Bit of a longer one, but an interesting topic! Whilst this conversation came about because of the recent Viper changes, it raised the …
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Bit of a longer one, but an interesting topic! Whilst this conversation came about because of the recent Viper changes, it raised the …
source
We've seen with Elden Ring and Mage Tower tuning in WoW that making things too difficult becomes a real problem. Tuning for the top 5% is not great. That's 95% of people getting disappointed, and for what? After awhile those were nerfed to reasonable levels. Sure, bad gamers need something to aspire to, but needing 1,000 attempts for an average gamer to complete an encounter is tedious and many players will not waste that much time beating their head on a desk. Thumbs up for good tuning and adjustments.
It''s weird to me that they didn't find these issues in testing but supposedly got enough good feedback in less than a week to already make changes to viper
either they are doing a massive quickshot or their testing needs improving
The best route I see them going is if they do a "Master Mode" for each job, where the intended play style would be largely focused on it, but with small gains ONLY if played well (5% gain). They shouldn't radically alter it's skills or play style but rather add in more challenging secondary mechanics on top of what they current design is. For example, adding positionals back, removing the combo highlighter, changing certain charge systems to being timer-based to encourage getting extra GCDs in a burst window (or losing them!) and so on. Don't change the skill potencies as that is what dictates the job balance within itself.
This system would be toggle able and likely be used in lower tier content, but likely not be used in Ultimate except for challenge runs (don't balance the game around this theoretical DPS gain).
I kinda feel like Preach is missing the point. This isn't a balancing change, it's a change based on purely some people not liking the gameplay. Which, if you don't like it, there are plenty of other jobs to play. We wanted Viper for the "busyness". We want it to be fast and actually make you think even just a little. For casuals, it shouldn't matter anyway because if all you're doing is dungeons and 24m as long as you're hitting your buttons, you'll do fine.
There is a massive problem with making jobs brain dead, and that is the class becomes boring af. Sure thats fine for the casuals, but didn't we just say we should have a bit of content for everyone? Why shouldn't we have a class that harder, more challenging for the people who want that challenge? Because the casuals will complain to? That take reeks like game journalists who complain elden ring is to hard. Like if its to hard, then maybe go play something a bit more your speed, because the challenge is part of the fun.
What's super funny to me is that the ENTIRE playerbase is sitting here saying "The people who are saying Viper is too difficult are ridiculous" while nobody is saying "Viper is too difficult."
And I think that's because people are fundamentally misunderstanding why this change is being made. If you watch people play Viper in new content, it's really obvious that people UNDERSTAND the job, but that the battles are SO mechanically busy that it becomes impossible to hit the positionals on some of the fights unless you're willing to just stop DPSing for a while, and that doesn't feel good.
Fucking love positionals. Really kills me to see them phased out more and more. I was really excited for viper and this hurts bad
my question is what does it matter if a casual can only get 50% of a job's power when the casual content those players are in doesn't even ask you to use 25%?
how can a job be too hard to learn for casuals when they can clear their content without learning the job to begin with? is that not literal nonsense?
you can't just keep simplifying ad infinitum because SOMEONE still can't win while also saying diversity of playstyle and skill expression are valuable. you have to draw the line at some point.
also, good players have to keep their own skill in mind to have an opinion, but "average" players have no opinion period. because they don't know what they're doing or saying.
asmongold himself proved you could beat the whole elden ring DLC by standing in place and poking BEFORE the blessing buffs, you just had to read item descriptions.
all of the people saying it was too hard were demonstrably wrong, they just had too much ego to use a shield.
my argument is the easier/more braindead a class is the more interesting you can make boss fights
MMOs supposed to be fun?
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Could be worse could be blm it's actually so fkin awful synced down no fun at all at any level picto has a 123 combo at 50 blm has fire gg
People take their skill and impose it on others. ie if I can play this job at this lvl then everyone else just needs to get on my lvl. All that does is have players drop the job. Once that happen changes will be more severe as dev try to get player to play the job. Its why Mnk and SMN had all those changes. I can run VRP just fine as it is but I do notice that I find myself using TN on CD for dreadwinder just because it give me more freedom. At that point just remove the positional on just that, would not even change the feel at all but drops the stress over lower skilled players. As someone who like old SMN the new SMN is in a better spot. Mnk changes got lot more ppl to play that job. They arent going to slow viper down just make it more forgiving as speed thends to have you trip up on your skills.
Clearly a job is too difficult if I have to look over from my YouTube video more than twice during the rotation.
Weird question. But does red/green color blindness have a higher incidence in the East compared to the West? It wasn't something I thought about, but then I seen a few people mention it, and I was like "of course". In the past, you could always remember "when I press this button I need to be flank" and "when I press this button rear". But with the shared buttons, I can see why that would be endlessly frustrating to people with red/green colorblindness because the color is the easy way to distinguish which positional you need.
Final fantasy ALREADY has the most boring fighting experience and people STILL complain that classes are to challenging lol
very good video! but my only gripe is probably talking about a buffet of content for all people to do and that it should cater to everyone! well i miss having complex jobs. i think there should be all types of jobs; jobs for the braindead, for the initiate, for the starter, for the optimizer, etc. removing all the complexity out of jobs because people who suck and can play the other 50 jobs in the game kind of goes against that buffet. 14 genuinely feels like a buffet for mostly idiots at this point, but there arent enough good mmo's on the market anymore to switch to, probably because the genre is stale as hell. i WISH wildstar still existed, genuinely fun and exciting game, but i think it came out too late. you say it was too hard too make money , but FFXI is STILL open and they genuinely treated the playerbase like shit LOL. OH this NM is too hard? literally cranked the difficulty on it even harder so that more people would cry. Oh you cheesed a fight? invalidated the run, and made it even harder. 18 hour fights just to not clear. i think people playing games have changed more than anything, because we were fine with things like wildstar back in the day, clearly the average player is just worse now.
You need to get with MrHappy on his Podcast. I would love hear you two discuss this
coming from playing Rogue and Demon Hunter in WoW, Viper feels (felt?) like a breath of fresh air. Just DAMAGE DAMAGE DAMAGE YEAH BOYS YEEEEEHAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
This issue will never be perfectly resolved, because the ratio of players who enjoy improving their skill vs. the players who play for the content alone is forever in flux. Game companies will always cater to both, because the skilled players will make them some money while also promoting the game, and the content players will make them the most money. This is the cycle that results in a game for the widest audience, while also providing above-average content. It's a compromise that everyone has to make.
In terms of casual players accessibility in Dawntrail dungeons I noticed something funny.
Trusts/Bots were created to allow more casual audience participate in dungeons without having to interact with other people, but they actually make the dungeons harder.
With other human players, even if you cannot play at all and stand in every fire, they are still able to ress/carry you through fights. While with trusts/bots, the fight wipes as soon as you die.
On top of that the fights tend to last longer as NPC-s do less damage, so you need to dodge more mechanics cycles on average.
The level 94 trait for Melee DPS is a buff to Mantra, a lv. 8 self-healing role skill.
At level 94, the game buffs a self heal of lv. 8.
The homogenization of stuff is bad when is this deep. At level 94 traits should be about critical skills, gameplay changing mechanics, skill ceiling increases.
Sadly this is something that XIV has overdone, to eliminate player responsability on performance, we have no builds, no choices, and no it's removing any kind of skill ceiling for the sake of balance and accesibility. At some point the game needs to bite, players need to be progressively filtered, instead we just have huge steps in difficulty depending on elected content as a game with difficulty options on the main menu instead of a progressive difficulty curve.
That a level 100 dungeon is the same difficulty as a level 30 dungeon is just bad design.
only time i have a problem with Viper is with Ping, it fucks up everything even in the slightest server tick fails or stutters
Take a shot every time preach says yoshiP invited him to dinner
I don't have issue myself with the viper positionals, but I do see what the problem would be for most players. The double weave between your dread combo positionals feels extremely awkward and would likely be difficult for some people to perform while moving from flank to rear (or vice versa). Especially depending on what type of controls they're using. I'm all for skill expression but that particular one is again just very awkward feeling.
Big problem is much of the Japanese playerbase who get listened to by developers, play on PlayStation controller. Having more buttons to push regularly than other jobs is going to require more learning as a new job. It is insane that these changes are coming within first week of release. It's likely many of the changes they do is based on data, showing that most players don't actually push their buttons, so they have to encourage or remove/bake skills into others to solve it.
I HATE positionals.
i personally love postionals and wish other games had more of them. But this is mostly coming from a long time Dark Age of Camelot player, it worked really well there
I'm super interested to hear your thoughts on ESO class design when you get around to endgame.
I'm a bad player, and I like the idea of making rotations less punishing. I don't do savage or harder content, and I'll still struggle to learn mechanics in later dungeons or 8 man raids, often having to do them 6+ times to understand the mechanics. Even then, I'll have difficulty splitting my focus between doing my rotation and monitoring the mechanics, so often I'll misalign my burst window with the rest of the party, or i'll mess up telegraphed mechanics, because I was focused on my bars instead of the boss. There are entire jobs i've never touched because just reading them makes them sound insanely complicated to manage.
So for people like me, we need non-punishing rotations, and ideally the MSQ should ramp up in difficulty over time enough that we can maybe feel confident at least trying savage content. So I like the viper changes, because the less bad players have to juggle, the more we can focus on not wiping the entire group on mechanics, letting you guys get through the content with less wipes or struggle, while letting us feel like we're contributing. I know the good players want complex mechanics and complex classes, but that's beyond most players of this game.
God I hate this game and its community so much sometimes. The base combo has two positionals and they are already overwhelmed with it.
Just release me from this pain, I do not want to care as much as I do, please let me be apathetic.
I hate Dragoon changess on making a 4 to 5 skill combo skills "fang of Claws and the other damn thing . WORST CHANGE EVER !
I would not be surprised if they remove the positionals from dreadwinder while keeping the positionals on your 123 there’s no way in hell they remove all of them but dreadwinder makes the most sense to me since a lot of people seem to not even know they’re there