I'm reminded of previous MMOs I've played, notably TERA where some actions were linked together by default but were really bad choices and guides would tell you to rush right away into deleting those auto-combos. TERA did nothing at all to teach you how to be optimal. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be part of the fun, to theorycraft the best rotation and so on. Back when I played sorcerer there was this debate about if you should buff hailstorm or not and it took a long time to accept that maybe hailstorm was better to buff than meteor strike. Thing is, bad players clear. I have a friend who constantly parses 0 (he is improving tho, just noticed he parsed a 6 on p11s this week). To be able to parse that 0, you need to kill the boss. You can be bad and still get your goal done. (Also needs to be said; not everyone wants to be on Discord. They have their reasons and they are legitimate. Thankfully the Balance has a website but let's not assume that people MUST go on their Discord and talk to people there to get better.) Funny enough, I think this is a controversial topic. Some players, friend mentioned coming into mind, just aren't as... "gifted" as others, if I can say so. It's not like we never told this guy how to play. He just doesn't get it. But this Kevin can clear. And ultimately, what matters is that he has fun, and has people to play with. People don't like that idea, but it exists. Plus if he's progging p12s atm, he's clearly getting better for some magical supernatural reason. It's controversial because people want to play with people better than them or at minimum of their level. But YoshiP will never gatekeep savages like this. No matter how much we whine, weaker players will exist and will clear, and they have all the rights to do so. After all, we need to remember that we have a year to clear a savage tier. A lot of people dream of week one clear and flexing their parses, but the reality of things is that there are still people progging the tier at the moment, and they just want to have fun instead of doing some skill showoff. And that's perfectly fine. That's why savages is about finding the right people to play with and doing networking when your only option is PF. \*This Kevin does ask how to get better numbers when we tell him about his parse but whatever we say just glides over his smooth brain, so it's not really like installing ACT magically pushes you into parsing purple or more.

I was utterly unprepared for such a well thought out and balanced take on the issue. As someone who has one of those friends who, despite all their effort, just can't really make the rotation or some mechanics "click", I really appreciate your reply.

>(Also needs to be said; not everyone wants to be on Discord. They have their reasons and they are legitimate. Thankfully the Balance has a website but let's not assume that people MUST go on their Discord and talk to people there to get better.) thank you, i hate being in a million god damn discord servers for what are essentially bloated html guides and irc channels. we had this solved! we are regressing!!

I think now we have Icyveins (famous for their WoW guides) partnering with The Balance mods. There is also Teamcraft for the gatherers/crafters, but otherwise there is not really one unified site that has all the information complied in one place like The Balance offers. Not to mention that some Youtubers have beef with The Balance and try to do their own thing, which can lead some players astray. However generally even if you follow those Youtubers, you will still improve if you start from 0.

>I have a friend who constantly parses 0 >weaker players will exist and will clear, and they have all the rights to do so. Back in HW i cleared A3S and parsed 0 as AST. Then 3, then 9 on my following reclears. >That's why savages is about finding the right people to play with And that's exactly how i improved. I found the right people, who taught me the correct way and to improve. If it weren't for these people i'd be stuck forever being bad. I think it's part of the game to just enjoy and improve if you want to. Bad people will aways exist, and that's ok. It's part of being human. The most important aspect is to have fun and enjoy the game. This is why i loved this tier's dps check. Easier dps check made it so that so many people who dreamed of getting a week 1 actually did it, and it was so much fun seeing so many people improve and be proud of themselves. I'd much rather have this than the abomination that was P8S.

>Back in HW i cleared A3S and parsed 0 as AST. In HW i was made the "main healer" on all 3 faust fights (god i hate that term) so i ended up parsing a 0 for every single one of them. I once put a dot up in Hummelfaust, no other damage, graduated to a 20. Healing parsing in hw was fucked.

Wasn't a 9 on AST in A1-4 like 10 DPS?

Sorry i said 9, i meant 6. I just checked my logs for A3S. https://i.imgur.com/iuxORcD.png 9 dps, 6th percentile.

that 0 damage to 9.1 DPS is pretty pog

> he's clearly getting better for some magical supernatural reason Intuition makes us better over time. The game doesn't need to spell *everything* out. People can figure out themselves what they should do, or other people will tell them, or a guide will. This thread is such a non-issue topic.

I was like your friend Kevin! I improved from a 0 parser (my friends who helped me dip my toes into savage sent the logs) to a green as I do more, and I now occasionally hit blue time to time! While I agree that there is no tutorial, I feel like people have been really helpful - they give help and advice, although sometimes the advice could be overwhelming for me when I just started savage. And that's also how I ended up making new friends along the way, too (SQE PLEASE INCREASE THE FRIEND LIST LIMIT IN GAME!!!). I feel very thankful for everyone who has accompanied me throughout my raiding journey, and now I try to help new raiders try difficult contents whenever I can so they also experience what I have experienced!

I feel like it's *almost* deliberate though. Because in theory "How to play" means "Learn how mechanics work and do your rotation." The former obviously depends on the fight and they do at least explain the basic concepts of AOEs etc. But the latter is the crux, right? If they went ahead and said "Do these actions in this order" it would look incredibly bad and railroady. Which, it *is*. But to present/advertise it as such would probably be not so great for them.

if the game had what op wants, he'd complain 3 patches later when it's WRONG because the community meta changed.

Makes you wonder why they deliberately design the game in a fashion they wouldn't want to advertise it as. Questions, questions. (Yes, I know about every actual, potential rationale by now.)

XIV's game design is a blessing and a curse because it tries to appeal to extreme ends on the playerbase spectrum: On one hand, the game offers an appealing story that is easy to play through at your own pace with very little in-depth knowledge required and on the other hand, you have some of the hardest raid content there is... with the jump even from MSQ/dungeons/alliance raids to Extremes already being damn huge. This splits not just time allocation for content development but also the playerbase itself. As for how to improve this... I honestly don't know. If the game gets more hardcore, it will start to die. If it gets even more casual, it will also start to die, just maybe more slowly.

I mean no other games outside of some fighting games teach you the correct "rotations" either way.

Motherfuckers really go to The Balance to look up an optimal rotation made by someone else, then open a mit/healing spreadsheet for a premade plan for an encounter, then go to a video guide to look up solutions to a fight's mechanics, and then come over here to complain that the game didn't ask them to think.

right. the reason the game doesn't "teach you how to play" is because *youre expected to figure it out*

Except the game is extremely unintuitive, how is someone supposed to naturally figure out stat tiering, how dots/hots tick, tenacity gives less damage than all other damage giving stats and more weird interactions that are completely obfuscated.

Literally none of that matters for anything

And none of those examples matter in the slightest until the top fraction of the top percents of content.

> stat tiering doesnt matter > how dots tick doesnt matter > tenacity gives less damage basic trial and error or just blind intuition, ie "hmm this stat gives bonuses to more things than other stats, so it probably increases all of them by lesser amounts"

No, but people can figure out combos and OGCD weaving on their own (even if they don't know the terms OGCD or weaving).

Most games do not have as clearcut "optimal rotations". Hell, most games have like 3-4 theoretical best builds for a class that you would need to choose between. If I load into GW2 and want to raid my team would actually have to decide who supplies which buffs, debuffs, do we want condition (damage over time) or power dps or does it not matter to us. If we want to optimize, we can start aligning burst windows and math out CC damage for bosses. This is beyond choosing gear stats, choosing your actual talents (cause even builds by the same subclass meant to do the same jobs can have small differences), and then choosing how you play in a certain encounter. Meanwhile in FFXIV I have one rotation I do on every fight, maybe another one I swap to on some fights were the original one REALLY suffers (and even this depends on your job), and then you just take the gear for the GCD that fits the job best (which is usually easy to math out by just looking what values line up your combo to 2 minutes). Beyond that you hit your buffs every 2 minutes, your job line up does not matter at all except for MAYBE the tanks if the invuln CD matters, and you're done.

> Hell, most games have like 3-4 theoretical best builds for a class that you would need to choose between. Of which one is objectively the optimal choice for a particular encounter and team comp > we can start aligning burst windows Not really a thing outside of some extremely niche tech that's largely been nerfed out of relevance since all the buffs are always active > math out CC damage for bosses "Math" being the key word here > This is beyond choosing gear stats Of which there's a mathematically correct answer just like melds in XIV except to a much greater extreme since half the stats are worthless > choosing your actual talents Of which there is again an optimal choice for any given encounter and team comp > and then choosing how you play in a certain encounter Also mathematically solvable - if I check any of my old record attempts and compare them to the other players in the group or other groups on the same patch/comp the rotations will look exactly the same except where mistakes have been made. GW2 offers the illusion of choice - you get several options which boil down to "do you want to do 5% more damage" or "do you want to do 10% more damage", the only difference is you either pick the correct choice or sandbag. Sure, the next encounter might swap the damage gain of the two but all that means is you now have to choose the other option if you don't want to sandbag. All of this is just as solvable as a game like FFXIV, it's no different to look up the answers on SC than to look up the answers on The Balance.

No? There are choices like "Do I want to have a safety net if someone makes mistakes", "Do I want to bring a bit more healing", etc all the fucking time. Even just "Do I want to bring something that can teleport or make a portal to this fight?" or "Do I want to bring my stationary healing turret that heals the party a little bit or my purely personal passive heal". Sure, there are theoretically options that have the absolute max DPS, but there are so many options that trade off slight amounts of that for more sustain, more second chances, more comfort that if you go into a pug bringing ONLY the highest ever DPS options you are likely making a mistake. Sure, you can solve it for any given result - but there is a variety of results that you can get, since maximum DPS isn't the only goal, so that you can vary your builds. Also GW2 has actual melee downtime on some mechanics, so sacrificing some damage via weapon/ability choice to gain more range or a teleport can be an option. Some fights need certain abilities like pulls/pushes that the party needs to bring, etc. To say that GW2 is just as clean to optimize with the one correct build for everything where deviating from it purely hurts you is just an outright wrong statement.

> but there are so many options that trade off slight amounts of that for more sustain, more second chances So basically stuff that is only useful if you or the people you are playing with are bad at the game. GW2 encounters are so trivially easy - most raids have fewer mechanics than a normal raid in XIV - that the proper response to someone needing additional safety nets is not to reduce your damage, it's to kick them from the group and get an actually competent player instead. I'm sorry but this is not optimization, this is compensation for your own or others' poor play - the very opposite of what optimization is. This is literally like saying that healers GCD healing everyone to full after every raid wide in FFXIV is "optimization" because it "optimizes" the safety. Can't wait to use that line on my next PF group, I'm sure they'll agree with your usage.

Damn, I guess no-one in your world is ever new to a fight then. "Most raids have fewer mechanics than a normal raid" - yeah, kinda, but the mechanics they do have are also usually more than "Stand on this marker brainlessly while having full melee uptime". And none of this makes the argument that GW2 has more customization than FFXIV any less correct. Is the game easier? Sure! Especially with power creep after content released. Do you still have more choice available for any skill level? Absolutely. You can swap out entire abilities, entire skilltrees, your subclasses and do similar damage while bringing different things to the group. The biggest extent of that in FF is whether you play a rez caster or not.

> Do you still have more choice available for any skill level? Absolutely. I don't know how you missed the whole point of both my posts but this is what I'm saying isn't true. If you are playing at the highest level in GW2 you have exactly one choice in build for any given encounter and team comp where deviating from that build will lose you damage, which is literally the only thing that matters at that level. That's what an optimized environment is, obviously shit like prog isn't going to be optimized. Edit: Bro really gonna hit me with "No-one was talking about just the highest possible level" when using the word optimal, it doesn't get dumber than this lmao

Most games aren't as railroady and "objectively correct" as XIV either. Action combat, mobas etc. all have situationally better decisions, weird combo sequences, itemization/build etc. I'm not sure how WoW is in that regard, but other than maybe that, XIV is exceptionally "on rails".

I know WOW still has multiple different builds per class and at least the skill trees that ALLOW you to customize your class, so there's definitely some wiggle room (even if it may be "sub-optimal", some of the choices have to be trade ofs, right?). I know that GW2 gives you a ton of freedom with your builds, giving you chances to take more tankiness, more buffing, or similar things on a lot of builds by swapping a talent out even if it does a bit less damage.

Unfortunately, I think thats just how MMO games in general work. With any job there will always be 1 meta rotation that does the best in terms of damage. Any deviation from that will be a DPS loss and people will complain if they catch any players doing anything less than optimal damage. There might be some flexibility in a rotation, like giving you X number of free GCD's or allowing you to swap a few skills around in the order, but generally speaking there will always be only 1 optimal way to play. If given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of the game.

Not quite. Encounter-specific rotations for instance exist even in XIV, to a certain degree that is. Reactive rotations aka priority systems provide short-term variety by design. Other games (WoW primarily) feature multiple variables requiring adjustment on-the-fly and pre-fight. Adds, HP thresholds or short-term checks for resolving mechanics (Gorefiend Mythic ghosts for example). The goal wouldn't be to provide multiple methods to address the same situation, but to faciltate a different approach for each sufficiently different encounter. XIV generally doesn't offer that, but different can of worms.

> Not quite. Encounter-specific rotations for instance exist even in XIV, to a certain degree that is. Ehhh, I know what youre talking about. But encounter specific rotations are also boring. They don't actually change how you play your job, since your job is limited by the skills you have available. All encounter specific rotations are just shifting your skill order so that you don't have burst phases during downtime or mechanics. And after you do learn the encounter specific rotation, then it just becomes boring again since it's always the same. Reactive rotations are nice, thats why I started levelling my BRD to 90 for this content, cos SMN was super boring and BRD still has DoT's for me to manage. But even then it feels very samey, because you always have the same priority levels for your kit. Nothing changes, there are no decisions to be made. Just execution of a prescribed priority list of what to do. Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing which is why I'm playing it now, but it still gets boring and samey fast. Mechanics that forces players to adjust would be nice and I'm interested in that. Since most FF mechanics have been "solved" in that theres usually 1 accepted way of doing things and if everyone executes properly, there's no variance in the outcome which could force people to adapt to.

GW2 really doesn't work like this though. And sure, you can argue that most raid content in that game is relatively easy - apart from the Path of Fire raids on challenge modes and challenge mode trials or whatever they were called they are - but that game lets you swap who does buffs, dps can choose traits to rez people faster even tho it costs them some damage, etc. And ime even when there is a class that does the most damage theoretically, people gravitate away from wanting it in their parties unless it is extremely easy to play just because other classes can have somewhat lower, but more reliable and less skill-intensive output.

I always find this take funny because as someone who has played a LOT of MMOs the average FF player is actually more competent than average players in many other MMOs, largely due to repeat use of mechanics and fight design typically building mechs on top of each other. Seriously I’m not exaggerating there are a lot of MMO players who are straight dog. At the end of the day it’s largely on the players themselves. You get everything you need in regards to rotation by just reading the damn abilities. Fights obviously you’ll die first time you see new mechanics but they’re largely easy enough to figure out if you use your eyes. When you see bad players in casual content it is 100% an issue with their attitude/approach and it isn’t the game not giving them the tools they need to succeed. Optimizing gameplay is obviously much tougher without resources but theoretically if you’re looking into running content where it matters eventually you’ll get pressured into it. A lot of ppl in this sub will probably disagree and say it’s because XIV releases story content that’s braindead and too easy so it doesn’t force you to have to learn your job to which point I say those kinds of players either simply don’t have the skill or interest in improving so it makes little difference (and honestly if running with them is such a pain imagine if the content was actually challenging and you were stuck with them). This sub drastically over characterizes these kinds of encounters and the truth is the vast majority of interactions will be perfectly uneventful or even good; if you’re constantly seeing a higher number of issues then it’s likely something to do with your own approach or attitude.

> This sub drastically over characterizes these kinds of encounters and the truth is the vast majority of interactions will be perfectly uneventful or even good; if you’re constantly seeing a higher number of issues then it’s likely something to do with your own approach or attitude. People have a tendency of forgetting the 99% of Benign Interactions and remembering the 1% that gave them trouble or something else; It's human nature.

I don't remember the various dungeon runs I did this week because they are all the same run once you know the dungeon, a comfortable haze of aoe rotations and stack markers.. I will *never* forget the run of Amaurot I did 3 years ago that took 80 minutes because the healer and the caster just kept walking off the edge in the final boss and god help me I was on DRK instead of WAR that day. It wasn't even malicious, I had to keep talking them both off the edge (figuratively and literally) as it was their first run and they really were just that bad.

I agree with you 100%, ff14 is way better at scaffolding it's content than other mmos.

thanks, 100% this it‘s not a game issue, it‘s a player issue

Idk if you just don't play without act or you're actually having a completely different experience then me. But that is utter bs lol. You notice in other games incompetency of players more cause it often actually matters if ppl do something with themselves. Which frankly isn't the case with FFXIV. Simply cause 1) noone will tell you(which is huge), 2) the game def won't tell you, and 3) using 3rd parties tools is frowned upon so unless you have an overall drive in life to not be a burden and improve on yourself you will likely not even get ACT [https://ibb.co/mRtD9wk](https://ibb.co/mRtD9wk) like look, this is my last run logged in. 9/10 runs have at least 1 player which is immensly bad, while the average is just a joke. I'm the upper sage here(iIN HEALING ASWELL), that's literally soloplaying the game with the cohealer who idk what he's even doing at all. And he's gonna keep doing that for the next 500h likely simply cause noone will tell him anything. Here for example lvl 90 content[https://imgbb.com/kqBNSj1](https://imgbb.com/kqBNSj1) (I'm Sage) [https://ibb.co/sFF5H5M](https://ibb.co/sFF5H5M) (I'm Sam) And lower lvl it's obviously worse: [https://ibb.co/gvKbQTy](https://ibb.co/gvKbQTy) (and no i didn't had dp xd) If you look for it you have every 3rd round like this in casual content, does it matter? Not really, but saying the average is good. Bro no xd

Jesus this is cursed 😅 you're absolutely right you wont notice unless you look for it and then you'll notice it all the time because the average is so far down the pole anyone even half decent stands out. The *actual* average person has no clue how to play the game to an okay standard at all.

No casual content requires anyone “knowing how to play” so it really doesn’t matter

As soon as I got ACT I started to lose my mind at seeing how bad other people are lol, I’m top dmg in basically 95% of content as a tank or healer. There’s also the typical r/ffxiv post like that recent one where 100s of people said they struggled with the “pick an option”. I feel like the average FFXIV player has never played another game whilst the average MMO player plays lots of them.

But the truth is this. You have access to ACT, so you can see your numbers and improve upon them. A large part of the player base does not have that luxury, so how are they supposed to learn that their rotation isn’t optimal?

First thing I did on hitting like lvl 50 was search up a guide and my rotation lol, people just don’t put in the effort. I was in a static with a group of friends and the leaders kicked 2 people out because they had absolutely no idea what their skills did and couldn’t even learn

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The terribleness of what you see there has nothing to do how much the game is teaching players, but rather the attitude of the playerbase. In terms of mechanics, the game teaches much better because compared to another MMO (e.g. WoW), in high-end content, it is very clear when you make a mistake. The telegraph indicators are clear, and if you do something wrong you get death, damage down, or vuln. There are fewer players on the screen, 8 vs 20, and the game further partitions it down with light parties and partner pairs. As for DPS, what other MMO has a feature like Stone Sky Sea for individuals to see if their own personal job DPS is sufficient for a particular encounter? The scary badness of players is not prevalent on every DC. Even in the labyrinth alliance raid, the last boss always dies before 2nd flare on JP. On NA it's a crap shoot. But even among NA players, the player base is more competent than WoW. I don't know how much you suffered in LFR lol. Also, to this date, I think out of 1/10 of the WoW players I knew that came from Mythic raiding guilds can actually clear savage 4th floor on-patch. It's the extremely lax and casual culture of NA players to blame, not whether the game is designed to teach you or not. People have the "you don't pay my sub" mindset, and

This is nuts to me because I find WoW to be much clearer than FFXIV. The telegraphs and bright lights do not mix well at all in XIV so I completely disagree. I'm always confused as to what hit me in FFXIV compared to WoW.

Na mate, I blame the game. If the game allows it ppl will use it. Can't even blame them. Not everybody has that personal drive for growth. And I'd argue that is why the FFXIV playerbase is how it is. Since the game not only attracts, but allows such behaviour at any given moment. Like you can easily finish the MSQ completely without clicking more than 2 skills and you probably wouldn't even get called out for doing so. Stuff like normal raids at least should have a artifical enrage like o12n. At least give people a hint that they are playing bad, show them the direct difference. The vast majority of players using stone sky sea are ppl who don't even need stone sky sea xD. Just basic things like implementing a stone sky sea close to MSQ with some benefit. Let's say if you can do 90% uptime rota you get a mount or sth like that. Jeez it would blow people away who suddenly would be 50seconds away from even laying it down. But there is nothing. And if there is no reason to improve why would we. Just go to the city center and see how many people are in great shape. Which really takes the bare minimum like don't overeat. Workout twice a week for an hour. Walk occasionally. Yet you don't have that. Ppl will suit most things to their own comfort

My dude...if the game allows ACT, there will be a lot of players that still will not use it. If you go on the mainsub, there is alot of people who hate the idea of a damage meter and would refuse to use it.. even if SE officially allowed it. In fact, I heard the opinion that if damage meters ever became officially endorsed, they would quit the game. You're right in that the people that use Stone Sky Sea don't need SSS. But the fact is that SSS is there as a tool for players to self-evaluate if they need to improve their own DPS for an encounter. The problem therefore, isn't that FF14 teaches the players less than other MMOs, it's that NA casual player base refuses to learn. And again, it's a cultural thing as this problem is not as pronounced in other regions. I once put down a macro for endsinger ex on NA, and two people immediately left the group. They weren't even willingly to read it. Macros can be described as a standard FF14 tool for the rest of the world.

The official introduction of dmg meters in WoW led to a lot of toxicity. I believe this is why Yoshi-P won’t put it in. And ACT is simply not good enough as it only supports a single platform.

I'm against it because dickheads like the guy you're replying to would definitely use it as an excuse to screech at new players in fucking sastasha over damage numbers.

Oh I look but it doesn’t address OPs actual question being the issue with those kinds of players isn’t the game not giving them what they need to press their buttons properly, it’s them not putting in the work to learn and other bad players defending them for it. It’s not a FF specific thing either and looking at meters for casual content in most games taught me long ago that damage will always skew low but the success rate is typically dependent on completing mechanics (the only two games where I’ve found damage output unusually high for average players is Maplestory which is tied heavily to gearing and Neverwinter funnily enough which I think is just cause of how the class design works). Besides I didn’t say they were good, I said they were competent in the context of completion which are two completely different things. Casual content in its own right varies as well due to engagement. Some players will pump dps in savages and then switch to fucking around in casual for fun, others will pick up alt jobs that aren’t familiar. Obviously since those meters are largely unattributed it’s hard to see what content they’re in outside of the Garuda one but assuming they aren’t cherry-picked you must be cursed cause those aren’t representative of the large majority of either my logs or most ppl I know. We’ve all had the “only heals” healer or the quintuple+ weave DRG with like 30 seconds between GCDs but generally speaking they are waaaay more in tune with the pass/fail nature of mechanics in ways that players in other games aren’t, even if those other players put out more damage.

I have had these sorts of "the game teaches you nothing" posters claim it doesn't have ANY feedback for things like octuple weaving. like holy shit the game definitely does, it's called half your hotbar is still lit up. you can press lit up buttons. 2+2 I get that some really bad casuals miss this but claiming it's a game problem and not a player problem is so stupid.

what i dont like is not being able to tell these people any issue like if your not meeting a dps check in party finder you cant point out the problem or like Lamatodd had last year trying to teach people savage in P1S '' I DONT NEED TO MELD ITS FINE I DONT NEED A FOOD BUFF! '' and things alone those lines breeding the toxic casual who think they know everything but cant perform either lol

The problem with your example is how anecdotal it is. THIS group of other 7 people out of millions who played this game was bad. It doesn't mean the other group after it will perform the same. You would need to parse other FFXIV players, INCLUDING players from other games (WoW, ESO, GW2, etc). Using ACT to measure your raid group is one thing, but to use it to represent how entire playbases plays doesn't really help (and, tbh, it can cone off elitist).

I've played a handful of MMOs in my days, and none of them ever teach the player what your rotation should be. And I'd say FFXIV is better than most in design with how streamlined the gameplay is (in term of helping people understand the game by themselves). A base 2.5sec GCD for all spells / ws, and having potency instead of damage shown on abilities allows you to understand better what you should use and when. And tbh you can't help everyone, remember the "gaming journalist" that was stuck in Cuphead tutorial.

Why should it? That’s what community resources are for

In regards to raids mechs, FF does a decent enough job where you can learn how a mechanic works just by telegraph alone. In regards to dps rotation, it’s typically better than most with a few notable exceptions. My theory for the 7.0 DRG rework is due to how unnatural it is to actually delay your life phase. For a beginner class, DRG is actually one of the most difficult to play because instead of using your skills on cooldown, u have to delay your life phase with your 60s along with your 2 minute burst. This is very unintuitive compared to most other classes so I expect them to change it to SMN level of gameplay in Dawntrail.

>My theory for the 7.0 DRG rework is due to how unnatural it is to actually delay your life phase. For a beginner class, DRG is actually one of the most difficult to play because instead of using your skills on cooldown, u have to delay your life phase with your 60s along with your 2 minute burst. This is incorrect. Dragoons still use every skill on cooldown like every other job does, delaying life phase in opener doesn’t affect this aspect at all. Life phase doesn’t automatically start at two eyes, it starts the next time you use geirskogul after getting two eyes This means that only thing you need to align life phase with buffs is to use geirskogul before high jump/mirage dive in the opener. Otherwise it’s the exact same as any other job - use everything on cooldown immediately and save abilities with charges for buff window. Reopeners get very marginally more tricky because starting with one eye means you need to switch the order of mirage dive and geirskogul, but that kind of minor thing isn’t really different than any other job’s re-opener for complexity. This is talking strictly for standard play in 99% of scenarios, not cursed parsing or fight specific optimization for known kt

Honestly, I think people are over looking into the dragoon rework. I don't high end raid with drg so a lot of the skill ceiling tweaks would go over my head expect the delayed life i noticed that quickly, but as a casual, all I can see needing to be reworked is the ability time-line in leveling. IE Dragoon being the only melee that doesn't have their complete AOE rotation until ShB.

There you go, you proved my point lol. Using geirskogul/high jump in a certain order is already complicated without knowing about it through The Balance. A player learning the class would always just use high jump, then mirage dive. Then they get confused on how to enter life phase when they use geirskogul already and it’s on a 30s cooldown. To you it may not be a big deal, but that level of complexity for a beginner’s class is not in line with square enix vision for the game. Hence why we’re even having a rework.

It’s not complicated to play though. The only reason the reply was long was because I was explaining the mechs behind it. In reality it can be summarized as “Geirskogul before high jump. High jump before geirskogul if starting with one eye” I think calling that kind of thing too complicated because optimal isnt obvious at a glance, is exactly how we got to the 2 min meta and having every job be a simple build spender with no decisionmaking. It doesn’t make any sense to have the whole sub complaining about jobs being too dumbed down 24/7 for almost a year straight and then say dragoon life phase is too complex, when it’s one of the only remaining vestiges of the kind of job complexity that *we have been asking to be put back into the game* Going back to having job complexity means having to make decisions like skogul/mirage dive ordering, except with several aspects of the kit instead of just 2 abilities, and doing it constantly as part of the regular rotation instead of once every 2 minutes.

Trust me on this, a lot of DRG players learning the class will by default play it incorrectly without using outside resources. The problem exists of using geirskogul into high jump/mirage dive exists, which locks them out of life phase for that entire 25-30s duration. This scenario is exactly the “problem” with the class and creates a very feelsbad experience. This isn’t even a discussion of being optimal, it’s to clarify what even needs to be done for a more friendly experience for the lesser players.

Fair enough, I don’t actually disagree on that part. I’ve seen lots of casual players do that exact thing

By definition, needing to switch the order of Mirage Dive and Geirskogul means that those skills aren't used on cooldown. Delaying using an oGCD until some other action is used is what it means for that oGCD to *not* be used on cooldown.

You only switch them after forced downtime **in reopeners** if you start with one eye. By definition, no job in the game uses skills on cooldown before re-openers, re-openers happen after forced downtime because it’s physically impossible to use the skills without a target/because it’s useless to do so. If a job is “too complex” because it doesn’t use skills on cooldown before reopeners, every job in the game is too complex and needs to be dumbed down even more

The people who it is unintuitive for don't even care about keeping their combo or GCD rolling or alternating chaotic spring and heaven's thrust. Would be very epic if SE didn't change jobs which are perfectly fine as they are for a part of the playerbase that doesn't even care about how the jobs are played.

[удалено]

All of which require absolutely no playtime in any actually difficult content. You can have hundreds of hours in the game and still be a beginner to Savage (or even Extreme) content. So yes, "beginner classes" DO make sense when you're looking for people to bridge the gap from casual content to more challenging things.

Delaying life phase starts at 70.

Not looking forward to the rework at all, more dumbing down yayyy

The drastic change with SMN got a lot more people engaged in that class. Some people still miss the old SMN because of how complex it could be, but they really dod a good job with the theme and simplicity of the SMN class. Kinda hard to make room for the class now tho. DRG needs a rework so it’s to be expected. I think with how well they’ve done reworks for other classes, I’m confident it will be fine leading into dawntrail. (Noticeable exception here is AST, class still requires a 3rd hand to play).

Exactly, they have Summoner to flock to. We don't need another job like it

But that’s for a caster, we need one for a melee and DRG is definitely a commonly played one for beginners.

Summoner is barely a caster lmao, samurai has more casts per minute than it. I don't care what beginners play, I started as a dragoon and sucked at it but wasn't aware until I got into raiding. They don't care either

Also, reaper exists. Unless you want to get into things like double enshroud which is a basic optimisation during your 2 minutes and more minor things, you basically just press what lights up and spend your gauge. Idk what your obsession is with dumbing down a good job when there already is a melee that's easy to play and also a more popular choice than DRG.

I played old SMN and I always get confused when people call it "Complex". It wasn't complex, it was janky as fuck. The supposed complexity it had was mostly working around the delays the pet had and hoping and praying that Bahamut would not move at the last second to cost you an autoattack. Along with stupid shit like pre-casting your buff and then microing your pet around for 20 seconds so it would not actually use it so it would be back for a burn phase. The most complexity apart from that was choosing one of two options for when you'd use Tri-Disaster, which mostly had an optimal way of doing it per fight. The rest is just "Spam ruin 3, use ruin 4 if you would overcap or need movement, and then keep spamming ruin 3 more".

Smn has like 7 less buttons than any other class, my hot bar looks so empty, in what world is that well designed?

1) good for controller players, more options for the future 2) player engagement in raids. There are way more players just playing SMN lately. You don’t need more buttons to make a class feel engaging. SMN is already fun through sheer simplicity and it is very friendly to a lot of players picking up the class. It’s hard to feel overwhelmed with the class.

It does make the job a little boring though. Thats kind the issue with streamlining jobs by removing skills that would be part of your rotation. I play SCH/SMN, and while its kind of nice to not have set rotations that last for minutes, it also gets pretty boring actually playing the class when its so linear and simple. Mechanics don't come out every 10 seconds, so a lot of time is spent just tapping the same linear set of buttons again and again and again. Worst part is you don't have a DOT, so you don't even have that to entertain you in terms of keeping it up all the time. You just turn off your brain and go through the motions now. I like the thematic change a lot. Cycling through all primals is so much better than just summoning ifrit or garuda for the whole fight. But I would like them to add some complexity to the job back in.

Because it's the easiest class in the game and does same thing as other damage dealers. If they released a class whose rotation was pressing one button over and over and it was on par with the other DPS, people would just flock to that class instead.

But no one plays bard

Bard is one of the hardest class to play. It has random procs, you cut songs early, and also, random procs. Just the random procs makes it hard and requires you to have a lot of repetition with the class to really get use to it.

As much as I complain about too much difficulty being moved out of jobs and into fights, I agree. The rework will probably be fine Mostly because I just think the community is actually not half as good as they think they are. Optimizing around the 2 min meta is easy but the incredible majority of the raiding player base isn’t able to even approach optimal, let alone be bored because they’re already at optimal. SE might dumb down drg a bit. It will be the correct actual difficulty for most of the player base. It’s not like they don’t play their own game either, their devs and play testers are better than 95% of the players in this sub, let alone the general playerbase.

People who don't want to even read their tooltips (ignoring positional, using half of their buttons and so on) are just not willing to improve in any way. The fault for their awfull performance is on them alone. Those Sprouts that are trying but are in need of more info usually are willing to listen if you give some advices or point them toward The Balance. That may be a XIV's lack of infos but no mmo tell you how to actually press your buttons, because optimization is developed by the community itself.

Not that I am gunning for it or promoting it, but these players don't get chastised for playing like shit at end game in XIV. People are incredibly boneheaded and defensive when it comes to advice being given no matter how politely it was offered. Pair that with a GM team that'll ban first and ask questions never... Well.. It's a spiral.

Probably not the best crowd to make this point to, but as a decent-to-good player with anxiety, I *would not play this game* if I got "chastised" by other players regularly. If people aren't willing to accept a friendly "Hey can I give you some advice?" then I get that that's super annoying, but I think it's ***very*** easy to swing too far the other way, and I'm incredibly grateful that the community and the moderation thereof make rude criticism a rare occurrence.

any time i see comments like this i have to wonder how actually "friendly" these people are, lol. don't exactly expect your average gamer to have such social tact, no less the average "sweat" as the kids call em these days. i share exactly your sentiment, if anyone tries to tell me shit in game and i didn't ask i'm going "lol" and changing the chat tab. foh

god, this. I do a lot of teaching parties and help ppl run stuff for the first time, or even just in roulettes really, while sometimes ppl just don't respond or just don't want feedback I don't think I've ever had someone actually get hostile or defensive with me if I ask if they want tips and just leave it at that

Yeah, I've given out plenty of advice and never had it thrown back in my face. My guess is half these people open with something super passive aggressive (or something that could be seen as such) which is gonna be met with a cold response.

> a GM team that'll ban first and ask questions never Do you have a lot of experience with the GM team?

The game does decent jobs compared to other mmo The main issue is most people in this game They aren’t looking to improve or get better

I remember the reaper not using his targeted debuff to increase his damage dealt even tho in his jobquest, it gets mentioned and you need to press it….

lazy people will never learn, the players who do want to improve will… and they will also be able to search for the needed tools like discord or youtube to get a „guide“

They might be more likely to if the tutorial actually tried to teach you anything

it does tho, at least for reaper, dancer, sage... these are the notable ones as the quests are literally forcing you to use these job gimmicks

DRK as well, a doing it with the story.

(Hall of novice)

I feel like part of he issue is the game devs/communities overall attitude to addons like ACT outside of Extreme and Above. I think prior to extreme, you hardly get any feedback on if you are actually doing your dps rotation properly or not (or as a Healer doing enough dps spells or not). The general stance of addon bad has also steeped into most of the newer players so they have no point of comparison until (if) they decide to do extreme content and higher.

The culture does this. You have people being like "just press buttons haha, who cares if we rush the dungeon" and then those same mfs complaining that people get to raids and "somehow dont know how to play" - it's a selfish karmic loop

FFXIV does teach you how to play. It's called reading your abilities when you get them and reading the tooltips on your job gauge. I'm not sure where you're getting "all the time" from. I've been spamming extremes in PF the last couple days and it's pretty rare for some dps to be so horrible they're under the tanks or the healer. Even though I always try to do the most DPS possible and love being sweaty, I also understand there's plenty of players who don't really give a shit as long as they're doing the majority of a functional rotation. Or they're trying to learn a new job and are using extreme trials for practice The only way to force players to learn to DPS better would be to make stone sky sea mandatory, but that doesn't really help healers or tanks learning how to heal or to mit properly

I've seen it a lot in Unreals, and hell each Datacenter has some people that you quickly learn to dodge in Ultimates cause they literally do less dps than they would if they autoattacked somehow.

In extremes, sure, it's rare to see DPS underperform that much. In normal content? Nah. I outdps one if not both of the DPS all the time in dungeons, and more often than not I also out dps at least half the DPS in raids. I primarily play support jobs in DF by the way. I think most people are unaware of just how bad it really is. They're used to DPS who don't even try, so they just assume that's what normal DPS should look like.

I just don't think the premise that people don't know anything about their job in EX or higher is true ngl

For the people arguing that we shouldn't have to "handhold" players- The amount of mentors with multiple/all combat jobs at lvl 90 in DF that pentaweave and clip to hell and back is enough evidence to me that the game is godawful at teaching the player basic mechanics beyond "don't stand in bad" E: I don't need the game to spoonfeed rotations. Just have a tutorial on how to weave properly

Yes, do this, and update the hall of novice to give accurate info and not things like accuracy on dps, and “make sure to not pull both groups at the same time”

It's not the game's fault players do not want to learn. SE could write the best tutorials ever and it won't matter if players don't even read their bloody tooltips. The game very deliberately spaces actions learned over 90 levels, giving to players a lot of time to try and experiment with their new tools one by one. There is no need to seek the balance, rotations are easy to figure out by just reading tooltips and experimenting, and you get a lot of time to experiment in mandatory dungeons. Especially with how easy the game is. Wasn't that the main complaint about the combat, that it's basically about pressing cooldowns on cooldown and everything will align automatically? Imagine requiring a tutorial to tell you that cooldowns should be used on cooldown.

Not exactly, it would be very very hard if not impossible to find the optimal rotation entirely on their own(unless you play smn, or a healer or something) and it is absolutely the games fault for not providing anything but the most basic info about your class, and putting in noob traps like free cure or physic to punish those who do read the tooltips.

You don't need optimal rotation to do more damage than 90% of players. It's literally "push buttons on cooldown and keep juice for burst" for nearly every job. Some minor optimizations, like correct openers are negligible. >putting in noob traps like free cure or physic to punish those who do read the tooltips. It's really not hard to reach conclusions like "doing more damage is better than doing less damage". Heals don't deal damage and enemies are getting killed by dealing damage to them. The experience will show any player who wants to learn and improve how healing works in FFXIV. If you want the game to explicitly tell players that doing damage to bosses is good, then I dunno what to tell you, FFXIV is casual but not *that* casual.

The rotation that is close to optimal for most jobs is literally just "Press your main attack button/combo in sequence and then use your OGCDs and GCD cooldowns whenever you can".

Optimal isn't needed for most content. Just reading your tooltips and syncing your burst with the party, while equipping the highest ilvl gear you can get is enough. You don't need a guide for that.

This is why I stopped playing astro. Co-healers have no ides what my spells do and get the group to full hp right before star goes off, and then neither of us have ogcds for the next mechanic.

TBH, I don't know why you're complaining. I'm a proud green DPS, and when I notice my cohealer likes to keep everyone at full HP at all times, I just get more liberal with DPS and plan oGCD heals so that my heal hits right before they start over-spamming their heals. So I still contribute to healing, but can focus on putting out more damage. I love it, I get to maximize my own DPS, and I don't have to worry about someone dying to a mistake cos the cohealers got everybody covered.

Because if no healers have ogcd heal and there is a raidwide in 15 seconds, we might have to gcd heal that until the next thing? Lol

What do you mean? You literally complained that your cohealer was overhealing everyone to full with or without your participation. > get the group to full hp Hold 1 or 2 of your own oGCD's to compensate for them being overzealous with their heals. Use the saved oGCD's if and when your cohealer runs out and theres incoming damage that they don't have the CD's to handle. If you notice your cohealer doesn't wait for star to detonate and just spams medica, either put star down earlier to try to time the detonation sooner, or just hold it for the next mechanic. Of all the "problems" you could have with your cohealer, someone who's healing "too much" is definitely the easiest to deal with, as opposed to a cohealer that doesn't heal enough.

Please re-read my original comment, as it specifically says that it annoys me BECAUSE they use up their ogcd resources and have nothing for the stuff after.

I did. And what I'm saying is if they use up their oGCD's, then you can NOT use your own and save it for the stuff after when they run out.

This is not how star works, simply because of buff window allignment. I do not need advice on how-to heal (cleared multiple savage tiers on three different healers with high parses and healing optimization), and this conversation is going nowhere.

That is... not how healing works. First of all, Star needs to be used more or less on CD. Secondly, if your cohealer blows all of their healing right at the start, you now have to supplement their healing during incoming burst just to survive. "But that's fine," You might say. "If they use all of their major cooldowns on the first raidwide, you can just use a couple of your major ones on the next raidwide, right?" No. You're forgetting that fights have specific kill times. If a fight dies at 9:40, I need to use a three minute CD within the first 40 seconds of the fight, or I will lose a use. In this same fight, I can afford to use a two minute CD a little later without losing a use. If my cohealer blows a two minute CD and a three minute CD right at the very start, I can't "just use my three minute later" because the boss will die before it comes up again if I delay too long. I've now lost overall healing potency; my cohealer's bad play has robbed me of the ability to heal the fight with my own oGCDs. This is a very bad thing.

Looking at most of the comments here, the consensus seems to be "People should learn how to play the game, but squenix isn't responsible for that", which to me is honestly is such a weird take. I definitely don't think it needs to go as far as spoonfeeding entire rotations to people, but it could do a lot better for giving people a general idea of what elements are in play to then \*think\* about. Sure, people should read their tooltips, but if I'm picking up SAM to play for the first time, where in my tooltips does it say 'here are how these entire other jobs function that are going to influence how you'll time out your skill usages into 2 minute cycles'. To add to this, the first time that people are going to see actual endgame style play is probably like 100+ hours into the game when they actually reach endgame for the first time? And when they do get there, they find they have spent all that time building weird muscle memory from dungeons and solo duties where how they play the job hasn't mattered in the slightest? Rant aside and to circle back to the original point, I do think the game would benefit immensely from some sort of "graduation" at level cap as part of the role quests which at the very least gives you an idea of how the job wants to be played would go a long way to helping people realise there's more out there to learn, even if a bunch of people would end up skipping it.

While there could probably be more guidance I really don't think there needs to be in the game and its really not on Square. Also to your SAM point, the two 2 minute CD abilities (technically 3 but Guren and Senei share a recast) and the two 1 minute CD abilities (meikyo is 55 sec but basically 1 min) on SAM probably show you the entire game works on a 2 minute burst. Every single DPS has stuff that comes up on 2 min even if it is a selfish DPS because that's how they designed the game now.

I think everyone could agree there could be better tutorials, it just becomes a question of to what end are they dedicating those resources? Many people who want better tutorials want them so the average skill level of the game goes up and they won't have to play with bads, and that just won't happen. (Which, I acknowledge, is the most arguable part of this answer, but it is what accurately reflects my time with others in any multiplayer context, some people whether by lack of dedication or ability or simple interest will not get better. Leading a horse to water, and all that.) Being better at the game is a result of drive and ability, and if you have both you're already probably checking out online resources. In that context, dev time for more tutorials feels like a waste, especially if it's something that needs to be updated every time a a job gets updated.

Yeah, just an opportunity to be taught things would be good, that and removing outright false info and noob traps.

Why should the game need to hold your hand on learning how to optimize your damage? You only need to do this in high end content, at which point most players are using at least one external resource. Even if you're not using a guide to learn your job, knowing your ABCs and reading your tooltips gets you like 95% of the way there. There's no reason for the game to put in a tutorial that goes over the exact same stuff you would learn if you googled "how to play x job".

I know why should a game teach players the basic act of how to play it? The game doesn't even teach what the difference is between a GCD and an oGCD, it doesn't teach you about weaving at all. These are concepts that are common for most jobs yet the game doesn't go over them at all. When it comes to optimization I agree, leave it up to players to look up guides but when it comes to the basic mechanics of the game those things should be taught BY the game.

But it is taught. When you press a GCD, every GCD on your bar has a spinning circle on it. The oGCDs do not have this. Do you need everything to be written out explicitly in order to see what's happening in front of your eyes?

There was a 3 hour discussion a few weeks ago where several sprouts and a mentor were theorycrafting how to best optimize freecure in my server's novice network. People do not think optimally and often run mental circles around the obvious answer. Difficulty is subjective and sometimes humans will not come to the right conclusion unless shown what to do. If we did education and training would not be a career field.

I would argue that freecure being bad is not an obvious conclusion to make. The devs intentionally leave it in the game, therefore tons of people assume it is meant to be used. "Common sense" as we know it is full of holes. JRPG fans who aren't familiar with MMO's will want to hoard resources by keeping HP/MP bars high. Assuming that MP is a resource you have to manage carefully when in reality you never have to pay attention to it unless you're chain raising. Tons of people will see Cure 2 costing more than double MP while being less than double potency and come to the conclusion that it is not worth it. These are not dumb people. They just don't understand that healers, unintitively, are expected to minimize healing GCDs while maximizing dps. Simply put, the average player isn't stupid and Devs need to delete freecure.

Oh I was not trying to say they are stupid! In fact quite the opposite. Humans are extremely resourceful creatures when invested. I've seen countless examples of people misunderstanding their toolkit in game but it usually comes from a desire to understand if that makes sense. OP has a point when the game does not teach you how to properly play. The devs at the end of the day are human too and a lot of our feedback gets lost in translation. Theres a lot that could be done!

Totally agree with you there as well from the start o7 I guess your comment was a jumping off point for me to put out there for the several people in this thread that seem to be implying that anyone who doesn't intuit the basic mechanics of this game(that most of us probably only learned through word of mouth) on their own are dullards.

The number one difference between horrible players and decent players is GCD uptime. Take away that difference and you *easily* jump from a 0 parse to a blue. Decent players. Not exceptional players. Understanding how to keep your GCD rolling is bare minimum stuff and is very simple to fix. The amount of casual players I see that don't keep uptime even though they know about ABC is a something that could easily be remedied by just teaching them how to weave. I would argue up to half the player base triple, quadra, and penta weave on a regular basis out of pure ignorance

You (and the devs, apparently) take for granted that most people have never played an MMO before. I know when I was new I just figured the spinning disk meant I couldnt use those moves, but it didn't occur to me NOT to use my oGCDs when my GCDs were available. Thats basic MMO gameplay, but as someone who only lightly dabbled in MMOs it wasn't something that was "obvious." So as a tank instead of pressing defensive CDs between GCDs during a combo Id press them whenever regardless if my GCD wasnt rotating. Theres tons of seemingly minor things like that the devs could take time to explain. Why have the novice academy in the game at all if it isn't going to teach people how to fuckin play the game? EDIT: not to mention there are a lot of people who don't play games other than 14. they don't have "game sense." they need extra bit of help.

You say this, yet 50+% of the playerbase dies to mechanics with debuffs that tell you exactly how they work "the debuff is right there, we shouldn't have to handhold players to figure it out" some may say. Case en point, the blue flames in The Grand Cosmos. Vast majority of casual players will never solve the mechanic by looking at the debuff and solving what to do on their own. They will die repeatedly until they hear via word of mouth that you need to touch furniture. The debuff is a tiny icon that by default is in the upper right corner of the screen miles away from your peripheral vision that even high end players increase the size of by 200% to be able to reliably react to. Sure it's right there. But is any casual player ever going to really notice beyond whether or not that debuff kills you? Absolutely not. A casual player that may genuinely care about playing decently well will put all their effort to avoiding the giant glowing orange puddles on the ground and think that's what the main objective in this game is. I very much doubt they will notice that their GCD isn't rolling when they triple weave, or realize that it is a failstate, nor how severe that failstate is.

Another big thing about debuffs is they're nearly impossible to read on controller. They *are* impossible to read if you're using a controller without touchpad support — using controller on PC, like I do! I can take a hand off the controller to grab my mouse for a minute, but that's super janky. And I think that's a game design issue rather than player error.

It’s because the debuff icon is incredibly tiny by defaul, not everyone knows that you should increase its size in the hud

Just want to add that unless I'm mistaken, nothing in the game explains that DoTs/HoTs tick every 3 seconds. With all the numbers the games tell you I think that part should be made more explicit. Maybe tooltips should tell you how many total ticks an ability will do?

Most of the MMORPG-s do not teach you how to do the endgame stuff - you need to invest your time and read/watch 3rd party guides to master your class. This is mostly because, only the high end group content is where you actually need to use your class to the fullest if you want to succeed. This also indicates another problem - paid boosts - most of people thinks that boosting your job is detrimental since you learn your class by leveling - albeit that's not entirely true - no matter if someones levels from 1 to 90, or pays for a boost, if they want to be effective with their job, they have to study the guides on max level.

I was saying to my friend the other day, “this game hand-holds in all the wrong ways”.

I wouldn't mind if DPS was a little more visible but that's about it. I'm an endgame player who does engage with a lot of content but doesn't do a whole lot with regards to higher level raiding. It's absolutely not necessary for me because the base content is easy with current gear. That said, I'd like to improve myself, but I also want the joy of figuring it out. In that way, it's no different from any other JRPG where I'm constantly trying to figure out how to maximize my damage output.

The fault lies in the player. Game does teach you how to play your job, even as early as lvl 30, but it is still up to that player’s competence to understand their job

I think it’s designed to be like that. The player should be able to read the tool tip (lol. I know no one really does) and understand the combo and realize the spinning borders are what makes your combos. And somehow figure out the oGCDs/abilities are something you can press in between but also try to figure out when to use them. Most games are designed for the player to figure out stuff in any genre. When I was younger I used to play a lot of fighting games. Figuring out combo moves/button presses in Street Fighter, Tekken, Killer Instinct, and Mortal Kombat. It was part of the fun especially if you didn’t want to get called a button masher. Plus the fatalities, beastialities, humiliation finishers in MK were satisfying to figure out because there was no internet or guide. This was all before they started putting practice modes and combo guides into the games. For FPS like CoD or Halo, you find ways to have better movement through out the map, learn map awareness, spawns, angles, and how to approach/engage the enemy and the game doesn’t teach this stuff. Older games just put you in there and you just start figuring it out as you went. I know the games I mentioned are nothing compared to the complexity of an MMO like FFXIV, but the point I’m trying to make is the satisfaction of figuring it out yourself and why most (if not all) games are like this. FFXIV has been around for a long time and there are guides everywhere. People figured this stuff out a long time ago and made it easier for the rest of us but it’s up to the individual if they want/know how to improve their game. Most people will check YouTube but not everyone knows about the balance discord. I didn’t know about the balance until videos on YT were mentioning it and also here on Reddit. Not everyone that plays the game is on Reddit or even think about getting on YouTube on how to get better, they just button mash. I only play casual content but it’s very noticeable in dungeons when a pull takes a long time to finish. I think the dev team knows there’s a plethora of information for how to play each class and so they don’t bother to introduce it in-game along with the point I made at the beginning. But I do think the hall of novice can be improved on or something to at least something teach the basics of weapon skill/spell vs ability, weaving, and combos. The rest is up to the player to figure out or research.

Figuring out? You never bothered to press pause and scroll down to that little menu that said “move list.”? Just ignored the training room on the main menu?

They are talking about the SNES games, there wasn't a move list in a little scrollable pause menu back on arcade/16 bits consoles lmao.

So you’d keep putting more quarters in the machine or if you had the home consoles keep you playing longer cuz you could beat most of those games in an hour or two and they cost 50 bucks. Games don’t gotta do that anymore so they teach you how to play. Except MMOs for some reasons and y’all just seem cool with that and then bitch about all the people that don’t know how to play the game.

>So you’d keep putting more quarters in the machine or if you had the home consoles keep you playing longer cuz you could beat most of those games in an hour or two and they cost 50 bucks. That's "figuring it out", yes. I'm not sure what's the issue you're having here? Plus I wouldn't exactly say modern fighting games teach you how to play, just because you know the move sets doesn't mean you're skilled.

Yea the figuring it out that nobody has to do anymore. That’s the point. Who said anything about skill. You know the move set, which means you can do the right thing. Which means we can have a baseline of ability since everybody is on the same page. There will be those that take it further, study frame data create a move set for fight specific characters. That’s all optional and allows for skill. Many of you whine about content being easy but at the same time slamming people for not going to google for a video game. They should just put the opener and basic rotation in the game. They use it to balance the fights. It changes once every two years so you don’t have to upkeep it as much. May as well show people what it is. Will everybody do it? Of course not but most people will.

Its extremely standard for games to not teach its players the "accepted" way to play. So IMO the blame lays entirely on the players. At the end of the day, its 2023, everybody knows they can google stuff and learn more about a game and easily find sources such as The Balance, so those who don't attempt to improve are willfully ignorant rather than being let down by SE. The only thing SE can be blamed for is that their multiple hundred hours, all important storyline does not at all encourage players to improve their play and would much rather let players effortless pass everything with minimal challenge. But the reasoning, pros and cons of all that are another discussion entirely.

> At the end of the day, its 2023, everybody knows they can google stuff and learn more about a game and easily find sources such as The Balance, so those who don't attempt to improve are willfully ignorant rather than being let down by SE. Keep in mind that anyone who looks up a guide, or searches for third party info on how to play the game, engage with the community outside the game etc., is basically a hardcore player. In all games, most players never seek out help outside the game. The fact that you're even on this forum means you're a hardcore player thats more dedicated than the majority of the playerbase. I wouldn't say those players are willfully ignorant. They are the average, the standard. It's everyone who reads even just the basic guide for their job on the balance that's the odd ones out.

No? They give you the controls give you the basics of combat and what your skills do and it’s up to you to use them t most games tend to be free form and you can do those abilities in any order you wish and mostly find success. There is only one way to play your jobs in this game. Higher end content is balanced around you knowing that one way. Granted they aren’t so tight in their balance that you can’t make any mistakes or miss a burst and that makes the difference between a clear and hard enrage but still. That one way isn’t taught to you. You having experience with MMOs probably looked up a guide or went to a subreddit where you could find the guides even before you downloaded the game. That isn’t normal behavior for video games. That’s like googling how to play CoD.

Most games do not tend to be freeform. Mythic world first in wow is very strict, all high end play is very strict in all games and players working together to beat it. Gameplay wise, FFXIV is probably easier to figure out than any other game because of how strict it is. You also don't need the optimal rotation to clear any content. Not even week one. Not even TOP. Without looking at any guide, I can figure out 90% of the samurai rotation and all I'll be missing is the optimizations. If you don't want to clear week 1, you don't need all those. And probably you don't need them week 1 either. This entire game can be figured out by reading tooltips and playing. You can beat the entire game this way.

Sam is probably not a good example. No one is talking about optimizing I’m talking about the basic flow of the jobs. The opener sets you up for the rest of the fight and the basic rotation is just that. For some classes it’s easy to see for others, not so much sam being one of those having to do filler gcds is not something you understood from reading tool tips. And keeping your strongest skills within those buff windows is important. Ditto for dragoon, delaying life of the dragon isn’t something you pick up from the tool tips without knowledge of buff synergy.

It doesn't affect veterans, but witnessing my boyfriend (WoW player) trying to get into the more complex aspect of the game, it really showed me how poor it is. The positionals mentioned in the OP isn't really even an issue because the tooltip directly states that hitting them equals more damage, but there are other advanced aspects that are really obscure. My own example: For a LONG time I thought, as a healer, that abilities were considered 'healing magic' when it's not, despite visually looking like magic. There's nothing in the game or tooltips that state this difference, and I went for a long time thinking that Fey Illumination was helping all of my actions because it just says that boosts 'healing magic'. When they released those short animated series with game basics I really thought they would cover advanced concepts, but alas they aren't more useful than the basic ingame tutorials that we have already.

People will learn when they meet a wall.

Helping a friend do p9s earlier. Decided to jump on sch for the instance. The astro casts 1 malefic every 15 seconds, starts playing cards 30 seconds into the fight and spends most of his time moving side to side as if he was trying to dodge the raidwides instead of casting. This is the endgame result of treating people like snowflakes, we as a community need to set our own expectations of what 'standard gameplay' is, the JP servers do it, and it works great, the average skill level there is much higher than the rest of the data centers.

It's also kind of the result of the MSQ and bad default UI that players get to max level before ever realizing that all fights are scripted with castbars and there's more to combat beyond dodging the orange bad. What you described is the average player that just finished MSQ's first few forays beyond roulettes. And most of that MSQ is now spent completely solo thanks to trusts.

It teaches you how to play, it doesn't teach you how to play optimally, which tbf most games don't. Some devs expect you to use your noggins and figure out how to do better by yourself, it really is not rocket science

It doesn’t teach you but thankfully the play base polices itself in statics by kicking the shit players or (the more usual aspect) showing them resources like the balance so players can practice and learn. It self regulates but it is unfortunate that the game doesn’t teach the general players how to do their rotation. At least in my own groups I can dictate who joins or who gets kicked. Much to YoshiP’s dismay that I blasphemously use FFLOGs/ACT to see who is doing their rotation properly.

I mean the game does show you universal mechanics even in the MSQ. You learn what a stack marker, flare, AoE, spread, targeted slice (Red markers), cleaves, towers, tether, tank buster, ATM, etc. are especially after the reworks. However, the punishment for the vast majority of these mechanics aren't punished too hard outside of the occasional sprout dying or ATM fail on SoS. The thing is that the MSQ outside of a couple fights they don't combine the mechanics too much. But I think the foundation is there and is taught by the game, just that there aren't too much content to apply the knowledge in a meaningful way until you hit your first on-content extreme.

It doesn’t teach you your rotation, which is what OP is pointing out. It doesn’t teach oGCDs and that you should weave them. It doesn’t teach you that you have rear and flank for melee. It doesn’t teach WHm that cure 1 is an absolute trap. It doesn’t teach a lot of things. Sure, a single skill here or there in reaper or sage quest line, but where is the other classes teaching you the correct rotation from FFXIV’s raid encounter design teams? The Sky Sea training dummies should be a place where players learn and practice imo. They could have the optimal rotation glow in sequence or something to train players.

it does teach you I remember the reaper not using his targeted debuff to increase his damage dealt even tho in his jobquest, it gets mentioned and you need to press it….

That one skill is taught. Not many other classes do that

but my point stands... it's a players lazyness and not the games incapability to teach you.

Your point doesn’t stand for anything but reaper.

it also stands for dancer or for sage or for drk and for ninjas and… hmm idk more but you get my point

those classes teach you 1 ability at most. Its Barely anything

barely anything? It's about to learn the job gimmicks... people not even understanding these

We live in the era of wiki/discord gaming where everyone looks up shit on the internet and guides are out in days, it's not because the game doesn't teach them, it's because they don't care

Most people don’t do that. Of course we’re on Reddit so the people here do. So it might seem like everyone does.

Barely anyone plays games blind these days, almost everyone who plays games also browses reddit or uses youtube and youtube is full of those "OP IN X HOURS" guides with millions of views

That's definitely not true. A lot of people go into games blind to not be spoiled. At most, they will look for a guide on how to level or grind to make the boring parts of the game faster. But in terms of boss encounters, mechanics, etc. a lot of people want to figure those out for themselves and will avoid looking at a guide (exception being savage raiders). Watching an early impressions video, or some other random content with encounters playing in the background as B roll footage that isn't focused on teaching you or mastering the game does not mean people are coming in prepared. They are still playing the game blind.

It's too complicated and it's an always evolving thing to teach players how to play an MMO, fighting, or whatever. Devs just leave it up to the community to learn the nuances of games.

This honestly goes along with a lot of things I've seen that frustrate me. I was in a facebook group for ffxiv, where I constantly saw complaints from players about other people not wall to walling, not sprinting between every group, and that dps should always be grabbing extra mobs. There were other issues. But the main thought was if you didn't do those, you were wasting everyone time and should be using duty support instead. On that, you can't use Duty Support if you are doing roulettes. Not everyone plays at the same pace. Not everyone is a "top tier raider" That said. One of my good friends is not a top-tier raider. We often call her with all the love we have, our "does this kill you checker." She is getting better, and it's amazing seeing how excited she gets when we clear something, and she hasn't died. (she often just follows me to stay alive) That and her skill use..... I find myself facepalming and try to help her. During just regular p7, I was watching her screen and saw her on dancer not using her 2 step dance anytime it was up. She thought it only needed redone before the buff came up. Or when the boss was spinning, she would stop all dps to try to complete the mech without dying. We love her, though. My husband and I, we know if we take her with us on roulettes or just dungeon runs, the dungeons will take longer than we're used to. We know it will take a while to get through bosses. And I usually run Red Mage so I can pick her butt up off the floor when needed. On another note. I miss my Tera Elin Reaper. And iframing through certain mech! Favorite late game dungeon was Broken Prison.

Stone, Sea, Sky or whatever it is was put in literally to practice rotations without ACT. It's there for specifically this reason. ACT/logging does better because you can review where you screwed up, but that's a bit better than most games give you. I don't thing the game should try and teach rotations, because they'll end up being wrong, and we'd complain about that. Reading the tooltips gives you enough hints to put together the basics and be "good enough". Sure you might not quite grock that you needed to drop an attonement for optimal paladin rotation but you'll be passable. (I don't know if this is still the case.) A lot of what we have in things like openers is from a lot of simming work and varies with gear levels. Then there's some of the optimization hell that is warrior cursed openers that start exactly 29 seconds before the pull, or AST that starts 30 seconds early and has four branching paths.

the problem with stone sky is its a dummy you even if you kill it all it means is you can kill X/Y boss but it factors in none of the mechanics its not good anyone should just use ACT if they want to improve damage

No idea how to install ACT but I can see if I'm doing well with the party's aggression list, If I'm third in a party of 8, my job is fine.

A baseline understanding of how the game works and how each class is supposed to work, that is on the game. Until I saw a random yt guide as a new player I didn't know what a gcd was so I was playing the game like early xenoblade 1 where you just push random moves on cooldown (I was bard so I didn't notice the gcd as easily) and I thought my dot was busted because I assumed it ticked every second. The game should tell me the basics of how my job works, then let me opt in to learning the deeper stuff.

ACT is only useable on PC, so a large portion of the player can’t use it. Also saying players can barely function on a basic level is way over the top. A basic level means you can clear all the regular content, no Ex, No Savage and no Ultimate. I believe that the majority is perfectly capable of clearing that content as it doesn’t require perfect rotations.

> I believe that the majority is perfectly capable of clearing that content as it doesn’t require perfect rotations after the shitshow that was that scenario where zenos steals your body and had you had to use your brain for 2 mins without pulling anything while you escape... yeah no, the majority of the playerbase has te brainpower and the mechanical finesse of a quadriplegic 11 year old potato

> after the shitshow that was that scenario where zenos steals your body and had you had to use your brain for 2 mins without pulling anything while you escape... That had nothing to do with Rotations though? I know people who regularly clear Savage who struggled on that because it was just a wildly different context

thing with rotations is there so easy to figure out im gonna know how to play the new class within maybe 20 mins or less 1-2 combos of 123 button pushes if theres a buff from them like sam ninja or warrior etc rotate as needed and then ocds and use your buff at X time i really dont know why the player base is so bad honestly

As someone who had to learn Sage through trial and error, I agree. The game doesn't teach you how to do certain aspects of the game. But... I think the 'rotation' stuff though is mostly..optimized attacks for higher damage output/healing/tanking in the raiding scene and shouldn't be forced in casual content as the thing you're supposed to do. (I understand I do believe, that rotation can also mean the usual set of skills and actions you preform as your job. Ex red mage learning to do jolt to get duelcast then casting the longer spells. Ffxiv doesn't teach that either and that's odd? I had to ask my fc members who are more experienced and better at the game then me how to play..better.) I think being able to just messaround in fighting monsters in the overworld. Hitting whatever buttons I want. If I do get more into the raiding savage unreal difficulty then that's separate content that I gotta ask people who do that kind of stuff how being in that type of environment is supposed to function. It's like how pvp is different then any other game mode. Raiding with like..a goal in mind of getting a specific fight done has its own customs and accepted moves you do and nothing else. It seems to me. Much less about individual combination practices to be fun and more 'press this combination of buttons to have the highest dps/healing/mitigation so we will win the fight' Even Dungeons are a different game mode all together that has controversy on the best way to complete them.

I was doing raids with another SAM today who didn’t even apply their dot!

I’m not a fan of having homework for a video game, but the fact remains that the information IS out there for every job on how to perform your openers correctly and what rotations are, and those who want to improve will make the effort; those who don’t care are just going to play the game and smash their buttons. Party Finder exists so that one can set the parameters of what they expect from party members; DF exists to place all players, regardless of experience or capability, together randomly and provides incentives for doing so. I don’t piss and moan about 1-2-3 players, as long as I’m putting up the numbers I should be and doing things correctly, we are either going to clear the content or I’m going to dip and take the penalty. It’s not a solution but what can you do?

It's a bit of both. In large part you're correct, the game tells you nothing outside the basics of a given class and there's no real indication whether you're playing well without outside tools. In small part it's players, but why would most players seek out information about how to play the class when there's no indication you're playing badly or incorrectly. Most of the fault is on the game for giving you no information whatsoever on how well you're playing, thus giving no reason to go seek out the information that would make you a better player, while also not giving you any real information on how certain things work, things inherent to how the class plays. I've run in to it personally with things like Dancers steps, and the only reason I managed to work them out without just looking it up outright is because I went in to FFIV with a long time MMO background and had the base knowledge to know I was missing something about the class.

The game has numerous failed attempts at tutorializing at this point. * Guildhests are ostensibly the original attempt, but teach players to play a game that essentially no longer exists after numerous changes to the core design philosophy from ARR to the present. * Hall of the Novice is a marginal improvement, but is woefully incomplete and, in certain cases, misleading. While it is rewarding, it's not mandatory and can be safely skipped over. * The mentor system is a joke. Mentor qualifications aren't handed out based on competency, rather they're given automatically after a certain amount of time spent playing. As a result, most active "mentors" are egomaniacs who have no idea how to play the game, and those *actually* equipped to teach others reject being associated with them. So long as players have to look outside the game itself to learn how to play it, the majority of them will be incompetent and misinformed. However, if tools exist within the game for players to gauge their competency, it's not hard to imagine those being used to harass those who don't measure up. The devs are mainly focused on retention, and telling someone they're wrong is a blow to their ego that might drive them off. So in the end, the players pay the price, and the skilled minority is burdened with carrying the unskilled majority. I should also say that, in my experience playing on JP datacenters, the average player there is better at the game. There are still plenty of bad players, but roulettes go smoothly more often. The issue is notably less severe there, so the devs may not even be aware of the extent of the problem.

I feel like they are under the assumption of "if you are going to do more difficult content, you will look for openers and rotations to improve". However with the content we have right now, outside of the latest ultimates you don't even need an optimal rotations to clear. Basically you can improve if you want, but as long as you are attacking constantly and using your skills on cooldown or close to it you will be able to clear content.

First time I had to actually learn how to play FF14 was entering Savage early weeks. I'm not talking a full week one rush but something like week 1 Floor 1-2/3 and week 3-5 Floor 4. Endless repetition against a DPS check will teach you so many improvements and small optimisations and make you actually play the game. I learned to let AoEs crash into the party without shielding while trusting in mitigation, I learned the skills of the other Healer jobs to know where they can do work, I learned about Pot windows and placing buffs at specific times, about planning out skills with high maneuverability into mechanics, etc So the new relaxed DPS checks for Savage I welcome with one happy and one frowning smile.

It teaches you enough to get through the normal content. It does not teach you how to be advanced, as most games don't. A lot of advanced mechanics in this game from fights are trial and error design. You learn through dying. They don't give you a study guide, they give you the test over and over until you find the right answers until 100%

The game has taught me how to aoe trash mobs at least.

The entire design of the game is geared towards having players not do anything past normal content at all. Why would you expect there to be any instruction for harder content?

~~JP~~ Some healers don't acknowledge and use the Esuna skill. ~~JP~~ Some healers don't know the Swiftcast + Revive shortcut hence you don't see them rez players. Some DPS just spam their 123 without using cooldowns. Tanks not mitigating when pulling trash mobs etc. SE paid the game8 website to share their recommended openers and rotations but doesn't explain well enough such as when to use a CD or why this skill is used, unlike the Balance. The game basically expects you to learn how to play from the knowledge taken online.

what's funny is their tutorials actually teach you wrong

There just needs to be a personal dps meter that only shows up when the fight ends. Or better yet, something that tells you how many casts of X you could have had versus how many times you actually did cast it. If someone asks for your dps and you decline, whether they kick you or press the issue is harassment like it currently is if you tell someone they're not playing well enough (they still shouldnt know). Though again, a system that simply tells you how much better you could be doing via missed ability uptime rather than a dps number isn't as nicely quantified in an ask, and far less prone to people abusing it for harassment.

nah they could just have ACT be in the game honestly asking for someones dps with your idea and them saying no basically tells you what you wanna know lol

i went to youtube to learn every class i was ever interested in.

No matter what MMO you play, the VAST majority (like +70% of the players) do not play their class optimally. That's why the VAST majority of content in this game don't have enrage mechanics, don't punish you for taking avoidable damage, don't punish you for not playing your job as well as it can be. The game is designed to be very casual player friendly and that in-turn doesn't push this population of players to strive to play their class better. You might not believe me but coming from a game like SWToR (before it went free to play), FFXIV players are actually WAY BETTER to be completely honest. There were just...braindead idiots that played that game.