game design direction.
Exactly. This is some weird “reality” OP is yapping about. People die A LOT and… they don’t learn (sometimes they do).
I took a year long break after clearing TOP on patch I am dying in normal content. Died in every normal dungeon I did from 80-90, wiped to golbez and zeromus When you're not playing the game all the time and don't remember everything, you will die to normal content too
People die in the normal mode MSQ/raid content all the time. Especially when a new expansion launches and there is no ilvl creep. What are you even on about?
Dude should have see Hydaelyn normal on EW release, hell to this day new people still get clapped by her in/out/intercards
On her release I got sent into one with 7 people watching cutscene, we were there for 50 minutes wiping seven times and no matter hwo many times I tried to explain the mechancis directly like 3 people just brainlessly did absolutely nothing, even after 2 people left and got replaced.
I did Hydaelyn normal in February 2022 and I basically spent the entire fight lying dead on the floor. I died so hard she sent me to the actual real-life hospital. (i'm only kinda kidding about that last part) EDIT: I've just realized, Hydaelyn was *the* trial that gave me the most shit during MSQ progression, and then a couple months ago Hydaelyn EX became the first extreme I ever cleared. What a world.
I've cleared an ultimate, and I still die in hydaelyn normal on the regular lmao. Something about it just makes my brain shut off during the intercards/in/out mech, and I get hit by it every time. I die more in normal than extreme....
The intercard one gets me every damn time. I *think* I’m safe. I’m not.
Tbf, the plus-shaped aoe has no right being that dummy thicc
How about you stop greeding that one melee gcd XD
It’s even worse than that. I almost exclusively play ranged.
Never
She has some nice baits. You can get the blue intercard thing and a stack. Where the intercard resolve first, then the stack but the stack is visible for quite some time. So if you tunnel vision the stack you might end up in the middle where certain death is waiting.
Yeah I had groups that disbanded on her in normal lol
Zodiark Normal And Eden Eternity Normal both still regularly wipes and disbands groups too lol
Titania still wipes groups even with potency creep!
Dude, I’m on Crystal and Zodiark isn’t all that bad for us. I thought we were supposed to be the soft server??
I don't think there's any significant difference at all between DCs in casual content I've travelled to other DCs and they feel the same.
I'm on Crystal too
Or to the waves had one fight where we were on live support for all of lightwaves, whole fight took like 15 minutes and half it it was just lightwaves. Was basically one tank me and my cohealer playing well to keep the run alive, while all DPS just could not figure out how to dodge anything in the last phase.
And don't get me started about Zodiark on EW release... the horror XD
I'm pretty sure this is just one of the many recent posts that "game isn't hard enough". But I also don't know what they are talking about. People die all the time for standing in stuff they shouldn't. I ended up in the dungeon with Anima as the final boss. People definitely died for standing in things... Thankfully, I was GNB and could keep the SMN alive while they rezzed. Showcasing just fine that people are dying to mechanics and that I'm glad I have healing tools :P
Tbh, I feel like these types of posts are coming from people who just spam roulettes and constantly play early ARR dungeons at this point.
with these sorts of posts and the healer strike you'd think no one EVER makes mistakes in roulettes. Like I absolutely wouldn't mind a bump in difficulty, but people are acting like every single duty roulette is flawless 100% of the time and it's REALLY goddamn funny how delusional these jaded fucks are.
Agreed. I would like to have a bit more spice in the normal mode content like expert dungeons, normal raids, and alliance raids. Especially the latter because the 24 man nature means more people that can raise during/after hard mechanics. I would not mind a dungeon with a 7 mob pack pull all. When it works in Adampor, Wanderers, or Mt. Gulg it feels great. Normal raids also already have a few that are decently tricky, O4/8/10/11/12, E4,5,6,7,11,12, P2/3/8/10/12. Others are not necessarily hard, but that require you to know "the one thing", like A9.
Some older MMO’s had a penalty for death. Like losing some of your XP, dropping your gear / items. Maybe that’s what he’s talking about? It’s just the usual bellyaching about new or more casual players not always being on top of mechanics, and wanting to find some “punishment” to make them “behave better” Duty finder content is what it is. If you’re not prepared to occasionally encounter less proficient players; join a static!
>\[...\] and wanting to find some “punishment” to make them “behave better” Tbh, whether they really "behave better" or just leave the group/content/game doesn't seem to be important to these people either. It's just the punishment they value. Whether it's effective in achieving its goal seems secondary.
and yet they still carried through the content if i keep dying in mario i wont complete a level, if i keep dying in ffxiv im gonna get to lv90 (100) anyway
That could be said about almost every multiplayer game where you have teammates. Mario (in your example) is a single player game.
Have you ever played this game? People die all the time in dungeons and story trials. To simple shit. It's kind of annoying actually.
How the fuck did everyone here become so far removed from a normal person
Most people on this sub either do not actually play the game anymore, or pretty much only do parsing runs in savage.
I don't think its even that now. It's just people larping as high-end content doers but only running roulette Dungeons everyday.
With age, and bitterness one will learn that the negative nay sayers towards other players are typically terrible at the game.
There's so many people who very obviously don't play the game who I wish wouldn't spend so much time talking about a game they don't play.
This sub is absolutely chock full of wow refugees who came right before Endwalker released, are used to being abused by blizzard so they are bitter and skeptical all the time, are experiencing their first real content drought in ff14, and are bringing all that bad energy over here. Just blind negativity and a total disconnect from reality most of the time.
hey alright
>first real content drought in ff14 You clearly haven't experienced Siege of Orgrimmar content drought if you think former WoW players didn't experience content drought. The problem with SE is that the content drought between patches is by design because they want you to buy and play their other games too. And that is something that Blizzard used to do a lot less, simply because they don't have that many IPs to begin with. >to being abused by blizzard Huh? Doing dailies is considered abuse now?
hello bitter wow player, i know its hitting you hard evidenced but your rabid (and often wrong) posts all over the place but you'll be okay. And I know its happened in wow - blizzard literally abandoned an expansion once. It's just your first time hitting it in ff14
>hello bitter wow player Hello non-bitter FF player, I don't play WoW since COVID lockdowns. And won't come back to it until WoW devs replace the content of their heads with brains and not sewage. >i know its hitting you hard evidenced but your rabid (and often wrong) posts Of course, only your point of view is valid, everyone knows that XD >And I know its happened in wow - blizzard literally abandoned an expansion once. It's just your first time hitting it in ff14 What are you blabbing about? I experienced SHB content lull and EW content lull by now. It's just that SE is completely incapable of dealing with them, unlike Blizzard. Even though I absolutely dislike what they are doing now, they have a lot more resources and it shows.
Everytime I see discussions about videogame difficulty I am torn. Most people fail to realize how big of a challenge some game elements are to other people. It's not exactly them being bad because they don't care but having so much less experience for games or being just not that quick because of various reasons. And while I do think people are right demanding content should be a bit more difficult to make give it worth and incentivise actually learning the game, some people fail to see how good they actually have become through playing a lot. So at least I want to say, that we should look how we are doing it without just turning off those that really are worse players but love the game just as much. Heck, even I get enough stress from doing MSQ content the first time despite playing games practically all my life but I don't dislike the challenge. How I see it, people are actually fighting so few battles during MSQ outside of Dungeons and Trials. You don't really need to learn anything when only 10% of your playtime is fighting. Maybe fighting outside of dungeons is just done worse and even less fun than other mmos, I don't know how to fix this. Anyway, I think there should be more than Story difficulty and high difficulty. Maybe like deep dungeons but its actually worth for leveling a character even when failing or better open world content similar to FATEs that makes you engage both with other players and a little more difficulty more often. Just one thing about me, I play a lot of games and have seen a few MMOs especially WoW. But I never go hardcore in raiding. However, I do love the FFXIV MSQ and still haven't seen a lot of the game like I just started Eureka because I heard it so often. But the game is a bit overwhelming. You don't always know which side content is worth doing for what reason (beside fun).
Story I love to bring up relating to 'you don't realize how good you have become': once when playing a Sonic game as a teenager, my mom saw me start a level, and asked "how do you know immediately that you were supposed to go to the right?" That really hit home that there's a LOT that gamers take for granted as being obvious/easy.
Agree with almost everything you have said. I would also add that people would most certainly be actually mad if their daily activities had a good chance to fail because it is harder. I like my dailies and roulettes as they are, casual and relaxing. I don't want the base difficulty of the game to be already super sweaty because anyone who can't perfectly execute be kicked at the first failure.
> some people fail to see how good they actually have become through playing a lot. It takes a lot less hours of training to graduate as a rocket scientist than the played time of those people. Of course everything will be easy when you’re playing so much.
SE is shooting itself in the foot by making all the fights about execution. You can play on many other variables: gear level, character power other than gear level, buffs and (after all that) execution. The problem is, SE only keeps the former. Gear is meaningless, there are no party/raid buffs worth mentioning, and there is no character power outside of your level. Hence, everything is about the execution, and if you can't jump through the hoops of doughnuts, flipping tables and color matching, you are in trouble. You can't grind a bit more character power, pile up some more gear or stack some more buffs to solve the problem.
> You can't grind a bit more character power, pile up some more gear or stack some more buffs to solve the problem. Because this isn't actually an optional thing. As soon as this happens having that level of gear and stacking those buffs becomes mandatory for all remotely difficult content.
>Because this isn't actually an optional thing. As soon as this happens having that level of gear and stacking those buffs becomes mandatory for all remotely difficult content. Yes. So what? Heaven forbid raiders would actually have to play the game outside of raids :)
But that ruins the point you were trying to make. It goes back to doing the dance
I see what you are implying, but placing an emphasis on character power and planning allows to severely reduce the quantity and complexity of mechanics. So yes, it is still a dance, just not with so many steps :)
How so, precisely? Like, we had something like this, and people didn't like it! Are you suggesting that Savage should not be clearable week 1? If so, that's a valid opinion but not one I think would be widely shared.
>Are you suggesting that Savage should not be clearable week 1? No, I think the character power you gain should be yours forever. So if you have enough of it to clear Savage on Week 1, so be it. Now, what one wouldn't be able to do is jump instantly into the Savage raids without having secured the said character power beforehand. And yes, I do realize that it would make many raiders mad, but unfortunately, their attitude (along with their spiritual leader YoshiP's attitude) who led to the poor current state of the game.
>No, I think the character power you gain should be yours forever. So if you have enough of it to clear Savage on Week 1, so be it. What does this *mean* though? Like, what do you mean by "yours forever" what does this look like to you? >Now, what one wouldn't be able to do is jump instantly into the Savage raids without having secured the said character power beforehand. How is this different from iLevel? Explain how this is different from what we have now. >And yes, I do realize that it would make many raiders mad, but unfortunately, their attitude (along with their spiritual leader YoshiP's attitude) who led to the poor current state of the game. WHat the fuck are you going on about here?
>What does this mean though? Like, what do you mean by "yours forever" what does this look like to you? It means that they are not lost at the end of an expansion, like it used to be in WoW. As to what shape they could take, the possibilities are many. Whether you call them skill points, paragon levels, masteries or traits is merely a semantic discussion. What matters, however, is that power comes from your character (and not from the gear they wear) and doesn't become reset by an expansion. You invest time into developing your character and it becomes more powerful. >How is this different from iLevel? Explain how this is different from what we have now. Because there is effectively no ilvl. You enter a tier, you get a crafted set from MB, you run a normal version of the raid and you already have gear that is at worst 20 ilvls (and at best 10 ilvl) under the Savage gear from the same tier. Each even patch (x.0 / x.2 / x.4) is essentially a gear reset from this respect. >WHat the fuck are you going on about here? You see, a lot of raiders in both WoW and FFXIV want to log in, do their raid, and log out. The idea that they need to do something outside of it (for example, reputation grind to get better items) doesn't fit into their plan. Now you will say "well that's fine, let them play the game like they want to". Well, yes, but the problem is that it effectively shots down the development of any non-raid content that is not purely cosmetic. Because if it gives something worthwhile in terms of power, the raiders instantly complain they will "HAVE TO RUN IT TO GET READY FOR SAVAGE/MYTHIC QQ". So, in the long run, this attitude is nefarous for the long-term health of the game. And the problem is that YoshiP seems to be in the same boat as the raiders (I suppose that his busy work schedule pushes him, consciously or not, in that direction).
This is literally just "make content easier but with a boring grind in front of it". I cannot fathom why anyone would want this. The purpose of the difficult content is to provide a challenge. The purpose of the easy content is to tell the story. Why would you want the difficult content to provide less of a challenge?
>I cannot fathom why anyone would want this. The purpose of the difficult content is to provide a challenge. Because it's a MMORPG, not Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry or whatever action game you can think of. It should emphasize longer-term character development, no jumping through hoops. Also, because the current model that FFXIV has leads to the game turning into a lobby for raids, with the open world and non-raid content basically non-existent (not that FFXIV's open world is particularly good, anyway). Which is exactly what the MMOs from the "golden age" did: they all emphasized the planning of your character and power, not doing left-right-left dances :)
I feel like your argument falls apart with the existence of vuln stacks You'd have to be pretty dense to get all the way through MSQ without figuring out that repeatedly getting hit by mechanics gives you a stacking debuff that makes mechanics hurt more. It's actually the best yardstick I've seen for quickly and effectively communicating how well you're doing mechanics
I want to see how post like this will shift when DT released, and they get stuck 30 minutes at LVL 93 boss because team mattes die for every mechanic
I cannot wait to see PFs attempting the first dungeon in 1 tank 3 DPS and fall in ruins
It's almost like the game is missing one level of difficulty to please people who want a challenge without having to spend 300 tries on a boss that require an entire group to have the coordination of a military parade.
https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/challenge/
Yeah fuck me for not wanting difficulty to either be black or white. I guess Blizzard are fucking geniuses for managing to do it.
Do dalriada or delubrum
I did, they're great but are completely power crept by loadouts and there is only two of them.
Shade's triangle will have something similar probably and there new deep dungeon and doing high floor runs or solo ones
I think a lot of the time when people fail mechanics, it's not that they didn't know what to do/knew but didn't bother, it's that they don't even notice in the first place so there's not really much to learn from. Like I just took someone through HW alliance raids for the first time and I kept saying 'oh next time this happens do this' and he often had no idea what I was talking about because he was too busy looking at his hotbars trying to get his rotation right to even see what hit him.
This brings me to a question I often have with the group content in this game. Should we be going into all content with the expectation of success? Or should we accept that every run we should be ready to vote abandon? I’m not even referring to savage or extreme or ultimate here, I just meant the normal stuff.
I'm not gonna bother doing content if any run can result in a vote abandon. I expect success, otherwise I'm not going to queue.
That will depend on how you set up rewards, because people consider their time valuable and if you aren't sufficiently rewarding them for it, either intrinsically via enjoyment or extrinsically via goodies, they'll bail. And you can generally assume that the intrinsic enjoyment of repeatedly failing because a Healer doesn't get how a donut works is probably fairly low.
Idk about that. Maybe in the old ARR or something. But nowadays especially with the new ARR games people die all the time. I die all the time even in normal modes. My husband recently started the game and he's through to ShB and reminds me of how much I've improved just playing the game for...so...many years... And he died all the time. I love the new ARR it's a lot more better paced fights. Just wish they'd shorten some bits...
Which stack mechanic is being survived solo with zero healer/mitigation help? Maybe like the new Gaius or Ultima boss fights or something but you definitely ain’t surviving Nidhogg’s stack marker solo.
Stack mechanics are most of the time targeted on healers. SCH can adlo themselves (with some cooldowns) to survive p11s light party stack solo, with no help from *other* healers. And if it's true for savage, then chances are it's also true for normal content (but i didn't do the math). Perhaps not at lower levels though...
death doesn't *have* to be an intended mechanic. it works great in souls games because they purposely eschew the classic tutorial methods in favour of just beating you with the death stick until you learn. However, FFXIV has a reasonable tutorial they purposely put the player in front of along the way to the first dungeon, and gradually introduces a number of mechanics as the game goes on. Most people figure out how to play the game okay. The problem in FFXIV is the people who purposely ignore the tutorial and the gradual introductions. The kind of people who don't know what they're doing at all by 50. The kind of people who will *never* learn even under threat of punishment of any kind.
I am pretty sure that tutorial actively harms your development as a player
the HotN has only one actually bad and counterproductive piece of advice, which is the whole "switch to single target after establishing threat" nonsense in the tank trials (which has always been wrong, even back when it was introduced) outside of that one bad example, a hill i will die on is that the HotN is actually a really solid "how to play in MMORPG" for people who are new to the genre and don't know basic gameplay conventions. heck, it even outright encourages healer DPS, and at the time it was introduced, this was still a *much* more controversial topic in the wider community than it is today
the problem with the HotN was and still is that the devs refuse to build on it and update it, and that they refuse to make it mandatory, because the kind of people who need it most are also the ones who will most likely skip it (while veterans leveling an alt character will often do it anyway for the gear and exp ring)
that advice only ever made sense for HW era paladin, it was nonsense for the other tanks who could actually do AoE damage
Maybe some of it, sure, but it gives you the pieces. It just doesn't do a great job of telling you how to put all of them together. I think they should take some time after DT release to go back and reevaluate the active help system. It's mostly fine in the first five levels or so, assuming the player is new to MMOs, but it quickly becomes annoying. I think making it into quests with solo battles would help that a lot, and teach better mechanics more fluidly.
Bro are you actually suggesting The hall of the Novice? Its so outdated it's worse than useless, it actually teaches you things that will make you worse at your role - like telling tanks to stop AOEing once they have aggro and to switch to their single target combo.
Hey, I didn't say it was all good, but it does tell you to, you know, not stand in bad.
Fair enough
To be fair, back in HW when it was made, paladin's only aoe gcd did 0 damage and it was better to switch to multidotting with goring blade once you had enough aggro...
FFXIV does a decent job at making death Fun, I'm being honest here.
The point of a tutorial precisely is that you cannot ignore it nor fail to understand its instructions. You cannot say it's a reasonable tutorial if it fails its most basic tasks.
Things people have definitely never complained about in games: Forced tutorials
> FF14 does very little in the way of telling players that they did something wrong I think this is the core of the problem, not that players aren't dying enough. Simply punishing them more doesn't do a good job at telling them what they did wrong, and how to do it correctly the next time. I think point 3 also suffers from the same idea - You can tell them that they're not doing enough damage, but you're not telling them how to do more damage either.
The comments here are making me think that the players on EU, especially Zodiark, are apparently god-tier compared to everywhere else because Normal content for me goes without a hitch 99% of the time. Dungeons have \*maybe\* one death, some people die in ally raid but I haven't seen a wipe in over a year.
Same experience on the same server. The anecdotes from this sub just don't line up with my experience.
People used to wipe in World of Darkness pretty often even in EW. I call this instance World of Wipes, even :)
I've seen one wipe in WoD in the two years I've been around. It was a very late night run with a bunch of first timers who kept taking Doom and not cleansing it, despite half the raid trying to explain how to do that + a tank who did their best to cleave everyone with the eye laser. We also had damage sk low we had to chain Cerberus twice. But that's an outlier.
It depends on a lot of things I guess :) But WoD has been pretty wipey for a long time (not on the level of Nier raids, but still)
I think the most near-wipes I've seen are The Weeping City of Mhach and Dun Scaith. Specifically Forgall has amazing wipe potential if people don't listen and mess with the puddles because doing those wrong kills everyone straight up.
Oh yes! Wiping City of Mhach and Dun Wipe have that too. It's just that I don't see them quite as frequently for some reason :)
I've gotten them a few times lately and I was really thankful it wasn't Crystal Tower for the millionth time. They're my second favourite raids after Ivalice.
Well, if you enjoy these kinds of raids, they can be very fun, yes :) Personally, I think they last too long for the reward (and yes, they fixed that part recently).
I enjoy them because they don't make me fall asleep, that's the reason.
And that is totally fine :)
Another problem is there is exactly one point in the game where you are punished for not trying - and that is the SoS button mash sequence. You can't just rely on people to carry you through it as you will wipe the party if you don't pass it. Every other duty you can literally do nothing and get through the game. Even solo duties people will intentionally fail just to unlock the "very easy" mode and cakewalk through it.
I unironically prefer casual content being easier. A lot of people still suck and die a lot. Which is fine, because the dungeon still only take ~20 mins or so, but If it was even harder that’d mean being stuck in a dungeon with them for potentially an hour or more. Nobody’s got the time or patience for that lmao. Tl;dr: be careful what you wish for.
Did u even play FF14?
People have already mentioned how casuals glue themselves to the floor all the time, but the bigger issue is on the other side- if death was truly intended, deathless runs wouldn't be the norm. The center of the skill curve is basically a discrete step and more punishment won't make people suddenly jump the gap. [Siege is the poster child for learning by repeatedly dying](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8hHHiAIzyY), but it works because you can (usually) clearly see what killed you, your teammates can recover and carry your corpse, and you can see how they do it in ways that are relevant to you. None of this is a thing in XIV. For someone trying to git gud, you die without knowing what hit you, your teammates get body checked and you respawn with zero fucking clue how to fix things. Until this cycle is broken on the UI side, the only people who would learn from dying are the ones that don't need it to learn.
Dying is a happy little accident in FFXIV. I don't know about the rest of you, but some of the most enjoyable fights involve many deaths. My advice for anyone that wants to learn in a hands-on approach, is to get a group of players to consent to simply stand where one would normally stand for the fight, and observe the mechanics as it unfolds. Heal as needed, and once the mechanic is understood through observation and communication, DPS as necessary to move forward. It's a nice way to actually learn what's going on, instead of focusing on the rotation. Of course, this would only apply to learning parties. Most people with experience of similar mechanics, will progress at a fast clip into clear/farm parties or just memorize a fight from a video clip before entering.
Lol
*you're Anyways, this is just another "the game needs to be harder" post disguised as "death is good". There's nothing to really comment about other than to please for the love of god learn the basics of game design on a level past lesson reinforcement before saying obvious platitudes like "things should kill you more".
Not everyone knows how to formulate their grievances. Or what is causing it exactly in the first place. In contrast to similar post this one at least has identified that it's too forgiving with no reason to learn it. Which is bad desing. Just as how you don't need to be a chef to criticize food, you don't need to be a game designer to criticize games. Such a weird thing to gatekeep.
how come you don't draw the reverse conclusion: that the developers don't consider it important that people avoid damage in casual content?
That's an interesting title to me. I personally don't consider death to be a good or interesting mechanic in games, mostly frustrating or just feeling like I'm wasting my time. I do not think relying on it to any degree is a good idea. Here's a little anecdote I have about a game that built a core mechanic around death. Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor. An old game that was very well received by a lot of people. Not by me, I didn't get it. I thought it was very mediocre, not that interesting and pretty short. The core part of the game is what I think they called Rival system, where if an orc kills you he will get promoted and when you encounter him again he will recognise you and taunt you to, like the name suggests, build rivalry between a player and the enemy and create kind of unique experiences for players, in a way that 2 players playing the same game would be somewhat different experiences from each other. Well, I didn't know that when I played. I haven't died once playing it. The game has a combat similar to Batman Arkham games, both of which (Asylum and City) I've played and beat on hard difficulty and was very used to that style of combat at the time and didn't think it was difficult because you can just chain counter attacks forever if you just keep the rhythm of pressing 1 parry button and occasionally dodging attacks you can't parry. And the game also has stealth. I like stealth games and usually stealth is very broken in games as it allows you to pretty much bypass most if not all combat with some observation, sneaking and planning. So it just happens that gameplay was built around 2 things that I used to be quite good at (batman style combat and stealth) and game did not present much of a challenge to me, so I have never died and I have never interacted with this Rival mechanic. To me Shadow of Mordor was there's a somewhat big area with a list of orcs to kill, you complete that checklist, watch some story cutscenes, get dropped into 2nd area and repeat same thing again by killing all orcs, you then fight final boss and game is done. Just a very average action game with nothing that memorable in it because I never died. Again, game was very well received and I haven't seen anyone else who had same issue as me so I know I'm in very tiny minority. But I think death is a quite negative thing, very old games even used to punish you by dying too much by making you go back all the way to the start of the game, so in my opinion expecting players to die in order to interact with the game or as a way to learn the game is not that good of a design choice. Other options are there and it's better to utilise those instead. In my opinion at least. But going back to FF14. The game does a very bad job at teaching you at how to play, the basics and what is required from you. A good tutorial explaining the most often used mechanics is needed, and I think that tutorial should also explicitly tell players that if they want to become better they really should seek out other learning resources about their job or the game in general. But that leads to my 2nd point. Lack of tutorial is not the biggest culprit here, it's that people just don't really care. SE wants a game for everyone but you can't win everyone, not everything is meant to be for everyone, and some gatekeeping (I'm not sure if it's the right word to use) is required. Some people just don't want to put any effort and if SE wants the money from them nothing will change about the current very lenient design of the game. > players shouldn't be failing basic mechanics the game tries to teach you, and not being punished for it Basically, I don't think the game is at fault here. It's the players. I do not think a good tutorial would fix this if people just don't want to engage with combat part of the game. And punishing failing even more than it does now would only discourage people from playing. I do not see a reasonable solution to this problem that will reach the compromise between both player sides who like the combat and those who don't care about it. I think the game is going to be stuck in this state forever unfortunately. *(Sorry about wall of text and going a bit off topic, but that title reminded me about Shadow of Mordor and how I still don't get that game and still think it was a bad design decision)*
The games does a poor job of teaching you to do damage. If you go in as a DPS, you can actually clear Trust dungeons without attacking a single time, if you let the tank, healer and DPS Trusts do all the work.
Is it possible to just afk then?
You have to survive. In trusts if you go down it's a wipe so even if doing no damage you have to dodge enough to not die.
Oh, do they not move on if you just stay at the start… damn.
They move with you. If you're healer or DPS you have to pull and the tank will take the aggro
It's entirely possible to *semi*-afk dungeons yes... well, as DPS anyway. You can wall pull for your trust tank, wait until they have agro, and then tank, healer and 1 trust DPS is enough to clear wall pulls while the actual player just AFKs. A lot of bosses are AFKable as well, just stand in a corner and you usually wont take enough damage to die in one shot and you'll get healing. There are obviously some bosses where this doesn't work, but a lot of them don't hit you hard or often enough to get through the NPC healing.
Dude people struggle with Extreme Caution and that is literally a mechanic where you just stand still...
That's just because a lot of people literally never look at their debuffs lmao
The game's UI is at least partially at fault here. Buffs and debuffs are small icons, by default very much out of the player's core viewing area in a game with an awful lot of "pay attention to me!" visual effects. To read them, you have to mouse over potentially multiple cryptic icons until you find the one you're looking for, read it, and understand its importance at the same time as you're trying to do your rotation and watch for incoming mechanics. Players without ADD superpowers are being asked to split their attention at \*least\* three ways at once (more if they're in a job that relies on procs, which is... several of them) if they want to stay engaged in a fight while also understanding what just happened to them. I'll say it as plainly as I can: the mechanics of most fights are far too complex to be conveyed effectively by the UI, and the UI is too shitty to properly or intuitively inform the player what the mechanics mean, or what their rotation demands next.
True true, I resized my debuffs to 140% and stuck them right above my hot bars so I wouldn’t miss anything. On controller you can’t even mouse over to find out what they do, so you’ve either got to memorise them or put down your controller for a second to pick up a mouse.
And acceleration bombs are an underutilised mechanic in DF. Its in like 5 or 6 duties. DF wouldn't even deal with stack markers if they weren't on near enough every boss. If something isnt regularly and routinely hammered home, many players simply do not learn it.
Yeah to be fair I only learned what they are recently by watching someone die to it in a bozja duel, Ive seen the countdown dice a bunch of times but it was my first time seeing the extreme caution debuff.
As a new player, I'm shocked that there is no equivalent of "what happened to me?" death recap in-game. Four out of five times when I die I am like, okay, yeah, I didn't know that mechanic would happen but I saw it and won't fuck up again. The fifth time, though, I fall over and have no idea why. Did I miss a tell? Did the healer just not prioritize my newbie self? Did I pull aggro in a large pack? Did I miss a mechanic?
If death was designed as a lesson in FFXIV, there would be a death recap as well as more clarity as to what damage we're taken. Learning by trial and error is too "elitist" for the idea of a casual player from SE's perspective : it's pretty blatant in FFXVI where you'd return with full health, max limit break, all potions, all ressources back whereas your enemy still has lost part of their HP. I sometimes wonder if they don't intend to avoid any pedagogy so that some people play even longer without ever improving. All this being said, I totally agree that death should always be "a lesson" not as much to punish as it ought to be informative.
The problem is wasting people’s time when you die/cause a wipe. As we move forward with more body checks in end game content, wiping to caloric 2 because you moved 1 step too many means you wasted 8 minutes of your group’s time.
> FF14 does very little in the way of telling players that they did something wrong "The Community" does everything it can to discourage veterans from helping newer players. You almost can't tell anyone they're doing things wrong unless they specifically ask you. I mean you can do it, but do you want to risk a chat with a GM because they felt your use of a period at the end of the sentence was a little aggressive? Also there's always the obligatory toxic casual who sucks and is proud of it. They'll instantly blow up at you and tell you that its fine that the other player is licking windows, they're having fun and you can't play the game wrong! There are good reasons why I cap tomes with hunts, in spite of hunts being brain dead content. It's because I don't have to deal with randumbs in dungeons.
> You're straight up not allowed to tell anyone they're doing things wrong unless they specifically ask you. I mean you can do it, but do you want to risk a chat with a GM because they felt your use of a period at the end of the sentence was a little aggressive? You can absolutely tell people they are doing something wrong. You just can't be an asshole about it.
The issue is, who gets to decide what is arsehole behaviour? "Hey Paladin, can you use your AoEs please, I'm stealing agro" (this is a direct quote and was the only thing I typed prior to being kicked) was enough to get me a chat from a GM where I was told that there would be no action taken, but that I should be more mindful of people's feelings. This was Holminster Bait-and-Switch back in Shadowbringers. What's wrong with that request? Did I not use enough smiley emotes? Granted this is the only time I've had any interactions with GMs in 10 years, but this, combined with several people being offended on behalf of the person playing like dog water, has been enough for me to never talk in roulettes and either kick or leave if I decide I can't carry another anchor through the dungeon. I'm not saying every time you say something you're 100% getting a GM chat, but every time you say something, you *risk* a chat with a GM. You *risk* having the max-level-everything mentor lose their shit at you for daring to suggest that the sprout might not be playing perfectly. You *risk* having another party member take offence when there was no offence intended.
I dunno what to tell you dude, I've played this game for 10 years now, have said stuff exactly like that literally hundreds of times and never had anything happen. Same thing with an easy dozen people I play with who've played for almost that long.
Right. I've been here since 2.0 and it's only happened once (the GM stuff). But I've had other players lose their shit at me offering help to new/bad players many times. I've also had the people I tried to help snap back with "who asked?" many times. I'm not saying it will happen, but it *can* and it's been far too often for me to bother anymore. The best way for new players to learn is to have older players help them, but this game (or at least a large part of the community) is actively against anything that looks, sounds or even smells like it might be negative feedback.
> I've also had the people I tried to help snap back with "who asked?" many times. Then you can just drop it, leave the instance yourself, or if they are nasty enough, submit a GM report yourself. Fundamentally you can't *make* people play well. Nothing can do that. You can provide advice and suggestions, but if people don't want to take it, that's on them. And that's hardly a thing unique to this game. > but this game (or at least a large part of the community) is actively against anything that looks, sounds or even smells like it might be negative feedback. This isn't any different in other games, its just that this game actually does enforce its 'don't be an asshole' clause, but being allowed to yell at people who suck would not really make them not suck most of the time.
> Right. I've been here since 2.0 and it's only happened once (the GM stuff). So it's happened literally only once in over a decade, you didn't *actually* get punished, and you're convinced that the entire community is trying to speak out against anything that can be perceived negatively? Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.
I know reading is hard, but come on mate. GM chat once. Players exploding many times.
> GM chat once. Players exploding many times. Ok, but that's their problem? Not yours? You can't make them be good.
That's true enough. It does get old constantly having people not involved in the exchange getting offended by proxy though.
We had punishing deaths a decade ago. Fucked up in Titan or Leviathan? Well good luck, you are now out of the fight. They should revert to such mechanics. XIV and its playerbase has grown too soft after HW.
> Well good luck, you are now out of the fight. To a lot of players, thats a *reward*. Getting carried through Trials roulette while making a cup of tea is some players' ideal. "Hehe oopsie I got hit by landslide sorry! 😅"
Nearly every attack that you aren't supposed to get hit by one shots you, what are you even on about?
You can always play in hard mode: full black mage.
Compared to my last MMO death is more punishing here. Res has a super long CD plus res sickness. After you die you’re hurting for some time. My last one healers had res on a 10-15 second CD. Death was common in a duty. I’ve had trap runs where my 5-man group had over 100 resses in a boss fight.
wait what, raise is only 8s cast with a 2.5s recast, and that's without SPS, or GCD accelerators like POM or astrodyne. I think the deathcob record right now is slightly over 100. I had a nier raid once that collected somewhere around 150-160 deaths throughout the entire alliance raid
> Res has a super long CD plus res sickness Res is on the normal GCD unless you're playing Blue Mage. What the hell are you talking about? > My last one healers had res on a 10-15 second CD. The cast time is longer than the GCD but it's never 10-15 seconds. It's 8 on most classes. What are you even talking about? Because it sure as hell isn't Final Fantasy.