Endgame Post from a JP PlayerFollow

I can only recall one RPG boss battle that required strategy and decision making, and that was Lavos in Chrono Trigger. All of the other RPG boss fights I can think of were simply marathon battles where you needed to out heal the damage you took.

Oh yeah, there was that one super gimmicky boss battle at the end of Chrono Cross. That was aweful.

The thing with offline rpgs is that the really hard fights are just gimmicks what give cheap deaths, because you can always over level and and trivialize any boss battle.

ex, ffvii at max level there was no interesting fights expect ruby and diamond weapon because those fights were super gimmicky.

To make fights interesting you have to either have bosses so much stronger then you that you have to find ways to beat them with team work and strategy (this only really works with games that have lots of horizontal progression because content stays challenging for long periods of time) or lots of gimmicks(this works with vertical progression games cuz even when you out level the content the gimmick can keep things challenging)

I don't know what FFX you were playing, but the PS2 original, the bosses were scripted. They either reacted to situation (usually % of its health remaining), presence of status effects, or it reacted to what you did to it.

It wasn't "Random", or "Luck", or anything like that.

The Guardian before Zanarkand?

It was basically something along these lines:

1). Normal Attack
2). Protect
3). Tail Sweep (which removes Haste)
4). Lucid Wings (or whatever that attack was called, the AoE status attack)

If missing X amount of its health, it'd throw these in:

1). Curaga or Regen on itself (100% to 75%)
2). Dispel on itself (if it has Reflect, 50-75%)
3). Reflect on one of your group members (<50% left, it'd follow up with Curaga or Regen bounced off that group member)

Not so random. Even more scripted is Yunalesca.



If you were Zerging Yunalesca, you were doing it horribly wrong.

Yunalesca spams counter-attack spells on you depending on what you used on her in Phase One.

Magic: Silence
Physical: Blind
Overdrives: Sleep

All of these also Dispel. BUT, Reflect prevents these.

Phase 2, she uses Hellbiter and turns everybody into a zombie and attempts to Regen (which Reflect prevents). Regen on Zombies = Poison.

Phase 3, she starts using Mega Death (zombies are immune to it).

The strategy to beat her without zerging is easy to understand, but sometimes difficult to pull off in the heat of the battle:

1). Keep Reflect up.
2). Keep at least 1 zombie in the group at all times (to avoid Mega Death).
3). Keep at least 1 zombie in your "back line" group to swap in in case crap hits the fan and you need a healthy zombie NOW.



"Don't attack it while its tail up" is actually a strategy. Hard to believe, eh? Very simple strategy, but it is a strategy. The first boss of FF7 is a tutorial boss -- it teaches you that bosses in FF7 are way more advanced than bosses in previous Final Fantasy games. It isn't meant to be complicated. The second boss you fight in a pincer attack, and if you fight him right, you hardly even get hit and he goes down like a little baby. If you fight him wrong, he will straight up murder your sorry butt. Were you paying attention during the boss fight? You'll probably do OK. Try to just mash the Attack Command and not care about which way he's facing? You'll probably die or at best barely survive.



Just because you failed at strategy in ATB-type (well, OK, FFX isn't ATB but close) games, doesn't mean the game was poorly designed. Every single boss in FFX with the exception of Seymour's Last Battle, Jecht+2 Pillars (who woulda thought the last major story boss would be somewhat hard?), and the Optional Bosses (which are, uh, optional) all were very do-able with most setups, unless you were horribly underpowered, as long as you followed the strategy and paid attention. With Seymour's Last Battle on the mountain, all you needed was Rikku's "Use" command, to use that one item on Yuna that doubles her HP for one fight if she couldn't survive that huge AoE attack without it.

Just because it is possible to level up and completely overpower the bosses doesn't mean they're poorly designed, either. I even specified in my earlier post that "as long as you didn't cheese the boss fights", you'd have an awesomely scripted boss that had genius mechanics if you paid attention. Some of those bosses actually appear to examine the conditions of the battle (like the boss before Zanarkand appears to do) and choose actions based upon that.

EDIT: In FFX, what am I calling "Appropriately powered"? Simple: Go through the game as per normal, and fight all the random battles while progressing through the game normally (+ or minus a few as some players get lost in mazes etc), having everybody take 1 action per battle (so that nobody misses out on XP), no grinding for levels.

Edited, Jun 20th 2014 8:50pm by Lyrailis

Just like MMORPGs and the various arguments casual gamers use to combat "hardcore gamers": People have fun in their own way, for example I have fun seeing how stuff actually work below the hood to see what square's programmers thought or didn't think of with certain battle scenes in their older games. Much like you have casual gamers who state they have fun not doing every content in the game in order to "space out what they do and have stuff to do later", which of course if you say they're going slow you'll get a judgmental response.

Again, you're arguing form the vantage point of hindsight. And again, you assume that I haven't beaten this legitimately before. I have. It's Free Company policy not to use exploits and there was a long standing argument within the FC whether or not the Enrage method was an exploit. Eventually, it was brought up that the Community representatives from SE said it was not, so a compromise was made. We would farm Coil 2 using the enrage method once at the end of each raid night so that our members would be rewarded for sticking it out, but we would not advance beyond Coil 2 until we could beat the fight with the normal method.

But your argument amounts to:

"We beat it, you should have no problem."

This isn't about whining, this is about the utter and complete lack of capability of some players to commiserate with others, or at the very least look at mechanics from different perspectives of their own.

You don't know me very well if you haven't gotten used to the fact that I habitually play the devil's advocate, often on behalf of casual players who, honestly, don't bother themselves with boards such as these because they view them as cesspools of elitist @#%^s - their words, not mine.

You can claim 'adjust' adapt, but there becomes a point where it ceases to be worth it, for the majority of your playerbase. Then, you're tyring to justify content that's only accessible to a sliver of your percentage base... cause prestige? That's **** poor game design and a fireable offense in the business world. When the gaming generation WAS a minority, it was excusable because you appealed to an inherently niche audience.

As Yoshida and Crew learned the hard way (read: the launch debacle) the market isn't so niche anymore. And to funnel the bulk of your audience down a single loot/story/achievement path, without having it accessible to the majority of your audience, means you're throwing away vast sums of money.

So, I'm going to turn this question on it's head to you, and ask you what would you prefer? That Yoshida inevitably tune "The Echo" up to ridiculous amounts to make up for the overuse of one-shot mechanics? Or that the mechanics themselves be somewhat more forgiving, and requiring less assistance overall? Cause the alternative is taking construction trucks to SE's bank accounts and just shoveling money out their front door into it.

The people who just pin up these tactics as foolproof from the onset and flat out neglect the difficulties of getting said tactics down, is what gets me into these 'whining' rants. It's as if they clear it, then flat out disrespect the struggle it was to get that far to begin with, or worse, heavily disrespect the people it leaves in the dust. And in the end, it is about the people. They're the one's paying, they're the ones trying to enjoy the game. And the very point of this thread is that right now, there's no balance in the current mechanics to appease any of the listed three player stereotypes.

Allegan Rot is not a joke. It literally forces you to play around it entirely or you wipe. There's no room for mistake there, even with the Echo it leaves very little recovery window unless you can immediately get back on your feet and reset. To address it as such is an insult to the endgame crowds that pioneered the methods to pass it, but to not list it out as a problem is just as insulting and blind to the vast majority players who've never passed it Legit.

In the end, the numbers don't lie. It's astronomically rare to find anyone these days that still beats Coil 2 using anything but the enrage method, and I'll make a safe bet that if Allegan Rot wasn't so downright punishing to get down, people wouldn't use the enrage method because doing it legit would be faster. The 8 minute wait is not something I'd want to do if I could rely on a Pug go without it, or my FC didn't want to relive the hassle that it was just to get it down that way. (Honestly though, for S&Gs I'd like to actually test haste out, most do not want to bother with even the nerfed High Voltage at twice the speed though.)

We're going to have another one of these case in points here soon, once Leviathan and Moogle Extreme become accessible separate of the original Extreme Trio. Sooo few people are going to go ahead and say "Yeah! Lets go do Titan extreme! That was a fun fight!" Granted, I'm sure there are some. But we really should not be basing our trickeldown mechanics on our top one percent of players - which is exactly what Yoshida is doing right now.



Edited, Jun 21st 2014 3:45pm by Hyrist

I actually like the content that's in place, as well as the paths for progression between hardcore/casual players.

To me, there are three big problems:

1: Too much insta-death, to the point that some battles don't seem to require strategy (which, to me, means no real skill).

- We've already discussed this, but I'd reduce the number of insta-death mechanics and add more randomness to boss battles. I'd rather have healers drop cure bombs than just have everyone be dead. It's just not really fun to get curb stomped over single mistakes with no chance for redemption. Battles should be tuned so that players who are good at their jobs can rebound from bad situations. As a side note, SE could add content that isn't related to the storyline and only drops gear, and this could be the uber 1337 content the hardcore players need to feel special.

(NOTE: I hate bringing up FFXI, but the CoP storyline was filled with difficult battles that could be beaten in a variety of ways. Eventually, most people could beat these battles without trouble, but nobody I knew waltzed in and beat everything the first time. They were difficult enough to require practice. So it CAN be done.)

2: Endgame is too inaccessible because of completion lockouts.

- It sucks that you pretty much have to form a static to get through the content, because casual players are often left on the outside looking in. This is also the case in FC, where some FC members are left out because others have already grouped up. I think this should be more like Crystal Tower, where people can do each turn as much as they'd like but can only receive one drop per week. At least then cycling people in for content completion would be easier, and people would have more time to practice and memorize fight scripts.

3. The game doesn't encourage people to build communities for clearing content.

- Free companies in this game come first, and linkshells come second... and not just socially. The development team put literally no thought into the linkshell system. Why aren't there at least linkshell messages or bulletin boards? Why can't there be some kind of in-game calendar option? As it stands, linkshells completely lack the functionality needed to bring a group of complete strangers together. And because people can only be in one FC -- and because many have already invested lots of gil/time into housing/points -- the communities within this game are very fragmented and static. If people had better infrastructure for forming in-game communities (and if lockouts were rolled back), then you'd see a surge of new communities filled with people who are eager and determined to clear this content.


Really, I feel the battle principles as they are now would probably be far more tenable if the game's social infrastructure were improved.


That said, the point of my comment wasn't to debate game design principles, because I'm not a game designer. I'm just a guy who has fun playing games, and I try not to over-analyze what I'm doing... that would require me to contemplate how much of my time is wasted in front of a screen.


Edited, Jun 21st 2014 2:03pm by Thayos

Ha, touche. Problem is, working customer service comes with dead period of time in which my mind tends to wander to subjects like these. But in coutnerpoint, if I'm getting paid to waste my time in front of a computer, is it truly a waste of time?

On Topic:
I like this reply, and I agree with many of the ideas on point here.

On the point of Social tools. I always felt that in some cases, people misused the Free Company system. A lot of people tend to use it primarily as a strong structure to build Endgame groups around, and in such their base tends to be smaller and more focused. I always felt that Free Companies, the way they are designed now, should have been used to house larger groups of players that are devided, by linkshells, into smaller, more focused groups for activities, and then the tools are developed around said concept.

However, from a more personal perspective, rather than an objective one, the very same thought pattern I present is undercut by my very own pratices in game. Specificly, Roleplaying communities then get hamstrung out of the abiliy to create customer settings based on the theme of their roleplay group. This could be offset by personal housing, or personal rooming, but we're not sure the extent and limits of that yet.

The over all theme of encouraging the community to interact more and play together, I am fully behind, however. To this end I'd like to see more open world events that inspire Free Companies to work together, rather than work in competition. But how to tune this for Free Companies of all sizes is a major issue to consider, one of which, isn't in my employment to make.

A personal question, Thayos: Where abouts in the CoP timeline are you referring to as far as difficulty? There was much, I feel was improperly tuned or just improperly implemented about CoP in particular - which was evidenced that, before the level cap raise, less than 30% of the active playerbase even completed CoP years after its implementation - which I view as a pretty monumental failure considering that was story content on top of endgame content gated. I'd say CoP was bad on the second catagory problem you listed.

That said, the fights themselves, from a personal perspective, I did enjoy very much, challenge and all. If people are catching on, I'm often conflicted between what I view should be more accessible, and my enjoyment of challenges. For instance, I enjoyed Twintania, difficulty and all, thoroughly. But, due to accessibility problems, I lothe Titan Ex with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. Because of its tendency to remove people completely, not only from participating in the fight, but also from viewing it at all once knocked out, is just heavily tilted against a fair learning curve.

On the matter of attempt/loot lockouts: I completely agree with having Coil assume the same participation/loot rules as Crystal Tower. It really does just hamper learning the fight having it the other way around. Even after getting Twin down, we still have to consiter just not doing Second Coil until it unlocked because of the odd number of Raiders our FC has - it's just not fair to them and we're not a hardcore Raiding FC.



In the end I just feel as if there was a stint of design mistakes as how they instituted difficulty in a few choice fights. In each instance they overused instant-kill mechanics, I've actually pondered out alternatives they could have gone with that wouldn't have been such a one-dimentional punishment mechanic

I'm a firm believer that difficulty isn't what stopped most people from beating CoP... I think the bigger problem was lack of incentive (and I don't even really think it was a problem... more a matter of choice).

For the longest time, there was simply no overly compelling reason for casual players to finish the CoP storyline. People would unlock Lufaise Meadows for exping, but even that was a novelty considering you could level on weapons in sky. There also wasn't much incentive for players to do endgame in sea, either. A lot of people enjoyed limbus; but between sky, dynamis and HNMs (and the fact that leveling a job to 75 could take a casual player six to 12 months), the cost of going through CoP to reach endgame just wasn't something the playerbase collectively strove for.

CoP was difficult, but it was easy enough for a dedicated group of people to do. There were no restrictions on linkshells, which were the primary communities in the game, and the playerbase as a whole was more cooperative than the community in XIV given the co-dependent nature of the game. Also, there were no lockouts like we have now. So the pieces were in place for players to form statics much easier.

My CoP static had a highly unorthodox setup, and more than once "elite" players would tell me we wouldn't succeed. We were ninja (taru), thief, rdm, rdm, bst, whm. We had very little DPS compared to the standard party setups, so winning our battles often took creative kiting/sleeping/timed use of abilities/designated healers on certain players/etc. At least a couple of our battles required using almost the entire 30-minute timer to win. For snoll tzar, our bst came as blm, and we created a strategy we'd never seen in any walkthroughs in order to pass the DPS check. I can't recall a single battle where our strategy consisted of "stand here... dodge this twice... now run over there into that crack... run out and in twice... then run over here..." etc.

Anyway, once ToAU came out, there was even less reason to go to sea. People who had sea access enjoyed things like Limbus, but there were still just lots of people who didn't want to go through all the trouble when they already had enough endgame content to keep them busy.

CoP was definitely hard, but it was hard in the right ways... and at the finish line were big, bad NMs that hardcore players loved to farm and kill (with absolutely no impact on the story, so the rest of us didn't need to feel like we were being gated off from the game).

Edited, Jun 21st 2014 7:36pm by Thayos

The content contradicts the design philosophy. Yoshi has stated that XIV is aimed at the extremely casual. Those are his own words. Personally it's not what I want from the game, but it isn't my game to design. He wants to make a casual game, that's his prerogative.

I don't get why they put hardcore mechanics in a casualcore game. Then at E3 they announce a 'brutal' mode that's supposed to be even harder than the extremes... what? That's actually the kind of content I would look forward to(were it not for the damned latency), but I see why people are upset about the 'difficulty' associated with some of these encounters. I really can't tell where they're trying to take this game anymore.

I agree that the game doesn't encourage people to build communities for clearing content but disagree that upgraded linkshell features would do much at all to change that. I think what the game really needs is content that gives people some real incentive to invite their friends, and incentive for those friends to want to participate. Even if more social options were added, it wouldn't change the options currently in the game which inevitably lead to close knit groups running together. I wouldn't attempt to recruit a decent number of players to clear content and tell them we were running on this date at that time only to tell a bunch of them "Sorry, the game only supports 8 man groups and we have what we need to run tonight."

It's not that I wouldn't love to try and get a group together of people excited to clear content and tell everyone to bring their friends, their family, other linkshell/fc members who want to try the content, etc. But the type of end game content that was accessible and flexible enough for this to work out well just doesn't exist in FFXIV ARR at this time.

Edited, Jun 22nd 2014 4:58am by Susanoh

They stopped giving missions a formal chapter numbering system with ToAU and just labeled the missions 1-45.

Then they did the weird back and forth thing with WotG where you had to do your nation's quests and the main trunk story missions at the same time, which turned out to be awful because if you wanted to do one nation and your friends wanted to do another nation, they couldn't help you on the quests. I was stuck on Winderst's "A Feast for Gnats" for about two years until I convinced a couple of friends to form a static to eventually knock out all three nations, but starting with the Windy stories so we could all progress together to the end. (Then you could go back and zip through the other nation's quests without having to redo the main story missions.)

They didn't repeat that in the Adoulin missions. Thank Altana.

I guess my point was that casual players shouldn't really be clearing hardcore content with ease. It's clear that they'd like to, but reducing the hardcore content to the level casuals feel comfortable with will also reduce the will of hardcore players to participate in that content.

I know that the hardcore(at least, as far as most would agree to) are a small percentage of this game. I do feel that many players who consider themselves to be casual would also grow bored of faceroll content though. Most any MMO on the market separates gear in tiers based on difficulty. For XIV this would probably equate to the same item or gear with slightly lower stats and ilvl, but I don't think people want that either...

This. A thousand times, this.

FFXI had tough bosses (and I use this term relatively, before someone with a dire need of being that guy comes in and says ZOMG THEY WERE EASY), but what made FFXI's bosses manageable was the ability to recover from a ***** up. You may get to the point of no return, and even then you can use the zombie tactic to keep the boss's HP from recovering (Zombie tactic is having one person repeatedly raise and die to the boss while the alliance recovers.)

In FFXIV, the bosses just punish you relentlessly for a mistake. Someone smack spiney? Alliance wipe. Tank dies? Most likely an alliance wipe. Rot? Alliance wipe. Hell. Demon Wall and you weren't directly facing him (which makes zero sense...he uses repel which is a forward push from his position, but you fly towards left)? Bridge knock out, can't be raised. Every MMO has its elitists, but this game forced even elitists to become that much more elitist to make up for the mechanic. Rule of the thumb: If you can't memorize mechanics, you're dead and useless and might have killed everyone else.

If mechanics don't lock you enough, you are ALSO locked by every static consisting of a maximum of 8 players. We have a cesspool of statics because of this. Not in a static? Well, have fun in DF in PF, where you are lucky if you see a win. Have friends you play with? Well, unless you were there with them from the start, their static is already done.

Don't even get me started with some of these statics.

I'm at the same wall most people are at. Titan Ex and T5. With such a wall like this, there isn't much for me to do that isn't just more dungeon grinding, more roulettes, and more FATEs. Its monotonous and makes you feel isolated. I liked FFXI for giving me a nice big crew to end game with. Here? I've been flying solo since level 1. Even the Main Story forced me to play solo, with the exception of the same bloody dungeons I'm grinding at 50 for currency.

Sorry for the rant, but my FFXIV life is just bland right now. Other than gossiping/RPing with my LS mates (who have their own statics), I'm finding less and less reasons to log in, unless I literally just have nothing to do. Which sucks. I like this game. I want this game to do for me what FFXI did, but it seems like "just another grind MMO, but hey, I can use my gamepad with this one. Yay."