Thread: FFXIV 3.0 : Heavensward - Expansion Information and Discussion    

Originally Posted by Taint

Where do they head then? We can all dodge lines. We know how to pass rot. We know how to tank swap. We know how to rotate CDs. We know how to mitigate huge AoEs. All they can bank on is HP/DPS checks, which will turn into just another lockout.

Lockout meaning we have to wait X amount of weeks to get enough tomes/tower type items to meet the HP/DPS check.

I was trying to think of various ways to increase difficulty and this is what I came up with:

• Increased stats: more damage dealt and a tighter DPS-check. Think T13. Odin on a casual level.
  
• More dodging: compare Titan HM to Titan EX… many people thought HM was somewhat intense when it was first released… until they saw EX.
  
• Team communication: things like Ramuh EX or T2 without the enrage strat, T10, T11, T12… these fights require people to talk to each other or at least delegate responsibilities and priorities ahead of time. Moogle EX requires some delegation of responsibility and communication on where to stand and which mobs to focus on at any given time.
  
• Individual responsibility: stunning, silencing, kiting… things like High Voltage in BCoB, Renauds in T7, or even Ifrit HM at launch. Chimera actually required silencing, stunning and kiting orbs before people used the terrain exploit. Machinist might have some new debuffs or CCs given what we've heard about targeting monsters' body parts.
  
• Unique debuffs: Leviathan EX, Ifrit EX, and T8 do this well… there's plenty more they could play with, like Pacification/Amnesia, Terror, Doom, Zombie… Mahisha S Rank and Qarn nightmares. World of Darkness did this a little with Doom and Death, obviously on a casual level. The opposite of this is unique buffs. The Chrysalis has a bit of this, and from what we can tell Astrologian is going to bring some interesting new buffs.
  
• Weaknesses and Resistances: T4 knights/soldiers used to be resistant to either magic damage or physical damage… Leviathan's head and tail reflect different types of damage, Agrippa The Mighty S Rank… T2 used to favour different types of dps depending on which path you took... They could also have weak spots on the boss that required attacking from certain directions at specific times or exposing weaknesses by using specific skills and spells on their own or in combination with others.
  
• Resource management: there are certain jobs that risk running out of TP or MP faster than others, like MNK or WHM, but a fight that required all jobs to more carefully use their resources could up the difficulty. To some extent T4 did this because you had waves of enemies where AOE was used by the DPS, the healers and the tanks, and even enmity as a resource could become an issue as the tanks would race to grab things as they spawned before the healers or dps could take hate. New abilities may help with this a bit, in the way Goad has done. Dark Knight seems like it will be an MP, TP, and enmity management job which could be interesting.
  
• Puzzle elements: things that have to be placed or done in a certain order to prepare for upcoming mechanics. Crystal Tower does this a lot… Scylla's orbs, Behemoth in LoTA… T8, T9 do this with towers and meteors…T12 to some extent with Bennus. Ramuh EX does it with orbs. T2 tried to do something interesting with this idea where you would disable certain abilities and grant specific buffs to the final boss depending on which mini bosses you killed on the way to it. Diabolos doors... Vishap did this on a very casual level.
  
• Instant death mechanics (everyone's least favourite): Titan, Qarn, T5, T6, Demon Wall, etc, etc.
  
• Randomness: This can mean a lot of different things… it's also likely to be the most frustrating and can also be the most detached from actual player skill unless it's executed properly. Bad phase changes in T7 are a frustrating form of RNG. Simpler forms like Ramuh EX lightning rings, T5 and T6 markers, etc. are a bit too basic. Shiva EX plays with the idea of randomness a little bit and is done fairly well. Savage Coil uses RNG a bit more… like in T6 where the bramble patches can appear anywhere.
  

I could probably go on, but these were the ones that came to me now. The point is they can always just pile on more in any individual category or combine them in new ways. The skill cap will likely increase up to a certain point where it just becomes unreasonable for a normal mode raid and anything greater will be relegated to Savage mode… where the real variation will come, especially for the expansion, is using new skills from the levelling process and new combinations of mechanics to force people to play their roles in a slightly different way (Ramuh orbs for tanks, kiting Renauds for ranged dps, Leviathan EX for healers, etc.).

There's quite a lot of variety already in FFXIV and I think there's a ton they can do. There's doubtless a lot more that I haven't thought of that they likely already have planned!

Yoshi-P has said this about new abilities in Heavensward:

Originally Posted by Yoshida

With some of the boss characters in Heavensward, you actually can’t fight them using your older skills — they might require you to know new skills that are only available after the level cap has been raised. This will create an opportunity for players to get together with the community to strategize how to beat these monsters. It’s safe to assume that you’ll be experiencing a new gameplay experience with the raising of the level cap.

Source

Please look forward to it.

Also...

Originally Posted by Niiro

Nothing that they've said so far has indicated that they plan to change much at all, lockouts and selling nostalgia are the order of the day.

If I have the energy later I might put together a shorter list of quotes here of all the brand new things being added in the expansion and all the significant changes to existing systems they have planned as I realize not everyone follows the interviews and stuff as closely (Sho's extensive list is great for this too). And because:

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png

Originally Posted by Detzu

Difficulty will be increased. They stated somewhere that 3.0 series will be less forgiving. But the best groups will still get those contents down in no time.

Having pretty much every fight mechanic in endgame content being a game-over if even one person fails isn't "Less forgiving" enough?

What do they have in mind, just throw in more Team Jump Roping mechanics?

Originally Posted by Detzu

Difficulty will be increased. They stated somewhere that 3.0 series will be less forgiving. But the best groups will still get those contents down in no time.

See I want to believe this but then we get another situation like Pharos Sirius were the people who hate using their brains and rotations will cry and cry until SE nerfs it into the ground because it's "too hard." Or even mechanic driven fights like Chrysalis or Steps of Faith, where braindead people expect to be able to go in and win no problem.

Or Amdapor Keep, where the Doomwall had to be nerfed like 6 times, let alone the dungeon itself. When he says less forgiving I'm sure he means more along the lines of Urth Gift trial, just constant assault of BS.

Originally Posted by Karbuncle

Having pretty much every fight mechanic in endgame content being a game-over if even one person fails isn't "Less forgiving" enough?

What do they have in mind, just throw in more Team Jump Roping mechanics?

You got me thinking of Mario party now. You remember the game! Jump that flaming rope OR ELSE!

Originally Posted by Karbuncle

Having pretty much every fight mechanic in endgame content being a game-over if even one person fails isn't "Less forgiving" enough?

What do they have in mind, just throw in more Team Jump Roping mechanics?

I'm curious. Could you give me an example of an MMO boss mechanic that you don't consider to fall in the "Team Jump Rope" category? I honestly can't think of any. To me the term doesn't really explain anything at all because you could make any mechanic conceivable fit that description given that it's not entirely trivial. What people call Team Jump Rope really seems to come from a cocktail of other mechanics that aren't necessarily that punishing on their own.

If they make it possible for people to die to mechanics with impunity and still make it possible for the rest of the party to meet DPS checks, handle healing, manage adds, and maintain their resources then you can only really end up with 2 things: Crystal Tower or Steps of Faith. Honestly, I don't see how you can have anything different. You are either punished harshly for mistakes immediately or you don't feel their full effects until the end of the fight when you've failed to meet all of the checks or the chain effect of mistakes becomes too overwhelming. If neither of these things happen then the fight becomes trivial.

Bosses in FFXIV already have quite a bit of variety to their mechanics and I listed in my previous post ways that those mechanics could be further diversified. But what would a mechanic look like that wasn't a Team Jump Rope? Honest question. Can you give an example from this game or another?

Is it the dodging you don't like? Do you want to be able to sustain more deaths and mistakes? Do you want DPS checks to be less severe? Do you want less individual or team responsibility?

Originally Posted by Stef

I'm curious. Could you give me an example of an MMO boss mechanic that you don't consider to fall in the "Team Jump Rope" category?

Any given NM in FFXI, and I'd like to say GW2 bosses have a shred of randomness to them, but I can't recall. I'll go lamer and name Star Trek Online bosses, even if they are poorly done they aren't patterned and you actually feel like you're fighting Romulans or Klingons, not a jump-rope-on-fire. (though I'm not stating STO as a Pinnacle of anything good here, god forbid...) ...

But that answer requires an explanation of where team jump rope comes from. "Team Jump Rope" is a term used by the JP community to describe patterned, time-based, mechanics. Example: Dodging/performing a mechanic that comes around every ~45 seconds, or 60 seconds, or 30 seconds, or in set intervals every fight (Weight of the Land as an example). Which is what XIV does in a lot of its fights of note/endgame content. They all have a strict pattern of moves the enemy will always use, in order, and often rapidly. So, if you remove the predictability and Pattern to all fights, you remove the "Team Jump Rope". Its quite simple, all they would have to do is not make every fight a pattern memorization. (Though I can't speak for final coil yet, though I do have access, but I doubt much has changes since Yoshi said patterns are staying).

(This is a separate thought)Its not about dodging or 1-hit KO or that, its about fights being more pattern memorization than anything else. For instance, the key to winning a raid is memorizing and executing mechanics perfectly... Because no matter how good your DPS is, how spot on your healers are, how great your tank is, the mechanics will still end your group if you fail them. In order of important raids are "Mechanic memorization" > "Job proficiency". That's not to say knowing how to maximize your DPS, time your cooldowns, to cure quickly is useless in fights, its not, and you definitely need to be good players due to the high damage output and DPS checks a lot of fights have... but if you're the best players on the server and flub a mechanic you still wipe, so its only to imply Mechanics > Skill in every endgame fight of note (Pre nerfs).

This leads to a problem I have with some fights, in that I don't really care about the mobs HP bar, how fast its going down, because I'm not fighting the boss, I'm fighting mechanic memorization. My foe is my memory, not Nael deus Darnus, and thats how fights feel to me. its "Okay heres first Comet, heres Ravensclaw... okay jump... k now another comet... okay Dynamo... okay jump if not pushed..." "Okay here comes golems... okay attack green... okay now red.. are there any rocks up? do we need anymore feeding?" "First dragon up, kill it, check to see if I have the status... watch out for next heavensfall... don't get sucked in... get ready for Fire-in, Fire out-, thunder out mechanics and check around for divebomb locations" so on, so forth.

In these fights I still remember to keep up rotations and such but I spend the entirety of the fight calling off the pattern in my head to the point the battle itself is background noise to making sure I do mechanics right. I'm sure its not like this for everyone though, but it is to me, and that makes you lose out on some of the "Epicness" those fights are suppose to have. Its not til the finishing cutscene that i come back down to earth and can realize i won. Does it mean that they aren't fun? No... I did enjoy the content. My only thing was that, even with all the Echoes and nerfs, some of these fights are painfully unforgiving. Rather its hard will be subjective, but the potency of your mistakes is the same regardless if you're a noob in 100 barely getting by or an expert in 130 whos done it a dozen times. These types of mechanics render I.lv, Echo, your own skill pretty much backseat to the memorization of mechanics. Which is why so many people still can't clear T9 and T5 despite our higher HP, damage, and such through gear/Echo.

Edit: Oh, and I'm not saying the fights should be made easier. Simply that they are quite punishing as is, especially pre-nerfs, I'm just curious how they will get more punishing.

Originally Posted by Karbuncle

Any given NM in FFXI

How did I know that would be the first place someone goes...

Originally Posted by Kaslo

How did I know that would be the first place someone goes...

Just because you might not like it doesn't mean its not true. Just as many people hate coil and mechanics driven fights as people who hate FFXI's NM system(k I'm pulling that out of my ass but what I mean is...). opinions be opinions man. But you probably knew this because

A) This originated as a FFXI board so theres bound to be a lot of players here
B) Its a legitimate argument. Just because FFXI as an abuseable mess of Stun locking and zerging doesn't mean adding randomness to XIV would bring that about. They're fundamentally different combat systems.

Did you even continue from that point...?

On one hand, more randomization would be interesting. On the other, patterns like the ones in t10 (it tries to incorporate randomization) are still engaging; the mechanic patterns require you to master the fight and master the way that you optimize your job's performance to react to that role.

Personally I see little issue in that. Randomization of mechanics would require mechanics beong neutered, more forgiving, less difficult or even less people would be included in these fights due to a lack of ability or simply not wanting to deal with it.

I feel like if more fights acted like t10's final phase (a pattern made up of smaller variant patterns that are randomized, i.e. you get either lightning+charge, tether+charge) throughout the entire fight with various different sets of available patterns, itd be an excellent balance. You'd still need to master the fight, but there'd be some element of dynamic thinking that requires you to act on the fly.

Also, let's not pretend that more than a handful of xi's nms were interesting. All of them could and can be tackled with a precanned strategy of "throw all the melee/mages at it with loads of buffs and spam ws/spells until it dies". They tried to solve this numerous times with proc and weakness systems, but they're more of an annoyance than riveting, involved gameplay mechanics that jad you thinking outside the box or reacting dynamically. Indeed, the only thing remotely dynamic about fighting something in xi is playing as one of the people designated to lock down the mob's attacks with stun...if you aren't using a bot. No more depth here than in xiv.

Vagary addresses this somewhat with the methods used to spawn the next nm, but thats one event out of over a decade worth of events.

Seriously, if you look at XI without nostalgia goggles, FFXI had just as much jump rope mechanics, or was entirely more boring.

Heck, outside of instanced fights, the hardest parts of FFXI fights was claiming the mob.

Originally Posted by Prothescar

Also, let's not pretend that more than a handful of xi's nms were interesting. All of them could and can be tackled with a precanned strategy of "throw all the melee/mages at it with loads of buffs and spam ws/spells until it dies". They tried to solve this numerous times with proc and weakness systems, but they're more of an annoyance than riveting, involved gameplay mechanics that jad you thinking outside the box or reacting dynamically. Indeed, the only thing remotely dynamic about fighting something in xi is playing as one of the people designated to lock down the mob's attacks with stun...if you aren't using a bot. No more depth here than in xiv.

Never said they were, because I know a lot of them... weren't lol. Only brought them up as a direct addressing of a statement asking about non-jump-rope fights.

You would combine FFXIV's style of combat, with the same general mechanics XIV offers (the mechanics aren't the problem, patterned fights are.), while adding the randomness, or at least slightly contained randomness (as you said, T10) in the combat of fights. I mean, are you guys really so engaged and interested in memorizing a pattern for every coil fight? Is the pattern memorization engaging? Or do you find T10 to be more fun than the others due to it keeping you on your toes in certain spots BECAUSE its not a set, specific, down-to-the-numbers pattern?

But I do agree, if you added randomness they would need to tone down the punishment or it would be rage inducing... I mentioned that in my above post too. But I don't think they'd have to be toned down so much that it would make the fight ball numbing. You could still have punishing randomized mechanics, just give people a bit longer reaction time to them, or simply make them do massive damage, killing you without the proper buffs (I.E possibly survivable with higher gear or Stoneskin/Adlo, but not without). Could even still include 1-hit-KO mechanics but make them kill an individual rather than a raid-wipe like Golems/Rocks or Petrify used to be. Can recover if a DPS or a single healer dies if you're skilled enough. I mean I might be able to think about it off the top of my head because I'm no game designer but there must be ways to implement challenge without it being a time/HP based pattern of game over mechanics?

And sorry, while on the topic of XI. They had a lot of challenging and engaging fights. While yes, they had a lot of abuseable/exploitable messes of fights because of bad design, but I mean, is Garuda/Ifrit hard so GD engaging? FFXIV isn't the end of all engaging combat itself either. Both games have their issues, and I acknowledge neither are perfect and I would even dare to say FFXI was way more of an exploitable mess in most of its combat, and I truly hated ground kings. But XI did have some engaging and difficult fights there. Its a shame they were often few and far between but they were there, and we all know it... something kept us going. Still. FFXI has passed, its time has passed, and I don't want XIV to be XI 2.0.

Originally Posted by Kaslo

Seriously, if you look at XI without nostalgia goggles, FFXI had just as much jump rope mechanics, or was entirely more boring.

Heck, outside of instanced fights, the hardest parts of FFXI fights was claiming the mob.

So I'll take that as a no, you didn't actually read the rest of it. But hey, if you're feeling feisty you can read this post as it actually does address a lot of things you said here.

(Not saying this to be a clown but I am actually heading off to work, and if anyone is interested in continuing the discussion regarding FFXIV and its mechanics/pattern driven combat, I'll do when I get off work around 5PM, sorry!)

XI's depht comes from the planning and building of your character rather than the fights themselves. Fights are rarely challenging and are just as much simple button mesh like every other game. Maybe when you solo certain things(depending on the job).

I've said it before but I think itemization is one of the weakest parts of XIV, takes away from an important aspect of strategic combat which is preparing yourself for it chosing the right equipment. Or, at least that's a fun thing to me.

Originally Posted by Prothescar

I mean i fail to see what's so engaging about someone running around with kirin chasing them while you blast it with noctoblasts and wind blades for 3 hours compared to the dodging and execution of xiv's boss mechanics, but anyway

And I fail to see whats engaging about 1, 2, 3 JUMP!, 1,2,3 jump! But its subjective, I agree and I don't claim to think everyone will like it... only a fool would seek to please everyone because its impossible. Still, You go to great length to play down and mock what made XI fun while going to great lengths to make XIV's sound like the second coming of Jesus. Its not bad, it really isn't, I still play, so its gotta have something going for it. Its engaging in its own way, which is forcing you to memorize the pattern.

Anyway. Again, not saying this is innately bad, but maybe some variety in the 'Engaging challenge' of these fights would be a reasonable request.

I'm sorry, but there was nothing fun about Kirin pre-kraken club and such. Charging Chi Blasts, or meditating for TP for weaponskill usage.. I mean, no. The best part was when the LB went off early in it's lifespan and killed people. That was about it.

While these fights are completely 100% scripted, at least you have to press more than a couple buttons (unless it's T12 fora melee DPS where their job is to literally training dummy the boss)

also not saying all fights in FFXI were like Kirin of course. The game grew, and just like that game growing, this game will as well. Maybe their battle mechanic team will come up with something more fun/engaging, who knows? I don't think anyone's saying FFXIV"s fights are the next coming of Jesus, though. If they are, they are blinded by the Yoshi-Penis.

Also I agree with the sentiments that the gearing system is probably it's weakest point. The fact that in the grand scheme of things, there really is a BiS, it kinda just makes gearing up a tad boring when you're having to spam the same fight over and over for one specific piece of gear because it's BiS.

Overall, it is what it is right now until Heavensward and we just have to hope the game changes.