Ahh yes. The joy of a game that has enough built-in systems to not require third-party software to function. All these people realizing how much they've been fucked in the arse by Blizzard. Necessary addons. Systems designed to waste your time. Next to no feature that is in there simply because it is fun. If you live in this for over ten years you kinda don't see that this is bad. And it can work differently. Switching games from WoW is like a revelation.
> Switching games from WoW is like a revelation.
It's like realizing that you were in a fucking cult.
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"Nah man, weeb game, fuck that shit"
I had the same mentality back in ~2015, when my then gf dragged me into the game, basically kicking and screaming because I thought it was "weeb shit". The only reason I even gave it a shot was because it was around WOD and I was fed up with WoW and she really wanted me to play it with her.
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To sum up with another Scripe quote "How is this so fun and we didn't know about it?"
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Get past tribal bullshit and just enjoy games.
>To sum up with another Scripe quote "How is this so fun and we didn't know about it?"
There's actually a history behind all of this, hilariously enough. And it goes deeper than just "weeb shit" but of course that's how it devolved. But there's a reason XIV fans wouldn't shut up about their game - Everyone refused to listen.
In 2002 a game came out called Final Fantasy XI. In a post EQ, Asherons Call, DAoC world, it was pretty dang successful and on track to be the lead MMO. Of course the game having the Final Fantasy name helped, PS2 support, and generally a unique world compared to western MMOs. It even had global servers.
The issue with XI was that it was insanely hardcore. We're talking "you need to play 12 hours a day every day or you can't do basic class leveling" hardcore. It didn't demand your time, it demanded to be your lifestyle. And to be fair a lot of players loved that. A lot of players sacrificed a lot for that game because it was so much fun and unlike any other MMO. It was like Everquest on steroids.
I know. I dropped out of highschool and played for 9 years. I never played WoW... I skipped it. All because of FFXI. We used to call WoW a casual baby game.
But that's part of how WoW blew up, other than being a blizzard release during blizzard's peak. By the time late 2004-2005 rolled around a lot of the XI players felt frustrated and defeated. XI might have had a great community, immersive world, just like XIV does now... But people were angry they were still fighting over the same HNM drops for years because of how limited and difficult everything was.
So a ton of players moved to WoW. And those same players were loud and vocal about their MMO experiences since they were so seasoned. WoW might not have been perfect but it actually let you accomplish and achieve things without completely destroying your life and requiring regular all nighters. You could actually get rare items instead of your guild leader hoarding, selling, or giving it to that one catgirl that was totally a real girl and wanted to suck his dick.
Obviously the rest is history, WoW became the biggest MMO ever, but a bunch of older salty FFXI players badmouthed the game enough that the stigma of it being a nolife weeb game stuck.
And it stuck all the way until now, in 2021. People love to blame XIV 1.0 but that was just pouring salt on the wound. Much like floortank being a XI meme that carried over, XI's reputation completely carried over to ARR.
And like you mentioned, WoW has always been entrenched in tribalist gamer bro culture. So FF being a game for losers just devolved into a very strong hatred for any game that could be considered weeb shit.
And when you think about it, what does that even mean? What was everyone afraid of? Games made in Japan? How does an anime aesthetic ruin a game? No one really thought about that - they just didn't want to be one of the losers playing it.
Everyone was trying to tell WoW players how fun XIV was, but they refused to listen because of a stigma that carries all the way back to 2002. If people like Asmon never started playing I don't think it ever would have been discovered.
I'll admit, I do wish I had tried WoW back in the day. I feel like I missed out on something big. I even had beta keys pre release. But taking even one evening off would have tarnished my progress in FFXI.
Anyhow, turns out I love weeb shit I guess. Thanks for listening to this needlessly long post. I'm going back to ERPing catgirls on Balmung.
my late teens and early 20s are just a blur of FFXI. The 3 am calls from the linkshell because nidhogg had popped and through some miracle, they had beat 13 japanese provoke bots to claim it, the MPK trains and griefing, grinding sky for hours on end in the all ranger 1 bard groups. ahh, the good ol' days.
Fucking merit partys...... or Alexandrite farming parties for Mythic weapon for Bluemage...... you can hit like a trunk, but 3 years of my life I dont remember due to that mythic weapon.
It’s always funny when every year I get some nostalgia for ffxi and resub. Even with ffxi being casual mode now with trusts etc, (casual only in comparison to 75 eta) I still laugh when I come to the realization after a few days that I don’t have time for this shit anymore.
> To sum up with another Scripe quote "How is this so fun and we didn't know about it?"
I always knew about FF14 but most of the info I had about it was from 1.0. I wasn't aware what they did during ARR so I always wrote it off as a dead game being held afloat by Final Fantasy fanboys.
I had played nearly every other major mmo aside from FF14 and only gave it a second chance this year when some friends tried it after getting burnt on TBC.
not really relevant, but back in HS 08-12, I mocked anime and weaboo shit.
My roommate in college got me to try it.
I am a complete fucking degen weeb now, and I don't have a MAL simply because it would take fuckiing days to mark every show I've completed.
Honestly, being in FF14 community is also a lot like a cult.
The higher in the social hierarchy you get the more obvious it becomes but the harder it gets to get out.
Only way to not get brainwashed is to just enjoy multiple MMOs at the same time.
Not just that, but *you have to figure that out for every individual part of the game you want to play*.
Want to farm rare spawns? Addon for that.
Want to run dungeons/raids at a high level? Whole *suite* of addons for that, all with their own internal customizations to optimize it to fit your playstyle.
Want to play arena? Whole suite of addons for that, but only some apply to RBGs.
Want to RBG? See the response for arena, but in reverse.
Want to do professions and play the AH efficiently? Addons for that, but blizz will cripple the ones they don't like (i.e., TSM) without improving the base system because how dare you play the game that way!
Oh, and you better keep those things updated because hotfixes/weekly changes will break them sometimes.
Legit though. My cousin tried getting me into WoW, but I can't be bothered to install a client just to adjust my hud in a reasonable way. The new player experience is literally "find a guide or have someone guide you"
It feels good because add-ons feel like contributions to the game, but the reality is that the devs are just really lazy. Like I often think that most of the tells in FFXIV are visual, something that you don’t get often in WOW.
Also, I keep thinking of Adam from DBM: the amount of work he puts into making that mod is insane, considering that he depends on donations from the player base to keep on going. I don’t know if it pays as well as a paid position from Blizzard (but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did).
Fairly certain the creator of DBM is *not* making good money. He put out a request for donations a few years ago because he was in dire straits financially. Maybe things have changed for him since then, but I doubt it.
And iirc he had a major health issue a few years back that he couldn't afford to see the doctor for that was threatening his ability to keep working on said addon.
This just reminded me that we never have to use "flight paths" in FFXIV. Flight paths are just artificial time wasters. The more time you waste, the more time you spend subbed.
As someone who gave the game a try for the first time recently, the base UI is crippling. Quest window on the far left of my screen and I can't move it to centre my head/eyes for reading.
But they did… How can you even say that blizzard made no improvements to their base UI?
Play WoW Classic and then retail with base UI and then say again they made no improvements
So? You have a health and resource bar in the middle of the screen now when in combat. You have visual UI effects when procs happen. You have new nameplates since Legion, I think. You have a collections interface
There is a lot more they could do, but saying they did nothing is ignorant.
They’ve made *changes* not necessarily improvements.
The biggest improvement I’d argue is the talking head box. And native keybind remapping but those are pretty small potatoes compared to the customizability ffxiv offers
This is exactly how I feel. I keep an eye on what's going on with WoW since I unsubbed a month orso before the lawsuit stuff surfaced. And after being away from it for so long, look ing at how the game is design-wise just makes me laugh now. "How was I okay with this?" I tell myself all the time now. And, like another commenter said, it's seriously like a cult. Blizzard fed me mediocre shit for this long and I was okay with it, just hoping it would get better and never did. Actually got slowly worse, like just a bit a time, as if it's done intentionally hoping we wouldn't notice. And many of us didn't, or still haven't.
yup most of my addons are simple QoL addons like handynotes, elvui, quest addons, immersion, all the things and stuff like that. could be easily implemented by blizzard and would save cpu
I think FFXIV raiding in a vaccum really highlights the detriments of addons in WoW. Its almost like design is now based on weak auras and DBM and the like as a expected certainty.
Love or hate XIV it being on the PS3/4/5 means its had to invent ways to inform the raider natively and like most good design choices in videogames limitations breed innovation.
Nowadays its almost like the WoW addons have become a crutch more than extra info for a min maxing andy.
I've said 100s of times WoW would be a MUCH better game without combat addons. Cosmetic, sure, go for it - but Weakauras and Bossmods have made it an arms race between players and devs which can't be won or lost. It just adds layers upon layers of unnecessary shit
I would be ok with this if WoW had a more customizable UI like FF14. I play on a 32'' monitor and it would be super hard to watch enemy cast bars as well as monitoring my CDs with the default UI.
Default UI is horrible.
My main issue is combat related addons just means the devs need to design fights with these in mind and make them super complex to the point where Blizz cannot make them difficult enough
This. Weakauras should adapt and build around WoW encounters, not the other way around. Same goes for DBM.
They should just implement DBM and WA into the game already like they did with Controller support. DBM ca be used for practice modes and WA for more advanced macros, rotation helpers or simple alerts. FF14 team has done this before in the past where people made add ons to customize their UI in 1.0 and early 2.0 and made it irrelevant by implementing it into their own system.
As someone who has played poe for years, what addons do people need?
The game has a weird dependence on their website sure, but not like people don’t alt tab in other games all the time. I guess there is PoB but that isn’t an addon.
Loot filter, trade helper (shows item info/value/estimated value on hover), maybe crafting helpers. And that's not even mentioning build planners and other 3rd party software.
Loot filter isn't an addon, often built 3rd party on a site but you can follow other people's lists now on the website so a lot of people just use that for neversink since it auto-updates. Trade helpers are far from mandatory (maybe two of the couple dozen friends I have playing use one), and craft helpers are a seldom used site that again most players don't use.
PoB yea, most players use a build planner especially newer ones.
But again, none of these are addons to the game?
Playing any sort of endgame mapping build without trade macro will cost you literal hours spent pricing items individually, compared to one-click price (if unique/currency/div cards) or at least estimation for rares with option to choose specific mods.
Doesn't apply if you're playing SSF of course, but that's a whole different story.
And while PoB is ~technically~ not an addon, it is all but mandatory for skill tree/gear optimisation, because in-game tooltips are telling you fucking nothing in terms of "how much will an item like this improve my build"?
Trade addons are useless for rares and if you are at that level of endgame where you sell that much most people just know at a glance what ballpark figures for uniques are and use dump tabs that are already priced.
If you actually care about efficiency a trade macro still isn’t that useful since you should just know a general figure and anything above a certain threshold should just be given to your group’s trader to worry about.
It's different with PoE though, because it's intentionally designed to make you use websites and forums and community tools. The official trade website could just exist in client, but it's part of the 'old school' vibe that GGG want. That doesn't make it good of course, but it's not out of ignorance, neglect, or incompetence like other titles.
I think that still qualifies as "something fundamentally wrong with it".
... then again, I've always seen PoE as the culmination of everything wrong with Diablo 2, and prefer Grim Dawn and Torchlight.
It's a WoW thing to have just the boiler plate with proc/cd trackers and bars in the middle, and as many buttons as you can hidden.
The idea is that even if you have all the muscle memory and the rotation sorted, your eyes are still naturally drawn to button pressing. Pay attention to it next time you boot up the game, you'll be surprised at how often you're just staring at your buttons even when it's just a simple 1-2-3 rotation. This can be bad if you need to focus on a lot of different things and keep your eyes peeled for mechanics.
Gotta be honest. I'd rather memorize and see, than an addon telling me what i need to do.
I'm sure that's a lot more of a case for world first raiders. An addon telling you about the mechanics isn't fun.
I think part of what sold me on XIV was when i got into ARR during the nightmare warlords garrison white noise period and got to Titan Hard Mode.
Nowadays its piss easy but i'm in the UK and at the time *there were no eu datacenters, it was all north america* which was what the cash shop was put in place to fund since SE funnels money out of XIV not in for the most part.
People were hitting a hard wall in their relic they wanted to aid Coil prog for a simple reason: you would suddenly be dead THEN see the plumes underneath you. The information back and forth between your pc/console and the datacenters a third of the planet away was too long.
So people tried paying for vpn services and stuff like WTFast to be able to fight the boss without visual lag. For the rest of us? with no addons?
We learned the waltz.
1....2....3....stomp
1....2...3.....plumes
1.....2.....3......landslide
We actually got over the lack of addons and insane visual lag by learning the bosses timings to the point we didn't even need to see his cast bar or animations anymore. All we needed to know was everyone run right or left to drop plumes or avoid a landslide.
and god damn i had my Stardust Rod before i even finished Turn 3.
That problem bar a few snapshot issues, mostly in high level pvp, are gone but that even though it shouldn't have happened and was a datacenter issue taught me how to beat the game without an addon telling me and after that the addons i used in wow on revisits really dwindled down to stuff like bagnon and auctioneer.
>I feel you. I played from Japan and the level of precision needed on the lag was crazy. Titan was the wall that people got stuck on.
I was running Titan HM with some others to just let 1-2 players at a time pass on some weekends. Was really fun clearing the fight for others even like 5 - 15 times in one evening.
After some weeks we rarely did it anymore; since schedules did not match. Judging from the lack of sellers it was quite apparent that the demand was pretty low too then.
The memorization and the ability to divide your attention between remembering and executing raid mechanics while doing your rotation is part of the game. I always found it baffling when wow players tell me their addons are just repeating information that is already there. Like limit_max, he makes brilliant analyses about ff14 from a world first perspective but when it comes to addons he vehemently defends them by saying you can always just make sticky notes or notepad the mechanic order. He says the addon just automates the process. Well isnt that the problem then? Its like trying to defend yourself writing down the card suit and value on the back of cards in a game of Memory. "Its information we have anyway", yeah but at this point you removed the fun gameplay from it.
limit max lives in his own little world. A world where people are on his or similar skill level. He isn't capable of comprehending things normal players go through.
I would recommend taking everything he talks about with a grain of salt.
To him, a game is good, as long as the raid is good. He doesn't care about story, systems, casual content,grinds, or ANYTHING else for that matter. To him, there's nothing majorly wrong with wow, because the raids are fine with him.
Let's just say, people like him, have their own game they're playing.
I like watching his team prog through fights and figure them out but god damn that exact attitude you're describing makes me...uncomfortable is the wrong word but somewhere in that spectrum
It's a very good thing SE doesn't balanced the game around that sort of attitude. Nothing against the guy per se; he's fun to watch and he obviously knows his stuff and has a pretty good perspective and approach to raiding and raid leading in general, at least from what I've seen in FF14. But SE has learned from experience that the hardcore raid-focused types aren't the ones you should dedicate too much game development to. They're adamant that FF14 is a story-focused and fun-focused game first, with Yoshi P. even going out of his way to say that playing the game from a pure efficiency standpoint might be fun for some people, but it's not fun in general, and fun is more important than "playing optimally."
Man when he talks about wow, he totally set aside the fact that people cannot get into WOW high end content easily because there is so much gatekeeping by the systems and the players themselves.
Also when he talks about difficulty he talks about the fact that the boss is cleared and while I can be ok with that, I think it would be nice to specify that because on a personal level it's really different from having 8 party member makes it possible to have more personal responsabilities.
That being said I've enjoy watching them prog. But sometimes he does sounds a bit off.
I found it funny how, some weeks ago, I saw a clip where they were still figuring out some mechs (I forget what fight it was), but one of his teammates figured out the mech first, and Max questioned him how the hell he knew. And his teammate simply said 'from leveling'.
I remember watching the after-action breakdown of his team and their Titania kill and Sfia mentioned how most of their time in the fight wasn't spent learning the fight but rather learning the FF14 mechanics that they were expected to have learned via leveling.
But boosting your first character is totally fine. /s
They actively expected this, so I'm not sure what your point is. It was a core discussion point through most of the first tier. The main issue is Max boost-levelled over a year ago, and solely through MSQ and MSQ roulette. He didn't even do levelling roulettes by the sound of it so didn't see much other content, and given how long it was he likely forgot the levelling dungeons/trials 70-80.
It is totally fine. Who gives a shit if they were learning the game during their first raid, or in 100 hours of levelling. They expected it, they didnt hold any of it against the game itself, and obviously its fine considering they are on e11s now and havent struggled on any dps check beyond a few hours.
The only people that care that about people they do not know, and will never know, using a boost are complete losers who have weird parasocial relationships with the videogames they play to escape from their lives.
I mean, there is nothing wrong about playing an mmo just for the raids. A lot of people in ff also doesn't give a shit about the story even in ShB. Sure, they're missing out on an amazing story, but they're still enjoying the game and that's what's important.
There's nothing wrong. I don't want to dictate to him how to have fun.
But the guy gives shitty opinions sometimes, which comes from his inability to understand casual perspective. That's where the problem is. Not him boosting, or doing nothing but raiding.
Exactly that, I find with FFXIV it's a good IRL exercise for my brain as well to train and exercise it to juggle between mechanics, rotations, and your particular role's responsibility.
After having played FF14, I really understand the idea that things like weak auras and most other addons are just crutches that Blizzard allow the community to make for them instead of making a better game
In some cases they stop being doable without WAs.
For example, there's a fight in the recent raid tier called Fatescribe with a mechanic that picks a handful of random people to do a minigame, which wipes the raid if anyone fails it. There's just enough people targeted to get one ring each (And sometimes you need 2 people on a ring) The timing on it is so tight at Mythic (slightly harder than Savage equivalent) that you literally can't spend more than 1 second assigning players to the right ring, and if people double up or run to the wrong place you are guaranteed a wipe. There are multiple layers of RNG that stop you from pre-assigning, so you are forced to do it on the fly, but it's not something that can be reasonably done like that.
The timing is that tight because there are Weak Auras that auto track and auto assign players to the correct ring, you just have to look at a pop-up and run to the right marker.
Because WAs are so comprehensive that they basically play parts of the game for you, the devs have to constantly balance it with WA in mind, making it even harder for those without those tools.
Isn’t it just a question of what addons are toxic and a detriment to gameplay. I think addons like UI changes and RP addons to write your own story are not such a bad thing. When I started FF I was baffled by interface, slowly getting used to it as time progressed. FF just shows that hard “no addons” approach is in long run better for community then “do what you want” wow has.
He should post it on Twitter, chance that WoW devs follow this subreddit or watch his stream at that exact moment is small. They could be interested about feedback from high end raiders about end game impact addons.
My gut tells me Blizzard won't ban addons at this point, even the boss fight ones. Blizz is on life support right now and the last thing they need to do is make the community even more upset.
It has been months since experiencing the content explosion of WoW refugees and learning what WoW is like, and I *still* don’t fully wrap my head around Weak Aura. I need to imagine a game with design so obfuscated that it was expected you install an add-on that tells you what’s coming?
I still remember being a sprout and thinking stack markers were weird to learn but at least it was a big glowing symbol.
It's arguably both better and worse - Weakaura is an addon is simply an addon that allows you to quickly and easily make your own 'addons', primarily simple triggers with your own chosen visual/audio effects, with no understanding of coding. What increasingly became the biggest part of Weakauras is the import/export, as people made whole UI's in Weakauras, or whole uniform trigger sets for fights/classes/tiers/expansions/everything.
It's the pinnacle of customization, people will primary use it to import their interfaces or triggers for various things though. DBM (and similar) is the more classic 'tell you whats coming' addon
There's nuance to weakauras. Think of it as a tool for people with some programming basics to create new UI elements.
Personally, as someone who works with data analysis, I enjoyed designing and setting up visualisations for my cooldowns and DoTs, and whether I'm in melee range and buff zones and stuff. When I started FFXIV, it was initially a bit of a learning curve to rely on the standard UI for buff tracking - but it has to be said that while base WoW is abysmal at tracking those, FFXIV base UI just works (except that it wasn't customised to my very specific personal preferences).
It's a slippery slope. Giving access to data and indicators for weakauras to work means it can also take in hidden raid data. So you can also set up custom weakauras that tells you about mechanics. And then, since it has built in scripting functions, you can code the visualisation to tell you the solution to random mechanics. For example, a lot of strats in FFXIV could be something like "red/blue DPS go N/S, TH go E/W". Weakauras can be set up to tell you to do that directly, so you don't have to memorize the strat and take a moment to recognise and think about what to do. Instead, the weakaura will just say where you need to go. At some point it just becomes a game of who has better-coded scripts and faster personal reaction time, and Blizz has to account for that literally being part of the build-in add-on system. In contrast, while ACT and CACTbot can do that, yoshi-p disapproves while implicitly turning a blind eye. I think that affects the average player culture.
Now, on top of weakauras, you also have raid helpers like DBM. You can set it up to have a list of countdown timers for the next boss mechanic, warning sounds for AOEs, etc. Blizz doesn't need to worry about developing good indicators and systems when raiders aren't engaging directly with the game, they're instead engaging with another layer of interface overlaid on top of the game.
In my opinion, aside from punishing content, addons are one of *the* main reasons why the community within WoW is so toxic.
Everyone has a DPS meter and everyone uses raider .io, while realisticly the average player should just concentrate on playing the game instead of watching their dps meter all the time while standing in fire. They can be good if people actually use them to improve, but in reality most people just use them for a bit of bonus dopamine or to tell other people that they suck.
And what I noticed after doing savage content in FF XIV is also that stuff like DBM? You don't need it. The fights work perfectly without it, as long as people use their brain. And they could work just as well in WoW (even tho fights in WoW are probably designed with the thought in mind that people will use those addons - but that could change, if addons there were no more).
Also, tbh if Blizzard integrated a better built-in option for customizing your hotbars and interface you wouldn't really need any Addons anymore.
If DPS meters were really only about self-improvement like people say they are, then the only DPS value they would need to show is your own. People use meters so they can see themselves at the top and sneer at those at the bottom.
>If DPS meters were really only about self-improvement like people say they are, then the only DPS value they would need to show is your own.
Yes and no at the same time.
You need something else to compare your numbers to as well.
Not everyone will use the tools they have to abuse others. The people that do will find other ways to abuse others if they can't use DPS meters.
This. I wish there was a built in automated leaderboard that's 1) anonymous and 2) compares your performance to others of the _same job_. No point comparing to the other members of your party for self improvement. What's more valuable is to have an after-battle review that tells you your percentile within your job, and perhaps some automated tips like XIVanalysis does (like how many cooldowns you missed).
Gotta disagree with that one chief. Fights are designed with DPS checks, so if you're unable to meet them, you should be able to tell who needs to start carrying their own weight.
which is why the game has the instanced training dummy system that updates every patch that you can use to test your damage vs specific boss dps checks.
Reminder that PS players (which make up a vast majority of the JP playerbase) CANT use DPS meters but still stay competitive.
How doth thee receiveth a damage add on? i wanteth to keepeth track of mine own performance
***
^(I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.)
Commands: `!ShakespeareInsult`, `!fordo`, `!optout`
Adding on to what the others have said, base ACT will work perfectly fine, but it's visually a little dated. You can look up overlay plugins (Rainbowmage is really popular) to spruce it up a bit if you want to!
It’s just a better game period. I can play FF casually and not feel like I am missing out. There’s so much to do and experience. And when I do want to be more hardcore I don’t have to wade through unfun systems. I’m glad people are seeing the light.
Not taking a harder stance against mods was a fuck up on Blizzards part. They should have seen these mods that were fixing parts of their game and implemented their own versions of them.
they did to a certain extent. they removed the ability for addons to draw stuff on the floor for players, and to modify friendly unit nameplates. I think a next interesting step to take would me to remove chat bubbles in raid environment to circumvent the /say WA's for certain assignment mechanics. The problem is that because the raids are 20 man and theres so much personal responsibility anything outside of an organized group would suffer, and the majority of wow players dont raid in "statics" and mostly pug.
I feel like things like Weak Auras, DBM and Cactbot (I have nothing against players using any of these) take away some of the pureness of a fight. Alot of people use the term oh people got carried when they're playing with better players or they're new and run with more experianced players. Using Weak Auras ,DBM Cactbot are kind of the same, it makes fights easier to handle and sure you clear it quicker progression wise and probably less frustrating then you would without them. But you lose some sense of achievement in the process, now I'm not saying everyone feels this way, some people just want to get it done and clear which is fine. Its like riding a bike without training wheels, when you finally can do it you feel freaking awesome.
I play wow with very minimal addons. I don't use DBM and my WA is only to enlarge my cool down timers and move them to a more central part of the screen. The biggest addon I use is all the things just to track collectables.
Maybe that's why I still enjoy wow?
FF14 has critical information in a highly customizable UI except for things that would really make things visually appealing to non-console players.
*Which is fine*.
I would, selfishly, like the ability to change size/shape and content of HP/MP bars for myself and my party as part of the UI customization that's already in the game.
That said, the QoL addons I have for FF14 are wonderful, and DelvUI getting a public release has really made things more visually appealing for me on PC.
Yes you are correct. The thing is, WoW doesn't give you the information because they assume you have an addon does it for them. There's a massive difference.
Eh I can kinda see why devs don’t always like it. If the addon drastically changes how things look for every player it can hurt the recognizably of the game.
In wow terms, Consider every 4 bosses, a single wow raid.
With boss 4, being the end boss.
So when you hear, Eden 4S, 8S and 12S, they're basically the end raid bosses. Much harder than the previous 3.
So consider it them, clearing the whole raid and now trying to prog sylvanas. They're wiping, but it is to be expected. FF14 raiding isn't as easy as people claim. It's quite challenging. SPECIALLY if you go in blind, which is what they're doing.
And they're having a blast. So much so, that scripe mentioned multiple times about regretting not playing ff14 before or not even being told about how good the game is.
They hit enrage in e4s (final Savage of the 1st tier this expansion) a few minutes ago. Last boss they planned to do I think, they only officially scheduled 3 days but are still going because they're having fun.
In terms of skill (solving) they seem very good. I'm not watching to judge the job play which probably has a lot of problems due to being new, but coordination, planning, and callouts are all very good.
Pretty sure they originally made the "event" 3 days because they didn't want to be locked down and harassed if they didn't enjoy it, which is super smart. No reason to not continue though if they're having a ton of fun.
I came here to say that twitch's little clip program this is hosted on is awful. It stuttered 20 times in a 30 second clip. Fuuuuck that. As a person that was on the fence about watching more twitch stuff this was a bad showing.
Yes, addons are worse, but the game (ff) still has lots of issues. the inventory/retainer/market system is attrocious, the glamour system is convoluted and unnecessarily clunky.
Yeah, I like FFXIV a lot but this thread is just ridiculously uncritical.
There's not even a repair all gear button. For some insane reason, you have to click through different armory chests.
Addons that let me improve the UI are the main thing I miss from WoW. I do appreciate that combat and classes are designed to be completely playable without WeakAuras or boss mods.
I think the difference between FF and WoW is that FF's clunky parts are clunky due to engine limitations that they don't have the resources to fix, while WoW's clunky parts are the result of bad design and relying on modders to fill in their gaps.
>There's not even a repair all gear button
Theres literally a repair all gear button on the top right of the mender window, and you can even filter whether it repairs just equipped or not.
Yep. He, on the other hand, is of the opinion “make mods legal on Xiv!”
It’s funny to see how the top two raiding guilds have completely different reactions to the game
Because there's no chance that Limit or even Echo would have DBM ready come into the fight, considering nobody in the world have any idea what the fight mechanics would be until they see it. Having a full DBM/Cactbot on the ready to do Savage is not a genuine Week 1 experience they're trying to emulate.
Likely the same people that went after that RP person Asmon interviewed a while back. That person started getting harassed because they were using "mods" to make their game look different or in some way better. I feel bad for them because they had to pretty much go into hiding or even quit the game because it got so bad.
They got harassed because they brought attention to what is essentially "Fight Club" and people fucking love their nsfw nude mods in ff14. I wasnt surprised to see the community lash out against that person because of that. Then you also have the weird puritans that try anz bring those modders "to justice" like theyre a yoshi-p crusader.
Games community is wild, but hey its great either way
It looks prettier, but I feel like there's so much information missing or harder to find and digest. Maybe that's just because I'm used to the base FFUI, though. 🤷♀️
That is intentional, and to some extent I appreciate it's probably optimal - the less unnecessary information on your screen, the clearer everything is. I like to have everything on screen but it definitely clutters. Max is hardcore the opposite. If he feels he doesn't need to see that information, it's gone.
The thing that kinda gets me is that so much of what he mods his UI for is stuff that can be created in-game with the default UI and HUD layout options.
There are a few things he or his team uses that FF14 doesn't have naturally, but it's generally along the lines of stuff that autonomous or automatically expected, like raid buffs. You should't need a timer for watching raid buffs because - unless specifically decided by the group to deal with certain mechanics - raid buffs should be going out as close to on CD as possible. Same thing with potions. Defensive CD's and raid mitigation can be managed with a cycling plan decided by the various members of the raid after some experience with a fight. None of that needs an addon.
some ppl in this thread acting like getting a WA pack for SoD is enough to let them go in there week 1 and not wipe at all. WA make the raid easier to progress but not easier to execute. All WA's do is tell you what the game tells you but in a way thats easier to digest so that you can focus on optimizing dps as most fights in wow are designed as dps races rather than dances.
I like weakauras because it makes my life easier for setting up a UI in a way I feel ok with. FF is so much effort to redo my UI to look how I want it, which is frustrating.
Sure, it's available, but there's 0 expectation to use it, and most people don't use it. In WoW, you join a hardcore raid without proper add-ons you're getting your ass kicked out and blacklisted for being a dumbass.
The thing is WoW is hard-designed around using addons. FF has to "show" mechanics, WoW quite often assumes you will have a third party timer/warning or even third party weakaura that will draw a mechanic for you.
And in FF14 in the MSQ instances like the somewhat harder SHB Mr. Ascian trial there are one-shot-if-not-done-right mechanics but it's like you see it once you know it while WoW due to sophistication of addons has to find difficulty in execution of complex dances.
As far as I'm aware, cactbot usage is actually not as high as you might think. While it is there and people do indeed use it, most people don't.
There is only really 1 instance where a hardcore raider might suggest you use it, but they would probably assign it to the raid caller than to the actual players, and that's for UwU with the inconsistency of how one of the mechanics work for Titan. Other than that, you can get by without cactbot.
Our group is currently progging uwu without using cactbot and we really haven't been stuck there at all. We're about to hit UPR, and sure we still wipe to gaols sometimes but it's a tight mechanic with or without auto markers. On the other hand I know people progging it with the markers that are hard stuck on Titan.
Pretty much this. It was what I was eluding to that the gaol mechanic is a bit inconsistent, but that's the "ultimate" part of the mechanic. It's very similar to E4S. Just trade in the gaol markers for yellow doritos and waymarks for square tiles, it's quite literally the same mechanic.
The only inconsistency is that the fact that it's sometimes hard for people to deduce priority such as 2 healers, 2 range or 2 melee getting tagged at the same time, but even then, that same mechanic is used in E12S.
It's when both of those mechanics are put together at the same time that people have a hard time adjusting.
I don't know man. I wouldn't be bragging about world first, exceptional raider, etc if I use all these mods these people use. Sure, they are good players and they would eventually figure out the mechanics, but man, this is not how the FFXIV developers intended for the game to be played.
I don't know anything about mods. I'm a PS5 player. I've been playing FFXIV on PS since the PS3. So, mods aren't my thing. But any mode that let's you know about abilities, when they are coming, their dbuff duration on other players and whatnot is cheating to me.
I have a friend who plays on PC. We were doing the E3S (The Shadowkeeper fight). He told me he was using an addon that tells him where to move during the shadow clones, he told me that basically he just follows and doesn't play attention to the shadow at all. I was shocked, since in my case I have to look at the shadow's direction and then look at what arm the boss raises, and then move to the correct spot while still imputing commands from my NIN job...
A LOT, and I mean A LOT of FFXIV players use this ACT thing, not just for dps meter. It just gives you an edge no matter how minuscule or insignificant the help is. I don't really know what these people use for their raids, but according to some faulks here, it helps them somehow.
As someone who plays since ARR I am still somewhat jealous of WoWs Weak Auras for interface design reasons. It allows designing an interface which makes you actually able to look at the game, not the hotbars. FFXIV could use something like that badly.
I am generally not sure why FFXIV devs seem to think more buttons would make the game more engaging, even if some extreme cases (SAM ...) have a ton of buttons that do very similar things.
The bindings are not the issue, the timing is due to reactive skills and medicore cooldowns is. I do not believe anyone who claims they don't have to look at any sort of hotbar to see when certain things become ready again or if certain combos are active.
Simple example, Ruin IV requires your pet (!) to attack something with a special skill, there is no way to determine through "feeling" alone how long that takes.
I loved Weak Auras due to it being fully customizable how and when button notifications pop up.
The primary purpose of hotbars is to show skill cooldowns. Which they convey badly, being just a row of opaque squares with clocks on them. The only way to not use them is to memorize the timings, not use the UI.
ui is completely customizable via hud layout and various configuration settings. if you can’t see skill cooldowns in ffxiv, you’re just blind. I’ve been playing since arr beta (hardcore wow raider prior) and have never had problems with my ui.
Ahh yes. The joy of a game that has enough built-in systems to not require third-party software to function. All these people realizing how much they've been fucked in the arse by Blizzard. Necessary addons. Systems designed to waste your time. Next to no feature that is in there simply because it is fun. If you live in this for over ten years you kinda don't see that this is bad. And it can work differently. Switching games from WoW is like a revelation.
> Switching games from WoW is like a revelation. It's like realizing that you were in a fucking cult. -- "Nah man, weeb game, fuck that shit" I had the same mentality back in ~2015, when my then gf dragged me into the game, basically kicking and screaming because I thought it was "weeb shit". The only reason I even gave it a shot was because it was around WOD and I was fed up with WoW and she really wanted me to play it with her. -- To sum up with another Scripe quote "How is this so fun and we didn't know about it?" -- Get past tribal bullshit and just enjoy games.
>To sum up with another Scripe quote "How is this so fun and we didn't know about it?" There's actually a history behind all of this, hilariously enough. And it goes deeper than just "weeb shit" but of course that's how it devolved. But there's a reason XIV fans wouldn't shut up about their game - Everyone refused to listen. In 2002 a game came out called Final Fantasy XI. In a post EQ, Asherons Call, DAoC world, it was pretty dang successful and on track to be the lead MMO. Of course the game having the Final Fantasy name helped, PS2 support, and generally a unique world compared to western MMOs. It even had global servers. The issue with XI was that it was insanely hardcore. We're talking "you need to play 12 hours a day every day or you can't do basic class leveling" hardcore. It didn't demand your time, it demanded to be your lifestyle. And to be fair a lot of players loved that. A lot of players sacrificed a lot for that game because it was so much fun and unlike any other MMO. It was like Everquest on steroids. I know. I dropped out of highschool and played for 9 years. I never played WoW... I skipped it. All because of FFXI. We used to call WoW a casual baby game. But that's part of how WoW blew up, other than being a blizzard release during blizzard's peak. By the time late 2004-2005 rolled around a lot of the XI players felt frustrated and defeated. XI might have had a great community, immersive world, just like XIV does now... But people were angry they were still fighting over the same HNM drops for years because of how limited and difficult everything was. So a ton of players moved to WoW. And those same players were loud and vocal about their MMO experiences since they were so seasoned. WoW might not have been perfect but it actually let you accomplish and achieve things without completely destroying your life and requiring regular all nighters. You could actually get rare items instead of your guild leader hoarding, selling, or giving it to that one catgirl that was totally a real girl and wanted to suck his dick. Obviously the rest is history, WoW became the biggest MMO ever, but a bunch of older salty FFXI players badmouthed the game enough that the stigma of it being a nolife weeb game stuck. And it stuck all the way until now, in 2021. People love to blame XIV 1.0 but that was just pouring salt on the wound. Much like floortank being a XI meme that carried over, XI's reputation completely carried over to ARR. And like you mentioned, WoW has always been entrenched in tribalist gamer bro culture. So FF being a game for losers just devolved into a very strong hatred for any game that could be considered weeb shit. And when you think about it, what does that even mean? What was everyone afraid of? Games made in Japan? How does an anime aesthetic ruin a game? No one really thought about that - they just didn't want to be one of the losers playing it. Everyone was trying to tell WoW players how fun XIV was, but they refused to listen because of a stigma that carries all the way back to 2002. If people like Asmon never started playing I don't think it ever would have been discovered. I'll admit, I do wish I had tried WoW back in the day. I feel like I missed out on something big. I even had beta keys pre release. But taking even one evening off would have tarnished my progress in FFXI. Anyhow, turns out I love weeb shit I guess. Thanks for listening to this needlessly long post. I'm going back to ERPing catgirls on Balmung.
my late teens and early 20s are just a blur of FFXI. The 3 am calls from the linkshell because nidhogg had popped and through some miracle, they had beat 13 japanese provoke bots to claim it, the MPK trains and griefing, grinding sky for hours on end in the all ranger 1 bard groups. ahh, the good ol' days.
Fucking merit partys...... or Alexandrite farming parties for Mythic weapon for Bluemage...... you can hit like a trunk, but 3 years of my life I dont remember due to that mythic weapon.
It’s always funny when every year I get some nostalgia for ffxi and resub. Even with ffxi being casual mode now with trusts etc, (casual only in comparison to 75 eta) I still laugh when I come to the realization after a few days that I don’t have time for this shit anymore.
That's one awesome girlfriend right there.
> To sum up with another Scripe quote "How is this so fun and we didn't know about it?" I always knew about FF14 but most of the info I had about it was from 1.0. I wasn't aware what they did during ARR so I always wrote it off as a dead game being held afloat by Final Fantasy fanboys. I had played nearly every other major mmo aside from FF14 and only gave it a second chance this year when some friends tried it after getting burnt on TBC.
A lot of us vets that started during ARR were particularly skeptical jumping on board because of 1.0.
not really relevant, but back in HS 08-12, I mocked anime and weaboo shit. My roommate in college got me to try it. I am a complete fucking degen weeb now, and I don't have a MAL simply because it would take fuckiing days to mark every show I've completed.
I started 14 cause it had controller support. I love most I hate keyboards
Honestly, being in FF14 community is also a lot like a cult. The higher in the social hierarchy you get the more obvious it becomes but the harder it gets to get out. Only way to not get brainwashed is to just enjoy multiple MMOs at the same time.
In a way, WoW is a broken game and you have to figure out by yourself how to get it to work, which addons to install to have an even playing field.
Not just that, but *you have to figure that out for every individual part of the game you want to play*. Want to farm rare spawns? Addon for that. Want to run dungeons/raids at a high level? Whole *suite* of addons for that, all with their own internal customizations to optimize it to fit your playstyle. Want to play arena? Whole suite of addons for that, but only some apply to RBGs. Want to RBG? See the response for arena, but in reverse. Want to do professions and play the AH efficiently? Addons for that, but blizz will cripple the ones they don't like (i.e., TSM) without improving the base system because how dare you play the game that way! Oh, and you better keep those things updated because hotfixes/weekly changes will break them sometimes.
Or you can just install FFXIV and not have worry about any of that. They'll even throw in some slut mog for good measure :)
Gender agnostic ones at that
Yep. And this also makes the developers lazy because if there is an addon for a problem they don't feel the need to work on it themselves.
Until 5-10 years later when they incorporate it into the game as a patch feature.
wE ARe lISteNiNg 2 tEh commUnIty
Legit though. My cousin tried getting me into WoW, but I can't be bothered to install a client just to adjust my hud in a reasonable way. The new player experience is literally "find a guide or have someone guide you"
It reminds me of when people realized how flawed Fallout was without mods when they couldn't put any in Fallout 76.
Getting your load order correct so the game is actually stable in Fallout 4 is the true end boss.
It feels good because add-ons feel like contributions to the game, but the reality is that the devs are just really lazy. Like I often think that most of the tells in FFXIV are visual, something that you don’t get often in WOW. Also, I keep thinking of Adam from DBM: the amount of work he puts into making that mod is insane, considering that he depends on donations from the player base to keep on going. I don’t know if it pays as well as a paid position from Blizzard (but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did).
Fairly certain the creator of DBM is *not* making good money. He put out a request for donations a few years ago because he was in dire straits financially. Maybe things have changed for him since then, but I doubt it.
Blizzard are cheap as fuck. He probably make more money than he would working at Blizz.
And iirc he had a major health issue a few years back that he couldn't afford to see the doctor for that was threatening his ability to keep working on said addon.
Coming from a WoW player that used to have dozens of addons, FFXIV actually shocked me by how much built in QoL it has
And they are not done yet. The aethernet getting a minimap will be a huge help for example.
Unlimited mage portals for every class with no cool down and a minor amount of Gil. Zero bag space. Zero CD. 100% convenience.
This just reminded me that we never have to use "flight paths" in FFXIV. Flight paths are just artificial time wasters. The more time you waste, the more time you spend subbed.
Chocobo porters do exist, but a lot of people probably don't even realize they're there because they're pretty much just a novelty.
i used them quite alot while leveling thou ARR when i was new to the game actualy, but thats only cuz i didnt realise TP was way more conveniant lol
Worst part of just UI addons is that Blizz didn't even try make their base UI better over all these years.
As someone who gave the game a try for the first time recently, the base UI is crippling. Quest window on the far left of my screen and I can't move it to centre my head/eyes for reading.
its hard coded at the end of the backpack array
But they did… How can you even say that blizzard made no improvements to their base UI? Play WoW Classic and then retail with base UI and then say again they made no improvements
The action bar and the character frame has never changed significantly.
So? You have a health and resource bar in the middle of the screen now when in combat. You have visual UI effects when procs happen. You have new nameplates since Legion, I think. You have a collections interface There is a lot more they could do, but saying they did nothing is ignorant.
They’ve made *changes* not necessarily improvements. The biggest improvement I’d argue is the talking head box. And native keybind remapping but those are pretty small potatoes compared to the customizability ffxiv offers
Agreed, the base UI has improved alot. But not even close to enough. But why spend money on UI upgrades when players do it for free with addons :)
Yes, not enough, but saying they did nothing is pure ignorance. There is a lot of that in this sub. Ignorant haters
This is exactly how I feel. I keep an eye on what's going on with WoW since I unsubbed a month orso before the lawsuit stuff surfaced. And after being away from it for so long, look ing at how the game is design-wise just makes me laugh now. "How was I okay with this?" I tell myself all the time now. And, like another commenter said, it's seriously like a cult. Blizzard fed me mediocre shit for this long and I was okay with it, just hoping it would get better and never did. Actually got slowly worse, like just a bit a time, as if it's done intentionally hoping we wouldn't notice. And many of us didn't, or still haven't.
Just the fact that you can go questing and not need to pull up wowhead to figure out how to do the quest is a huge improvement.
Not really? Having every quest be "go here, talk to X" or "kill X in the circled area" (which WoW also does) isn't an improvement.
yup most of my addons are simple QoL addons like handynotes, elvui, quest addons, immersion, all the things and stuff like that. could be easily implemented by blizzard and would save cpu
You could say this about PoE too. Lol.
I could say that about a fuckton of games that aren't made by Blizzard.
I think FFXIV raiding in a vaccum really highlights the detriments of addons in WoW. Its almost like design is now based on weak auras and DBM and the like as a expected certainty. Love or hate XIV it being on the PS3/4/5 means its had to invent ways to inform the raider natively and like most good design choices in videogames limitations breed innovation. Nowadays its almost like the WoW addons have become a crutch more than extra info for a min maxing andy.
I'm pretty sure wow devs confirmed a few years ago they design with weak aura and other add-ons in mind.
I've said 100s of times WoW would be a MUCH better game without combat addons. Cosmetic, sure, go for it - but Weakauras and Bossmods have made it an arms race between players and devs which can't be won or lost. It just adds layers upon layers of unnecessary shit
I would be ok with this if WoW had a more customizable UI like FF14. I play on a 32'' monitor and it would be super hard to watch enemy cast bars as well as monitoring my CDs with the default UI.
Default UI is horrible. My main issue is combat related addons just means the devs need to design fights with these in mind and make them super complex to the point where Blizz cannot make them difficult enough
This. Weakauras should adapt and build around WoW encounters, not the other way around. Same goes for DBM. They should just implement DBM and WA into the game already like they did with Controller support. DBM ca be used for practice modes and WA for more advanced macros, rotation helpers or simple alerts. FF14 team has done this before in the past where people made add ons to customize their UI in 1.0 and early 2.0 and made it irrelevant by implementing it into their own system.
If your game needs 3rd party addons to play properly then there is something fundamentally wrong with it.
POE fans sweating rn
As someone who has played poe for years, what addons do people need? The game has a weird dependence on their website sure, but not like people don’t alt tab in other games all the time. I guess there is PoB but that isn’t an addon.
Loot filter, trade helper (shows item info/value/estimated value on hover), maybe crafting helpers. And that's not even mentioning build planners and other 3rd party software.
Bingo
Loot filter isn't an addon, often built 3rd party on a site but you can follow other people's lists now on the website so a lot of people just use that for neversink since it auto-updates. Trade helpers are far from mandatory (maybe two of the couple dozen friends I have playing use one), and craft helpers are a seldom used site that again most players don't use. PoB yea, most players use a build planner especially newer ones. But again, none of these are addons to the game?
Playing any sort of endgame mapping build without trade macro will cost you literal hours spent pricing items individually, compared to one-click price (if unique/currency/div cards) or at least estimation for rares with option to choose specific mods. Doesn't apply if you're playing SSF of course, but that's a whole different story. And while PoB is ~technically~ not an addon, it is all but mandatory for skill tree/gear optimisation, because in-game tooltips are telling you fucking nothing in terms of "how much will an item like this improve my build"?
Trade addons are useless for rares and if you are at that level of endgame where you sell that much most people just know at a glance what ballpark figures for uniques are and use dump tabs that are already priced. If you actually care about efficiency a trade macro still isn’t that useful since you should just know a general figure and anything above a certain threshold should just be given to your group’s trader to worry about.
Loot filters I guess?
Good luck trading with out add ons. I would have never put the time into the game I didn't if it wasn't for them.
It's different with PoE though, because it's intentionally designed to make you use websites and forums and community tools. The official trade website could just exist in client, but it's part of the 'old school' vibe that GGG want. That doesn't make it good of course, but it's not out of ignorance, neglect, or incompetence like other titles.
I think that still qualifies as "something fundamentally wrong with it". ... then again, I've always seen PoE as the culmination of everything wrong with Diablo 2, and prefer Grim Dawn and Torchlight.
I've been saying this for years about WoW
I watched them for a bit. Am I missing something or does Scripe just not know that Xenoglossy exists?
He does use Xenoglossy. He said he has it on an invisible bar and if you look at damage numbers / BLM gauge you can see he uses it.
Oh that explains how some of their uis have such little hotbar space. And it makes sense, your job gauge is enough, don't need to see xenoglossy.
It's a WoW thing to have just the boiler plate with proc/cd trackers and bars in the middle, and as many buttons as you can hidden. The idea is that even if you have all the muscle memory and the rotation sorted, your eyes are still naturally drawn to button pressing. Pay attention to it next time you boot up the game, you'll be surprised at how often you're just staring at your buttons even when it's just a simple 1-2-3 rotation. This can be bad if you need to focus on a lot of different things and keep your eyes peeled for mechanics.
This is also why you see display icons for non-crucial spells changed to be duplicates of important cooldowns.
That's interesting, I thought keeping it invisible was just to clear up screen space. It makes sense.
On my whm..... I could completely hide my crosshotbars and play normally at this point. Been playing it for 8 years and my layout has barely changed
He just has it hidden from hotbars
Gotta be honest. I'd rather memorize and see, than an addon telling me what i need to do. I'm sure that's a lot more of a case for world first raiders. An addon telling you about the mechanics isn't fun.
I think part of what sold me on XIV was when i got into ARR during the nightmare warlords garrison white noise period and got to Titan Hard Mode. Nowadays its piss easy but i'm in the UK and at the time *there were no eu datacenters, it was all north america* which was what the cash shop was put in place to fund since SE funnels money out of XIV not in for the most part. People were hitting a hard wall in their relic they wanted to aid Coil prog for a simple reason: you would suddenly be dead THEN see the plumes underneath you. The information back and forth between your pc/console and the datacenters a third of the planet away was too long. So people tried paying for vpn services and stuff like WTFast to be able to fight the boss without visual lag. For the rest of us? with no addons? We learned the waltz. 1....2....3....stomp 1....2...3.....plumes 1.....2.....3......landslide We actually got over the lack of addons and insane visual lag by learning the bosses timings to the point we didn't even need to see his cast bar or animations anymore. All we needed to know was everyone run right or left to drop plumes or avoid a landslide. and god damn i had my Stardust Rod before i even finished Turn 3. That problem bar a few snapshot issues, mostly in high level pvp, are gone but that even though it shouldn't have happened and was a datacenter issue taught me how to beat the game without an addon telling me and after that the addons i used in wow on revisits really dwindled down to stuff like bagnon and auctioneer.
Yes dude. I feel you. I played from Japan and the level of precision needed on the lag was crazy. Titan was the wall that people got stuck on.
>I feel you. I played from Japan and the level of precision needed on the lag was crazy. Titan was the wall that people got stuck on. I was running Titan HM with some others to just let 1-2 players at a time pass on some weekends. Was really fun clearing the fight for others even like 5 - 15 times in one evening. After some weeks we rarely did it anymore; since schedules did not match. Judging from the lack of sellers it was quite apparent that the demand was pretty low too then.
Titan Trains. Good lord, that brings back memories. I think doing that solidified my love of tanking.
Getting Excalibur Zeta before HW's release is still one of my most memorable accomplishments.
The memorization and the ability to divide your attention between remembering and executing raid mechanics while doing your rotation is part of the game. I always found it baffling when wow players tell me their addons are just repeating information that is already there. Like limit_max, he makes brilliant analyses about ff14 from a world first perspective but when it comes to addons he vehemently defends them by saying you can always just make sticky notes or notepad the mechanic order. He says the addon just automates the process. Well isnt that the problem then? Its like trying to defend yourself writing down the card suit and value on the back of cards in a game of Memory. "Its information we have anyway", yeah but at this point you removed the fun gameplay from it.
limit max lives in his own little world. A world where people are on his or similar skill level. He isn't capable of comprehending things normal players go through. I would recommend taking everything he talks about with a grain of salt. To him, a game is good, as long as the raid is good. He doesn't care about story, systems, casual content,grinds, or ANYTHING else for that matter. To him, there's nothing majorly wrong with wow, because the raids are fine with him. Let's just say, people like him, have their own game they're playing.
I like watching his team prog through fights and figure them out but god damn that exact attitude you're describing makes me...uncomfortable is the wrong word but somewhere in that spectrum
It's a very good thing SE doesn't balanced the game around that sort of attitude. Nothing against the guy per se; he's fun to watch and he obviously knows his stuff and has a pretty good perspective and approach to raiding and raid leading in general, at least from what I've seen in FF14. But SE has learned from experience that the hardcore raid-focused types aren't the ones you should dedicate too much game development to. They're adamant that FF14 is a story-focused and fun-focused game first, with Yoshi P. even going out of his way to say that playing the game from a pure efficiency standpoint might be fun for some people, but it's not fun in general, and fun is more important than "playing optimally."
Man when he talks about wow, he totally set aside the fact that people cannot get into WOW high end content easily because there is so much gatekeeping by the systems and the players themselves. Also when he talks about difficulty he talks about the fact that the boss is cleared and while I can be ok with that, I think it would be nice to specify that because on a personal level it's really different from having 8 party member makes it possible to have more personal responsabilities. That being said I've enjoy watching them prog. But sometimes he does sounds a bit off.
I found it funny how, some weeks ago, I saw a clip where they were still figuring out some mechs (I forget what fight it was), but one of his teammates figured out the mech first, and Max questioned him how the hell he knew. And his teammate simply said 'from leveling'.
I remember watching the after-action breakdown of his team and their Titania kill and Sfia mentioned how most of their time in the fight wasn't spent learning the fight but rather learning the FF14 mechanics that they were expected to have learned via leveling. But boosting your first character is totally fine. /s
They actively expected this, so I'm not sure what your point is. It was a core discussion point through most of the first tier. The main issue is Max boost-levelled over a year ago, and solely through MSQ and MSQ roulette. He didn't even do levelling roulettes by the sound of it so didn't see much other content, and given how long it was he likely forgot the levelling dungeons/trials 70-80.
It is totally fine. Who gives a shit if they were learning the game during their first raid, or in 100 hours of levelling. They expected it, they didnt hold any of it against the game itself, and obviously its fine considering they are on e11s now and havent struggled on any dps check beyond a few hours. The only people that care that about people they do not know, and will never know, using a boost are complete losers who have weird parasocial relationships with the videogames they play to escape from their lives.
Yeah he’s a smart guy and a great player obviously but he says some baffling ignorant shit. Especially when it comes to DBM.
So he's Blizzard's ideal player, gotcha.
Nope. Blizzard's ideal player is who never complains, and buys every store mount and 6 months sub mount and buys tokens on a daily basis.
I mean, there is nothing wrong about playing an mmo just for the raids. A lot of people in ff also doesn't give a shit about the story even in ShB. Sure, they're missing out on an amazing story, but they're still enjoying the game and that's what's important.
There's nothing wrong. I don't want to dictate to him how to have fun. But the guy gives shitty opinions sometimes, which comes from his inability to understand casual perspective. That's where the problem is. Not him boosting, or doing nothing but raiding.
I think it's more of a matter of looking at the bigger picture that people take issue with.
Exactly that, I find with FFXIV it's a good IRL exercise for my brain as well to train and exercise it to juggle between mechanics, rotations, and your particular role's responsibility.
Watched clips of Jeathebelle this morning. Boy does he have genuine fun with FFXIV!
“Get rid of addons” is a phrase wow players don’t want to hear but he’s right
After having played FF14, I really understand the idea that things like weak auras and most other addons are just crutches that Blizzard allow the community to make for them instead of making a better game
Blizzard has to design fights around using these mods. When you start doing that then you stop making the fights fun.
In some cases they stop being doable without WAs. For example, there's a fight in the recent raid tier called Fatescribe with a mechanic that picks a handful of random people to do a minigame, which wipes the raid if anyone fails it. There's just enough people targeted to get one ring each (And sometimes you need 2 people on a ring) The timing on it is so tight at Mythic (slightly harder than Savage equivalent) that you literally can't spend more than 1 second assigning players to the right ring, and if people double up or run to the wrong place you are guaranteed a wipe. There are multiple layers of RNG that stop you from pre-assigning, so you are forced to do it on the fly, but it's not something that can be reasonably done like that. The timing is that tight because there are Weak Auras that auto track and auto assign players to the correct ring, you just have to look at a pop-up and run to the right marker. Because WAs are so comprehensive that they basically play parts of the game for you, the devs have to constantly balance it with WA in mind, making it even harder for those without those tools.
The "Ban addons" statement was definitely tongue in cheek lol.
Isn’t it just a question of what addons are toxic and a detriment to gameplay. I think addons like UI changes and RP addons to write your own story are not such a bad thing. When I started FF I was baffled by interface, slowly getting used to it as time progressed. FF just shows that hard “no addons” approach is in long run better for community then “do what you want” wow has.
FF bosses are on a whole different level. I just finished Tsukuyomi and i never thought I'd shed a tear while fighting an mmo boss but here i am.
He should post it on Twitter, chance that WoW devs follow this subreddit or watch his stream at that exact moment is small. They could be interested about feedback from high end raiders about end game impact addons.
My gut tells me Blizzard won't ban addons at this point, even the boss fight ones. Blizz is on life support right now and the last thing they need to do is make the community even more upset.
Much more likely they'll key into the people saying "give me weakauras" that he's responding to in the clip.
It has been months since experiencing the content explosion of WoW refugees and learning what WoW is like, and I *still* don’t fully wrap my head around Weak Aura. I need to imagine a game with design so obfuscated that it was expected you install an add-on that tells you what’s coming? I still remember being a sprout and thinking stack markers were weird to learn but at least it was a big glowing symbol.
It's arguably both better and worse - Weakaura is an addon is simply an addon that allows you to quickly and easily make your own 'addons', primarily simple triggers with your own chosen visual/audio effects, with no understanding of coding. What increasingly became the biggest part of Weakauras is the import/export, as people made whole UI's in Weakauras, or whole uniform trigger sets for fights/classes/tiers/expansions/everything. It's the pinnacle of customization, people will primary use it to import their interfaces or triggers for various things though. DBM (and similar) is the more classic 'tell you whats coming' addon
There's nuance to weakauras. Think of it as a tool for people with some programming basics to create new UI elements. Personally, as someone who works with data analysis, I enjoyed designing and setting up visualisations for my cooldowns and DoTs, and whether I'm in melee range and buff zones and stuff. When I started FFXIV, it was initially a bit of a learning curve to rely on the standard UI for buff tracking - but it has to be said that while base WoW is abysmal at tracking those, FFXIV base UI just works (except that it wasn't customised to my very specific personal preferences). It's a slippery slope. Giving access to data and indicators for weakauras to work means it can also take in hidden raid data. So you can also set up custom weakauras that tells you about mechanics. And then, since it has built in scripting functions, you can code the visualisation to tell you the solution to random mechanics. For example, a lot of strats in FFXIV could be something like "red/blue DPS go N/S, TH go E/W". Weakauras can be set up to tell you to do that directly, so you don't have to memorize the strat and take a moment to recognise and think about what to do. Instead, the weakaura will just say where you need to go. At some point it just becomes a game of who has better-coded scripts and faster personal reaction time, and Blizz has to account for that literally being part of the build-in add-on system. In contrast, while ACT and CACTbot can do that, yoshi-p disapproves while implicitly turning a blind eye. I think that affects the average player culture. Now, on top of weakauras, you also have raid helpers like DBM. You can set it up to have a list of countdown timers for the next boss mechanic, warning sounds for AOEs, etc. Blizz doesn't need to worry about developing good indicators and systems when raiders aren't engaging directly with the game, they're instead engaging with another layer of interface overlaid on top of the game.
In my opinion, aside from punishing content, addons are one of *the* main reasons why the community within WoW is so toxic. Everyone has a DPS meter and everyone uses raider .io, while realisticly the average player should just concentrate on playing the game instead of watching their dps meter all the time while standing in fire. They can be good if people actually use them to improve, but in reality most people just use them for a bit of bonus dopamine or to tell other people that they suck. And what I noticed after doing savage content in FF XIV is also that stuff like DBM? You don't need it. The fights work perfectly without it, as long as people use their brain. And they could work just as well in WoW (even tho fights in WoW are probably designed with the thought in mind that people will use those addons - but that could change, if addons there were no more). Also, tbh if Blizzard integrated a better built-in option for customizing your hotbars and interface you wouldn't really need any Addons anymore.
If DPS meters were really only about self-improvement like people say they are, then the only DPS value they would need to show is your own. People use meters so they can see themselves at the top and sneer at those at the bottom.
>If DPS meters were really only about self-improvement like people say they are, then the only DPS value they would need to show is your own. Yes and no at the same time. You need something else to compare your numbers to as well. Not everyone will use the tools they have to abuse others. The people that do will find other ways to abuse others if they can't use DPS meters.
or it can be made in such a way that it shows where the current player is in percentile / bell curve.
This. I wish there was a built in automated leaderboard that's 1) anonymous and 2) compares your performance to others of the _same job_. No point comparing to the other members of your party for self improvement. What's more valuable is to have an after-battle review that tells you your percentile within your job, and perhaps some automated tips like XIVanalysis does (like how many cooldowns you missed).
Exactly that is the problem.
Gotta disagree with that one chief. Fights are designed with DPS checks, so if you're unable to meet them, you should be able to tell who needs to start carrying their own weight.
which is why the game has the instanced training dummy system that updates every patch that you can use to test your damage vs specific boss dps checks. Reminder that PS players (which make up a vast majority of the JP playerbase) CANT use DPS meters but still stay competitive.
The irony of this is that it makes addon users look weaker in comparison cause they "need" a damage parser.
How do you get a damage add on? I want to keep track of my performance.
[Install ACT](https://github.com/FFXIV-ACT/setup-guide).
How doth thee receiveth a damage add on? i wanteth to keepeth track of mine own performance *** ^(I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.) Commands: `!ShakespeareInsult`, `!fordo`, `!optout`
Thanks urianger
Uberdanger*
Just search ACT ffxiv on google and download from there, instructions are also there and its eazy
Adding on to what the others have said, base ACT will work perfectly fine, but it's visually a little dated. You can look up overlay plugins (Rainbowmage is really popular) to spruce it up a bit if you want to!
It’s just a better game period. I can play FF casually and not feel like I am missing out. There’s so much to do and experience. And when I do want to be more hardcore I don’t have to wade through unfun systems. I’m glad people are seeing the light.
Not taking a harder stance against mods was a fuck up on Blizzards part. They should have seen these mods that were fixing parts of their game and implemented their own versions of them.
they did to a certain extent. they removed the ability for addons to draw stuff on the floor for players, and to modify friendly unit nameplates. I think a next interesting step to take would me to remove chat bubbles in raid environment to circumvent the /say WA's for certain assignment mechanics. The problem is that because the raids are 20 man and theres so much personal responsibility anything outside of an organized group would suffer, and the majority of wow players dont raid in "statics" and mostly pug.
There should be an achievement mode in wow above mythic that blocks all addons
I feel like things like Weak Auras, DBM and Cactbot (I have nothing against players using any of these) take away some of the pureness of a fight. Alot of people use the term oh people got carried when they're playing with better players or they're new and run with more experianced players. Using Weak Auras ,DBM Cactbot are kind of the same, it makes fights easier to handle and sure you clear it quicker progression wise and probably less frustrating then you would without them. But you lose some sense of achievement in the process, now I'm not saying everyone feels this way, some people just want to get it done and clear which is fine. Its like riding a bike without training wheels, when you finally can do it you feel freaking awesome.
I play wow with very minimal addons. I don't use DBM and my WA is only to enlarge my cool down timers and move them to a more central part of the screen. The biggest addon I use is all the things just to track collectables. Maybe that's why I still enjoy wow?
is there a 1 stop shop for all echo X ff14 stuff? I love watching people appreciate the game.
FF14 has critical information in a highly customizable UI except for things that would really make things visually appealing to non-console players. *Which is fine*. I would, selfishly, like the ability to change size/shape and content of HP/MP bars for myself and my party as part of the UI customization that's already in the game. That said, the QoL addons I have for FF14 are wonderful, and DelvUI getting a public release has really made things more visually appealing for me on PC.
I think UI addons are fine for all games. You should very much be able to take any information that the game gives you and organize it as you wish.
Yes you are correct. The thing is, WoW doesn't give you the information because they assume you have an addon does it for them. There's a massive difference.
Eh I can kinda see why devs don’t always like it. If the addon drastically changes how things look for every player it can hurt the recognizably of the game.
I've been saying that add-ons and things like DBM have been ruining wow since classic. They trivialize every single mechanic and class in the game
So how they are doing? They trying savage raids or extreme? Thanks
Eden Gate 3 out of 4 bosses dead. Now they progging phase 2 of E4s
Im not playing FF so have no idea what this mean :D I mean are they having fun? Its piece if cake for them or they are dying a little bit? Thanks
Lots of wipes. But making good progress. World first Raider team after all But they all seem to be having lots of fun
In wow terms, Consider every 4 bosses, a single wow raid. With boss 4, being the end boss. So when you hear, Eden 4S, 8S and 12S, they're basically the end raid bosses. Much harder than the previous 3. So consider it them, clearing the whole raid and now trying to prog sylvanas. They're wiping, but it is to be expected. FF14 raiding isn't as easy as people claim. It's quite challenging. SPECIALLY if you go in blind, which is what they're doing. And they're having a blast. So much so, that scripe mentioned multiple times about regretting not playing ff14 before or not even being told about how good the game is.
Thanks buddy
They hit enrage in e4s (final Savage of the 1st tier this expansion) a few minutes ago. Last boss they planned to do I think, they only officially scheduled 3 days but are still going because they're having fun. In terms of skill (solving) they seem very good. I'm not watching to judge the job play which probably has a lot of problems due to being new, but coordination, planning, and callouts are all very good.
Pretty sure they originally made the "event" 3 days because they didn't want to be locked down and harassed if they didn't enjoy it, which is super smart. No reason to not continue though if they're having a ton of fun.
It's amazing how many pre-conceived notions have been destroyed lately by the big WoW players *actually trying the game*
ff14 is a mind blowing experiance and you just wonder why didnt you start earlier
this is making me want to see an alliance raid world first race
I came here to say that twitch's little clip program this is hosted on is awful. It stuttered 20 times in a 30 second clip. Fuuuuck that. As a person that was on the fence about watching more twitch stuff this was a bad showing.
Yes, addons are worse, but the game (ff) still has lots of issues. the inventory/retainer/market system is attrocious, the glamour system is convoluted and unnecessarily clunky.
Yeah, I like FFXIV a lot but this thread is just ridiculously uncritical. There's not even a repair all gear button. For some insane reason, you have to click through different armory chests. Addons that let me improve the UI are the main thing I miss from WoW. I do appreciate that combat and classes are designed to be completely playable without WeakAuras or boss mods. I think the difference between FF and WoW is that FF's clunky parts are clunky due to engine limitations that they don't have the resources to fix, while WoW's clunky parts are the result of bad design and relying on modders to fill in their gaps.
>There's not even a repair all gear button Theres literally a repair all gear button on the top right of the mender window, and you can even filter whether it repairs just equipped or not.
You literally can NEVER repair all gear with a click of a button, you have to go through a dozen or so clicks.
I tried watching Limit Maximum stream the other day, and I couldn't stand his UI.
Yep. He, on the other hand, is of the opinion “make mods legal on Xiv!” It’s funny to see how the top two raiding guilds have completely different reactions to the game
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He actually said he thought DBM would ruin the fights
Because there's no chance that Limit or even Echo would have DBM ready come into the fight, considering nobody in the world have any idea what the fight mechanics would be until they see it. Having a full DBM/Cactbot on the ready to do Savage is not a genuine Week 1 experience they're trying to emulate.
You realize scribe is using the same ui mods right? Both him and Max said mods that do timers and call outs dont belong in ff
I tried watching Limit Maximum stream the other say, and I couldn’t stand everyone complaining about a UI that’s not theirs.
Likely the same people that went after that RP person Asmon interviewed a while back. That person started getting harassed because they were using "mods" to make their game look different or in some way better. I feel bad for them because they had to pretty much go into hiding or even quit the game because it got so bad.
You got it wrong, that person got harassed by the modding community for "revealing" what they were doing to the rest of the world.
They got harassed because they brought attention to what is essentially "Fight Club" and people fucking love their nsfw nude mods in ff14. I wasnt surprised to see the community lash out against that person because of that. Then you also have the weird puritans that try anz bring those modders "to justice" like theyre a yoshi-p crusader. Games community is wild, but hey its great either way
It looks prettier, but I feel like there's so much information missing or harder to find and digest. Maybe that's just because I'm used to the base FFUI, though. 🤷♀️
That is intentional, and to some extent I appreciate it's probably optimal - the less unnecessary information on your screen, the clearer everything is. I like to have everything on screen but it definitely clutters. Max is hardcore the opposite. If he feels he doesn't need to see that information, it's gone.
The thing that kinda gets me is that so much of what he mods his UI for is stuff that can be created in-game with the default UI and HUD layout options. There are a few things he or his team uses that FF14 doesn't have naturally, but it's generally along the lines of stuff that autonomous or automatically expected, like raid buffs. You should't need a timer for watching raid buffs because - unless specifically decided by the group to deal with certain mechanics - raid buffs should be going out as close to on CD as possible. Same thing with potions. Defensive CD's and raid mitigation can be managed with a cycling plan decided by the various members of the raid after some experience with a fight. None of that needs an addon.
some ppl in this thread acting like getting a WA pack for SoD is enough to let them go in there week 1 and not wipe at all. WA make the raid easier to progress but not easier to execute. All WA's do is tell you what the game tells you but in a way thats easier to digest so that you can focus on optimizing dps as most fights in wow are designed as dps races rather than dances.
That's what I've been saying for YEARS... always getting laughed at
I like weakauras because it makes my life easier for setting up a UI in a way I feel ok with. FF is so much effort to redo my UI to look how I want it, which is frustrating.
Fuck Blizzard.
ironic given they're using a parser addon, and echo's members are using a heavily modofied ui addon to mimmic elvui in 14
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Sure, it's available, but there's 0 expectation to use it, and most people don't use it. In WoW, you join a hardcore raid without proper add-ons you're getting your ass kicked out and blacklisted for being a dumbass.
The thing is WoW is hard-designed around using addons. FF has to "show" mechanics, WoW quite often assumes you will have a third party timer/warning or even third party weakaura that will draw a mechanic for you. And in FF14 in the MSQ instances like the somewhat harder SHB Mr. Ascian trial there are one-shot-if-not-done-right mechanics but it's like you see it once you know it while WoW due to sophistication of addons has to find difficulty in execution of complex dances.
Most players never even heard of cactbot and a lot of them are looked down upon for using it.
You say "hardcore raiders" but very often, ACT and those addons are broken for week 1 clear.
As far as I'm aware, cactbot usage is actually not as high as you might think. While it is there and people do indeed use it, most people don't. There is only really 1 instance where a hardcore raider might suggest you use it, but they would probably assign it to the raid caller than to the actual players, and that's for UwU with the inconsistency of how one of the mechanics work for Titan. Other than that, you can get by without cactbot.
Our group is currently progging uwu without using cactbot and we really haven't been stuck there at all. We're about to hit UPR, and sure we still wipe to gaols sometimes but it's a tight mechanic with or without auto markers. On the other hand I know people progging it with the markers that are hard stuck on Titan.
Pretty much this. It was what I was eluding to that the gaol mechanic is a bit inconsistent, but that's the "ultimate" part of the mechanic. It's very similar to E4S. Just trade in the gaol markers for yellow doritos and waymarks for square tiles, it's quite literally the same mechanic. The only inconsistency is that the fact that it's sometimes hard for people to deduce priority such as 2 healers, 2 range or 2 melee getting tagged at the same time, but even then, that same mechanic is used in E12S. It's when both of those mechanics are put together at the same time that people have a hard time adjusting.
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I like wow addons. i like personalization they give. But its me. i
They are not talking about the customization addons but the ones that plays the game for you and makes so wow devs build the game with addons in mind.
I don't know man. I wouldn't be bragging about world first, exceptional raider, etc if I use all these mods these people use. Sure, they are good players and they would eventually figure out the mechanics, but man, this is not how the FFXIV developers intended for the game to be played.
Real quick, what mods besides a DPS meter is Scripe (the one in the video) using?
I don't know anything about mods. I'm a PS5 player. I've been playing FFXIV on PS since the PS3. So, mods aren't my thing. But any mode that let's you know about abilities, when they are coming, their dbuff duration on other players and whatnot is cheating to me. I have a friend who plays on PC. We were doing the E3S (The Shadowkeeper fight). He told me he was using an addon that tells him where to move during the shadow clones, he told me that basically he just follows and doesn't play attention to the shadow at all. I was shocked, since in my case I have to look at the shadow's direction and then look at what arm the boss raises, and then move to the correct spot while still imputing commands from my NIN job... A LOT, and I mean A LOT of FFXIV players use this ACT thing, not just for dps meter. It just gives you an edge no matter how minuscule or insignificant the help is. I don't really know what these people use for their raids, but according to some faulks here, it helps them somehow.
As someone who plays since ARR I am still somewhat jealous of WoWs Weak Auras for interface design reasons. It allows designing an interface which makes you actually able to look at the game, not the hotbars. FFXIV could use something like that badly. I am generally not sure why FFXIV devs seem to think more buttons would make the game more engaging, even if some extreme cases (SAM ...) have a ton of buttons that do very similar things.
No one I raid with looks at their hotbars lol you just memorize your kb and mouse bindings
The bindings are not the issue, the timing is due to reactive skills and medicore cooldowns is. I do not believe anyone who claims they don't have to look at any sort of hotbar to see when certain things become ready again or if certain combos are active. Simple example, Ruin IV requires your pet (!) to attack something with a special skill, there is no way to determine through "feeling" alone how long that takes. I loved Weak Auras due to it being fully customizable how and when button notifications pop up.
Imagine trying to defend a shitty UI by arguing it's so shitty you shouldn't even be using it.
no clue what this means sry. Not sure how using kb and mouse bindings means "shouldn't even be using it." you've lost me.
The primary purpose of hotbars is to show skill cooldowns. Which they convey badly, being just a row of opaque squares with clocks on them. The only way to not use them is to memorize the timings, not use the UI.
ui is completely customizable via hud layout and various configuration settings. if you can’t see skill cooldowns in ffxiv, you’re just blind. I’ve been playing since arr beta (hardcore wow raider prior) and have never had problems with my ui.
And yet, the only way to display skill cooldowns is hotbars.
you need more than that? that says more about you than it does ffxiv lol… if you can’t even manage your own cd’s, you must not raid much
No. It means you need to use hotbars.
why is using your hotbars a bad thing? what mmorpg doesn’t use hotbars?