That time has come for me as well...Follow

That said, Thayos, I took 3 brand new people into Twintania last week and we got to Twister phase with little to no difficulty. So there's an argument to be had about memorization verses randomness.

We were even recovering our healer in multiple points. We still ultimately wiped, but we had never planned to go there to begin with that night, and we did it to wrap up the night.

While I don't like the instant-death and limited recovery mechanics, the fact that they are in many points so cleanly scripted tends to make up for that fact. I feel that if they better hone their difficulty so it's less about instant death and more about long-term consequence through the fight, it would be fine.

I can't help but recall how much I enjoy the last fight in Stone Vigil Hard mode. Nothing in that fight is instant hit, but get hit too many times, you're toast.

But that fight was a bit on the random end too, an easy overall. I could see a marriage of these two concepts be the best thing for FFXIV's battles - some portions scripted with some not, and with stacking consequences rather than a single, instant death.

While I'm not disagreeing with your statement you have to acknowledge they didn't magically get it right first time. I remember week after frustrating week attempting Archimonde only to have one or two people repeatedly fail to click their feathers and lead to an entire raid wipe. Blizzard learned from that I feel, although I haven't played the last expansion so my knowledge is possibly outdated but S-E may in time, at their own glacial pace, come to realise this as well.

I feel, currently, if they're going to continue overusing the insta-death mechanics on certain encounters they should at least exclude those fights from the DF as it really only leads to frustration and disappointment. I haven't played in over a month now but I grew so tired of attempting T5 and Ultima HM with PUGs where the opening line from half the alliance was, "So what do we do here then?" The DF isn't fit for purpose where these encounters are concerned, it's perfect for dungeon-bashing etc but anything remotely challenging requiring class knowledge and a basic grasp of strategy I feel it really flounders.

No, they need to be left in. They just need to tune the battles so that if a few players in the group die, you can still get the clear so players who are struggling can practice without completely halting the entire group from progress.

When you learn something, failure is expected. When you learn from something, success is an option. People just need to learn to execute and there's really no other way around it since it's a group activity.


Normal dungeons can be accessed immediately by anyone with the required character level. Even if you tossed or disenchanted all your quest rewards, you can purchase the necessary ilvl gear from vendors assuming you are high enough level.

All you have to do is compare the ilvl of the dungeon and raid drops to the ilvl required for the next raid...

Normal dungeons drop 410 gear, but heroic dungeons require a 435 ilvl to enter. Heroic dungeons drop 450 gear, but LFR requires at least 460 ilvl to enter. Even if you do go through the progression there are still small gaps. These gaps are expected to be filled by doing your dailies and purchasing valor point gear, defeating world bosses weekly for higher level gear and/or purchasing crafted gear.

Yes, LFR is meant for casual players to experience raiding but you still have to work up to it. It might be possible to skip heroics but it requires an extraordinary amount of 3 things: Time, money and luck.

Time: You could purchase almost a full set of valor gear just capping your valor, but it's essentially 2 pieces every 3 weeks. It would take you several months of just doing dailies if you wanted to try and leapfrog like this. The only supplement was battlefield barrens which gave a slightly lower than valor reward once a week. You also had world bosses, but the chance of getting gear from those was about the same as if you were running a dungeon. If this was all you did then you might get 5 pieces of gear in a month. Still not enough.

Money: Some of the valor gear can be traded or sold on the auction house, but early in an expansion it is in very high demand. It will cost you a fortune and you can only purchase 2-3 pieces. That alone will not break the requirement. There are also crafted pieces of gear that will help, but again; you're going to pay through the nose. A casual player wouldn't play enough to be able to afford either of these, much less both. I still don't think that going both of these routes will allow you into LFR. I know they reduced the ilvl requirement from 463 to 460 so I could be wrong on this, but it's still not in the realm of possibility for a player who isn't farming relentlessly or buying gold from RMT.

Luck: You could go weeks without seeing a world boss drop that helped you or you could get everything you needed in just a few.

The moral of the story is, it was always faster to go through the progression. No casual player would be able to afford to buy their way through content. More importantly, if the ultimate goal was to participate in content then they wouldn't want to skip it anyway.

As for timeless isle, yes it's a nice catch up mechanic but full 496 is not even close to the 560ish you need to enter hardmodes. The discussion here is about players in XIV having catch-up mechanics that allow them to participate in the hardest content without having to prove that they've earned the right to be there. It's also about there being a random group finder tool for this type of content. You can't run normal or heroic raids in WoW without creating your own group or being invited to one that someone else is putting together.

Edited, Sep 10th 2014 4:40pm by FilthMcNasty

There's not anything wrong with allowing players to get caught up but at best, they should be set on the doorstep of current normal mode content. The issue is that there are rewards that allow players to leapfrog normals altogether and go directly to harder difficulty content that is current, not outdated.

Never trust the OFs!

I disagree that the issue is one of underdeveloped player skill. As I've said before, most of these fights are simply about memorizing scripts, so success in one fight doesn't carry over to success in the next fight. Every single battle has its own unique learning curve. So the problem isn't that people are skipping through the content and not getting good enough... the problem is that most people don't have statics, and they're constantly thrown into the mix with people who haven't yet memorized fight mechanics, which basically dooms the run before it starts. Ultimately, it's about memorization. No matter how much I memorize pattern A, I'll still have just as much memorizing to do when I hit patterns B, C and D.

That said, I've done a few of the more recently implemented battles over the past week, and I think SE acknowledged the errors in its ways and is moving away from overly scripted insta-death spam content. Yesterday I entered Levi Ex with my new FC, and although I died at the very end, was able to beat it on my third or fourth attempt. I didn't fall off the barge until after I died (my corpse slid off into the frigid waters). In this case, although there were plenty of insta-death moves, mitigating those moves was also much easier. For example, when dodging Leviathan's dives, you don't have to run to a tiny point on the ship, wait for a bomb to go off, then run to another tiny point in hopes of surviving while not getting blown up and/or hit by landslide. Also, the railings are up for half the fight, keeping players who die in the battlefield a bit longer and giving parties more of a chance to learn deeper into the bout. After Levi, we went into Ramuh Ex... and this fight was very similar in that the mechanics were there, but much simpler to deal with. We made it slightly past the first big DPS check (about halfway through the fight) before stopping.

Previously, I've said what separates FFXIV from FFXI is that in FFXI, there were often several ways to mitigate insta-death mechanics, often by using various well-timed job abilities. In FFXIV, there's usually just one way to mitigate such mechanics, and if you ***** up you're boned. While that's still the case, SE seems to be making those mechanics slightly easier to pull off.

That's why you're seeing players (like myself) who haven't even attempted Titan Ex jump ahead to the later battles. I'd gladly do Titan Ex (and I plan on doing it), but it's currently a poorly designed, heavily scripted insta-death spam fest. That doesn't sound fun to me. but battles like Moogle Ex, Levi Ex and Ramuh Ex seem to get it just right.