This one is slightly less edited than my average discussion video, because really, I just wanted to share my feelings about raiding in this Expansion. Would love to hear your thoughts, too!
As a side note, I know some of the quality on the old footage is a little choppy. To fix this going forward, I’ve bought an extra dive specifically to keep footage on, so I can store native HQ footage rather than needing to resort to my old YouTube videos. I’ll build up a nice archive. Thank you for understanding!
Patreon: https://patreon.com/RinonBanana
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rinonbanana
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/rinbanana
Discord: discord.gg/rinon
DSR Full Video: https://youtu.be/gNn-A0ZP9Hc
TOP Full Video: https://youtu.be/FalOh8mW1EA
0:00 Intro
1:27 Job Design
11:00 Extreme Trials
13:48 Savage
16:44 Hitboxes and Positionals
18:14 Third Turns
20:26 P8S
23:24 Door Bosses
26:45 Healing
36:15 Fight Difficulty vs Job Difficulty
37:47 Ultimates
42:29 Criterion
#ffxiv #endwalker #dawntrail
source
No.
About the job design part: I'm a main DRK for about 3 years and let me say this – DRK sucks.
And before some motherfuckers come and say "uh drk is fine in raids" the game isn't called Raid Fantasy XIV, its easy to be "fine" with 2 focused babysitters FORCED to keep you alive.
I would love more healing for the raid itself, but I think tanks are too dependant in xiv. I wish tanks were more protecting each other and not on the healers. I hate having to beg healers for everything I don't feel like im protecting my team at all.
The fact that Hydaelyn entrusted the survival of Eorzean to ignorant rabbits ruined the whole game and the entire story for me. I can't believe that the great Hydaelyn is so stupid given that she has millennia to prepare. The whole thing became a big joke.
Given the part about healers, might I suggest looking into Blu Mage healers? It's got an incredible kit of both Healing and DPS, and it is so satisfying to do. Or at least that's what my fellow Blu Healers say.
I would get heated this expac because people would say "everything is limit cut" like no, it's all closer to fundamental synergy than anything. But also how else do you want us to have coordinated 8 person mechanics communicated to us?
I'll Have to agree with you about the healing becoming easier. I miss the HPS healing of Stormblood where not using a gcd heal was unheard of. Literally God Kefka required more HPS to heal then any boss in shadowbringers a full expansion later. Unless I'm in p6-p7 DSR or p6 Omega, I'm generally struggling to stay awake as healer
I think variant and criterion dungeons are some of the best additions in EW. Variant dungeons are super cool with the different routes, and the secret routes are unique and fun to do. Criterion is something I'm super excited to prog in 7.0 since I don't really have the time to do savage anymore. I hope they keep up criterion as a viable upgrade path.
I'm so glad finally someone pointed out why the DPS check in P8S isn't an issue! Having an optimized group is only really a big deal for week 1 groups, and I feel that finding an optimal comp is part of the fun for many week 1 groups! Besides, you can definitely play machinist as long as your group is skilled enough to get there! I find it funny that people want harder content but can't even handle a difficult dps check
Lifelong MMO healer main, here. I'm dumping healing for 7.0., and it's good that more influencers are mentioning the issues with encounter design that have healers spamming 1. It's insane that GCD healing is seen as something to avoid, even in what you're asking for.
I feel like the problem with healing is exemplified by the advice about cure when you learn cure II, "stop pressing that button". So much of the healers game play is maximize pressing your 2 DPS buttons, and don't press those other buttons(gcd's). Imagine any other role being told here's 8 of your 20+ button's press those 2 a lot, press the others when ya can, don't press the rest.
On the TOP clear – 100%. I got pilloried for saying what you said, harassed, even left the official forums (and then, weeks later, banned because the people were so mad they were reporting literally every one of my posts). It was insane. For saying…what you said. The "healers bad lol" take was so strong, and people would get FURIOUS if you pointed out it was or could be literally anything other than "healers need more DPS buttons" which…doesn't even make SENSE if your problem with FFXIV healing is the TOP 0 healer clear. More DPS buttons on healers wouldn't have changed that.
6:10 this is so ridiculously frustrating, too. MCH still doesn't feel great even with the adjustments made to it on "good" ping (as reported by the log in screen). I will still ghost mudras on NIN even on "good" ping. I love playing both of these jobs, but only in casual content where it's fine for me to have things go poorly. I also pretend DRK and DRG don't exist lmfao
AM is absolutely unhealthy in the current state. Either the devs can choose to add markers to the fights that people are relying on am for now, or they should slam down the ban hammer for all the 'obvious' uses of it (for example the pf advertising that everyone knows what it means regardless of the attempts at plausible deniability)
Rinon hitting with banger videos as always!
I think it's great that you clearly state your stance on several things but are able to clearly explain why instead of just saying "Things are too ez now".
I've always considered myself much more casual in the raiding scene so I never really thought about the intricacies of job design/job balance as much since I don't rly see myself as having a good say in any of those things. The first time I really thought abt it was during p8s. I'm glad that your group was able to clear the check week 1 but my team at the time was definitely made up of the 3-5 jobs that were considered not optimal (WAR, RDM (me), MCH) and we suffered for it. While the idea of having to adapt and switch jobs based on fight does sound interesting, in the end, some of the more optimal jobs aren't really enjoyed by everybody and I wouldn't super agree with having people play jobs they don't enjoy in order to clear the fight (xeno with gnb on p8s for eg). That probably is more of a personal issue and is easily fixed as more new jobs come out for each archetype down the road but just my two cents!
Super love your thoughts on healing in particular! While I still think Scholar is fun to play, healing as a whole has definitely become a little less interesting and motivating to do. Excited to see whether Dawntrail will be able to bring that spark back for the healer mains but if all else fails, I know chain strategem got my back.
honestly from an objective standpoint this expansion was pretty good for raiders, with decently difficult savage, 2 ults, 3 criterions and fun extremes, but its also the expansion where I finally got hit by mega burnout and just lost all motivation. I think my main issue is job design, EW really doubled down on the boring 'pool everything for buffs' design that I already hated with some ShB jobs, and melee felt boring as hell because of it.
Good riddance kaiten i wont miss you haha
Yoshi-P did comment that they went overboard with boss hitboxes. I'm expecting that in Dawntrail they will become more realistic when boss size is considered.
Endwalker was a great expansion. However, if I had to pick one thing, I would have changed.. likely it be SE should of told players to shut as as they don't know what they want.
okay so im a casual player.
i don't do extremes savages ultimates.
planning to do criterion.
i recently reached story to be continued played all side trials raids alliance raids having started arr last june.
as a scholar main who is currently leveling other jobs one us astrologian.
and i enjoy it ALOT.
its very busy in terms of what needs to be preemptively put up to deal with reactive healing moments
atm im at 71 and successfully healed holminster switch.
some things id personally change thus far about the job is for one:
stellar explosions giant dominance. have it grant damage reduction prior to giant and perhaps add some mechanic to speed up the timer (perhaps % damage taken by the entire party triggers giant dominance)
as well as granting something akin to clarifying draw to minor arcana as it would allow queen to be a more consistent raid wide reactive tool for astro.
grant tank / melee cards a damage reduction so you think more about giving it to your tank for a tank buster or the damage to your melee ontop of the dmg increase.
similarly healing potency buff to the range/support cards.
i like the idea behind essential dignity being the single target oh hecc ability of astro amd having multiple charges is nice but i feel as tho more would be interesting to have.
collective unconcious is also a great ability i believe that could be reworked slightly to become a sort of. passage of arms as paladin has (my favorite ability ngl)
same as it is now but grants a burst heal ontop of the regen dispersed to all in the area.
let's say a 800 potency heal if two people 650 for 500 for 4 350 for 8 (honestly idk balancing im just spitballin)
and astrodyne. let it be activateable the moment you have one sticker and build the other two different ones as you get them as usual but a same one just doesn't register. as well as tipping sticker rng in the astros favour more.
these are some things id change/add and maybe ill have more ideas as i level more but i figured that's where i stand now
I think EW was a good expansion if you are a HC raider because we got to feast with the amount of content we got w Savages, Ultimates, and Criterions. I'm not sure how good it is if you aren't a huge raider. The variant dungeon is prob midcore but it's hard to find a reason to go back in once you do all the routes. It doesn't feel quite right to call normal criterion midcore – I'd put it as a stepping stone from EX to Savage but I don't think there's anything that exists in EW to bridge regular content to Extreme or provide a ramp.
I really liked hearing your opinion on everything! I'm glad you made a video like this, cuz after both ultimate videos, and the 100 creators video I was really wondering where you personally stood! I might not agree with EVERYTHING, but I liked hearing you talk about this expansion
As someone who does everything in the game except Exs, Savage and Ultimate (therefore the majority of this video was irrelevant to me lol), my answer is Yes. My biggest issue was that the patch story was a little too mid.
As a healer main, one healing check I actually enjoyed was the p8s p2 Natural Alignment mechanic. Having to deal with constantly hard hitting attacks with little breathing room to act was genuinely fun. I wish we could have more mechanics in which the healing check was like that.
"i'm about to say something controversial"
proceeds to say the least controversial, most widely agreed upon opinions in the entire community
P8S was easily the most consistently fun savage to prog and farm, with the best theme music, mix of mechanics and rewards. Don't bothering thinking otherwise; you won't find a better one.
banger vid
18:00 I want Phys Ranged jobs to have positionals to offset the ranged tax and make gameplay more interesting
Its wild you brought up Barbariccia, because i felt the exact same as a healer. That fight on release has pressured me more as a healer than ANY fight during savage so far. It wasnt necessarily timing, it was the actual planning I had to do for my buttons, i needed to be more aware of what was on/off cooldown. Savage is tough, sure- but barbariccia was New in a way I hadn't experienced before. This paired with the fact it even felt narratively potent? It really felt like the boss saying "Im going to make your life hell trying to recover this party"
Hard disagree on having easy and hard jobs even though it seems to be the road taken by SE. Now as a result we see more than half the players going for SMN or DNC in their own roles, and that also causes issues with different skill levels inside statics as well.
I'm a job commie and i'll die on the hill where every job should have accessibility (yes, even BLM), with a decently intricate rotation for those who want to push further. It's absolutely disheartening when your favorite job is turned into a braindead thing just for the sake of offering playschool jobs to the playerbase. They were managing very fine before in previous expansions, and I doubt that casual really care whether they could press buttons more efficiently with their job anyway.
"P8S check was fair but I had the optimal comp for it". Yeah go tell that to the groups that ran with the suboptimal tanks that lost you 400 DPS each (and which got emergency buffed by SE as a result). I don't disagree with the idea of tight checks, but this was bullshit.
I'm still miffed about Kaiten being deleted because there was never any "management" going on with Kenki anyway, you Kaiten'd every Iajutsu and the combo to light up your stickers would always produce enough Kenki to do said Kaiten. Deleting it didn't even change anything about the rotation but robbed the job of a skill that looked and felt great to use.
As someone who started playing in HW, EW has finally convinced me that I am no longer the target audience for this game. The battle and job design is the complete opposite of everything that had made me like this game for. At this point I honestly don't believe SE is going to do anything about healers and healing anytime soon, considering their track record (and recent interviews) and story is simply not enough for me to buy the next expansion. So I guess I'll be skipping it for now and I'll just observe from the outside to see how things will go.
I think the most funny doorboss subversion would be a doorboss on 1s. Doorboss in a normal would be the second most funny subversion although it probably would actually be a difficulty decrease because a significant number of good players who first-clear normals would just assume its a glorified phase change and not realize its a checkpoint, while its just giving a free checkpoint to worse players.
My take is that the expect that everyone has to do damage hurts healers too. Like how using anything other than an ogcd heal is a damage loss (except for whm I guess with the lillies) and how the expectation is that you stand there and cast Broil 80% of the fight (I play scholar that's why I use that example) and how casting succor is now just a "prog button"
While yes it can be fun to plan out this CD and ogcd over a fight can get rewarding, but pressing the same button 100s of times for damage doesn't feel good
But that is just my take, other than that I enjoy healing in FF14
This was a great video! I'd love to see more, especially on Criteron. As someone who gave up healing halfway through Endwalker having done it from Stormblood, there's a lot to love about Criteron healing, especially in savage. The damage profile and outgoing damage feels great for a single healer, and the single pull + timed nature of the whole dungeon means you even have cooldown considerations that go beyond a single boss. If every boss felt like the first boss of Aloalo savage, I'd definitely go back to healing over DPS.
I do miss doing savage content. Mind you the meta minded masses kind of kill the raid scene for me this expansion (ninja hate was real I swear.) which is a shame cause I loved all the normal versions of the 8 man fights.
I can agree with a lot of the positives you state for the encounter design in FF14 and its positives, but there's something I'm curious about and something I disagree with.
First, just to get out of the way, I think it's a bit disingenuous to praise Endwalker for having more varied arenas. Every arena turning into a circle/square by Shadowbringers was a degeneration from a previous standard and a problem, so fixing it was just returning (somewhat) to a previous standard that never should have been left in the first place. Spinning it as a positive feels like a (if I may use a generic example) that bit in 1984 where chocolate rations were reduced significantly, then increased slightly, and everyone praised the increase of their chocolate rations despite actually getting less. It's good that these improvements happened but that we were ever in a position where every arena was roughly the same is ridiculous and should overwhelm any praise given for the developers solving problems they made themselves.
Second, as for my question — do you think the quality of your static is impacting your evaluation of fights? You mention doing PF for them, so I'm curious what your success rate was like there and how you felt about the fights in PF. There's a lot about FF14 raid design I like and I agree completely with your observations, including that P8S's execution check was great, and that there simply aren't other games like this so we should appreciate the one game with encounter design of this nature. However, when it comes to Endwalker's raids, I wonder if the style didn't get too aggressively unfun / punishing for casual players. Specifically, the hard "pass/fail" mechanics here 1 failure rapidly wipes the entire raid. P9S Levinstrike was absolute torture for my more casual friends, and single-handedly dominated the experience of the fight. I would be averse to ever doing the fight again or in PF because of all the bad times I experienced with it (helping them clear and initially progging it myself). P11's letter of the law is a fine mechanic, but due to the 4 towers, a single person messing up can easily wipe the raid (especially if it's a tank), and Dark and Light is very precise with brutal punishments. It's more fine for fourth floors, but I feel like my brain glosses over at the thought of doing High Concept or Classical Concepts again and waiting to see if 1 person out of 8 makes a single mistake which kills us all.
This has always been a factor in FF14 raiding (e.g. someone messing up Height Error in A8S), but I think it got especially egregious in Endwalker, and I observed several of my casual friends dropping the tier and sometimes even the game over it. You mention that over time mechanic complexity has increased to match jobs simplifying and player skill increasing, but don't mention the consequences where individual players have their mistakes highlighted more aggressively. In Heavensward an individual player could play their job somewhat poorly and still win; just look at BLM footage from the time and see the uptime. But there's no getting away with standing in the wrong place in Levinstrike or High Concept. My conclusion ended up being that to enjoy raiding in FF14, you REALLY need a VERY good group to minimize the consequences of insta wipes. It seems harder and harder for casuals to have fun raiding casually when the raid style is so punishing and strict. And so, to repeat my question, do you think the quality of your static is impacting your evaluation of fights? It seems to me that my penta-legend god static friends all have a more positive impression of these raids than the even midcore raiders who end up spending 80-100 hours on P8S or whatever beating their heads against high concept etc.
Can I take a moment to say that I adore the way you talk about high end content Ronin, both the highs and lows that Endwalker has gone through. I’m excited to have Dawntrail as my first major expansion, but I can’t deny I have my bias towards Endwalker for being my first for a number of things in this game, from raiding to job design. That’s not anything objective, so I don’t think my opinion caries a great deal of weight, but the good that we did get was really good. Thank you for this discussion and here’s to the future in Dawntrail.
I feel like a video with a title like this focusing strictly on raid content really falls into the "vocal minority" trap or discussion. If you are gonna make a video about if an expansion is good or not, you should be much more thorough rather than just raid/hard content
Even tho I started with Endwalker. As a Scholar main Ive been slowly understanding why people complain about healing (this video actually helped me understand a lot. And while I’ll most likely never fully understand just because I haven’t been playing the game since earlier expansions, I still agree with them and would like SE to do more with healers and have encounters make me work a lot more.
All I have to say is, I play high latency on a data center outside of my continent due to friends and several jobs I really like are unoptimizable; Machinist feels like I'm choosing to lose DPS, Ninja's mudra is so jank that I end up missing one or double tapping it, and overall the only job I don't see myself losing GCD time is Warrior
Third party tools that assist in fight solving and generate things like automarkers or camera hacks are trash and every person banned for using them deserves it. All you're doing it for is a glowy weapon that looks shit, and a title. and bragging rights. All three are worthless is everybody knows, or can reasonably assume, that you didn't do it yourself.
This means that over time, people will drift away from bothering to do raids, and fight design quality will tank like WoW has, until we reach the point of fights being made around those tools, with simple number inflation difficulty.
I'm probably a rare personality when it comes to this opinion, but… the 2 minute meta is a BLESSING for the game.
As a Partyfinder only player, this is the first time ever, where if people are able to keep their rotation somehow going, Partyfinder groups can compete in damage output with a well organized static. Yes Statics will always be ahead, but the gap has never been smaller. AND THAT IS A GOOD THING.
I do not want to play a game where I always know "If I want my job to perform optimally, I need to join a static where we coordinate our buff windows in a spreadsheet" or even worse have certain jobs be massivly worse in certain team comps. The game should be designed with PF as priority nr.1 and statics second. TOP is a great raid, but it's very clear it was designed for groups with comunication in mind. After doing it in a static and then later in PF, it was apperent that lots of the mechanics were not designed around having no one in the raid take extra responsibility marking people or then get punished by having to do MUCH harder strats (sigma congaline YIKES), just because of it.
Back to the 2min meta: I started in ShB 5.4 and barely had the honour of progging the last Eden raidtier. The differences in comp even in ShB (where they were already simplified) were drastic, plus certain jobs had clear disadvantages. This heavily punished random PF groups or people who one-trick a job and look for a spot in a static where a different jobs is prefered.
But then it begs the question: Is it worth to sacrifice some level of high end optimization for a general level of equality? The answer is ABSOLUTLY yes.
There is no way ever, we would have got raids like TOP and DSR with the job complexity of StB on top of it. The reason we got such incredibly difficult fights is that jobs are simple enough that people can put their focus on the raidmechanics instead. If they for some reason decide to go back to StB complexity, we have to also go back to the UCOB mechanical difficulty.
And please if you comment, spare me with "statics are supposed to be supported more because it's an MMO!!11". No. Statics should be formed to raid with your friends, not to execute a prog more efficiently. That can be a benefit, but shouldn't be something that is a given.
I did think Endinger EX felt incomplete, or rather too vanilla. All X.1 extremes added good stuff be it interesting mechs or something epic while Endsinger was just another dorito fight released right after farming zodiark
I've heard many people say Summoner is better now, and as a former Summoner main, I couldn't disagree more. Just as you say, Summoner used to be a job with a complex and precise rotation that had a very satisfying finish. Now it's become incredibly repetitive and tedious to play. Even though I know it's highly unlikely, I still hope it will go back to the fun job it used to be someday.
On the extremes, I was extremely disappointed and generally grossed out by Werlyt's story, and I hated the fights both on their own and as part of that story. That whole story felt poorly written with characters who were caricatures in every sense of the word: the kids were dumb and annoying, he who shall not be named was creepy and dumb, and I ended up skipping the very last cutscene with that guy (something I never do) out of sheer disgust with the whole affair. Even the last cutscene of the entire story did not impress me, felt forced and exaggerated and I simply didn't care about those kids. By comparison, literally anything that Endwalker had to offer would be better by definition, but the fact that it brought back MSQ trials was the absolute best decision. Finally I could feel fully invested in the story again, and the Fiends and Golbez were great. However, I can easily say that it is the 6.0 MSQ trials that were my favorites, in this order: Hydaelyn, Endsinger and Zodiark. Barbariccia was certainly a complex fight, but I by far preferred Rubicante, which itself was not easy but I found it more fun.
As far as the savages go, they do seem interesting. The majority of the feedback seems to be that they're just tough enough, but of course there are always a few who will still manage to whine about them being too easy. Ultimates though, for me there is simply no interest in them if I hated the original fights they're based on. In this case, old man Thordan was not the least bit interesting to me the first time around and I would want nothing to do with him in this ultimate either unless it was just to clear it once, if I should ever become good enough to do an ultimate.
As an aside, I'm surprised you didn't mention MSQ, because while Shadowbringers was amazing, Endwalker 6.0 surpassed it for me. The 6.x patch story was pretty enjoyable too, very interesting and finally connecting so many previous stories to the MSQ. Zero was a pretty great character and it was good to return to the First and see some friends there again.
I never really found a main job in Endwalker. I ended up just bouncing around from job to job when I did play. The job design is just super boring and then all my friends quit so I didn’t personally enjoy Endwalker lol