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10/15/2014 7:56:40 PM
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I don’t know if many of you have ever tried FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, but a strategy came to light last year around this time where teams could successfully beat a boss by first allowing it to enrage instead of competing against the boss’s complex mechanics (a sort of “hot potato” mechanic where you have to pass a debuff to a teammate within a countdown or it would wipe the raid). Contrarily, the enrage on this boss immobilized it, where it would then begin spamming arena-wide AoE damage every few seconds. The intent being of course, that enrage would wipe the raid.
Instead, teams got creative. They brought a 3rd healer (instead of the standard 2), a single tank (rather than 2) and 5 DPS classes (instead of the standard 4). This make-up allowed teams to wait for the boss to purposefully enrage (after enough time elapses in the dungeon) and then essentially DPS race the boss with the 3rd healer providing enough of a healing buffer to prevent a wipe.
People cried that the dev team should nerf the fight, that it was “cheese”, that people ignored the mechanics to make the fight trivial. However, there was a trade-off; doing the fight this way was time-consuming. The boss didn’t enrage until a lot of time had passed, so teams would sit around for anywhere from 5 mins to 10 mins waiting for the right moment to strike. Do the encounter the “intended” way and you never had to wait, you just had to deal with different mechanics.
The dev team’s response? They were surprised and [i]impressed][/i] by the ingenuity of the community and that the fight was “working as intended”. They had no plans to “nerf” the content.
I think this is relevant.
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I'm pretty sure they considered this change but then chose not to (someone clearly toyed with it, because they accidentally did this for a few days with a patch, increasing the Enrage damage enough to make this method significantly harder). I think the fact that they knew they would be nerfing the content within a couple months anyways and raising the effective level cap contributed heavily to the decision, along with the feeling by many that managing the ROT curse in that fight +other effects was the hardest mechanism in all of the raid, and thus prevented people from experiencing the content. If they had been further away from an expansion when this tactic became popular, the story may have been different. As it was they couldn't afford to alienate the users, because unlike Destiny they have an active subscription base they need to maintain to survive. That said, on the surface at least, I agree that Square's public response came off as much more sensible and respectful of the players than this one. Money model aside, Square is taking a different approach from Bungie, in that they want everyone to be able to experience the Raid (especially since the Raid is a continuation of the main story) and Boss fights at some point - adding buffs for failures, lowering difficulty as new content is released, and adding the ability to matchmake. However the new, active content, is always intended to be the most difficult, challenging, and catered to focused, dedicated teams. This is something I think Bungie should also seriously consider and advertise if they are willing, as right now a large number of people will never experience the single most creative portion of the game. As new expansions are released, the old Raids should gain level 24 "easy modes" [i]with matchmaking[/i], less chests, and a legendary reward at the end similar to the Tiger playlist. That way more people can at least experience and enjoy the mechanics and maps, as well as unlock grimoire cards for some of the most subtly interesting lore in the game (that should really be part of the damned raid). I would point out that FFXIV is doing a lot of things wrong as well, which Bungie also needs to be mindful of. The biggest problem with both games, and the reason I left FFXIV, is the lengthy, aimless-feeling fight against the RNG gods to make progress beyond level cap. In both cases it even involves lots of mindless grinding of low level content, fingers crossed. In Bungie's case, since there are admittedly many more opportunities for frequent players, this is mainly an issue with casual players who can't consistently get daily rewards needed to upgrade gear, and then often go weeks not getting what they need (****ing mountains of ascendant energy, and 0 shards)
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Thanks for taking the time to respond, devwild. You're absolutely right. I had forgotten about the inadvertent update that increased the enrage damage. You’ve also outlined perfectly why I gave up on the relic quest line – I won’t support content that forces endgame players to actively grind low-level content for meager or incremental rewards towards the progress of a powerful class weapon. I agree with you on the lvl 24 version of the raid and the lore inclusion as well. Raid tokens would go a long way in addressing the RNG issue.
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Thanks for your response too, I know I went beyond what you were saying. :) And yeah, it was only about a week after that expansion came out that I stopped playing. I was already considering it for real life reasons, but both the relic weapon quest and the requirements for master crafting felt like a smack to the face, extending gameplay through pure, mindless RNG - no skill, no challenge, no fun - just keep yanking on the slot machine. Many people I played with were rapidly losing the sense of having fun at that point, so it was a good time to make a clean break. Cheers
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Just more proof Bungie has no idea its "not an mmo" game is totally an MMO. They don't reward ingenuity, they punish for it. At least their punishments are kinder in that they don't ban or remove items from inventory over it, they just make it crappy for you if you want to try it again. Maybe that means you need to continuously be creative, but eventually the only way to beat the game will be to follow a step-by-step guide. Go here, stand here. Take cover here. When the shield is down, wait exactly 2 seconds. If you have a bubble, shoot it with your sniper rifle. If you have no bubble, step out and shoot the Templar in the face with the sniper. If you can't see his face, throw your grenade to hit him in the body, then shoot him with your Atheon's Epilogue. If you don't have an Atheon's Epilogue, you shouldn't be raiding. Like seriously, GTFO. Who wants that? If your team has multiple roles, like sniper, they should be allowed to snipe... Or to figure out a place that the AI is a little bad at getting to and hit them with your auto rifle. Or pulling out a shotgun that shreds goblins without trying. Or open your Pocket Infinity and bursting everything down because holy crap that thing is more of a doorway than a weapon. Or if you have it, destroy everything with your Vex Mythoclast. Be creative! But no, Bungie doesn't want that. May as well roll a fighter because the DM keeps getting on me for using a bow, or healing allies, or using fire magic; if I'm not using a sword, I'm going to die to something random and unrelated, so thanks DM.
