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Ytlaya posted:Man, I really wanted to enjoy Astrologian, but I'm loving terrible with it. My mind is just extremely bad at multitasking, and I can't deal with this card stuff on top of managing healing, much less attempting to DPS some on top of that. The hardest part of tanking is dealing with pubbies that won't AOE in dungeons. Tank classes are all easy and straightforward, and you can bumble your way through most fights with knowing almost nothing about boss mechanics. Even at the higher end of raiding, DPS and healers are under more stress for perfect performance. The main issue with tanks is that every single mistake that you make is immediate and obvious to everyone else. As long as you have decent healers, you can recover from most mistakes without any serious issue, but everyone will know that you messed up. With that said, tanking in ffxiv is a ton of fun, and if you are interested in it you should give it a shot.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:05
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Monathin posted:This wouldn't have made a better experience, fyi. The reason all the jobs got simpler was so they could make fights more interesting. You can have both, but that raises the difficulty floor for the entire game and they don't want to do that (since it would result in a healthy chunk of the player base leaving).
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Jul 22, 2018 04:12
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Monathin posted:Like you can argue whether they did a good job on it (it varies from class to class) but there's no way on earth adding another level of mechanical complexity would've worked for the majority of classes. Yeah, I personally don't like it as I've argued in the past. Most of the complexity in FFXIV when it comes down to class DPS mechanics is pretty superficial. It's just a shitload of buttons and mechanics that do the same thing, don't interweave very well while leveling which is an incredibly poor design as your endgame rotation can be completely different from anything you've seen before at early levels. Depending on the expansion and class you just had to relearn it from scratch as soon as you hit certain level thresholds. And speaking for myself, none of it is really interesting at all. They're all hard to learn, easy to master. I think that the thing that frustrated me the most about the class design in this game is that mastering a DPS class doesn't give you any real tools to do anything more than your job. Healing seems to be the most efficient role for that in FFXIV, but DPSing is incredibly inflexible. Playing from ARR Beta to the end of Heavensward maining a Dragoon and all your buttons were just numerous abstractions of a DPS rotation that is both long and easy, and gaining a new skill never made me feel particularly more powerful (if I recall correctly one of the HW Dragoon skills make you less powerful by adding more positional complexity to your rotation, a new button to play, and no real DPS gain). I think I gave every class but Bard a whirl and they were all very similar in that regard. Crafting ended up being a lot more fun and more to my style.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:26
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Thundarr posted:You can have both, but that raises the difficulty floor for the entire game and they don't want to do that (since it would result in a healthy chunk of the player base leaving). For a paid subscription MMO, "can have both but would raise the skill floor to the point where a non-insignificant percentage of users would be unable to perform to spec and thus leave the game" and "can't have both" is an entirely meaningless, superficial distinction.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:52
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Elentor posted:Yeah, I personally don't like it as I've argued in the past. Most of the complexity in FFXIV when it comes down to class DPS mechanics is pretty superficial. It's just a shitload of buttons and mechanics that do the same thing, don't interweave very well while leveling which is an incredibly poor design as your endgame rotation can be completely different from anything you've seen before at early levels. Depending on the expansion and class you just had to relearn it from scratch as soon as you hit certain level thresholds. And speaking for myself, none of it is really interesting at all. They're all hard to learn, easy to master. Oh the levelling setup is awful as it is right now, but endgame button bloat was terrible, and has only gotten worse for some classes (Machinist, Dragoon). I played Dragoon through HW and Fang and Claw vs Wheeling Thrust felt like a meaningless coinflip distinction to me since 99% of the time I'm hugging the corners of a boss anyway. But I don't felt like the class got weaker for it. Dragoon is honestly a bad example though, I've been arguing (especially since Stormblood hit and exposed the rest of its flaws) that its probably the class that needs the most overhaul to actually "work" given how weird the distinction is between your actual lancer skills and your Dragoon jumps are, and how Life of the Dragon works (it's probably the clunkiest of the mechanics they added, they band-aided it to work but it's really bad, I ditched to Samurai after a point and never looked back.) To each their own, though, I'm glad people find certain aspects of the game enjoyable. I kind of like the thrill of being a melee DPS because most of the fights hate your guts and you're desperately trying to maintain uptime. But yeah otherwise I agree with you that the levelling experience needs some fine-tuning after they pruned the tree so to speak. But that's been the case for a while now. Though I do laugh at all the people now complaining at how they only get one button to press levelling now, because as a Dragoon that's all I knew anyway 
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Jul 22, 2018 04:58
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Elentor posted:Yeah, I personally don't like it as I've argued in the past. Most of the complexity in FFXIV when it comes down to class DPS mechanics is pretty superficial. It's just a shitload of buttons and mechanics that do the same thing, don't interweave very well while leveling which is an incredibly poor design as your endgame rotation can be completely different from anything you've seen before at early levels. Depending on the expansion and class you just had to relearn it from scratch as soon as you hit certain level thresholds. And speaking for myself, none of it is really interesting at all. They're all hard to learn, easy to master. By this are you referring to the fact that playing "correctly" involves basically adhering to a particular "algorithm" of button presses? Like it's hard to get used to the algorithm (which can be kind of complex for some classes, with all the combos and procs and stuff), but once you do your performance is mostly a function of how well you can adhere to it (which doesn't leave much room for doing anything else without sacrificing your DPS)?
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Jul 22, 2018 05:15
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RME posted:just a bicorn 
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Jul 22, 2018 05:34
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Ytlaya posted:By this are you referring to the fact that playing "correctly" involves basically adhering to a particular "algorithm" of button presses? Like it's hard to get used to the algorithm (which can be kind of complex for some classes, with all the combos and procs and stuff), but once you do your performance is mostly a function of how well you can adhere to it (which doesn't leave much room for doing anything else without sacrificing your DPS)? Kinda. For SB I went with Samurai because it just felt so much smoother, but to compare Dragoon, the class I mained for the most time, with the classes I played WoW (Feral/Rogue/Hunter). My personal complaints are that: 1) The algorithms are unnecessarily long, but not hard. You just have to memorize them. Explaining Feral or pre-Legion Shadow Priest to someone on a surface level is pretty simple - apply all dots and keep them up, shred when you have nothing else to do. Each button has a clear and specific purpose (Mangle, may it rest in peace, adds a debuff. Shred deals a bunch of damage. Rake applies a DoT that is far more powerful than the other generators. Rip applies a DoT that is even more powerful but conditional. When every planet and moon is aligned, you do a Ferocious Bite) that can be freely mixed and adapted to a variety of situations so they scale enormously with your intimate knowledge of the class. Dragoon is just a long sequence of buttons that try to do the same (keep timers up) but it takes a lot more buttons, and is unfathomably easier once you learn it. Taking a look at the Dragoon design, it's pretty clear that it was designed from the ground up as a "complex DPS rotation", but the decision tree is trivial despite the larger amount of buttons, and because so many of the buttons exist to serve the purpose of providing a DPS rotation, the classes are relatively far less powerful than a class in WoW. Which is fine, because this isn't WoW, but having a class design that is neither interesting, challenging or powerful feels anemic and boring to me on its own merits. 2) The algorithms don't require any challenging on-the-fly adjustment for your DPS. Because the bosses are pretty tight dances, you can plan or theorycraft the optimal stop points ahead of time with ease. And, ironically enough in the case of the Dragoon, you need to do so because if you jump and the boss casts a void zone that you didn't know beforehand, you're dead and there's nothing you can do to stop it. FFXIV is very much about planning, not so much about reaction. This would go hand in hand with the longer GCD... except that the optimal Dragoon rotation for a long time involved interweaving GCD and off-GCD skills, so yeah. When I started playing I wrote a simcraft of the Dragoon class and let it evolve patterns genetically trying to maximize the yield across a multitude of situations, and the results were pretty much the same as common sense dictated, with not a lot of variation. This makes every fight in this game extremely predictable and the way you deal with situations are always the same. 3) Because there are so many buttons dedicated to your DPS rotation, your kit is very anemic. You don't have a lot of tools, your movement skills are good for DPS, bad for movement and hilariously bad for survival. Something we were talking in Discord the other day was about this janky aspect of the classes, and how, to give you an example, every class in WoW can bypass Grand Magistrix Elisande's rings through a movement skill, but if you were to put a FFXIV Dragoon in that fight a bunch of them would just die from an animation lock from a Jump animation. This low amount of tools and lack of flexibility is really what makes the combat in this game so unappealing to me. One of the first (I think it was the 8th, don't remember) Eye of Azshara M+15 Kills with a Feral involved my Hunter friend and I kiting King Deepbeard after the rest of the party died. To compare, in FFXIV we duo'd Brayflox Hard during the Zodiac grind as a Dragoon + Bard, again as kiting, but it was very just a case of mathematically proving that it was possible and executing the dance, and there was no real advantage in doing so. The former was an unbelievably exciting moment, the latter was "yeah I don't get how tanks die in this poo poo" followed by the realization that that was it, that was as far as we could go math-wise. Basically, mastering a Rogue allowed you to carry a Naxxramas raid. Mastering Dragoon allows you not to die in Titan. You don't enhance the quality of the raid, you just reach the status quo of optimal. And that's pretty boring to me. At least if you can master crafting you can sell an item to RPers for 20m gil as a result of your efforts. The skill ceiling of the DPS classes is very, very, very low and the skill floor is "annoying" is how I'd describe it. I don't think there's anything wrong with a different model in itself (and there are even WoW designers who praise FFXIV's boss design) but I don't find the FFXIV class model satisfying. Which is a pity because I prefer this game to WoW in general, and I have a lot more stuff to complain about the latter lately. Elentor fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 06:01
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Main story quest is sending me into the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak, and it's the longest wait time I've seen on the duty finder yet. Some of that could be what time it is, but is there anything particularly terrible about this dungeon?
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Jul 22, 2018 07:46
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Yes. It is the first of four 1.0 dungeons that they chopped up to repurpose into a 2.0 dungeon. This makes them a kind of jank that you don't get in other dungeons. Good luck.
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Jul 22, 2018 08:02
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honestly it isn't that bad, once. it has kind of a neat concept? it just sucks every time after because it's repetitive and drags on too long
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Jul 22, 2018 08:21
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It was longer than the previous dungeons, but not that bad. The worst part was the 2 dps whose keyboards had permanently stuck W keys.
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Jul 22, 2018 08:40
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NeurosisHead posted:It was longer than the previous dungeons, but not that bad. The worst part was the 2 dps whose keyboards had permanently stuck W keys. That's not a bug that's a feature.
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Jul 22, 2018 09:32
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If you guys think FFXIV got simplified too much on class design, you should see how dumbed down WoW specs have become with years of ability pruning. Some specs are down to MOBA levels. 8 buttons tops. Especially melees like legion Frost DK and other assorted cancer specs. It barely matters the order you mash your buttons in anymore and it feels like every spec is 1/3rds of a class.
Athropos fucked around with this message at 09:42 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 09:38
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Now here's a man who loves his countrymen.
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Jul 22, 2018 10:45
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SwissArmyDruid posted:That's a symptom of a lot of jobs, unfortunately. PLD got off easy. It actually gained an AoE that works in Pissvale and Shield Oath is at 30 now. Their new energy system is half-baked though and only used in two skills, an old defensive move from HW that used to be on a short GCD and a new single target ally defender with barely any duration. Still, it could be worse. Hobgoblin2099 posted:Now here's a man who loves his countrymen.  but with the Ala Mhigan flag's colors. Don't even have to change the eagle head.Tenik posted:The hardest part of tanking is dealing with pubbies that won't AOE in dungeons. Tank classes are all easy and straightforward, and you can bumble your way through most fights with knowing almost nothing about boss mechanics. Even at the higher end of raiding, DPS and healers are under more stress for perfect performance. The main issue with tanks is that every single mistake that you make is immediate and obvious to everyone else. As long as you have decent healers, you can recover from most mistakes without any serious issue, but everyone will know that you messed up. I tried out tanking in my first dungeon because I'd just looted a tank piece from a levequest before I went there, it turned out to be the best decision I ever made. super sweet best pal fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 12:19
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The short version of why Toto-rak sucks, or at least why I think it's the worst dungeon in the game: it is entirely too big for being that early, there are no interesting challenges in it (it doesn't even have midbosses), and the last quarter to third is full of stupid bullshit that arbitrarily slows you down like the webs and the slime. If they got rid of the webs and slime, added some midbosses, and chopped off another third of the dungeon, I wouldn't resign myself to despair when I wind up in that shithole via duty roulette. The fact that it's low enough level that AOE options are limited does not help.
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Jul 22, 2018 12:40
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Athropos posted:If you guys think FFXIV got simplified too much on class design, you should see how dumbed down WoW specs have become with years of ability pruning. Some specs are down to MOBA levels. 8 buttons tops. Especially melees like legion Frost DK and other assorted cancer specs. It barely matters the order you mash your buttons in anymore and it feels like every spec is 1/3rds of a class. I will gently remind all goons that MCH not only was one of the jobs that was stretched from 1-60 to 1-70, but that large chunks of it were also ripped out, and the job was not rearranged accordingly. After unlocking Rook Turret at level 40, a MCH gains nothing until level 50. Every other job in the game gets from 1-4 additional skills during this time, MCH gets jack and poo poo. (second place goes to BRD, which has one skill during the 40-50 stretch, but then has its own, weird-rear end gap in skills from level 18 to 30.) SwissArmyDruid fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Jul 22, 2018 |
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Jul 22, 2018 12:48
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MechaCrash posted:The short version of why Toto-rak sucks, or at least why I think it's the worst dungeon in the game: it is entirely too big for being that early, there are no interesting challenges in it (it doesn't even have midbosses), and the last quarter to third is full of stupid bullshit that arbitrarily slows you down like the webs and the slime. It has a midboss, the dullest midboss. Twice!
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Jul 22, 2018 12:52
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super sweet best pal posted:It has a midboss, the dullest midboss. Twice! I was about to mention that second to last boss in the lighthouse but then I remembered that fight takes all of 15 seconds and that's why it's not registering as exciting to me.
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Jul 22, 2018 15:39
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Toto rak is annoying. The map is bad and there's forced double backing, everything is in tight quarters so you have to swivel the camera a bunch, fun mechanics like "slowing down" and "being separated from your party", and boring incidental flavor text. That said, I'll take it over AV every day of the week because chances are in my favor that it's completable in 20 minutes and people aren't going to be arguing in the first room.
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Jul 22, 2018 15:56
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SwissArmyDruid posted:I will gently remind all goons that MCH not only was one of the jobs that was stretched from 1-60 to 1-70, but that large chunks of it were also ripped out, and the job was not rearranged accordingly. On the one hand it's true that MCH doesn't gain anything from 40-50 but on the other it also feels relatively complete at 40 (38 really, the turret doesn't add much), which is way earlier than every job except for maybe RDM. You've got Wildfire, the core of the class, the two most interesting 60 second cooldowns in Rapid Fire and Reassemble, a simple buff to maintain in Hot Shot, your full 1-2-3 filler combo and both reloads to give you something to do both in and out of Wildfire. You'll eventually add on another system, some group utility and some raw potency cooldowns but that's all the basics right there at 38 while most classes have to wait for 50+ to feel like they have some sort of rotation.
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Jul 22, 2018 16:21
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WrightOfWay posted:On the one hand it's true that MCH doesn't gain anything from 40-50 but on the other it also feels relatively complete at 40 (38 really, the turret doesn't add much), which is way earlier than every job except for maybe RDM. You've got Wildfire, the core of the class, the two most interesting 60 second cooldowns in Rapid Fire and Reassemble, a simple buff to maintain in Hot Shot, your full 1-2-3 filler combo and both reloads to give you something to do both in and out of Wildfire. You'll eventually add on another system, some group utility and some raw potency cooldowns but that's all the basics right there at 38 while most classes have to wait for 50+ to feel like they have some sort of rotation. Yeah, its not like Dragoon where you're just spamming Heavy Thrust -> Impulse Drive until you learn one of your full combos.
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Jul 22, 2018 16:47
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I see your point, and I can somewhat agree, but I do still prefer longer combos in general. I could see paring down most of the melee jobs from 8 hit combos to 6. but, looking at samurai, I don't really know what you would cut. There's a lot of cruft to be sure, but all that cruft is what has you having to plan ahead or make interesting decisions during a PvE fight. You could cut 3rd eye and it's two follow-ups, but i actually really like using 3rd eye a lot, even if the effect isn't all that great since it feels like doing a timing counter. You could cut gurren and hagakure but then you've cut everything that makes kenki even vaguely complex.The only other thing I would cut is ageha, because executes are dull. I think sam is generally fun in PvP but if they just dragged that moveset over into PvE, it wouldn't be particularly interesting and that's about the best that could be done with the class as-is if you wanted to go for a more gw2/current WoW style of combat.
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Jul 22, 2018 17:06
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Monathin posted:Yeah, its not like Dragoon where you're just spamming Heavy Thrust -> Impulse Drive until you learn one of your full combos. That was fixed in stormblood, True Thrust > Vorpal Thrust is like 10 more potency then Impulse x2.
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Jul 22, 2018 17:16
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I love 14s long rear end rotations compared to wow's and especially over GW2 where you feel like you're done with the class so early that it becomes really boring and I don't have much to look forward too. Having the long rear end DRG combo is great. Keeping botd up is not. I am probably in the minority here but I also like how some classes like BLM or SNM are really different at different levels. Though BLM didn't really get culled like some other classes.
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Jul 22, 2018 17:34
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Phone posted:Toto rak is annoying. The map is bad and there's forced double backing, everything is in tight quarters so you have to swivel the camera a bunch, fun mechanics like "slowing down" and "being separated from your party", and boring incidental flavor text. toto-rak sucks but there's only one area where you need to double back and it's a short passage, anytime else is the fault of your party for not seeing and picking up the macguffins
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Jul 22, 2018 20:24
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I leave if I get toto-rak and go fishing for the lockout.
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Jul 22, 2018 20:44
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Just finished chrysalis, all the people happily jumping into the tear as soon as it appears instead of waiting out the debuff 
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Jul 22, 2018 21:35
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Leal posted:Just finished chrysalis, all the people happily jumping into the tear as soon as it appears instead of waiting out the debuff it's really easy to heal through and you're in there for very very little if you just LB the rock.
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Jul 22, 2018 21:55
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:it's really easy to heal through and you're in there for very very little if you just LB the rock. GUESS WHAT THE DPS FAILED TO DO 
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Jul 22, 2018 22:03
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:it's really easy to heal through and you're in there for very very little if you just LB the rock. I mean, it can't be that easy since it has been ages since I had a tear phase resolve without deaths.
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Jul 22, 2018 22:48
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Limit breaking the tear is loving cowardice
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Jul 22, 2018 23:05
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Failboattootoot posted:I mean, it can't be that easy since it has been ages since I had a tear phase resolve without deaths. I mean I haven't gotten it in months but the only time I had deaths that I can remember are like...before HW came out?
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Jul 22, 2018 23:06
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Don't think anyone notices these things  Now onto the steps of faith 
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Jul 22, 2018 23:11
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There's some really good dialogue in the random conversations between people so unimportant you can't even talk to them. I like the couple at Mih Khetto's that's breaking up. Also it's mostly completely pointless text so they let Koji Fox just go nuts and fill them with whatever insane references he can think of
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Jul 22, 2018 23:14
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Especially the saga of the NPC's constantly repairing/constructing zones. Hanging man from HW came back for the Enclave!
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Jul 23, 2018 00:28
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I have a problem with too many buttons to press because the game doesn't really support good hotkeys out of the box. I was able to enjoy WoW for a long time because of addons and the fact that each spec was streamlined already. I've still put off rebinding my hotbars because I'm playing multiple classes and like stuff to be accessible. I wish the classes were a bit more streamlined and I do agree with some of the criticisms above... what I really like is the flavor of each class, though, which is what Legion WoW tried to do but a lot of execution was lacking. I don't mind DRG's rotation because I played through the Azure Dragoon story (up to ARR at least) and that was pretty cool. I also just got Wondrous Tails. Is this useful and something to be done every week? Lily Catts fucked around with this message at 01:38 on Jul 23, 2018 |
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Jul 23, 2018 01:33
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If you enjoy RNG and being full of hate, then yes, do Wondrous Tails.
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Jul 23, 2018 01:35
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Schneider Heim posted:I also just got Wondrous Tails. Is this useful and something to be done every week? you might as well grab it if you're going to be doing a bunch of roulettes but it's a p. big time investment otherwise
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Jul 23, 2018 01:49
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