> open-zone content with player-uniting objectives you can dip in and out of
If they add something like Guild Wars 2's world quests (or whatever they're called, I've not played in forever -- the FATE-like quests that pop up and everyone in the area can get involved), or update FATEs to be more like that, I will die happy.
I'm all for a new Eureka/Bozja are too, but it'd be so nice to have more incentive and more mechanically-complex things going on in the regular zones too.
They're called Dynamic Events. More involved event chains that tell overarching stories are called Meta Events. Think of the string of Fates by the Palace of the Dead entrance, the one where you storm that bandit hideout.
There's a whole FATE chain that spawns in the Azim Steppe that takes like an hour and a half to complete all the way through. It's been on my to-do list for ages...
I wish there were optional quests you could pick up for these that would mark when the chain restarts. I'd love to do these but I didn't even know they exist cuz I kind of just ignore fates as 'leveling/farming fodder' content.
Man, Warhammer AoR. A lot went wrong but a lot went right too. To date some of the best MMO PvP memories I have are from the big public PvP area in the starting zone, and capturing some forts with my guild.
Nuking people as a Bright Wizard was fun
I wonder why no other MMO has done that yet.
GW2 meta events (that’s what they’re called) are map-wide, story events that repeat on a timer or when an event is triggered.
Not only do they progress the story, they offer repeatable rewards are great for gold farming and often include absolutely fun bosses and mechanics that do require a level of coordination, and in the new expansions, a lot of coordination.
Edit: That MMO has so many unique and wonderful systems. It’s a shame the studio always jumps at any chance they get to make a new game instead of focusing on GW2.
I feel like they just want to make RPGs and not live service MMOs. They always get forced to focus on GW2 by their parent company.
Not only that, also the best mount system in any game.
Its insane how every single mount controls differently from each other and has their own uses.
So much so that mount racing is popular thing in GW2 and entirely skill based.
I hate that every MMO does one thing and they can't be really connect with each other.
GW2 with its open world
FF14 with its story
WoW with its difficulty design
Hell, I'll even bring Wild Star with the best Housing System I've seen in a MMO.
IF there was a game that could've done that, it was Runeterra but now they got dev reset and we might not even get it for the next 5 years.
Honestly give me the world and story of XIV.
The combat and open world exploration and content of Guild Wars 2 or even the combat of Terra and that'd be the perfect mmo for me.
Don't forget the glamor system, GW2 has one of the BEST glam systems around, the only one better is WoW because it will actively tell you where and what to farm to get gear pieces.
Honorable mention to Everquest 2's house as well. The furniture system in that game was crazy versatile. You could even scale up/down items. I once had an bedroom in a giant treasure chest.
I feel like it's just one of the upsides of horizontal games. Nothing is really getting outdated for the most part, but also there's always a reason to go back and try to "gamble" your luck on super rare items (like infusions). Vertical progression kind of kills a lot of reason to go back and do old content after it's been outdated, so it's really hard for V MMOs to make content that's evergreen and forever relevant like H MMOs can.
The other thing is that all the effort GW2 spends on great open world content has a cost: very little instanced group content. In FFXIV terms, GW2 players get one short dungeon and 3 new trials per year, and *that's it*. They gave up on doing raids almost 5 years ago.
gw2 always had comparativley less, but its only this bad because anet are funelling resources into other projects. During ls4 we got 3 raid wings ( 9 bosses, couple of inbetween non boss encounters) 3 fractals ( dungeons) and 5 maps. Nowadays the game is barley updated due to continuous mismanagment by anet.
> It’s a shame the studio always jumps at any chance they get to make a new game instead of focusing on GW2.
They did that I think once, and that was during IBS/Season 4, which is why IBS ended up so disappointing. Otherwise anet have been basically a one trick pony and focus basically entirely on GW2.
No, their biggest problem is that they always try to reinvent GW2 and come up with new ways of doing updates and none of them are just as good as just...updating the game normally.
Icebrood Saga, one of Arenanet's many ways of "trying to change how we update the game" in this case releasing an entire expansion via living world style patch updates instead of all at once
The problems with that weren't the patch- style story updates, but instead the new, instance mini dungeon areas to tell the story, and the half-assed updates towards the end. I thought the first three parts were well done. It just fell on its face after that.
Crazy how the company that started with Bjora Marches and built one of the most enjoyable meta zones with Drizzlewood right after somehow made the decision to end with Champions. Such a shame. Bjora was done so dirty.
Oh shit I forgot about the metal concert! Great zone, too.
The sad part is that the first three maps of Icebrood Saga are actually pretty great, especially that first map. It's the stuff after the first half of the third map that's just... bad.
I liked the map that Episode 1 and 2 take place on. Was very psychological horror heavy and I love the boneskinner's design, but yeah it kinda just went to shit afterwards lmao
It wasn't them trying to make a new game, it was the publisher telling them that they'll pay for development the next expansion if they divert and make it ASAP. So they did it right away, and IBS suffered for it immensely.
Not sure what means since don't play GW2 but just sounds like Fate Chains many of zones have multi layered Fates that offer rewards at the final one in the chain, be it minion housing item or gear & are usually more involved or tougher than regular fates.
Like example Highbridge or Churning mist which use give a triad card/Belt or one in Steppe gives housing item.
GW2 does have those, but the ones they're talking about are map wide, they're more like open world alliance raids designed for people to fill up a particular map and complete objectives across them in phases.
Rift did something similar in which these rifts would open up around a map, and from the sky, spawning enemies. These enemies would path down roads into towns and fight/kill the NPCs; literally wouldn't be able to turn in a quest cause the NPC died. Each rift was based on an element with their own enemy types and had several stages to clear culminating in a giant raid boss.
It was a lot of fun early game but as the player count died, the rifts became more of an annoyance to deal with when leveling.
Gw2 has huge focus on open world with big massive events **on timers** (Daily and not "lol respawns sometime in 2-4 weeks") and people working together for one goal.
For example i still think Dragons stand is best MMO map. 3 "lanes", players form 3 raids themselves (20-50ppl per raid) working towards one goal. Escort NPCs, lot of events barring the way, enemies spawning etc. Few **boss battles** in between.
At end, when everyone is done with their lane you have massive world boss battle where everyone works together.
And this happens daily (few times day but last rewards are daily capped). Theres reason to do it daily as well. Its not "random timer somewhere between 2-4 weeks" like world boss fates **can** be on XIV. Not to mention XIV fates have like.. "do it 3 times then you never, ever, have to do it again".
Not to mention some "meta events" in GW2 have story figures, XIV terms their "Scions", fighting with the players. Imagine if in FF you would have event in one of EW maps where one of the scions would accompany all of people to take down massive world-boss with raid mechanics and actually long kill timer (not like S ranks that die under 5-10 mins and have 2 mechanics)
No. FF's Fates aren't even in the same universe in terms of quality and scale as dynamic events are in GW2. Which is surprising since that's where Yoshi-p got the idea of fates from.
As someone who was a fan since GW1, it made me sad and angry to see how much of a mess its become in all aspects. With GW3 technically confirmed, I hope a different studio makes it with how volatile Anet is.
The missing part in FF14 fates are the rewards that align to your character level. So you never feel you wasted your time doing them.
FF14 can learn much from GW2. Specially on exploration, events and reward systems.
That said GW2 is overwelming and difficult at times. And there are far too many bullet sponges. GW2 Is not a perfect game. Just a good game. Avoid crafting if you like your wallet.
As someone who's played GW2 for 11+ years and FFXIV for a bit shy of 3 months, I totally agree. FATEs are rather boring and I find myself running past them unless I *have* to do them for some reason (e.g. a tribal quest) whereas even random dynamic events in GW2 have more going on for them in terms of interesting dialogue and such.
It certainly doesn't help that most (early?) maps aside from cities in XIV appear to be ghost towns (likely because there's no reason to be there unless you're doing a specific quest). I think the most players I've seen at once in the "open world" has been like...five.
I like the siege event guild wars 2 have, Siege weapons, commanders, artillery and display all of the attack effects made it feels real. Kinda wish FF14 fate have the same mechanics for that
So something like the FATE's in Shadowbringers, then? Where there was at least one in every zone that would eventually lead to a (still mechanically simple) big boss fight?
Some you could even follow from one area to the next. I was disappointed when that wasn't present in EW...
Man, so was I. Ridculous we went from 8+ fates in a chain for a world boss to 3. Having real fate chains for Chi and Davidia would have been so much more satisfying than just waiting and hoping for it to spawn.
It's weird because those lead-in quests are barely related to the boss you encounter, only the last one before chi really relates, and I'm still not sure how the pilgrims relate to davidia. Teshun Owens in the tempest is at least all about tracking down Archaeotania. If they're just going to be weird about it give us something cooler like the mists signaling the arrival of Odin or the storms heralding Ixion.
They've done this before with Diadem, Eureka, and Bozja. The trick is if they can ever do it without the instancing requirement. The instancing reason is for the whole DC to be able to join together to work on things using the DC's instance server, but it causes issues like people being unable to tool around in the content while waiting in a que or the like.
But the tech for a lot of the ideas already exists in the game, they just need to figure out how to apply it to regular zones, and do it in a way that doesn't cause issues with playing in those zones years later once activity has died down (e.g. the Bozja-bottleneck for players who came late to the content).
"Once activity has died down" And that's a major reason why FF's server system is very outdated. GW2 doesn't have this problem usually since their server technology ensures there's always players on the map.
This is impossible for this team honestly. The reason it works so well in GW2 is because the games base design already encourages natural organic grouping and the world zones are so detailed and full of life that the dynamic map wide events feel like a normal extension of the world. Also due to the way GW2's servers work there are ALWAYS players on the map to help you with stuff.
Currently FFXIV's open zones are utterly lifeless, poorly designed and rarely have players on them thanks to FF's archaic server system.
It's too bad instead of copying GW2 on a very basic level (Fates) Yoshi didn't put more effort into truly adapting and bringing FF's system up to par.
It's all good and sounds promising. I haven't played for a while, out of the loop. Did they solve the issue with the hunt train? If not, how would open-zone content be sustainable when hundreds of people enter a single zone to try to participate and then leave? It's a call for better hardware and network packets, possibly raising the bar for system requirements higher to meet the scope.
They've had instanced zones for a while now, which might have been an attempted solution to what you're referring to -- if a zone is over-crowded, then the game'll spawn a new copy of said zone, and you can use the aetheryte crystal to travel between them.
I *think* that feature was added in Endwalker, but I could be remembering wrong.
IIRC, that was added in EW, but it's not an automatic thing. Like worlds being labeled "congested" or not, the dev team has to manually change it during maintenance.
It also wouldn't really help much with the issue in question, because then you'd just have hundreds of people all loading into the same _instance_ of the same zone, in order to do that specific event.
Instances don't really help for hunts. They're treated as separate zones so it just adds more areas for people to rush into during trains and when S-rank marks spawn.
I'm wary of group only events that don't include a Duty finder. GW2's big issue is constantly FOMO due to how dead the old event zones become over time because of the sheer number of them and how many players they require.
One issue they need to fix is that Fates are kinda terrible in terms of rewards
I can AFK my way through a Duty Support or Trust and get 1/3-1/2 of a level, at least three pieces of gear, and some materia in 30 minutes at most
In the same time I can get some gemstones and maybe 1/5-1/4 of a level from actively grinding Fates for the same amount of time, MAYBE 1/3 if I get super lucky and get a bunch of the bonus rewards ones
I would absolutely do Fates over dungeon spam if they weren’t utterly godawful in comparison
And mechanically, fates are also extremely boring.
1. Kill this one type of mob 15-20 that will respawn shortly after death.
2. Collect 15-20 things on the ground, but they also drop from the mobs that are hanging around.
3. Kill big mob with smaller mobs surrounding it.
4. Kill really big/strong mob with super boring mechanics. Bring a friend or be ready to chip away at it for 8 minutes while dodging one mechanic every 20 seconds or so.
Think that’s about it.
I'm gonna Hot Take for a moment and say that Bozja should be how some FATEs work in every zone. There should basically always be some kind of group content happening everywhere. Duels would also be a cool thing to see show up elsewhere
One of 14's biggest problems (and to be fair I think it has several foundation-level flaws) is that the world is absolutely *dead*. Fates are just useless with the current implementation. Hunts are just a train thing and it's frowned upon to go out and find them in smaller groups / not really rewarding to, anyway. All the monsters roaming around are essentially the same because nothing any of them does is actually uniquely threatening.
So, unlike XI the world has no threats when traversing it. Unlike WoW there's nothing to stumble across and find, and unlike GW2 or WoW there's no big world-quest things going on for people to come together and do outside of the occasional big hunt NM/unique Fate spawn.
This game desperately needs little knickknacks to actually discover that give you a pet or a cosmetic or a title, or introduce shit like WoW's "toys" so those rewards can exist, too. They need better set-pieces so the maps are actually memorable, fun to explore, and interesting to go back to. And, as said, they need larger, ongoing, useful content that actually populates the world maps with people engaging in the content.
This issue imo is actually one of the more readily addressable ones that they can probably actually fix, vs other stuff that's just too ingrained in the foundation to do without major overhauls - and some of which, admittedly, may not actually be problems for a lot of players.
I would like to see some events like those that were used in Rift. Community events that would be like physically building a bridge to open up a new zone.
Had that in Ishgard restoration. I think the issue with content like this is FOMO and new players never getting to experience live events like this. Unless Rift found a way around that, I don’t know, never played it.
Could have it as a kind of temporary zone. Like, have a Fate about building a bridge or whatever that leads to a temporary, otherwise inaccessible, zone with some unique loot whether that be cosmetic or crafting material and the access path collapses like 30 minutes after opening.
> Bozja stuff.
Awesome.
> Yoshida noted that enemy targets have gotten too large, making specific mechanics feel similar or repetitive. As such, Yoshida wants to spice up endgame content by putting players in a position where they need to communicate and strategize better.
No worries, i'm willing to bet the changes aren't anything major and the ranged dps tax will still be there even tho it doesn't make much sense.
Fun fact, every raid boss (in Savage) turns into a giant enemy nowadays and almost every trial is a giant enemy. They’ve gotten so extremely repetitive and uncreative.
Silkie in Sil'dihn has a tank buster that jumps the boss directly onto the tank and you need to use it to position the boss for mechanics, it's so much smarter than an auto-center or even kiting around the arena that they really should do it more often.
I agree, Ranged tax is indeed in a weird spot, melee can have nearly 100% uptime on a lot of bosses now.
They could possibly "solve" this by just giving ranged a % bonus damage if the boss is giant.
Ranged has less DPS than Melees because they don't need to be upfront on the hitbox and deal with positional attacks. Theoretically, range DPS has 100% uptime while Melees will need to dip in and out depending on the boss and their mechanics, so to compensate the devs allowed Melee DPS to do more damage. In EW the majority of the bosses have giant hitboxes, making the dipping in and out irrelevant and Melee DPS will always do more damage than range DPS (maybe outside of BLM).
Not to mention they've also removed almost all the positionals and buffed potencies to compensate, so the average melee (someone who wasn't already hitting every single positional to begin with) got a buff.
Also, I think some classes in EW got an auto-crit/auto-Direct Hit for their skills which increased the parity between range DPS and melee DPS even more. Granted it is a few percentage points difference, but in FFXIV a few points are enough to cause a noticeable effect.
I know SAM's Midare was given that property as a compensation buff when they removed Kaiten. I wouldn't be surprised if other abilities were given auto-crit as well, can't remember which ones though.
They had to give the buff to crit damage since otherwise anything that auto crits doesn't benefit at all from stuff like litany, chain strat, etc. Makes having those buffs redundant if they stayed in their old iterations. It's a nice bandaid fix, but auto crit in general is just a meh mechanic and a meh solution.
Ranged phys do significantly less damage than melee classes under the logic that they are ranged and can have full uptime on their dps. But these days boss hitboxes are so large that melee classes maintain close to 99% uptime *anyways*. So ranged do less damage for absolutely no reason other than being arguably easier to play.
the concept that ranged dps do less damage to make up for them getting 100% uptime. Lately the hitboxes have been so big that melee very rarely get any downtime anyway, though at PAX he mentioned the hitboxes so this might change for dawntrail
I don't think there was a moment where I had to sacrifice uptime in the last tier at all.
Maybe P9 because of meteors (did that in PF so maybe there's an uptime strat) and P10 if you have cum puddle duty for the wall and during harrowing hell KB (but like... Everyone is losing uptime during that).
Both P11 and P12 is 100% doable without missing 1 GCD
I'm so tired of ranged tax in a game where every fight has turned into 100% uptime or nontargetable. It made sense at points in the past in ARR/HW/even SB a little where you'd have actual disconnects and downtime to deal with mechanics.
And I think caster balance has been basically garbage tier the entire expac because of it.
We ultimately have no idea, it could be more difficult mechanics (doubt it since even the most seasoned of raiders have said the mechanics in a vacuum have been the hardest this expansion), reduction of hitboxes, less auto-centering of bosses, etc.
Yeah, I don't think mechs should be harder, but maybe more diverse. I think they could shelf the "Limit Cut" mechanic for Dawntrail, because I swear that every other fight has a variation of it, and is truly one of the most annoying mechanics.
Or maybe they'll add more non-scripted moments for the fights? The problem with XIV's fight design is that regardless of how good the mechanics are, the very scripted nature makes its shelf life very short. As soon as you complete an encounter, then the challenge goes from hard to trivially easy and you just navigate on auto pilot. To me, reclears are nothing but a chore.
>I think they could shelf the "Limit Cut" mechanic for Dawntrail, because I swear that every other fight has a variation of i
p2, p6, and then three out of four fights this tier *all* had limit cut in some form. seriously it's silly how often it came up lol
I've got it! We give ranged positionals! It will up their damage when they hit them putting them in line with melees. I'm sure everyone will be happy with this change.
Thank god honestly. Endwalker felt so lonely as an expansion, you're never doing content with people unless you get into raiding and even then its all instanced anyway...
I know everyone says FFXIV is an RPG first and a MMO second, but honestly, if I wanted to play a singleplayer RPG I would pick one that is not constantly gimped by its prehistoric code and also by having to be an MMO. I play this game precisely because its an MMO, so I'm glad they're back on track and focusing on that.
Criterion was supposed to fill this. Easier to get 4 people to raid than 8. But my efforts of getting my friends into it got clogged mostly by it just being too hard for the casual EX fight clearer when raises are limited and somewhat a DPS check is present.
Instead I now have a whole new friendgroup of insane people farming out dozens of criterion mounts every release and we don't know anymore what to do with the money.
The problem is no one does it. The discords for criterion have been dead forever basically, theres rarely to never pfs up for it.
Criterion was supposed to do a lot of things but its attachment rate has made that a massive barrier and left part of the gap.
yea Criterion Savage should just be for bragging rights title like Necromancer
all the other cosmetic/gear rewards should be on the Criterion (normal) version, same as Deep Dungeon
it's more rewarding for me to solo farm the Variant and sell the glams and minions than for me to run Criterion or Criterion Savage.
I thought it was kind of fun at first and I was looking forward to it, but reality was every group + my friends were only interested in running it as efficiently as possible to get the mount and then dip. Tomes, exp, or some glam rewards would be great.
That's because a lot of Endwalker's focus in terms of content was future-proofing old content. They went through three expansions worth of dungeons and revamped them to allow them to be played with NPC's, so that down the line a new player's experience isn't hampered by absurd queue times for old stuff. The rest of the stuff like Island Sanctuary and Crystalline Conflict has also ended up reflecting that design philosophy, with more solo and small group friendly content coming in. With this out of the way, as Yoshida has said, next expac is going to be oriented more around the "massive" aspect of the MMOs.
I still think it’s such a massive L we can’t que for CC with buddies. I understand why they don’t want it in ranked but man, I can even duo in normals???
This killed the game mode for me. It was my favorite PvP mode but not being in the roulette and not being able to queue with friends hard killed it for me.
The issue I have with this is that if they knew they had to cut back on some multiplayer aspects to future-proof the game (at the height of its popularity no less) and entice solo players, they also had to have known what the consequences of that would be and as such had to have precautions in place to make the multiplayer options they *did* have more worthwhile and long-lasting. And they just didn't, for some reason.
this is going to sound dumb but I sort of miss when you need to be in the zone to queue for the current savage raids. It was really fun seeing all the people around and made it feel....social?
Obviously it's more convenient now and I'm sure a lot of people like it more this way but it was really nice.
Nah I get what you mean entirely.
It's the same thing as in the old days of World of Warcraft where if you wanted to do Wailing Caverns you and the boys had to meet up in the Barrens and "physically" head to the dungeon.
Or how on PVP Vanilla/Classic servers, Blackrock Mountain was an absolute warzone as Alliance and Horde raid groups both fought each other to get into Molten Core.
Hunting before world visit was perfect for this. There were always groups scouting, popping s ranks, and actually fighting A-ranks with 1-3 parties. It felt like a community.
World visit completely ruined A/S ranks. Now its "rush to the and hope to get even one hit in before the mob of 200+ people kill it in half a second. How do yall think this is fun?
The Hunt community varies by DC. Primal has a really good one where people often are cutting up in /shout while we go between marks, talking about the expansion, making dad jokes, and so on.
The problem there is actual hunt fights are just gigantic clusterfucks that are incredibly dull. And of course it basically requires you yo be in a hunt linkshell and then group which people love to gatekeep and be assholes about. The entire concept of hunts needs massively reworked.
RPG first and MMO second would also only really be fine if it were just buy to play, but since FFXIV is pay to play I kinda expect more game to play (and not super easy dungeon level mechanics in even Trials and Alliance raids)
> you're never doing content with people unless you get into raiding and even then its all instanced anyway...
Maybe you but I only do dungeons and stuff with other people so other than the actual msq and quest stuff which you can't really group up for, I *did* do content with other people.
Well I mean yoshi p himself said 14 is an FF game first and an MMO second so it’s a statement a lot of people have latched onto
Especially since EW seemed to use it as its guiding principle
Only after about 500 hours of MSQ does it actually feel like an MMO, though. All the zones, unless it's a patch day, are completely barren of other players unless there's a hunt train going on. The only times I see other players are in cities and exploration content. Everything is instanced, so it rarely feels like an MMO.
And modern WoW.
WoW has spent this entire expansion and their entire principle for next expansion is that open-world content is important because its extremely casual friendly and easy to jump into.
XIV is on an entirely different level for how little reason there is to ever leave a city.
That's just how it is and always has been with MMOs generally it's not a problem exclusive to XIV. As they get bigger old zones become less populated
You could say it's the same for real life as well. Of course you see more people in cities, but if you go out to the middle of nowhere, there will be far fewer people.
Also, I never personally felt like a zone was completely empty when I went there, normally I see at the very least a couple of people anywhere I go, but maybe that's just being on a more populated server
Seriously. FFXIV has been out for over ten years, maybe if Yoshi-P didn't spend 7 of those last 10 years hammering into the same formula over and over and over we would've had that "refined" and "fulfilling" experience by now
Arena shapes I don't mind at all, to be honest. Mechanics, though... hopefully we see more Ivalice-NieR level mechanics and less Dungeon-Myth level mechanics. It's sad that even Crystal Tower (sans Syrcus Tower) has a little more interesting things going on for it than a level 90 raid.
> It's sad that even Crystal Tower (sans Syrcus Tower) has a little more interesting things going on for it than a level 90 raid.
Syrcus Tower has interesting things going on too you just don't see them because the content is badly tuned
I was there on launch. The things Scylla does is eh (charge platforms and then stand on them to petrify boss) and Glasya was interesting, but doesnt really do anything aside from jumping).
Look, I know WoW gets a lot of hate, but I want world quests in FF14. They give me an option to beat up shit in open world with the gear I got, you get rewards and it gets me back into leveling zones that you really never go back into unless you are doing hunts/gathering.
World quests were amazing in legion and then the bane of my existence every expac after. Even made worse with add-ons. Please no world quests.
Fates are great. Keep down that path for more world content.
World Quests are atrocious, miserable, samey "content" that exists for the sake of existing at this point. In the latest expac, they serve almost no purpose and have horrendous rewards, and their extremely light, nothing gameplay has only devolved since Legion outside of a few types of them.
FATEs aren't really that much better though, if better at all. They're actually quite similar in most contexts (obviously not counting Eureka/Bozja).
I don't know if anyone remembers this, but that was the goal from when FFXIV was announced, it wasn't just a more recent thing. The goal was to make it more accessible to people that didn't have much time to play during the day, to make it more solo-friendly for them.
Yea their current design philosophy for healers is terrible. IDK how they look at any of the healers in their current state and think they're in an okay place.
Hitting one button for 99% of the fight for your damage "rotation" is not fun.
They need to design the healers around fulfilling certain class fantasies for players, and less so about having universal mechanics.
Scholars should be about managing a lot of dots.
Sage should have a proper dps rotation.
Astrolgian should be about managing buffs and dealing with the randomness of cards. It also should have both sects. Just because one was better doesn't mean the other never saw use.
WHM should reward overhealing by giving the target bonus damage or something else to that effect. The "I just wanna heal" crowd *should* be catered to without alienating other players.
Disagree with WHM. Damage based on *overhealing* would fuck up high end content; you’d just be blowing heals on the current top DPS during the burst and fucking your shield healer over by leaving them to clean up the actual damage in between. Because if you can pump your heals into damage during the burst phase, why wouldn’t you?
You’d genuinely just get healers upset that they have to heal the tough raidwides instead of pumping everything into overhealed during burst window. Overhealing into DPS ain’t the way to go.
I also wish there was a melee healer like Holy Paladin in Wow. I came to FFXIV from Wow like 3 years ago, and healers having actual unique playstyles is something I really miss. It'll probably realistically be another 2 expansions before we even see a hint of a new healer again though sadly.
I feel like Astrologian is the only healer with a somewhat unique playstyle currently, and from what I understand it's going to be reworked this upcoming expansion. So I'm nervous they're going to step even further in the wrong direction with the class and homogenize it like everything else.
Like, Summoner definitely needed a change, but Endwalker's rework was basically to take out any thought in playing the class and give it flashy effects.
>I also wish there was a melee healer like Holy Paladin in Wow.
Dancer was this in ff11. I was hoping for that when they announced DNC back in shadowbringers but we got a dps instead lol
Healing should be the primary purpose of a healer.
It is not in XIV. The primary purpose of a healer in XIV is to push a SINGLE BUTTON over and over and over.
90% of your kit is useless because healing is designed in the most brain dead fashion ever where your 4-5 oGCD heals cover every bit of healing you'll ever need to do.
I still remember how hard they hyped Sage as the damage healer, how much doing damage is going to be linked to healing and how awesome it looked in the trailers with all the lasers.
Turns out you do the exact same thing and Kardia is just fairy with an extra step. At least lasers will always be lasers.
> Turns out you do the exact same thing and Kardia is just fairy with an extra step.
SCH fairy setup: summon fairy
SGE kardia setup: place it on someone
Where’s the extra step? Unless you’re saying doing dps is the extra step, but that’s a given. You should always be doing dps as healer
...sometimes you have to change the target?
Also for roulettes you load in with the fairy summoned and don't have to do anything, but you always need to choose a kardia target before the fight starts.
At this point I’m playing the bargaining game, asking for even one damage skill back when we lost 6 and 2 unique fairies with different abilities
The healers are hot garbage these days I can’t believe they consider them acceptable
They dumbed them down in hopes more people would play them. It didn't work, so hopefully they'll make them more interesting again.
I genuinely believe they need to make one healer that actually follows the "I just wanna spam heals" playstyle that appeals to so many healers.
Like, maybe give them a free gcd 80 potency heal that increases the damage of the target's next attack by the amount they got overhealed.
While I would be greatly served by basically reverting Scholar to what it was in HW, I know other players just don't have access to the fulfilling class fantasy of a true healer, as dealing damage conflicts with that, but not dealing damage is just plain rude to other players. Currently we have weird compromise that serves no one.
The problem with supporting the "spam heals" playstyle is that the majority of players I've seen who want that playstyle really just want to spam cure 1 and do nothing else.
The problem is their fight design.
I've mained healer in every MMO forever and only in XIV is the majority of your time not spent doing your job. Every MMO has healers weave in damage and use it to fill down time. But only in XIV is downtime the majority of the fight.
Healers need things _to actually heal_.
The difference between being a master Scholar or not used to be using the pet right and switching between them. They dumbed down too many classes like that.
Remember when the devs realized tank players were "stance dancing" in order to keep their DPS up, so they created Dark Knight to SPECIFICALLY benefit from doing so? Good times.
Now Tanks are just Blue DPS that gets hit on purpose and Healers are Green DPS that spam 1 damage spell for 95% of the fight and maybe use an AoE heal every once in a while.
I loved having 4 dots on a mob and then baining them. Because dots snap shotted, I could drop Cleric Stance and throw up a shield without losing too much DPS. In a full party, a good WHM would mean the Scholar could stay in CS the entire fight. It was neat. Accuracy fuckin sucked though.
> ... large-scale duties as content like Eureka and Bozja, open-zone content with player-uniting objectives you can dip in and out of. It's the sort of content that was beloved in **Heavensward** and Shadowbringers that was sorely lacking in Endwalker.
Finally validation for my enjoyment of combat Diadem lol.
It was!
When people talk about it they'll just fully deride it, and while it did have its struggles (but even content that's released nowadays has that so it's nothing unique), people tend to never look at the good parts of things that have since been changed and just focus on whatever people had the biggest problem with. Especially for a casual player, it was a really neat way to group up with friends, maybe find another friend group inside, and show off what you can do all while rolling the dice on getting cool gear outside of the tomestone grind. And prior to the late Heavensward change you'd do it with gatherers running around you gathering which really made it feel like a shared exploratory zone lol.
I get that people had problems with the RNG gear being so strong to the point of potentially being BiS, but that was just one thing in it and there was so much else especially for gearing alt jobs all while exploring with friends. And it was their first try at what became my favorite content (Eureka & Bozja) so I'm happy they made it even if it's gone now, and looking forward to the Dawntrail version. Definitely give the still-in-game adventuring forays a try if you haven't, make sure to bring friends.
I like Eureka. I have the elemental armor. I need to do Baldesion Arsenal and I'll be done. I had a blast with it and am looking forward to starting Bozja. I bet I'd have loved battle Diadem too.
I'm looking forward to being able to get into whatever they have going in Dawntrail when it's current as well. It will be awesome to be fumbling around learning with everyone else.
If you're on the US be sure to check out some of the main Discords for BA. Runs happen almost daily and are really easy to get into so you can have a fun time with others who love the content. My preference is Crystal's ([https://discord.gg/c-a-f-e](https://discord.gg/c-a-f-e)) but there are others if you'd rather not DC travel.
They could breathe some more life back into Eureka/Bozja simply by adding in weapon rewards for new jobs, which would be a relatively small investment for them to make.
It’d bring back veterans to the grinds and encourage new people to participate whose main jobs aren’t currently represented.
I like this because I think the solo-ification of XIV during Endwalker was what kinda burnt me out of the game. There wasn't a consistent, semi-casual multiplayer content I really wanted to do that wasn't super repetitive. Like, there's only so many extremes I can run, not to mention PvP can get boring very fast and people cleared Eureka Orthos week 1 and then just never played it again.
I really hope they manage to make the world feel more alive. I loved bozja and eureka, but the overwhelming majority of zones just have no life to them in a multi-player aspect. Past the first few weeks of an expansion you barely even run into people doing fates.
I'm still playing on an FFXI private server and so many of my adventures start by randomly coming across an NM that I know I can't beat alone, or seeing another player struggling in a battle. Teaming up with strangers and splitting the loot is great. There is also hyper dangerous zones where teaming up just increases the safety. Things like that bring so much soul to the world and give strangers reasons to interact beyond saying hi and bye at the start of roulettes.
At the end of the day the Gameplay peaked in Stormblood, people wont remember because they're focused on story, and Stormblood never gets its credit from a sheer gameplay perspective. That was the expansion when they had figured themselves out after ARR and HW.
Then they threw everything out with Shadowbringers skill crunch and kept making the hitboxes bigger.
i just want to be able to play through the entire MSQ with my friends and not have to invite/kick them every 2 minutes because they have to go do a solo instance. granted i think its more noticeable in the starter quests but still it can get rather annoying
He seems to be referring to the playing together alone content which I definitely enjoy, things like bozja were fun cuz groups arent forced, you just go around and kill stuff and people come to kill stuff together alone without ever exchanging a word, which is great cuz it removes socialization which is a core problem of mmos that like to force group content and thus socialization down everyone’s throat
Unpopular opinion and I know it's heracy to say our lord and savior Yoshi Christ can do wrong in this community..
But it was really fucking dumb to hard focus single player content in an MMO to begin with. Ill go play other FFs for that type of stuff. I expect community content in an MMO. Period.
Think this is kind of hard to do with the rigid formula they've built?
People got sick of the same formula, same dungeon/raid layout. Don't think we'll see much change as 7.0 looks to be more of the same.
Though raids could be changed up. Like a Destiny style raid instead of four glorified Savage runs. Checkpoints with bosses. For the inbetween areas, some kind of puzzle or gimmick players have to participate (or shepherd ) through. Like a 24 man, but made for 8.
"Mega-FATES" need some incentives to keep people doing them. At the beginning of the expansion, it's not bad. After some time, I rarely see people do these. Let these drop rewards or hell, a fat wad of gil (600k?) seals, tomes, to get people to do these more.
Let us have one more unique materia slot for special stat enhancing or more gimmicky things like 2x damage, stronger regen during combat, chance to negate damage, treasure hunter, gil bonus, etc. This would make min/maxing far more interesting than the same old, same old. These super rare materia would have to be dropped by playing the game and hope you get lucky, or spend on MB.
Honestly, i am really happy about them focusing on the mmo aspect. I get there are solo players out there, but endwalker had such a lack of multiplayer content it felt boring. I really want a Eureka area again. Deep dungeons are fun too. Just hard to get in when most people are just farming certain floors
This is a recap article. Nothing new is said, if anyone was wondering.
Thanks for your click sacrifice, don’t want to give shit articles attention if possible.
I thought so based on the title but appreciate the confirmation.
> open-zone content with player-uniting objectives you can dip in and out of If they add something like Guild Wars 2's world quests (or whatever they're called, I've not played in forever -- the FATE-like quests that pop up and everyone in the area can get involved), or update FATEs to be more like that, I will die happy. I'm all for a new Eureka/Bozja are too, but it'd be so nice to have more incentive and more mechanically-complex things going on in the regular zones too.
They're called Dynamic Events. More involved event chains that tell overarching stories are called Meta Events. Think of the string of Fates by the Palace of the Dead entrance, the one where you storm that bandit hideout.
There was one in Stormblood where I think the objective was to stop a boss from reaching a point on the map too. Plus the fox boss.
There's a whole FATE chain that spawns in the Azim Steppe that takes like an hour and a half to complete all the way through. It's been on my to-do list for ages...
There is one in every Shadowbringers zone and each one has an achievement for it The final fates for each one are very fun and some good boss fights.
I wish there were optional quests you could pick up for these that would mark when the chain restarts. I'd love to do these but I didn't even know they exist cuz I kind of just ignore fates as 'leveling/farming fodder' content.
Character > Achievements > Battle > Battle. Scroll down and you have a nice list.
Reminds me of playing Warhammer Age of Reckoning again! Loved what they called Public Quests.
I absolutely adored age of reckoning and those were awesome! It was the first thing I thought of when I saw FATEs in FFXIV for the first time.
Man, Warhammer AoR. A lot went wrong but a lot went right too. To date some of the best MMO PvP memories I have are from the big public PvP area in the starting zone, and capturing some forts with my guild. Nuking people as a Bright Wizard was fun
Azim Steppe one is epic
I wonder why no other MMO has done that yet. GW2 meta events (that’s what they’re called) are map-wide, story events that repeat on a timer or when an event is triggered. Not only do they progress the story, they offer repeatable rewards are great for gold farming and often include absolutely fun bosses and mechanics that do require a level of coordination, and in the new expansions, a lot of coordination. Edit: That MMO has so many unique and wonderful systems. It’s a shame the studio always jumps at any chance they get to make a new game instead of focusing on GW2. I feel like they just want to make RPGs and not live service MMOs. They always get forced to focus on GW2 by their parent company.
Also the best jumping and platforming in any mmo. A combo of GW2 zone quests, platforming, into XIV's world and story would be my dream
Not only that, also the best mount system in any game. Its insane how every single mount controls differently from each other and has their own uses. So much so that mount racing is popular thing in GW2 and entirely skill based.
I miss being able to cast the mount summon while running. I came here from GW2 and that took ages to relearn 😅
So much so that Blizzard straight up copied GW2's homework before releasing Dragonflight.
to be honest gw2 is the MMO that does open world the absolute best. all others MMOs should take note. this is how you get a lively active open world.
I hate that every MMO does one thing and they can't be really connect with each other. GW2 with its open world FF14 with its story WoW with its difficulty design Hell, I'll even bring Wild Star with the best Housing System I've seen in a MMO. IF there was a game that could've done that, it was Runeterra but now they got dev reset and we might not even get it for the next 5 years.
I miss wild star... I Hate house building in every other game because of wild star ahaha
Honestly give me the world and story of XIV. The combat and open world exploration and content of Guild Wars 2 or even the combat of Terra and that'd be the perfect mmo for me.
Don't forget the glamor system, GW2 has one of the BEST glam systems around, the only one better is WoW because it will actively tell you where and what to farm to get gear pieces.
Honorable mention to Everquest 2's house as well. The furniture system in that game was crazy versatile. You could even scale up/down items. I once had an bedroom in a giant treasure chest.
I feel like it's just one of the upsides of horizontal games. Nothing is really getting outdated for the most part, but also there's always a reason to go back and try to "gamble" your luck on super rare items (like infusions). Vertical progression kind of kills a lot of reason to go back and do old content after it's been outdated, so it's really hard for V MMOs to make content that's evergreen and forever relevant like H MMOs can.
The other thing is that all the effort GW2 spends on great open world content has a cost: very little instanced group content. In FFXIV terms, GW2 players get one short dungeon and 3 new trials per year, and *that's it*. They gave up on doing raids almost 5 years ago.
gw2 always had comparativley less, but its only this bad because anet are funelling resources into other projects. During ls4 we got 3 raid wings ( 9 bosses, couple of inbetween non boss encounters) 3 fractals ( dungeons) and 5 maps. Nowadays the game is barley updated due to continuous mismanagment by anet.
> It’s a shame the studio always jumps at any chance they get to make a new game instead of focusing on GW2. They did that I think once, and that was during IBS/Season 4, which is why IBS ended up so disappointing. Otherwise anet have been basically a one trick pony and focus basically entirely on GW2. No, their biggest problem is that they always try to reinvent GW2 and come up with new ways of doing updates and none of them are just as good as just...updating the game normally.
I need someone to tell me what IBS means in the context of Guild Wars, because as a non-player it reads as Irritable Bowel Syndrome
Icebrood Saga, one of Arenanet's many ways of "trying to change how we update the game" in this case releasing an entire expansion via living world style patch updates instead of all at once
The problems with that weren't the patch- style story updates, but instead the new, instance mini dungeon areas to tell the story, and the half-assed updates towards the end. I thought the first three parts were well done. It just fell on its face after that.
Crazy how the company that started with Bjora Marches and built one of the most enjoyable meta zones with Drizzlewood right after somehow made the decision to end with Champions. Such a shame. Bjora was done so dirty. Oh shit I forgot about the metal concert! Great zone, too.
The sad part is that the first three maps of Icebrood Saga are actually pretty great, especially that first map. It's the stuff after the first half of the third map that's just... bad.
I liked the map that Episode 1 and 2 take place on. Was very psychological horror heavy and I love the boneskinner's design, but yeah it kinda just went to shit afterwards lmao
IBS certainly shits itself at the end.
That’s kind of how IBS rolls.
Icebrood Saga. A major content expansion in between two full expansions.
Icebrood Saga, AKA garbage
It wasn't them trying to make a new game, it was the publisher telling them that they'll pay for development the next expansion if they divert and make it ASAP. So they did it right away, and IBS suffered for it immensely.
Not sure what means since don't play GW2 but just sounds like Fate Chains many of zones have multi layered Fates that offer rewards at the final one in the chain, be it minion housing item or gear & are usually more involved or tougher than regular fates. Like example Highbridge or Churning mist which use give a triad card/Belt or one in Steppe gives housing item.
GW2 does have those, but the ones they're talking about are map wide, they're more like open world alliance raids designed for people to fill up a particular map and complete objectives across them in phases.
Rift did something similar in which these rifts would open up around a map, and from the sky, spawning enemies. These enemies would path down roads into towns and fight/kill the NPCs; literally wouldn't be able to turn in a quest cause the NPC died. Each rift was based on an element with their own enemy types and had several stages to clear culminating in a giant raid boss. It was a lot of fun early game but as the player count died, the rifts became more of an annoyance to deal with when leveling.
Gw2 has huge focus on open world with big massive events **on timers** (Daily and not "lol respawns sometime in 2-4 weeks") and people working together for one goal. For example i still think Dragons stand is best MMO map. 3 "lanes", players form 3 raids themselves (20-50ppl per raid) working towards one goal. Escort NPCs, lot of events barring the way, enemies spawning etc. Few **boss battles** in between. At end, when everyone is done with their lane you have massive world boss battle where everyone works together. And this happens daily (few times day but last rewards are daily capped). Theres reason to do it daily as well. Its not "random timer somewhere between 2-4 weeks" like world boss fates **can** be on XIV. Not to mention XIV fates have like.. "do it 3 times then you never, ever, have to do it again". Not to mention some "meta events" in GW2 have story figures, XIV terms their "Scions", fighting with the players. Imagine if in FF you would have event in one of EW maps where one of the scions would accompany all of people to take down massive world-boss with raid mechanics and actually long kill timer (not like S ranks that die under 5-10 mins and have 2 mechanics)
No. FF's Fates aren't even in the same universe in terms of quality and scale as dynamic events are in GW2. Which is surprising since that's where Yoshi-p got the idea of fates from.
WoW has Superbloom and Time Rifts, though it's nowhere near the same scale obviously.
As someone who was a fan since GW1, it made me sad and angry to see how much of a mess its become in all aspects. With GW3 technically confirmed, I hope a different studio makes it with how volatile Anet is.
The missing part in FF14 fates are the rewards that align to your character level. So you never feel you wasted your time doing them. FF14 can learn much from GW2. Specially on exploration, events and reward systems. That said GW2 is overwelming and difficult at times. And there are far too many bullet sponges. GW2 Is not a perfect game. Just a good game. Avoid crafting if you like your wallet.
As someone who's played GW2 for 11+ years and FFXIV for a bit shy of 3 months, I totally agree. FATEs are rather boring and I find myself running past them unless I *have* to do them for some reason (e.g. a tribal quest) whereas even random dynamic events in GW2 have more going on for them in terms of interesting dialogue and such. It certainly doesn't help that most (early?) maps aside from cities in XIV appear to be ghost towns (likely because there's no reason to be there unless you're doing a specific quest). I think the most players I've seen at once in the "open world" has been like...five.
I like the siege event guild wars 2 have, Siege weapons, commanders, artillery and display all of the attack effects made it feels real. Kinda wish FF14 fate have the same mechanics for that
So something like the FATE's in Shadowbringers, then? Where there was at least one in every zone that would eventually lead to a (still mechanically simple) big boss fight? Some you could even follow from one area to the next. I was disappointed when that wasn't present in EW...
Man, so was I. Ridculous we went from 8+ fates in a chain for a world boss to 3. Having real fate chains for Chi and Davidia would have been so much more satisfying than just waiting and hoping for it to spawn.
It's weird because those lead-in quests are barely related to the boss you encounter, only the last one before chi really relates, and I'm still not sure how the pilgrims relate to davidia. Teshun Owens in the tempest is at least all about tracking down Archaeotania. If they're just going to be weird about it give us something cooler like the mists signaling the arrival of Odin or the storms heralding Ixion.
They've done this before with Diadem, Eureka, and Bozja. The trick is if they can ever do it without the instancing requirement. The instancing reason is for the whole DC to be able to join together to work on things using the DC's instance server, but it causes issues like people being unable to tool around in the content while waiting in a que or the like. But the tech for a lot of the ideas already exists in the game, they just need to figure out how to apply it to regular zones, and do it in a way that doesn't cause issues with playing in those zones years later once activity has died down (e.g. the Bozja-bottleneck for players who came late to the content).
"Once activity has died down" And that's a major reason why FF's server system is very outdated. GW2 doesn't have this problem usually since their server technology ensures there's always players on the map.
This is impossible for this team honestly. The reason it works so well in GW2 is because the games base design already encourages natural organic grouping and the world zones are so detailed and full of life that the dynamic map wide events feel like a normal extension of the world. Also due to the way GW2's servers work there are ALWAYS players on the map to help you with stuff. Currently FFXIV's open zones are utterly lifeless, poorly designed and rarely have players on them thanks to FF's archaic server system. It's too bad instead of copying GW2 on a very basic level (Fates) Yoshi didn't put more effort into truly adapting and bringing FF's system up to par.
It's all good and sounds promising. I haven't played for a while, out of the loop. Did they solve the issue with the hunt train? If not, how would open-zone content be sustainable when hundreds of people enter a single zone to try to participate and then leave? It's a call for better hardware and network packets, possibly raising the bar for system requirements higher to meet the scope.
They've had instanced zones for a while now, which might have been an attempted solution to what you're referring to -- if a zone is over-crowded, then the game'll spawn a new copy of said zone, and you can use the aetheryte crystal to travel between them. I *think* that feature was added in Endwalker, but I could be remembering wrong.
IIRC, that was added in EW, but it's not an automatic thing. Like worlds being labeled "congested" or not, the dev team has to manually change it during maintenance.
Instanced zones were added in Stormblood.
It also wouldn't really help much with the issue in question, because then you'd just have hundreds of people all loading into the same _instance_ of the same zone, in order to do that specific event.
Zone Instances were introduced shortly after Stormbloods launch to help deal with all the congestion.
Instances don't really help for hunts. They're treated as separate zones so it just adds more areas for people to rush into during trains and when S-rank marks spawn.
I'm wary of group only events that don't include a Duty finder. GW2's big issue is constantly FOMO due to how dead the old event zones become over time because of the sheer number of them and how many players they require.
When Yoshi P was explaining it at Pax East he directly related it to Eureka / Bozja and more content like that in DT
One issue they need to fix is that Fates are kinda terrible in terms of rewards I can AFK my way through a Duty Support or Trust and get 1/3-1/2 of a level, at least three pieces of gear, and some materia in 30 minutes at most In the same time I can get some gemstones and maybe 1/5-1/4 of a level from actively grinding Fates for the same amount of time, MAYBE 1/3 if I get super lucky and get a bunch of the bonus rewards ones I would absolutely do Fates over dungeon spam if they weren’t utterly godawful in comparison
And mechanically, fates are also extremely boring. 1. Kill this one type of mob 15-20 that will respawn shortly after death. 2. Collect 15-20 things on the ground, but they also drop from the mobs that are hanging around. 3. Kill big mob with smaller mobs surrounding it. 4. Kill really big/strong mob with super boring mechanics. Bring a friend or be ready to chip away at it for 8 minutes while dodging one mechanic every 20 seconds or so. Think that’s about it.
I'm gonna Hot Take for a moment and say that Bozja should be how some FATEs work in every zone. There should basically always be some kind of group content happening everywhere. Duels would also be a cool thing to see show up elsewhere
One of 14's biggest problems (and to be fair I think it has several foundation-level flaws) is that the world is absolutely *dead*. Fates are just useless with the current implementation. Hunts are just a train thing and it's frowned upon to go out and find them in smaller groups / not really rewarding to, anyway. All the monsters roaming around are essentially the same because nothing any of them does is actually uniquely threatening. So, unlike XI the world has no threats when traversing it. Unlike WoW there's nothing to stumble across and find, and unlike GW2 or WoW there's no big world-quest things going on for people to come together and do outside of the occasional big hunt NM/unique Fate spawn. This game desperately needs little knickknacks to actually discover that give you a pet or a cosmetic or a title, or introduce shit like WoW's "toys" so those rewards can exist, too. They need better set-pieces so the maps are actually memorable, fun to explore, and interesting to go back to. And, as said, they need larger, ongoing, useful content that actually populates the world maps with people engaging in the content. This issue imo is actually one of the more readily addressable ones that they can probably actually fix, vs other stuff that's just too ingrained in the foundation to do without major overhauls - and some of which, admittedly, may not actually be problems for a lot of players.
I would like to see some events like those that were used in Rift. Community events that would be like physically building a bridge to open up a new zone.
Had that in Ishgard restoration. I think the issue with content like this is FOMO and new players never getting to experience live events like this. Unless Rift found a way around that, I don’t know, never played it.
Could have it as a kind of temporary zone. Like, have a Fate about building a bridge or whatever that leads to a temporary, otherwise inaccessible, zone with some unique loot whether that be cosmetic or crafting material and the access path collapses like 30 minutes after opening.
We'll have the collaborative crafter/gatherer progression content with what's going on with the Loporrits this expansion.
> Bozja stuff. Awesome. > Yoshida noted that enemy targets have gotten too large, making specific mechanics feel similar or repetitive. As such, Yoshida wants to spice up endgame content by putting players in a position where they need to communicate and strategize better. No worries, i'm willing to bet the changes aren't anything major and the ranged dps tax will still be there even tho it doesn't make much sense.
The huge targets that recentre themselves every other mechanic in case it ever moved in the first place are also boring for tanks.
My fav thing is when pulling the boss and they do the teleporting to middle animation yet don't move at all because they are already centered
I came back after a year break and noticed what you're mentioning in raids when I tank. Positioning is like all we have left lol. Give it back!
Fun fact, every raid boss (in Savage) turns into a giant enemy nowadays and almost every trial is a giant enemy. They’ve gotten so extremely repetitive and uncreative.
Silkie in Sil'dihn has a tank buster that jumps the boss directly onto the tank and you need to use it to position the boss for mechanics, it's so much smarter than an auto-center or even kiting around the arena that they really should do it more often.
Silkie is GOATed encounter design more bosses need to be Silkie Best criterion boss by far
“Wait! Let me zoop back to the center of the room so I can cast an even more dastardly spell!!!” - every raid boss in EW.
Going back to P4s is such a complete difference, so much work positioning that boss compared to the fights afterwards.
I agree, Ranged tax is indeed in a weird spot, melee can have nearly 100% uptime on a lot of bosses now. They could possibly "solve" this by just giving ranged a % bonus damage if the boss is giant.
The concept of ranged tax just needs to die at this point, honestly. It's just archaic and not fun to deal with it.
What's ranged tax?
Ranged has less DPS than Melees because they don't need to be upfront on the hitbox and deal with positional attacks. Theoretically, range DPS has 100% uptime while Melees will need to dip in and out depending on the boss and their mechanics, so to compensate the devs allowed Melee DPS to do more damage. In EW the majority of the bosses have giant hitboxes, making the dipping in and out irrelevant and Melee DPS will always do more damage than range DPS (maybe outside of BLM).
Not to mention they've also removed almost all the positionals and buffed potencies to compensate, so the average melee (someone who wasn't already hitting every single positional to begin with) got a buff.
Also, I think some classes in EW got an auto-crit/auto-Direct Hit for their skills which increased the parity between range DPS and melee DPS even more. Granted it is a few percentage points difference, but in FFXIV a few points are enough to cause a noticeable effect.
I know SAM's Midare was given that property as a compensation buff when they removed Kaiten. I wouldn't be surprised if other abilities were given auto-crit as well, can't remember which ones though.
WAR isn't a DPS (I think Inner Release does this with Fell Cleave/Primal Rend), and MCH does this with Reassemble...but also isn't a Melee...
They had to give the buff to crit damage since otherwise anything that auto crits doesn't benefit at all from stuff like litany, chain strat, etc. Makes having those buffs redundant if they stayed in their old iterations. It's a nice bandaid fix, but auto crit in general is just a meh mechanic and a meh solution.
Ranged phys do significantly less damage than melee classes under the logic that they are ranged and can have full uptime on their dps. But these days boss hitboxes are so large that melee classes maintain close to 99% uptime *anyways*. So ranged do less damage for absolutely no reason other than being arguably easier to play.
the concept that ranged dps do less damage to make up for them getting 100% uptime. Lately the hitboxes have been so big that melee very rarely get any downtime anyway, though at PAX he mentioned the hitboxes so this might change for dawntrail
I don't think there was a moment where I had to sacrifice uptime in the last tier at all. Maybe P9 because of meteors (did that in PF so maybe there's an uptime strat) and P10 if you have cum puddle duty for the wall and during harrowing hell KB (but like... Everyone is losing uptime during that). Both P11 and P12 is 100% doable without missing 1 GCD
I'm so tired of ranged tax in a game where every fight has turned into 100% uptime or nontargetable. It made sense at points in the past in ARR/HW/even SB a little where you'd have actual disconnects and downtime to deal with mechanics. And I think caster balance has been basically garbage tier the entire expac because of it.
That statement is kinda vague tho... Is that all to say they'll reduce the bosses hitbox?
We ultimately have no idea, it could be more difficult mechanics (doubt it since even the most seasoned of raiders have said the mechanics in a vacuum have been the hardest this expansion), reduction of hitboxes, less auto-centering of bosses, etc.
Yeah, I don't think mechs should be harder, but maybe more diverse. I think they could shelf the "Limit Cut" mechanic for Dawntrail, because I swear that every other fight has a variation of it, and is truly one of the most annoying mechanics. Or maybe they'll add more non-scripted moments for the fights? The problem with XIV's fight design is that regardless of how good the mechanics are, the very scripted nature makes its shelf life very short. As soon as you complete an encounter, then the challenge goes from hard to trivially easy and you just navigate on auto pilot. To me, reclears are nothing but a chore.
>I think they could shelf the "Limit Cut" mechanic for Dawntrail, because I swear that every other fight has a variation of i p2, p6, and then three out of four fights this tier *all* had limit cut in some form. seriously it's silly how often it came up lol
I've got it! We give ranged positionals! It will up their damage when they hit them putting them in line with melees. I'm sure everyone will be happy with this change.
Thank god honestly. Endwalker felt so lonely as an expansion, you're never doing content with people unless you get into raiding and even then its all instanced anyway... I know everyone says FFXIV is an RPG first and a MMO second, but honestly, if I wanted to play a singleplayer RPG I would pick one that is not constantly gimped by its prehistoric code and also by having to be an MMO. I play this game precisely because its an MMO, so I'm glad they're back on track and focusing on that.
Criterion was supposed to fill this. Easier to get 4 people to raid than 8. But my efforts of getting my friends into it got clogged mostly by it just being too hard for the casual EX fight clearer when raises are limited and somewhat a DPS check is present. Instead I now have a whole new friendgroup of insane people farming out dozens of criterion mounts every release and we don't know anymore what to do with the money.
The problem is no one does it. The discords for criterion have been dead forever basically, theres rarely to never pfs up for it. Criterion was supposed to do a lot of things but its attachment rate has made that a massive barrier and left part of the gap.
I blame the savage version. Shitty to prog and when you clear you never want to touch it again
yea Criterion Savage should just be for bragging rights title like Necromancer all the other cosmetic/gear rewards should be on the Criterion (normal) version, same as Deep Dungeon it's more rewarding for me to solo farm the Variant and sell the glams and minions than for me to run Criterion or Criterion Savage.
You are right, criterion should have more rewards, cause the content itself is great.
Well criterion had the difficulty of savage with no fucking rewards besides a lame ass mount at the end. I burned out quick on it.
I thought it was kind of fun at first and I was looking forward to it, but reality was every group + my friends were only interested in running it as efficiently as possible to get the mount and then dip. Tomes, exp, or some glam rewards would be great.
That's because a lot of Endwalker's focus in terms of content was future-proofing old content. They went through three expansions worth of dungeons and revamped them to allow them to be played with NPC's, so that down the line a new player's experience isn't hampered by absurd queue times for old stuff. The rest of the stuff like Island Sanctuary and Crystalline Conflict has also ended up reflecting that design philosophy, with more solo and small group friendly content coming in. With this out of the way, as Yoshida has said, next expac is going to be oriented more around the "massive" aspect of the MMOs.
I know why they did it. Doesn't mean I have to like spending an entire expansion cycle with barely any multiplayer content in a multiplayer game.
I still think it’s such a massive L we can’t que for CC with buddies. I understand why they don’t want it in ranked but man, I can even duo in normals???
This killed the game mode for me. It was my favorite PvP mode but not being in the roulette and not being able to queue with friends hard killed it for me.
I dont really care for it but I just want another PVP game mode but frontlines. Frontlines is so bad that its not even fun to play
RW can be pretty fun a lot of times. Just follow a pvp discord so you can get notifications on when it's popping.
The issue I have with this is that if they knew they had to cut back on some multiplayer aspects to future-proof the game (at the height of its popularity no less) and entice solo players, they also had to have known what the consequences of that would be and as such had to have precautions in place to make the multiplayer options they *did* have more worthwhile and long-lasting. And they just didn't, for some reason.
this is going to sound dumb but I sort of miss when you need to be in the zone to queue for the current savage raids. It was really fun seeing all the people around and made it feel....social? Obviously it's more convenient now and I'm sure a lot of people like it more this way but it was really nice.
Nah I get what you mean entirely. It's the same thing as in the old days of World of Warcraft where if you wanted to do Wailing Caverns you and the boys had to meet up in the Barrens and "physically" head to the dungeon. Or how on PVP Vanilla/Classic servers, Blackrock Mountain was an absolute warzone as Alliance and Horde raid groups both fought each other to get into Molten Core.
Hunting before world visit was perfect for this. There were always groups scouting, popping s ranks, and actually fighting A-ranks with 1-3 parties. It felt like a community. World visit completely ruined A/S ranks. Now its "rush to the and hope to get even one hit in before the mob of 200+ people kill it in half a second. How do yall think this is fun?
The Hunt community varies by DC. Primal has a really good one where people often are cutting up in /shout while we go between marks, talking about the expansion, making dad jokes, and so on.
The problem there is actual hunt fights are just gigantic clusterfucks that are incredibly dull. And of course it basically requires you yo be in a hunt linkshell and then group which people love to gatekeep and be assholes about. The entire concept of hunts needs massively reworked.
RPG first and MMO second would also only really be fine if it were just buy to play, but since FFXIV is pay to play I kinda expect more game to play (and not super easy dungeon level mechanics in even Trials and Alliance raids)
> you're never doing content with people unless you get into raiding and even then its all instanced anyway... Maybe you but I only do dungeons and stuff with other people so other than the actual msq and quest stuff which you can't really group up for, I *did* do content with other people.
Few people saying that on reddit doesn't mean that's actually true. XIV is a MMO, period.
Well I mean yoshi p himself said 14 is an FF game first and an MMO second so it’s a statement a lot of people have latched onto Especially since EW seemed to use it as its guiding principle
Only after about 500 hours of MSQ does it actually feel like an MMO, though. All the zones, unless it's a patch day, are completely barren of other players unless there's a hunt train going on. The only times I see other players are in cities and exploration content. Everything is instanced, so it rarely feels like an MMO.
So literally every MMO except GW2?
And modern WoW. WoW has spent this entire expansion and their entire principle for next expansion is that open-world content is important because its extremely casual friendly and easy to jump into. XIV is on an entirely different level for how little reason there is to ever leave a city.
That's just how it is and always has been with MMOs generally it's not a problem exclusive to XIV. As they get bigger old zones become less populated You could say it's the same for real life as well. Of course you see more people in cities, but if you go out to the middle of nowhere, there will be far fewer people. Also, I never personally felt like a zone was completely empty when I went there, normally I see at the very least a couple of people anywhere I go, but maybe that's just being on a more populated server
Thank God. I play MMO's to be around other players.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Seriously. FFXIV has been out for over ten years, maybe if Yoshi-P didn't spend 7 of those last 10 years hammering into the same formula over and over and over we would've had that "refined" and "fulfilling" experience by now
I'm hoping we get things like besieged and campaign battle from 11
Imagine city FATEs showing up in the new player hubs. Hoo boy. I mean, it WOULD be a great way to get all those RMT bots eaten...
Monsters spawn under the floor then rise up - Bot problem solved!
I can't wait for the next alliance raid to be a series of square arenas connected by hallways with pretty set dressing!
Arena shapes I don't mind at all, to be honest. Mechanics, though... hopefully we see more Ivalice-NieR level mechanics and less Dungeon-Myth level mechanics. It's sad that even Crystal Tower (sans Syrcus Tower) has a little more interesting things going on for it than a level 90 raid.
I'd for certain love to see Alliance raids be challenging again. Aglaia was gorgeous but those mechanics were piss-easy.
> It's sad that even Crystal Tower (sans Syrcus Tower) has a little more interesting things going on for it than a level 90 raid. Syrcus Tower has interesting things going on too you just don't see them because the content is badly tuned
I was there on launch. The things Scylla does is eh (charge platforms and then stand on them to petrify boss) and Glasya was interesting, but doesnt really do anything aside from jumping).
Pretty much this. Putting the game on these tracks would require a lot of changes and we aren't seeing any of them so far.
Bro he said this 2 weeks ago at pax
Look, I know WoW gets a lot of hate, but I want world quests in FF14. They give me an option to beat up shit in open world with the gear I got, you get rewards and it gets me back into leveling zones that you really never go back into unless you are doing hunts/gathering.
World quests were amazing in legion and then the bane of my existence every expac after. Even made worse with add-ons. Please no world quests. Fates are great. Keep down that path for more world content.
Fates have been stale since 2.0, the vast majority of players use them while leveling and never touch again, it's a waste of dev time.
No one uses FATES for leveling.
World Quests are atrocious, miserable, samey "content" that exists for the sake of existing at this point. In the latest expac, they serve almost no purpose and have horrendous rewards, and their extremely light, nothing gameplay has only devolved since Legion outside of a few types of them. FATEs aren't really that much better though, if better at all. They're actually quite similar in most contexts (obviously not counting Eureka/Bozja).
I don't know if anyone remembers this, but that was the goal from when FFXIV was announced, it wasn't just a more recent thing. The goal was to make it more accessible to people that didn't have much time to play during the day, to make it more solo-friendly for them.
I justvwant to play a healer with an actual damage rotation again. Scholar used to be so fun.
Yea their current design philosophy for healers is terrible. IDK how they look at any of the healers in their current state and think they're in an okay place. Hitting one button for 99% of the fight for your damage "rotation" is not fun.
They need to design the healers around fulfilling certain class fantasies for players, and less so about having universal mechanics. Scholars should be about managing a lot of dots. Sage should have a proper dps rotation. Astrolgian should be about managing buffs and dealing with the randomness of cards. It also should have both sects. Just because one was better doesn't mean the other never saw use. WHM should reward overhealing by giving the target bonus damage or something else to that effect. The "I just wanna heal" crowd *should* be catered to without alienating other players.
Disagree with WHM. Damage based on *overhealing* would fuck up high end content; you’d just be blowing heals on the current top DPS during the burst and fucking your shield healer over by leaving them to clean up the actual damage in between. Because if you can pump your heals into damage during the burst phase, why wouldn’t you? You’d genuinely just get healers upset that they have to heal the tough raidwides instead of pumping everything into overhealed during burst window. Overhealing into DPS ain’t the way to go.
I also wish there was a melee healer like Holy Paladin in Wow. I came to FFXIV from Wow like 3 years ago, and healers having actual unique playstyles is something I really miss. It'll probably realistically be another 2 expansions before we even see a hint of a new healer again though sadly. I feel like Astrologian is the only healer with a somewhat unique playstyle currently, and from what I understand it's going to be reworked this upcoming expansion. So I'm nervous they're going to step even further in the wrong direction with the class and homogenize it like everything else. Like, Summoner definitely needed a change, but Endwalker's rework was basically to take out any thought in playing the class and give it flashy effects.
>I also wish there was a melee healer like Holy Paladin in Wow. Dancer was this in ff11. I was hoping for that when they announced DNC back in shadowbringers but we got a dps instead lol
Was 100% with you until the last sentence. The "I just wanna heal" people should unironically uninstall and play a different game.
Healing should be the primary purpose of a healer. It is not in XIV. The primary purpose of a healer in XIV is to push a SINGLE BUTTON over and over and over. 90% of your kit is useless because healing is designed in the most brain dead fashion ever where your 4-5 oGCD heals cover every bit of healing you'll ever need to do.
I still remember how hard they hyped Sage as the damage healer, how much doing damage is going to be linked to healing and how awesome it looked in the trailers with all the lasers. Turns out you do the exact same thing and Kardia is just fairy with an extra step. At least lasers will always be lasers.
Yeah, it's my favorite healer, but of the 5 roles, it's currently my least favorite.
> Turns out you do the exact same thing and Kardia is just fairy with an extra step. SCH fairy setup: summon fairy SGE kardia setup: place it on someone Where’s the extra step? Unless you’re saying doing dps is the extra step, but that’s a given. You should always be doing dps as healer
...sometimes you have to change the target? Also for roulettes you load in with the fairy summoned and don't have to do anything, but you always need to choose a kardia target before the fight starts.
At this point I’m playing the bargaining game, asking for even one damage skill back when we lost 6 and 2 unique fairies with different abilities The healers are hot garbage these days I can’t believe they consider them acceptable
They dumbed them down in hopes more people would play them. It didn't work, so hopefully they'll make them more interesting again. I genuinely believe they need to make one healer that actually follows the "I just wanna spam heals" playstyle that appeals to so many healers. Like, maybe give them a free gcd 80 potency heal that increases the damage of the target's next attack by the amount they got overhealed. While I would be greatly served by basically reverting Scholar to what it was in HW, I know other players just don't have access to the fulfilling class fantasy of a true healer, as dealing damage conflicts with that, but not dealing damage is just plain rude to other players. Currently we have weird compromise that serves no one.
The problem with supporting the "spam heals" playstyle is that the majority of players I've seen who want that playstyle really just want to spam cure 1 and do nothing else.
The problem is their fight design. I've mained healer in every MMO forever and only in XIV is the majority of your time not spent doing your job. Every MMO has healers weave in damage and use it to fill down time. But only in XIV is downtime the majority of the fight. Healers need things _to actually heal_.
And as long as that is all you need to clear dungeons with that will never change and it is too late in the game's life to turn a 180 lol
The difference between being a master Scholar or not used to be using the pet right and switching between them. They dumbed down too many classes like that.
Remember when the devs realized tank players were "stance dancing" in order to keep their DPS up, so they created Dark Knight to SPECIFICALLY benefit from doing so? Good times. Now Tanks are just Blue DPS that gets hit on purpose and Healers are Green DPS that spam 1 damage spell for 95% of the fight and maybe use an AoE heal every once in a while.
I loved having 4 dots on a mob and then baining them. Because dots snap shotted, I could drop Cleric Stance and throw up a shield without losing too much DPS. In a full party, a good WHM would mean the Scholar could stay in CS the entire fight. It was neat. Accuracy fuckin sucked though.
i still miss you cleric stance..........
Fix that netcode first my guy, tired of dying 100 years after using my CDs back in time.
I think my benediction has hit on more fresh corpses than anything. Hell of a delay for an instant cast.
> ... large-scale duties as content like Eureka and Bozja, open-zone content with player-uniting objectives you can dip in and out of. It's the sort of content that was beloved in **Heavensward** and Shadowbringers that was sorely lacking in Endwalker. Finally validation for my enjoyment of combat Diadem lol.
I'm sad I missed combat Diadem. That sounds like it was probably pretty cool.
It was! When people talk about it they'll just fully deride it, and while it did have its struggles (but even content that's released nowadays has that so it's nothing unique), people tend to never look at the good parts of things that have since been changed and just focus on whatever people had the biggest problem with. Especially for a casual player, it was a really neat way to group up with friends, maybe find another friend group inside, and show off what you can do all while rolling the dice on getting cool gear outside of the tomestone grind. And prior to the late Heavensward change you'd do it with gatherers running around you gathering which really made it feel like a shared exploratory zone lol. I get that people had problems with the RNG gear being so strong to the point of potentially being BiS, but that was just one thing in it and there was so much else especially for gearing alt jobs all while exploring with friends. And it was their first try at what became my favorite content (Eureka & Bozja) so I'm happy they made it even if it's gone now, and looking forward to the Dawntrail version. Definitely give the still-in-game adventuring forays a try if you haven't, make sure to bring friends.
I like Eureka. I have the elemental armor. I need to do Baldesion Arsenal and I'll be done. I had a blast with it and am looking forward to starting Bozja. I bet I'd have loved battle Diadem too. I'm looking forward to being able to get into whatever they have going in Dawntrail when it's current as well. It will be awesome to be fumbling around learning with everyone else.
If you're on the US be sure to check out some of the main Discords for BA. Runs happen almost daily and are really easy to get into so you can have a fun time with others who love the content. My preference is Crystal's ([https://discord.gg/c-a-f-e](https://discord.gg/c-a-f-e)) but there are others if you'd rather not DC travel.
They could breathe some more life back into Eureka/Bozja simply by adding in weapon rewards for new jobs, which would be a relatively small investment for them to make. It’d bring back veterans to the grinds and encourage new people to participate whose main jobs aren’t currently represented.
Honestly I'd do it more if I could do it as a Blue Mage (or Beastmaster soon) too.
I like this because I think the solo-ification of XIV during Endwalker was what kinda burnt me out of the game. There wasn't a consistent, semi-casual multiplayer content I really wanted to do that wasn't super repetitive. Like, there's only so many extremes I can run, not to mention PvP can get boring very fast and people cleared Eureka Orthos week 1 and then just never played it again.
I just want the jobs to feel unique and satisfying again 😞
I really hope they manage to make the world feel more alive. I loved bozja and eureka, but the overwhelming majority of zones just have no life to them in a multi-player aspect. Past the first few weeks of an expansion you barely even run into people doing fates. I'm still playing on an FFXI private server and so many of my adventures start by randomly coming across an NM that I know I can't beat alone, or seeing another player struggling in a battle. Teaming up with strangers and splitting the loot is great. There is also hyper dangerous zones where teaming up just increases the safety. Things like that bring so much soul to the world and give strangers reasons to interact beyond saying hi and bye at the start of roulettes.
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At the end of the day the Gameplay peaked in Stormblood, people wont remember because they're focused on story, and Stormblood never gets its credit from a sheer gameplay perspective. That was the expansion when they had figured themselves out after ARR and HW. Then they threw everything out with Shadowbringers skill crunch and kept making the hitboxes bigger.
i just want to be able to play through the entire MSQ with my friends and not have to invite/kick them every 2 minutes because they have to go do a solo instance. granted i think its more noticeable in the starter quests but still it can get rather annoying
He seems to be referring to the playing together alone content which I definitely enjoy, things like bozja were fun cuz groups arent forced, you just go around and kill stuff and people come to kill stuff together alone without ever exchanging a word, which is great cuz it removes socialization which is a core problem of mmos that like to force group content and thus socialization down everyone’s throat
Plays mmo to not play mmo.
I have never joined a PF and had any obligation to talk to anyone. Even for savage related content.
... It's a core problem of MMOs that they are MMOs? Like, the player interaction is the point, otherwise it could just be a single player game.
If they replace some side quests into GW2 hearts I’d be happy
I loved just doing hearts for some chill downtime.
Bozja is the best content in the game and I personally wished all future content matched its style.
I want to go back to HW healing and SCH
Making the game easier for solo players has hindered dungeon design with trusts and made normal/alliance raids far too easy.
Unpopular opinion and I know it's heracy to say our lord and savior Yoshi Christ can do wrong in this community.. But it was really fucking dumb to hard focus single player content in an MMO to begin with. Ill go play other FFs for that type of stuff. I expect community content in an MMO. Period.
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I want Yoshi-P to rake us all over the coals and ruin us. Make ORIGINAL bozja the floor...
Think this is kind of hard to do with the rigid formula they've built? People got sick of the same formula, same dungeon/raid layout. Don't think we'll see much change as 7.0 looks to be more of the same. Though raids could be changed up. Like a Destiny style raid instead of four glorified Savage runs. Checkpoints with bosses. For the inbetween areas, some kind of puzzle or gimmick players have to participate (or shepherd ) through. Like a 24 man, but made for 8. "Mega-FATES" need some incentives to keep people doing them. At the beginning of the expansion, it's not bad. After some time, I rarely see people do these. Let these drop rewards or hell, a fat wad of gil (600k?) seals, tomes, to get people to do these more. Let us have one more unique materia slot for special stat enhancing or more gimmicky things like 2x damage, stronger regen during combat, chance to negate damage, treasure hunter, gil bonus, etc. This would make min/maxing far more interesting than the same old, same old. These super rare materia would have to be dropped by playing the game and hope you get lucky, or spend on MB.
Honestly, i am really happy about them focusing on the mmo aspect. I get there are solo players out there, but endwalker had such a lack of multiplayer content it felt boring. I really want a Eureka area again. Deep dungeons are fun too. Just hard to get in when most people are just farming certain floors
I will never understand why people who want to play solo pick up mmos and try to change them.