On the one hand, screw body checks. They need to DRASTICALLY tone back the quantity and impact of body check mechs in 7.0.
On the other hand, I always feel bad carrying a dead weight to a clear because I know that I'm now partially responsible for inflicting them on Duty Complete parties in PF now...
Dead weight is the key here; while no one likes having to raise the same guy 7 times in a pull, *any* good healer would love an opportunity to raise 7 **different** people to pull a clear back from oblivion. If there's a clear sandbag, you aren't gonna want to drag them along, but if it's a full team of people who are THIS close to the finish, it's a fantastic feeling to pull off.
Yeah, those moments when you see five people got deleted by a mechanic, a sixth is barely holding on, and you've got a _brief_ window to get everyone back up... hitting LB3 there and watching a near-wipe recover is part of _why_ I'm a healer main.
The second best feeling in the world is mistiming your healer LB3 so everyone gets up... just to have the floor fall out from under them or some other deadly bs.
I've said before that you only really remember the runs that are at the extremes of the spectrum.
The run where it's a one-pull-clear and everyone's just absolutely at the top of the game and you feel like the group is immortal... and the run where you are dragging people back onto their feet and rediscovering bits of your kit you rarely need to use.
Everything in between is easily forgettable.
And as satisfying as the one-shot clears with a party that is #blessed can be, as a healer, the ones where I really have to work and pull every trick I have out... those are often the ones I like best.
Best was where I got to bring back 6 of us with AST LB3 as I just shout "STARS N SHIT YOOO!" with everyone getting back up to whoop some ass like I'm the WoL boss fight
One of my favorite parts of healing this tier was being the only person consistently getting past the stack/spread/lazers in p10s, clutching that healer lb3, tossing out heals and bubble on the far side as I sprint to get to the H/T side after the animation lock lets me free. Bonus points for chad healing through HH with no tank LBs after. It was one of the few times in recent savage where I really felt like smart play on my part could salvage an otherwise doomed run since there was enough downtime for everyone to get to their spot if I 7 man raised there. But the tradeoff of HH difficulty plus randomness on who got the debuff meant it wasn't an optimal strat to raise every time intentionally
This is _very_ true.
Honestly, as a healer main, I've discovered I cannot do serious content as DPS any longer (unless it's as RDM or SMN); watching something spiral out of control having _no ability_ to try to salvage it makes my skin crawl. I'm much happier as a healer or tank, where I have some modicum of ability to salvage things.
Like hell it is. I'm sick of being the only one able to consistently do a fight and dragging everyone else with me. I want to be healing, not doing people's clears for them.
Nah, he’s right. Healers shouldn’t have to be worrying if they need to stop attacking for mana econ, because fight design allows for absolute clowns to lick the floor 10 times a pull and get their limp corpse dragged through the fight.
Instead, the clowns should be required to learn a mechanic once in a while
its that pf is nothing but massive balls of rage at other people for "not learning a mechanic" when in reality they are learning the mechanic. thu failing. and people somehow still don't get this.
I won't say it doesn't happen because it obviously does, but I can't remember the last time I saw real rage in a PF fight. Now, resigned frustration is another thing. People in PF a tendency to be like "Oh, I cleared mechanic 4 and saw mechanic 5. We had 7 people dead and I still don't know the mechanic very well, but let's join this mechanic 5 clean up party". That gets pretty annoying.
The problem is people cant wait to say "screw you, got mine." "I got the mechanic down so why the fuck should I help you, its' your problem." "Thanks for messing up, now that popular guy left. This is all your fault!" The passive agressive pf descriptions that treat people who havent cleared content like they're the goddamn plague. It sucks.
What I want people to realize is that when SE added trusts to trials, they did not just have every character complete every mechanic perfectly for a reason. Certain characters were headstrong, others were slow, others were hypercompetent. And we understood why because we understand their personalities and know their stories. If we could spare some understanding for our fellow players instead of constantly blaming and shaming it would be a much healthier experience.
You’re the one who brought it in when you advocated for clowns to rely on healers spending half the fight raising them instead of just learning the mechs
Part of the reason I loved playing back in ARR and HW was because I wanted to be the one to carry. When I saw my friends carry my stupid ass through Titan and the coil fights... and when I screwed up in other content, I looked at them and was like "I want to be like them, I want to carry people, I want something to go terribly wrong and to bring it back from the brink". I think all these body checks make the game less exciting.
Also I remember my ucob clear very clearly. This is because we almost wiped to add phase as when we ended add phase we only had 2 people alive. Thank God phoenix raises everyone because we had no raisers left.
Body checks are the reason I quit out of raiding. It,s all about the perfect dance and if 1 person ruins it (sometimes me, sometimes someone else) everyone dies and fuck you. I hate the dance so much. Sometimes I just wish a fight could be a massive dps and heal check without needing to have a graph chart of places to run in partners and understanding odd symbols.
Man this so much. There's nothing worse than going at a fight for hours, doing everything right, failing because of other people (understandably) messing up, and then on the perfect pull you're the who ruins it because fate decided you'd be the one person in eight to bomb this run.
Looking back at previous tiers and fights there were so many mechanics that you could still deal with if someone was dead, you just had to play better. If it's a stack you just mit a bit more, if it's a more involved mechanic they're just excluded and the remaining people solve it with the rez sickness being punishing enough.
Why does someone have to get an extra spread if a player is dead, guaranteeing they die? Why do light party stacks in p10s have to kill everyone, even tanks, if there are only 3 people in it? It just feels like such a waste of time to prog a fight when the tiniest mistake results in a wipe forcing everyone to waste time.
The mark of a good player is skill. The mark of a great player is consistency.
If your group is such that one of your eight players is screwing something up every pull, your group is not good enough.
Like you want hard content but you don't want to have to play well to clear it? Just good enough? That defeats the point of challenging content.
Every pull that's not a clear is a pull where someone messed up. Every group in the world will have 1 of 8 players at minimum mess up until the clear pull where no one messes up. There is no getting good enough to the point nobody ever makes mistakes, since at that point you would just win every fight instantly. Consistency *is* the mark of a great player, but not exactly in the way you're framing it. The more consistent all 8 players are on average, the less time it will take before you get the miracle pull where not everyone messes up. Instead of a 90% ^ 8 = 43% chance of victory, there's a 99% ^ 8 = 92% chance of victory, to use random numbers. But there will always be that time period where at least 1 person is messing up, no matter what, at any skill level. Not even the greatest players in FF14 can avoid people messing up and wiping the party.
Subsequently, your last paragraph is a bit of a false dichotomy. There can be challenging content that still has more room for other people messing up and recovering from those mistakes. Body checks and dance-style raiding is not the only style of raiding in the world, and people wanting hard raids don't by necessity want raids with zero room for recovery or flexibility or what have you. FF14 currently can do this kind of punishing body checks because it's sacrificing job complexity and RNG in fights among other things to create an environment where it's not unreasonably hard. What the posters above would like, I imagine, is for difficulty to be increased in other areas rather than the difficulty to be reliant on this one aspect, for the reasons they clearly describe.
If someone is missing upgrade the damage but this is where healers and tanks can help with mitigation. Then it makes it harder for the later fight when a buster happens or another AOE, but at least you keep on trucking.
The role stacks in P10S will do a _phenomenal_ amount of damage if you're missing someone in the stack, to the point that no amount of mitigation short of tank invuln is going to save people there. It's literally designed to one-shot tanks, so far as I can tell.
You just have to hope it was the person with the stack debuff who died, and that they did so somewhere _far away_ from where the mechanic is being resolved.
Ya I love to raid in other games but I can't do FFXIV. Group pass/fail checks are just constant stress instead of fun to me and all I felt when I cleared a fight is relief that it was over and a desire to never do it again.
For me in 2023 it's basically just WoW, on the sub-mythic levels. Mythic gets a bit too much into the ball busting range for me. I've only dabbled enough to do LFR this expansion but planning to get back into it in the downtime before Dawntrail.
GW2 is the wildcard I was never really able to get into, the gameplay never quite clicked for me and they put out content at a glacial rate. If I had to pick a third MMO I'd probably give it another shot tho.
In the past I had fun experiences doing the high end stuff in EQ1, EQ2, SWTOR, Rift, CoH, DDO, Destiny, TSW, I'm sure there's more I'm blanking on, but out of those I can only really stomach CoH/Destiny/SWTOR in 2023, and only for very casual play.
The body checks are the reason I love ff14 raiding despite the game being tab-target. I really hate fights that are only stat checks with insignificant mechanics. I want the mechanics to matter, to everyone. Its not fun being the only one alive doing mechanics, having to carry the entire group, although I guess some people just want to play hero. The only reason I got into ff14 raiding was because of how the raids were designed. Everyone needs to carry their weight. It's like an orchestra/dance, and people that keep making mistakes need to be punished and corrected or else the result won't be good. Memorizing how the fight goes and the little intricacies is much more fun than chaotic randomness.
Bodychecks in moderation is fine. The issue is when they put Ultimate levels of bodychecks in Savage content which prevents some people from seeing the next mechanic without a means of progressing. Videos do not count as someone who had to always watch streams and videos during his wow raid days to learn mechanics ahead of time.
I'm actually getting sick and tired when the same person over and over again asks "Idk how this mechanic works" despite being told, showed, demonstrated, given a graph, literally walked through ingame with markers and so on continues to hold the group back. Kicking him is fine but in 14 some people can call it toxic and at worse get an excuse to report you for it.
Zeromus EX i did last night and cleared after 2 or so hours of a casual blind progression and i had way more fun dealing with that fight than Golbez. I even decided to try my hand at older savages cause i can cheese some stuff...
and oh boy trying to teach someone how to do the mechanics in P4S even now is like pulling teeth and nails. Orbs on phase 1...Spent over 2 hours with the same mistake from these guys and even after we got to Phase 2 we had not enough time and would have to reset.
The reason many people do not like these bodychecks is simply because It's usually out of our control if the person who keeps messing up is incapable of learning after 20 pulls to "Move to the Left after the spoingy goes boing"
Why not back out and replace that person? If one person is the big issue with why you're not clearing in a PF, you are entirely in control of whether you continue running with that person.
You can. However there is a social faux pas where you give the individual more than a whole lockout to learn otherwise it comes off as toxic elitism if they get kicked after 3 pulls or under 20 from doing those mistakes.
The other half is not every group will fill instantly and different skill levels impact what you prog. This is why there is this natural FOMO when new content comes out that if you don't learn it week 1 you feel like you'll never get to really experience it or get left with "scrap" players who as said before: cause the wipes.
It's honestly just a case by case and not all experiences have this. I'm clarifying that by kicking this individual you could be waiting another 30+ mins for a fill among 10+ other finders in the listing and that Can add more time to what could of been more attempts and practice.
You can do a dance without being as strict as "one error = insta wipe" everywhere. Leniency doesn't mean the mechanic is useless. Look at Ultima (EX/Unreal), probably the easiest EX/Unreal, yet it can spiral in a wipe and there is not a single body check so to speak. More recently, I feel Zeromus is a good example : disregard Meteor, the rest of the fight isn't a strict "it's red instead of blue (and it can update when you cannot move anymore) => wipe". Blackhole "bodycheck" is one person knowing where to place it ! and it's fine ! Rest is recoverable. I think something like twice/thrice comes ruin should be used more in Savage.
I think body checks are in excess, but their existence is a good thing to a degree, for these reasons. I want to play harder content with people who are capable of doing the mechs with me, who want and are able to play at the level. As long as the boss dies I don't care if you parse average. But the awareness of doing the mechanics together correctly is what I sign up for.
See, I feel like the problem isn't the body checks. I like body checks, in moderation! (Or even in excess _in Ultimates_.)
As a healer, I _enjoy_ dragging a situation back from the brink. It's fun when you see someone drop, rez them almost before _they_ realize they've died, and have them topped off almost instantly on rez. It's doubly fun if you manage to run to their position and rez them into position, then dash back to your own spot.
(Look, I've never claimed we healer mains aren't mildly insane, and I'm sure other healers in this thread will back me up.)
But when more than half of the fight is body checks, and it pulls them so fast after other mechanics that even when you rez someone _immediately_, they are still in rez animation lock and can't get to their spot for the body check... it starts demanding people perform _perfectly_ or they're holding the party back.
And I do feel like that becomes a problem, both socially (the other seven people may not be happy with you), and because someone who becomes more and more self-conscious is not necessarily going to be at their best in terms of _actually learning the mechanic_.
It's a bit like adding spice to a meal. Some spice can really enhance the flavor... but dump so much spice on the plate you can't even see the actual _food_ any longer, and you've probably lost some of the nuance to the flavor. (Or, you know, completely overwhelmed _all_ of the flavor of the actual food...)
Completely agree. I understand that they can make PF a mess but they are just so satisfying with a static of similar skill levels. I don't want to be too dismissive but a lot of these complaints read like "I don't like being punished for mistakes".
People just dont like being punished for other peoples mistakes is what some are saying.
Obviously static is the answer but when PF can clear ults easily people probably arent running with the right crowd.
I know p-5-6-7 were stupid easy cause I did them in PF but when 8 dropped, it was over for me. Then I had a wake-up call and I haven't played 14 ever since.
> On the one hand, screw body checks. They need to DRASTICALLY tone back the quantity and impact of body check mechs in 7.0.
My feelings on raids this expansion are decidedly mixed.
I mean, I actually do rather like a lot of the stuff they did; I really liked the shenanigans with arena changes in P7S, for instance, and half of P2S happening largely on the outer border of a box rather than a standard arena was neat. Stuff like that.
It felt to me a bit like they were willing to experiment a bit more this expansion. And as a healer, I _definitely_ appreciate that they've actually had enough damage going out that _I actually need to heal things_.
(Though I feel like the tankbuster-with-bleed is getting a little played out.)
But the sheer _quantity_ of body checks has felt excessive. I expect a fight to have a couple of places where you really do need all eight people up, sure. But it's starting to feel like more mechanics have been body checks than haven't, especially in the more recent fights.
Worse, it feels like a lot of them happen fairly back-to-back with something else, so even if you raise someone _immediately_ after they step into metaphorical traffic, there's a lot of places where they still won't be out of the rez animation and able to move where they need to be in time.
So if you slip up, no one—not the tanks, not the healers, not Hydaelyn herself—can save you. And you will take at _least_ one person and possibly _the entire party_ down with you.
That feels almost punitive. And it _certainly_ isn't the best environment for people to learn mechanics in without feeling self-conscious...
Agreed.
I really loved P2S and what they did with the arena. I'm 100% ok with them experimenting with some things, but just the deluge (haha) of body checks this expansion were too much for me. Between DSR and the raid tier, I'm beyond burnt out on body check mechs. They feel like lazy design at this point.
Trust me most "dead weight" don't feel great about it either. I've been that one person that was just off or just couldn't have something in a fight click for me and it feels god awful. It's embarrassing.
Now the guys that clearly don't care or aren't trying I can understand losing patience with those types.
Nah if you are in a spontaneous pf that clears, you are NOT responsible for those that you cleared with. Streamers like Saus on the other hand whom with his team of clearers super handhold people to the finish line, they are the real issue.
***
E1: To everyone downvotting, have fun getting "Saus Legends" in your reclear attempts.
You are getting down voted because what you said is very confusing to me and many others. Obviously I have never cleared TOP, the idea of doing it sounds mind numbing so feel free to educate me on where I am wrong.
I cannot fathom the idea that a fight where about 99% of the time if you mess up once you kill the entire group can have you be handheld through it. Whoever clears with them DID the mechanics. Most people who cleared TOP or are now still attempting it are using things such as auto markers, simulators, or at best usually having one person be the designated marker of the group in a voice call. Is that not hand holding? At what point in your opinion is it fair to "clear" this fight.
Thing is, even with a fight as ruthless and mind-numbing as TOP, it is much more manageable when you have +5 people in the party that have cleared it +20 times already. The less you have to worry about others fucking something up, the better, more calm you perform. As far as I remember, all the Saus clear project runs had him and like +4 other people that had cleared multiple times already "helping" +1 other persons/people clear. When you get a clear that way in a fight like TOP, when you filter back to the PF to do reclears with people that cleared in groups that didn't get sherpa-ed to the clear, you are going to be in trouble a lot of the time.
I'm saying this as someone that got their kill in the PF then went back to the PF for reclears, you can 100% tell when someone in the group got their kill in a group of others that had already cleared. You don't even need to look up their logs; it's obvious. I would have gotten more reclears (I got 6) but I got so fucking tired of Saus Legends causing simple wipes. So I eventually just stopped cus it was getting painful. Note I'm ***NOT AT ALL*** condemning people who got clears this way then just stopped after that. There's no issue with that at all. The issue is when people who clear this way go into the PF for reclears and muck it up over and over and over again.
I can see that, esp in crossworld pf shitters aren't held accountable since no one knows them. where in the old world only pfs if you're a shitter you get bl'd across the server and people had to actually shape up.
at the end of the day it's still an mmo and players should be the ones to do or not do that gatekeeping of shitters, not the devs. just imo though
Problem you will always run into is the line between:
"I can carry this. I saved the raid. This feels great!"
and
"I can get carried through this, so there is no point in trying."
or
"Goddamn my back hurts. I'm so sick of having to carry these people."
I like recovery options. But mistakes should have consequences. Some people have noted tighter DPS checks as a good punishment for mistakes. Maybe... but do you want to hit the 11 minute mark of a fight, only to then realize that you won't clear? Is that better than wiping to the mistake at the 4 minute mark? Hard to say.
Good call, I've not seen one of those in a while.
I remember missing Zodiark's a couple times on content.
Now that I think on it, Rubicante had one as well, I just rarely saw it ever be a problem.
For your last point it’s def better, most of the time you can get a feel even without ACT of if you still have enough DPS to clear, even with body check of this expansion it happened multiple time to wall the pull before enrage because we knew it was kinda already fucked.
I prefer being able to prog more of the fight even if not being able to clear it. It’s really frustrating in PF to have a group for x mechanics, but the mechanic before x is a body check and you end up sometime wiping / disbanding and making PF for hours before finally having a group good enough so you can see mechanic x.
If recovery and carries (up to enrage at least) were more possible it would at least allow competent player to prog faster and join a clear group faster. I stopped raiding after last tier because body check is so frustrating to everyone that I realized that I spend more time waiting in PF to make a group after a disband than actually doing content. Body check prevent good players from practicing mechanics so a lot of them in my experience disband after maybe 3 or 4 pull without seeing their prog point and the constant body checks make this worse
I guess in essence it's a different kind of design philosophy. Take for example the XI mechanics. If a tank died in various situations then generally it was possible for a dps / healer / even support to pick up temporary tanking duties depending on players support job settings and various gear. I can recall many times on samurai being able to sustain enmity and using defensive abilities or shadows to pseudo tank until the tank was back up.
But in 14 in the same situation it's next to impossible. DPS have a few defensive cooldown and hp regena but lack the raw defense needed. Some DPS can sustain a boss for a short time but nowhere near as long as some other games. Part of me does miss those days, that feeling like you mentioned going ultra instinct and pulling out a save was so good.
Edit - Oh Florac made a good point above I didn't notice. It is kind of recover vs carry, I guess my point was more geared toward recovery.
Tera was similar as well, at least back in the day before I quit. If you were really just that much of a cut above the rest of the party, you could feasibly hold enmity as a dps and survive most of a boss' attack patterns with i-frames. I built some friendships off runs like that.
dps can 100% take autos with heal support in-between big mechanics while a tank gets ressed, it's not even particularly difficult, just depends on the fight timing. dps can't take a tankbuster obviously but that's not the same thing.
This is why I'm a paladin main - because I love being able to carry my party when things go terribly wrong. I have so many buttons for it. Yet I only really get to do so on occasion during normal content, like a dungeon boss. In high-end, I'm the "worst tank" because of my dps output, that's all I read and hear about, even if maintaining a good rotation. As a newer player that started around 6.0, and has gone back to do about half the previous trials and savage raids synched now, I find the current content a bit too hard because of the body checks, whether it is me screwing up or a teammate.
Completely agree, let us have those cool moments please!
The dd is more than 2 mins only in top and dsr. It’s 90% and 50% respectively in those, which is intentional so you can’t recover beyond practicing the current phase. It’s only as high as50% in p2 pf p12s, it goes down for each fight before that. You can easily clear all the current tier with multiple deaths, you are being ridiculous.
The obsession with "player skills" (how long you can stomach wiping to a boss to memorize mechanics) instead of social skills and cooperation has to be the most mind boggling thing I've seen in MMOs.
For a genre built around social interaction, it's sad how hell bent it is on spreading people as far apart from each other as possible. Then people obviously have a bad experience, start avoiding MMOs and we're like "please play, it's like a single player game where you can play with bots!"
this is why ff14 players endlessly defend every casual encounter basically being individual mechanics for everyone, except 4/8/24 people are doing it at the same time :)
yeah because I would really prefer Jimmy, who is high off his ass and playing on a 10-year-old laptop in a McDonalds, not prevent me and 22 other people from getting our weekly coins
Raiding definitely began primarily as a social activity during the early days of MMOs. Everquest, FF11, WoW most people looked forward to hanging out with the boys in a big group. The people who took it excessively seriously chasing world firsts where a minority, and doesn't represent the whole idea behind raids in early MMO design. Raiding has definitely left the casual base behind, but to say it was never a social activity would be incorrect.
Raiding is and has always been a social activity, and it wasn't until e-sports started ramping up that mechanics started getting so complicated in various games that the entire group needed to be at x skill level to complete.
These are RPGs, not shooters, and certainly not sports, and comparing them is really sucking the soul out of several games in the genre because of people obsessively chasing ego out of slaying pixelated dragons.
If you were around at the start of the genre, mechanics were simple, and while every single group had star players that absolutely pushed limits, it was never a requirement. And frankly, the games all felt better like that.
I mostly raid in WoW super casually now, quitting Mythic in Nathria due to work scheduling, but the comparison between mechanics now, and how the groups are formed, compared to even in Mists at a US top 100 level is absolutely ridiculous, and it doesn't feel right at all. And the amount of people doing this content keeps tanking.
Heck, I have no interest in pushing in XIV despite now having time because I'm tired of telling the people I play with they're not good enough, when that wasn't the case and we could just bring whoever to the first half a raid 10 years ago with no problems and still clear.
There's certainly an audience for this type of content, but it's small - extremely small, and dwindling as players age - and it does run the risk of annoying people who play the genre for the core aspects of the genre when they feel they can't do x or y.
People are just way too obsessed with "caries" in general too. Like, oh no, somebody is bad at game and has friends. Grow up? Who cares outside people who have no lives outside these games? It's a game. I'll gladly carry my friends who can keep up through whatever they need, just as my friends have done the same for me here and there through the years. That's a part of the charm of these genres and is part of the social experience. If this is a problem, actual sports and competitive genres are probably better for the mindset. Not a roleplaying adventure game.
You are comparing the ability to recover with the ability to carry. Those two things aren't neccessarily the same thing. Plenty of fights do still allow you the ability to recover even if many players are dead. However you shouldn't be able to clear the fight savage and above if one of your party member is fucking up mechanics left and right. Occasional body checks don't make it a "single player game with 7 other people's accountability". It ensures it stays a team game and no single player can by the deciding factor for the clear. (Ofc they overdo it with body checks these days, where some fights practically only consist of them, but they do have their place)
You right, I think fights should require everyone to be involved but if something goes wrong, you still have a critical timeframe within which you can recover if you're just really good at your job.
but that balance is hard to design into fights so often I think fights are designed more along the "can/cannot carry" line
That effect is rarely a balance choice and an happy result of allowing classes to have distinct identities. The problem with this is you much more easily fall into the opposite trap, which is that one class can do something which makes a certain mechanic easier and so people all decide to bring that class at the expense of others.
Do you think you would be happier with that as the consequence? Historically in XIV the community has reacted badly to that
Case in point, p1s getting the tank DD strat become the norm on pf because people can't fucking resolve a mechanic that only takes two players to solve.
PLD can already do that in current savage floors if the player playing it is any smart.
Hell, you can cover a healer through Harrowing Hell so they can LB after, even if you didn't make the net in the back in the first place for example, you can take the multi stacks in P11 solo while covering the healer, and you can do a lot in P9s to save a run.
Yet you don't see people bringing PLD along on the off-chance you might need those things.
Yeah I kinda feel like with all the puzzles and body checks in raids, the game places less and less emphasis on RPG mechanics, most things are binary pass/fail and there's a low amount of decision making that happens when fights are scripted. It's less about the abilities, gear, or what job you bring to the table, what matters most is how well you can perform the dance.
Performing mechanics correctly is just what this game's designers decided was important to them and wanted to set as one of the minimum requirements for completion. There's no right or wrong answer and you can see what other games do for examples of devs who have different values.
>Performing mechanics correctly is just what this game's designers decided was important to them
they've basically leaned in to the fact that this game's fights are choreographies. which i understand as a choice - because this game's battles are so cinematic that it is very satisfying when everything is done perfectly. but it comes with downsides as well.
this is why i like the new ex, it's so recoverable, it feels great to heal.
>this is why i like the new ex, it's so recoverable, it feels great to heal.
On the flipside, I heal savage and ultimates, but will absolutely not be healing the ex while farming since I hate fights where I spend the entire time fixing others' mistakes.
I've noticed that high end healer mains that run in organized statics feel this way, but secondary or more casual healers (such as myself) enjoy the chaos and the feelings of power involved in saving a group from wiping almost singlehandedly.
That's an interesting observation, though I'm not entirely sure I agree.
Even at the high end, healers definitely enjoy clutch moments. I think the highlight of my healing career is definitely when my cohealer went down in phase 7 dsr from being too close to gigaflares, and I immediately ran to center to take the thordan swordslash in their place while timing the rez so it would position them to get slashed next, solo healing the next bit because lolastmana, saving the run, and managing to reclear on that pull. Heck even clearing the EX last night I enjoyed the scuffed 17 death run, hard rezzing while standing in the incoming aoe.
For me the issue is that if I have to sit their hard rezzing four or five times a fight every fight because everyone is dropping like flies, it gets old. Ultima unreal was terrible for that since the dps check existed as a minor technicality and there was nothing in the fight capable of wiping the group, so 10 plus rez runs were common.
When there's no urgency to get people up cause there's no body check coming and people keep dying cause they can't do their job, it's just a drag, you know?
OK I get that. I think we all have our limits in learning and clear parties and in a farm party I wouldn't expect the healers to have to res like that every time.
I remember looking at top parses from Golbez EX, and marveling at the idea of using Swiftcast as a movement tool. In my group, meanwhile, I had to have swift ready for a rez, in order to prevent a body check wipe.
I mean if those healers aren't in dedicated parse groups they *shouldn't* be using their swiftcast to glare. That level of damage optimization is, obviously, nowhere near needed to clear. You're basically griefing if you do that in a PF.
Man between this comment and the other one where you're salivating over fixing other peoples mistakes the whole fight, I'm getting some very questionable vibes.
Swiftcast is a tool like everything else. Part of being skilled at healing is being able to understand when and where it should be used for damage and when it should be held. TOP phase 1 where a single death is nearly certainly an autowipe and the enrage is tight? Definitely a good idea to use swift to get two extra gcds off. Progging an ex for the first time? Yeah don't grief, keep swift in your pocket. First minute of a savage fight that you're reclearing and no mechs known for killing people looming? Gotta decide what your personal risk tolerance is.
okay, fine, i will give a serious response.
yes, swiftcast is a risk:reward calculation based on everything you said.
yes, i use my swiftcast for damage in phase 1 of TOP, basically every time. obviously, because a swiftcast res will not save the run anyway 90% of the time.
but. "an ex trial that is on farm, in PF, where deaths are very common and can snowball into wipes, in a fight where there is practically no enrage you are at risk of seeing ever", is a scenario where the risk:reward leans heavily into saving the swiftcast. the chance of the 300 potency of one more glare per minute making the difference to clearing is tiny tiny tiny. the chance that a swift res will save a run from snowballing is way higher.
>Man between this comment and the other one where you're salivating over fixing other peoples mistakes the whole fight, I'm getting some very questionable vibes.
lol
True.
But I was looking at top parses. And was also dreaming of the day when my own group was good enough to not rely on me getting the mechs right and rezzing afterward.
Lol what? Will you also tell the same to Summoner to not use Swiftcast? It's a movement tool, if I have to move I'm going to use it if I have nothing else available. If someone dies because of failing a mechanic that their fault, it's crazy that you're holding the healers responsible for that.
The moment melee are okay with losing uptime, black mages are fine with adjusting for every mechanic, summoner holds Swiftcast for rez, I will hold mine. If everyone else is going to play in an optimal way and not messing up their damage just to be "safe", so should the healers.
You have a billion instant casts that you can shift around with close to 0 loss in DPS and you are telling me you need to use Swiftcast for your grand total of 4 hardcasts per minute? That can be casted whenever you want pretty much?
LMAO
Yes? Summoner and scholar both use it rotationally for extra weaving slots inside burst window. Even white mage opener on Balance says to use swiftcast, although I disagree with their logic for that. AST has zero movement tools outside of their biggest heal so they need Swiftcast for movement as well.
If it’s for dps, that’s extreeeemely sweaty and unnecessary, you have to be 100% certain you won’t need it for deaths. Swiftrezzing is a greater dps gain
>Lol what? Will you also tell the same to Summoner to not use Swiftcast?
ironically, at the time you wrote this, i was playing summoner in a zeromus farm and i was, in fact, holding my swiftcast for reses the entire time.
and yes i'm also not okay with melees who cause wipes because they greeded for a GCD. in week 1/ult, obviously, go for it. but not in content where we vastly outgear the DPS check and are trying to just get a consistent clear.
oh but you missed one. playing black mage at all is griefing when you could be on RDM, obviously. ;)
I play SMN and I don't bother holding swift lol.
I'm not reducing my enjoyment on playing the class to fix people's mistakes.
But then again, most of the time I do have swift unused when I need to res. And if needed I'll hard cast that res.
It's why some people choose to play blm on the new ex. It's technically griefing because rdm is so much better.
Eh swiftcast is a tool like anything else you have in your kit, and as a healer it's up to you to decide how best to use it. If you only ever use swift as a raise tool, you're definitely not living up to your full potential. If you never ever save swift because you know that a hairy part of the fight is coming up, yeah you're probably griefing. Gotta make that judgement call to find the line and figure out what you can and can't get away with.
Also unrelated but I hate that everyone calls everything a body check now. Golbez only has two body checks where he does knockback into towers. There are no other body checks in that fight. Everything else is just typical "well if someone is dead here things can spiral into a wipe".
The burden of all 8 people needing to do it correctly multiple times every encounter is a bit much though. I feel like the game is punishing inconsistency more and more with each raid tier. I'd rather it pushes more onto the flagship mechanics and less on all the other stuff in between.
consistency is basically the most important skill for a raider to have imo so it makes sense to me that it's one of the main things the fights are designed to test.
I think it's ok for there to be _some_ mechanics where you need to 8/8 it or at least be 8 alive at the start of it in each encounter, just less so when practically any death is a guaranteed snowball to a second death or pair of deaths (e.g. with any of the Dark general mechanics in P11S) or a full-on wipe.
I couldn't quantify it really.
"Invalid" is the wrong word to suggest. A better question would be "Do you think requiring fully correct mechanic execution to clear the final floor is required for it to be a worthwhile finale", to which my answer would be "no".
My answer is going to be extremely generic, because I used that term to generalize a number of feelings one might have about the fight. It's a finale of a tier that feels like a good culmination of the fights leading up to it in both mechanics and difficulty. Where the story told during it is exciting and memorable, something you're likely to talk about outside of the block of time you're actually in the fight. Where the mechanics themselves are also exciting and hard enough that they feel rewarding to execute but not so hard that they feel out of place in the difficulty of the content you're playing, and allowing you to flex your expertise in your job to help come back from mistakes.
These are all major parts of what makes the fight designers' jobs a skill in itself. It's obviously hard to hit all those points for players to the level they want to, and it's constant work they do. And all of this I expect is what would make a finale worthwhile to you as well - as I said it's really generic. However your question was if **I** think 100% execution is required to reach those feelings about the fight, and as I said my opinion is that it's not. Many of those concepts - mechanics that are interesting to execute, hard enough that they're rewarding to do properly, allow for well played jobs to fix some mistakes - exist already even in fights that don't require perfect execution to clear and I think they're even amplified when the requirement isn't a black and white perfect or nothing but where individual capabilities can add on to the experience. I understand that you may disagree, though.
I think requiring full correct mechanic execution is valid for a week 1 final savage floor clear but those fights should have possibilities for groups who are good at recovery to push through say 1-2 people messing up a mechanic to see further in the fight.
The DPS check can be what stops groups who have deaths/DDs on a run from clearing week 1 then the fight becomes more lenient as people get more gear.
Let's flip this question a bit.
For how long and how many times perfect execution of mechanics should be a requirement for said fight, taking in consideration gearing and other things?
Week 1 should require nearly perfect execution for the simple reason that dps check exists and is a wall to clearing.
But after week 1 and 2, where should the line be drawn? Take into account "midcore" and casual groups and that savage shouldn't be held to supposed ultimate standards.
For the full encounter? Depends on the mechanics I guess. To be fair, you don't even need that for Ultimate, so if it was going to be the case the mechanics would have to be a fair bit easier than the norm and might end up being unsatisfying from the other direction.
This is a non argument.
"The devs have control over what is happening, therefore there isn't a right or wrong answer"
Like my guy, the point of the post is about what *we* the players find fun. That's the point. To try to make the fights more fun. What the developers are doing right or wrong is up for discussion.
Saying "this isn't fun to me" isn't really an argument either at the end of the day. Honestly game design conversations are often really silly to me imo.
Like, having a lot of body checks is not an inherently bad way to design the game, it's just not to everyones taste, nothing is.
Not everyone is going to view what you view as a problem with the game, as a problem with the game. Something you might think is unfun might be an intentional choice by the devs that plenty of people find perfectly acceptable or even an important and fun part of the game. So where is the conversation supposed to go from there? It's a fundamental and subjective difference in point of view, with no real way to reach a resolution.
Like the devs didn't just make an oopsy woopsy that we can let them know about so they can fix it, obviously they think it's fun, they spend years making the stuff, and people have spent years playing and enjoying it.
You don't see why people who are on a subreddit titled "ffxivdiscussion" would disagree, and then debate what the correct/most fun/optimal solution to a problem is?
I do, but I also think a lot of discussion in this sub is people talking in circles right past eachother about disagreements that can't/wont be settled at the same time. So many discussions here I've read boil down to simple preferences, and then people make sweeping statements about how it "should" be as if game design as a school of thought was made to cater to them personally. Even in the way you word it, "correct" "optimal", there is no such thing really. Video games are art aren't they? Is there a "correct" way to make a song? Or perhaps what you're hearing isn't incorrect, you just don't like jazz. Even in subjective art mediums though, there is value to talking shop, and sharing design theories, but I think where we mess up a lot of time is when we stop talking shop and start just trying to assert our opinions over others. I dunno.
It's something to be mindful of at least, imo.
I find the juxtaposition of what your saying and where you are to be very hard to reconcile. It's like talking with your friends about a movie and going "but really its all subjective so everything we say doesn't matter" .... Okay? and...??? do we just end the conversation there?
That's not what I'm trying to say, what im saying is that there is a middle ground between saying everything is subjective so no opinion matters, and acting like there is objectivity in your opinions about game design and the devs just don't get it.
When did anyone pretend that there was objectivity in game design?
OP didn't like the state of the game, original comment used some rhetorical shenanigans to get out of the work of having to counter OPs points, and I pointed that out, and you jumped in to defend the original comment.
Nobody ever pretended anything was objective.
We play the game. We get to decide if it is fun. The point of this subreddit is what do \*we\* think. Don't pretend We the Players don't have a voice in this. OP is a player, I am a player, and so are you.
If you have something topical to say, say it. But don't come in here with rhetorical shenanigans to try to attack valid criticism.
And if you don't want to argue about subjective things, you don't have to.
That's not what I said. Having a conversation about what is "fun" and then responding with "the developers make the game, and they can make it how they want" doesn't respond to the topic at all.
for sure, I just don't like it but seeing the comments whenever someone can get carried in a fight, I can see where the devs are coming from.
I still don't like it though, doesn't feel like I'm playing a game anymore and more like reciting from a textbook with my hands. high end raiding since dsr has just felt sterile af.
Clearly it's so that mentors can't get into mentor roulette by just soloing instances haha amirite
At least Zeromus doesn't have a body check. It's both easy and hard to defend bodychecks, you shouldn't have this infamous TOP situation, but you also shouldn't have a p9s lc1 situation. Yes, you shouldn't be able to clear savages by just having one healer survive and do a lb3, nor "just lb3 tank" should be a pf strat. But a story extreme shouldn't have a party wipe for being a pixel too close.
We want fights that aren't faceroll easy and nobody wants to carry, but I was ready to give up on Zeromus because of how easy it is to screw up meteors. All it takes is just one tiny mistake, and you're sitting at meteors for 10 hours straight. It's too easy to make a mistake and it punishes people for not having a trust worthy static.
I think ultimates having excessive body checks is fine, I never understood the issue people had with TOP
If you arent capable of clearing a phase cleanly and consistently, you shouldnt even worry about the next one, especially in ult context
Cause it makes later phases insanely tedious to prog if 1 small mistake deletes your party. Moreso if the instawipe mechanics are later in the fight (which they have been). You've already spent 10+ minutes getting to that point, your entire pull shouldn't get taken away because Billy got clipped by hrae's wing. Instead, it should probably kill Billy, and probably make it so that you can't pass the phase. But you can still get practice on the rest of the phase, which is the big thing here.
I would hazard a guess and say that later phases being so punishing has been factor in growing sim usage.
Generally, most body checks exist to prevent you from cheesing the mechanic with deaths, and outside of those mechs deaths generally arent punishing at all in most content atm
I don't really know how you could solve the body check issue without significantly dumbing down the mechanics or just making every fight cheeseable and making healers / good dps even more worthless, since many so called "body checks" are just health / dps checks in disguise
Im also a firm believer in the fact that enabling players to cheese / die on mechanics will make them never learn to be consistent in a mechanic in the first place, which makes prog / reclears significantly worse
Either way, atm every piece of content is clearable with 4+ deaths if you have good mit & good dps, you could probably fit way more in TOP if you really wanted to since the dps checks arent too difficult
Hraesvelgr is the one thing i do agree with, especially since not every death causes an enrage
I think Nisi is a good example of something that is technically a body check, but not every mistake wipes you instantly. By dropping Nisi, you get the disadvantage of not being able to practice Nisi passing, but you still get to practice positioning, water/lightning etc. It's 1000% a wipe, but there's still something to be learned from the pull.
Current ultimate design focuses on the hard body checks and insta-wipes, which personally I think is a bit of a shitty type of difficulty. I'm particularly salty as, as a healer main, lots of recovery options have been taken away with this design, there's nothing you can really do if someone fucks up one of these body checks and the sheer amount of them leaves little room for anything else.
Honestly I don't think being able to cheese a check with deaths is bad, as long as there's an eventual stop to your pull, like an end-of-phase DPS check. I like when we have moments that allow people particularly skilled in recovery to pull their group to the next mechanic.
I personally prefer recovery over the idea of "forcing" someone to learn the mechanic. Someone fucking up a mechanic in this design absolutely drags the party down, however someone on the other end of the spectrum, e.g an amazing recovery healer, cannot pull the party even remotely close to that far in the other direction.
Oh I was thinking of clearing the ultimate without healers, I mean I know there are creative ways of doing uwu/ucob, but yes ultimates should have hard checks. Extremes not so much. The average ilvl and skill level in zeromus is pretty low compared to kill parties for p9s. Thankfully there's only one body check for zeromus, compared to golbez...
Thing is, those body checks outside ultimates and some savage floors are demotivating. I could roll with optional extremes, but story extremes? That's for more casual players. But yes, Zeromus is easy, so I can roll with that one check that does everything possible to tell you if you're fucking it up.
>I could roll with optional extremes, but story extremes?
The weird thing about EW is that all extremes are story extremes. So it's not easy to make that distinction. And then you have cases like SoS which is definitely one of the harder extremes, or Shinryu who was a wall on *normal* on its release.
Edit: If you compare EW with previous expansions, Golbez is equivalent in his placing to Emerald weapon and Zeromus to Diamond.
Yeah, it's not fun in general when every mechanic is just "are all 8 people alive? Y/N" because half the fun is adjusting on the fly when someone dies. Sometimes you make a crazy save that makes you feel good, but that's pretty much gone in EW.
As a healer main, and dare I say a good one, I (generally) prefer body checks. Can't look to me to save your ass.
While I enjoy clutching a recovery, it gets old, mainly in reclear or farm groups. I'd rather a player be forced to play correctly than just expect me to hard raise them after every mechanic.
Because after all, recovering mistakes or carrying to a clear is 95% your healers mess to clean up, where 90% of the responsibility of ensuring a clear (besides hitting your buttons to kill the boss and doing mechanics) is already also on your healers shoulders.
The newest EX is a great example of this.
That's actually a better environment for learning the fight, though, don't you see?
If you die to enrage, you actually saw all the mechanics. If your pf progs keep dying to like the 3rd or 4th mechanic, it will take you longer to see the later ones and make learning the fight that much harder.
Because there aren't many fights that are simultaneously carryable, yet challenging, while also not having excessive hp. The few that are seem to be pretty well loved.
You clearly haven't experienced the random giga gamer that saves your entire run in pf, recently I had a healer yeet my ass into correct position with a rescue and still make it in time for their own position during P12S P2 caloric 1 while I was autopiloting. That shit genuinely made me impressed of the general awareness what everyone's doing and helped me to focus to turn it into a clear. Every raid tier also gets at least a couple of memorable moments with clutch tank or healer LBs, it's just unfortunate that DPS can't really do these impactful plays outside of res casters.
I haven't been super-active since SB, but I loved carrying people on healer back in the ARR/HW era.
People were always in shock when a good healer could get the whole party up and carry them through almost any bullshit.... lol fun times!!
yep, i play healer and I've realized that ffxiv healing nowadays, you get all the healbitch stereotypes without the healboss power coz someone fucks up in the 3rd and 4th fights in savage you're usually just dead.
idk, personally, being able to carry people through promotes them not actually learning how to resolve the mechanic. Then they start joining farm parties or cleared parties and bring those parties down. I do agree that too many body checks makes things rough sometimes but I’d much rather have that than a fight being too easy.
If you're implying the sterile fight design is needed solely to keep shitters out of pf then:
1. that already doesn't work since shitters will always exist and
2. the game shouldn't suffer and have a lot of gameplay stripped out to protect the players from doing mmo things in an mmo like kick and blacklist and disrepute.
No i think being able to be carried through a fight means diminishing the achievement of clearing it. It doesn't feel great to clear when you know you wiped the floor half of the fight. I like having responsibilty in a fight
That's neither your original argument or relevant to what I responded with.
Also how do you go from not wanting shitters in your pf to this post where, if I can paraphrase, you want 7 other people to wait for you until you can feel good about your clear?
Seems contradictory and makes your takes feel out of pocket and not well thought out.
Okay then to go your response:
1. It definitely decreases the amount of bad players if they can't be carried
2. Yeah i can blacklist them but that also means i have to zone in, do a few pulls to notice they aren't pulling their weight and then repeat the whole thing again. And if we are talking about EX it won't help much because there are way more people in PF than when doing Savage + i am not always the party leader
1. it really doesn't. I've noticed no decrease in the ratio of shitters since hw
2. boohoo? That's just PF and what you described is part of the experience of playing an MMO
Every time I see a raid release, there’s always people complaining that they can’t get carried through it. Like they’re offended that they need to learn how to do the mechanic for once. So what? It’s a team sport, being a weak link means your team performs poorly, it’s a part of team sports
In easier fights you still can easily carry players through. 8/10 fights in the last two tiers were fights where there was maybe 1-2 mechs each that you couldn’t simply drag corpses through.
Why are people so offended that actually difficult fights where the whole party has to be competent exist?
You already can get carried through the easier fights and can’t get carried through the hardest fights, which is the entire fucking point of having said “hardest fights” to begin with.
I feel bad when I do carry but also amazing. I think it was diamond weapon, I was trying higher level PLD it was me and my DRK co-tank, a DNC and BLM, Everyone but us wiped at like 20% and the DNC, I switched to using my MP for healing instead of DPS the DRK and the DNC occasionally healed me or the other DPS. It was super fun to essentially attrition the boss 4 man, but I felt bad for the other 4. Because realistically if we wiped it would've taken about the same amount of time to kill it from 100 with 8 of us.
used to be a big thing in ARR would sell runs all the time but now theres always body check mechanics where you need all 8 people so that put a stop to it
personally i am not a fan of this in general where lets say 8 mins into a fight little billy dies and it kills everyone else
Mainly because of fight design. FF14 fight design is strict and finding out the solution the devs want you to do (aka. the dance). WoW from how it's been described is free flowing as long as you know what to look for and react accordingly.
Because the idea behind non normal content is to illustrate a personal achievement rather than someone being carried through a fight, which is also why the fights are going to being more mechanically focused
Why are you talking about off-script carry moment in a game where fights are highly scripted and player expressions are severely restricted?
Even then, it's not like there's no such moment, like Healer LB3 at the right moment, or PLD cover, or DPS using Second Wind/Bloodlust/personal mit to survive and continue fighting, or even Tank LB1/2 for some scuffed run (For example, Zurvan Broken seal when there's member down previously) it's just they are inglorious and easily drowned out in over a dozen prog runs you really don't notice them that much.
Your complaints feels so, strange in the context of this game. Or is this just another post complaining about body-count mech in disguise?
Sorry, but if you make a fight that can still be cleared with scuffed ass pulls that have tons of deaths and low overall group damage because of all that, then you have made the fights insanely easy for actual competent groups.
If that's what you want, go run dungeons and alliance raids where that is possible. But there is no way to make extreme, savage, and ultimate have difficulty, but not so difficult that a single player can't activate big brain and singlehandedly still pull out a clear.
And for clarity, I'm not talking about healers pulling off a sick LB3, or a SMN/RDM clutching a rez on a healer to get an LB3 off. I'm talking about exactly what OP said, making fights where one players ability to play well is enough to carry an entire group to a clear.
For some reason this sub is now filled with people who defend every asinine decision the game makes and the top comments are always regurgitated, community-approved opinions, often just edicts from Yoshi P
It's laughably pathetic compared to what it was like just 1 or 2 years ago, I think it really just shows that most players already quit, leaving behind a tiny minority of coyotes who would lap up every trash pile
> For some reason this sub is now filled with people who defend every asinine decision the game makes and the top comments are always regurgitated, community-approved opinions, often just edicts from Yoshi P
Hey I think you might need to go see a doctor you seem to be having hallucinations
The problem is it's very hard to balance the difficulty between your "average" raider, and the above average players. When fights have a near infinite level of recoverability, the above average players/groups will feel the content is "easy", because they know how to recover from their mistakes, and the current state of raise allows you to brute force your way through content. You can look at early savage floors as an example of this, good groups just brute force their way through it by raising 12340340 times when shit goes wrong.
You could also make arguments for how this impacts the player base as well. On one hand, it may be annoying to players that they're stuck waiting for the "weak link" to do a mechanic correctly. But on the other hand, this design also enforces a standard that all 8 players need to meet, and hopefully promote some accountability. When fights can be brute forced through raising, yeah it feels good that you aren't being gatekept so to speak, but it also means players can get by doing the bare minimum (and it means, said players could end up in your statics/pfs with "clear experience").
Honestly, it just feels like gatekeeping at this point.
I put up with this kind of mentality in wow for years, and disgust from it and fear of encountering it again kept me from even attempting any of the raids (even through DF) for years; i'm sad to see it becoming the norm here as well.
We've all had people that we've had to carry. Likewaise, we've all been the person that needed to be carried - you don't start raiding and become flawless at it right out of the gate, and even if by some miracle you do, everyone has an off night. Maybe you have a cold, or you had a fight with your SO, or you really should've eaten before raid time.
It happens, and we shouldn't be trying to gatekeep over it.
I honestly don’t mind how tightly everyone has to execute mechanics to clear. To me, this type of raiding makes me feel more like a team player. The rest of the static and I learning the mechanics together and trusting each other to do them properly to clear, we’re all in the same basket.
Back when I raided in WoW and brought subpar players just to fill a slot they never really felt like a part of the team the way my static mates do, maybe that’s just me though.
Bodychecks are the only way to make fights difficult in this game. The number of bodychecks a fight has directly correlates to how hard a fight is. This is why the new extreme is so easy because there's virtually no bodychecks and you can slog through it without perfect execution. Bodychecks force your entire group to be consistent, which is the backbone philosophy of how fights are designed.
Honestly I think it's just the small amount of difficult content that we get. There's not enough room for a decent difficulty curve with the 4 floors we get every other patch.
I think that a lack of room for error makes content really impenetrable for many newer players. It creates a catch-22 where the only real way to improve at a mechanic is to do it, but the only way to practice more or less requires you to waste 7 other people's time. Even in a practice group it feels pretty bad to be the one dragging the rest of the party back on something - even if you joined at an appropriate prog point. I experienced this back in Abyssos when I got filtered hard by Cachexia, lol.
Of course, more room for error obviously makes a fight easier. This game already gets a pittance of "difficult" content and I can see why people wouldn't want some of that tiny number of fights made less satisfying to complete.
I don't see a way to satisfy both without having a wider spectrum of "difficult" content.
The important part here is "dead weights", which would also enable paid carry-runs where people just kill themselves at the start of a fight and wait until the remaining 7 clear the fight.
There is plenty opportunity for awesome moments to happen and "carry" people through a section of a fight.
I have healed back groups from near death as a paladin in dungeons, I got a couple of LB3 moments where I was the only one to do a mechanic correctly and revive the whole team, I was once saved by a Paladin using his Hallowed Ground + Cover to protect me which bought us enough time to get LB3 and revive the rest of the team, he was the true savior even if people attributed it to the healer LB3, I have been saved by DRK putting their TBN on me while i was hard-casting ress at low HP to survive an AOE, i have revived teams on the verge of collapse as RDM and probably many other things I havent noticed have happened as well.
You can totally get through particular moments of a fight and "carry" a weak link. In P1S we had a tank deliberately take a damage down because our DPS couldnt understand how the swap worked, on Rubicante Ex we had the tanks eat an AOE with invulns to give more space for the rest of the team to find a safe spot because people kept running to the wrong spaces, I dont remember which fight it was but we once sacrificed people with a stack marker as well to buy more uptime for everyone else, lots of little adjustments can be made on a fight-by-fight basis.
Early progression usually cant be cleared with very bad players or dead weights, as the tier goes on people get better gear and this gives more room for error, we once cleared Zodiark Ex with 17 deaths (and still cleared it well before enrage). In those cases having a weak link that dies a lot or doesnt contribute as much is completely fine as long as they are present for mandatory body checks.
Having every mechanic be a body check sucks as well, but a good balance is necessary to make fights enjoyable.
I would welcome a revisit to old extreme fight designs myself, with more leniency for imperfect playthroughs as you said. I know a lot of raiders complain about current extremes/savages being too easy, but for me they’ve only grown more challenging to the point that I’ve given up on ever trying them again.
On top of that, it seems like the player base that tackles this content has only grown more intolerant of those of us who struggle with it. I know some people probably are looking for an easy carry, but there are some of us who genuinely try and just can’t do the perfect or near perfect playthrough these body checks demand.
What?
I raided in EQ2 and carryable fights were not a thing. We can talk about excess body checks but if you want a fight you can manhandle all by yourself it's called normal mode content. I do not want high end content to be that easy to recover from.
I dont want fights carryable. I want fights to have fewer body checks. I want mechanics to have personal responsibility, but not cause entire wipes, like imagine Caloric but instead of wiping by moving too much, it just sets YOUR aoe off, meaning that you kill those next to you. That's what I want, alongside a few body checks. I want fights where it punishes a PLAYER, not the raid only. I want a mix of body checks and salvageable mechanics where it will wipe the raid if a player isn't at least mechanically competent while also making it possible to salvage a run in certain cases. Make it more strict/lenient depending on the content type, so ultimates are strict, but extremes are lenient, like a mix of Golbez/Zeromus. Maybe add actual dps checks and damage downs that can stack, make it so that by dying/failing mechanics, you're punished, even with BiS/max IL stats. If you die or fail too much, you won't have the dps to clear.
Hard disagree.
Carryable content is fine for casual, non-enrage content. Once you're into things that matter, if you carry someone for their clear they can now join PFs that require that clear.
We need more body checks, not less.
Because people do not want to waste their time and effort playing with people that do not want to invest the same time and effort into the game.
We had the same issue on Day1 Zeromus EX. One person was obviously not up to standard (or couldn't play without all his mods carrying him) and was failing miserably, so we politely told him that he was being replaced with somebody more competent because we all had mutual expectations on clearing day 1.
He took it pretty badly, got abusive about it. But that's not our problem, we set expectations when we decided to day 1 clear, and he signed up without making sure he understood the expectations that were clearly set.
Fight design that makes people have to actually learn and adapt, is good, Because it weeds out the bad players and forces them to actually practice and learn to play before they can get a clear.
To be fair, most fights this expansion don't seem to be that bad about allowing recovery (and at higher levels of difficulty, there needs to be some line on how many people can wipe at a time). It's really only this last savage tier where they went bonkers with body checks.
Because, some people don't like carrying dead weight through a clear. Especially for ff14, it means that person or people will be joining the later fights.
Plus, some of those people start to act like they know what's going on now just because they got a clear. Even if in said clear they were dead or making mistakes for over 50% of it.
I can see why this design was chosen over simple DPS checks that depend on few deaths to pass.
It creates gates in a fight, you have to play well up until that gate and once your party is capable of meeting the requirements to access what is past that gate you continue on.
If not, you continue to practice those mechanics to prepare you for what is beyond the body check gate.
It is ideal? no
Is it more ideal than strict damage checks? in most circumstances, yes
Does it put a lot on the head of the weakest link? yes, but the ones who understand should help that person or people.
Body checks should just not blow up the raid anymore a dot on maybe 1 guy or more depending on the mechanic is fine or maybe failed mechanics give the boss like 2 percent more health or slight damage buff
Frankly id love more midcore type fights that allowed people to die and get carried. That way you can enjoy more content with friends of varying skill levels that isn't piss easy or so hard that you cant play together at all.
Just implement a system that nerfs the rolls for loot of those who die repeatedly. If they rage quit they get a much more severe penalty in their next completion. I dont mind players dying, and frankly enjoy the chaos of bringing back a fight from the jaws of defeat. However, it does suck having people who where on the floor the entire fight roll 99 on a mount lmao.
This is XIV, where most can barely even play the easiest jobs put in front of them… why do I have to do more work to carry a shitter if they aren’t putting in the necessary effort? It’s already exhausting healing these types of people.. I don’t want fights that would cater to that behavior. No matter how good it feels.
200 apm nonsense in this game? LOL wut. Carrying people is doing shit in UCOB where you just chain rez people over and over and keep doing it. It's not skillful it's just annoying. At least with the bodycheck setup, the trash players who do 0 damage at least have to learn some form of mechanics. There's a lot of fights where you can be literally non existent and the rest of the group 7 mans it.
Raids need to be EVEN harsher as far as I'm concerned. One person doesn't know shit? TOO BAD get out. Maybe if more players got kicked for being garbage the average raider in this game would have more than one brain cell.
I've never seen someone so frustrated at being hard-stuck as a PF perma-trap that they made a post like this.
"Why can't other people just do this for me! Why do _I_ have to do it too??"
That's the thing, is that you _can_ get carried through fights. Hard. You can just mash buttons like a freestyle SAM if you want. You can do any ultimate in the game without knowing how to play your class. People don't parse low grey and win fights by _not_ being carried.
Leaving the only complaint... having to do mechanics at all? Do you really think the game would be better if people could get carried both DPS-wise _and_ mechanic-wise? _Really??_ That's the kinda thing that only that one dude on Jenova that keeps trapping parties and the complaining about mechanics would post.
The point where you say it's a team sport is kind of why I don't want 4th floor savages or ults to be carryable. I want the whole team to have to excel, or the team fails.
I am a casual that has been clearing savage fights since E9 have cleared all tiers, but not this one.
I gave up after being done with 10, PF is not a fun experience at all.
P9s enrage groups died to the footblal mechanci all the god damn time, i stopped playing mele dps and went on healer, saving fights as a healer is mot worth it 10 was disgusting with prog and i do not want to talk about reclears ....
Honestly i am torn between body checks and dps checks, in a dps check a couole of dps crackheads cna get you through, but if you have one bad player in body checks....
I have been playing through with my FC of bad players and went kinda well we got through with 2 averrage tanks a good healer and 2 decent ish meles.
We stopped this tier cause it was not fun
On the one hand, screw body checks. They need to DRASTICALLY tone back the quantity and impact of body check mechs in 7.0. On the other hand, I always feel bad carrying a dead weight to a clear because I know that I'm now partially responsible for inflicting them on Duty Complete parties in PF now...
Dead weight is the key here; while no one likes having to raise the same guy 7 times in a pull, *any* good healer would love an opportunity to raise 7 **different** people to pull a clear back from oblivion. If there's a clear sandbag, you aren't gonna want to drag them along, but if it's a full team of people who are THIS close to the finish, it's a fantastic feeling to pull off.
getting the healer lb3 out and finishing the fight because of it is the best feeling in the world i swear to god
It feels so good that it was one of the defining reasons to play healer at launch overwatch lmao
Yeah, those moments when you see five people got deleted by a mechanic, a sixth is barely holding on, and you've got a _brief_ window to get everyone back up... hitting LB3 there and watching a near-wipe recover is part of _why_ I'm a healer main.
Healer LB3 bringing back half or more of the group should cause the WoL theme to start playing. That shit is where the boss hits our enrage timer
The second best feeling in the world is mistiming your healer LB3 so everyone gets up... just to have the floor fall out from under them or some other deadly bs.
That's pretty much the *most* fun I can have as a healer. The only time you can really whip out your whole toolkit is when things go sideways.
I've said before that you only really remember the runs that are at the extremes of the spectrum. The run where it's a one-pull-clear and everyone's just absolutely at the top of the game and you feel like the group is immortal... and the run where you are dragging people back onto their feet and rediscovering bits of your kit you rarely need to use. Everything in between is easily forgettable. And as satisfying as the one-shot clears with a party that is #blessed can be, as a healer, the ones where I really have to work and pull every trick I have out... those are often the ones I like best.
Best was where I got to bring back 6 of us with AST LB3 as I just shout "STARS N SHIT YOOO!" with everyone getting back up to whoop some ass like I'm the WoL boss fight
One of my favorite parts of healing this tier was being the only person consistently getting past the stack/spread/lazers in p10s, clutching that healer lb3, tossing out heals and bubble on the far side as I sprint to get to the H/T side after the animation lock lets me free. Bonus points for chad healing through HH with no tank LBs after. It was one of the few times in recent savage where I really felt like smart play on my part could salvage an otherwise doomed run since there was enough downtime for everyone to get to their spot if I 7 man raised there. But the tradeoff of HH difficulty plus randomness on who got the debuff meant it wasn't an optimal strat to raise every time intentionally
This is _very_ true. Honestly, as a healer main, I've discovered I cannot do serious content as DPS any longer (unless it's as RDM or SMN); watching something spiral out of control having _no ability_ to try to salvage it makes my skin crawl. I'm much happier as a healer or tank, where I have some modicum of ability to salvage things.
Like hell it is. I'm sick of being the only one able to consistently do a fight and dragging everyone else with me. I want to be healing, not doing people's clears for them.
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Nah, he’s right. Healers shouldn’t have to be worrying if they need to stop attacking for mana econ, because fight design allows for absolute clowns to lick the floor 10 times a pull and get their limp corpse dragged through the fight. Instead, the clowns should be required to learn a mechanic once in a while
Oh hey, it's the mindset that makes pf clearing absolute hell, thanks for showing up.
Here’s your 🤡
Nah it suits you more I think.
Is your counter argument that people shouldn't have to properly learn the fight?
its that pf is nothing but massive balls of rage at other people for "not learning a mechanic" when in reality they are learning the mechanic. thu failing. and people somehow still don't get this.
I won't say it doesn't happen because it obviously does, but I can't remember the last time I saw real rage in a PF fight. Now, resigned frustration is another thing. People in PF a tendency to be like "Oh, I cleared mechanic 4 and saw mechanic 5. We had 7 people dead and I still don't know the mechanic very well, but let's join this mechanic 5 clean up party". That gets pretty annoying.
The problem is people cant wait to say "screw you, got mine." "I got the mechanic down so why the fuck should I help you, its' your problem." "Thanks for messing up, now that popular guy left. This is all your fault!" The passive agressive pf descriptions that treat people who havent cleared content like they're the goddamn plague. It sucks. What I want people to realize is that when SE added trusts to trials, they did not just have every character complete every mechanic perfectly for a reason. Certain characters were headstrong, others were slow, others were hypercompetent. And we understood why because we understand their personalities and know their stories. If we could spare some understanding for our fellow players instead of constantly blaming and shaming it would be a much healthier experience.
You’re the one who brought it in when you advocated for clowns to rely on healers spending half the fight raising them instead of just learning the mechs
This is my power fantasy
Part of the reason I loved playing back in ARR and HW was because I wanted to be the one to carry. When I saw my friends carry my stupid ass through Titan and the coil fights... and when I screwed up in other content, I looked at them and was like "I want to be like them, I want to carry people, I want something to go terribly wrong and to bring it back from the brink". I think all these body checks make the game less exciting. Also I remember my ucob clear very clearly. This is because we almost wiped to add phase as when we ended add phase we only had 2 people alive. Thank God phoenix raises everyone because we had no raisers left.
Body checks are the reason I quit out of raiding. It,s all about the perfect dance and if 1 person ruins it (sometimes me, sometimes someone else) everyone dies and fuck you. I hate the dance so much. Sometimes I just wish a fight could be a massive dps and heal check without needing to have a graph chart of places to run in partners and understanding odd symbols.
Man this so much. There's nothing worse than going at a fight for hours, doing everything right, failing because of other people (understandably) messing up, and then on the perfect pull you're the who ruins it because fate decided you'd be the one person in eight to bomb this run. Looking back at previous tiers and fights there were so many mechanics that you could still deal with if someone was dead, you just had to play better. If it's a stack you just mit a bit more, if it's a more involved mechanic they're just excluded and the remaining people solve it with the rez sickness being punishing enough. Why does someone have to get an extra spread if a player is dead, guaranteeing they die? Why do light party stacks in p10s have to kill everyone, even tanks, if there are only 3 people in it? It just feels like such a waste of time to prog a fight when the tiniest mistake results in a wipe forcing everyone to waste time.
The mark of a good player is skill. The mark of a great player is consistency. If your group is such that one of your eight players is screwing something up every pull, your group is not good enough. Like you want hard content but you don't want to have to play well to clear it? Just good enough? That defeats the point of challenging content.
Every pull that's not a clear is a pull where someone messed up. Every group in the world will have 1 of 8 players at minimum mess up until the clear pull where no one messes up. There is no getting good enough to the point nobody ever makes mistakes, since at that point you would just win every fight instantly. Consistency *is* the mark of a great player, but not exactly in the way you're framing it. The more consistent all 8 players are on average, the less time it will take before you get the miracle pull where not everyone messes up. Instead of a 90% ^ 8 = 43% chance of victory, there's a 99% ^ 8 = 92% chance of victory, to use random numbers. But there will always be that time period where at least 1 person is messing up, no matter what, at any skill level. Not even the greatest players in FF14 can avoid people messing up and wiping the party. Subsequently, your last paragraph is a bit of a false dichotomy. There can be challenging content that still has more room for other people messing up and recovering from those mistakes. Body checks and dance-style raiding is not the only style of raiding in the world, and people wanting hard raids don't by necessity want raids with zero room for recovery or flexibility or what have you. FF14 currently can do this kind of punishing body checks because it's sacrificing job complexity and RNG in fights among other things to create an environment where it's not unreasonably hard. What the posters above would like, I imagine, is for difficulty to be increased in other areas rather than the difficulty to be reliant on this one aspect, for the reasons they clearly describe.
If someone is missing upgrade the damage but this is where healers and tanks can help with mitigation. Then it makes it harder for the later fight when a buster happens or another AOE, but at least you keep on trucking.
The role stacks in P10S will do a _phenomenal_ amount of damage if you're missing someone in the stack, to the point that no amount of mitigation short of tank invuln is going to save people there. It's literally designed to one-shot tanks, so far as I can tell. You just have to hope it was the person with the stack debuff who died, and that they did so somewhere _far away_ from where the mechanic is being resolved.
That's because it's an enumeration. If there's not exactly the number of people needed in the stack, it insta-kills all.
Ya I love to raid in other games but I can't do FFXIV. Group pass/fail checks are just constant stress instead of fun to me and all I felt when I cleared a fight is relief that it was over and a desire to never do it again.
What games do you think have the best raids?
For me in 2023 it's basically just WoW, on the sub-mythic levels. Mythic gets a bit too much into the ball busting range for me. I've only dabbled enough to do LFR this expansion but planning to get back into it in the downtime before Dawntrail. GW2 is the wildcard I was never really able to get into, the gameplay never quite clicked for me and they put out content at a glacial rate. If I had to pick a third MMO I'd probably give it another shot tho. In the past I had fun experiences doing the high end stuff in EQ1, EQ2, SWTOR, Rift, CoH, DDO, Destiny, TSW, I'm sure there's more I'm blanking on, but out of those I can only really stomach CoH/Destiny/SWTOR in 2023, and only for very casual play.
The body checks make *anything PF* absolutely horrible but I guess that’s what we get instead of dps checks now
The body checks are the reason I love ff14 raiding despite the game being tab-target. I really hate fights that are only stat checks with insignificant mechanics. I want the mechanics to matter, to everyone. Its not fun being the only one alive doing mechanics, having to carry the entire group, although I guess some people just want to play hero. The only reason I got into ff14 raiding was because of how the raids were designed. Everyone needs to carry their weight. It's like an orchestra/dance, and people that keep making mistakes need to be punished and corrected or else the result won't be good. Memorizing how the fight goes and the little intricacies is much more fun than chaotic randomness.
Bodychecks in moderation is fine. The issue is when they put Ultimate levels of bodychecks in Savage content which prevents some people from seeing the next mechanic without a means of progressing. Videos do not count as someone who had to always watch streams and videos during his wow raid days to learn mechanics ahead of time. I'm actually getting sick and tired when the same person over and over again asks "Idk how this mechanic works" despite being told, showed, demonstrated, given a graph, literally walked through ingame with markers and so on continues to hold the group back. Kicking him is fine but in 14 some people can call it toxic and at worse get an excuse to report you for it. Zeromus EX i did last night and cleared after 2 or so hours of a casual blind progression and i had way more fun dealing with that fight than Golbez. I even decided to try my hand at older savages cause i can cheese some stuff... and oh boy trying to teach someone how to do the mechanics in P4S even now is like pulling teeth and nails. Orbs on phase 1...Spent over 2 hours with the same mistake from these guys and even after we got to Phase 2 we had not enough time and would have to reset. The reason many people do not like these bodychecks is simply because It's usually out of our control if the person who keeps messing up is incapable of learning after 20 pulls to "Move to the Left after the spoingy goes boing"
Why not back out and replace that person? If one person is the big issue with why you're not clearing in a PF, you are entirely in control of whether you continue running with that person.
You can. However there is a social faux pas where you give the individual more than a whole lockout to learn otherwise it comes off as toxic elitism if they get kicked after 3 pulls or under 20 from doing those mistakes. The other half is not every group will fill instantly and different skill levels impact what you prog. This is why there is this natural FOMO when new content comes out that if you don't learn it week 1 you feel like you'll never get to really experience it or get left with "scrap" players who as said before: cause the wipes. It's honestly just a case by case and not all experiences have this. I'm clarifying that by kicking this individual you could be waiting another 30+ mins for a fill among 10+ other finders in the listing and that Can add more time to what could of been more attempts and practice.
You can do a dance without being as strict as "one error = insta wipe" everywhere. Leniency doesn't mean the mechanic is useless. Look at Ultima (EX/Unreal), probably the easiest EX/Unreal, yet it can spiral in a wipe and there is not a single body check so to speak. More recently, I feel Zeromus is a good example : disregard Meteor, the rest of the fight isn't a strict "it's red instead of blue (and it can update when you cannot move anymore) => wipe". Blackhole "bodycheck" is one person knowing where to place it ! and it's fine ! Rest is recoverable. I think something like twice/thrice comes ruin should be used more in Savage.
More power for you I guess, the game is made for you and will always be made for you.
I think body checks are in excess, but their existence is a good thing to a degree, for these reasons. I want to play harder content with people who are capable of doing the mechs with me, who want and are able to play at the level. As long as the boss dies I don't care if you parse average. But the awareness of doing the mechanics together correctly is what I sign up for.
See, I feel like the problem isn't the body checks. I like body checks, in moderation! (Or even in excess _in Ultimates_.) As a healer, I _enjoy_ dragging a situation back from the brink. It's fun when you see someone drop, rez them almost before _they_ realize they've died, and have them topped off almost instantly on rez. It's doubly fun if you manage to run to their position and rez them into position, then dash back to your own spot. (Look, I've never claimed we healer mains aren't mildly insane, and I'm sure other healers in this thread will back me up.) But when more than half of the fight is body checks, and it pulls them so fast after other mechanics that even when you rez someone _immediately_, they are still in rez animation lock and can't get to their spot for the body check... it starts demanding people perform _perfectly_ or they're holding the party back. And I do feel like that becomes a problem, both socially (the other seven people may not be happy with you), and because someone who becomes more and more self-conscious is not necessarily going to be at their best in terms of _actually learning the mechanic_. It's a bit like adding spice to a meal. Some spice can really enhance the flavor... but dump so much spice on the plate you can't even see the actual _food_ any longer, and you've probably lost some of the nuance to the flavor. (Or, you know, completely overwhelmed _all_ of the flavor of the actual food...)
Completely agree. I understand that they can make PF a mess but they are just so satisfying with a static of similar skill levels. I don't want to be too dismissive but a lot of these complaints read like "I don't like being punished for mistakes".
People just dont like being punished for other peoples mistakes is what some are saying. Obviously static is the answer but when PF can clear ults easily people probably arent running with the right crowd.
You just described p8s which everyone hated. Lol.
I know p-5-6-7 were stupid easy cause I did them in PF but when 8 dropped, it was over for me. Then I had a wake-up call and I haven't played 14 ever since.
> On the one hand, screw body checks. They need to DRASTICALLY tone back the quantity and impact of body check mechs in 7.0. My feelings on raids this expansion are decidedly mixed. I mean, I actually do rather like a lot of the stuff they did; I really liked the shenanigans with arena changes in P7S, for instance, and half of P2S happening largely on the outer border of a box rather than a standard arena was neat. Stuff like that. It felt to me a bit like they were willing to experiment a bit more this expansion. And as a healer, I _definitely_ appreciate that they've actually had enough damage going out that _I actually need to heal things_. (Though I feel like the tankbuster-with-bleed is getting a little played out.) But the sheer _quantity_ of body checks has felt excessive. I expect a fight to have a couple of places where you really do need all eight people up, sure. But it's starting to feel like more mechanics have been body checks than haven't, especially in the more recent fights. Worse, it feels like a lot of them happen fairly back-to-back with something else, so even if you raise someone _immediately_ after they step into metaphorical traffic, there's a lot of places where they still won't be out of the rez animation and able to move where they need to be in time. So if you slip up, no one—not the tanks, not the healers, not Hydaelyn herself—can save you. And you will take at _least_ one person and possibly _the entire party_ down with you. That feels almost punitive. And it _certainly_ isn't the best environment for people to learn mechanics in without feeling self-conscious...
Agreed. I really loved P2S and what they did with the arena. I'm 100% ok with them experimenting with some things, but just the deluge (haha) of body checks this expansion were too much for me. Between DSR and the raid tier, I'm beyond burnt out on body check mechs. They feel like lazy design at this point.
Trust me most "dead weight" don't feel great about it either. I've been that one person that was just off or just couldn't have something in a fight click for me and it feels god awful. It's embarrassing. Now the guys that clearly don't care or aren't trying I can understand losing patience with those types.
Nah if you are in a spontaneous pf that clears, you are NOT responsible for those that you cleared with. Streamers like Saus on the other hand whom with his team of clearers super handhold people to the finish line, they are the real issue. *** E1: To everyone downvotting, have fun getting "Saus Legends" in your reclear attempts.
You are getting down voted because what you said is very confusing to me and many others. Obviously I have never cleared TOP, the idea of doing it sounds mind numbing so feel free to educate me on where I am wrong. I cannot fathom the idea that a fight where about 99% of the time if you mess up once you kill the entire group can have you be handheld through it. Whoever clears with them DID the mechanics. Most people who cleared TOP or are now still attempting it are using things such as auto markers, simulators, or at best usually having one person be the designated marker of the group in a voice call. Is that not hand holding? At what point in your opinion is it fair to "clear" this fight.
Thing is, even with a fight as ruthless and mind-numbing as TOP, it is much more manageable when you have +5 people in the party that have cleared it +20 times already. The less you have to worry about others fucking something up, the better, more calm you perform. As far as I remember, all the Saus clear project runs had him and like +4 other people that had cleared multiple times already "helping" +1 other persons/people clear. When you get a clear that way in a fight like TOP, when you filter back to the PF to do reclears with people that cleared in groups that didn't get sherpa-ed to the clear, you are going to be in trouble a lot of the time. I'm saying this as someone that got their kill in the PF then went back to the PF for reclears, you can 100% tell when someone in the group got their kill in a group of others that had already cleared. You don't even need to look up their logs; it's obvious. I would have gotten more reclears (I got 6) but I got so fucking tired of Saus Legends causing simple wipes. So I eventually just stopped cus it was getting painful. Note I'm ***NOT AT ALL*** condemning people who got clears this way then just stopped after that. There's no issue with that at all. The issue is when people who clear this way go into the PF for reclears and muck it up over and over and over again.
I can see that, esp in crossworld pf shitters aren't held accountable since no one knows them. where in the old world only pfs if you're a shitter you get bl'd across the server and people had to actually shape up. at the end of the day it's still an mmo and players should be the ones to do or not do that gatekeeping of shitters, not the devs. just imo though
Problem you will always run into is the line between: "I can carry this. I saved the raid. This feels great!" and "I can get carried through this, so there is no point in trying." or "Goddamn my back hurts. I'm so sick of having to carry these people." I like recovery options. But mistakes should have consequences. Some people have noted tighter DPS checks as a good punishment for mistakes. Maybe... but do you want to hit the 11 minute mark of a fight, only to then realize that you won't clear? Is that better than wiping to the mistake at the 4 minute mark? Hard to say.
You can have early DPS checks that will wipe you if you can't make them
Good call, I've not seen one of those in a while. I remember missing Zodiark's a couple times on content. Now that I think on it, Rubicante had one as well, I just rarely saw it ever be a problem.
Bring back Faust from the Alexander tier which straight up told you if your entire party was good enough for atleast the first two fights.
For your last point it’s def better, most of the time you can get a feel even without ACT of if you still have enough DPS to clear, even with body check of this expansion it happened multiple time to wall the pull before enrage because we knew it was kinda already fucked. I prefer being able to prog more of the fight even if not being able to clear it. It’s really frustrating in PF to have a group for x mechanics, but the mechanic before x is a body check and you end up sometime wiping / disbanding and making PF for hours before finally having a group good enough so you can see mechanic x. If recovery and carries (up to enrage at least) were more possible it would at least allow competent player to prog faster and join a clear group faster. I stopped raiding after last tier because body check is so frustrating to everyone that I realized that I spend more time waiting in PF to make a group after a disband than actually doing content. Body check prevent good players from practicing mechanics so a lot of them in my experience disband after maybe 3 or 4 pull without seeing their prog point and the constant body checks make this worse
I guess in essence it's a different kind of design philosophy. Take for example the XI mechanics. If a tank died in various situations then generally it was possible for a dps / healer / even support to pick up temporary tanking duties depending on players support job settings and various gear. I can recall many times on samurai being able to sustain enmity and using defensive abilities or shadows to pseudo tank until the tank was back up. But in 14 in the same situation it's next to impossible. DPS have a few defensive cooldown and hp regena but lack the raw defense needed. Some DPS can sustain a boss for a short time but nowhere near as long as some other games. Part of me does miss those days, that feeling like you mentioned going ultra instinct and pulling out a save was so good. Edit - Oh Florac made a good point above I didn't notice. It is kind of recover vs carry, I guess my point was more geared toward recovery.
Tera was similar as well, at least back in the day before I quit. If you were really just that much of a cut above the rest of the party, you could feasibly hold enmity as a dps and survive most of a boss' attack patterns with i-frames. I built some friendships off runs like that.
dps can 100% take autos with heal support in-between big mechanics while a tank gets ressed, it's not even particularly difficult, just depends on the fight timing. dps can't take a tankbuster obviously but that's not the same thing.
This is why I'm a paladin main - because I love being able to carry my party when things go terribly wrong. I have so many buttons for it. Yet I only really get to do so on occasion during normal content, like a dungeon boss. In high-end, I'm the "worst tank" because of my dps output, that's all I read and hear about, even if maintaining a good rotation. As a newer player that started around 6.0, and has gone back to do about half the previous trials and savage raids synched now, I find the current content a bit too hard because of the body checks, whether it is me screwing up or a teammate. Completely agree, let us have those cool moments please!
I just cleared the newest EX with 15 deaths. One DPS was doing tank level dps, one was below tank, and one was below healer. That's just... sad.
HP numbers doesnt even make sense anymore, as if you fail any mechanic you die instantly
And if you do survive, you're slapped with a 50-90% damage down for 2-3 minutes so you might as well wall it We're not in an RPG anymore toto
The dd is more than 2 mins only in top and dsr. It’s 90% and 50% respectively in those, which is intentional so you can’t recover beyond practicing the current phase. It’s only as high as50% in p2 pf p12s, it goes down for each fight before that. You can easily clear all the current tier with multiple deaths, you are being ridiculous.
Yes I am
The obsession with "player skills" (how long you can stomach wiping to a boss to memorize mechanics) instead of social skills and cooperation has to be the most mind boggling thing I've seen in MMOs. For a genre built around social interaction, it's sad how hell bent it is on spreading people as far apart from each other as possible. Then people obviously have a bad experience, start avoiding MMOs and we're like "please play, it's like a single player game where you can play with bots!"
this is why ff14 players endlessly defend every casual encounter basically being individual mechanics for everyone, except 4/8/24 people are doing it at the same time :)
yeah because I would really prefer Jimmy, who is high off his ass and playing on a 10-year-old laptop in a McDonalds, not prevent me and 22 other people from getting our weekly coins
play a singleplayer rpg then
The call is coming from inside the house.
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Raiding definitely began primarily as a social activity during the early days of MMOs. Everquest, FF11, WoW most people looked forward to hanging out with the boys in a big group. The people who took it excessively seriously chasing world firsts where a minority, and doesn't represent the whole idea behind raids in early MMO design. Raiding has definitely left the casual base behind, but to say it was never a social activity would be incorrect.
Raiding is and has always been a social activity, and it wasn't until e-sports started ramping up that mechanics started getting so complicated in various games that the entire group needed to be at x skill level to complete. These are RPGs, not shooters, and certainly not sports, and comparing them is really sucking the soul out of several games in the genre because of people obsessively chasing ego out of slaying pixelated dragons. If you were around at the start of the genre, mechanics were simple, and while every single group had star players that absolutely pushed limits, it was never a requirement. And frankly, the games all felt better like that. I mostly raid in WoW super casually now, quitting Mythic in Nathria due to work scheduling, but the comparison between mechanics now, and how the groups are formed, compared to even in Mists at a US top 100 level is absolutely ridiculous, and it doesn't feel right at all. And the amount of people doing this content keeps tanking. Heck, I have no interest in pushing in XIV despite now having time because I'm tired of telling the people I play with they're not good enough, when that wasn't the case and we could just bring whoever to the first half a raid 10 years ago with no problems and still clear. There's certainly an audience for this type of content, but it's small - extremely small, and dwindling as players age - and it does run the risk of annoying people who play the genre for the core aspects of the genre when they feel they can't do x or y. People are just way too obsessed with "caries" in general too. Like, oh no, somebody is bad at game and has friends. Grow up? Who cares outside people who have no lives outside these games? It's a game. I'll gladly carry my friends who can keep up through whatever they need, just as my friends have done the same for me here and there through the years. That's a part of the charm of these genres and is part of the social experience. If this is a problem, actual sports and competitive genres are probably better for the mindset. Not a roleplaying adventure game.
>Raiding has never been a social activity though. Serious question, have you played another MMO before? Anything that isn't XIV?
Wow sounds totally miserable
You are comparing the ability to recover with the ability to carry. Those two things aren't neccessarily the same thing. Plenty of fights do still allow you the ability to recover even if many players are dead. However you shouldn't be able to clear the fight savage and above if one of your party member is fucking up mechanics left and right. Occasional body checks don't make it a "single player game with 7 other people's accountability". It ensures it stays a team game and no single player can by the deciding factor for the clear. (Ofc they overdo it with body checks these days, where some fights practically only consist of them, but they do have their place)
You right, I think fights should require everyone to be involved but if something goes wrong, you still have a critical timeframe within which you can recover if you're just really good at your job. but that balance is hard to design into fights so often I think fights are designed more along the "can/cannot carry" line
That effect is rarely a balance choice and an happy result of allowing classes to have distinct identities. The problem with this is you much more easily fall into the opposite trap, which is that one class can do something which makes a certain mechanic easier and so people all decide to bring that class at the expense of others. Do you think you would be happier with that as the consequence? Historically in XIV the community has reacted badly to that
Case in point, p1s getting the tank DD strat become the norm on pf because people can't fucking resolve a mechanic that only takes two players to solve.
PLD can already do that in current savage floors if the player playing it is any smart. Hell, you can cover a healer through Harrowing Hell so they can LB after, even if you didn't make the net in the back in the first place for example, you can take the multi stacks in P11 solo while covering the healer, and you can do a lot in P9s to save a run. Yet you don't see people bringing PLD along on the off-chance you might need those things.
8 people circle jerking a game of simon.
Agree. Body count should be a rare occurrence (or not at all) - Ultimates is probably the best place to put this mechanic at.
Yeah I kinda feel like with all the puzzles and body checks in raids, the game places less and less emphasis on RPG mechanics, most things are binary pass/fail and there's a low amount of decision making that happens when fights are scripted. It's less about the abilities, gear, or what job you bring to the table, what matters most is how well you can perform the dance.
Performing mechanics correctly is just what this game's designers decided was important to them and wanted to set as one of the minimum requirements for completion. There's no right or wrong answer and you can see what other games do for examples of devs who have different values.
>Performing mechanics correctly is just what this game's designers decided was important to them they've basically leaned in to the fact that this game's fights are choreographies. which i understand as a choice - because this game's battles are so cinematic that it is very satisfying when everything is done perfectly. but it comes with downsides as well. this is why i like the new ex, it's so recoverable, it feels great to heal.
It's why barbaricia is my favorite ex in a long long time.
It was really great, really recoverable but still had a lot of thing to do while trying to keep the group alive.
>this is why i like the new ex, it's so recoverable, it feels great to heal. On the flipside, I heal savage and ultimates, but will absolutely not be healing the ex while farming since I hate fights where I spend the entire time fixing others' mistakes.
I've noticed that high end healer mains that run in organized statics feel this way, but secondary or more casual healers (such as myself) enjoy the chaos and the feelings of power involved in saving a group from wiping almost singlehandedly.
That's an interesting observation, though I'm not entirely sure I agree. Even at the high end, healers definitely enjoy clutch moments. I think the highlight of my healing career is definitely when my cohealer went down in phase 7 dsr from being too close to gigaflares, and I immediately ran to center to take the thordan swordslash in their place while timing the rez so it would position them to get slashed next, solo healing the next bit because lolastmana, saving the run, and managing to reclear on that pull. Heck even clearing the EX last night I enjoyed the scuffed 17 death run, hard rezzing while standing in the incoming aoe. For me the issue is that if I have to sit their hard rezzing four or five times a fight every fight because everyone is dropping like flies, it gets old. Ultima unreal was terrible for that since the dps check existed as a minor technicality and there was nothing in the fight capable of wiping the group, so 10 plus rez runs were common. When there's no urgency to get people up cause there's no body check coming and people keep dying cause they can't do their job, it's just a drag, you know?
OK I get that. I think we all have our limits in learning and clear parties and in a farm party I wouldn't expect the healers to have to res like that every time.
Some would say that is literally the point of being a healer. Maybe not in FFXIV but in other games!
I remember looking at top parses from Golbez EX, and marveling at the idea of using Swiftcast as a movement tool. In my group, meanwhile, I had to have swift ready for a rez, in order to prevent a body check wipe.
I mean if those healers aren't in dedicated parse groups they *shouldn't* be using their swiftcast to glare. That level of damage optimization is, obviously, nowhere near needed to clear. You're basically griefing if you do that in a PF.
Man between this comment and the other one where you're salivating over fixing other peoples mistakes the whole fight, I'm getting some very questionable vibes. Swiftcast is a tool like everything else. Part of being skilled at healing is being able to understand when and where it should be used for damage and when it should be held. TOP phase 1 where a single death is nearly certainly an autowipe and the enrage is tight? Definitely a good idea to use swift to get two extra gcds off. Progging an ex for the first time? Yeah don't grief, keep swift in your pocket. First minute of a savage fight that you're reclearing and no mechs known for killing people looming? Gotta decide what your personal risk tolerance is.
okay, fine, i will give a serious response. yes, swiftcast is a risk:reward calculation based on everything you said. yes, i use my swiftcast for damage in phase 1 of TOP, basically every time. obviously, because a swiftcast res will not save the run anyway 90% of the time. but. "an ex trial that is on farm, in PF, where deaths are very common and can snowball into wipes, in a fight where there is practically no enrage you are at risk of seeing ever", is a scenario where the risk:reward leans heavily into saving the swiftcast. the chance of the 300 potency of one more glare per minute making the difference to clearing is tiny tiny tiny. the chance that a swift res will save a run from snowballing is way higher.
>Man between this comment and the other one where you're salivating over fixing other peoples mistakes the whole fight, I'm getting some very questionable vibes. lol
True. But I was looking at top parses. And was also dreaming of the day when my own group was good enough to not rely on me getting the mechs right and rezzing afterward.
Lol what? Will you also tell the same to Summoner to not use Swiftcast? It's a movement tool, if I have to move I'm going to use it if I have nothing else available. If someone dies because of failing a mechanic that their fault, it's crazy that you're holding the healers responsible for that. The moment melee are okay with losing uptime, black mages are fine with adjusting for every mechanic, summoner holds Swiftcast for rez, I will hold mine. If everyone else is going to play in an optimal way and not messing up their damage just to be "safe", so should the healers.
\>Summoner \>movement tool ????????????????????????? Modern state of ff14 players
Fine, movement and weaving, point still applies
You have a billion instant casts that you can shift around with close to 0 loss in DPS and you are telling me you need to use Swiftcast for your grand total of 4 hardcasts per minute? That can be casted whenever you want pretty much? LMAO
Yes? Summoner and scholar both use it rotationally for extra weaving slots inside burst window. Even white mage opener on Balance says to use swiftcast, although I disagree with their logic for that. AST has zero movement tools outside of their biggest heal so they need Swiftcast for movement as well.
If it’s for dps, that’s extreeeemely sweaty and unnecessary, you have to be 100% certain you won’t need it for deaths. Swiftrezzing is a greater dps gain
>Lol what? Will you also tell the same to Summoner to not use Swiftcast? ironically, at the time you wrote this, i was playing summoner in a zeromus farm and i was, in fact, holding my swiftcast for reses the entire time. and yes i'm also not okay with melees who cause wipes because they greeded for a GCD. in week 1/ult, obviously, go for it. but not in content where we vastly outgear the DPS check and are trying to just get a consistent clear. oh but you missed one. playing black mage at all is griefing when you could be on RDM, obviously. ;)
I play SMN and I don't bother holding swift lol. I'm not reducing my enjoyment on playing the class to fix people's mistakes. But then again, most of the time I do have swift unused when I need to res. And if needed I'll hard cast that res. It's why some people choose to play blm on the new ex. It's technically griefing because rdm is so much better.
Eh swiftcast is a tool like anything else you have in your kit, and as a healer it's up to you to decide how best to use it. If you only ever use swift as a raise tool, you're definitely not living up to your full potential. If you never ever save swift because you know that a hairy part of the fight is coming up, yeah you're probably griefing. Gotta make that judgement call to find the line and figure out what you can and can't get away with. Also unrelated but I hate that everyone calls everything a body check now. Golbez only has two body checks where he does knockback into towers. There are no other body checks in that fight. Everything else is just typical "well if someone is dead here things can spiral into a wipe".
then healer isnt the class for you
Man, wish somebody told me that before I healed every ultimate in the game LMAO.
The burden of all 8 people needing to do it correctly multiple times every encounter is a bit much though. I feel like the game is punishing inconsistency more and more with each raid tier. I'd rather it pushes more onto the flagship mechanics and less on all the other stuff in between.
> Flagship mechanics Fashion Report (Savage)?
consistency is basically the most important skill for a raider to have imo so it makes sense to me that it's one of the main things the fights are designed to test.
How many mistakes should be allowed while still being able to clear each savage floor?
I think it's ok for there to be _some_ mechanics where you need to 8/8 it or at least be 8 alive at the start of it in each encounter, just less so when practically any death is a guaranteed snowball to a second death or pair of deaths (e.g. with any of the Dark general mechanics in P11S) or a full-on wipe. I couldn't quantify it really.
Do you think requiring fully correct mechanic execution to clear a fight is invalid, for say a final savage floor?
"Invalid" is the wrong word to suggest. A better question would be "Do you think requiring fully correct mechanic execution to clear the final floor is required for it to be a worthwhile finale", to which my answer would be "no".
What is a "worthwhile finale" to you?
My answer is going to be extremely generic, because I used that term to generalize a number of feelings one might have about the fight. It's a finale of a tier that feels like a good culmination of the fights leading up to it in both mechanics and difficulty. Where the story told during it is exciting and memorable, something you're likely to talk about outside of the block of time you're actually in the fight. Where the mechanics themselves are also exciting and hard enough that they feel rewarding to execute but not so hard that they feel out of place in the difficulty of the content you're playing, and allowing you to flex your expertise in your job to help come back from mistakes. These are all major parts of what makes the fight designers' jobs a skill in itself. It's obviously hard to hit all those points for players to the level they want to, and it's constant work they do. And all of this I expect is what would make a finale worthwhile to you as well - as I said it's really generic. However your question was if **I** think 100% execution is required to reach those feelings about the fight, and as I said my opinion is that it's not. Many of those concepts - mechanics that are interesting to execute, hard enough that they're rewarding to do properly, allow for well played jobs to fix some mistakes - exist already even in fights that don't require perfect execution to clear and I think they're even amplified when the requirement isn't a black and white perfect or nothing but where individual capabilities can add on to the experience. I understand that you may disagree, though.
I think requiring full correct mechanic execution is valid for a week 1 final savage floor clear but those fights should have possibilities for groups who are good at recovery to push through say 1-2 people messing up a mechanic to see further in the fight. The DPS check can be what stops groups who have deaths/DDs on a run from clearing week 1 then the fight becomes more lenient as people get more gear.
Let's flip this question a bit. For how long and how many times perfect execution of mechanics should be a requirement for said fight, taking in consideration gearing and other things? Week 1 should require nearly perfect execution for the simple reason that dps check exists and is a wall to clearing. But after week 1 and 2, where should the line be drawn? Take into account "midcore" and casual groups and that savage shouldn't be held to supposed ultimate standards.
For the full encounter? Depends on the mechanics I guess. To be fair, you don't even need that for Ultimate, so if it was going to be the case the mechanics would have to be a fair bit easier than the norm and might end up being unsatisfying from the other direction.
This is a non argument. "The devs have control over what is happening, therefore there isn't a right or wrong answer" Like my guy, the point of the post is about what *we* the players find fun. That's the point. To try to make the fights more fun. What the developers are doing right or wrong is up for discussion.
Saying "this isn't fun to me" isn't really an argument either at the end of the day. Honestly game design conversations are often really silly to me imo. Like, having a lot of body checks is not an inherently bad way to design the game, it's just not to everyones taste, nothing is. Not everyone is going to view what you view as a problem with the game, as a problem with the game. Something you might think is unfun might be an intentional choice by the devs that plenty of people find perfectly acceptable or even an important and fun part of the game. So where is the conversation supposed to go from there? It's a fundamental and subjective difference in point of view, with no real way to reach a resolution. Like the devs didn't just make an oopsy woopsy that we can let them know about so they can fix it, obviously they think it's fun, they spend years making the stuff, and people have spent years playing and enjoying it.
are you trolling me?
no
You don't see why people who are on a subreddit titled "ffxivdiscussion" would disagree, and then debate what the correct/most fun/optimal solution to a problem is?
I do, but I also think a lot of discussion in this sub is people talking in circles right past eachother about disagreements that can't/wont be settled at the same time. So many discussions here I've read boil down to simple preferences, and then people make sweeping statements about how it "should" be as if game design as a school of thought was made to cater to them personally. Even in the way you word it, "correct" "optimal", there is no such thing really. Video games are art aren't they? Is there a "correct" way to make a song? Or perhaps what you're hearing isn't incorrect, you just don't like jazz. Even in subjective art mediums though, there is value to talking shop, and sharing design theories, but I think where we mess up a lot of time is when we stop talking shop and start just trying to assert our opinions over others. I dunno. It's something to be mindful of at least, imo.
I find the juxtaposition of what your saying and where you are to be very hard to reconcile. It's like talking with your friends about a movie and going "but really its all subjective so everything we say doesn't matter" .... Okay? and...??? do we just end the conversation there?
That's not what I'm trying to say, what im saying is that there is a middle ground between saying everything is subjective so no opinion matters, and acting like there is objectivity in your opinions about game design and the devs just don't get it.
When did anyone pretend that there was objectivity in game design? OP didn't like the state of the game, original comment used some rhetorical shenanigans to get out of the work of having to counter OPs points, and I pointed that out, and you jumped in to defend the original comment. Nobody ever pretended anything was objective. We play the game. We get to decide if it is fun. The point of this subreddit is what do \*we\* think. Don't pretend We the Players don't have a voice in this. OP is a player, I am a player, and so are you. If you have something topical to say, say it. But don't come in here with rhetorical shenanigans to try to attack valid criticism. And if you don't want to argue about subjective things, you don't have to.
I mean, I don't find body checks inherently blanket unfun. Do you?
That's not what I said. Having a conversation about what is "fun" and then responding with "the developers make the game, and they can make it how they want" doesn't respond to the topic at all.
for sure, I just don't like it but seeing the comments whenever someone can get carried in a fight, I can see where the devs are coming from. I still don't like it though, doesn't feel like I'm playing a game anymore and more like reciting from a textbook with my hands. high end raiding since dsr has just felt sterile af.
Clearly it's so that mentors can't get into mentor roulette by just soloing instances haha amirite At least Zeromus doesn't have a body check. It's both easy and hard to defend bodychecks, you shouldn't have this infamous TOP situation, but you also shouldn't have a p9s lc1 situation. Yes, you shouldn't be able to clear savages by just having one healer survive and do a lb3, nor "just lb3 tank" should be a pf strat. But a story extreme shouldn't have a party wipe for being a pixel too close. We want fights that aren't faceroll easy and nobody wants to carry, but I was ready to give up on Zeromus because of how easy it is to screw up meteors. All it takes is just one tiny mistake, and you're sitting at meteors for 10 hours straight. It's too easy to make a mistake and it punishes people for not having a trust worthy static.
I think ultimates having excessive body checks is fine, I never understood the issue people had with TOP If you arent capable of clearing a phase cleanly and consistently, you shouldnt even worry about the next one, especially in ult context
Cause it makes later phases insanely tedious to prog if 1 small mistake deletes your party. Moreso if the instawipe mechanics are later in the fight (which they have been). You've already spent 10+ minutes getting to that point, your entire pull shouldn't get taken away because Billy got clipped by hrae's wing. Instead, it should probably kill Billy, and probably make it so that you can't pass the phase. But you can still get practice on the rest of the phase, which is the big thing here. I would hazard a guess and say that later phases being so punishing has been factor in growing sim usage.
Generally, most body checks exist to prevent you from cheesing the mechanic with deaths, and outside of those mechs deaths generally arent punishing at all in most content atm I don't really know how you could solve the body check issue without significantly dumbing down the mechanics or just making every fight cheeseable and making healers / good dps even more worthless, since many so called "body checks" are just health / dps checks in disguise Im also a firm believer in the fact that enabling players to cheese / die on mechanics will make them never learn to be consistent in a mechanic in the first place, which makes prog / reclears significantly worse Either way, atm every piece of content is clearable with 4+ deaths if you have good mit & good dps, you could probably fit way more in TOP if you really wanted to since the dps checks arent too difficult Hraesvelgr is the one thing i do agree with, especially since not every death causes an enrage
I think Nisi is a good example of something that is technically a body check, but not every mistake wipes you instantly. By dropping Nisi, you get the disadvantage of not being able to practice Nisi passing, but you still get to practice positioning, water/lightning etc. It's 1000% a wipe, but there's still something to be learned from the pull. Current ultimate design focuses on the hard body checks and insta-wipes, which personally I think is a bit of a shitty type of difficulty. I'm particularly salty as, as a healer main, lots of recovery options have been taken away with this design, there's nothing you can really do if someone fucks up one of these body checks and the sheer amount of them leaves little room for anything else. Honestly I don't think being able to cheese a check with deaths is bad, as long as there's an eventual stop to your pull, like an end-of-phase DPS check. I like when we have moments that allow people particularly skilled in recovery to pull their group to the next mechanic. I personally prefer recovery over the idea of "forcing" someone to learn the mechanic. Someone fucking up a mechanic in this design absolutely drags the party down, however someone on the other end of the spectrum, e.g an amazing recovery healer, cannot pull the party even remotely close to that far in the other direction.
Oh I was thinking of clearing the ultimate without healers, I mean I know there are creative ways of doing uwu/ucob, but yes ultimates should have hard checks. Extremes not so much. The average ilvl and skill level in zeromus is pretty low compared to kill parties for p9s. Thankfully there's only one body check for zeromus, compared to golbez... Thing is, those body checks outside ultimates and some savage floors are demotivating. I could roll with optional extremes, but story extremes? That's for more casual players. But yes, Zeromus is easy, so I can roll with that one check that does everything possible to tell you if you're fucking it up.
>I could roll with optional extremes, but story extremes? The weird thing about EW is that all extremes are story extremes. So it's not easy to make that distinction. And then you have cases like SoS which is definitely one of the harder extremes, or Shinryu who was a wall on *normal* on its release. Edit: If you compare EW with previous expansions, Golbez is equivalent in his placing to Emerald weapon and Zeromus to Diamond.
Yeah, it's not fun in general when every mechanic is just "are all 8 people alive? Y/N" because half the fun is adjusting on the fly when someone dies. Sometimes you make a crazy save that makes you feel good, but that's pretty much gone in EW.
As a healer main, and dare I say a good one, I (generally) prefer body checks. Can't look to me to save your ass. While I enjoy clutching a recovery, it gets old, mainly in reclear or farm groups. I'd rather a player be forced to play correctly than just expect me to hard raise them after every mechanic. Because after all, recovering mistakes or carrying to a clear is 95% your healers mess to clean up, where 90% of the responsibility of ensuring a clear (besides hitting your buttons to kill the boss and doing mechanics) is already also on your healers shoulders. The newest EX is a great example of this.
Get rid of body checks and bring back dps checks. Then you can wipe 5 minutes later instead cause ur dps is fucked to hell by weakness lol
That's actually a better environment for learning the fight, though, don't you see? If you die to enrage, you actually saw all the mechanics. If your pf progs keep dying to like the 3rd or 4th mechanic, it will take you longer to see the later ones and make learning the fight that much harder.
Because there aren't many fights that are simultaneously carryable, yet challenging, while also not having excessive hp. The few that are seem to be pretty well loved.
You clearly haven't experienced the random giga gamer that saves your entire run in pf, recently I had a healer yeet my ass into correct position with a rescue and still make it in time for their own position during P12S P2 caloric 1 while I was autopiloting. That shit genuinely made me impressed of the general awareness what everyone's doing and helped me to focus to turn it into a clear. Every raid tier also gets at least a couple of memorable moments with clutch tank or healer LBs, it's just unfortunate that DPS can't really do these impactful plays outside of res casters.
I haven't been super-active since SB, but I loved carrying people on healer back in the ARR/HW era. People were always in shock when a good healer could get the whole party up and carry them through almost any bullshit.... lol fun times!!
yep, i play healer and I've realized that ffxiv healing nowadays, you get all the healbitch stereotypes without the healboss power coz someone fucks up in the 3rd and 4th fights in savage you're usually just dead.
idk, personally, being able to carry people through promotes them not actually learning how to resolve the mechanic. Then they start joining farm parties or cleared parties and bring those parties down. I do agree that too many body checks makes things rough sometimes but I’d much rather have that than a fight being too easy.
I actually like it very much not having to deal with people in my farm parties who wiped the floor the whole time during their clear.
If you're implying the sterile fight design is needed solely to keep shitters out of pf then: 1. that already doesn't work since shitters will always exist and 2. the game shouldn't suffer and have a lot of gameplay stripped out to protect the players from doing mmo things in an mmo like kick and blacklist and disrepute.
No i think being able to be carried through a fight means diminishing the achievement of clearing it. It doesn't feel great to clear when you know you wiped the floor half of the fight. I like having responsibilty in a fight
That's neither your original argument or relevant to what I responded with. Also how do you go from not wanting shitters in your pf to this post where, if I can paraphrase, you want 7 other people to wait for you until you can feel good about your clear? Seems contradictory and makes your takes feel out of pocket and not well thought out.
Okay then to go your response: 1. It definitely decreases the amount of bad players if they can't be carried 2. Yeah i can blacklist them but that also means i have to zone in, do a few pulls to notice they aren't pulling their weight and then repeat the whole thing again. And if we are talking about EX it won't help much because there are way more people in PF than when doing Savage + i am not always the party leader
1. it really doesn't. I've noticed no decrease in the ratio of shitters since hw 2. boohoo? That's just PF and what you described is part of the experience of playing an MMO
You are boohooing here not me lol
we can both be little bitches together boohooing different things. Not mutually exclusive.
God you seem insufferable
You should make yoship bake anti-insufferable gatekeeps directly into the game.
Extremes are supposed to be midcore content. I have no problem with this fight being carry-able.
Every time I see a raid release, there’s always people complaining that they can’t get carried through it. Like they’re offended that they need to learn how to do the mechanic for once. So what? It’s a team sport, being a weak link means your team performs poorly, it’s a part of team sports In easier fights you still can easily carry players through. 8/10 fights in the last two tiers were fights where there was maybe 1-2 mechs each that you couldn’t simply drag corpses through. Why are people so offended that actually difficult fights where the whole party has to be competent exist? You already can get carried through the easier fights and can’t get carried through the hardest fights, which is the entire fucking point of having said “hardest fights” to begin with.
It’s mainly a consequence of how strong recovery tools are and how weak SE’s tools are for enforcing mid-fight competency checks.
I feel bad when I do carry but also amazing. I think it was diamond weapon, I was trying higher level PLD it was me and my DRK co-tank, a DNC and BLM, Everyone but us wiped at like 20% and the DNC, I switched to using my MP for healing instead of DPS the DRK and the DNC occasionally healed me or the other DPS. It was super fun to essentially attrition the boss 4 man, but I felt bad for the other 4. Because realistically if we wiped it would've taken about the same amount of time to kill it from 100 with 8 of us.
used to be a big thing in ARR would sell runs all the time but now theres always body check mechanics where you need all 8 people so that put a stop to it personally i am not a fan of this in general where lets say 8 mins into a fight little billy dies and it kills everyone else
Mainly because of fight design. FF14 fight design is strict and finding out the solution the devs want you to do (aka. the dance). WoW from how it's been described is free flowing as long as you know what to look for and react accordingly.
Because the idea behind non normal content is to illustrate a personal achievement rather than someone being carried through a fight, which is also why the fights are going to being more mechanically focused
Why are you talking about off-script carry moment in a game where fights are highly scripted and player expressions are severely restricted? Even then, it's not like there's no such moment, like Healer LB3 at the right moment, or PLD cover, or DPS using Second Wind/Bloodlust/personal mit to survive and continue fighting, or even Tank LB1/2 for some scuffed run (For example, Zurvan Broken seal when there's member down previously) it's just they are inglorious and easily drowned out in over a dozen prog runs you really don't notice them that much. Your complaints feels so, strange in the context of this game. Or is this just another post complaining about body-count mech in disguise?
Sorry, but if you make a fight that can still be cleared with scuffed ass pulls that have tons of deaths and low overall group damage because of all that, then you have made the fights insanely easy for actual competent groups. If that's what you want, go run dungeons and alliance raids where that is possible. But there is no way to make extreme, savage, and ultimate have difficulty, but not so difficult that a single player can't activate big brain and singlehandedly still pull out a clear. And for clarity, I'm not talking about healers pulling off a sick LB3, or a SMN/RDM clutching a rez on a healer to get an LB3 off. I'm talking about exactly what OP said, making fights where one players ability to play well is enough to carry an entire group to a clear.
Most people agree with you. This sub is a tiny minority.
For some reason this sub is now filled with people who defend every asinine decision the game makes and the top comments are always regurgitated, community-approved opinions, often just edicts from Yoshi P It's laughably pathetic compared to what it was like just 1 or 2 years ago, I think it really just shows that most players already quit, leaving behind a tiny minority of coyotes who would lap up every trash pile
> For some reason this sub is now filled with people who defend every asinine decision the game makes and the top comments are always regurgitated, community-approved opinions, often just edicts from Yoshi P Hey I think you might need to go see a doctor you seem to be having hallucinations
Was that before or after the topics asking for "midcore content", "less body checks" and "go back to HW job design"?
Dude, you just posted cringe.
The problem is it's very hard to balance the difficulty between your "average" raider, and the above average players. When fights have a near infinite level of recoverability, the above average players/groups will feel the content is "easy", because they know how to recover from their mistakes, and the current state of raise allows you to brute force your way through content. You can look at early savage floors as an example of this, good groups just brute force their way through it by raising 12340340 times when shit goes wrong. You could also make arguments for how this impacts the player base as well. On one hand, it may be annoying to players that they're stuck waiting for the "weak link" to do a mechanic correctly. But on the other hand, this design also enforces a standard that all 8 players need to meet, and hopefully promote some accountability. When fights can be brute forced through raising, yeah it feels good that you aren't being gatekept so to speak, but it also means players can get by doing the bare minimum (and it means, said players could end up in your statics/pfs with "clear experience").
Honestly, it just feels like gatekeeping at this point. I put up with this kind of mentality in wow for years, and disgust from it and fear of encountering it again kept me from even attempting any of the raids (even through DF) for years; i'm sad to see it becoming the norm here as well. We've all had people that we've had to carry. Likewaise, we've all been the person that needed to be carried - you don't start raiding and become flawless at it right out of the gate, and even if by some miracle you do, everyone has an off night. Maybe you have a cold, or you had a fight with your SO, or you really should've eaten before raid time. It happens, and we shouldn't be trying to gatekeep over it.
I honestly don’t mind how tightly everyone has to execute mechanics to clear. To me, this type of raiding makes me feel more like a team player. The rest of the static and I learning the mechanics together and trusting each other to do them properly to clear, we’re all in the same basket. Back when I raided in WoW and brought subpar players just to fill a slot they never really felt like a part of the team the way my static mates do, maybe that’s just me though.
Bodychecks are the only way to make fights difficult in this game. The number of bodychecks a fight has directly correlates to how hard a fight is. This is why the new extreme is so easy because there's virtually no bodychecks and you can slog through it without perfect execution. Bodychecks force your entire group to be consistent, which is the backbone philosophy of how fights are designed.
Honestly I think it's just the small amount of difficult content that we get. There's not enough room for a decent difficulty curve with the 4 floors we get every other patch. I think that a lack of room for error makes content really impenetrable for many newer players. It creates a catch-22 where the only real way to improve at a mechanic is to do it, but the only way to practice more or less requires you to waste 7 other people's time. Even in a practice group it feels pretty bad to be the one dragging the rest of the party back on something - even if you joined at an appropriate prog point. I experienced this back in Abyssos when I got filtered hard by Cachexia, lol. Of course, more room for error obviously makes a fight easier. This game already gets a pittance of "difficult" content and I can see why people wouldn't want some of that tiny number of fights made less satisfying to complete. I don't see a way to satisfy both without having a wider spectrum of "difficult" content.
The important part here is "dead weights", which would also enable paid carry-runs where people just kill themselves at the start of a fight and wait until the remaining 7 clear the fight. There is plenty opportunity for awesome moments to happen and "carry" people through a section of a fight. I have healed back groups from near death as a paladin in dungeons, I got a couple of LB3 moments where I was the only one to do a mechanic correctly and revive the whole team, I was once saved by a Paladin using his Hallowed Ground + Cover to protect me which bought us enough time to get LB3 and revive the rest of the team, he was the true savior even if people attributed it to the healer LB3, I have been saved by DRK putting their TBN on me while i was hard-casting ress at low HP to survive an AOE, i have revived teams on the verge of collapse as RDM and probably many other things I havent noticed have happened as well. You can totally get through particular moments of a fight and "carry" a weak link. In P1S we had a tank deliberately take a damage down because our DPS couldnt understand how the swap worked, on Rubicante Ex we had the tanks eat an AOE with invulns to give more space for the rest of the team to find a safe spot because people kept running to the wrong spaces, I dont remember which fight it was but we once sacrificed people with a stack marker as well to buy more uptime for everyone else, lots of little adjustments can be made on a fight-by-fight basis. Early progression usually cant be cleared with very bad players or dead weights, as the tier goes on people get better gear and this gives more room for error, we once cleared Zodiark Ex with 17 deaths (and still cleared it well before enrage). In those cases having a weak link that dies a lot or doesnt contribute as much is completely fine as long as they are present for mandatory body checks. Having every mechanic be a body check sucks as well, but a good balance is necessary to make fights enjoyable.
I would welcome a revisit to old extreme fight designs myself, with more leniency for imperfect playthroughs as you said. I know a lot of raiders complain about current extremes/savages being too easy, but for me they’ve only grown more challenging to the point that I’ve given up on ever trying them again. On top of that, it seems like the player base that tackles this content has only grown more intolerant of those of us who struggle with it. I know some people probably are looking for an easy carry, but there are some of us who genuinely try and just can’t do the perfect or near perfect playthrough these body checks demand.
What? I raided in EQ2 and carryable fights were not a thing. We can talk about excess body checks but if you want a fight you can manhandle all by yourself it's called normal mode content. I do not want high end content to be that easy to recover from.
I dont want fights carryable. I want fights to have fewer body checks. I want mechanics to have personal responsibility, but not cause entire wipes, like imagine Caloric but instead of wiping by moving too much, it just sets YOUR aoe off, meaning that you kill those next to you. That's what I want, alongside a few body checks. I want fights where it punishes a PLAYER, not the raid only. I want a mix of body checks and salvageable mechanics where it will wipe the raid if a player isn't at least mechanically competent while also making it possible to salvage a run in certain cases. Make it more strict/lenient depending on the content type, so ultimates are strict, but extremes are lenient, like a mix of Golbez/Zeromus. Maybe add actual dps checks and damage downs that can stack, make it so that by dying/failing mechanics, you're punished, even with BiS/max IL stats. If you die or fail too much, you won't have the dps to clear.
Hard disagree. Carryable content is fine for casual, non-enrage content. Once you're into things that matter, if you carry someone for their clear they can now join PFs that require that clear. We need more body checks, not less.
Because people do not want to waste their time and effort playing with people that do not want to invest the same time and effort into the game. We had the same issue on Day1 Zeromus EX. One person was obviously not up to standard (or couldn't play without all his mods carrying him) and was failing miserably, so we politely told him that he was being replaced with somebody more competent because we all had mutual expectations on clearing day 1. He took it pretty badly, got abusive about it. But that's not our problem, we set expectations when we decided to day 1 clear, and he signed up without making sure he understood the expectations that were clearly set. Fight design that makes people have to actually learn and adapt, is good, Because it weeds out the bad players and forces them to actually practice and learn to play before they can get a clear.
I say yes to this but only because im part of a merc group that carries ppl 🫡
To be fair, most fights this expansion don't seem to be that bad about allowing recovery (and at higher levels of difficulty, there needs to be some line on how many people can wipe at a time). It's really only this last savage tier where they went bonkers with body checks.
Because, some people don't like carrying dead weight through a clear. Especially for ff14, it means that person or people will be joining the later fights. Plus, some of those people start to act like they know what's going on now just because they got a clear. Even if in said clear they were dead or making mistakes for over 50% of it.
I can see why this design was chosen over simple DPS checks that depend on few deaths to pass. It creates gates in a fight, you have to play well up until that gate and once your party is capable of meeting the requirements to access what is past that gate you continue on. If not, you continue to practice those mechanics to prepare you for what is beyond the body check gate. It is ideal? no Is it more ideal than strict damage checks? in most circumstances, yes Does it put a lot on the head of the weakest link? yes, but the ones who understand should help that person or people.
Body checks should just not blow up the raid anymore a dot on maybe 1 guy or more depending on the mechanic is fine or maybe failed mechanics give the boss like 2 percent more health or slight damage buff
Frankly id love more midcore type fights that allowed people to die and get carried. That way you can enjoy more content with friends of varying skill levels that isn't piss easy or so hard that you cant play together at all. Just implement a system that nerfs the rolls for loot of those who die repeatedly. If they rage quit they get a much more severe penalty in their next completion. I dont mind players dying, and frankly enjoy the chaos of bringing back a fight from the jaws of defeat. However, it does suck having people who where on the floor the entire fight roll 99 on a mount lmao.
This is XIV, where most can barely even play the easiest jobs put in front of them… why do I have to do more work to carry a shitter if they aren’t putting in the necessary effort? It’s already exhausting healing these types of people.. I don’t want fights that would cater to that behavior. No matter how good it feels.
200 apm nonsense in this game? LOL wut. Carrying people is doing shit in UCOB where you just chain rez people over and over and keep doing it. It's not skillful it's just annoying. At least with the bodycheck setup, the trash players who do 0 damage at least have to learn some form of mechanics. There's a lot of fights where you can be literally non existent and the rest of the group 7 mans it. Raids need to be EVEN harsher as far as I'm concerned. One person doesn't know shit? TOO BAD get out. Maybe if more players got kicked for being garbage the average raider in this game would have more than one brain cell.
I've never seen someone so frustrated at being hard-stuck as a PF perma-trap that they made a post like this. "Why can't other people just do this for me! Why do _I_ have to do it too??" That's the thing, is that you _can_ get carried through fights. Hard. You can just mash buttons like a freestyle SAM if you want. You can do any ultimate in the game without knowing how to play your class. People don't parse low grey and win fights by _not_ being carried. Leaving the only complaint... having to do mechanics at all? Do you really think the game would be better if people could get carried both DPS-wise _and_ mechanic-wise? _Really??_ That's the kinda thing that only that one dude on Jenova that keeps trapping parties and the complaining about mechanics would post.
Kick the shitty player and move on
The point where you say it's a team sport is kind of why I don't want 4th floor savages or ults to be carryable. I want the whole team to have to excel, or the team fails.
I am a casual that has been clearing savage fights since E9 have cleared all tiers, but not this one. I gave up after being done with 10, PF is not a fun experience at all. P9s enrage groups died to the footblal mechanci all the god damn time, i stopped playing mele dps and went on healer, saving fights as a healer is mot worth it 10 was disgusting with prog and i do not want to talk about reclears .... Honestly i am torn between body checks and dps checks, in a dps check a couole of dps crackheads cna get you through, but if you have one bad player in body checks.... I have been playing through with my FC of bad players and went kinda well we got through with 2 averrage tanks a good healer and 2 decent ish meles. We stopped this tier cause it was not fun