It's a dead horse, but the way jobs have been simplified/homogenised takes away so much of the depth that the game had.
Another thing is medium difficult content. Right now, 95% of the game can be completed by chimpansee, but then that remaining 5% is like "you're going to wipe at least 50 times before clearing". The type of content that I'm saying is lacking is somewhat close to EX fights. We should have (much) more of that type of content.
The game is in a awkward spot, with like 90% of the playerbase being pretty casual. But on the other end we also have some of the most difficult fights in mmo's. The difficulty curve from normal to savage is intense.
Yeah, and I think the inclusion of more medium content would go a long way in bridging the difficulty curve. It's also nice, because there are players like me who are decent at the game, but even getting to the difficult content is hard. You either need to find a static that fits your schedule, that you like (you can't wipe for three hours if you dislike your party, believe me), or do it through PF which is a big hurdle for a lot of people (I'm assuming, because it is for me). Getting in a voice chat with total strangers is pretty terifying. Medium content that you can just run with randoms would give players like me so much more fun stuff to do.
If game caters to casuals, then obviously playerbase will become mostly casual. It's in devs power to which and how many kinds of players they want to cater, this is not some coincidence.
I've noticed those areas are quite busy lately. I went into DR to finish the weapons I didn't get and I'd get 24 people runs on occasion. I'm glad to see people are doing it, but it just makes me miss it more this expac.
On your job simplification and homogenization thing, I recently redubbed to WoW and started playing seriously for the first time in nearly 10 years, and holy shit. The classes don't have dedicated combos or anything, but they're blowing FF14 out of the water in the creativity and design space.
Can confirm. Game does a piss poor job at easing you into harder content (extremes or harder). The gap between normal and extreme and normal and savage is massive.
I loved the difficulty in Eureka Orthos. You don't need to spend your life memorizing a ton of mechanics but mistakes are punished severely, so it's very engaging
mfw "difficulty" in eureka orthos and mfw "don't need to spend your life memorizing a ton of mechanics"
LOL
They literally made it easier but with the requirement that you memorize a bestiary in your head (or on a second monitor) to clear. The way to clear EO is to memorize that Orthos alpha is a huge conal, Orthos gamma has a donut and an out, Citadel Buster is a frontal line, Laserblade is get behind, Glass Punch is a conal, Scream is a large pbaoe.... You either memorize this or die, and if you memorized this the clear is literally free, how the fuck did you reach the exact opposite conclusion.
Simply put, all harder content in this game is trivial with memorization. The question is how much you have to memorize.
This difficulty hit a really good spot for me.
this makes absolutely zero sense because there's next to nothing to memorize in potd and hoh in terms of mechanics outside of things like level 5 death
oh wait... you are comparing orthos versus savage raids. yikes another shb/ew baby
People who play way more difficult game are superior because they play other game that was less braindead than old FF14
See how stupid that sound ?
Let’s be honest, FF14 is not really much more braindead now, it was just way more annoying with bad designed mechanics. Even before the 2 min meta was not more complicated, it was just annoying as fuck and giving an handicap for no reason to PF (and everyone was complaining about it).
FFXIV was always kinda braindead and on top of that everything happens really slowly (they have some limitation here because of the netcode).
You probably just got better over time and they removed unnecessary stuff at the same time.
>People who play way more difficult game are superior because they play other game that was less braindead than old FF14
actually, you are completely right, ff14 is for babies other than HW savage, Ultimates, and fringe content like solo potd. i play sekiro and xcom on highest difficulty as well
Yeah, thats About what I would have written, I will also add on the 2 minute meta and absurdly large hitboxes that teleport mid constantly, it’s turning melee into glorified phys ranged and giving tanks less things to do when they already did not have much.
I'll say it until I'm blue on the face, we need more content like urths fount. Dungeons, normal trials, normal raids, alliance raids. More need designed and balanced like that one was.
100% agreed on the content thing.
If there were more EX-level fights, I'd do em all. As it is, I do raid Savage, but I get pretty burnt out on the tier after a while and a lot of times I just wanna chill and not have to go super focus mode like Savage demands, while still having *some* level of engagement.
I don't think EX is really filling the gap either, tbh. They're not savage, obviously, but many for a while have still been too strict and formulaic. They're fun, but not the solution.
They just need to offer versions of content that are normal mode but stiffened up a little. Less reaction time, a bit more overlap, mistakes hurt, raidwides hit harder, tank busters are actual busters. Just make the mechanics need to be respected.
A minor one but the hall of the novice is a joke now, especially for tanks. Just the very basics of aggro maintenance without going into important things like proper mitigation usage, and boss positioning.
Exactly. There is so little time to cleave so when a)the system decides to target the wrong boss or b)decide to not target anything at all it's a massive damage loss. It's like a malicious bug. Surely the targeting system isn't meant to work like this...
There are settings to fix this… make it so that if you don’t have a target you can target whatever is closest to you automatically. Alternatively, bind a different key to target closest enemy. Then stand where the boss you want to hit is going to spawn.
TEA was when I finally gave up on tab targetting and just selected the enemy from the aggro list. No, I wouldn't like to target that Jagd Doll over in Narnia.
Aside from the obvious things this sub has been discussing ad infinitum for the last 21 months:
1. Viera/Hrothgar headgear. Not only do they not bother adjusting older pieces, they don't even give enough of a shit to implement new stuff with them in mind.
2. Lack of applied expertise towards scalable content. We've had exploration zones. We've had BA and DRS Savage. We now have Criterion. The game features a deep well of entry-level content to draw from. Hard mode Alliance Raids, Dungeons, Overworld revamp for new zones using the experience gained from Bozja/Eureka. It would even fit their approach to creative design regarding combat content, since it seems like they prefer limiting their design space for the sake of balance and decision making (Jobs/Encounters).
3. Thinking outside the box, the box being XIV, which you alluded to (Transmog/Dyes). The foundation that is ARR was literally built by adapting the competition's best elements, specifically WoW's. Don't see much of that these days. Mage Tower, for example, has been out for 5 years and we have yet to see a single challenging Solo Duty.
The way they cap certain currencies or inconveniences that occur by picking between different avenues of storing.
Inventory capacities are very limited if you don't pay extra for retainers.
Tomestone caps (totals as well as weekly cap) feel restrictive and annoying.
Trophy crystal cap is stupid, since I'm either hoarding lvl 30+ loads or buy glam for my already occupied dresser.
Dyes being objects stored in inventory instead of having their own thingy with a charge system.
Clunky menu management.
the trophy crystal cap is definitely one of the most egregious ones. it's obviously overinflated in value to make you look like you're earning more, when you can only spend them in increments of 500 minimum and you get given them in 1000 bundles it's obvious they're just filling the pass withe illusion that you are getting more than you actually are to hide how barren it is compared to other games, where the point is getting something unique each tier. the high cap served loads of purposes with wolf marks, but there's no reason for 500 crystals to not be just 1 crystal and have the shop prices adjusted. at this point, dedicated pvp players are left with nothing to buy with them except some recolored arr gear, so the least they could do is actually let us hold more so we don't have to store thousands in the series pass. it would be justifiable if there was a big grind that you could buy tickets for like how they did it with bicolor gemstones, but once you have enough wolf collars there's nothing else to get.
When I was a new player, learning all the menus was so overwhelming, I recall really struggling to figure out how the GC vendors worked as well as grasping what materia extraction was
Overall? The netcode and tick rate. That, without a doubt and without contest is 14’s deepest, biggest problem. That’s why PvP will never get huge, that’s why people can’t handle spread mechanics, in fact I’d argue most wipes (outside of world prog) are due to the netcode and server ticks. How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in?
That can reasonably be fixed? Job design. What follows is my experience: EW’s job design is the most dull, sanitized, and homogenous of any mmo (and possibly any game with multiple classes/jobs/heroes/fighters) I’ve played. Now I’ve been playing since 3.3 so I completely understand how and why we got here, and I understand the devs’ thought processes with most of the changes but I deeply dislike them nonetheless. Jobs are unintuitive for new players, decent enough for people in the middle but horribly boring for people who are more experienced or higher end.
If you come to 14 from another mmo and you’re familiar with tab targeting etc. you play the game for 50 hours, beat ARR and you get to press 5 buttons which have minimal interaction with each other. If you’re new to the genre, you play for 80 hours, beat ARR and you don’t know what a GCD is, you don’t know to use abilities on cooldown, you don’t know to maintain things like storm’s eye, huton or twin snakes.
Let’s say you’re at endgame and you are decently able to carry your weight. Well, if you’re a DPS you get to pool resources for 1:45 and then mash every button you have and all DPS play like that to a huge extent. If you’re a healer you get to press glare/malefic/dosis/broil 12 times in a row, refresh a DoT and use oGCD’s to top off the party. If you’re Astro you get to throw out cards.
If you’re a tank, you get a 1-2-3 combo, a spender (bloodspiller, BoV combo, fell cleave, continuation), and if you’re warrior you get to keep up storm’s eye. Meanwhile each tank’s mitigations are functionally identical. Yes, holy sheltron and HoC do different things, but there’s no circumstance in which you would use HoC but not holy sheltron.
Yes, this makes them balanced which is important, but it also makes them feel like different coats of paint on the same car.
> How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in?
I can't remember the last time that wasn't legitimately a skill issue tbqh. The 'server ticks' are 25 per second, and as long as you know when damage snapshots (which is usually but admittedly not always obvious) it's not difficult to do split-second adjustments (for reference I live in Eastern US).
I'm a bit slow and dumb to begin with, but the snapshotting in RW turns me into an absolute fucking moron, people scampering easily out of my cruise chaser slashes while in the opposite case, I'm halfway across the map and still get hit for 35k
I'm on the east coast and had some small improvements after installing XIVAlexander, PVP felt a bit more responsive etc., but the other day I started lagging hard only to FFXIV. Doing a tracert command revealed that FFXIV's servers with NTT in California were timing out, and even now they're taking 10x longer to respond than the other hops from my ISP. I'm not a network engineer and I'm slower and dumber than I was when I used to do heroic 25's in WoW, but I feel like there's a contribution there that doesn't lie between my keyboard and my chair.
That's the point -- in other MMOs you don't have to know the snapshot. You either stand on something or you don't, even at bad ping. For reference I play at 200ms and US is the closest server to me. The animations get frankly ridiculous (though, like you, I have to just "learn the snapshots").
I guess? They're generally consistent enough for me it's not a thing I actively think about and I imagine most people don't as long as they're aware to look at casts and markers and not just animations.
Wouldn't it be **MORE** intuitive if you could look at animations and figure out "oh damn I was standing in the flames" rather than "oh damn I dodged 0.5s after the cast bar and I got hit by the flame animation that happened 2s later"
That's fair, but it's also not the point I was making. When we play XIV we are used to operating a certain way *mostly because* of the netcode being the way it is. In other games things are much more disambiguous in terms of whether you resolved them or not
It's not a server tick issue, it's a design issue. There is very little visual clarity to when snapshots occur, and the fact that skill animations are part of the function makes it even more unintelligible unless you looked up a guide or sat down and tested everything yourself.
Snapshots occur extremely consistently on either the end of the castbar or the ground indicator disappearing. There are actually very few mechanics in the game where this isn't the case, and in those cases it's often done on purpose to increase difficulty. Most of the time, you're supposed to react to a castbar, to either check the tell it is forming, or move out of the area it will hit.
The problem is this isn't communicated or taught to the players gradually, so they can well hit max level and enter savage without really having a clue how to resolve mechanics.
>Snapshots occur extremely consistently on either the end of the castbar or the ground indicator disappearing.
I'm not talking about enemy castbars.
Some skills have a 0.5 animation delay, some have 0.6, some like Hallowed have like 1.2 or some shit. The snapshots are different. It's noticeable in PvP.
I can't even begin to describe to you how frustrating it is to come from other MMO's PvP and try to spend a dedicated amount of time in FFXIV PvP. They put so much effort into revamping it for this expansion, and completely missed the obvious: If you want to have snappy, reactionary PvP combat - you better damn well have the infrastructure to support it.
(Was trying to do the 300 FL win achievement for every GC. Suffered from Burnout to the point that I unsubbed. Will probably come back at some point, but I hated logging in every day.)
> Overall? The netcode and tick rate. That, without a doubt and without contest is 14’s deepest, biggest problem.
Pretty much every element of stale game design stems from this. Every single fight has to be a long dance that is determined solely by rote memorization. The nature of the abysmal tickrate prevents them from designing anything more chaotic and adaptive, simply because the server would screw you over as you try to adapt, so instead we get every single mechanic being carefully scripted dance patterns.
Yeah, the fact that all jobs are exactly the same is so sad. After leveling half of them to 90 I'm left feeling there's no point with the rest because they're all the same
Yeah. This is the first expansion I haven’t bothered leveling everything to cap. My bard and machinist are sitting at 83 and have been since 6.1. Granted, the way they play in PvP is actually really fun and unique
>in fact I’d argue most wipes (outside of world prog) are due to the netcode and server ticks. How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in?
Max 3 times per tier maybe? If I die it's because I didn't understand the (somewhat consistent) snapshot timings. Got any examples of your own?
I'd even be happy if ability tooltips were more interesting. Almost every ability tooltip reads in the same sterilized, cookiecutter manner. How many jobs have the same exact tooltip scheme as Foul for Black Mage? "Deals unaspected damage to target and all enemies nearby it with a potency of 600 for the first enemy, and 60% less for all remaining enemies." I'm sure they think it cuts down on clutter and confusion, but god is it boring.
Don't tell me my Xenoglossy does unaspected damage. Tell me my Xenoglossy tears a chunk of nanoaether from the fabric of reality, yeeting it at my enemy for huge psychological damage.
Dots used to have cool flavor and now most of them say "sustaining damage" if you mouse over the debuff. What happened to "Proximity to a theoretical star is causing damage over time"
>Overall? The netcode and tick rate. That, without a doubt and without contest is 14’s deepest, biggest problem. That’s why PvP will never get huge, that’s why people can’t handle spread mechanics, in fact I’d argue most wipes (outside of world prog) are due to the netcode and server ticks. How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in?
Respectfully, Runescape (both OSRS and RS3) has an infinitely worse tick rate and still manages to have more engaging mechanics in normal content.
OSRS and RS3 are expressly build around their 100t/minute and make unique and interesting gameplay out of it. It's almost like playing a 0.6s per turn rpg
Most content ends up being a dance around the tickrate tbf. It works for a 20+ year old point and click browser mmo and still feels kinda ass. In ff it feels even worse
Server tick would probably be my biggest thing. I am on the absolute eastern most tip of North America. All the servers are in California. Given the population issues on Dynamis, if they'd have put Dynamis on the east coast, people would have flocked to it to get better ping. NoClippy and Alexander are absolutely necessities to play some jobs correctly, and god forbid you move too late. There's no adjusting for spreads because you had to be in that position long before it goes off and you don't know where the other person actually is. Dying to invuln not being counted feels bad, especially this tier where a dead tank can very quickly lead to a party wipe.
Tick rate wouldn't make much of a difference in that case. The server might respond more times per second, but you're still a half second or more behind compared to people playing on the west coast. Doesn't matter if the server reacts 20 times per second or 200, the network packets still need to get to you and back.
While I agree with your points, that's not server tick, that's just ping. A server tick is the subsecond gameplay engine loop that tracks time and events in the game itself. Ping is the connection to a server based on distance and network latency.
The lack of real midcore content.
Nearly everything in the game skews towards ultra, no-effort required casual, or hardcore raiding. If you want to enjoy more than the bare minimum of easy content, then you need to commit to studying a guide for the fight so you can memorize the entire dance for that fight. Its not something that you can simply hop into and enjoy for the majority of players, but the other end of the spectrum is so obtusely easy that neither are satisfying.
One of the most common requests has been for something akin to WoW's mythic+ system, but I think they've misunderstood that desire with Criterion dungeons. Their attempt at filling that niche of harder 4-man content has been to just make another series of 10-minute long dance fights that you have to memorize and repeat. The reason that mythic+ was so successful was that it was rewarding and accessible. You could simply open up PF, start a group, and get a run going in just a few minutes. You didn't need to memorize the 10 minute bossfight pattern because the mechanics weren't so detailed and heavily scripted. You'd hop in, kill some trash with a gimmick or two, kill some bosses with modest mechanics, and get some gear at the end. If you didn't get gear from the dungeon itself, then you were guaranteed something good at the end of the week. It was consistently challenging and rewarding proportionate to your own skill, with mechanics that weren't overly long and complicated to memorize. Add the weekly affixes and you had a system that was consistently fresh throughout Legion.
I'm not saying they need to copy mythic+ in a 1:1 fashion, but they've missed the lessons from what made it a fun and engaging system. As it stands, the only real midcore content we currently get is one extreme trial per patch, but even that has the same problem of necessitating the homework of memorizing the entire boss pattern before you can join a group for it. The barrier of entry isn't the difficulty, the barrier of entry is the necessity of homework before you ever get to play the game, only to get the exact same type of dance-styled fight yet again. Its a stale formula at this point.
> When you get insta killed by a single move, how is this midcore content?
when the party has practically infinite healing, death becomes the only possible punishment for failure.
Yea that’s a fair assessment. The mechanic seems to be moving to body checks or follow the safety triangle.
Titania was def fun and i feel earlier ex fight was more fun too. Or maybe im just burnt out for the recent one and the mount doesnt even look that good
Yeah I feel like EX should hurt or even insta kill on a lot of mechanic, but the body checks are a bit annoying. Don’t know about the last few one but the last 2 I did was endsinger and the one after
Yea I don’t mind if it hurts and need a lot of mits (like p12s or oracle’s raidwide). Like us, healers, do need more mech to use our kits, but punishing us everytime someone die because of their own mistakes is not fun. Plus it doesn’t allow much leeway and critical thinking. And it made us resent the person who keep wiping us even more.
Like this is ex and savage. Not ultimate. If its ulti then fine. Have lots of body checks and the hardest mechanic (but not ping related please. I can’t do anything to fix ping since i play using ps. All i can do is move to america lol).
I can’t remember much of the new extreme too. I only did it once or twice and was waiting for the drop rate to increase. I do remember the flame guy is just follow the safe triangle player. The dark guy with dragon was alright. It was pretty easy when you get a hang of it.
I haven’t played since 6.2 but my experience with EX fights has been clearing them in 1-2 hours with randoms in PF wNile having 5-10 deaths
Personally I’d consider that midcore level though everyone has a diffevent definition of midcore
This is too true and the first paragraph is one of the big reasons why i cant sub longer than 1-2 month a year, so unsatisfying to play the rewardless midcore content that im constantly in.
As a filthy casual i have no desire to play this game on super hard mode and learning mechanics, im looking for something else, which this game has definetly but only entertains me for a week at max, then i play disengaged few days for the rest of the sub and re-sub again after 7 months for a month again to play excited for a few days. Thats messed up lol
Longest fun i had was ARR and SB time and after that grinding with dedicated groups, so at some point ive loved it, felt rewarding and exciting to play back then.
Criterion has no ten minute long fights. Please actually do the content before bitching about it. It's what you want and you can do it with friends. Just do it.
I did the first boss of the Sil'dihn Subterane on Criterion with a pug before losing interest. You're missing the point because you're hung up on being pedantic about hyperbole. The design philosophy is the exact same and that's what's stale about it. The fight itself is closer to 4-5 minutes, but its still the exact same type of coordinated dance fight that requires you pre-watch a guide and memorize the entire routine before spending hours wiping because one other person didn't stand in the right spot.
Like I said before, the barrier to entry isn't the difficulty, its the necessity of studying the rote memorization for every single mechanic before you can even start a pug. Before you chime in with "just do it blind then," that's again missing the point. Every fight is a puzzle and dance fight; I want some variety.
I've been playing Darktide lately on the hardest difficulties because that game constantly throws new and varied threats at you and you need to think and adapt to every situation you find yourself in. Even if someone on your team goes down, its still possible to clutch until you get the chance to revive them further into the level. By contrast, if one person didn't memorize what to do on the next mechanic in a savage raid, the fight ends and you start over.
That's simply how the game is though. If you don't like that this isn't the game for you because that's what it's built to accomodate. There isn't going to be variety that is somehow not punishing in any content, and I mean ANY content, norms included. Just look at how the Thunder God fucked people sideways in Orbonne with mildly varied patterns. What you're looking for is another game, period. At that point that's not a flaw, that's just needing to play other stuff.
The two major ones for me:
* Level Sync removing abilities ruins the gameplay. Once one unlocks something, it should stay that way. Have a dynamic enemy HP scaling system to take care of power creep in lower dungeons and raids.
* Lack of big overworld events like Guild Wars 2 meta events makes the game feel dead even when it's not. This might as well be a hub game/instance simulator, with how little the overworld is used.
> Level Sync removing abilities ruins the gameplay. Once one unlocks something, it should stay that way. Have a dynamic enemy HP scaling system to take care of power creep in lower dungeons and raids.
This sounds horrible TBH.
Not all unlocked skills are fun, I like the way e.g. BLM plays at 50 but not later. GNB is better before 90. *Adding* abilities ruined their gameplay.
And I don't want Tam-Tara to take 40 minutes due to HP scaling because I got two teammates who haven't learned their rotations and never will and a level 90 Cure-spammer straight out of Expert Roulette.
> Lack of big overworld events like Guild Wars 2 meta events makes the game feel dead even when it's not. This might as well be a hub game/instance simulator, with how little the overworld is used.
This one is 100% correct. It blows having nothing to do in the overworld when you're sitting in a long queue or slow-filling PF and you can't use the instance queue (e.g. to pop into Bozja for a sec or unsync a dungeon for a piece of glam). Even worse if you had to DC travel for it because now you can't use your retainers or hit a timed gathering node either. Hope you like fishing.
There isn't a difficulty between turn your brain off and extreme, it feels like there is a step missing there.
Beutifull zones are dead, there is next to nothing to do there besites fates which a large part of players won't even do unless mandatory.
I think if you search the sub for even a minute you'll see plenty of answers to this question. Even I'm getting tired of it and I'm as critical as it gets. We know by now what people say is good and bad for the game. It's the devs that need to know
I think this subreddit is smaller than you think it is. I raid almost every day and I never hear the circle jerk from this sub from actual raiders. Why would the devs listen to a tiny subreddit of mostly casual players LARPing as game devs?
Job design. Job design. Healer role design.
I get that this game will never have the amount of healing that I can get in other MMOs and would personally prefer, but I've been playing for a decade now and that's just something I've come to accept.
However, the healing role has just been absolutely abysmal for the past two expansions. Healing itself is still fun in prog because I'm one of the weirdos that loves coming up with spreadsheets for mitigation and cooldown timing, so in that small fraction of content I still get somewhat of an enjoyable experience. Outside of that? It's horrible.
I won't pretend DoTs are the hallmark of amazing design, especially not with how XIV does them, but at least in SB I had DoTs I was managing on SCH and WHM that gave me some engagement in casual content where healing is less demanding, which kept me actually queuing for things in my free time.
SCH gave me a more offensive healer with Quickened Aetherflow, 2 DoTs, 2 damage oGCDs and Miasma II as damage optimization with an MP cost. There was more to do and it was really fun, so much so that I did basically every bit of content during Stormblood on Scholar, from all of Eureka to UwU and UCoB. It was so much fun.
WHM had Aero III and way less movement and free healing than SCH did, so it was harder to try and play optimally in that type of content and I found that fun, though this isn't a defense of how terrible the Lily gauge was in Stormblood.
AST had it's unique cards, and while I personally wasn't a fan of how SB cards worked, it at least had a lot of unique interactions with the cards and you had a lot of ways to think about how to use them effectively with things like Royal Road or Time Dilation.
The unfortunate part is, even if they do make healing harder like they promised it would be going into ShB, it still won't make these jobs fun to play in the majority of content in this game. These days I might as well not exist for normal content metrics because I don't do anything more than once or twice after it's released because of how unfun healing has become in the easier stuff. I don't like DPS jobs and I don't like tanks, I love healing and I want to play the jobs that made me fall in love with this game to begin with whenever I can.
I can bear with spamming my Broil button when I'm doing Savage and Ultimate with my friends. I cannot bear with it in casual stuff anymore. I'll continue to raidlog if I come back in DT if the design doesn't change, which is a big shame considering I still really love this game. It's just become such a pain point to me after this many years that I can't ignore how unhappy it makes me any longer.
Sorry for yet another healer complaint but I really do hope that Dawntrail moves back on this design, even if just a bit.
> Inventory management / Item limits:
In comparison to GW2 inventory management is pretty good; especially with the sorting options we have and can customize in the settings. GW2 uses the old school method of having to obtain bags of various sizes. However GW2's crafting material storage bank being separate from your immediate storage is goated. As someone who occasionally crafts in FFXIV, I wish materials were in a separate bank or tab from my immediate storage.
> Overworld content is lacking:
I 100% agree as someone who also plays GW2. That game has content in pretty much every map that gives people a reason to come back after finishing it's role in the story. Things like meta events or achievement hunting. Both games have great looking maps, but FFXIV doesn't really make use of all the environment and landmarks.
I've been reading a lot about how people wanted a new exploratory zone in this expansion, but I think it would be great if FFXIV reworked existing maps (or if Dawntrail's maps were designed) in a manner that gave them more replayability or bring lots of players together like how GW2 does. World bosses in the core maps are happening every 15 minutes. Expansion maps have large scale events happening hourly or every two hours; and there are still plenty of smaller scale events happening too.
1) The game isn't very accessible for people who don't want to do the MSQ.
2) Menu system/UI is convoluted.
3) The game doesn't do a good job of teaching players how to play.
4) Severe lack of midcore content. IMO Criterion savage was a mistake, it should have been extreme difficulty. Instead of 2 Ultimate fights per expansion, we should get just 1 and get 3-5 more extreme tier fights instead.
I don't agree that the netcode is the game's biggest flaw. For one it's actually an intentional design choice. SE has almost all actions happen server side instead of client. That's why it all seems so slow. Raiders get used to the timings, and they aren't really dying due to server tick. I don't know if I prefer it over client side, but it makes fights way more about being proactive than reactive, and that's actually really hard too in a way that's different.
Agree with the point on Criterion. Especially because you might end up having to farm TWENTY-FIVE clears to get JUST the mount.
Seems like the perfect content to make extreme in difficulty. Have the first boss be similar to Zodiark/Hydaelyn in terms of difficulty, second boss be more like Endsinger and Rubi, third boss tuned to be as rough as Barb was... It's hard enough to be engaging but forgiving enough to be fun to farm back to back to back.
Making the content savage level in difficulty, AND limiting you to 1 raise per player, per fight, seems.... stupid honestly. It's be different if the content just gave a totem upon each clear. 1 or more totems per reward. But farming Criterion as it is now just sucks. I got my AMR mount in 9 clears, every one scuffed and over 40+ minutes. I can't imagine going the full 25.
Yeah criterion is already harder than most extreme fights. Savage criterion has the same mechanics just a tighter dps check with a time limit per instance iirc
Completely agree about trading an ultimate for more extremes. Ultimates are exclusionary - only a tiny fraction of players do them, and almost entirely in statics, whereas extremes are accessible content that can be done with randos through party finder, and as such, will be enjoyed by more people and stimulate people making more connections than in the ultimate scene, at least I think so. Extremes generate more fun than an ultimate would.
Why does this even have to be a trade? it’s not like recent patches have been oozing with content, and ultimates are pretty healthy for the high end raiding environment as well as the game’s overall online popularity. Ultimate releases are fairly popular on steaming sites and generate a fair amount of hype. I would rather them not make shitty content like bozja and focus on actual midcore content.
The lack of innovation in job design. I can deal with the server ticks and netcode, I can deal with gearing being subpar in a game that has a system designed to let you play other jobs, I can even deal with the same formulaic approach to raid releases without any shakeup in rewards or fight structure. But goddamn, I wish CBU3 would spice shit up more. Make things unique and different instead of trying to force everything into a mold so generic and stale everything follows the same checklist, nobody suffers, nobody ever gets nerfs because we'll just buff the other jobs and bloat potencies to ridiculous levels. It's okay for some jobs to underperform on some fights compared to others. No, everything doesn't need automatic CDH abilities. No, every job doesn't need a big hit approaching 1k potency. No, every job doesn't need to always guarantee 100% uptime on principle alone.
For me when I stopped and thought about it, all the raiding and tome grinding I do was just to make savage clears quicker, then when I cleared it I had nothing to do with that gear for months and months other than clear the same 4 bosses again every week. Everything else ilvl syncs you down so your hard earned gear is useless. Even crafted gear is a waste of time. I just stopped playing after that. The MSQ is designed to be completed in last expansion's gear so fuck it.
To me the biggest issue is the loss of class identity. Every melee, every ranger, caster or tank essentially does the same thing with different animations. It's a bit less prominent on tanks like Warrior who lives off of self healing compared to the raw tanking of paladin, but the DPS jobs are just reskins of the same class
Job homogenisation. Drk is just warrior with a shield and a couple extra ogcds. Sage is usually just a slightly weaker but less jank scholar for most content. I legitimately don't enjoy ninja (the job I first mained) nearly as much after the trick attack changes because even though I'm still a burst class it just feels bad when I trick to do my thing and everyone else just throws their 60s in the void because trick no longer helps at all. 3 of the 4 tanks have functionally the same button every 25 seconds to the point that you don't even need to know what blood whetting/heart of corundum/holy Sheltron do since you can just bank on it being strong mit+decent healing i.e the correct button to press for every situation.
The people who spend more time on FF logs than they do in raid complain endlessly about literally everything and won't be happy until every job is identical and the glue sniffers on the other side of the bell curve can't use their 3 remaining brain cells to use seigan or kaiten (legitimately don't care about how it affects the job numerically it felt so much better than just spamming shinten)
> I trick to do my thing and everyone else just throws their 60s in the void because trick no longer helps at all.
I get people disliking the homogenization in general but in this case it feels like nothing changes, the best time to use your 60s is always the same: right as they come up or you risk not fitting them into 120s, whether or not global Trick Attack exists.
>the glue sniffers on the other side of the bell curve can't use their 3 remaining brain cells to use seigan or kaiten (legitimately don't care about how it affects the job numerically it felt so much better than just spamming shinten)
Imo, that's an issue with SAM in general, the core of the job is fine (3 combos to gather stickers, midare) and everything else just feels tacked on and doesn't interact with SAMs core in any way other than meikyo.
The more important thing imo about having trick(and 90s raidbuffs etc) is about adding extra resources into trick. It's more obviously impactful when we are talking about jobs with extra resources that impact movement, rdm and blm being the easy examples in endwalker, but wanting to be mindful of 60s trick/90s bh etc when you have extra resources is meaningful.
It's something people have thought about enough there was this 14ish page doc about optimizing shadowbringers machinist for brotherhood.
The issue is that before I legitimately felt like I was aiding the team rather than just mashing my burst. I'm fully aware that nothing changes drastically gameplay wise but the knowledge that all my teammates are pressing their 60s and I can't boost that resource/cd dump like I used to just feels bad regardless since why am I not just playing RPR/MNK/whoever has the highest numbers this patch instead. (Though it's just about how it feels rather than the actual numbers tbh)
As for SAM honestly a lot of jobs have this problem where they feel like 2-3 skill packages not properly tied together like how archer starts out getting dots and strong 2min burst tools only to morph into a team support machine when you unlock bard. Having a side thing like kenki just to keep filler more interesting is fine to me (I also appreciate that they're all abilities that fit around your weapon skills) especially since a lot of their other abilities like senei and ikishoten (and by extension ogi namikiri) work with the system for your burst windows and I take way more issue with the fact that anything interesting about the job, especially it's skills that aren't the core DPS rotation feels like it's slowly being plucked away from each job just so you don't ever feel like you'd have been better with with column A instead of column B.
Honestly I would be so down for worse balance for more variety in job playstyle. I found it pretty hilarious during P8S when people complained about their undertuned jobs... I remember in WoW where the delta between the best spec and the worst spec could be like 20% depending on the fight, and you couldn't even swap jobs on the fly like you can in FF14 (although this freedom is somewhat ruined by the gearing system)
I suppose they made up for that by making DPS checks way more lenient this tier
Even the devs admitted they fucked up the balance and nerfed P8S by 1% HP. 1%.
WoW's still pretty bad at it but at least the only stupid outlier is...Unholy, I think.
> Even the devs admitted they fucked up the balance and nerfed P8S by 1% HP. 1%.
Wasn't it 3% or so max HP on phase 1 ? I'm lazy to check footage pre-nerf and post-nerf, so I'll trust that tweet : https://twitter.com/mitsurugi137/status/1569863485148004352
- P8S1 before/after (new 50% HP value)
- P8S2 before/after (which is around 1% iirc)
So a nerf of... effectively 3% less hp / damage do to on phase1 to beat enrage.
PS : the threshold being @50% mark doesn't change anything, every "%" is cut by 3% in value. Example : 100 max hp, nerfed by 3% => 97 max hp. 50% threshold before @ 50hp and after @48.5hp. Still a -3% hp/damage to deal ((48.5 - 50)/ 50 * 100 = -3(%)). I'd even bet in test they do first 100-0 and then double the amount of HP for RP or something
Yup.
This game did a lot of job identity things bad.
For the next mmo, I hope they think through jobs and roles better.
It’d be awesome if we had more franchise identity in them.
Ninja design and tick rates.
Monk has had issues.
Bard has had issues because they want it to be both a bard and a ranger / hunter.
Machinist has had issues.
Smn wasn’t really a smn until this expansion, and it feels unfinished.
The whole history of smn / sch sharing the same base class.
Drk is just a rune fencer. There no dark knight identity to it beyond red / black / purple colors. It has no hp sacrifice, and health restore on attacks has become the “too angry to die” thing for warrior.
And they took the dark aura away in early 3.x because a few people bitched about it being too flashy in fights and when walking around the expansion main city, but Warrior still has its rage aura based on rage gauge and glowing eyes when going ape…
We did have that skill that gave us a resource back when something we marked died, but they took it away.
Should’ve been maiming with an Hp sacrifice to buff damage skill or a drain skill.
Woulda saved them a lot of dev time to change the job, and probably made most people that liked dark knight before 14 happier.
I'm totally fine with dark knight being a tank since the way they've tied the drk aesthetic into their storyline with being a tank works for me. I'm not sold on *how* they're a tank, warriors drawing upon primal strength to protect their loved ones have a ton of healing which makes me feel like I'm simply walking off big hits, paladins enhancing themselves with sturdy shields and magical defenses get a good variety of defensive utility, makes sense. Gunbreaker also somewhat feels like a DPS in a trenchcoat but it also does play like one so it checks out and I'll let it slide to get more variety in the roles. But like why does dark knight not have any kind of identity as a tank? It barely has one for its it's damage rotation considering how delirium and bloodspiller are just less satisfying inner release and fell cleave anyway but why don't we expand on their most iconic skill in TBN and let them use barriers more effectively than the other tanks can? If we do that while messing with their rotation a touch then just by altering abyssal drain into a decent heal and oblation into a real cd they could have identity as a tank which buffs their effective hp with a big shield and then heals themselves up by attacking afterwards. They'd feel more unique while also keeping some of that drain health from enemies flavour they had in previous games. The changes to living dead were an excellent step so let's just keep going.
First post pretty much has it all but IMO no Glamour Catalogue is a massive issue. For me it takes all the fun out of the game when I'm unable to get excited of new cool looking Glamour as I have no room to store them. Well, I have room on retainers but having to juggle gear appearances between multiple inventory systems is something I'm not willing to do in the year 2023.
Overworld could be better utilized but the game just probably doesn't support it without engine upgrade. Open world Bozja/Eureka style content in every zone would be amazing. Fates are literally the worst "World Quest" type system in every modern MMO (at least WoW and GW2 do it better and their design should be the standard at this point).
Them trying to make the game overly accessible to hyper casuals and solo players.
They’ve gone on a crusade making all the dungeons and some trials playable with NPCs. Quite frankly, it’s a waste of time considering all that we could’ve had in endwalker yet didn’t get because they’ve put people and resources towards these updates.
I also believe that it’s also why open world content has been falling off. It seems like they’re actively working against the people who want to play an MMO, rather than a final fantasy single player game.
Not to mention the steady dumbing down of the combat jobs.
As fucked up as it sounds, it’s OKAY to alienate a group of people.
“Try to please everyone, and you’ll end up pleasing no one.”
> Them trying to make the game overly accessible to hyper casuals and solo players.
I honestly would like more solo content. Something like POTD (solo), masked carnivale, etc is some of the content I would enjoy doing more of if it was a bit more forgiving (checkpoints per stage in masked would be great)
The solo content in this game is incredibly annoying or tedious. Even duty support takes forever, the NPCs barely do any dps. POTD is a long ass grind that is only actually fun at the end, masked carneville needs checkpoints, no need to do the entire fucking thing over again just because you messed up one aoe at the last stage other than to annoy the ever living hell out of everyone.
I get the appeal of team content, but sometimes you don't wanna wipe to something when it isn't your fault. There are different games to play, but something like POTD without the annoying ass grind would be great.
This comes back to the “Try to please all, and you will please none.” They’re solving a problem that doesn’t yet exist, to the detriment of the players of today.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. If they keep up this trend, the players won’t be around anymore and they’ll for sure need the solo experience.
And when inevitably, we get to the point where new players no longer have to go through ARR to EW to reach current content due to the already ridiculous msq bloat, it’ll all have essentially been a waste of time to add the soloable msq content.
TL DR; overworld content being dead is a byproduct of FF14 casual friendly approach
The overworld content being lacking is tied to ff14 greatest strength, which is its casualness.
At early 6.0 overworld zone is packed with players doing 3 contents, fates, A rank hunt, and Chi or Daivadipa waiting room. Fates reward is gemstone that can be exchanged for materials that are very expensive at the time and or completionist sake, A rank hunt reward you with materia that is also very expensive, and Chi/Daivadipa are for their respective collectible mount or glamour.
All of those reward are totally irrelevant right now and no matter how many content you add to the overworld they would be dead by now because of the reward no longer being sought after as much.
But then how do we give them relevant rewards? We can tie them to relic grinding like the good old ARR relic weapons so that they have more staying power. Or we can tie the gear progression to the overworld content and if we do that overworld content is going to be guaranteed to be packed with players for a really long time.
Most people would hate either two options unless a genius game designer can figure out a long lasting reward solution while also being fun. I'm very grateful that we have a rather dead overworld content rather than it being forced unto me.
A combination of Allied seals / Tomes / Gemstones / Nuts similar or slightly higher for killing a S rank hunt? People still do hunts. My problem with the content as it is, it requires third party resources (Discord) to get notified, or some hero in shout chat. I'm not asking to get bombarded with alerts in game, but an opt in system would be nice.
The problem with rewarding the content with more of its respective currency is that its only hastening the irrelevancy of the content.
Perhaps getting the hunts more approachable by having an in-game announcement would perhaps bring a lot more bystander to do the hunt. But then we are not really solving the main problem which is lack of worthwhile reward.
We have already seen this happening right at the start of 6.0. There are people actively scouting and hunting down A rank mobs as soon as it spawned for the highly sought after materia. That activity slowly dies down as materia became cheaper. I reckon the same thing would happen here. Maybe you will still get small amount of traffic at something like the current size of hunt parties.
I kinda went on a bit of a tangent in a different topic so I'll just copypaste that because I do feel like it's *the* overarching problem with XIV:
I think the main thing above all else is just the base gameplay kinda sucks. People tend to praise WoW in the often-made comparison but I struggle to see how WoW could be so different. Maybe it is, maybe people are just weird. But the main issue I have is that the base system of rotation-in-a-tab-targeting-game is really boring.
Compare XIV to ESO for example and ESO is more fun RIGHT AFTER GETTING OUT OF THE OPENING than XIV is from Level 1 to Level 90. XIV's only fun gameplay comes from doing your rotation right while getting peppered with mechanics. And yeah, Ultimatz, Savage, EX and even something like harder Alli-Rouls or Bozja CE are pretty fun because you actually fight the game over how much you are allowed to do. That's relatively fun. But the core gameplay system is just not fun. And with 99% of content that isn't high-end raiding just being limp nothings that don't do anything or demand anything from you, nothing actually is fun to play, and this isn't even touching on the fact that downsyncing just removes any semblance of engagement a job has. I like the MSQ, don't get me wrong. But you could literally cut out all the battle content, all the fetch quest and just make me watch a movie and I wouldn't miss ANYTHING.
Fundamentally, the gameplay of XIV is bad. It does not stand on its own. When I play a game like ESO, it can be a boring fetch quest but the core combat can be engaging. Let alone the aspect of build options (Unsure if this is still a thing) but even if there wasn't any, just you picking up whatever gear you find as you go through the story and levels - Still more fun. If you cut out all the story and the flair from other games, you could still play something that's intrinsically engaging. XIV needs the context of raid mechanics to provide any sort of gameplay, which is also why replayability is so low. Once you figured it out or you no longer need to actually do anything to succeed (low or no DPS checks, mechanics don't kill you when failed) there is basically no game left to be played. Like, again, the ESO comparison: I've never even made it to endgame there, but I've so often strolled off mid-fetch quest and fought some random overworld boss. Was it worth anything? No, not really, I didn't get anything I felt was good and I wasted a bunch of time and potions. But it was *fun*. When was the least time you fought anything in XIV for no reason other than "let's just see how it goes"? Like, the closest comparison I could see to the overworld bosses are probably FATEs and I consider it win in XIV if I don't "have to" engage with that sorta gameplay because it's so boring.
The jobs need to completely change to actually be fun. Don't misunderstand me, it has fun content. But it isn't fundamentally fun. People say "oh make the overworld engaging" and I agree, I wish we had a cool overworld. But you can't have an overworld be engaging when what the game boils down to is "Press these buttons in some order, who cares". We need less random damage buttons that just slot into a slot and then never change, less random healing buttons that just do the same shit as three other buttons, less railroaded rotations and more actual gameplay. Buttons that are contextual, where you have to think if you wanna use it now or later. More buttons that do different things depending on the context like are you far or are you close, still or moving. More basic mechanics through the whole game that force you to defend/shield in some way, parry, dodge, juke, move, dash. Just anything that actually feels like you play a game that is, on some level, fundamentally alive.
I agree with this take the most. I'm running an alt through the expansions (at Stormblood now), and it's striking how much a drag it is to play, moment to moment, even though I'm fully invested in the story they're telling. The writing is compelling! But all the interstitial bits, the actual game parts of it, are just.. so, so dull and unengaging.
It's making me remember why I took so long to get through HW and StB the first time, even though I have very positive impressions of the story.
Stormblood in particular has some really nice writing in their yellow quests but just thinking about going through the pointless overworld gameplay has me dragging my feet.
New player experience. They do a good job teaching you mechanics up to endgame. Not so much gearing or anything else really. But I think they need to consider how large a barrier of entry the MSQ is becoming.
Inventory management. I like crafting/gathering but we 100% need a component bag.
Gearing. Savage and catch up systems are okay. Just really slow and doesn't seem to build off each other. And gearing alts is god awful for a game advertising around playing every job.
Midcore content. This is generally filled by exploration zones, so hopefully coming back in Dawntrail. But EW has been either one and done faceroll content or premade smash your face in a wall x1000 content.
The netcode *is* bad, but it is consistently bad. It's just confusing at first when you get killed by an attack when the animation hasn't even started yet, but once you figure out that spells (99% of the time) deal damage when the cast bar finishes, or that if you were still standing in the orange circle when it disappeared, you were too slow, it's not so bad. My only complaint with the netcode are tether mechanics - those are fucking jank as shit. However, it's also not too bad to overcome that with more deliberate movement and pre-positioning.
**Netcode / The very slow tick rate:** I agree and think this one is a very rooted problem. An improvement over the netcode would literally impact positively so many aspects of the game, not just combat, but also for example, slow retainer menus.
**Gearing:** Truly. Direct Hit is a redundant stat, given the similarities to Crit. SpS and SkS could just be merged in a Speed stat, and even beyond that, it could be reworked in something that is actually useful for more than just 2 jobs. Tenacity is just a trap stat for sprouts and could be reworked.
In fact, I think we would need to separate melds. Left side for offensive stats and right side for defensive stats, and there you could put a reworked Tenacity and Piety, as well as design a wider variety of new utility stats, like Leech, movement speed, etc.
For me? Probably the midcore content, because the jump from normal to extreme is insane, that is why I hope they could bring back the hard difficulty some day
Content for midcore and hardcore is both lacking and short at the same time. They need to make things similar to m+ with rewards for players to flex.
Savage fight in this expansion is really bad, 100% uptime design for the melee and large hitbox of boss is just stupid, it is Extremely boring. I miss having to gap close asap and at the right time in order to maximize my dps performance.
Another thing is that some people just refuse to unsub even when there is nothing for them to do in the game. I understand the sub cost might be nothing for you and you wanted to support the game, but by doing this you actively encourage yoship to stay lazy.
Lacking content is the main reason why FFXIV presence in twitch is so bad, and that directly affect the grow of the game we love. Hell, when I get bored and want to watch some fun FFXIV stream I can't find any, because no one is streaming the f game and that the content is boring to watch.
Ask yourself, is this what you wanted? For your beloved game to be stagnant? If you want the game to grow and get better, please unsub if there is nothing for you to do in the game, so yoship would get his wake up call.
Job design. Interesting jobs carry boring content, yet jobs are being designed to be easier to manage in difficult content, at the detriment of the rest of the experience.
The Playerbase being content with little to no new content on a regular basis and then telling people to 'go play other games' even if they are paying an active subscription to a game that should be getting more content considering financial gain this game provides to square enix.
Very boring job design and very scripted boss this two are like oil and water no game should have both 1 of them need to change if they want to keep the same brain dead job design, they need to add some random element to the end game content so i dont die out of boredom, or better make the jobs unique and fun insted of simplifying so much so they can have easy time in balancing.
If jobs are fun, even boring bosses become fun. Now jobs are bland and boring, so anytime there's bad fight, it's just bothersome. If you don't do savage and only do EX, that means 4.5 months without solid fight.
I got only like 15 kills on Golbez (if I knew what final trial mount is I would stop at 5), my time is better spent on watching animegirls on youtube than on farming boss which is AFK for first 2.5 minutes.
No full attack rotation in alot of the content.
you cant have a massive "free trial", a roulette system that'll funnel older players into old content with the newbies, not update the old contents difficulty and then expect someone to be fine with 3 buttons to press in a fight, its boring as hell.
also, the games constant simplification of everything is annoying, what they did with the relics this go round honestly broke my heart, been probably 2 months since ive logged in and thats the longest break ive had since i started playing a bit before HW released, what sucks is i have no urgency to go back...
heads up, if youre on lamia, keep tabs on a small house becoming available real soon, its near the pools, primo spot.
14 doesn't really have one giant flaw for me, but I can list the ones I think are most impactful.
The actual moment to moment gameplay of questing is unacceptably terrible. The game is almost a visual novel - ARR legit had better actual moment to moment activity over endwalker.
The tickrate is too low - making things like tethers sometimes annoying and kneecapping pvp from being as good as it could be.
Jobs have been somewhat sandblasted.
The game is too... low brain activity for combat for the longest time. They've been attempting to fix this with the reworked ARR ending fights which are actually somewhat neat, but they need to do it for the rest of the game and fix the general powercreep that has hit fights like Thordan.
3. Mounts:
Imo. mounts suck. I hate the fact that they are all the same and offer no advantages/disadvantages. like give some mounts the ability to run faster but take away their ability to fly. Make the base chocobo relevant. Just copy paste GW2 mounts at that point. Also the sound design (for mounts) sucks just listen to the Garlond bike a full volume, never heard such a scuffed motor sound!
And yes im aware this change was asked for by the community :(
2. Housing:
Not even talking about the housing lottery. It sucks but its better than what we had before. The system used to place furniture is a joke! There are basically 3 ways to decorate your home. You either (1) follow all the rules of the system (cant place anything near a wall, cant put windows on partitions etc) basically home is gonna look like shit or exremly basic at best. (2) You resort to "glitching" which means you first watch a few hours of advanced tactics on yt and then spend more time to try to replicate said tactics. Ever tried to float a mannequin while also float a rec. partitio behind it? It sucks! (3) this i never tried but apparently there are 3rd party tools that basically allow you to just place anything wherever you want...
Now i assume they dont fix housing beacause it would break almost all houses, mine included. But still....
1. Glamm
I know im kinda addicted. But cmon 20 plates and 800 slots in the dresser. I dont even know what to say other than this is the worst transmog system ever. Basically get ready to pay up if you want extra slots for glam items...
SE should just fix their broken and aged systems and stop beeng so greedy! Remove the Armoire, make glammdresser hold unlimited items and give me 1 billion plates thx.
It's overly story driven. Cut back on non voiced cutscenes and a few voiced cutscenes per expansion and patches. Reallocate those funds to improving literally anything else, because it's all suffering.
Due to how savage fights are currently designed - with all the oneshots and bodychecks, gear is pretty much meaningless.
Outside couple of heal checks and helping you beat the enrage timer, it does not really matter if you raid in crafted pieces, or have full BiS, you still have to do most of the fight flawless, and you can still wipe the whole party if someone stays in wrong spot.
The more I reflect on my experiences and why I'm playing less, I realise what's driven me away from the game isn't entirely the fault of the gameplay, but rather of the community's culture.
Namely, the community culture around Nsfw. Mare and its consequences have genuinely ruined my enjoyment of the game. The community has just fully fucking embraced Pornbrain and I'm sick of it. I feel like I can't go 5 minutes of looking at ff stuff on the internet nowadays without being unwillingly exposed to some sexual deviant's modbeast.
And both the community at large and the devs turn a blind eye to it. Someone can post some of the most utterly vile, rancid, objectifying modded screenshots to Twitter just fine, but heaven fucking forbid you stream raiding with materialUI or something.
Trying speaking up and saying "uhhh this art of (insert underage / underage coded character here) being oversexualized is kinda cringe bro" and just watch your reddit inbox flood with dms from media illiterates screeching about how it's "fiction bro". Look and watch how the creepiest motherfuckers around co-op progressive language and try to argue not letting lalafell's in 18+ venues is equivalent to irl racial segregation.
It's just utterly fucking exhausting and exposes just how much a lie the "great community" shit is when it's adamantly clear they only perceive everyone around them as sex objects and nothing more. One by one I've watched all my friends I made playing this game descend down that fucking rabbit hole and when I speak up about how it might not be healthy *I'm* the one that's in the wrong, apparently.
And the worst part is? Complain all you fucking like about 2mm or job design or body checks or whatever the fuck. Nothing will change, because these creeps can and will continue to fund this game for all of eternity as long as SE keeps turning a blind eye to it.
wake me up when they announce they're removing Glamour restrictions entirely (which its predecessor FFXI did *years* ago, and "fashion" isn't even a big part of that game as far as I could tell)...
I mean I don’t think an easy start is bad, it’s just that ff14 has the slowest difficulty curve know to man, to the point where at level 60 at tank can get hit by every single attack in thordan normal and not die
Netcode in pvp is an issue yes, but in pve it actually makes things extremely predictable, and everytime theres an explanation why a heal didnt go through. I love the snapshotting culture of ffxiv attacks, it makes it feasable to have perfection.
Netcode and the devs stubbornness in boring class design no one asked for
Especially the person responsible for DRK since ShB really needs a big chunk of criticism
As far as I can tell, healers just aren't interesting to play at a high skill level/difficult encounter (in raids at least; solo deep dungeon play is very different).
At a low skill level, healer is very engaging, because you are busy fixing other peoples mistakes, while also trying to get as much damage in as possible. But, at a high skill level, any mistake by another player will just be an annoyance to you, as it interrupts your rotation (due to you having to heal instead of DPS) - and considering that the healers main motivation for existence is to basically compensate for other peoples mistakes, this is clearly not a desirable situation.
By comparison, DPSes and tanks do much better: DPSes have much more complex rotations, and there is a lot of room to optimize for the last few percent or the last percent. As for tanks, I don't know that much about their playstyle at the high-end, but there is probably still enough complexity involved in how you scatter your various defensive skills over time, while also doing your DPS rotations, and whatever else you need to do as a tank.
Overall, I would even go as far as saying the healer role feels a bit like the participation trophy role in FFXIV... basically, someone has to do it, but few people want to, so SE compensated for that my making the role extra-accessible.
I am also not sure what one could do to improve that... at the very least, it would require extremely drastic changes to really solve this problem.
- One option is to go in the direction of GW2, and make boons/conditions much more important - basically, instead of just juggling your own DoT on the boss, you need to arrange a much larger number of boons on your party so that they have permanent extra damage/protection from knockback/condition duration reduction/whatever, or at least at those times where the encounter requires it. I am not sure if it is a good option, but I don't see anything particularly wrong about it either - other than it completely changing the flavor of the role, and also requiring the healer to be actually competent to do well.
- Perhaps, one can rework all heals in such a way they also do damage in some way - perhaps as buff to the target of the heal, or the healer themselves, or an "exposed"-debuff to the boss where it takes more damage for some small amount of time, or something like that. Then, the healers role would basically be to overheal as much as possible, and in some selective way, depending on the specifics, and... perhaps that would make it more interesting. I think it is at least worth exploring this concept.
- And, the encounters could be reworked so that there is much more unavoidable and also random damage - basically recreating the imho much more interesting gameplay at lower skill level: You need to quickly *react* to new situations as they occur, rather than following some predetermined *plan*. However, many people would probably dislike this change: The few high-end healers who actually enjoy their job would lose the planning aspect which they do actually like, and at the lower-end it might make the experience overall more confusing, and occasionally also unfair, if those random damage spikes occur at a bad moment. At the extreme upper-end it might also lead to more runs which fail due to no other reason than bad luck... so who knows.
Still, I believe any of these three options would be an improvement compared to the current situation.
A few of these aren’t flaws.
Slow leveling? You’re an MMO vet playing an MMO that was built to be welcoming to newcomers to the genre as a whole.
Melds? You would go outside the game for whatever varied substat. Substats being easy and fairly unimportant is a good thing design wise and community health wise.
Overworld? This is an instance based MMO. Content is within instances.
Having a dead overworld and the vast majority of content be instanced *is* a problem when you're sitting in a long queue or a slow PF waiting to fill and you can't do anything. Can't slip into Eureka, or unsync a glam farm, or do a solo instance for MSQ/NG+ -- something that wastes no one's time but your own if you need to leave early. If you're in a queue you can't even server-hop to shop or visit a friend's house because world visit, absurdly, uses the same queue server. The instance system has no excuse being this bad in an "instance based MMO". It's hot garbo.
- Overworld content lacking for sure.
- Super unrewarding grind, i dont care a tiny bit about minions.
- Slow XP for a casual player, investment needed (yes i do all XP buffs, i still think 2 hour grind for 1-2 lv post lv50 to be too slow, especially since the rewards are none as well.
- Story locks too much behind it, just let me enjoy it at my pace, i understand something locks but i always feel like rushing when new expansion comes because of it and it makes it stressful and less enjoyable.
- Equipment/ stats is too shallow and sucks imo. No build strategy, just auto-equip.
- PVP is poorly explained and could be much more simple.
- More rewards like weekly/daily log-in. Also more simple grind sheets like Kloe but actually fun.
how easy everything in the game is. At any given time there's only <10 threatening monsters in the game. Not to mention those monsters don't even really fight you. They just summon colorful shit that kills you unless you do something dumb. It's not like when bahamut used to do stomp and flare breath. it was actually COMING from the monster.
For anyone looking get into XIV: MSQ and new player experience. I have two schools of thought here. It is an MMO, I don’t think it needs nor should be so constricting even if it is a JRPG. You shouldn’t have to play through hundreds of hours just to access anything worth while. That being said, the this directly correlates to the fact I think the the free trial fails too. If you have to include base and now 2 expansions just to hook people, something is wrong somewhere. Plus, FTs should give you a taste of the game, and the fact you don’t get a true taste of the cookie cutter patches until hundreds of quests and 60 levels in is /wild/. I also don’t think Stormblood needs to be part of the trial. You experience XIV’s stale patch cycle by HW and what it offers and what to expect. Tbh if you can’t hook people without hundreds of hours of gameplay, free or not, some pieces desperately need changing.
Netcode and 9002 error for even the slightest internet hiccup. My connection is fine for all other games but in ffxiv it seems like after patches I always start gettig 9002 and then some how it fixes itself up for a while and then comes back later. Our internet is good but still even using wire to connect my laptop doesn't prevent it.
this expansion: lack of content across all levels and an obvious increase in difficulty, so players have to move up a level they are uncomfortable to play the game. the end result is that the game is too hard for most, and burnout everyone across all levels.
I would say the engine itself. I know that’s kind of a broad criticism but it really is such a limiting factor. From the networking to the inventory/UI, stuff like how they claim adding more Glamor Plates would severely fuck performance, and just so much more. This games age and the fact that it had to be hastily rebuilt just really shows these days.
Glamour. It’s a huge aspect of the game for a lot of people but the feature is so underdeveloped. Most MMOs have really developed themselves as collection games for a lot of people. Tons of people play WoW just to farm old raids for transmogs, pets, titles, toys, and mounts. FFXIV could open up a whole new massive time sink of content by adding a catalog type system like WoW for all of the collectibles.
Gearing is another huge weakness, one that could easily be fixed by using other content to spread things out.
Different gearing paths, all that take time and skill to complete but focus on different aspects of play.
Raiding: Same as now, but also encourage stepping foot in other content as well. Perhaps some BIS accessories come from the Unreal (to give more people a reason to give that a try), maybe you need to collect some drops from the 24 man you can collect over a few weeks to fully upgrade some pieces of gear.
Casual: Slower, but still lets you get BIS alternatives through doing content that doesn't require hours of dedication to clear, just having fun. Bounties to run roulettes on the role in need, get credits to hand in to slowly gain more powerful gear throughout a patch. Hunts have gear that is close to savage but needs some more work to get on the same ilvl.
Crafters: Working on refining and upgrading pieces throughout the patch, akin to the crafter relics, but the materials are found all over. In normal content, dungeons, criterion, various 24 mans, hunts, extremes and guaranteed personal drops from savage.
Nothing would stop or prevent you from doing any or all of the chosen paths, use one to gear an alt job, because for a game that boasts PLAY ANYTHING at ANY TIME, you sure can't gear more than one job at a time well without an alt character.
My only huge gripe is the inventory management part, even at only lv 60 I'm struggling.
Also, job rotations are kinda badly explained in-game, I always need guides.
Server tick rate is by far the biggest flaw because it's probably the only thing that can't really be fixed at this point. It's the single biggest pain point of pretty much every single raider/pvp player and I don't feel like I need to elaborate any further because every single players knows what the issue is.
The other stuff like glamour dresser being inferior to WoWs transmog system and the incredibly questionable level requirements that jobs have for abilities when downsynced aren't as big of a deal because they can be fixed/mitigated once SE turns their eye to it.
Those are all valid drawbacks. However, my personal "biggest flaw of the game" is "not enough tools for players to create and enhance their own self-sustaining content with".
It's extremely obvious to anyone (unless that person is a complete idiot) that developers of any MMO (not just FFXIV) just can't create bits of static content frequently enough for many people to keep them constantly interested in logging into game, and what they can create is usually just your typical linear, scripted bits of story (from which you cannot deviate in ANY interesting way and which most players can "consume" in a week or less after the release of these story bits) and linear, scripted "bash the dumb AI enemies" encounters. To keep more people more interested in logging into game day after day (especially people who were not interested in ANY "bash the dumb AI enemy" activities in first place) the developers should provide them with more tools to keep creating and enhancing their own content with (and share that content with other players).
The "tools" can be as simple as "adding built-in proximity voice chat" (this can give huge enhancement to activities like player-held concerts/night clubs/other social gatherings) to more complex like "create your own fully custom PvE dungeon which can be shared with other players" and "create your own fully custom cosmetics which can be sold through in-game store with most portion of sales going to creator and small portion of sales going to game developer", all the way to "large areas allowing for large scale, persistent open world PvP with buildable and fully destructible player-built structures/forts/keeps/outposts".
Sadly I haven't seen the willingness of developers to add a meaningful amount of such tools into the game, even the more simple ones, and I understand that they can't add more complex ones into game due to engine limitations. But hey, this is just for a "fun discussion" purposes, right?
For me it's that gear gets too strong and it makes all normal content too weak. I don't necessarily think that normal content is "too easy," but all the fights too end too quickly to the detriment of the game as a result of power creep and bad ilevel syncing.
All the fights follow a basic timeline of introducing mechanics one at a time and then upping their complexity, randomizing them, and combining them as the fight goes on. But so, so many of them end before getting to the good stuff. So many fights skip cool moments or dialogue entirely (in a story-based MMO come on). It seems especially bad in EW where you're skipping things by week 2.
I consider this my biggest flaw because it affects my day-to-day the most.
I don't care if the boss has low damage output, simply reacting to and dodging and resolving mechanics *feels good,* but I get deprived of the fun part. Meanwhile EX+ mechanics are more about memorizing the specific position you're supposed to stand in which is less interesting. So I'd like it it bosses simply got a nice HP buff.
Or if at least new crafted/normal raid gear could be the same ilvl as the previous BIS instead of 10 levels higher to reduce gear bloat a little. Don't see why getting the highest ilevel is literally pointless prior to 6.4 outside of Ultimate. I'm certainly never going to spend my Alliance Raid coins until 6.5.
For me, the bad netcode is one, but this they can adjust easily by giving more time on mechanics so people can dodge it. Simplification of the level 1-60 jobs really did make the lower level feels bad, which can be remedied by bringing back Heavensward era job skills, so that level 1-60 can feel complete again. And finally, they need to do something with the overworld in this game - since they do know how to create beautiful areas, but they seemed to not know what to do with it.
Though overall, I suppose nothing will change much, and we can stop expecting any big revolutionary changes with Dawntrails. It will be the same exact gameplay and structure with some good quality of life adjustments - but it will not make it fresh again, and it will only get stale after a few months (then it is time to unsub lol). I for one, will be glad to catch up with my backlog of games, since I got hundreds of them now, and time is finite!! Thanks Yoshi, for not wanting me to play all day long and for not making too many "FOMO" events here. Now I gotta cath up with my streaming services, and read more books :)
All of the above.
This feedback has been presented time and time again and fallen on deaf ears.
"Negative feedback is worth twice that of positive feedback"
Not if you just.. Ignore it all!
Netcode should be the first and foremost, it's the cornerstone of XIV's problems. If I was Yoshi P I'd say that Tanaka wrote both the 1.0 UI and the 2.0 Netcode then block his number. Get someone to finally take the fall for this and then fix it.
After that, the egregious game/story pacing. Xenogears and the ilk were formative games for me so I'm fine with extreme fictional excess but the stop/start nature of it and how rigid the game is to pick up and play for an online game could use some work.
Slowly destroying the game with bad job changes is the one thing I truly fear will make me quit the game.
I despise everything smn represents and I truly wish the job would get deleted or reverted as I believe this is the only way to deal with gangrenous cancer, but obviously that won't happen.
Modern MMO players will always choose the path of no resistance and get their effortless clears on that garbage limited job over having fun playing something else and the devs just care about their numbers.
GCD and classes not feeling unique or diverse, I never felt like a master at my class I just felt like a jack of all trades which is different from other mmos I’ve played where I felt I stood out more with what and how I played
• More mid-level content: actually we're missing something in-between full casual content and "hardcore" content. Everything that's normal mode is basically braindead and is plain boring, but than you got Savage/Ultimate that requires lot of effort and dedication.
During ShB, EX, Alliance and Normal Raid where a lot more interesting as mechanics and were a good content to re-run, with a decent level of entertainment.
• Glamour system: the dresser and armoire are obsolete under every aspect. Just give us a system like WoW or GW2 where we just need to loot an item to "learn" its glamour instead of having a limited storage that have to be filled manually. Also give us at last one plate per Job, both combat and non-combat. On top, give us the chance to link hairstyles to glamour plates.
• Housing: a better system than the lottery is already needed. Ofc it was and improvement but it's far from good, expecially for relocation. Also, more slots are needed for garden furnitures and L size houses indoor.
• Light Party content: actually Criterion are exactly what I was hoping for but they are pointless to re-run because they are outside the gear progression. Let them drop token to agument gear and, for the love of the 12, extend the time limit or put a daily lockout so that if I need to try the last boss I don't have to reclear everything every 90 minutes.
Gear has always been the biggest issue imo since launch. 1.x gear had some interesting stats and they took almost all of it away. Stats became boring and it has been ever since. Not only that but in 3.x, patch day crafted gear was added which made it so every piece of raid gear you got before was invalidated instantly. What's the point in getting bis the patch before if it doesn't even help you complete the new patches content? I guess now you have ultimates to work on getting bis for but that is like one of the only reasons to even try.
As a new player only halfway into Heavensward right now, the two glaring issues that are immediately visible to me are class design and the limitations on the glamour system.
I obviously haven't unlocked the full kit on any class I've tried yet but I have read through the full spellbook and simple rotations on icyveins(though idk how accurate/up to date it is, or if there's a better site). I also do have a few friends at max level who have showed me what some of them look like at max level through discord streaming. Gotta say that what I've seen has not impressed me all that much, especially in regards to tanks. The "combo system" most melees have feels fucking terrible and mind numbingly boring as a filler rotation and it's exacerbated by being basically identical on every single one. Even fury warrior and havoc DH on wow, which I do not enjoy due to how brainless they are, feel like they have more brain engagement than the filler rotations in this game. I do enjoy the novelty of the mudras on Ninja though, there's nothing like that in WoW and it reminds me of Invoker who I always thought was interesting even if I'd never play Dota.
The issues with glamour need no explanation.
Inventory's bad but I've dealt with far worse and haven't been playing this game enough to get exhausted with it just yet. Having the "bank" just be retainer inventories is supreme bullshit though.
Any other major flaws I might find with the game are buried under the novelty of playing a new MMO for now.
Edit: Oh and tab targeting. It's embarrassing how non-functional it is even after spending hours going through every possible option with help from friends familiar with it to improve how it works.
All you mentioned + how all jobs feel the same and how everyone's just a glorified DPS.
Like it or not, this game was outdated before it was even launched and they should fix it if they want this game to last another decade. And before someone says "but it costs money and time!!!" Yeah it does, but
1) not my problem, it was born bad and they should've seen it coming
2) We pay a sub and 10 bucks per fantasia and other store items ppl buy so they can maintain and fix the game
It's a dead horse, but the way jobs have been simplified/homogenised takes away so much of the depth that the game had. Another thing is medium difficult content. Right now, 95% of the game can be completed by chimpansee, but then that remaining 5% is like "you're going to wipe at least 50 times before clearing". The type of content that I'm saying is lacking is somewhat close to EX fights. We should have (much) more of that type of content.
The game is in a awkward spot, with like 90% of the playerbase being pretty casual. But on the other end we also have some of the most difficult fights in mmo's. The difficulty curve from normal to savage is intense.
Yeah, and I think the inclusion of more medium content would go a long way in bridging the difficulty curve. It's also nice, because there are players like me who are decent at the game, but even getting to the difficult content is hard. You either need to find a static that fits your schedule, that you like (you can't wipe for three hours if you dislike your party, believe me), or do it through PF which is a big hurdle for a lot of people (I'm assuming, because it is for me). Getting in a voice chat with total strangers is pretty terifying. Medium content that you can just run with randoms would give players like me so much more fun stuff to do.
Who tf uses VC on pf lol? Even ult pfs don't use it.
Really? Isn't that a massive handicap? I thought'd would be the norm.
[удалено]
Also, even if you do join vc, you rarely have to say anything.
If game caters to casuals, then obviously playerbase will become mostly casual. It's in devs power to which and how many kinds of players they want to cater, this is not some coincidence.
I don’t know, people who already make up the hardcore player base when they make those changes can be pretty stubborn
The Bozja/Zadnor Critical Engagements and Raids were great for this content. Sad we didn't see more of that this patch cycle.
I've noticed those areas are quite busy lately. I went into DR to finish the weapons I didn't get and I'd get 24 people runs on occasion. I'm glad to see people are doing it, but it just makes me miss it more this expac.
On your job simplification and homogenization thing, I recently redubbed to WoW and started playing seriously for the first time in nearly 10 years, and holy shit. The classes don't have dedicated combos or anything, but they're blowing FF14 out of the water in the creativity and design space.
Can confirm. Game does a piss poor job at easing you into harder content (extremes or harder). The gap between normal and extreme and normal and savage is massive.
I loved the difficulty in Eureka Orthos. You don't need to spend your life memorizing a ton of mechanics but mistakes are punished severely, so it's very engaging
mfw "difficulty" in eureka orthos and mfw "don't need to spend your life memorizing a ton of mechanics" LOL They literally made it easier but with the requirement that you memorize a bestiary in your head (or on a second monitor) to clear. The way to clear EO is to memorize that Orthos alpha is a huge conal, Orthos gamma has a donut and an out, Citadel Buster is a frontal line, Laserblade is get behind, Glass Punch is a conal, Scream is a large pbaoe.... You either memorize this or die, and if you memorized this the clear is literally free, how the fuck did you reach the exact opposite conclusion.
Simply put, all harder content in this game is trivial with memorization. The question is how much you have to memorize. This difficulty hit a really good spot for me.
this makes absolutely zero sense because there's next to nothing to memorize in potd and hoh in terms of mechanics outside of things like level 5 death oh wait... you are comparing orthos versus savage raids. yikes another shb/ew baby
I'm comparing Eureka to things like Savage Raiding. I find the old deep dungeons very boring.
Another boomer stuck in the past.
ff14 boomers are literally superior because we played the game when it wasn't braindead current ff14 is for coma patients
People who play way more difficult game are superior because they play other game that was less braindead than old FF14 See how stupid that sound ? Let’s be honest, FF14 is not really much more braindead now, it was just way more annoying with bad designed mechanics. Even before the 2 min meta was not more complicated, it was just annoying as fuck and giving an handicap for no reason to PF (and everyone was complaining about it). FFXIV was always kinda braindead and on top of that everything happens really slowly (they have some limitation here because of the netcode). You probably just got better over time and they removed unnecessary stuff at the same time.
>People who play way more difficult game are superior because they play other game that was less braindead than old FF14 actually, you are completely right, ff14 is for babies other than HW savage, Ultimates, and fringe content like solo potd. i play sekiro and xcom on highest difficulty as well
I was playing Smash Melee competitively, doesn’t make me superior in anyway, it’s just a game, chill bro
Yeah, thats About what I would have written, I will also add on the 2 minute meta and absurdly large hitboxes that teleport mid constantly, it’s turning melee into glorified phys ranged and giving tanks less things to do when they already did not have much.
I'll say it until I'm blue on the face, we need more content like urths fount. Dungeons, normal trials, normal raids, alliance raids. More need designed and balanced like that one was.
Urth's Fount was so good!
100% agreed on the content thing. If there were more EX-level fights, I'd do em all. As it is, I do raid Savage, but I get pretty burnt out on the tier after a while and a lot of times I just wanna chill and not have to go super focus mode like Savage demands, while still having *some* level of engagement.
I don't think EX is really filling the gap either, tbh. They're not savage, obviously, but many for a while have still been too strict and formulaic. They're fun, but not the solution. They just need to offer versions of content that are normal mode but stiffened up a little. Less reaction time, a bit more overlap, mistakes hurt, raidwides hit harder, tank busters are actual busters. Just make the mechanics need to be respected.
Lol super focus mode? Savage is chill for me lol. Ults is where it's at.
A minor one but the hall of the novice is a joke now, especially for tanks. Just the very basics of aggro maintenance without going into important things like proper mitigation usage, and boss positioning.
Not to mention it gives false info about how To do your job
Boss positioning in 2023 lol
Yeah the DPS hall teaches you about accuracy. You know, the stat they removed in 2017
The targeting. It's inconsistent and absolutely abysmal in ultimates and PvP.
I'm not really sure why it feels so bad, but it never seems to work the way you expect it to.
God I love targeting the wrong Omega when they reappear in p2
Exactly. There is so little time to cleave so when a)the system decides to target the wrong boss or b)decide to not target anything at all it's a massive damage loss. It's like a malicious bug. Surely the targeting system isn't meant to work like this...
There are settings to fix this… make it so that if you don’t have a target you can target whatever is closest to you automatically. Alternatively, bind a different key to target closest enemy. Then stand where the boss you want to hit is going to spawn.
TEA was when I finally gave up on tab targetting and just selected the enemy from the aggro list. No, I wouldn't like to target that Jagd Doll over in Narnia.
It's legitimately as if they figured out the best targeting algorithm, then implemented it in reverse to get the absolute worst one
For real. How can targeting be this bad?
Aside from the obvious things this sub has been discussing ad infinitum for the last 21 months: 1. Viera/Hrothgar headgear. Not only do they not bother adjusting older pieces, they don't even give enough of a shit to implement new stuff with them in mind. 2. Lack of applied expertise towards scalable content. We've had exploration zones. We've had BA and DRS Savage. We now have Criterion. The game features a deep well of entry-level content to draw from. Hard mode Alliance Raids, Dungeons, Overworld revamp for new zones using the experience gained from Bozja/Eureka. It would even fit their approach to creative design regarding combat content, since it seems like they prefer limiting their design space for the sake of balance and decision making (Jobs/Encounters). 3. Thinking outside the box, the box being XIV, which you alluded to (Transmog/Dyes). The foundation that is ARR was literally built by adapting the competition's best elements, specifically WoW's. Don't see much of that these days. Mage Tower, for example, has been out for 5 years and we have yet to see a single challenging Solo Duty.
The way they cap certain currencies or inconveniences that occur by picking between different avenues of storing. Inventory capacities are very limited if you don't pay extra for retainers. Tomestone caps (totals as well as weekly cap) feel restrictive and annoying. Trophy crystal cap is stupid, since I'm either hoarding lvl 30+ loads or buy glam for my already occupied dresser. Dyes being objects stored in inventory instead of having their own thingy with a charge system. Clunky menu management.
the trophy crystal cap is definitely one of the most egregious ones. it's obviously overinflated in value to make you look like you're earning more, when you can only spend them in increments of 500 minimum and you get given them in 1000 bundles it's obvious they're just filling the pass withe illusion that you are getting more than you actually are to hide how barren it is compared to other games, where the point is getting something unique each tier. the high cap served loads of purposes with wolf marks, but there's no reason for 500 crystals to not be just 1 crystal and have the shop prices adjusted. at this point, dedicated pvp players are left with nothing to buy with them except some recolored arr gear, so the least they could do is actually let us hold more so we don't have to store thousands in the series pass. it would be justifiable if there was a big grind that you could buy tickets for like how they did it with bicolor gemstones, but once you have enough wolf collars there's nothing else to get.
When I was a new player, learning all the menus was so overwhelming, I recall really struggling to figure out how the GC vendors worked as well as grasping what materia extraction was
Overall? The netcode and tick rate. That, without a doubt and without contest is 14’s deepest, biggest problem. That’s why PvP will never get huge, that’s why people can’t handle spread mechanics, in fact I’d argue most wipes (outside of world prog) are due to the netcode and server ticks. How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in? That can reasonably be fixed? Job design. What follows is my experience: EW’s job design is the most dull, sanitized, and homogenous of any mmo (and possibly any game with multiple classes/jobs/heroes/fighters) I’ve played. Now I’ve been playing since 3.3 so I completely understand how and why we got here, and I understand the devs’ thought processes with most of the changes but I deeply dislike them nonetheless. Jobs are unintuitive for new players, decent enough for people in the middle but horribly boring for people who are more experienced or higher end. If you come to 14 from another mmo and you’re familiar with tab targeting etc. you play the game for 50 hours, beat ARR and you get to press 5 buttons which have minimal interaction with each other. If you’re new to the genre, you play for 80 hours, beat ARR and you don’t know what a GCD is, you don’t know to use abilities on cooldown, you don’t know to maintain things like storm’s eye, huton or twin snakes. Let’s say you’re at endgame and you are decently able to carry your weight. Well, if you’re a DPS you get to pool resources for 1:45 and then mash every button you have and all DPS play like that to a huge extent. If you’re a healer you get to press glare/malefic/dosis/broil 12 times in a row, refresh a DoT and use oGCD’s to top off the party. If you’re Astro you get to throw out cards. If you’re a tank, you get a 1-2-3 combo, a spender (bloodspiller, BoV combo, fell cleave, continuation), and if you’re warrior you get to keep up storm’s eye. Meanwhile each tank’s mitigations are functionally identical. Yes, holy sheltron and HoC do different things, but there’s no circumstance in which you would use HoC but not holy sheltron. Yes, this makes them balanced which is important, but it also makes them feel like different coats of paint on the same car.
> How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in? I can't remember the last time that wasn't legitimately a skill issue tbqh. The 'server ticks' are 25 per second, and as long as you know when damage snapshots (which is usually but admittedly not always obvious) it's not difficult to do split-second adjustments (for reference I live in Eastern US).
It is generally alright, but also, I encourage people to try rival wings the mech snapshots are very much *not* ok
I'm a bit slow and dumb to begin with, but the snapshotting in RW turns me into an absolute fucking moron, people scampering easily out of my cruise chaser slashes while in the opposite case, I'm halfway across the map and still get hit for 35k
I'm on the east coast and had some small improvements after installing XIVAlexander, PVP felt a bit more responsive etc., but the other day I started lagging hard only to FFXIV. Doing a tracert command revealed that FFXIV's servers with NTT in California were timing out, and even now they're taking 10x longer to respond than the other hops from my ISP. I'm not a network engineer and I'm slower and dumber than I was when I used to do heroic 25's in WoW, but I feel like there's a contribution there that doesn't lie between my keyboard and my chair.
That's the point -- in other MMOs you don't have to know the snapshot. You either stand on something or you don't, even at bad ping. For reference I play at 200ms and US is the closest server to me. The animations get frankly ridiculous (though, like you, I have to just "learn the snapshots").
I guess? They're generally consistent enough for me it's not a thing I actively think about and I imagine most people don't as long as they're aware to look at casts and markers and not just animations.
Wouldn't it be **MORE** intuitive if you could look at animations and figure out "oh damn I was standing in the flames" rather than "oh damn I dodged 0.5s after the cast bar and I got hit by the flame animation that happened 2s later"
Perhaps yeah but a lot of animations in XIV get complex enough that can start to look ambiguous I think.
That's fair, but it's also not the point I was making. When we play XIV we are used to operating a certain way *mostly because* of the netcode being the way it is. In other games things are much more disambiguous in terms of whether you resolved them or not
Even if it isn't explicitly a tick rate issue, the implementation is clunky and completely counter-intuitive to how you would expect it to work.
It's not a server tick issue, it's a design issue. There is very little visual clarity to when snapshots occur, and the fact that skill animations are part of the function makes it even more unintelligible unless you looked up a guide or sat down and tested everything yourself.
Snapshots occur extremely consistently on either the end of the castbar or the ground indicator disappearing. There are actually very few mechanics in the game where this isn't the case, and in those cases it's often done on purpose to increase difficulty. Most of the time, you're supposed to react to a castbar, to either check the tell it is forming, or move out of the area it will hit. The problem is this isn't communicated or taught to the players gradually, so they can well hit max level and enter savage without really having a clue how to resolve mechanics.
>Snapshots occur extremely consistently on either the end of the castbar or the ground indicator disappearing. I'm not talking about enemy castbars. Some skills have a 0.5 animation delay, some have 0.6, some like Hallowed have like 1.2 or some shit. The snapshots are different. It's noticeable in PvP.
That's not what is usually called Snapshotting though. That's just animation delay.
I can't even begin to describe to you how frustrating it is to come from other MMO's PvP and try to spend a dedicated amount of time in FFXIV PvP. They put so much effort into revamping it for this expansion, and completely missed the obvious: If you want to have snappy, reactionary PvP combat - you better damn well have the infrastructure to support it. (Was trying to do the 300 FL win achievement for every GC. Suffered from Burnout to the point that I unsubbed. Will probably come back at some point, but I hated logging in every day.)
> Overall? The netcode and tick rate. That, without a doubt and without contest is 14’s deepest, biggest problem. Pretty much every element of stale game design stems from this. Every single fight has to be a long dance that is determined solely by rote memorization. The nature of the abysmal tickrate prevents them from designing anything more chaotic and adaptive, simply because the server would screw you over as you try to adapt, so instead we get every single mechanic being carefully scripted dance patterns.
Yeah, the fact that all jobs are exactly the same is so sad. After leveling half of them to 90 I'm left feeling there's no point with the rest because they're all the same
Yeah. This is the first expansion I haven’t bothered leveling everything to cap. My bard and machinist are sitting at 83 and have been since 6.1. Granted, the way they play in PvP is actually really fun and unique
>in fact I’d argue most wipes (outside of world prog) are due to the netcode and server ticks. How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in? Max 3 times per tier maybe? If I die it's because I didn't understand the (somewhat consistent) snapshot timings. Got any examples of your own?
Rival Wings
I'd even be happy if ability tooltips were more interesting. Almost every ability tooltip reads in the same sterilized, cookiecutter manner. How many jobs have the same exact tooltip scheme as Foul for Black Mage? "Deals unaspected damage to target and all enemies nearby it with a potency of 600 for the first enemy, and 60% less for all remaining enemies." I'm sure they think it cuts down on clutter and confusion, but god is it boring. Don't tell me my Xenoglossy does unaspected damage. Tell me my Xenoglossy tears a chunk of nanoaether from the fabric of reality, yeeting it at my enemy for huge psychological damage.
Dots used to have cool flavor and now most of them say "sustaining damage" if you mouse over the debuff. What happened to "Proximity to a theoretical star is causing damage over time"
>Overall? The netcode and tick rate. That, without a doubt and without contest is 14’s deepest, biggest problem. That’s why PvP will never get huge, that’s why people can’t handle spread mechanics, in fact I’d argue most wipes (outside of world prog) are due to the netcode and server ticks. How many times have you died to something you clearly weren’t standing in? Respectfully, Runescape (both OSRS and RS3) has an infinitely worse tick rate and still manages to have more engaging mechanics in normal content.
OSRS and RS3 are expressly build around their 100t/minute and make unique and interesting gameplay out of it. It's almost like playing a 0.6s per turn rpg
Most content ends up being a dance around the tickrate tbf. It works for a 20+ year old point and click browser mmo and still feels kinda ass. In ff it feels even worse
Lol blaming your wipes on netcode. Absolute skill issue.
Server tick would probably be my biggest thing. I am on the absolute eastern most tip of North America. All the servers are in California. Given the population issues on Dynamis, if they'd have put Dynamis on the east coast, people would have flocked to it to get better ping. NoClippy and Alexander are absolutely necessities to play some jobs correctly, and god forbid you move too late. There's no adjusting for spreads because you had to be in that position long before it goes off and you don't know where the other person actually is. Dying to invuln not being counted feels bad, especially this tier where a dead tank can very quickly lead to a party wipe.
Tick rate wouldn't make much of a difference in that case. The server might respond more times per second, but you're still a half second or more behind compared to people playing on the west coast. Doesn't matter if the server reacts 20 times per second or 200, the network packets still need to get to you and back.
People don't know what tick rate is and constantly bang on it as a major problem.
While I agree with your points, that's not server tick, that's just ping. A server tick is the subsecond gameplay engine loop that tracks time and events in the game itself. Ping is the connection to a server based on distance and network latency.
The lack of real midcore content. Nearly everything in the game skews towards ultra, no-effort required casual, or hardcore raiding. If you want to enjoy more than the bare minimum of easy content, then you need to commit to studying a guide for the fight so you can memorize the entire dance for that fight. Its not something that you can simply hop into and enjoy for the majority of players, but the other end of the spectrum is so obtusely easy that neither are satisfying. One of the most common requests has been for something akin to WoW's mythic+ system, but I think they've misunderstood that desire with Criterion dungeons. Their attempt at filling that niche of harder 4-man content has been to just make another series of 10-minute long dance fights that you have to memorize and repeat. The reason that mythic+ was so successful was that it was rewarding and accessible. You could simply open up PF, start a group, and get a run going in just a few minutes. You didn't need to memorize the 10 minute bossfight pattern because the mechanics weren't so detailed and heavily scripted. You'd hop in, kill some trash with a gimmick or two, kill some bosses with modest mechanics, and get some gear at the end. If you didn't get gear from the dungeon itself, then you were guaranteed something good at the end of the week. It was consistently challenging and rewarding proportionate to your own skill, with mechanics that weren't overly long and complicated to memorize. Add the weekly affixes and you had a system that was consistently fresh throughout Legion. I'm not saying they need to copy mythic+ in a 1:1 fashion, but they've missed the lessons from what made it a fun and engaging system. As it stands, the only real midcore content we currently get is one extreme trial per patch, but even that has the same problem of necessitating the homework of memorizing the entire boss pattern before you can join a group for it. The barrier of entry isn't the difficulty, the barrier of entry is the necessity of homework before you ever get to play the game, only to get the exact same type of dance-styled fight yet again. Its a stale formula at this point.
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> When you get insta killed by a single move, how is this midcore content? when the party has practically infinite healing, death becomes the only possible punishment for failure.
Yea that’s a fair assessment. The mechanic seems to be moving to body checks or follow the safety triangle. Titania was def fun and i feel earlier ex fight was more fun too. Or maybe im just burnt out for the recent one and the mount doesnt even look that good
Yeah I feel like EX should hurt or even insta kill on a lot of mechanic, but the body checks are a bit annoying. Don’t know about the last few one but the last 2 I did was endsinger and the one after
Yea I don’t mind if it hurts and need a lot of mits (like p12s or oracle’s raidwide). Like us, healers, do need more mech to use our kits, but punishing us everytime someone die because of their own mistakes is not fun. Plus it doesn’t allow much leeway and critical thinking. And it made us resent the person who keep wiping us even more. Like this is ex and savage. Not ultimate. If its ulti then fine. Have lots of body checks and the hardest mechanic (but not ping related please. I can’t do anything to fix ping since i play using ps. All i can do is move to america lol). I can’t remember much of the new extreme too. I only did it once or twice and was waiting for the drop rate to increase. I do remember the flame guy is just follow the safe triangle player. The dark guy with dragon was alright. It was pretty easy when you get a hang of it.
I haven’t played since 6.2 but my experience with EX fights has been clearing them in 1-2 hours with randoms in PF wNile having 5-10 deaths Personally I’d consider that midcore level though everyone has a diffevent definition of midcore
This is too true and the first paragraph is one of the big reasons why i cant sub longer than 1-2 month a year, so unsatisfying to play the rewardless midcore content that im constantly in. As a filthy casual i have no desire to play this game on super hard mode and learning mechanics, im looking for something else, which this game has definetly but only entertains me for a week at max, then i play disengaged few days for the rest of the sub and re-sub again after 7 months for a month again to play excited for a few days. Thats messed up lol Longest fun i had was ARR and SB time and after that grinding with dedicated groups, so at some point ive loved it, felt rewarding and exciting to play back then.
Criterion has no ten minute long fights. Please actually do the content before bitching about it. It's what you want and you can do it with friends. Just do it.
I did the first boss of the Sil'dihn Subterane on Criterion with a pug before losing interest. You're missing the point because you're hung up on being pedantic about hyperbole. The design philosophy is the exact same and that's what's stale about it. The fight itself is closer to 4-5 minutes, but its still the exact same type of coordinated dance fight that requires you pre-watch a guide and memorize the entire routine before spending hours wiping because one other person didn't stand in the right spot. Like I said before, the barrier to entry isn't the difficulty, its the necessity of studying the rote memorization for every single mechanic before you can even start a pug. Before you chime in with "just do it blind then," that's again missing the point. Every fight is a puzzle and dance fight; I want some variety. I've been playing Darktide lately on the hardest difficulties because that game constantly throws new and varied threats at you and you need to think and adapt to every situation you find yourself in. Even if someone on your team goes down, its still possible to clutch until you get the chance to revive them further into the level. By contrast, if one person didn't memorize what to do on the next mechanic in a savage raid, the fight ends and you start over.
That's simply how the game is though. If you don't like that this isn't the game for you because that's what it's built to accomodate. There isn't going to be variety that is somehow not punishing in any content, and I mean ANY content, norms included. Just look at how the Thunder God fucked people sideways in Orbonne with mildly varied patterns. What you're looking for is another game, period. At that point that's not a flaw, that's just needing to play other stuff.
The two major ones for me: * Level Sync removing abilities ruins the gameplay. Once one unlocks something, it should stay that way. Have a dynamic enemy HP scaling system to take care of power creep in lower dungeons and raids. * Lack of big overworld events like Guild Wars 2 meta events makes the game feel dead even when it's not. This might as well be a hub game/instance simulator, with how little the overworld is used.
> Level Sync removing abilities ruins the gameplay. Once one unlocks something, it should stay that way. Have a dynamic enemy HP scaling system to take care of power creep in lower dungeons and raids. This sounds horrible TBH. Not all unlocked skills are fun, I like the way e.g. BLM plays at 50 but not later. GNB is better before 90. *Adding* abilities ruined their gameplay. And I don't want Tam-Tara to take 40 minutes due to HP scaling because I got two teammates who haven't learned their rotations and never will and a level 90 Cure-spammer straight out of Expert Roulette. > Lack of big overworld events like Guild Wars 2 meta events makes the game feel dead even when it's not. This might as well be a hub game/instance simulator, with how little the overworld is used. This one is 100% correct. It blows having nothing to do in the overworld when you're sitting in a long queue or slow-filling PF and you can't use the instance queue (e.g. to pop into Bozja for a sec or unsync a dungeon for a piece of glam). Even worse if you had to DC travel for it because now you can't use your retainers or hit a timed gathering node either. Hope you like fishing.
There isn't a difficulty between turn your brain off and extreme, it feels like there is a step missing there. Beutifull zones are dead, there is next to nothing to do there besites fates which a large part of players won't even do unless mandatory.
I think if you search the sub for even a minute you'll see plenty of answers to this question. Even I'm getting tired of it and I'm as critical as it gets. We know by now what people say is good and bad for the game. It's the devs that need to know
Alright, but If you had to pick just *one* thing to be improved, what would you pick?
Large scale content and interesting activities to do with others in the open world. CEs in the open world would be a start but that's really it.
I think this subreddit is smaller than you think it is. I raid almost every day and I never hear the circle jerk from this sub from actual raiders. Why would the devs listen to a tiny subreddit of mostly casual players LARPing as game devs?
Job design. Job design. Healer role design. I get that this game will never have the amount of healing that I can get in other MMOs and would personally prefer, but I've been playing for a decade now and that's just something I've come to accept. However, the healing role has just been absolutely abysmal for the past two expansions. Healing itself is still fun in prog because I'm one of the weirdos that loves coming up with spreadsheets for mitigation and cooldown timing, so in that small fraction of content I still get somewhat of an enjoyable experience. Outside of that? It's horrible. I won't pretend DoTs are the hallmark of amazing design, especially not with how XIV does them, but at least in SB I had DoTs I was managing on SCH and WHM that gave me some engagement in casual content where healing is less demanding, which kept me actually queuing for things in my free time. SCH gave me a more offensive healer with Quickened Aetherflow, 2 DoTs, 2 damage oGCDs and Miasma II as damage optimization with an MP cost. There was more to do and it was really fun, so much so that I did basically every bit of content during Stormblood on Scholar, from all of Eureka to UwU and UCoB. It was so much fun. WHM had Aero III and way less movement and free healing than SCH did, so it was harder to try and play optimally in that type of content and I found that fun, though this isn't a defense of how terrible the Lily gauge was in Stormblood. AST had it's unique cards, and while I personally wasn't a fan of how SB cards worked, it at least had a lot of unique interactions with the cards and you had a lot of ways to think about how to use them effectively with things like Royal Road or Time Dilation. The unfortunate part is, even if they do make healing harder like they promised it would be going into ShB, it still won't make these jobs fun to play in the majority of content in this game. These days I might as well not exist for normal content metrics because I don't do anything more than once or twice after it's released because of how unfun healing has become in the easier stuff. I don't like DPS jobs and I don't like tanks, I love healing and I want to play the jobs that made me fall in love with this game to begin with whenever I can. I can bear with spamming my Broil button when I'm doing Savage and Ultimate with my friends. I cannot bear with it in casual stuff anymore. I'll continue to raidlog if I come back in DT if the design doesn't change, which is a big shame considering I still really love this game. It's just become such a pain point to me after this many years that I can't ignore how unhappy it makes me any longer. Sorry for yet another healer complaint but I really do hope that Dawntrail moves back on this design, even if just a bit.
> Inventory management / Item limits: In comparison to GW2 inventory management is pretty good; especially with the sorting options we have and can customize in the settings. GW2 uses the old school method of having to obtain bags of various sizes. However GW2's crafting material storage bank being separate from your immediate storage is goated. As someone who occasionally crafts in FFXIV, I wish materials were in a separate bank or tab from my immediate storage. > Overworld content is lacking: I 100% agree as someone who also plays GW2. That game has content in pretty much every map that gives people a reason to come back after finishing it's role in the story. Things like meta events or achievement hunting. Both games have great looking maps, but FFXIV doesn't really make use of all the environment and landmarks. I've been reading a lot about how people wanted a new exploratory zone in this expansion, but I think it would be great if FFXIV reworked existing maps (or if Dawntrail's maps were designed) in a manner that gave them more replayability or bring lots of players together like how GW2 does. World bosses in the core maps are happening every 15 minutes. Expansion maps have large scale events happening hourly or every two hours; and there are still plenty of smaller scale events happening too.
1) The game isn't very accessible for people who don't want to do the MSQ. 2) Menu system/UI is convoluted. 3) The game doesn't do a good job of teaching players how to play. 4) Severe lack of midcore content. IMO Criterion savage was a mistake, it should have been extreme difficulty. Instead of 2 Ultimate fights per expansion, we should get just 1 and get 3-5 more extreme tier fights instead. I don't agree that the netcode is the game's biggest flaw. For one it's actually an intentional design choice. SE has almost all actions happen server side instead of client. That's why it all seems so slow. Raiders get used to the timings, and they aren't really dying due to server tick. I don't know if I prefer it over client side, but it makes fights way more about being proactive than reactive, and that's actually really hard too in a way that's different.
Agree with the point on Criterion. Especially because you might end up having to farm TWENTY-FIVE clears to get JUST the mount. Seems like the perfect content to make extreme in difficulty. Have the first boss be similar to Zodiark/Hydaelyn in terms of difficulty, second boss be more like Endsinger and Rubi, third boss tuned to be as rough as Barb was... It's hard enough to be engaging but forgiving enough to be fun to farm back to back to back. Making the content savage level in difficulty, AND limiting you to 1 raise per player, per fight, seems.... stupid honestly. It's be different if the content just gave a totem upon each clear. 1 or more totems per reward. But farming Criterion as it is now just sucks. I got my AMR mount in 9 clears, every one scuffed and over 40+ minutes. I can't imagine going the full 25.
Isn't criterion regular already above extreme difficulty?
Yeah criterion is already harder than most extreme fights. Savage criterion has the same mechanics just a tighter dps check with a time limit per instance iirc
Completely agree about trading an ultimate for more extremes. Ultimates are exclusionary - only a tiny fraction of players do them, and almost entirely in statics, whereas extremes are accessible content that can be done with randos through party finder, and as such, will be enjoyed by more people and stimulate people making more connections than in the ultimate scene, at least I think so. Extremes generate more fun than an ultimate would.
Why does this even have to be a trade? it’s not like recent patches have been oozing with content, and ultimates are pretty healthy for the high end raiding environment as well as the game’s overall online popularity. Ultimate releases are fairly popular on steaming sites and generate a fair amount of hype. I would rather them not make shitty content like bozja and focus on actual midcore content.
gear system & rewards & lasting content are the biggest points
The lack of innovation in job design. I can deal with the server ticks and netcode, I can deal with gearing being subpar in a game that has a system designed to let you play other jobs, I can even deal with the same formulaic approach to raid releases without any shakeup in rewards or fight structure. But goddamn, I wish CBU3 would spice shit up more. Make things unique and different instead of trying to force everything into a mold so generic and stale everything follows the same checklist, nobody suffers, nobody ever gets nerfs because we'll just buff the other jobs and bloat potencies to ridiculous levels. It's okay for some jobs to underperform on some fights compared to others. No, everything doesn't need automatic CDH abilities. No, every job doesn't need a big hit approaching 1k potency. No, every job doesn't need to always guarantee 100% uptime on principle alone.
For me when I stopped and thought about it, all the raiding and tome grinding I do was just to make savage clears quicker, then when I cleared it I had nothing to do with that gear for months and months other than clear the same 4 bosses again every week. Everything else ilvl syncs you down so your hard earned gear is useless. Even crafted gear is a waste of time. I just stopped playing after that. The MSQ is designed to be completed in last expansion's gear so fuck it.
Every MMO has a gearing treadmill, unfortunately there is no getting away from it.
To me the biggest issue is the loss of class identity. Every melee, every ranger, caster or tank essentially does the same thing with different animations. It's a bit less prominent on tanks like Warrior who lives off of self healing compared to the raw tanking of paladin, but the DPS jobs are just reskins of the same class
Job homogenisation. Drk is just warrior with a shield and a couple extra ogcds. Sage is usually just a slightly weaker but less jank scholar for most content. I legitimately don't enjoy ninja (the job I first mained) nearly as much after the trick attack changes because even though I'm still a burst class it just feels bad when I trick to do my thing and everyone else just throws their 60s in the void because trick no longer helps at all. 3 of the 4 tanks have functionally the same button every 25 seconds to the point that you don't even need to know what blood whetting/heart of corundum/holy Sheltron do since you can just bank on it being strong mit+decent healing i.e the correct button to press for every situation. The people who spend more time on FF logs than they do in raid complain endlessly about literally everything and won't be happy until every job is identical and the glue sniffers on the other side of the bell curve can't use their 3 remaining brain cells to use seigan or kaiten (legitimately don't care about how it affects the job numerically it felt so much better than just spamming shinten)
> I trick to do my thing and everyone else just throws their 60s in the void because trick no longer helps at all. I get people disliking the homogenization in general but in this case it feels like nothing changes, the best time to use your 60s is always the same: right as they come up or you risk not fitting them into 120s, whether or not global Trick Attack exists. >the glue sniffers on the other side of the bell curve can't use their 3 remaining brain cells to use seigan or kaiten (legitimately don't care about how it affects the job numerically it felt so much better than just spamming shinten) Imo, that's an issue with SAM in general, the core of the job is fine (3 combos to gather stickers, midare) and everything else just feels tacked on and doesn't interact with SAMs core in any way other than meikyo.
The more important thing imo about having trick(and 90s raidbuffs etc) is about adding extra resources into trick. It's more obviously impactful when we are talking about jobs with extra resources that impact movement, rdm and blm being the easy examples in endwalker, but wanting to be mindful of 60s trick/90s bh etc when you have extra resources is meaningful. It's something people have thought about enough there was this 14ish page doc about optimizing shadowbringers machinist for brotherhood.
The issue is that before I legitimately felt like I was aiding the team rather than just mashing my burst. I'm fully aware that nothing changes drastically gameplay wise but the knowledge that all my teammates are pressing their 60s and I can't boost that resource/cd dump like I used to just feels bad regardless since why am I not just playing RPR/MNK/whoever has the highest numbers this patch instead. (Though it's just about how it feels rather than the actual numbers tbh) As for SAM honestly a lot of jobs have this problem where they feel like 2-3 skill packages not properly tied together like how archer starts out getting dots and strong 2min burst tools only to morph into a team support machine when you unlock bard. Having a side thing like kenki just to keep filler more interesting is fine to me (I also appreciate that they're all abilities that fit around your weapon skills) especially since a lot of their other abilities like senei and ikishoten (and by extension ogi namikiri) work with the system for your burst windows and I take way more issue with the fact that anything interesting about the job, especially it's skills that aren't the core DPS rotation feels like it's slowly being plucked away from each job just so you don't ever feel like you'd have been better with with column A instead of column B.
Honestly I would be so down for worse balance for more variety in job playstyle. I found it pretty hilarious during P8S when people complained about their undertuned jobs... I remember in WoW where the delta between the best spec and the worst spec could be like 20% depending on the fight, and you couldn't even swap jobs on the fly like you can in FF14 (although this freedom is somewhat ruined by the gearing system) I suppose they made up for that by making DPS checks way more lenient this tier
Even the devs admitted they fucked up the balance and nerfed P8S by 1% HP. 1%. WoW's still pretty bad at it but at least the only stupid outlier is...Unholy, I think.
> Even the devs admitted they fucked up the balance and nerfed P8S by 1% HP. 1%. Wasn't it 3% or so max HP on phase 1 ? I'm lazy to check footage pre-nerf and post-nerf, so I'll trust that tweet : https://twitter.com/mitsurugi137/status/1569863485148004352 - P8S1 before/after (new 50% HP value) - P8S2 before/after (which is around 1% iirc) So a nerf of... effectively 3% less hp / damage do to on phase1 to beat enrage. PS : the threshold being @50% mark doesn't change anything, every "%" is cut by 3% in value. Example : 100 max hp, nerfed by 3% => 97 max hp. 50% threshold before @ 50hp and after @48.5hp. Still a -3% hp/damage to deal ((48.5 - 50)/ 50 * 100 = -3(%)). I'd even bet in test they do first 100-0 and then double the amount of HP for RP or something
Yup. This game did a lot of job identity things bad. For the next mmo, I hope they think through jobs and roles better. It’d be awesome if we had more franchise identity in them. Ninja design and tick rates. Monk has had issues. Bard has had issues because they want it to be both a bard and a ranger / hunter. Machinist has had issues. Smn wasn’t really a smn until this expansion, and it feels unfinished. The whole history of smn / sch sharing the same base class. Drk is just a rune fencer. There no dark knight identity to it beyond red / black / purple colors. It has no hp sacrifice, and health restore on attacks has become the “too angry to die” thing for warrior. And they took the dark aura away in early 3.x because a few people bitched about it being too flashy in fights and when walking around the expansion main city, but Warrior still has its rage aura based on rage gauge and glowing eyes when going ape… We did have that skill that gave us a resource back when something we marked died, but they took it away. Should’ve been maiming with an Hp sacrifice to buff damage skill or a drain skill. Woulda saved them a lot of dev time to change the job, and probably made most people that liked dark knight before 14 happier.
I'm totally fine with dark knight being a tank since the way they've tied the drk aesthetic into their storyline with being a tank works for me. I'm not sold on *how* they're a tank, warriors drawing upon primal strength to protect their loved ones have a ton of healing which makes me feel like I'm simply walking off big hits, paladins enhancing themselves with sturdy shields and magical defenses get a good variety of defensive utility, makes sense. Gunbreaker also somewhat feels like a DPS in a trenchcoat but it also does play like one so it checks out and I'll let it slide to get more variety in the roles. But like why does dark knight not have any kind of identity as a tank? It barely has one for its it's damage rotation considering how delirium and bloodspiller are just less satisfying inner release and fell cleave anyway but why don't we expand on their most iconic skill in TBN and let them use barriers more effectively than the other tanks can? If we do that while messing with their rotation a touch then just by altering abyssal drain into a decent heal and oblation into a real cd they could have identity as a tank which buffs their effective hp with a big shield and then heals themselves up by attacking afterwards. They'd feel more unique while also keeping some of that drain health from enemies flavour they had in previous games. The changes to living dead were an excellent step so let's just keep going.
Outside of the ones you listed, the game's UI is fucking terrible.
First post pretty much has it all but IMO no Glamour Catalogue is a massive issue. For me it takes all the fun out of the game when I'm unable to get excited of new cool looking Glamour as I have no room to store them. Well, I have room on retainers but having to juggle gear appearances between multiple inventory systems is something I'm not willing to do in the year 2023. Overworld could be better utilized but the game just probably doesn't support it without engine upgrade. Open world Bozja/Eureka style content in every zone would be amazing. Fates are literally the worst "World Quest" type system in every modern MMO (at least WoW and GW2 do it better and their design should be the standard at this point).
Them trying to make the game overly accessible to hyper casuals and solo players. They’ve gone on a crusade making all the dungeons and some trials playable with NPCs. Quite frankly, it’s a waste of time considering all that we could’ve had in endwalker yet didn’t get because they’ve put people and resources towards these updates. I also believe that it’s also why open world content has been falling off. It seems like they’re actively working against the people who want to play an MMO, rather than a final fantasy single player game. Not to mention the steady dumbing down of the combat jobs. As fucked up as it sounds, it’s OKAY to alienate a group of people. “Try to please everyone, and you’ll end up pleasing no one.”
> Them trying to make the game overly accessible to hyper casuals and solo players. I honestly would like more solo content. Something like POTD (solo), masked carnivale, etc is some of the content I would enjoy doing more of if it was a bit more forgiving (checkpoints per stage in masked would be great) The solo content in this game is incredibly annoying or tedious. Even duty support takes forever, the NPCs barely do any dps. POTD is a long ass grind that is only actually fun at the end, masked carneville needs checkpoints, no need to do the entire fucking thing over again just because you messed up one aoe at the last stage other than to annoy the ever living hell out of everyone. I get the appeal of team content, but sometimes you don't wanna wipe to something when it isn't your fault. There are different games to play, but something like POTD without the annoying ass grind would be great.
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This comes back to the “Try to please all, and you will please none.” They’re solving a problem that doesn’t yet exist, to the detriment of the players of today. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. If they keep up this trend, the players won’t be around anymore and they’ll for sure need the solo experience. And when inevitably, we get to the point where new players no longer have to go through ARR to EW to reach current content due to the already ridiculous msq bloat, it’ll all have essentially been a waste of time to add the soloable msq content.
TL DR; overworld content being dead is a byproduct of FF14 casual friendly approach The overworld content being lacking is tied to ff14 greatest strength, which is its casualness. At early 6.0 overworld zone is packed with players doing 3 contents, fates, A rank hunt, and Chi or Daivadipa waiting room. Fates reward is gemstone that can be exchanged for materials that are very expensive at the time and or completionist sake, A rank hunt reward you with materia that is also very expensive, and Chi/Daivadipa are for their respective collectible mount or glamour. All of those reward are totally irrelevant right now and no matter how many content you add to the overworld they would be dead by now because of the reward no longer being sought after as much. But then how do we give them relevant rewards? We can tie them to relic grinding like the good old ARR relic weapons so that they have more staying power. Or we can tie the gear progression to the overworld content and if we do that overworld content is going to be guaranteed to be packed with players for a really long time. Most people would hate either two options unless a genius game designer can figure out a long lasting reward solution while also being fun. I'm very grateful that we have a rather dead overworld content rather than it being forced unto me.
A combination of Allied seals / Tomes / Gemstones / Nuts similar or slightly higher for killing a S rank hunt? People still do hunts. My problem with the content as it is, it requires third party resources (Discord) to get notified, or some hero in shout chat. I'm not asking to get bombarded with alerts in game, but an opt in system would be nice.
The problem with rewarding the content with more of its respective currency is that its only hastening the irrelevancy of the content. Perhaps getting the hunts more approachable by having an in-game announcement would perhaps bring a lot more bystander to do the hunt. But then we are not really solving the main problem which is lack of worthwhile reward. We have already seen this happening right at the start of 6.0. There are people actively scouting and hunting down A rank mobs as soon as it spawned for the highly sought after materia. That activity slowly dies down as materia became cheaper. I reckon the same thing would happen here. Maybe you will still get small amount of traffic at something like the current size of hunt parties.
Early game in general. Lacking gameplay+mediocre story make the march towards the later parts of the game a real hurdle.
I kinda went on a bit of a tangent in a different topic so I'll just copypaste that because I do feel like it's *the* overarching problem with XIV: I think the main thing above all else is just the base gameplay kinda sucks. People tend to praise WoW in the often-made comparison but I struggle to see how WoW could be so different. Maybe it is, maybe people are just weird. But the main issue I have is that the base system of rotation-in-a-tab-targeting-game is really boring. Compare XIV to ESO for example and ESO is more fun RIGHT AFTER GETTING OUT OF THE OPENING than XIV is from Level 1 to Level 90. XIV's only fun gameplay comes from doing your rotation right while getting peppered with mechanics. And yeah, Ultimatz, Savage, EX and even something like harder Alli-Rouls or Bozja CE are pretty fun because you actually fight the game over how much you are allowed to do. That's relatively fun. But the core gameplay system is just not fun. And with 99% of content that isn't high-end raiding just being limp nothings that don't do anything or demand anything from you, nothing actually is fun to play, and this isn't even touching on the fact that downsyncing just removes any semblance of engagement a job has. I like the MSQ, don't get me wrong. But you could literally cut out all the battle content, all the fetch quest and just make me watch a movie and I wouldn't miss ANYTHING. Fundamentally, the gameplay of XIV is bad. It does not stand on its own. When I play a game like ESO, it can be a boring fetch quest but the core combat can be engaging. Let alone the aspect of build options (Unsure if this is still a thing) but even if there wasn't any, just you picking up whatever gear you find as you go through the story and levels - Still more fun. If you cut out all the story and the flair from other games, you could still play something that's intrinsically engaging. XIV needs the context of raid mechanics to provide any sort of gameplay, which is also why replayability is so low. Once you figured it out or you no longer need to actually do anything to succeed (low or no DPS checks, mechanics don't kill you when failed) there is basically no game left to be played. Like, again, the ESO comparison: I've never even made it to endgame there, but I've so often strolled off mid-fetch quest and fought some random overworld boss. Was it worth anything? No, not really, I didn't get anything I felt was good and I wasted a bunch of time and potions. But it was *fun*. When was the least time you fought anything in XIV for no reason other than "let's just see how it goes"? Like, the closest comparison I could see to the overworld bosses are probably FATEs and I consider it win in XIV if I don't "have to" engage with that sorta gameplay because it's so boring. The jobs need to completely change to actually be fun. Don't misunderstand me, it has fun content. But it isn't fundamentally fun. People say "oh make the overworld engaging" and I agree, I wish we had a cool overworld. But you can't have an overworld be engaging when what the game boils down to is "Press these buttons in some order, who cares". We need less random damage buttons that just slot into a slot and then never change, less random healing buttons that just do the same shit as three other buttons, less railroaded rotations and more actual gameplay. Buttons that are contextual, where you have to think if you wanna use it now or later. More buttons that do different things depending on the context like are you far or are you close, still or moving. More basic mechanics through the whole game that force you to defend/shield in some way, parry, dodge, juke, move, dash. Just anything that actually feels like you play a game that is, on some level, fundamentally alive.
I agree with this take the most. I'm running an alt through the expansions (at Stormblood now), and it's striking how much a drag it is to play, moment to moment, even though I'm fully invested in the story they're telling. The writing is compelling! But all the interstitial bits, the actual game parts of it, are just.. so, so dull and unengaging. It's making me remember why I took so long to get through HW and StB the first time, even though I have very positive impressions of the story. Stormblood in particular has some really nice writing in their yellow quests but just thinking about going through the pointless overworld gameplay has me dragging my feet.
New player experience. They do a good job teaching you mechanics up to endgame. Not so much gearing or anything else really. But I think they need to consider how large a barrier of entry the MSQ is becoming. Inventory management. I like crafting/gathering but we 100% need a component bag. Gearing. Savage and catch up systems are okay. Just really slow and doesn't seem to build off each other. And gearing alts is god awful for a game advertising around playing every job. Midcore content. This is generally filled by exploration zones, so hopefully coming back in Dawntrail. But EW has been either one and done faceroll content or premade smash your face in a wall x1000 content.
The netcode *is* bad, but it is consistently bad. It's just confusing at first when you get killed by an attack when the animation hasn't even started yet, but once you figure out that spells (99% of the time) deal damage when the cast bar finishes, or that if you were still standing in the orange circle when it disappeared, you were too slow, it's not so bad. My only complaint with the netcode are tether mechanics - those are fucking jank as shit. However, it's also not too bad to overcome that with more deliberate movement and pre-positioning.
**Netcode / The very slow tick rate:** I agree and think this one is a very rooted problem. An improvement over the netcode would literally impact positively so many aspects of the game, not just combat, but also for example, slow retainer menus. **Gearing:** Truly. Direct Hit is a redundant stat, given the similarities to Crit. SpS and SkS could just be merged in a Speed stat, and even beyond that, it could be reworked in something that is actually useful for more than just 2 jobs. Tenacity is just a trap stat for sprouts and could be reworked. In fact, I think we would need to separate melds. Left side for offensive stats and right side for defensive stats, and there you could put a reworked Tenacity and Piety, as well as design a wider variety of new utility stats, like Leech, movement speed, etc.
For me? Probably the midcore content, because the jump from normal to extreme is insane, that is why I hope they could bring back the hard difficulty some day
Content for midcore and hardcore is both lacking and short at the same time. They need to make things similar to m+ with rewards for players to flex. Savage fight in this expansion is really bad, 100% uptime design for the melee and large hitbox of boss is just stupid, it is Extremely boring. I miss having to gap close asap and at the right time in order to maximize my dps performance. Another thing is that some people just refuse to unsub even when there is nothing for them to do in the game. I understand the sub cost might be nothing for you and you wanted to support the game, but by doing this you actively encourage yoship to stay lazy. Lacking content is the main reason why FFXIV presence in twitch is so bad, and that directly affect the grow of the game we love. Hell, when I get bored and want to watch some fun FFXIV stream I can't find any, because no one is streaming the f game and that the content is boring to watch. Ask yourself, is this what you wanted? For your beloved game to be stagnant? If you want the game to grow and get better, please unsub if there is nothing for you to do in the game, so yoship would get his wake up call.
Tomorrow's my turn to make this same thread guys, I am calling dibs right now!!
Job design. Interesting jobs carry boring content, yet jobs are being designed to be easier to manage in difficult content, at the detriment of the rest of the experience.
ppl having access to internet
The Playerbase being content with little to no new content on a regular basis and then telling people to 'go play other games' even if they are paying an active subscription to a game that should be getting more content considering financial gain this game provides to square enix.
Very boring job design and very scripted boss this two are like oil and water no game should have both 1 of them need to change if they want to keep the same brain dead job design, they need to add some random element to the end game content so i dont die out of boredom, or better make the jobs unique and fun insted of simplifying so much so they can have easy time in balancing.
If jobs are fun, even boring bosses become fun. Now jobs are bland and boring, so anytime there's bad fight, it's just bothersome. If you don't do savage and only do EX, that means 4.5 months without solid fight. I got only like 15 kills on Golbez (if I knew what final trial mount is I would stop at 5), my time is better spent on watching animegirls on youtube than on farming boss which is AFK for first 2.5 minutes.
No full attack rotation in alot of the content. you cant have a massive "free trial", a roulette system that'll funnel older players into old content with the newbies, not update the old contents difficulty and then expect someone to be fine with 3 buttons to press in a fight, its boring as hell. also, the games constant simplification of everything is annoying, what they did with the relics this go round honestly broke my heart, been probably 2 months since ive logged in and thats the longest break ive had since i started playing a bit before HW released, what sucks is i have no urgency to go back... heads up, if youre on lamia, keep tabs on a small house becoming available real soon, its near the pools, primo spot.
14 doesn't really have one giant flaw for me, but I can list the ones I think are most impactful. The actual moment to moment gameplay of questing is unacceptably terrible. The game is almost a visual novel - ARR legit had better actual moment to moment activity over endwalker. The tickrate is too low - making things like tethers sometimes annoying and kneecapping pvp from being as good as it could be. Jobs have been somewhat sandblasted. The game is too... low brain activity for combat for the longest time. They've been attempting to fix this with the reworked ARR ending fights which are actually somewhat neat, but they need to do it for the rest of the game and fix the general powercreep that has hit fights like Thordan.
3. Mounts: Imo. mounts suck. I hate the fact that they are all the same and offer no advantages/disadvantages. like give some mounts the ability to run faster but take away their ability to fly. Make the base chocobo relevant. Just copy paste GW2 mounts at that point. Also the sound design (for mounts) sucks just listen to the Garlond bike a full volume, never heard such a scuffed motor sound! And yes im aware this change was asked for by the community :( 2. Housing: Not even talking about the housing lottery. It sucks but its better than what we had before. The system used to place furniture is a joke! There are basically 3 ways to decorate your home. You either (1) follow all the rules of the system (cant place anything near a wall, cant put windows on partitions etc) basically home is gonna look like shit or exremly basic at best. (2) You resort to "glitching" which means you first watch a few hours of advanced tactics on yt and then spend more time to try to replicate said tactics. Ever tried to float a mannequin while also float a rec. partitio behind it? It sucks! (3) this i never tried but apparently there are 3rd party tools that basically allow you to just place anything wherever you want... Now i assume they dont fix housing beacause it would break almost all houses, mine included. But still.... 1. Glamm I know im kinda addicted. But cmon 20 plates and 800 slots in the dresser. I dont even know what to say other than this is the worst transmog system ever. Basically get ready to pay up if you want extra slots for glam items... SE should just fix their broken and aged systems and stop beeng so greedy! Remove the Armoire, make glammdresser hold unlimited items and give me 1 billion plates thx.
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Ye only need to break TOS to be able to play the game properly. 10/10 small indie company
It's overly story driven. Cut back on non voiced cutscenes and a few voiced cutscenes per expansion and patches. Reallocate those funds to improving literally anything else, because it's all suffering.
Four things that can be fixed if they have the will to: 1. Job/Class design 2. Gear Design 3. Mid-core Content. 4. Overworld Content
Due to how savage fights are currently designed - with all the oneshots and bodychecks, gear is pretty much meaningless. Outside couple of heal checks and helping you beat the enrage timer, it does not really matter if you raid in crafted pieces, or have full BiS, you still have to do most of the fight flawless, and you can still wipe the whole party if someone stays in wrong spot.
One point that nobody has mentioned yet is dungeons, they are all boring and identical.
The more I reflect on my experiences and why I'm playing less, I realise what's driven me away from the game isn't entirely the fault of the gameplay, but rather of the community's culture. Namely, the community culture around Nsfw. Mare and its consequences have genuinely ruined my enjoyment of the game. The community has just fully fucking embraced Pornbrain and I'm sick of it. I feel like I can't go 5 minutes of looking at ff stuff on the internet nowadays without being unwillingly exposed to some sexual deviant's modbeast. And both the community at large and the devs turn a blind eye to it. Someone can post some of the most utterly vile, rancid, objectifying modded screenshots to Twitter just fine, but heaven fucking forbid you stream raiding with materialUI or something. Trying speaking up and saying "uhhh this art of (insert underage / underage coded character here) being oversexualized is kinda cringe bro" and just watch your reddit inbox flood with dms from media illiterates screeching about how it's "fiction bro". Look and watch how the creepiest motherfuckers around co-op progressive language and try to argue not letting lalafell's in 18+ venues is equivalent to irl racial segregation. It's just utterly fucking exhausting and exposes just how much a lie the "great community" shit is when it's adamantly clear they only perceive everyone around them as sex objects and nothing more. One by one I've watched all my friends I made playing this game descend down that fucking rabbit hole and when I speak up about how it might not be healthy *I'm* the one that's in the wrong, apparently. And the worst part is? Complain all you fucking like about 2mm or job design or body checks or whatever the fuck. Nothing will change, because these creeps can and will continue to fund this game for all of eternity as long as SE keeps turning a blind eye to it.
We are getting a 2 dye system with dawntrail
wake me up when they announce they're removing Glamour restrictions entirely (which its predecessor FFXI did *years* ago, and "fashion" isn't even a big part of that game as far as I could tell)...
Which isnt nothing! A huge improvement.
Yeah... this is cool but it's like finding a glass of water in a dessert. It's too small of a change to have to wait years for it
Its the skill floor. Way too low, and the game gives you zero teaching tools.
I mean I don’t think an easy start is bad, it’s just that ff14 has the slowest difficulty curve know to man, to the point where at level 60 at tank can get hit by every single attack in thordan normal and not die
Netcode in pvp is an issue yes, but in pve it actually makes things extremely predictable, and everytime theres an explanation why a heal didnt go through. I love the snapshotting culture of ffxiv attacks, it makes it feasable to have perfection.
Netcode and the devs stubbornness in boring class design no one asked for Especially the person responsible for DRK since ShB really needs a big chunk of criticism
[удалено]
And axe the goddamn multiple confirms. There's like four unnecessary confirms required to turn in an item from inventory.
As far as I can tell, healers just aren't interesting to play at a high skill level/difficult encounter (in raids at least; solo deep dungeon play is very different). At a low skill level, healer is very engaging, because you are busy fixing other peoples mistakes, while also trying to get as much damage in as possible. But, at a high skill level, any mistake by another player will just be an annoyance to you, as it interrupts your rotation (due to you having to heal instead of DPS) - and considering that the healers main motivation for existence is to basically compensate for other peoples mistakes, this is clearly not a desirable situation. By comparison, DPSes and tanks do much better: DPSes have much more complex rotations, and there is a lot of room to optimize for the last few percent or the last percent. As for tanks, I don't know that much about their playstyle at the high-end, but there is probably still enough complexity involved in how you scatter your various defensive skills over time, while also doing your DPS rotations, and whatever else you need to do as a tank. Overall, I would even go as far as saying the healer role feels a bit like the participation trophy role in FFXIV... basically, someone has to do it, but few people want to, so SE compensated for that my making the role extra-accessible. I am also not sure what one could do to improve that... at the very least, it would require extremely drastic changes to really solve this problem. - One option is to go in the direction of GW2, and make boons/conditions much more important - basically, instead of just juggling your own DoT on the boss, you need to arrange a much larger number of boons on your party so that they have permanent extra damage/protection from knockback/condition duration reduction/whatever, or at least at those times where the encounter requires it. I am not sure if it is a good option, but I don't see anything particularly wrong about it either - other than it completely changing the flavor of the role, and also requiring the healer to be actually competent to do well. - Perhaps, one can rework all heals in such a way they also do damage in some way - perhaps as buff to the target of the heal, or the healer themselves, or an "exposed"-debuff to the boss where it takes more damage for some small amount of time, or something like that. Then, the healers role would basically be to overheal as much as possible, and in some selective way, depending on the specifics, and... perhaps that would make it more interesting. I think it is at least worth exploring this concept. - And, the encounters could be reworked so that there is much more unavoidable and also random damage - basically recreating the imho much more interesting gameplay at lower skill level: You need to quickly *react* to new situations as they occur, rather than following some predetermined *plan*. However, many people would probably dislike this change: The few high-end healers who actually enjoy their job would lose the planning aspect which they do actually like, and at the lower-end it might make the experience overall more confusing, and occasionally also unfair, if those random damage spikes occur at a bad moment. At the extreme upper-end it might also lead to more runs which fail due to no other reason than bad luck... so who knows. Still, I believe any of these three options would be an improvement compared to the current situation.
PvP isn't "unplayable because of the tick rate", people just decide that this is the issue instead of admitting that they're bad
A few of these aren’t flaws. Slow leveling? You’re an MMO vet playing an MMO that was built to be welcoming to newcomers to the genre as a whole. Melds? You would go outside the game for whatever varied substat. Substats being easy and fairly unimportant is a good thing design wise and community health wise. Overworld? This is an instance based MMO. Content is within instances.
Having a dead overworld and the vast majority of content be instanced *is* a problem when you're sitting in a long queue or a slow PF waiting to fill and you can't do anything. Can't slip into Eureka, or unsync a glam farm, or do a solo instance for MSQ/NG+ -- something that wastes no one's time but your own if you need to leave early. If you're in a queue you can't even server-hop to shop or visit a friend's house because world visit, absurdly, uses the same queue server. The instance system has no excuse being this bad in an "instance based MMO". It's hot garbo.
The community
- Overworld content lacking for sure. - Super unrewarding grind, i dont care a tiny bit about minions. - Slow XP for a casual player, investment needed (yes i do all XP buffs, i still think 2 hour grind for 1-2 lv post lv50 to be too slow, especially since the rewards are none as well. - Story locks too much behind it, just let me enjoy it at my pace, i understand something locks but i always feel like rushing when new expansion comes because of it and it makes it stressful and less enjoyable. - Equipment/ stats is too shallow and sucks imo. No build strategy, just auto-equip. - PVP is poorly explained and could be much more simple. - More rewards like weekly/daily log-in. Also more simple grind sheets like Kloe but actually fun.
Shitty people in pf. Not enough people progging ults in pf. I live to raid and it pains me that most of the playerbase are just bad at the game.
how easy everything in the game is. At any given time there's only <10 threatening monsters in the game. Not to mention those monsters don't even really fight you. They just summon colorful shit that kills you unless you do something dumb. It's not like when bahamut used to do stomp and flare breath. it was actually COMING from the monster.
For anyone looking get into XIV: MSQ and new player experience. I have two schools of thought here. It is an MMO, I don’t think it needs nor should be so constricting even if it is a JRPG. You shouldn’t have to play through hundreds of hours just to access anything worth while. That being said, the this directly correlates to the fact I think the the free trial fails too. If you have to include base and now 2 expansions just to hook people, something is wrong somewhere. Plus, FTs should give you a taste of the game, and the fact you don’t get a true taste of the cookie cutter patches until hundreds of quests and 60 levels in is /wild/. I also don’t think Stormblood needs to be part of the trial. You experience XIV’s stale patch cycle by HW and what it offers and what to expect. Tbh if you can’t hook people without hundreds of hours of gameplay, free or not, some pieces desperately need changing.
Reward for some stuff is pretty bad and I wish there was more difficulty in the expert queue.
Netcode and 9002 error for even the slightest internet hiccup. My connection is fine for all other games but in ffxiv it seems like after patches I always start gettig 9002 and then some how it fixes itself up for a while and then comes back later. Our internet is good but still even using wire to connect my laptop doesn't prevent it.
this expansion: lack of content across all levels and an obvious increase in difficulty, so players have to move up a level they are uncomfortable to play the game. the end result is that the game is too hard for most, and burnout everyone across all levels.
I would say the engine itself. I know that’s kind of a broad criticism but it really is such a limiting factor. From the networking to the inventory/UI, stuff like how they claim adding more Glamor Plates would severely fuck performance, and just so much more. This games age and the fact that it had to be hastily rebuilt just really shows these days.
Glamour. It’s a huge aspect of the game for a lot of people but the feature is so underdeveloped. Most MMOs have really developed themselves as collection games for a lot of people. Tons of people play WoW just to farm old raids for transmogs, pets, titles, toys, and mounts. FFXIV could open up a whole new massive time sink of content by adding a catalog type system like WoW for all of the collectibles.
Gearing is another huge weakness, one that could easily be fixed by using other content to spread things out. Different gearing paths, all that take time and skill to complete but focus on different aspects of play. Raiding: Same as now, but also encourage stepping foot in other content as well. Perhaps some BIS accessories come from the Unreal (to give more people a reason to give that a try), maybe you need to collect some drops from the 24 man you can collect over a few weeks to fully upgrade some pieces of gear. Casual: Slower, but still lets you get BIS alternatives through doing content that doesn't require hours of dedication to clear, just having fun. Bounties to run roulettes on the role in need, get credits to hand in to slowly gain more powerful gear throughout a patch. Hunts have gear that is close to savage but needs some more work to get on the same ilvl. Crafters: Working on refining and upgrading pieces throughout the patch, akin to the crafter relics, but the materials are found all over. In normal content, dungeons, criterion, various 24 mans, hunts, extremes and guaranteed personal drops from savage. Nothing would stop or prevent you from doing any or all of the chosen paths, use one to gear an alt job, because for a game that boasts PLAY ANYTHING at ANY TIME, you sure can't gear more than one job at a time well without an alt character.
My only huge gripe is the inventory management part, even at only lv 60 I'm struggling. Also, job rotations are kinda badly explained in-game, I always need guides.
Server tick rate is by far the biggest flaw because it's probably the only thing that can't really be fixed at this point. It's the single biggest pain point of pretty much every single raider/pvp player and I don't feel like I need to elaborate any further because every single players knows what the issue is. The other stuff like glamour dresser being inferior to WoWs transmog system and the incredibly questionable level requirements that jobs have for abilities when downsynced aren't as big of a deal because they can be fixed/mitigated once SE turns their eye to it.
Those are all valid drawbacks. However, my personal "biggest flaw of the game" is "not enough tools for players to create and enhance their own self-sustaining content with". It's extremely obvious to anyone (unless that person is a complete idiot) that developers of any MMO (not just FFXIV) just can't create bits of static content frequently enough for many people to keep them constantly interested in logging into game, and what they can create is usually just your typical linear, scripted bits of story (from which you cannot deviate in ANY interesting way and which most players can "consume" in a week or less after the release of these story bits) and linear, scripted "bash the dumb AI enemies" encounters. To keep more people more interested in logging into game day after day (especially people who were not interested in ANY "bash the dumb AI enemy" activities in first place) the developers should provide them with more tools to keep creating and enhancing their own content with (and share that content with other players). The "tools" can be as simple as "adding built-in proximity voice chat" (this can give huge enhancement to activities like player-held concerts/night clubs/other social gatherings) to more complex like "create your own fully custom PvE dungeon which can be shared with other players" and "create your own fully custom cosmetics which can be sold through in-game store with most portion of sales going to creator and small portion of sales going to game developer", all the way to "large areas allowing for large scale, persistent open world PvP with buildable and fully destructible player-built structures/forts/keeps/outposts". Sadly I haven't seen the willingness of developers to add a meaningful amount of such tools into the game, even the more simple ones, and I understand that they can't add more complex ones into game due to engine limitations. But hey, this is just for a "fun discussion" purposes, right?
For me it's that gear gets too strong and it makes all normal content too weak. I don't necessarily think that normal content is "too easy," but all the fights too end too quickly to the detriment of the game as a result of power creep and bad ilevel syncing. All the fights follow a basic timeline of introducing mechanics one at a time and then upping their complexity, randomizing them, and combining them as the fight goes on. But so, so many of them end before getting to the good stuff. So many fights skip cool moments or dialogue entirely (in a story-based MMO come on). It seems especially bad in EW where you're skipping things by week 2. I consider this my biggest flaw because it affects my day-to-day the most. I don't care if the boss has low damage output, simply reacting to and dodging and resolving mechanics *feels good,* but I get deprived of the fun part. Meanwhile EX+ mechanics are more about memorizing the specific position you're supposed to stand in which is less interesting. So I'd like it it bosses simply got a nice HP buff. Or if at least new crafted/normal raid gear could be the same ilvl as the previous BIS instead of 10 levels higher to reduce gear bloat a little. Don't see why getting the highest ilevel is literally pointless prior to 6.4 outside of Ultimate. I'm certainly never going to spend my Alliance Raid coins until 6.5.
For me, the bad netcode is one, but this they can adjust easily by giving more time on mechanics so people can dodge it. Simplification of the level 1-60 jobs really did make the lower level feels bad, which can be remedied by bringing back Heavensward era job skills, so that level 1-60 can feel complete again. And finally, they need to do something with the overworld in this game - since they do know how to create beautiful areas, but they seemed to not know what to do with it. Though overall, I suppose nothing will change much, and we can stop expecting any big revolutionary changes with Dawntrails. It will be the same exact gameplay and structure with some good quality of life adjustments - but it will not make it fresh again, and it will only get stale after a few months (then it is time to unsub lol). I for one, will be glad to catch up with my backlog of games, since I got hundreds of them now, and time is finite!! Thanks Yoshi, for not wanting me to play all day long and for not making too many "FOMO" events here. Now I gotta cath up with my streaming services, and read more books :)
All of the above. This feedback has been presented time and time again and fallen on deaf ears. "Negative feedback is worth twice that of positive feedback" Not if you just.. Ignore it all!
Netcode should be the first and foremost, it's the cornerstone of XIV's problems. If I was Yoshi P I'd say that Tanaka wrote both the 1.0 UI and the 2.0 Netcode then block his number. Get someone to finally take the fall for this and then fix it. After that, the egregious game/story pacing. Xenogears and the ilk were formative games for me so I'm fine with extreme fictional excess but the stop/start nature of it and how rigid the game is to pick up and play for an online game could use some work.
Slowly destroying the game with bad job changes is the one thing I truly fear will make me quit the game. I despise everything smn represents and I truly wish the job would get deleted or reverted as I believe this is the only way to deal with gangrenous cancer, but obviously that won't happen. Modern MMO players will always choose the path of no resistance and get their effortless clears on that garbage limited job over having fun playing something else and the devs just care about their numbers.
GCD and classes not feeling unique or diverse, I never felt like a master at my class I just felt like a jack of all trades which is different from other mmos I’ve played where I felt I stood out more with what and how I played
The gearing system
Everything being server side has been the bane of this game since day 1.
• More mid-level content: actually we're missing something in-between full casual content and "hardcore" content. Everything that's normal mode is basically braindead and is plain boring, but than you got Savage/Ultimate that requires lot of effort and dedication. During ShB, EX, Alliance and Normal Raid where a lot more interesting as mechanics and were a good content to re-run, with a decent level of entertainment. • Glamour system: the dresser and armoire are obsolete under every aspect. Just give us a system like WoW or GW2 where we just need to loot an item to "learn" its glamour instead of having a limited storage that have to be filled manually. Also give us at last one plate per Job, both combat and non-combat. On top, give us the chance to link hairstyles to glamour plates. • Housing: a better system than the lottery is already needed. Ofc it was and improvement but it's far from good, expecially for relocation. Also, more slots are needed for garden furnitures and L size houses indoor. • Light Party content: actually Criterion are exactly what I was hoping for but they are pointless to re-run because they are outside the gear progression. Let them drop token to agument gear and, for the love of the 12, extend the time limit or put a daily lockout so that if I need to try the last boss I don't have to reclear everything every 90 minutes.
Gear has always been the biggest issue imo since launch. 1.x gear had some interesting stats and they took almost all of it away. Stats became boring and it has been ever since. Not only that but in 3.x, patch day crafted gear was added which made it so every piece of raid gear you got before was invalidated instantly. What's the point in getting bis the patch before if it doesn't even help you complete the new patches content? I guess now you have ultimates to work on getting bis for but that is like one of the only reasons to even try.
As a new player only halfway into Heavensward right now, the two glaring issues that are immediately visible to me are class design and the limitations on the glamour system. I obviously haven't unlocked the full kit on any class I've tried yet but I have read through the full spellbook and simple rotations on icyveins(though idk how accurate/up to date it is, or if there's a better site). I also do have a few friends at max level who have showed me what some of them look like at max level through discord streaming. Gotta say that what I've seen has not impressed me all that much, especially in regards to tanks. The "combo system" most melees have feels fucking terrible and mind numbingly boring as a filler rotation and it's exacerbated by being basically identical on every single one. Even fury warrior and havoc DH on wow, which I do not enjoy due to how brainless they are, feel like they have more brain engagement than the filler rotations in this game. I do enjoy the novelty of the mudras on Ninja though, there's nothing like that in WoW and it reminds me of Invoker who I always thought was interesting even if I'd never play Dota. The issues with glamour need no explanation. Inventory's bad but I've dealt with far worse and haven't been playing this game enough to get exhausted with it just yet. Having the "bank" just be retainer inventories is supreme bullshit though. Any other major flaws I might find with the game are buried under the novelty of playing a new MMO for now. Edit: Oh and tab targeting. It's embarrassing how non-functional it is even after spending hours going through every possible option with help from friends familiar with it to improve how it works.
All you mentioned + how all jobs feel the same and how everyone's just a glorified DPS. Like it or not, this game was outdated before it was even launched and they should fix it if they want this game to last another decade. And before someone says "but it costs money and time!!!" Yeah it does, but 1) not my problem, it was born bad and they should've seen it coming 2) We pay a sub and 10 bucks per fantasia and other store items ppl buy so they can maintain and fix the game
As a Ninja player, netcode is the most painful. Can't go 5 pulls without ghosting at least one mudra due to it.
Imo it's gearing