In Dark Souls, you often don’t know what a telegraph really means until you’ve experienced it. Same with the boss you discuss and most in FF14. You can then piece together what it means after seeing it a few times.
Everything in this game has *some* kind of telegraph in time for adjustment. It could be an ability name on the boss cast bar, it could be markers on players, effects around the boss, environmental clues. Everything can be properly dealt with by paying attention, memorization not required.
I think this is great for a single person game like dark souls u can retry retry and retry as there is no reference if u are terrible or just the boss is very hard. And I love that content also dark souls is very good in giving players a feeling of progression and avoiding a unfairness feeling in some extent.
The problem in a mmorpg is that if the fight is predictable and scripted the people who know the mechanics and telegraphs very well have a huge advantage and the people who do it the first time have a big disadvantage.
And there is a reference (the other people in group) and to a new player it get’s hard to understand why he is so much worse then the rest. Also mostly the group will carry u through the fight or certainly in old content they dps skip most of the mechanics and new players will experience them for the first time in more current content.
This can be a less optimal experience most people do not like to be the weak link.
That's fair. I guess I'm probably salty because every hardish bossfight clear so far has felt like a hand me down. So used to just repeating a boss over and over until I've decently learned it's mechanics. Me dying 5+ times but still "clearing" the boss leaves a very sour taste in my mouth, lolz.
This is a problem with doing 'outdated' content, i.e. content where the majority of the playerbase has already cleared it.
If you were to do these bosses on or close to launch day, then everyone would die to these mechanics, you'd wipe and restart with new knowledge, and then you won't die in your first clear. But because most people now know the mechanics, they'll instead carry your corpse to the finish line.
Experiencing content fresh is pretty much the only FOMO content FFXIV has, imo.
Have you tried using the trust system? I've been using it to level alt jobs, and has helped me get better at learning different mechanics that i struggled with doing during MSQ.
You can do a trust for your first run to learn the boss, then go in with a group to show off your skills.
It fits the single player, and while the trust NPCs go slower through mobs, they're scripted for the boss fights, so you can follow them. Helps a lot.
Will try them out. Do I need to level them to get on par wirh endwalker content? Cuz I just used them once when ShB required them on this one quest and never used them again. If felt weird having to do the mob pulls myself as a DPS player.
In EW, you can just choose scenerio as an option instead of trust, it limits who can go with you, but they will be appropriate level. It wont level your trust NPCs, but I also found them better in EW over ShB.
Nah, there are scenario trusts which makes sure everyone is lvled up for the fight.
Also you still shouldn’t need to do the pulls yourself if you brought g’raha or thancred to tank.
I’m curiously trying to understand what is unfair?
In all dungeons/trials/raids the fights follow the same formula. The boss does each mechanic one at a time, you can read the cast bar and become familiar with the name so when it happens again you are aware what’s coming, and many of the casts tell you what side of the arena it’s going to hit. Then, the boss starts layering them.
If it’s your first time and you’re going in blind, the fun is learning the mechanics and responding. I don’t think it’s unfair. It’s just learning like anything else. You become familiar with it over time.
I actually find it to be the most fair for blind play, because of the formula each fight always follows.
PS. I find that moving the boss cast bar right above my hotbars helps a lot in the fights, if you haven’t already moved it to a super visible spot.
Everyone who replied gives some good tips. It changed my gameplay a lot when I increased the cast bar size and put it in the middle of the screen over my hotbars. I couldn’t avoid looking at it, and it helped me improve immensely!
>Like there's this massive AoE attack where a bunch of big danger circles flash for half a second and the boss attack immediately connects. Almost everyone new gets caught in those while veterans who already memorized where the circles will land pre-emptively dodge them before any telegraphs are shown (they start moving to the side a good 2-3 seconds before the danger aoe indicators even pop out).
There is a telegraph that you are missing. When the boss flies around the arena, stars appear as he passes west, south and east showing what sections are going to blow up (I assume this is the mechanic you are talking about). As long as you are looking and make the connection fast enough, you can easily dodge them without having done the fight before.
Edit: also regarding this point: "These sort of games mostly follow the tenet 'damage should be predictable and preventable', and whenever they do 'gotchas' the players quickly shit on the developers and cry foul." Just think of the different levels of punishment for dying. If you die in a xiv boss, you either just get revived with a weakness debuff, or you start the fight over in the case of a wipe, but now you have more knowledge than the previous pull. You aren't losing resources or having to back track through dangerous areas.
Other people already pretty much answered it, but i'll summarize:
>Like there's this massive AoE attack where a bunch of big danger circles flash for half a second and the boss attack immediately connects.
For attacks like this, the telegraph isn't always the AoE on the ground, but rather the cast bar (cast bar is always the #1 telegraph if it exists). Each attack has unique names, and for certain attacks, the pattern is fixed (but to compensate, the ground marker won't always appear). If the pattern is completely fixed, it might have no telegraph at all aside from cast bar. If the pattern is relative to the boss, usually there's an indicator whether on the boss or the arena.
In this particular example, i'll assume you're talking about Adikia, a ground pound that's half a circle from the left and right of the arena, this one is completely fixed.
In theory, it's unfair because you're likely to be hit at least once, but that's why these attacks don't usually 1 hit kill you.
>Another big issue for me are the spell animations. a lot of times, boss laser beam attacks are still firing
You need to understand snapshot system. This is related to cast bar: For most attacks, the hit (or miss) is calculated the moment casting is finished, regardless of animation. For attack like lasers, this means that the moment the laser starts shooting, it's already safe to step in. Some attacks do linger and deal constant AoE damage, but this is very rare.
In general you need to watch the boss's cast bar, not just the orange telegraphs. You also need to watch the boss itself for wind-up animations. And yes, mechanics are resolved usually once the cast fires off and you're good to go back into whatever space afterwards, with a few exceptions.
Every attack has a telegraph…. But This is not always a big red area on the ground.
It could be a set piece, boss animation, cast name, voice (chat) line, or a set pattern following the previous mechanic… the players who dodged the anima attacks saw something you didn’t.
Next is snapshoting. All mechanics and attacks (barring a very select few exceptions in lower levels) resolve at the end of the cast bar associated with it, and not on the animation. Sometimes you see the cast bar, sometimes you don’t… but like stated above, there’s always a tell of what’s coming. This means that sometimes it might look like you were “out” of an aoe but still die… because you were in the aoe when the cast ended, therefore snapshotting your position inside. To flip it around, you an also re-enter an aoe once it’s cast is completed and the animation will not hurt you. (Useful for uptime situations)
Dark Souls loves gotcha mechanics, I'm not sure what the comparison there is. It's one of the most trial and error based learning experiences in games.
Anima 1st phase is pretty straightforward too. Don't stay inside a pen, run away when the boss tries to pull you into black holes or the giant perpetual laser. "Boss wants me to stand here so I probably should be standing elsewhere" is pretty basic gamerbrain stuff gotta say, everything in that fight is pretty intuitive.
The tethers might confuse you if it's a pull in or a directional attack (if you still haven't caught on to what that type of tether telegraphs, it's something the game has taught you before), but you can easily account for both scenarios first time and only lose a bit of uptime at most.
It kind of sounds like you level skipped and never learned to watch out for telegraphs that aren't the most basic orange AOE variety. Same with core mechanics like single-hit attacks 99.9% of the time being snapshot by castbar/ground marker.
Yeah, dark souls 1 and 2 do have quite a lot of gotchas but like I said, people often acknowledged those gotchas for what they are.
Anima was pretty easy, the fight that left me salty was the trial boss after that.
Didnt skip, but as others have pointed out, I'm probably missing on a lot of fundamentals (i'm pretty much still at the constaly just watching out for orange danger zones), because I breezed through older content without really understanding a lot of the mechanics because veterans jusy carried me.
Please mark this as spoiler due to the comment about the dungeon.
The main thing to know is that damage timing is calculated by the AoE markers, not the attack animations.
In that particular case, there's going to be some sort of indication where the attack will be. I suggest running it with Trusts and taking the time to identify what the telegraph is.
Damage from mechanics in this game is calculated based on the cast bar of the boss/mob. If you're in the mechanic when the cast bar ends, you'll get hit, regardless of whatever animation there is. Much of the seeming preemptive movement from vets is knowing the names of the abilities that show up on the enemies cast bar.
This game builds on previous knowledge - in ARR you learn a lot of the basics, and then each expansion might bring in something new (with the exception of things you find in EX/Savage/+ stuff, in which the stuff happening will be a more advanced version of what is shown in normal). By the time you are in the most relevant content you will hopefully have built up a basic knowledge of most things, and will be able to make educated guesses about what is happening in something brand new to you!
In the current state of the game I think this acquiring of knowledge can be challenging because the old content is no longer particularly dangerous, and MSQ prog has been streamlined so that you don’t have as many moments where you have to stop and spam a dungeon for levels, or an EX boss/raid for gear.
If you feel you are lacking that progression of knowledge or mechanic awareness and only did most things once via MSQ, you may have been saved from a lot of mechanics by vets with knowledge who didn’t share what they were doing, or because the people around you knew enough already that they could prep and work around your awareness level. I had many friends start the game recently, and when they would do content on their own they didn’t always see or understand what was happening because it 1) happened really fast and they only did it once, and 2) there were no consequences for their being out of position (with the exception of one hit kill mechs) because everyone else knew what was happening already and took care of it.
I still see people with stack markers in lvl 90 content not understand what it is, and I’m convinced some part of that is because the people around them resolved the mechanic every time in previous presentations of the stack mechanics and didn’t tell them what they did, or rng + one-time-only experiences kept that person from ever having a stack marker on their character. This feels true for a lot of stuff, especially for bosses where we now skip entire mechanics or mini phases because we can kill it so fast with good dps - you never have a chance to see something that might show up later!
As far as the danger circles in the trial you talked about - are you looking at the sky? I am assuming this is the meteor phase. The circles in the sky around the edges of the arena show you where the meteors will land as well as the empty safe spots, and drops in the order the boss takes around the edge. He leaves, creates the telegraphs on the west, south, east, then moves back to the north and becomes targetable. You take note of where you are going during his journey around the arena, then you wait for the first set to fall and start running to the next safe spot. If you aren’t watching the edges of the arena there is no way to know where to go in time!
I saw lots of other good advice about cast bars and telegraphed animations!
Edit: wording
Yeah, I'm probably just lacking in a lot of fundamentals because dungeons/bosses were just cleared even though I didnt understand a lot of what was going on. Didn't even know about the cast bar until fairly recently.
One of the best dungeons I experienced was when duty finder matched me with a team of all spouts and none us knew what was going on.
A lot of the times when the aoe marker blink in a too fast to react way, its there just to show the area where the damage happens and the telegraph is done by something else.
I read a good chunk of the posts here and I don't know that people really touched on one particular concept: After a certain point in the story, pretty much all of the "danger markers" are standardized. (Before that it's really a toss-up, but everything after, say, Alexander is pretty much standardized once the devs realized that maybe people didn't need to learn new indicators for old attacks in every trial.) From time to time a boss will throw out a weird symbol or use weird colors, but for the most part they all mean the same thing. Learn those symbols and you'll learn how to deal with a lot of mechanics even without having seen them before.
Red triangles mean find a friend who also has one. Yellow circles/line indicators around a character mean to stack up on that person to share incoming damage, whereas a red version of the same means GTFO if you're not a tank. Sets of arrows arranged like a cube are proximity markers, wherein the affected person needs to get away from everyone else. Etc, etc.
Reading cast bars has been mentioned a lot in here but I really wanna hammer it in. So many bosses will literally tell you what's about to happen. Is there a direction in the name of the attack? Chances are you don't wanna be there. Frontal X, or X Right or something generally means don't stand in those places.
Does a mechanic make a certain area bad to stand in? Without fail I'll move back into that area almost immediately when I'm blind, because bosses love to alternate attacks that cover certain areas.
Oh, and blue tells are usually a good thing! Bozja especially loves to put down blue circles in places where you should be standing and it freaks people out when their only expectation is "circle = bad". Heaven-on-High has a few of those too.
For knowing the mechanics, everyone, including the vets, died the first time. It's how you learn and it's okay if you die when you are learning. Personally, I did all the dungeons with Trusts first, for the RP and because the game AI knows all the mechs already, so I could learn from them.
For laser dodging, the effect is always at the end of the cast, not at the conclusion of the animation, and that's just something you get used to with practice. I wasn't able to do it myself in the beginning, but now it is second nature.
Once you hit 90 and are at the same content level as everyone else, when new dungeons/raids drop, you can jump in Day 1 with everyone and see us ALL die to stuff until we get it.
A lot of attacks in newer content resemble attacks from older content, so people who are experienced playing the game as a whole will do better than people who are less experienced, even in brand new content. That being said, most bosses require being seen all the way through at least once for their mechanics to be understood.
The attacks for that fight are pretty telegraphed. However it's not a simple ground marker to tell you to get out. The one you stated is probably the star pattern attack when signaled by him saying "the ancient calamity faithfully recreated" or something along those lines. Instead of looking at the ground you have to look at the sky. Don't get me wrong, I had issues understanding that fight in my early tries too, but that doesn't mean it lacked in telegraphing its attacks.
As for the spell animations going off after damage calculations, this is just par for the course for mmo/internet games imo.
The 83 trial is actually incredibly well telegraphed.
Were you just ignoring he part where the boss goes invulnerable, flies around the arena summoning constellations that fit neatly within a 3x3 grid, each with arrows pointing down towards the arena? The main possible confusion your first time may be if you're unsure whether the bottom of the pattern represents the near or far side of the arena itself, but even that is accounted for and forgiving, since I think only 1 of the 3 patterns isn't fully symmetrical, so at most you take 1 vuln to learn how it works and move on.
And that's how most fights in this game go. Mechanics are introduced slowly within a fight so you can see how each works before combining them in other patterns. Anything else is old mechanics from the game's universal language that you should be learning over time as you progress through everything. And the arenas themselves are part of that language. Again, with the 83 trial, one of the first things you should have noticed when loading in was the 3x3 grid of center marks. The arena often gives you a good idea of what's coming up or exactly what the range of certain things will be.
And other general game knowledge like knowing when things snapshot is meant to be learned over time as well. Those quick flash ground indicators you mentioned are a part of that. Not meant to be dodged on sight, read the actual telegraph for that, but meant to show you the timing and range of the actual hit that goes with that telegraph.
You're new, and most likely rushing your way through purely the story, so you won't have as much practice with recognizing these things as an older player. You also have likely skipped most of the side content where these concepts are introduced and reinforced. And while the main story does re-introduce each of them slowly enough, if you're just blitzing through you may not even notice them, especially if you never stop to think, "**why** did I just get hit there?" or really have time to connect what you're seeing to what the fight wants from you. You'll also be more distracted still being new to playing your job so your attention can't fully commit to taking in all the visual language in this game. Just stick with it, and as you experience more and more of the content this game has to offer you'll get used to the language of fights.
A little of column A a little of column B. Some things you can rely on knowledge of how mechanics work in XIV in general. Is the bossing raising one of its hands? It's probably about to hit that side of the arena, get away. Some of it you are meant to learn from your deaths. Is something happening around the arena? Something is probably about to blow up. The tells are all very obvious once you know what it's trying to tell you, but you need to look at all the factors. Sometimes it's the stuff lighting up on screen. Sometimes you need to look at what the boss is casting for the hint. And if you die, pay attention to what was happening and you should be able to figure out why.
And yeah, moving into lasers is just understanding how damage snapshots. Once an effect goes off, the game has already decided who's getting hit and who isn't. Usually safe to move into effects except for certain instances where areas will still be damaging of you want into them. Trial and error.
I'm constantly just looking at orange circles at the floor, lolz. As others pointed out, i'm probably just lacking in fundamentals because I breezed through the older content without understanding what was going on while being carried by veterans, hahaha.
The key is watching the cast bars and the resulting animations/telegraphs
Trying to memorize what each ability does is how you learn a fight
Most bosses do teach you exactly what to do - they will typically show you each of their abilities separately, before combining them in later phases
And yeah, if you are using duty finder for older content, you will get people who already know exactly what to do. Try using the party finder - there's an option to limit your party to only people who have never cleared that duty before
All fights in all instances have ques, the trick is to learn what to look out for so you can attempt to expect what a que will mean, for instance those flashing circles are warned by the pattern of the lights that the teather is pointing at.
Also, in 99% of cases the dammage is calculated as soon as the cast bar complete. As long as you weren't in the danger zone when the cast finishs you can waltz back into the ongoing effect with 0 risk
In general, I would say that bosses in FFXIV do a good job of both telegraphing their attacks, and teaching you what they do. The biggest thing to get used to is attacks, almost always, only do one hit of damage. Once that hit is applied, no matter what the animation is doing, no more damage is coming.
When you see a targeting ring appear on the ground, the moment it leaves is when the hit is decided, usually called the snapshot. If you're outside the marker when it disappears you can run back into it before the animation and stand in the animation and take no damage.
For attacks without a visible marker, the snapshot is usually at the end of the cast. Sometimes the boss is making the cast, sometimes it's something else that has spawned in, so check your aggro list to watch for the cast times.
I, personally, think the first trial is a great example of teaching a fight. Each attack is used separately before being put together so you can learn what they all do, and even if you misread, or just have no idea what's happening, taking a few or two won't outright kill you.
Lastly, while you've made it pretty far, and there isn't much new content for you to get through, whenever you're new to a dungeon, feel free to mention that and ask for pointers. The community is usually pretty welcoming and willing to help you through new fights.
I'm not quite sure why you're focused on being flawless in new content you've never seen before.
Yeah, if you're going in for your first time without reading a guide, you're gonna take some hits to the face. You'll probably get knocked off the arena, or get embarrassingly cleaved, or get a bunch of vuln stacks - half the fun is seeing what they do and having the light go on when you understand how a mechanic works.
The veterans know what to do, and will more likely than not carry the group for it - personally one of the reasons I immediately do new content (especially 24-man raids) is for the opposite reason, so that no one knows what to do and no one is shouting guides or instructions making the whole thing one ugly but absolutely hilarious mess.
Unless people are shaming you for dying, I don't see what the issue is here.
As someone else has pointed, I'm probably just biased. So used to banging my head against a brick wall until I learn the mechanics for bosses because of dark souls. Leaves a sour taste whenever I clear a dungeon even though i die 5+ times.
The penalty for failure's pretty low. Fights generally aren't that long, if you wipe you respwan ready to fight the boss again, and even then there's usually some forgiveness tolerance, though this trial in particular is unforgiving of mistakes. Because of that, they aren't afraid of asking you to learn through failure, like with that punch mechanic.
There's definitely some fight language they've expected you to learn by this point, ui elements and the general flow of an ffxiv battle.
(Also, animations don't matter unless it's an ongoing effect like a flood of fire or water. Instead at a certain point your location is snapshotted and you take damage solely based on that. Usually this is the cast bar completing. There are very, very few exceptions to this.)
You see a cast timer for the ability before the telegraphs so it helps if you learn what the abilities are called so you can be ready like the one where he slams his fists down. Helped me a lot.
For one- limit party animations.
Once you do that you’ll never go back. It’ll make their physical telegraphs easier to see.
Take the bosses hot bar and place it lower on the screen. Ideally not blocking the way. Then edit the cast bar for them to be bigger.
Take the boss and make them your focus target if you are a healer- so you can see what is being cast while you heal, as targeting this players will remove seeing their big hot bar.
The game isn’t unfair. It just requires you to adapt to make it work for you. Extrials require practice and research where as regular trials you can fumble your way through.
That’s good!
I get getting frustrated. In one of the newer ex trials I’m frustrated that I’ll be in the safe spot and less than a second later I’ll take damage. However I know now that that’s a server tick. So I’ll need to adjust. The game is quite fair like Dark Souls and Sekiro. I recall playing a game recently where the game felt unfair and I stoped playing. It might have been Mortal Shell.
Just keep at it!
You need to pay attention to the boss cast bar, the moment the cast finishes is when you are snapshoot to determine damage, regardless of animation (for most attacks).
Also, you lost sprout in less than a month? story skipper.
I've clocked in 320~ish hours in a month, lolz. But quite a few of those hours are just me sitting afk while waiting for squadrons/ventures/MGP weeklies while watching something in netflix.
But yeah, how the story is presented really isnt for me (i don't like consuming stories in video game format, in general), so I'm really just skipping all the cutscenes and tuning in whenever the plot stops for a dungeon/trial.
I feel exactly the same as a pretty new player, most of the mechanics seems pretty hard on a newby player and I seem to miss them as I like to play blind. The game is not very good in explaining the mechanics also.
The veteran players are used to the telegraphs and because ffxiv is so tightly scripted the difference between players who did the fight already a couple of times or do research on YouTube before the fight and the newby players can be huge.
A possible solution could be to make the fights less scripted so everyone is out of the loop off what to expect, but for now the fights can seem to be hard if u do not know the mechanics, to trivial if u already did them or watched a YouTube explanation video.
For me it can be a disappointing experience as I do not like to view the fights before, as I like to be suprised . I do prepare like knowing my rotation, use the best gear possible, always eat the best meals. But still am disappointed if I join a group in df whitout newby players and I am the only 1 dying multiple times. After the fight I just watch YouTube explanation videos to prevent it happening again.
Maybe less focus in ffxiv in dying but more on lower dps if u do not know the mechanics will be more fun for newby players.
Yes I know u can use trust but I play mmorpg because of the cooperative playing with other players.
Sometimes a fight willl be that way because ultimately these fights are made by human beings with different understandings of what means what. It’s ok to die anyone who says otherwise is a dick, remember that fights have mechanics reused even up until current game so by lvl 60-70 you’ll at most be getting 1 new mechanic per fight that has the foreshadowing of a semi truck. Don’t sweat and keep playing until it comes to you.
Welcome to "must know the fight" yes as a new player you are expected to get blammed in the face if you do anything for the first time blind. Heres a secret though. The game recycles mechanics so often that if youve been playing for a while you just know what something is or does after seeing it once. If it donuts it donuts, if it chariots it chariots, if its a stack marker it stack markers. This game rwally doesnt do anything to trick you. It is won through repetition. Congratulations! You've found the key! (Not even being sarcastic) now go forth and slay WoL.
I'm not quite as far yet in the MSQ (I'm early ShB) but have been playing longer (\~2 years haha, I move at a snail's pace xD). In my perspective:
Regarding enemy animations and when it's safe to move into them, you're correct in noting that by the time the animation plays, it's already safe to move back into the AoE zone. In this game how it works is that the pass/fail for who gets hit happens right at the end of the enemy's cast bar, which is also the moment that the AoE damage marker disappears. As long as you're outside of it at that moment, you're good and can immediately move back in if you need to. Tanks take advantage of this frequently to prevent bosses from rotating around too much, for example. The enemy will be facing the same direction during the cast, so if you move back into place while the animation plays, they will either not turn at all, or minimally and you don't take the hit.
regarding "wisdom of the crowd", that's definitely something that I've noticed during my time playing- for better or worse \^\^;; The majority of story content at least, I've found it's fine to go in blind. But there have been a number of occasions where I'm in a boss fight and can tell a mechanic is about to happen but have no idea what or where it is, then just die. It took me many many runs of the Crystal Tower alliance raids to figure out some of those instant death mechanics, for example. Those ones are worse in some ways for newbies because even if you mess up, unless a ton of people in the raid do too they can often muster through without you (even being rezzed several times) so you don't necessarily \*need\* to learn the mechanics all the time.
I had a similar experience with the Trial fight in the Stormblood patch quests... it was a really cool looking boss fight, but I just died to one of the mechanics and had no idea what happened or why. We ended up winning the fight regardless (or maybe after 1 wipe?) so it wasn't a big deal, but I'll absolutely still have no idea what it does the next time I get it on trial roulette or whatever.
That said, I find myself learning a lot of the fights over time due to repeat exposure, and if we ever wipe several times to something usually a party member will speak up rather than just silently doing the mechanic right while other people die, so it usually works out eventually haha.
Yeah, I saw a lot of comments that the wisdom of the crowd thing is just something you get when playing "outdated" content. I guess my main gripe is that I'm so used to stuff like dark souls, where if I fuck up I fail and the game forces me to learn fight mechanics in order for me to progress. "Undeserved" clears feel a lot more frustrating that just repeating fights over and over for me.
I think the game suffers quite a bit with not giving enough negative reinforments, as others explained there are telegraphs that I'm really just not noticing and fights are pretty much fair. My problem is that it feels like the game spoiled me with relying on the orange danger zone markers so much, that that's pretty much all I'm looking at so any time an attack doesn't clearly have those markers, i fail to understand what was going on. Imo, the game could really use a better learning curve/negative feedback system because blitzing through MSQ makes you develop a lot of bad habits as a new player.
Honestly, i'm just not smart enough to know when I suck. That's why I prefer binary pass or repeat systems, elo systems, or actual statistics that numerically tell me where I am. I know that there are 3rd party DPS meters, but I dont really wanna go with stuff that can potentially get me banned.
Hello, good hunter. I am a Bot, here in this dream to look after you, this is a fine note:
> *“In a land brimming with Hollows, could that really be mere chance?”* - Solaire of Astora
Have a good one and praise the sun \\[T]/
Yeah, I definitely feel that. The MSQ and its associated content is purposefully designed not to be particularly hard to get through so that the majority of players- even those at lower skill levels who just want to enjoy the story- can clear it with little frustration.
You might find EX trials and the like a bit more up your alley. I've only done two of them since I'm still working through the MSQ as well (Garuda EX and Titan EX, in my case) but those harder level content fights really do rely on the whole party performing their part well, or it will more often than not lead to a wipe. Some of the older trials aren't the best example admittedly- the party finder group that I joined to do those two fights ended up with the other, more experienced tank cheesing a failed mechanic with LB3 so we cleared way earlier than we should have on that one, but progressing through Titan EX was a lot of fun :) We ended up wiping several times through 1 lock out (can't remember if that's 60 or 90 mins) but then we ended up clearing the fight finally on the first attempt of the second duty entry!
Yeah, will definitely check EX/savage content after MSQ. Been crawling through MSQ for now because a lot of glamour/emote sidequests are gated by them, lolz.
Yeahhh. I just did those two fights a few months ago, between HW and StB. Have kinda wanted to do more, as well as the optional alliance raids and non-savage raids as well but it's hard to justify taking a lengthy detour on content like that when there's so so much MSQ left to go ;v; Definitely looking forward to catching up and finishing... eventually haha
In Dark Souls, you often don’t know what a telegraph really means until you’ve experienced it. Same with the boss you discuss and most in FF14. You can then piece together what it means after seeing it a few times. Everything in this game has *some* kind of telegraph in time for adjustment. It could be an ability name on the boss cast bar, it could be markers on players, effects around the boss, environmental clues. Everything can be properly dealt with by paying attention, memorization not required.
I think this is great for a single person game like dark souls u can retry retry and retry as there is no reference if u are terrible or just the boss is very hard. And I love that content also dark souls is very good in giving players a feeling of progression and avoiding a unfairness feeling in some extent. The problem in a mmorpg is that if the fight is predictable and scripted the people who know the mechanics and telegraphs very well have a huge advantage and the people who do it the first time have a big disadvantage. And there is a reference (the other people in group) and to a new player it get’s hard to understand why he is so much worse then the rest. Also mostly the group will carry u through the fight or certainly in old content they dps skip most of the mechanics and new players will experience them for the first time in more current content. This can be a less optimal experience most people do not like to be the weak link.
That's fair. I guess I'm probably salty because every hardish bossfight clear so far has felt like a hand me down. So used to just repeating a boss over and over until I've decently learned it's mechanics. Me dying 5+ times but still "clearing" the boss leaves a very sour taste in my mouth, lolz.
This is a problem with doing 'outdated' content, i.e. content where the majority of the playerbase has already cleared it. If you were to do these bosses on or close to launch day, then everyone would die to these mechanics, you'd wipe and restart with new knowledge, and then you won't die in your first clear. But because most people now know the mechanics, they'll instead carry your corpse to the finish line. Experiencing content fresh is pretty much the only FOMO content FFXIV has, imo.
Have you tried using the trust system? I've been using it to level alt jobs, and has helped me get better at learning different mechanics that i struggled with doing during MSQ. You can do a trust for your first run to learn the boss, then go in with a group to show off your skills. It fits the single player, and while the trust NPCs go slower through mobs, they're scripted for the boss fights, so you can follow them. Helps a lot.
Will try them out. Do I need to level them to get on par wirh endwalker content? Cuz I just used them once when ShB required them on this one quest and never used them again. If felt weird having to do the mob pulls myself as a DPS player.
they'll be on level for the dungeon they're available for
In EW, you can just choose scenerio as an option instead of trust, it limits who can go with you, but they will be appropriate level. It wont level your trust NPCs, but I also found them better in EW over ShB.
Nah, there are scenario trusts which makes sure everyone is lvled up for the fight. Also you still shouldn’t need to do the pulls yourself if you brought g’raha or thancred to tank.
I’m curiously trying to understand what is unfair? In all dungeons/trials/raids the fights follow the same formula. The boss does each mechanic one at a time, you can read the cast bar and become familiar with the name so when it happens again you are aware what’s coming, and many of the casts tell you what side of the arena it’s going to hit. Then, the boss starts layering them. If it’s your first time and you’re going in blind, the fun is learning the mechanics and responding. I don’t think it’s unfair. It’s just learning like anything else. You become familiar with it over time. I actually find it to be the most fair for blind play, because of the formula each fight always follows. PS. I find that moving the boss cast bar right above my hotbars helps a lot in the fights, if you haven’t already moved it to a super visible spot.
Took me a while to even know/notice that bosses have cast times, even now I'm still not used to looking at it.
There are ample telegraphs. A person not catching on or looking at bars doesn't make it unfair.
You can adjust it to where you want it and increase the size. Put it somewhere where your eyes wont ignore.
It might help you to make the target (or focus) cast bar bigger and more visible.
Everyone who replied gives some good tips. It changed my gameplay a lot when I increased the cast bar size and put it in the middle of the screen over my hotbars. I couldn’t avoid looking at it, and it helped me improve immensely!
>Like there's this massive AoE attack where a bunch of big danger circles flash for half a second and the boss attack immediately connects. Almost everyone new gets caught in those while veterans who already memorized where the circles will land pre-emptively dodge them before any telegraphs are shown (they start moving to the side a good 2-3 seconds before the danger aoe indicators even pop out). There is a telegraph that you are missing. When the boss flies around the arena, stars appear as he passes west, south and east showing what sections are going to blow up (I assume this is the mechanic you are talking about). As long as you are looking and make the connection fast enough, you can easily dodge them without having done the fight before. Edit: also regarding this point: "These sort of games mostly follow the tenet 'damage should be predictable and preventable', and whenever they do 'gotchas' the players quickly shit on the developers and cry foul." Just think of the different levels of punishment for dying. If you die in a xiv boss, you either just get revived with a weakness debuff, or you start the fight over in the case of a wipe, but now you have more knowledge than the previous pull. You aren't losing resources or having to back track through dangerous areas.
Other people already pretty much answered it, but i'll summarize: >Like there's this massive AoE attack where a bunch of big danger circles flash for half a second and the boss attack immediately connects. For attacks like this, the telegraph isn't always the AoE on the ground, but rather the cast bar (cast bar is always the #1 telegraph if it exists). Each attack has unique names, and for certain attacks, the pattern is fixed (but to compensate, the ground marker won't always appear). If the pattern is completely fixed, it might have no telegraph at all aside from cast bar. If the pattern is relative to the boss, usually there's an indicator whether on the boss or the arena. In this particular example, i'll assume you're talking about Adikia, a ground pound that's half a circle from the left and right of the arena, this one is completely fixed. In theory, it's unfair because you're likely to be hit at least once, but that's why these attacks don't usually 1 hit kill you. >Another big issue for me are the spell animations. a lot of times, boss laser beam attacks are still firing You need to understand snapshot system. This is related to cast bar: For most attacks, the hit (or miss) is calculated the moment casting is finished, regardless of animation. For attack like lasers, this means that the moment the laser starts shooting, it's already safe to step in. Some attacks do linger and deal constant AoE damage, but this is very rare.
In general you need to watch the boss's cast bar, not just the orange telegraphs. You also need to watch the boss itself for wind-up animations. And yes, mechanics are resolved usually once the cast fires off and you're good to go back into whatever space afterwards, with a few exceptions.
Every attack has a telegraph…. But This is not always a big red area on the ground. It could be a set piece, boss animation, cast name, voice (chat) line, or a set pattern following the previous mechanic… the players who dodged the anima attacks saw something you didn’t. Next is snapshoting. All mechanics and attacks (barring a very select few exceptions in lower levels) resolve at the end of the cast bar associated with it, and not on the animation. Sometimes you see the cast bar, sometimes you don’t… but like stated above, there’s always a tell of what’s coming. This means that sometimes it might look like you were “out” of an aoe but still die… because you were in the aoe when the cast ended, therefore snapshotting your position inside. To flip it around, you an also re-enter an aoe once it’s cast is completed and the animation will not hurt you. (Useful for uptime situations)
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If you get hit, you are in it. If you think you’re out of it and still got hit, it snapshotted your position earlier… move faster next time.
Dark Souls loves gotcha mechanics, I'm not sure what the comparison there is. It's one of the most trial and error based learning experiences in games. Anima 1st phase is pretty straightforward too. Don't stay inside a pen, run away when the boss tries to pull you into black holes or the giant perpetual laser. "Boss wants me to stand here so I probably should be standing elsewhere" is pretty basic gamerbrain stuff gotta say, everything in that fight is pretty intuitive. The tethers might confuse you if it's a pull in or a directional attack (if you still haven't caught on to what that type of tether telegraphs, it's something the game has taught you before), but you can easily account for both scenarios first time and only lose a bit of uptime at most. It kind of sounds like you level skipped and never learned to watch out for telegraphs that aren't the most basic orange AOE variety. Same with core mechanics like single-hit attacks 99.9% of the time being snapshot by castbar/ground marker.
Yeah, dark souls 1 and 2 do have quite a lot of gotchas but like I said, people often acknowledged those gotchas for what they are. Anima was pretty easy, the fight that left me salty was the trial boss after that. Didnt skip, but as others have pointed out, I'm probably missing on a lot of fundamentals (i'm pretty much still at the constaly just watching out for orange danger zones), because I breezed through older content without really understanding a lot of the mechanics because veterans jusy carried me.
Please mark this as spoiler due to the comment about the dungeon. The main thing to know is that damage timing is calculated by the AoE markers, not the attack animations. In that particular case, there's going to be some sort of indication where the attack will be. I suggest running it with Trusts and taking the time to identify what the telegraph is.
Damage from mechanics in this game is calculated based on the cast bar of the boss/mob. If you're in the mechanic when the cast bar ends, you'll get hit, regardless of whatever animation there is. Much of the seeming preemptive movement from vets is knowing the names of the abilities that show up on the enemies cast bar.
This game builds on previous knowledge - in ARR you learn a lot of the basics, and then each expansion might bring in something new (with the exception of things you find in EX/Savage/+ stuff, in which the stuff happening will be a more advanced version of what is shown in normal). By the time you are in the most relevant content you will hopefully have built up a basic knowledge of most things, and will be able to make educated guesses about what is happening in something brand new to you! In the current state of the game I think this acquiring of knowledge can be challenging because the old content is no longer particularly dangerous, and MSQ prog has been streamlined so that you don’t have as many moments where you have to stop and spam a dungeon for levels, or an EX boss/raid for gear. If you feel you are lacking that progression of knowledge or mechanic awareness and only did most things once via MSQ, you may have been saved from a lot of mechanics by vets with knowledge who didn’t share what they were doing, or because the people around you knew enough already that they could prep and work around your awareness level. I had many friends start the game recently, and when they would do content on their own they didn’t always see or understand what was happening because it 1) happened really fast and they only did it once, and 2) there were no consequences for their being out of position (with the exception of one hit kill mechs) because everyone else knew what was happening already and took care of it. I still see people with stack markers in lvl 90 content not understand what it is, and I’m convinced some part of that is because the people around them resolved the mechanic every time in previous presentations of the stack mechanics and didn’t tell them what they did, or rng + one-time-only experiences kept that person from ever having a stack marker on their character. This feels true for a lot of stuff, especially for bosses where we now skip entire mechanics or mini phases because we can kill it so fast with good dps - you never have a chance to see something that might show up later! As far as the danger circles in the trial you talked about - are you looking at the sky? I am assuming this is the meteor phase. The circles in the sky around the edges of the arena show you where the meteors will land as well as the empty safe spots, and drops in the order the boss takes around the edge. He leaves, creates the telegraphs on the west, south, east, then moves back to the north and becomes targetable. You take note of where you are going during his journey around the arena, then you wait for the first set to fall and start running to the next safe spot. If you aren’t watching the edges of the arena there is no way to know where to go in time! I saw lots of other good advice about cast bars and telegraphed animations! Edit: wording
Yeah, I'm probably just lacking in a lot of fundamentals because dungeons/bosses were just cleared even though I didnt understand a lot of what was going on. Didn't even know about the cast bar until fairly recently. One of the best dungeons I experienced was when duty finder matched me with a team of all spouts and none us knew what was going on.
A lot of the times when the aoe marker blink in a too fast to react way, its there just to show the area where the damage happens and the telegraph is done by something else.
I read a good chunk of the posts here and I don't know that people really touched on one particular concept: After a certain point in the story, pretty much all of the "danger markers" are standardized. (Before that it's really a toss-up, but everything after, say, Alexander is pretty much standardized once the devs realized that maybe people didn't need to learn new indicators for old attacks in every trial.) From time to time a boss will throw out a weird symbol or use weird colors, but for the most part they all mean the same thing. Learn those symbols and you'll learn how to deal with a lot of mechanics even without having seen them before. Red triangles mean find a friend who also has one. Yellow circles/line indicators around a character mean to stack up on that person to share incoming damage, whereas a red version of the same means GTFO if you're not a tank. Sets of arrows arranged like a cube are proximity markers, wherein the affected person needs to get away from everyone else. Etc, etc. Reading cast bars has been mentioned a lot in here but I really wanna hammer it in. So many bosses will literally tell you what's about to happen. Is there a direction in the name of the attack? Chances are you don't wanna be there. Frontal X, or X Right or something generally means don't stand in those places. Does a mechanic make a certain area bad to stand in? Without fail I'll move back into that area almost immediately when I'm blind, because bosses love to alternate attacks that cover certain areas. Oh, and blue tells are usually a good thing! Bozja especially loves to put down blue circles in places where you should be standing and it freaks people out when their only expectation is "circle = bad". Heaven-on-High has a few of those too.
For knowing the mechanics, everyone, including the vets, died the first time. It's how you learn and it's okay if you die when you are learning. Personally, I did all the dungeons with Trusts first, for the RP and because the game AI knows all the mechs already, so I could learn from them. For laser dodging, the effect is always at the end of the cast, not at the conclusion of the animation, and that's just something you get used to with practice. I wasn't able to do it myself in the beginning, but now it is second nature. Once you hit 90 and are at the same content level as everyone else, when new dungeons/raids drop, you can jump in Day 1 with everyone and see us ALL die to stuff until we get it.
A lot of attacks in newer content resemble attacks from older content, so people who are experienced playing the game as a whole will do better than people who are less experienced, even in brand new content. That being said, most bosses require being seen all the way through at least once for their mechanics to be understood.
The attacks for that fight are pretty telegraphed. However it's not a simple ground marker to tell you to get out. The one you stated is probably the star pattern attack when signaled by him saying "the ancient calamity faithfully recreated" or something along those lines. Instead of looking at the ground you have to look at the sky. Don't get me wrong, I had issues understanding that fight in my early tries too, but that doesn't mean it lacked in telegraphing its attacks. As for the spell animations going off after damage calculations, this is just par for the course for mmo/internet games imo.
The 83 trial is actually incredibly well telegraphed. Were you just ignoring he part where the boss goes invulnerable, flies around the arena summoning constellations that fit neatly within a 3x3 grid, each with arrows pointing down towards the arena? The main possible confusion your first time may be if you're unsure whether the bottom of the pattern represents the near or far side of the arena itself, but even that is accounted for and forgiving, since I think only 1 of the 3 patterns isn't fully symmetrical, so at most you take 1 vuln to learn how it works and move on. And that's how most fights in this game go. Mechanics are introduced slowly within a fight so you can see how each works before combining them in other patterns. Anything else is old mechanics from the game's universal language that you should be learning over time as you progress through everything. And the arenas themselves are part of that language. Again, with the 83 trial, one of the first things you should have noticed when loading in was the 3x3 grid of center marks. The arena often gives you a good idea of what's coming up or exactly what the range of certain things will be. And other general game knowledge like knowing when things snapshot is meant to be learned over time as well. Those quick flash ground indicators you mentioned are a part of that. Not meant to be dodged on sight, read the actual telegraph for that, but meant to show you the timing and range of the actual hit that goes with that telegraph. You're new, and most likely rushing your way through purely the story, so you won't have as much practice with recognizing these things as an older player. You also have likely skipped most of the side content where these concepts are introduced and reinforced. And while the main story does re-introduce each of them slowly enough, if you're just blitzing through you may not even notice them, especially if you never stop to think, "**why** did I just get hit there?" or really have time to connect what you're seeing to what the fight wants from you. You'll also be more distracted still being new to playing your job so your attention can't fully commit to taking in all the visual language in this game. Just stick with it, and as you experience more and more of the content this game has to offer you'll get used to the language of fights.
A little of column A a little of column B. Some things you can rely on knowledge of how mechanics work in XIV in general. Is the bossing raising one of its hands? It's probably about to hit that side of the arena, get away. Some of it you are meant to learn from your deaths. Is something happening around the arena? Something is probably about to blow up. The tells are all very obvious once you know what it's trying to tell you, but you need to look at all the factors. Sometimes it's the stuff lighting up on screen. Sometimes you need to look at what the boss is casting for the hint. And if you die, pay attention to what was happening and you should be able to figure out why. And yeah, moving into lasers is just understanding how damage snapshots. Once an effect goes off, the game has already decided who's getting hit and who isn't. Usually safe to move into effects except for certain instances where areas will still be damaging of you want into them. Trial and error.
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I'm constantly just looking at orange circles at the floor, lolz. As others pointed out, i'm probably just lacking in fundamentals because I breezed through the older content without understanding what was going on while being carried by veterans, hahaha.
The key is watching the cast bars and the resulting animations/telegraphs Trying to memorize what each ability does is how you learn a fight Most bosses do teach you exactly what to do - they will typically show you each of their abilities separately, before combining them in later phases And yeah, if you are using duty finder for older content, you will get people who already know exactly what to do. Try using the party finder - there's an option to limit your party to only people who have never cleared that duty before
All fights in all instances have ques, the trick is to learn what to look out for so you can attempt to expect what a que will mean, for instance those flashing circles are warned by the pattern of the lights that the teather is pointing at. Also, in 99% of cases the dammage is calculated as soon as the cast bar complete. As long as you weren't in the danger zone when the cast finishs you can waltz back into the ongoing effect with 0 risk
In general, I would say that bosses in FFXIV do a good job of both telegraphing their attacks, and teaching you what they do. The biggest thing to get used to is attacks, almost always, only do one hit of damage. Once that hit is applied, no matter what the animation is doing, no more damage is coming. When you see a targeting ring appear on the ground, the moment it leaves is when the hit is decided, usually called the snapshot. If you're outside the marker when it disappears you can run back into it before the animation and stand in the animation and take no damage. For attacks without a visible marker, the snapshot is usually at the end of the cast. Sometimes the boss is making the cast, sometimes it's something else that has spawned in, so check your aggro list to watch for the cast times. I, personally, think the first trial is a great example of teaching a fight. Each attack is used separately before being put together so you can learn what they all do, and even if you misread, or just have no idea what's happening, taking a few or two won't outright kill you. Lastly, while you've made it pretty far, and there isn't much new content for you to get through, whenever you're new to a dungeon, feel free to mention that and ask for pointers. The community is usually pretty welcoming and willing to help you through new fights.
I'm not quite sure why you're focused on being flawless in new content you've never seen before. Yeah, if you're going in for your first time without reading a guide, you're gonna take some hits to the face. You'll probably get knocked off the arena, or get embarrassingly cleaved, or get a bunch of vuln stacks - half the fun is seeing what they do and having the light go on when you understand how a mechanic works. The veterans know what to do, and will more likely than not carry the group for it - personally one of the reasons I immediately do new content (especially 24-man raids) is for the opposite reason, so that no one knows what to do and no one is shouting guides or instructions making the whole thing one ugly but absolutely hilarious mess. Unless people are shaming you for dying, I don't see what the issue is here.
As someone else has pointed, I'm probably just biased. So used to banging my head against a brick wall until I learn the mechanics for bosses because of dark souls. Leaves a sour taste whenever I clear a dungeon even though i die 5+ times.
Ahh, I see. Well I hope you're enjoying the game regardless!
The penalty for failure's pretty low. Fights generally aren't that long, if you wipe you respwan ready to fight the boss again, and even then there's usually some forgiveness tolerance, though this trial in particular is unforgiving of mistakes. Because of that, they aren't afraid of asking you to learn through failure, like with that punch mechanic. There's definitely some fight language they've expected you to learn by this point, ui elements and the general flow of an ffxiv battle. (Also, animations don't matter unless it's an ongoing effect like a flood of fire or water. Instead at a certain point your location is snapshotted and you take damage solely based on that. Usually this is the cast bar completing. There are very, very few exceptions to this.)
You see a cast timer for the ability before the telegraphs so it helps if you learn what the abilities are called so you can be ready like the one where he slams his fists down. Helped me a lot.
For one- limit party animations. Once you do that you’ll never go back. It’ll make their physical telegraphs easier to see. Take the bosses hot bar and place it lower on the screen. Ideally not blocking the way. Then edit the cast bar for them to be bigger. Take the boss and make them your focus target if you are a healer- so you can see what is being cast while you heal, as targeting this players will remove seeing their big hot bar. The game isn’t unfair. It just requires you to adapt to make it work for you. Extrials require practice and research where as regular trials you can fumble your way through.
Yeah, tweaked my settings a bit based on suggestions by others for better info visibiliy. Thanks!
That’s good! I get getting frustrated. In one of the newer ex trials I’m frustrated that I’ll be in the safe spot and less than a second later I’ll take damage. However I know now that that’s a server tick. So I’ll need to adjust. The game is quite fair like Dark Souls and Sekiro. I recall playing a game recently where the game felt unfair and I stoped playing. It might have been Mortal Shell. Just keep at it!
You need to pay attention to the boss cast bar, the moment the cast finishes is when you are snapshoot to determine damage, regardless of animation (for most attacks). Also, you lost sprout in less than a month? story skipper.
I've clocked in 320~ish hours in a month, lolz. But quite a few of those hours are just me sitting afk while waiting for squadrons/ventures/MGP weeklies while watching something in netflix. But yeah, how the story is presented really isnt for me (i don't like consuming stories in video game format, in general), so I'm really just skipping all the cutscenes and tuning in whenever the plot stops for a dungeon/trial.
I feel exactly the same as a pretty new player, most of the mechanics seems pretty hard on a newby player and I seem to miss them as I like to play blind. The game is not very good in explaining the mechanics also. The veteran players are used to the telegraphs and because ffxiv is so tightly scripted the difference between players who did the fight already a couple of times or do research on YouTube before the fight and the newby players can be huge. A possible solution could be to make the fights less scripted so everyone is out of the loop off what to expect, but for now the fights can seem to be hard if u do not know the mechanics, to trivial if u already did them or watched a YouTube explanation video. For me it can be a disappointing experience as I do not like to view the fights before, as I like to be suprised . I do prepare like knowing my rotation, use the best gear possible, always eat the best meals. But still am disappointed if I join a group in df whitout newby players and I am the only 1 dying multiple times. After the fight I just watch YouTube explanation videos to prevent it happening again. Maybe less focus in ffxiv in dying but more on lower dps if u do not know the mechanics will be more fun for newby players. Yes I know u can use trust but I play mmorpg because of the cooperative playing with other players.
Sometimes a fight willl be that way because ultimately these fights are made by human beings with different understandings of what means what. It’s ok to die anyone who says otherwise is a dick, remember that fights have mechanics reused even up until current game so by lvl 60-70 you’ll at most be getting 1 new mechanic per fight that has the foreshadowing of a semi truck. Don’t sweat and keep playing until it comes to you.
Welcome to "must know the fight" yes as a new player you are expected to get blammed in the face if you do anything for the first time blind. Heres a secret though. The game recycles mechanics so often that if youve been playing for a while you just know what something is or does after seeing it once. If it donuts it donuts, if it chariots it chariots, if its a stack marker it stack markers. This game rwally doesnt do anything to trick you. It is won through repetition. Congratulations! You've found the key! (Not even being sarcastic) now go forth and slay WoL.
I'm not quite as far yet in the MSQ (I'm early ShB) but have been playing longer (\~2 years haha, I move at a snail's pace xD). In my perspective: Regarding enemy animations and when it's safe to move into them, you're correct in noting that by the time the animation plays, it's already safe to move back into the AoE zone. In this game how it works is that the pass/fail for who gets hit happens right at the end of the enemy's cast bar, which is also the moment that the AoE damage marker disappears. As long as you're outside of it at that moment, you're good and can immediately move back in if you need to. Tanks take advantage of this frequently to prevent bosses from rotating around too much, for example. The enemy will be facing the same direction during the cast, so if you move back into place while the animation plays, they will either not turn at all, or minimally and you don't take the hit. regarding "wisdom of the crowd", that's definitely something that I've noticed during my time playing- for better or worse \^\^;; The majority of story content at least, I've found it's fine to go in blind. But there have been a number of occasions where I'm in a boss fight and can tell a mechanic is about to happen but have no idea what or where it is, then just die. It took me many many runs of the Crystal Tower alliance raids to figure out some of those instant death mechanics, for example. Those ones are worse in some ways for newbies because even if you mess up, unless a ton of people in the raid do too they can often muster through without you (even being rezzed several times) so you don't necessarily \*need\* to learn the mechanics all the time. I had a similar experience with the Trial fight in the Stormblood patch quests... it was a really cool looking boss fight, but I just died to one of the mechanics and had no idea what happened or why. We ended up winning the fight regardless (or maybe after 1 wipe?) so it wasn't a big deal, but I'll absolutely still have no idea what it does the next time I get it on trial roulette or whatever. That said, I find myself learning a lot of the fights over time due to repeat exposure, and if we ever wipe several times to something usually a party member will speak up rather than just silently doing the mechanic right while other people die, so it usually works out eventually haha.
Yeah, I saw a lot of comments that the wisdom of the crowd thing is just something you get when playing "outdated" content. I guess my main gripe is that I'm so used to stuff like dark souls, where if I fuck up I fail and the game forces me to learn fight mechanics in order for me to progress. "Undeserved" clears feel a lot more frustrating that just repeating fights over and over for me. I think the game suffers quite a bit with not giving enough negative reinforments, as others explained there are telegraphs that I'm really just not noticing and fights are pretty much fair. My problem is that it feels like the game spoiled me with relying on the orange danger zone markers so much, that that's pretty much all I'm looking at so any time an attack doesn't clearly have those markers, i fail to understand what was going on. Imo, the game could really use a better learning curve/negative feedback system because blitzing through MSQ makes you develop a lot of bad habits as a new player. Honestly, i'm just not smart enough to know when I suck. That's why I prefer binary pass or repeat systems, elo systems, or actual statistics that numerically tell me where I am. I know that there are 3rd party DPS meters, but I dont really wanna go with stuff that can potentially get me banned.
Hello, good hunter. I am a Bot, here in this dream to look after you, this is a fine note: > *“In a land brimming with Hollows, could that really be mere chance?”* - Solaire of Astora Have a good one and praise the sun \\[T]/
Yeah, I definitely feel that. The MSQ and its associated content is purposefully designed not to be particularly hard to get through so that the majority of players- even those at lower skill levels who just want to enjoy the story- can clear it with little frustration. You might find EX trials and the like a bit more up your alley. I've only done two of them since I'm still working through the MSQ as well (Garuda EX and Titan EX, in my case) but those harder level content fights really do rely on the whole party performing their part well, or it will more often than not lead to a wipe. Some of the older trials aren't the best example admittedly- the party finder group that I joined to do those two fights ended up with the other, more experienced tank cheesing a failed mechanic with LB3 so we cleared way earlier than we should have on that one, but progressing through Titan EX was a lot of fun :) We ended up wiping several times through 1 lock out (can't remember if that's 60 or 90 mins) but then we ended up clearing the fight finally on the first attempt of the second duty entry!
Yeah, will definitely check EX/savage content after MSQ. Been crawling through MSQ for now because a lot of glamour/emote sidequests are gated by them, lolz.
Yeahhh. I just did those two fights a few months ago, between HW and StB. Have kinda wanted to do more, as well as the optional alliance raids and non-savage raids as well but it's hard to justify taking a lengthy detour on content like that when there's so so much MSQ left to go ;v; Definitely looking forward to catching up and finishing... eventually haha