-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward |OT| Raiders of the Void Ark
- Thread starter Trojita
- Start date
Man, The Howling Eye was freakin' hard.
First night I was a 44 BLM. Wiped about 6 or 7 times before we all gave up for the night. Nobody could seem to do everything right. Either staying too close to pillars or not taking out adds or not properly avoiding the large attacks.
Then last night I tried again. 45 BLM with the 45 job gear, so much better defense and INT than I had last fight. Wiped twice and succeeded the third time (even though the other DPS had died with about 10% boss health left and I fucked up my rotation and had to cast Blizzard 1 and wait for MP regeneration, ugh).
FINALLY. Pretty awesome cutscene after that too.
First night I was a 44 BLM. Wiped about 6 or 7 times before we all gave up for the night. Nobody could seem to do everything right. Either staying too close to pillars or not taking out adds or not properly avoiding the large attacks.
Then last night I tried again. 45 BLM with the 45 job gear, so much better defense and INT than I had last fight. Wiped twice and succeeded the third time (even though the other DPS had died with about 10% boss health left and I fucked up my rotation and had to cast Blizzard 1 and wait for MP regeneration, ugh).
FINALLY. Pretty awesome cutscene after that too.
HylianScribe
Member
Starting to feel the burn out in this game. Between Adders pvp and being stuck on the same piece of content for 2+ months now, starting to think I need a break. I don't care if I get called a scrub for this, but if there is no "HM" equivalent for next raid, ie 3 tiers, I'm not raiding savage until the odd patches to save myself the grief and agony by having gear carry available from the get go. I can't take not clearing something for this long, it's making me want to quit the game, not just raiding.
In happier news, I started playing Super Mario Maker last night and was a lot of fun. Qhon suggested making a coil level. Not sure how to do that, heh. I can think of an idea for Titan EX - a single platform level where Thwomps smash down to break off the edges every so often, and bob-ombs get tossed down.
In happier news, I started playing Super Mario Maker last night and was a lot of fun. Qhon suggested making a coil level. Not sure how to do that, heh. I can think of an idea for Titan EX - a single platform level where Thwomps smash down to break off the edges every so often, and bob-ombs get tossed down.
The name doesn't mean anything. This is a normal cycle for MMOs, the devs got told that their content was so easy for too long that they decided to overtune the difficulty. Stay tuned for one or two raid cycles from now where they undertune it way too much before finally finding the happy medium again. But yeah, the "tier" doesn't mean anything. A3 and A4 were always going to be this difficult, it has nothing to do with the fact that they added a baby mode.
I'm tried too, mostly of whining though.
yep a lot of players are feeling the same about savage. now lets see if SE will do something about it
It'd be easier to handle if it wasn't all of four bosses until like February or March.
That's a really, really long time for a dearth of endgame content. Groups are already past A1S and A2S, and are starting to overcome A3S and then literally the only end-game fight remaining is A4. To me that doesn't really seem acceptable, no matter how much "good will" the developers seem to have accrued from 1.0->2.0.
IMO, a good raiding scene has challenging but do-able fights with soft gear checks, more challenging fights with strong gear checks, and then "secret" or "prestige" fights that are tuned around what A3S/A4S are now (think Ulduar hard mode bosses, Yogg-Saron 0 lights, or in FFXIV terms, the Savage Coil fights which only rewarded bragging rights titles.)
You can cut out development time by just making 2-3 versions of the same fights, but that really shouldn't be a path we should encourage if at all possible.
A good raid balances difficulty, progression, risk and reward, and is designed with the patch cycle length in mind. Alex Savage currently doesn't feel like it exemplifies any of those things.
This isn't anything new. Their raid content cycle has always been 4 bosses each 6 months. I mean, if you don't like it then you don't like it, but this has been the deal since 2.0 started.
I don't think you're alone, and this is why I'd be pretty shocked to see A3S/A4S style fights repeated next tier. I still think they could have eased the problem by not making A1S/A2S relatively quick fights with a brick wall at the end (I've said it before, but the order should have been 2->1->4->3 with some tuning bumps to make 1 harder and 4 easier), but the way things have played out and the general discontent with 3 means we'll probably get a gentler curve.
I dunno, most of what I've enjoyed about Alexander Savage has been the planning aspect of it more than the raw damage (talking out P4 positions and movement plans for Protean/Sluice/Digi that basically eliminated mispass possibilities was fun, idk. Puzzles!), and I'm guessing that's a lot of what they'll remove next go-round, which is a bummer. But based on the design philosophy behind pretty much everything non-Savage in the expansion, I'm guessing they'll make next tier a little less ridiculous. They may leave the A4S-style gear wall in the final floor, since that was incredibly effective at keeping world-first unattainable for a while, but I think that just works out to a month of final floor which people might be okay with.
Ideally we'd get easy mode normal, a Coil-tuned HM, and then an actual Savage version that dropped, like, a 5 ilvl upgrade item for all gear (which is still what gobdip should be--the current coat/twine/dip setup is stupid as dip becomes totally useless really fast.)
Right, but Final Coil was October 27th 2014 and we probably won't get Alexander 2 until Feb/March 2016 (assuming they get back to normal 3-month timeframe; push it out further if they keep up their recent cycles.) That's 8 raid bosses spanning like 15-16 months. They just really, really fucked up their patch cycles around HW.
They took time off after HW dropped (which was fine) and they did that stupid month long delay between HW dropping and savage dropping (which was stupid). That's where the extra three months came from. If 3.2 comes out in February than that just tells me they are back on track with the same release cycle. I'll hold my outrage for now and just laugh at the doomsday enthusiasts for now.
I think I've been spared burn-out due to the fact that my group eased down a bit once we hit A3S. We usually do a lockout, sometimes two if everyone has plenty of time and energy. Plus we're typically only doing this a few times per week. (Once to get back to A3S, and maaaaybe twice more for progression.)
Only advice I can give to Korra. Put Badder progression on hold for a few weeks and do something else until 3.1. I'm sure there's other titles you could be playing between raids to give yourself a bit of a breather.
PS: Back before Heavensward released, I remember YoshiP saying that they probably wouldn't make the next expansion as large. At the time I really didn't understand that, but, now I think I can see why they'd make that decision. The size of the Heavensward story clearly tripped their update schedule up a bit. A small expansion, where more of the story is told in subsequent patches, probably makes a lot more sense given the size of the development team.
Only advice I can give to Korra. Put Badder progression on hold for a few weeks and do something else until 3.1. I'm sure there's other titles you could be playing between raids to give yourself a bit of a breather.
PS: Back before Heavensward released, I remember YoshiP saying that they probably wouldn't make the next expansion as large. At the time I really didn't understand that, but, now I think I can see why they'd make that decision. The size of the Heavensward story clearly tripped their update schedule up a bit. A small expansion, where more of the story is told in subsequent patches, probably makes a lot more sense given the size of the development team.
I think a lot of people have said this to Korra already
You play too much FFXIV and there really isn't much content there to match all of that play time. I mean, play what you want, but I think if you want video game time, it's probably best if you step away from FFXIV for a bit. Not saying to out right quit but PVPing during all of your free time probably hasn't helped the burn-out situation.I'm pretty sure the fact that they've been working in contact crunch time since 2.0 released is what tripped up the schedule. They finally realized that wasn't viable. It was nice while it lasted but there is a reason other MMOs have slower content roll outs.
It doesn't really matter to me where the delays came from, more that they followed up the gigantic drought of the end of ARR with a delayed raid with weird tuning that's probably going to be around longer than it should. It's just really unfortunate that A3S/A4S happened now with the scheduling stuff, instead of at a time when things were 4 bosses every 6 months with poverty gear on month 4 like clockwork. I just kind of think they messed up the expansion in a few key ways so burnout isn't terribly surprising or unwarranted.
3.2 is infinitely more interesting than 3.1 for that reason; we'll get a lot of what they learned from HW out of what they do there I think.
Are you using large in the sense that the zones are big and empty?
I'd estimate 80% of my time spent leveling to 60 was repetitive throwaway quests (like moogles) and travel time. The dungeons were fun, and the story was an improvement, but I don't really understand why the expansion was apparently so large it "tripped them up". Compared to other MMO's this expansion was actually quite small.
Oh, I'm sure that hasn't helped, but I think HW exacerbated the issue.
First, we had 2.55, which wasn't really a full patch, they just held over one trial and the last bit of MSQ from 2.5. This was basically a means to give them more time to finish the expansion, without having a huge gap in time between patches.
Honestly, this wouldn't have been a bad way to handle it. However, then Heavensward was delayed a month, and the follow-up patch was delayed a month after that. The net result, is that the last patch we've had that was primarily centered around the end-game, was about ten months ago. Admittedly Heavensward helped, but only a relatively small portion of HW centers around end-game.
Really, when it comes to new expansion, the developers either need to do a better job keeping older content relevant, or they need to get follow-up patches out a bit faster. This doesn't matter nearly as much near the end of an expansion cycle, since there's generally a lot of back-content by then.
The story was large and there isn't another MMO that you could point to with a similar sized story for their expansion (SWTOR is actually getting an expansion this month with what I am estimating is more story but that expac is getting no new dungeons, no new raids, and only a 5 level increase).
I don't know what you're qualifiying as "story", WoW has plenty of "story" but whereas FFXIV fades to black and puts you in a cutscene, WoW works the story into quest chains (along with having cutscenes) and gameplay.
The story in HW was a cutscene or two, usually following 1-2 levels of pure level grinding or following a dungeon - i.e., stuff that would have happened regardless.
WoW has lore handed to you in walls of text from quest givers with occasional big events happening. If I have to explain the difference then I guess this isn't a conversation worth having.
ಠ_ಠ
A cutscene or two once every level or two, this is accurate.
When some mashes the button during dialogue and skips anything skippable then we get posts like that.
idk /shrug
Idk man, I hear that Witcher 3 game has some "story" too. I'm usually doing some traveling then they do a talking thing for a bit followed by more travelling. It feels like a lot of padding.
Allright, I'm clearly discussing this game with the game's most fervent fanboys, so you're right, this discussion is definitely not worth having.
"You're wrong because your a fanboy," is a notoriously weak argument.
Much like "no it's not" with meme eyes.
I dunno, I felt like I was skipping a ridiculous number of cutscenes per level.
It does branch into an interesting discussion about the return of development effort for a story-based MMO vs a more content-based one. For a grinding/repetition-based game, investing a substantial amount of time and energy in stuff meant to be done once is unique in the genre (oh, and TOR). Makes it hard to really compare with other games.
I don't know, you tried to tell us that WoW and FFXIV had a similar amount of story. The best I could muster is laughing at you.
That's the thing, most of the cutscenes you were skipping weren't really story. Unless they were main story quests, which typically bookended each zone, everything in between, hours and hours worth, was throwaway filler quest garbage. If it wasn't "walk from point A to point B and talk to this npc" it was "kill X mob" or "click X amount of sparkly points on the ground". You may have missed a cutscene where the Moogle King floats around, but saying that's somehow leaps and bounds above storytelling in another MMO is just silly.
If we were to actually add up the time investment in legitimate story progression and the farting around you were required to do in between those story quests, the latter would eclipse the former. Most of the time leveling, you'd finish the short story chain and then essentially say "Cya later" to Alphinaud and co. until you spent the next four to five hours clicking on moogles or delivering key items between bug people.
- Several NEW zones, each of which got a cutscene or two when you first entered the zone and explored it.
- Five ENTIRELY NEW dungeons, complete with bosses, mechanics and music. This doesn't count Aetherichemical Research Facility. Each new dungeon generally had multiple scenes surrounding it.
- NEW job quests, each of which has multiple cutscenes with each quest
- NEW Raid, which had several cutscenes.
- NEW Primals, each of which was given their own storyline and had multiple cutscenes surrounding each.
- Repurposed old dungeons and trial locations for new events in Heavensward, EACH of which also had a cutscene.
ಠ_ಠ
The bolded is a factually false statement. You are correct in asserting that you can't just do the main story to get from 50-60 but there were multiple main story related quests in each zone, not one at the beginning and one at the end. Asserting otherwise is ridiculous at best and purposely dishonest at worst.
It's a good thing there's a qualifier in front of the bolded word that implies it doesn't hold true every time, just most of the time.
Which is true.
Except it's not? The only time you're statement is even close to true is the last zone of the game because they obviously just put filler in of activating each of those teleport things. The rest of the zones were full of story quests guiding your hand through the entire zone. So again, you are being purposely dishonest for reasons I guess. I'm sorry story MMOs aren't your thing.
Edit: And not even mentioning that the story brought you back to multiple 2.x areas as well so it wasn't even just a "bookend" for entering and exiting each new zone.
I might also note, RPG's in general, are one of the most time consuming genre's to develop. There are a lot of potential bugs that can occur when you're creating a simple fetch quest, so each one needs to be carefully and meticulously debugged to make certain nothing game breaking occurs.
There's a reason so many other MMO's just tell their stories via walls of text. What FFXIV is doing is much more difficult.
There's a reason so many other MMO's just tell their stories via walls of text. What FFXIV is doing is much more difficult.
This is really more lore vs story? I dunno, WoW never really cares if you deal with their story events per se. They exist but there's no real push to making you deal with it ever.
It's part of the weird design current Savage. A3S has a lot of gear-check walls involved in the fight but it also has a strict limit to the amount of gear you can ever get to throw at it. A4S likewise has another gear-check to meet and you're looking at around a month of A3S clears to meet it due to the twines/coupons. I guess the expectation is throwing yourself at the strategy, planning, etc. parts of it and let gear fit the curve as it comes in but not sure it really worked out like they wanted it to.
Really begs the question of how they want to approach A5+.
MS Paint drawings \o/ I'm not sure that's the case though. If anything, they'll tone down some of the reactionary stuff and allow for more planning to be done. So closer to the randomness we kind of saw in T10/T11. That and upping the amount of time available.
It's part of the weird design current Savage. A3S has a lot of gear-check walls involved in the fight but it also has a strict limit to the amount of gear you can ever get to throw at it. A4S likewise has another gear-check to meet and you're looking at around a month of A3S clears to meet it due to the twines/coupons. I guess the expectation is throwing yourself at the strategy, planning, etc. parts of it and let gear fit the curve as it comes in but not sure it really worked out like they wanted it to.
Really begs the question of how they want to approach A5+.
MS Paint drawings \o/ I'm not sure that's the case though. If anything, they'll tone down some of the reactionary stuff and allow for more planning to be done. So closer to the randomness we kind of saw in T10/T11. That and upping the amount of time available.
I can't imagine the bugs that could occur between clicking on an NPC, reading their text, and then clicking on another NPC.
Unless the NPC didn't spawn or something, you're drastically overcomplicating what any of the rudimentary quests in FFXIV actually involve.
Mr. Bubble
Member
It's not new and not unprecedented. But choosing to go with 4 bosses per raid content cycle has pigeonholed the devs into overcompensating their fight designs. It's been clear that A3S is a response to the hardcore raiders clearing Coil so fast. But the difficulty spike between A2S and A3S is massive. It's apparent that there should be steps of content between A2S and A3S difficulty, but there isn't which is why there's been so much discussion about burnout, statics breaking up, etc.
I actually agree with this statement. Coil was overall the perfect difficulty for the, "primary" mode of an end-game raid.
These days I tend to think what they should have done is as follows. They have an Normal Mode Alexander, and a Savage Mode. Normal Mode is about FCoB level difficulty, Savage is, pretty close to where A3S and A4S are now. Then six months later, they put out a Story Mode version of the raid, which is about on par with Normal Mode Alex now. No loot drops in Story Mode, but these fights are instead put onto the Trial Roulette, so there's always a steady stream of people to do them.
Granted, it way too late to really change that at this point, but I still think this would have worked a lot better.
I'll just stop you at the bolded. There is a bug for everything, if you don't know that then I recommend you not speak on the issue.
I agree with the number of bosses being to low but most MMOs go through this early on even if they are releasing 13 boss raid instances that take 3 hours to clear out speed running. The vocal minority was whining that things were too easy when most of the community was at a nice sweet spot. The devs made the mistake of listening to that vocal minority which caused them to overtune. You can look at Rift to see the reverse (early on, don't know what the scene looks like now) where the vocal minority was whining that things were too hard, the devs listened and ended up releasing a raid that the average pug was clearing on day 3. The issue here is a common one where the devs listened to the community but the community is stupid and doesn't actually know what they need or want.
I blame Elsysim and Lucerica for fucking things up for the rest of us. GET A JOB!
not really, yoship shouldn't use the top 16 people as a difficulty metric, much less for anything, really
It makes me wonder if it's possible to field some kind of A3S help nights or just practice nights at least. I can't heal it on the alt I don't think (not without some actual A1/A2 drops probably? Not sure, actually) but I do at least have a geared caster and tank. For people that just want more time in the fight or see other strategies or just because it's still kind of fun to them.
Coil allowed for plug-and-play strategies fairly well so a lot of the helping just was about blowing through it. Current Alex Savage, though, is really more about the time in there and the differing perspectives could help.
It really depends on what makes people think it's so hard. Put another way, if this fight was at the tail end of the expansion where everyone knows new roles, new rotations, new kits, etc., would the fight have still been this bad for most people?
Why are you being so condescending? I'm a software developer, with the cookie cutter quest system they have in place there's very little room for error. Being vague with "Bugs happen" isn't a sufficient rebuttal to how somehow FFXIV's quest system, borrowed from dozens of preceding MMO's, is somehow more involved.
oh god
It's quest design for an MMO, "there's very little room for error" is not a statement that computes in there. The myriad connections between everything can cause the oddest bugs and issues. You've also drifted away from what the original person you quoted said. He said that it was more involved because there is actually a real story going on over those quests. I could see how you could argue that point but just saying "these quests are cookie cutter so bugs are highly unlikely" is a ridiculous statement.
Do you really want to recruit an ex-dragonthing to laladom? Make better choices!
I dunno, it depends on if you think planning and execution are the domain of Lucrezia and Elysium alone. What tends to cause the most issues in A3S from what I've been through is just doing stuff wrong, not being super tight on DPS/HPS requirements or ridiculous health checks (from what I can tell this is A4S' problem.) Like, consistency is tough, and it's a stupidly long fight, but most wipes are because somebody just did something mechanically wrong, not because it requires everyone to be top-tier everything forever.
Which is kind of the fight design I prefer; going full tunnel to pretend to get to max DPS rotation makes everything feel the same.
I dunno, it depends on if you think planning and execution are the domain of Lucrezia and Elysium alone. What tends to cause the most issues in A3S from what I've been through is just doing stuff wrong, not being super tight on DPS/HPS requirements or ridiculous health checks (from what I can tell this is A4S' problem.) Like, consistency is tough, and it's a stupidly long fight, but most wipes are because somebody just did something mechanically wrong, not because it requires everyone to be top-tier everything forever.
Which is kind of the fight design I prefer; going full tunnel to pretend to get to max DPS rotation makes everything feel the same.
tbh, i'd be in a state of delirium if he'd just show up.
we'll make him lala after he's invested
no, no no. I was talking/joking about the thought/theory
/truth
You actually can make a mistake in A3S at this point and carry on, though, in a lot of cases. You just can't make a mistake and have half the group panic, or make a mistake and have no idea what to do because you're following a script, or have a terrible plan that puts you in a bad spot to start and make a mistake, or make like seven mistakes in a row and go lolgearcarry.
Oh I 100% believe that's why A4S is the way it is, specifically out of annoyance over the early clears.
also brb fantasiaing alt to lala and actually leveling it to be useful. one day.
Oh I 100% believe that's why A4S is the way it is, specifically out of annoyance over the early clears.
also brb fantasiaing alt to lala and actually leveling it to be useful. one day.
HylianScribe
Member
Was going to post a pretty long response to some stuff an hour or so ago, but decided maybe I didn't need to. One of the points was how I love single player RPGs so much for those times I screw up mechanics but still somehow manage to pull off the win on a first play through. Most single player games do not require a high degree of skill/execution/strategy to win the battle on a first play through, and you can get by with a messy, impromptu plan of action to try to salvage things. FF XIV's raids do not allow for this until you are overgeared. During progression, rarely, if ever, can you overcome a decent mistake. That sucks so much of the fun out of the fight for me. And yes, with a fight that's 10+ minutes long, that sucks. I can deal with that on a smaller scale (see hard platformers, character action games) where the restart penalty doesn't suck because the thing you're trying to overcome only lasts a few mins long at most. The requirement that a single mistake can ruin the run/fight only applies to harder difficulty settings or self-imposed challenges, which is what you do AFTER you know a fight very well and have been clearing it a lot. MMO raid design is like the complete opposite of this, especially in FF XIV, because it has to for the sake of keeping people playing...er paying longer. It's probably the single thing I hate the most about MMO raiding. Compound this with the fact 7 other people can make mistakes (ie it's not just you), and yea...it's frustrating. Which is why I've stuck to single player games for most of my life and have hated any type of co-op ever conceived.