FFXIV: Hall of the Novice is still bad



Lemme take you for a ride, and see why Hall of the Novice is still bad. The mistakes it makes, and what I’d want out of it to do better.

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43 thoughts on “FFXIV: Hall of the Novice is still bad”

  1. when i play ff14 in the fc i always want to say not everyone comes from warcraft or a game known as point and click. when a game has you click on something there tradtionally known to have mechanics. i hate mechanics, well there good because if you can dodge everything dont need a healer.but genashi impact is what im more use to an action based game 0 mechanics. so i like the new novice afther 5 trys i passed it. i hear warcraft explains everything before starting. i think ff14 is better then wow because its way more roll play friendly. to me every class/job in ff14 is simple and powerful but undertaking mechanics is what choosing the right job important. bard, summoner is for any one anything else can be a challenge

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  2. My primary gripe with the new tactical training is that at no point do you have to dodge/resolve mechanics while also fighting a boss. It just seems like a very weird choice to not lean into “Okay, now do all of that while smacking the enemy” as a final exam that can teach good habits for things like spacing and when to greed vs when to play it safe.

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  3. Wesk, Square should be paying you since your videos are the real tutorial for this game. Your videos are the real Hall of the Noice and – as a Mentor – I will keep recommending sprouts watch your videos as long as you make them.

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  4. Agree with you 100% about the focus target advice being bad, but there is one more example of when I, at least, focus target in a pack: Beeees (and bee-like things). Anything with Final Sting. Unless, of course, the dps is just so high that everything gets obliterated before it can go off. Happy to see a video from you as I was just wondering this morning if you were talking a break. 🙂

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  5. I
 actually genuinely hate when people suggest hall of the novice or any other tutorial adjacent device is made mandatory. While I agree the actively discouraging dpsing on healer and actively discouraging aoe on dps is VERY bad. The rest is fine for casual content. I firmly believe that making this mandatory even if it was perfect would be kinda irrelevant and dumb. First you would lose players. Not just the lazy ones who would bash their way through but also the ones who want to try high end content and can but hate MSQ and are now being forced to do even more
    mind numbing content. The second reason
. Its a multiplayer game. Players SHOULD be willing to teach and help at least to some degree. There is already so little talking in duty already and the few times I can help in things its nice. Its encourages players to talk and chat together. So while I think hall of the novice probably does need some improvement like you listed it should never be mandatory
. Well maybe if someone story/job skips but only in that case.

    Also small side note. I think its the worst idea ever to suggest SE make individual job tutorials. The jobs change each expac and while some largely remain the same like RDM at its core some get reworked far too often. Its too many resources and leaves too much room for players to complain because SE taught the job incorrectly.

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  6. I don't think I've ever run into a healer that refuses to do damage for years now, why do so many still whine and complain about this? More often I find healers now who refuse to heal likely following advice that healers need to do damage and never cast a gcd heal. Granted this is mainly cohealers but still… it's annoying.

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  7. An opener tutorial is not necessary and honestly would be bad for casual players. Openers are more for optimization than casual play. What we need is for job quests to focus more on telling players to use their whole toolkit. Encourage them to press all their buttons. Focus on the fact that certain abilities make other abilities do more damage. Teach them how one button activates another. We don’t need something that focuses on optimizing damage. Players will and have done the optimizing without the game telling them to. Just the basics of using every button. If people just press buttons duties would go a lot faster.
    Just put the tooltips into the job quests. Also would be a good idea that at the end of each expansions job/role quests it reminds you to read your tooltips.
    And since it was mentioned cure 1 is probably never going to be addressed in game. As bad as it is free cure is intended. The game will never tell players not to use it. It falls under the same thing as openers imo. Not using cure 1 is an optimization that players have discovered. Same as openers and burst phases. Only way it gets addressed is by SE making a change to cure 1. They either have it upgrade to cure 2 (I don’t think this is likely), remove free cure entirely (I see no point to this. Might as well just upgrade it at that point) or they change free cure so that it is an actual viable option.

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  8. I think there was one instance where you had to overlap AOEs because of limited room… but yeah, its annoying to do that first boss in current Praetorium and see everyone, sometimes even tanks, run for their lifes, hugging the wall…

    Question, am I banned for preferring X? I dont use it or the alternative (I have a life 😛 ) but I would prefer X if I did…

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  9. my favorite part of the hall of the novice tactics is the concept that different roles handle things differently, and then whether or not you play healer, the mechs end with an invisible medica instead of even the conjurer npc doing anything. Even in training mode healers are useless (except for yoshi p's favorite move, esuna)

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  10. Yeah. Needs something more for tanks ans healer. Was lvling bard and the tank was provoke then single target the mobs. I caught a lot of strays hits and arms length got a work out..try asking the paladin if they wanted a tip but the game is full of introverts like me and said nothing…… brings in the whole pain of mentor roulette with that.

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  11. I remember my very first stack marker. It was on me, and I ran away from the group because I thought the "giant glowing sign" meant I was going to get hit with something big and I should not cleave it to my team.

    Lol

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  12. It's weird to me that they didn't put in a tutorial for things like Limit Break. I've seen tons of players not even put it on their bar because it doesn’t get added to their bar for them, or they think it's a personal resource, etc.

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  13. And even if there are a few places where it theoretically could be beneficial to focus target people are still not gonna do it since it's old optional content and people no longer remembers how the mechanics in those works so they are still just gonna grug through it and just react to things as it happens.

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  14. The first instance of the homing AoE would be Cloud of Darkness in the Crystal Tower series. What makes it even worse is that one ticks really fast as well, so this slow tutorial version is just flat out bad.

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  15. I think my big complaint is that it doesnt show tge player how to watch for Boss Anination Tells.
    Things like Nidhoggs Hot Wings, or raising an arm for a half room cleaves. Non floor marker tells, and the like.

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  16. All of this tells me that SE insists on pushing back on the standards set by the community. They apparently do not like wall to wall pulls, nor having the tank keep aoe'ing once they grabbed all the mobs. So long as the devs keep fighting with their own community, we're gonna keep having these problems.

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  17. I feel like this is reminiscent to real life job training where they give you the foundation and you have to learn the rest on the job. They cannot list off every single different example you're going to run into. A lot of your nitpicks are for different scenarios in different dungeons, and they can't give every single example. It's also up to the player to play the game and learn as well. Is the new hall of the novice great? Far from it, but I definitely wouldn't call it terrible or bad.

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  18. The 1st chasing aoe is in WoD Cloud of Darkness uses one. As these exams are meant to show you things you'll run into up to the end of HW. Oh yeah the original training guides haven't changed for teaching bad habits. I understand that they want to teach the absolute basics, but any one doing them who know to do more than just that will fail these hard. especially when smn still had shadow flare. I also don't like how on the dps they used to teach people to go and grab any adds as a dps. the only time I've ever been fine with that advice is for the bees that spawn during the 1st boss of Quarn. I'd rather have a dps to die to final sting than the tank or healer.

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  19. I dont think its useless… sprout in EW here, being told that there are Different Kinds Of Towers where the mechanic was the same but they looked different was good, and also I liked that they mixed up the mechanics and had us do them all at once in the end, but I do agree this is reeeeally not good training for how the multiplayer content actually works in this gams.

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  20. Single target priotisation used to be a thing in ARR when enmity management was important and swapping to tank stance reduced your damage, you also couldn't just AoE spam because TP would drain out fast. Some tanks would even mark enemies in kill order so you could focus one down at a time.
    I cannot remember too much about Heavensward, but i'm going to assume that this was still somewhat the case when Hall of the Novice released (3.2).

    That being said, Heavensward is almost 10 years old now and they should maybe update Hall of the Novice to more modern design…

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  21. Consider as well that Yoshida made the comment that he "Would be very interested in watching high level streamers attempt the new hall of the novice". WHY? For a high level player these things were so rudimentary and boring. How could he possibly want to watch someone skilled at the game do it?

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  22. A tutorial on attacks that aren’t telegraphed by an aoe marker would be nice. I know stuff like glower and the swing moves are telegraphed now, but there’s still a few moves where you need to pay attention to what the boss is doing.

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  23. I agree with all the proposed changes except for openers
    Since jobs change around to much between patches and expansions, it would be a huge overhead or would get outdated fast
    Maybe a damage check that forced you to use most of your buttons to pass? With rhe NPC yelling that you have more power than you are using?

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  24. I'm just saying this loosely, as I agree with most of the video Wesk, but WoW tried that idea of "you must complete this training thing before you can que for (heroic) dungeons" in Warlords of Draenor and it went over terribly. Some players just aren't very good, and most of them are already painfully aware. Creating that barrier to entry usually just means you turn them away altogether.
    I get that for some people having a group that just can't get right sucks. The 3rd boss of the 2st Endwalker tier on normal difficulty (the tree lady) wrecked the first group I tried it with till we ran outta time. Had to requeue to get it killed to see the story. I've had many things like that happen but that, to me, is just part of the mmo experience. It's just something you gotta deal with from time to time.

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  25. I think they especially need a tanking specific training level with basics about mitigation, boss positions, trash pulls, tank stance, enmity list, and co-tanking. Especially, especially, co tanking. The amount of sprouts that just grab aggro and spin bosses cause they think they have to be main tank, then proceed to cleave the party or die constantly only to rez and provoke on cd to be mt is really silly. I know there's probably guides, and tooltips but people don't read. Have them learn this pre-hard modes in arr. So before Thornmarch. They could have even done it naturally in a solo duty or something, but having a tutorial instance would be so good for helping new tanks not like…

    But then again there's also gnb/drk you can grab with no tanking experience too.

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  26. Yeah, do not agree at all. For starters FF14 is literally only game from multitude other MMO's I've played over few decades and absolutely none of them has anything like this feature. That's already a big bonus.

    Besides that, you assume too much from basic training what this feature aims to provide. At no point ever was the goal of this feature to teach to players all the boss tactics out there. It provides a solid foundation to a totally new player, introduces core mechanics, how to recognize them and what are the core actions to do to survive them. Specifics themselves come with gameplay and are learned while playing the game. Also are learned from more experienced players in their Free Companies who can teach the new ones about things, tell how to deal with some action in specific fight. All of that comes from specific experience itself and provides the final lesson. Expecting a novice hall to teach everything is like lazy man's dream – let others do the work so that I can avoid it, despite the fact that I have the experience and knowledge I could provide.

    You are also looking at Novice Hall with a view of an experienced player and that's a total oversight. It is meant for someone who is completely new to the game and knows nothing, knows not what to expect but wants to learn and that it does very well. After the lessons there new player can function considerably better in all the situations he or she will encounter for the appointed level and more complex mechanics will be learned as player unlocks and advances higher level content. As it is intended. Thus no, it isn't bad by any measure, it's quite the opposite. Can more be added to it, say so-called "expert tactics"? Sure. Why not suggest this to developers then, provide specific examples what to add and what to explain and, hopefully, see the Novice Hall get updated even further, with newer information? But it being bad? Sorry, absolutely incorrect. It provides very good basics to someone who is completely new to the game, to any and all mechanics and allows these players to encounter new things with better understanding and confidence. Yes, they will make mistakes at first anyway, like everyone does with new things, but they will make way less mistakes with Novice Hall lessons behind them and will learn things faster as well. Or in other words, as is intended with this feature.

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  27. Openers as a required lesson isn't something that needs to be covered. That's very much a natural skill expression you'll stumble on if you care about it. Remember, most people DO NOT interact with high level content. That's a minority in the community.

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  28. I don't fully agree with the idea that in dawntrail you ignore the big guy enemies. They will likely die last but if they are positioned well in the pool of enemies, targeting them first is good. I've had it where they even die mid pull rather than be the last thing to die. But I do agree with 99% of what youre saying In the video.

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