Dev Tracker: Discussion

[ccl]

Delve 1.0 was hard because they outdated r/e/m; now they make content assuming not everyone has r/e/m so I doubt we will see something as hard (Unless they release a new ilvl and make r/e/m hard to upgrade)

legion wasn't hard, but it was very fun and entertaining cause you could try to beat your kill number every run.

[Draylo]

People seem to think they're cool for saying everything is easy, but when it requires strategy and following through w/it then its not exactly a walk in the park. People needed to be on their game for things like Delve before nerfs/ilevel and things like Legion. It wasn't difficult when they were all on their game but it was at least somewhat challenging I guess is a better word. A lot different than current stuff where you just faceroll through things and ignoring most mechanics due to it. You could say the same thing about any MMO that things aren't "hard" simply because you understand all the mechanics and have a good team.

[Damane]

Delve 1.0 was hard because they outdated r/e/m; now they make content assuming not everyone has r/e/m so I doubt we will see something as hard (Unless they release a new ilvl and make r/e/m hard to upgrade)

legion wasn't hard, but it was very fun and entertaining cause you could try to beat your kill number every run.

legion was just a brd/cor rotation party, coupled with stuns and or PDs and Embrava. imho as long as bard and cor rotation exists even when stuff comes out that outdates REM it would not be hard due to that.

[JSHidaka]

Delve 1.0 wasn't hard because they "outdated" the REM's... was hard because, was an event they released early, if it was AFTER the "+skills on weapons" and all the ilvl113(or even 109 gear) we have now, it would have been easier.

[Shenrien]

Delve 1.0 had a lot going for it at its release, it required not just a handful of carry strong dps and a whm to pull off a win but everyone to advance their characters to beat the old naakuals.

You had monks getting manibozho gear which was critical to achieve the accuracy on Tojil -- who was the gate to pretty much every other naakual, you had SCH building up really high m.acc sets, utilizing 2 GEOs for M.Eva. Eva, Def and Atk down, you had mantra rotation you had timing certain abilities for different phases of a fight, healers gear didn't change much at the time short of bokwus gloves if they needed extra cure potency, otherwise at the time I believe AF+1 was ahead in potency.

But yeah, Delve 1.0 was about the progression of everyone to help each other succeed, we have yet to have any content release between then and now that actually forced players to make such a dramatic shift in gear, using debuffs, and having clutch interrupts on mechanics that can lead to wipes, it was great! It was engaging and was a sense of accomplishment when Tojil was first brought down, and giving the gear that helped bring down the other two. If you want to see something like that happen again, the only way it's going to happen is if ilevel is increased and the requirements to beat the content are as brutal as what we had to put up with in the past.

I also feel +skills took away a lot of that initial difficulty and should be removed but that will never happen because square never makes bad game design choices.

[ccl]

Delve 1.0 wasn't hard because they "outdated" the REM's... was hard because, was an event they released early, if it was AFTER the "+skills on weapons" and all the ilvl113(or even 109 gear) we have now, it would have been easier.

Not outdating r/e/m is honestly one of the issue of current content, they cannot make content that require Koga dps, it would excluse too many people: when they outdated them, they could make content that required the most damaging other option that didn't come from boss (wich were easy to get); when we got boss weapon, the event became much easier, the issue now is we start every new content with the best wpn, so I really believe it can never be as hard as delve 1 was before 1st kill.

I agree that legion was much more challenging than the current content; there are zero event atm that require support to be as good as support needed to be in legion to clear 20+ in Hal of mul(before the event nerf).

[Byrthnoth]

SE designed first-release Delve to be an area where you farmed Plasm and upgraded Plasm gear, but I bet they didn't intend for us to be able to kill the bosses. They added the boss wall lock when they noticed that people were attempting the boss fight and building strategies to defeat it, but that didn't stop people from doing 5 NM + Boss kills. There were two ways to kill the bosses initially:
1) Do the DD strat with 5 NMs+Boss.
2) Do the relic RNG strat with beads.

I don't think SE thought that the DD strat would be possible on any of the bosses with the 113 weapons. Using relic RNGs is always kind of cheating, so I bet they didn't anticipate that one either.


If iLevel 119 weapons were unobtainable, then less organized alliances wouldn't have been able to get boss wins and the weapons wouldn't have become ubiquitous. SE would have had a lot more latitude to justify the iLevel 115 weapons and a lot of the "why is this happening?"-tier drops they released last summer/fall, which were probably in the pipeline before they realized that they didn't make Tojil hard enough. As it is, most of us skipped straight from the iLevel system's release to having 119 weapons (and a lot of people promptly quit due to the RME fiasco.) In response SE basically gave up and released 119 RMEs/made Delve lowman content, which was probably the right move but was too late to really reverse the damage that had been done.


In summary, I think Delve's release was poorly planned, but if we hadn't been able to kill Delve bosses then the Adoulin expansion would unfolded very differently even if the rest of the system remained as it was.

[NynJa]

People needed to be on their game for things like Delve before nerfs/ilevel and things like Legion

lolwut?
Having 8 songs and 4 cor rolls and 4 geo debuffs isnt "being on your game", its being buffed out the fuckin ass to the point you cant die.

Its a massive Pchan-tier comment. "I solo X mob", when by solo he meant outside whm with 8 songs from bards that buffed and dropped PT.


If SE had made it that songs/rolls drop when the bard/cor drop pt, it would change the landscape quite a bit as well.

[Damane]

lolwut?
Having 8 songs and 4 cor rolls and 4 geo debuffs isnt "being on your game", its being buffed out the fuckin ass to the point you cant die.

Its a massive Pchan-tier comment. "I solo X mob", when by solo he meant outside whm with 8 songs from bards that buffed and dropped PT.


If SE had made it that songs/rolls drop when the bard/cor drop pt, it would change the landscape quite a bit as well.

well on delve 1.0 that was only one part, the other part was job abilty rotations (mantra) 2 hours, wild card and people geared to no end, in every slot (from brds to whms to schs etc), but yeah the large part was the buffs. yeah my statement still stands, as long as there is brd and cor rotation in existence there will never be hard content, even if they outdate RMEs with an ilvl upgrade.

[Draylo]

Plenty of groups didn't swap BRDs or COR and still beat the content, how is that relevant to this topic? People also beat Legion w/o holding 2hr buffs like Embrava. Rotating abilities and stacking them is part of the game, its part of any MMO.

lolwut?
Having 8 songs and 4 cor rolls and 4 geo debuffs isnt "being on your game", its being buffed out the fuckin ass to the point you cant die.

Its a massive Pchan-tier comment. "I solo X mob", when by solo he meant outside whm with 8 songs from bards that buffed and dropped PT.


If SE had made it that songs/rolls drop when the bard/cor drop pt, it would change the landscape quite a bit as well.

To the point where you can't die? The fuck are you talking about lol, plenty of groups died to Tojil back then.

[ccl]

So delve 1 was a joke day one to you because we rotated brd+cor?

[Malithar]

Delve 1 at launch and Legion were cool, don't think anyone's arguing if they were difficult or not, just the lil gimmicks and shit we employed to make them doable/easier, you know, the things that we did to allow us to beat things rather than wait for the +skill update, ilvls to be added, etc.

I'm more curious if we'll ever see content like that again. My money says we won't though, player base isn't there (for most people) to support some high tier alliance content, and even if it was, it feels we've hit a baby stage of the game where content is designed around the lower tier denominator. Just don't think we'll see anything balanced around the idea of "the top tier players will clear it, and we'll nerf it over time so others can do it." They did that with Delve, they even said they'd do that ahead of time, and the entire time it was met with backlash. Whether it was the top end players bitching about the nerfs to the content, or the noobs who couldn't ever get clears because "SE caters to the elites onry! QQ"

Not happy at the idea of no more difficult, if only for a short time, content, but at the same time, I enjoy just playing the game. Content like that made it so without your A Team online and ready to go, you couldn't run it.

[Draylo]

Well the discussion keeps going in circles, need more DEV news or the update to come lol. Just having one or two events like that is fine, theres plenty you can do (although people choose not to if they already geared one job) without your whole team being on. Something simple like Monstrosity being updated (if ever) would be something fun to do if it had decent rewards for the PVP portion, like vanity equips.

[Prothescar]

i wish they would update monstrosity. thought we were supposed to have party play and shit for it already

[Hitou]

I just wanna play dragons already! But yeah it would be a lot less boring to grind exp on monstrosity if you could team up. Really wish they'd add MON vs. MON PVP too since no one did/does player vs MON, mostly because it's so one-sided. And also because there's no reward worth bothering with.

[Bukadan]

the player base is there for difficult content, too many people complain about hard content though. SE should make a poll or something, "HARD CONTENT? y/n?" and make who answered what public. everyone who said no can burn in hell!

[Sechs]

With such a varied difference in performance between players

I understand what you're saying, it's true. But that same thing happens in WoW as well.
Now... I don't know if the degrees of separation between good and bad players is worse in FFXI than WoW, might be, but trust me the same thing happens in WoW.
So I don't think that's the real "issue" here.

The big difference imho is another (premise: not saying one is better and the other is worse, I'm just describing)


WoW has a very "controlled" environment.
Over the last years they removed concepts (which were already much less present in WoW compared to FFXI, to begin with) like "hybrid roles" or "buffer/support". They went back to a strict implementation of the trinity system, where each class is either a Tank, a DD (ranged, melee, physical, magical) or a Healer, period.
Also, there is no more buff stacking.
Buffs got standardized and every class has several buffs. The same buff effect can be provided by multiple classes with slightly different variations/lasting times/activations, but they do not stack.

FFXI has a more complex model where monsters are more similar to players (they too gain TP, they use TP moves when they reach a certain value etc), there are a lot of jobs which do not fit a single or specific role (hybrids, supporters etc) and there is a buff overstacking, which has been honestly been abused over the years by us players (COR/BRD swapping, prebuff before BCs etc and 20000000 different buffs which all stack)
This creates a silly situation where sometimes monsters are harder the more people you bring (more TP generated => more TP moves spam) and where you can "Zerg" mobs down ignoring strategies.

In WoW you can hardly do that, unless you're doing watered down content or old content.
Also monsters are more "predictable". They usually have a strategy to be beaten, and the variations to that strategy are all pretty close to the main one (there are exceptions of course).
You know that if you do thing X, the thing Y is going to happen. You know that if you avoid doing A, then B is gonna happen.
You know at which % the mob is gonna use what.
FFXI has this for some monsters, but WoW uses this to a much higher degree and the level of randomness, which still exists, is much much much much much lower than the one present in FFXI.

neither of which are really difficult.

Yeah, they're not difficult, they feel more like devs/game "cheating" on you.
But then again you can hardly do it any other way.
Devs are not "controlling" and setting limits to the players' power (as they do in WoW, see above).
And given this, they cannot know how powerful a group of players can get. Finding a balance in making content challenging for some but not impossible for everybody else is really difficult in such an environment where there can be so much diversity in the "level of power" of players.

Their best attempt so far has been the difficulty scaling we sa in BCs maybe.

[Sechs]

It's part of why a lot of MMORPGs end up homogenizing classes

Bull's eye, it's exactely this.
Homogenizing things makes it more predictable for devs to know what setup players will use and how strong/powerful groups will be.
Once you set this in motion, it's much easier to tune fights and fit the difficulty level exactely where you want it to be.
There are several pros in this approach, but in the long run I don't know if I like it.

I love buffing/support classes, and the strict implementation of the trinity system just couldn't possibly allow that and I hate it =/
It's the same reason why some people end up getting bored of FFXIV (which uses the exactely same identical model, atm)

[EjinCaitsith]

People saying Legion was a joke? It took almost a year for NA to start clearing it with any sort of frequency. At lot changed in that year, mainly the Dynamis changes taking full effect allowing almost anyone to make a relic; couple that with Embrava locking and pre-nerf PD, it finally became beatable. Once SCH stunning was incorporated it became even easier because it allowed for another party of DDs.

As others have said, I think they planned for Delve 1.0 to progress in the same way, with other events eventually making us strong enough to beat MBs all spanning over a year or so. They probably expected the best groups to clear MB with beads, but made beads so stupid to farm that it wouldn't happen often and they'd only get 30K plasm for all that work, so if you assume groups couldn't 1-5+MB, they had Delve 1.0 set up pretty nice.

Assuming they implemented it right, I'd love an event like Legion again. With a few hard, but beatable chambers to farm for some new gear, then one stupidly hard chamber that we couldn't possibly hope to beat in the first few months. Wouldn't be that hard, just make mobs resist stun, make a bunch fully resist ranged damage to avoid RNG abuse and have the most deadly moves ignore EA/Scherzo. Pretty much VD DMII where they are immune to ranged damage: that would keep us busy for awhile.

[Shenrien]

I kinda would like to see a Delve based Legion, spawn 3 tiered NMs that are enraged and then an enraged naakual will spawn, clear 6 chambers to go to the 7th chamber where you fight 3 waves, each wave having 2 naakuals randomly pooled but no duplicates, i.e. you won't face tojil twice, then the 4th wave will be the 7th naakual we've yet to encounter. It could be their way of introducing it rather just having it be some overworld thing that you sit and wish would end because of how horrible the experience is.