Through 2.4. The MSQ grind is real, though I'm enjoying the story and characters a lot. It just needs less filler quests.
I was worried when we went back to the frozen elf lands because I strongly disliked that place in 2.0, but the over-the-top Haurchefant, and the new characters Aymeric, and Iceheart were all really enjoyable.
I also got to do Odin and Ultima, which are the first trials I've wiped on, and they were really fun. I'm hoping I'll be able to get into more trials like that pre-80, but the ARR Extreme queues seem to be infinite for DPS.
I imagine you're gonna be hard pressed to find people wanting to run the Ex's sync'd with 7 randos unless you make a Party Finder for it. Ultima and Odin have the advantage of being MSQ and glamour dependent.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I've found that if something isn't on the MSQ, or doesn't have a mount, glamour or pet people want, you are going to need a pre-made to get them done in any reasonable time. Which I think is fair. FF14 has done a better job than any MMO I can remember making most older content relatively easy to still find groups for due to the roulette system. Every MSQ encounter or dungeon I've needed to run for story progression I've had no trouble getting a queue pop for.
I remember waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2.2 I think when I first subbed being worried if I would ever find a group to do the Relic Reborn questline. Last night, I queued up for the Chimera fight with no issues. I don't know how they do it, but to think I'm still finding groups for ARR content is amazing.
I get legit genuine enjoyment doing palace of the dead with people who sit on the exit and whine about people going for chests.
Want to boss people around? Queue with your friends i don't give a shit about your time it's no more valuable then mine.
I mean, context is important. If everyone is going for chests and one guy is sitting at the exit point refusing to help, he's an asshole. If everyone in your group is speed clearing for levels and you insist on exploring every room for chests, you're the asshole. IMO. I prefer getting chests personally, but I'd really defer to what the broader group wants to do.
I remember waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2.2 I think when I first subbed being worried if I would ever find a group to do the Relic Reborn questline. Last night, I queued up for the Chimera fight with no issues. I don't know how they do it, but to think I'm still finding groups for ARR content is amazing.
I remember waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 2.2 I think when I first subbed being worried if I would ever find a group to do the Relic Reborn questline. Last night, I queued up for the Chimera fight with no issues. I don't know how they do it, but to think I'm still finding groups for ARR content is amazing.
Back in the day in ARR 2.0, when I was a paladin, my server at the time was Ultros, and the Ultros community put together a Relic Reborn public linkshell that people could join to help each other with those quests. I was a part of that community, and I was quite the popular person, because I was one of the few tanks who participated in that. I cannot count the number of times I had to run Titan, Garuda, Dhorne Chimera, and all the other bosses that were required for that original quest chain.
Back then, there was a very skilled monk who friended me. On top of being a skilled player, he was also a genuinely helpful person and he put together groups a lot to help people get their Relic Reborn done. And since I was on his friends list, he invited me along to tank quite often. You just don't see people like that in MMOs very much. That was honestly one of the best community driven experiences I've ever had playing an MMO. Period.
Back in the day in ARR 2.0, when I was a paladin, my server at the time was Ultros, and the Ultros community put together a Relic Reborn public linkshell that people could join to help each other with those quests. I was a part of that community, and I was quite the popular person, because I was one of the few tanks who participated in that. I cannot count the number of times I had to run Titan, Garuda, Dhorne Chimera, and all the other bosses that were required for that original quest chain.
Back then, there was a very skilled monk who friended me. On top of being a skilled player, he was also a genuinely helpful person and he put together groups a lot to help people get their Relic Reborn done. And since I was on his friends list, he invited me along to tank quite often. You just don't see people like that in MMOs very much. That was honestly one of the best community driven experiences I've ever had playing an MMO. Period.
Ultros in general is still pretty great, when world visiting opened up for awhile you'd see messages in NN from visiting people that were basically "Wait, you guys actually use NN to help?"
I mean, of course you'll run into the occasional bad apple, and I'm likely biased since I've been on Ultros from 2.0 till now, but from everything I've heard it's probably still one of the better worlds.
Mostly it just sucks because I can't ever run things with Aether people.
That's just how threat is now, for all tanks, you just passively generate all the threat and no DPS or healer can catch up to you in a million years unless you just hit something once and kept running to grab more stuff. Even then it takes some work to peel something off you. They basically decided to excise threat as a mechanic that anyone has to think about except an occasional tank swap mechanic in 8 man content.
Yeah, all the tanks feel very similiar on threat. Which is to say that I agree with the above; it's practically gone as a mechanic, in the sense that dps and tanks need to fight over it. It's still there as a mechanic to make sure the (main) tank is doing something and a switch to decide who the main tank is for boss mechanic resolution. Honestly, this is a very good change for tanks, in my opinion. It frees up the tank from worrying about both threat/sec output and their damage/second output and working to balance those as best as possible, with very limited information feedback. Not having to really micromanage threat puts the focus onto efficient dps rotation and mitigation cooldowns.
The new abilities for Dark Knight have been rather underwhelming so far. I'm only 74, but I think the new ones I've seen are so far are just a harder hitting version of lower level abilities (the ones that give you the damage buff) and a second combo ability for the pbaoe (that I forget the name of). Not really all that exciting.
The new buff and the abilities that go along with it are ... ok, but its pretty trivial to keep up the buff, and the important thing to recognize is when to shield. I don't know if its just because I'm not in the new content yet, but I don't think that I've had to really fight for threat at all (but then again, I guess they took away the ability to catch up on threat with the second combo going away). I'm not disliking the class, but it just feels a little...empty I guess? I dunno quite how to put it.
You've also basically described my experience leveling through ShB as Warrior. My 72 and 76 abilities are higher damage replacements for earlier actions, when conditions are met. My 76 is an amazingly good hp regen ability for myself and one other target. When I'm off-tanking, it's great. When doing 4-man content, it's a fantastic hp regen on trash. This is to say that all the tanks are in a very good spot and play similarly, while still retaining their own fiction and niches. But I still very much appreciate and approve of the 80 kit over the 70 kit. It's a very good middle ground between power-creep and stagnation.
I will say, for my money, Shadowbringers is the best tanking experience in the game thus far.
As for "threat catch-up" just use Provoke or a couple damage abilities, it's not an interesting mechanic for the tank to need to have tools to claw their way back up the threat list, just smash and go.
I don't want to feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but to bring the conversation back to threat a bit with tanks, I'm certainly ok with them essentially doing away with threat as a mechanic, I like to think that I'm open to change and there is nothing to say that threat needs to be way that tanks distinguish themselves from dps, but I feel like they removed threat as a mechanic, and then didn't replace it with anything. So far, I just feel like I'm doing just less than when I was doing before the patch. Or maybe not even before the patch, since while the threat combo was there, there was hardly ever any need for it, but certainly less than what I was doing in Heavensward.
I get that threat is not particularly fun as deeps (as others have said) because it feels like it limits you particularly if you have a bad tank in pugs, which especially in light parties, is where the game is aimed at. But I did enjoy the tension that I had to have between doing dps and generating threat that I had to keep in mind and adjust accordingly. I feel like you could still keep this kind of tension, but just have it dps independent. Still have threat, but just have it independent what the dps is doing, where I have to keep that threat meter high enough that the damage is still on me, but weave as much damage in as I can. I still think it could work, or barring that, some other kind of mechanic that fills in that whole, but right now, I'm just not really feeling it.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
I'm only up to 65 PLD but it can't be worse than the 50-60 storyline. It's not physically possible. They even apologized at the end for how crap it was.
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drunkenpandarenSlapping all the goblin hamIn the top laneRegistered Userregular
The threat catch up wombo combo is Provoke, followed by targeting the other tank and using Shirk. Super helpful if a tank died and they're not MTing or if they were MTing but now that have to OT because they got rescued off a cliff while already moving into position on Eden: Extra Wet Edition.
When tanking 8 man stuff, if I'm not the one pulling, I'll usually keep tank stance off for my opener then switch it back on after 20-30 seconds or so and shirk the MT on cooldown. That way if they go down suddenly I'm already next highest in threat by a solid margin and pick up the boss automatically.
What they're talking about is if you are in the OT role, but need to gain a bunch of threat at once (say because you died and lost your threat). You can provoke the boss and then immediately shirk the other tank. That way the MT still has top threat but you, the OT, are now 2nd in threat in case the fight has any mechanics that target top 2 threat.
Fortunately SE has gotten smarter about that and Savage mechanics will now target based on role rather than threat, so it's only helpful doing lower content.
I'm only up to 65 PLD but it can't be worse than the 50-60 storyline. It's not physically possible. They even apologized at the end for how crap it was.
That 50-60 storyline was a big reason why I switched to Dark Knight...it was terrible.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
the 50-60 paladin storyline is GoT levels of "there was an obvious logical endpoint here and you inexplicably decided to undercut it with nonsense at the finish line"
6th 80. Glad that's over with. Next up, Black and Red Mage so I can get the Soul of the Mage achievement before going back and getting the other 3 tanks done.
Healing in Shadowbringers just isn't fun. Too many pants on head exceptional tanks who are quite happy to explain to me that no, the dungeons aren't set up in easily recognized clusters of 1-5 mobs in distinct pulls that you might pull multiples if you're feeling good and are overgeared, but rather, the dungeons are set up so that you pull every single mob in the dungeon at the same time until the dungeon physically prevents you from running any further forward, obviously, and I was a silly goose noob for thinking otherwise.
Having said that though, I do like White Mage more than the other two healers this go around, and the above was the exception, not the rule. (Still too many people p-p-p-p-POWER PULLING, though.) Not as many support buttons, but the tradeoff is not as many support buttons.
you do realize when it comes to leveling dungeons you can’t actually “overgear” them due to level/itemsync right
not gonna dive into the other side of that topic because the horse is dead but if there’s an expectation that the leveling dungeons are going to get easier over time because gear that simply isn’t the case
might save some heartache to just get used to the content being run at higher speeds as familiarity is built
your post still says the opposite of what mine says? I'm not sure what the correction is
the leveling content from HW is not sleep at your desk easy just like the current leveling content is not sleep at your desk easy, assuming you're pulling two packs like most everyone does
i'll use sohm al as my example here because that dungeon can still be quite challenging (the first two sections are grinders)
ala mhigo and castrum abania are still challenging
just like all of the 71-79 dungeons are varying levels of challenging and will be mostly evergreen just like the others; the only thing that will change is players' familiarity and understanding of each trash group's individual mechanics
thus it will not get easier due to gear
edit: marking an exception for 1-50 because the 1-50 stuff is sort of on its own and old at this point and has always been easy
edit 2: in case it wasn't clear again reiterating the expectation that gear will trivialize the leveling dungeons won't happen because of syncing
I've come around wholly on the multi-pull topic. Pulling two (or three packs, aka wall-to-wall) if the healer/tank coordination can work is just flat out better. Rotate tank mitigation and healer cooldowns as necessary.
But single-pulls are maddening now (for me.) It's the worst of both worlds whether I'm tanking or healing. The incoming damage isn't strong enough to require cooldowns or resource usage and my aoe's are doing less effective damage because they're only hitting one pack's worth of targets instead of two. I've healed every ShB dungeon doing multi-pulls by now and tanked most of them and it's far preferable to single groups.
That's just how threat is now, for all tanks, you just passively generate all the threat and no DPS or healer can catch up to you in a million years unless you just hit something once and kept running to grab more stuff. Even then it takes some work to peel something off you. They basically decided to excise threat as a mechanic that anyone has to think about except an occasional tank swap mechanic in 8 man content.
Yeah, all the tanks feel very similiar on threat. Which is to say that I agree with the above; it's practically gone as a mechanic, in the sense that dps and tanks need to fight over it. It's still there as a mechanic to make sure the (main) tank is doing something and a switch to decide who the main tank is for boss mechanic resolution. Honestly, this is a very good change for tanks, in my opinion. It frees up the tank from worrying about both threat/sec output and their damage/second output and working to balance those as best as possible, with very limited information feedback. Not having to really micromanage threat puts the focus onto efficient dps rotation and mitigation cooldowns.
The new abilities for Dark Knight have been rather underwhelming so far. I'm only 74, but I think the new ones I've seen are so far are just a harder hitting version of lower level abilities (the ones that give you the damage buff) and a second combo ability for the pbaoe (that I forget the name of). Not really all that exciting.
The new buff and the abilities that go along with it are ... ok, but its pretty trivial to keep up the buff, and the important thing to recognize is when to shield. I don't know if its just because I'm not in the new content yet, but I don't think that I've had to really fight for threat at all (but then again, I guess they took away the ability to catch up on threat with the second combo going away). I'm not disliking the class, but it just feels a little...empty I guess? I dunno quite how to put it.
You've also basically described my experience leveling through ShB as Warrior. My 72 and 76 abilities are higher damage replacements for earlier actions, when conditions are met. My 76 is an amazingly good hp regen ability for myself and one other target. When I'm off-tanking, it's great. When doing 4-man content, it's a fantastic hp regen on trash. This is to say that all the tanks are in a very good spot and play similarly, while still retaining their own fiction and niches. But I still very much appreciate and approve of the 80 kit over the 70 kit. It's a very good middle ground between power-creep and stagnation.
I will say, for my money, Shadowbringers is the best tanking experience in the game thus far.
As for "threat catch-up" just use Provoke or a couple damage abilities, it's not an interesting mechanic for the tank to need to have tools to claw their way back up the threat list, just smash and go.
I don't want to feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but to bring the conversation back to threat a bit with tanks, I'm certainly ok with them essentially doing away with threat as a mechanic, I like to think that I'm open to change and there is nothing to say that threat needs to be way that tanks distinguish themselves from dps, but I feel like they removed threat as a mechanic, and then didn't replace it with anything. So far, I just feel like I'm doing just less than when I was doing before the patch. Or maybe not even before the patch, since while the threat combo was there, there was hardly ever any need for it, but certainly less than what I was doing in Heavensward.
I get that threat is not particularly fun as deeps (as others have said) because it feels like it limits you particularly if you have a bad tank in pugs, which especially in light parties, is where the game is aimed at. But I did enjoy the tension that I had to have between doing dps and generating threat that I had to keep in mind and adjust accordingly. I feel like you could still keep this kind of tension, but just have it dps independent. Still have threat, but just have it independent what the dps is doing, where I have to keep that threat meter high enough that the damage is still on me, but weave as much damage in as I can. I still think it could work, or barring that, some other kind of mechanic that fills in that whole, but right now, I'm just not really feeling it.
I appreciate the response. Though, for clarity's sake, I was talking about how threat feels as a mechanic on the tank side as much as for dps.
It's a binary switch for the tank. Do you have threat? Mission Accomplished Do you not? Fission Mailed There's no mechanics to reward excellent threat generation, it's either On or Off. And it doesn't matter whether the tank has 1 extrea threat or 1 thousand extra, it's all the same to the target. Add in that the UI gives pretty limited feedback on threat to the tank and it would make meaningful engagement with the mechanic really difficult in the current state of things. Right now, the tank sees the current threat status (Threat Held, Threat nearly held, Threat not held and Practically No Threat) on all engaged mobs and can tab-target to see the current relative levels for that monster. The info feedback on threat overtake rate or threat generation rate is just not there. It was also very difficult for a tank to see that another mob that they Had Threat on was in danger of dropping threat when it wasn't targeted.
To touch on what mechanic was re-introduced for tanks in lieu of threat generation. It really is that mitigation cooldowns and damage reduction are the new meta. It's way more about using those abilities to keep damage down so the healer can spend more time doing their own dps. Or to use cooldowns that increase the tank's own damage so the mobs die faster, so less damage is put onto the tank/party.
Removing all threat mitigation/reduction buttons from dps but still making dps threat overtake would be even worse, because then the mechanic comes down to numbers instead of player skill. If the tank can't generate threat fast enough, the dps will overtake and you'd be back to the dps having to stop taking actions until a buffer builds up again. I don't see that being fun for anyone. The dps sees that they can't play to their full potential because the numbers are against it. The tank sees their generation is insufficient and it's hampering others in the group. For that to be a feasable mechanic change, I think the game would have to include cooldowns or traits that tanks can deliberately use to pump their threat generation.
To pull an axiom from table-top role playing, a good mechanic can be said to be one where failure is as interesting as success. So what's interesting about failure to hold threat? What's interesting about successfully holding threat? And to delve in a little deeper, what's interesting about holding All The Threat?
Edit: Just so I don't feel that I'm posing these questions without sharing my own answers ...
1) Failing to hold threat isn't interesting because it's usually a failure state for an encounter, boss or mob damage is high enough that it leads to deaths more often than not. And grabbing threat back is just seen as the tank reasserting the correct state, which leads to ...
2)Successfully holding threat isn't interesting because it's a static state. It's expected and things are going as normal.
3)Holding a massive lead on threat isn't interesting because there's no benefit to being that far ahead. Pre-ShB, It only meant the tank could transition to their dps rotation fully, for the rest of the encounter. But then, why not just transition to the dps rotation sooner? or transition and then use the extra enmity rotation later once or twice, only when it's needed to keep ahead.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
You could do staggered threat levels. Maybe you do a system where the tank gains auto-attack threat very easily, but the mobs have abilities that target other party members, and there are stages of threat to indicate the frequency of targeting someone else, and at low enough threat level you don't get targeted. So the tank tries to maximize their threat while the DPS work to minimize theirs. And in a multi-tank situation, the off-tank needs to maintain high enough threat to eat most of the additional attacks so that the main tank doesn't have to take it all, while not going over to screw up positioning.
You could do staggered threat levels. Maybe you do a system where the tank gains auto-attack threat very easily, but the mobs have abilities that target other party members, and there are stages of threat to indicate the frequency of targeting someone else, and at low enough threat level you don't get targeted. So the tank tries to maximize their threat while the DPS work to minimize theirs. And in a multi-tank situation, the off-tank needs to maintain high enough threat to eat most of the additional attacks so that the main tank doesn't have to take it all, while not going over to screw up positioning.
Yeah! A system like that would be cool. Even leave design space for a tank cooldown that gets the target to focus All attacks on them for a short time. Or an encounter design where the main tank doesn't want their threat to be too high or the extra attacks sent their way would be too much.
Would be necessary to have that level of information easily visible to the party. but it's more interesting than a static "Is threat highest" true/false Boolean.
It would need tweaking if it were to go into ff14, I feel, no desire to increase button bloat yet again. Though Provoke wouldn't be needed in it's current state if a tank's auto attacks (or first ability usage, just so there's not a delay between targeting a mob and the first auto-attack swing) is enough to get basic threat automatically.
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drunkenpandarenSlapping all the goblin hamIn the top laneRegistered Userregular
You could do staggered threat levels. Maybe you do a system where the tank gains auto-attack threat very easily, but the mobs have abilities that target other party members, and there are stages of threat to indicate the frequency of targeting someone else, and at low enough threat level you don't get targeted. So the tank tries to maximize their threat while the DPS work to minimize theirs. And in a multi-tank situation, the off-tank needs to maintain high enough threat to eat most of the additional attacks so that the main tank doesn't have to take it all, while not going over to screw up positioning.
One of the Eden bosses already kind of does that. He'll auto attack the two top players on Threat. Which is why when one goes down, better to provoke for a second, then shirk over to the other tank.
I know what shirk and provoke do, drunkenpanda just made it sound like there was some kind of benefit to provoking before you shirk.
Provoke puts you on the top of threat, no matter how much has been generated. So if you shirk with no provoke before hand after getting rezzd, then you moved 0 threat over to the other tank.
As I mentioned earlier, deliberately allowing party members to take threat in large pulls during group content can be a useful strategy. It turns uses the group's hp pool as the buffer instead of just the tank's and can increase heal/mana efficiency while reducing the number of GCDs spent on spamming the tank. It is a niche roll in the current game design and I am not sure if supporting the niche is worth the other costs.
Would anyone mind helping me out with farming A12S for a weapon? Really want one for glamour, was hoping to get some 80's to help (still working on that myself, 76 DNC is my highest atm). I tried a PF last night and it went horribly (poor Bright).
I think the problem with threat is that it's difficult to tell if you're doing it well. With healing, you know if you fucked up. Everyone's dead. With DPS, you're always striving to have a bigger number. With threat, and specifically when threat is something you need to care about, it is invisible as to whether you are doing threat poorly or if the other player isn't playing correctly to respect the threat ramp up. No MMO has really seemed to find a way to visualize threat in a way to let you know that. Like that's the thing that's really frustrating when you jump from group to group as the non-tank is you do the same thing in every group and it feels completely random as to whether you pull threat or not because of the various differences in tank skill level. So, unless MMOs are going to put in the work to make it more clear whether threat is going well or not, I'm okay with it being functionally trivial.
World of Warcraft seemed to come closest, but that was with added mods (and even then, it was per mob, afaik.) The key to getting a good idea of threat is being able to see threat/second. Because the real key isn't seeing absolute numbers, it's about seeing how the tank is faring in comparison to everyone else, like in a race. You don't really care who is in first, you care about knowing if you're on track to overtake or be overtaken.
Everquest shows you a list of the top ten things you have any hate on, and your hate percentage as a number. If you have 100 hate, it also shows you the second highest hate percentage. It's brilliant and I wish some other MMOs would steal it.
So as a tank you see
100...42
100...01
100...14
100...89
100...27
And you know that you need to switch down to mob number 4 right quick because the wizard is forgetting to use his deaggro spells. Or don't switch, if you would rather he contribute some hit points to the benefit of the group.
Mind you.
This is also the game that launched with a level 50 cap, and where the designers decided that since all raid mobs were level 53 and up then the taunt skill should be capped at 52.
Then they forgot to raise the taunt cap for, mmm, four years or so, despite normal mobs going well past 52. Taunt just didn't work as a skill, and there was no success or failure message to tell you that.
FF14 does have at least a little graphical way of showing relative threat on each party member for whatever mob you have targeted, it shows a little tiny bar under their icons in the party list, the fuller the bar the closer they are to the highest threat on the list. In 4.X I would watch those to make sure no one was creeping up on taking aggro from me on any targets as the tank and do my enmity combo or AOE enmity move to them if they were getting dangerously close to switching targets. In 5.X it's mostly irrelevant after the pull as the bars just don't ever visibly move with all the threat you just passively put out as you do your AOE rotation. It's still useful in a 2 tank situation where you need to make sure you're not taking aggro off the main tank but staying well ahead of the DPS and healers just in case, though.
Today i had to purposely wipe a guildhest of all things so i could leave it because the group could not wrap their head around the idea of "If you don't kill them all at around the same time they will keep reviving at full health."
I spent ten minutes trying to tell them in party to be met with silence as they kept killing one at a time having it revive by the time they killed the second. so i just let them die and left.
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drunkenpandarenSlapping all the goblin hamIn the top laneRegistered Userregular
FF14 does have at least a little graphical way of showing relative threat on each party member for whatever mob you have targeted, it shows a little tiny bar under their icons in the party list, the fuller the bar the closer they are to the highest threat on the list. In 4.X I would watch those to make sure no one was creeping up on taking aggro from me on any targets as the tank and do my enmity combo or AOE enmity move to them if they were getting dangerously close to switching targets. In 5.X it's mostly irrelevant after the pull as the bars just don't ever visibly move with all the threat you just passively put out as you do your AOE rotation. It's still useful in a 2 tank situation where you need to make sure you're not taking aggro off the main tank but staying well ahead of the DPS and healers just in case, though.
For the other tank, all it really shows is when and when not to use Shirk.
FF14 does have at least a little graphical way of showing relative threat on each party member for whatever mob you have targeted, it shows a little tiny bar under their icons in the party list, the fuller the bar the closer they are to the highest threat on the list. In 4.X I would watch those to make sure no one was creeping up on taking aggro from me on any targets as the tank and do my enmity combo or AOE enmity move to them if they were getting dangerously close to switching targets. In 5.X it's mostly irrelevant after the pull as the bars just don't ever visibly move with all the threat you just passively put out as you do your AOE rotation. It's still useful in a 2 tank situation where you need to make sure you're not taking aggro off the main tank but staying well ahead of the DPS and healers just in case, though.
Yeah, I've talked about that exact thing. but it's not perfect because it is only one target and only shows the threat levels as they sit at that moment. It has no data on rate of threat gain/loss or showing any hint that maybe a dps is moving up on threat and could overtake eventually. For a meaningful threat system and mechanic, wherein threat and damage output are expected to be balanced by the tank, I would want some data that will show if the tank needs to start putting out higher threat abilities or not.
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I imagine you're gonna be hard pressed to find people wanting to run the Ex's sync'd with 7 randos unless you make a Party Finder for it. Ultima and Odin have the advantage of being MSQ and glamour dependent.
I mean, context is important. If everyone is going for chests and one guy is sitting at the exit point refusing to help, he's an asshole. If everyone in your group is speed clearing for levels and you insist on exploring every room for chests, you're the asshole. IMO. I prefer getting chests personally, but I'd really defer to what the broader group wants to do.
Its on the trials roulette for that one.
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Yeah but back in the day it was out in the open.
Back then, there was a very skilled monk who friended me. On top of being a skilled player, he was also a genuinely helpful person and he put together groups a lot to help people get their Relic Reborn done. And since I was on his friends list, he invited me along to tank quite often. You just don't see people like that in MMOs very much. That was honestly one of the best community driven experiences I've ever had playing an MMO. Period.
Ultros in general is still pretty great, when world visiting opened up for awhile you'd see messages in NN from visiting people that were basically "Wait, you guys actually use NN to help?"
I mean, of course you'll run into the occasional bad apple, and I'm likely biased since I've been on Ultros from 2.0 till now, but from everything I've heard it's probably still one of the better worlds.
Mostly it just sucks because I can't ever run things with Aether people.
I don't want to feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but to bring the conversation back to threat a bit with tanks, I'm certainly ok with them essentially doing away with threat as a mechanic, I like to think that I'm open to change and there is nothing to say that threat needs to be way that tanks distinguish themselves from dps, but I feel like they removed threat as a mechanic, and then didn't replace it with anything. So far, I just feel like I'm doing just less than when I was doing before the patch. Or maybe not even before the patch, since while the threat combo was there, there was hardly ever any need for it, but certainly less than what I was doing in Heavensward.
I get that threat is not particularly fun as deeps (as others have said) because it feels like it limits you particularly if you have a bad tank in pugs, which especially in light parties, is where the game is aimed at. But I did enjoy the tension that I had to have between doing dps and generating threat that I had to keep in mind and adjust accordingly. I feel like you could still keep this kind of tension, but just have it dps independent. Still have threat, but just have it independent what the dps is doing, where I have to keep that threat meter high enough that the damage is still on me, but weave as much damage in as I can. I still think it could work, or barring that, some other kind of mechanic that fills in that whole, but right now, I'm just not really feeling it.
I'm only up to 65 PLD but it can't be worse than the 50-60 storyline. It's not physically possible. They even apologized at the end for how crap it was.
Steam: pandas_gota_gun
That 50-60 storyline was a big reason why I switched to Dark Knight...it was terrible.
6th 80. Glad that's over with. Next up, Black and Red Mage so I can get the Soul of the Mage achievement before going back and getting the other 3 tanks done.
Healing in Shadowbringers just isn't fun. Too many pants on head exceptional tanks who are quite happy to explain to me that no, the dungeons aren't set up in easily recognized clusters of 1-5 mobs in distinct pulls that you might pull multiples if you're feeling good and are overgeared, but rather, the dungeons are set up so that you pull every single mob in the dungeon at the same time until the dungeon physically prevents you from running any further forward, obviously, and I was a silly goose noob for thinking otherwise.
Having said that though, I do like White Mage more than the other two healers this go around, and the above was the exception, not the rule. (Still too many people p-p-p-p-POWER PULLING, though.) Not as many support buttons, but the tradeoff is not as many support buttons.
not gonna dive into the other side of that topic because the horse is dead but if there’s an expectation that the leveling dungeons are going to get easier over time because gear that simply isn’t the case
might save some heartache to just get used to the content being run at higher speeds as familiarity is built
players aren't likely to come into a dungeon with their gear at the maximum allowed level when that dungeon is new
leveling dungeon in particular have no minimum gear requirements, exacerbating the problem
Eh, leveling alts in ShB is easy. It's 3 or 4 runs a level, if you have rest XP + you can skip a level a day via duty finder roulettes.
the leveling content from HW is not sleep at your desk easy just like the current leveling content is not sleep at your desk easy, assuming you're pulling two packs like most everyone does
i'll use sohm al as my example here because that dungeon can still be quite challenging (the first two sections are grinders)
ala mhigo and castrum abania are still challenging
just like all of the 71-79 dungeons are varying levels of challenging and will be mostly evergreen just like the others; the only thing that will change is players' familiarity and understanding of each trash group's individual mechanics
thus it will not get easier due to gear
edit: marking an exception for 1-50 because the 1-50 stuff is sort of on its own and old at this point and has always been easy
edit 2: in case it wasn't clear again reiterating the expectation that gear will trivialize the leveling dungeons won't happen because of syncing
But single-pulls are maddening now (for me.) It's the worst of both worlds whether I'm tanking or healing. The incoming damage isn't strong enough to require cooldowns or resource usage and my aoe's are doing less effective damage because they're only hitting one pack's worth of targets instead of two. I've healed every ShB dungeon doing multi-pulls by now and tanked most of them and it's far preferable to single groups.
I appreciate the response. Though, for clarity's sake, I was talking about how threat feels as a mechanic on the tank side as much as for dps.
It's a binary switch for the tank. Do you have threat? Mission Accomplished Do you not? Fission Mailed There's no mechanics to reward excellent threat generation, it's either On or Off. And it doesn't matter whether the tank has 1 extrea threat or 1 thousand extra, it's all the same to the target. Add in that the UI gives pretty limited feedback on threat to the tank and it would make meaningful engagement with the mechanic really difficult in the current state of things. Right now, the tank sees the current threat status (Threat Held, Threat nearly held, Threat not held and Practically No Threat) on all engaged mobs and can tab-target to see the current relative levels for that monster. The info feedback on threat overtake rate or threat generation rate is just not there. It was also very difficult for a tank to see that another mob that they Had Threat on was in danger of dropping threat when it wasn't targeted.
To touch on what mechanic was re-introduced for tanks in lieu of threat generation. It really is that mitigation cooldowns and damage reduction are the new meta. It's way more about using those abilities to keep damage down so the healer can spend more time doing their own dps. Or to use cooldowns that increase the tank's own damage so the mobs die faster, so less damage is put onto the tank/party.
Removing all threat mitigation/reduction buttons from dps but still making dps threat overtake would be even worse, because then the mechanic comes down to numbers instead of player skill. If the tank can't generate threat fast enough, the dps will overtake and you'd be back to the dps having to stop taking actions until a buffer builds up again. I don't see that being fun for anyone. The dps sees that they can't play to their full potential because the numbers are against it. The tank sees their generation is insufficient and it's hampering others in the group. For that to be a feasable mechanic change, I think the game would have to include cooldowns or traits that tanks can deliberately use to pump their threat generation.
To pull an axiom from table-top role playing, a good mechanic can be said to be one where failure is as interesting as success. So what's interesting about failure to hold threat? What's interesting about successfully holding threat? And to delve in a little deeper, what's interesting about holding All The Threat?
Edit: Just so I don't feel that I'm posing these questions without sharing my own answers ...
1) Failing to hold threat isn't interesting because it's usually a failure state for an encounter, boss or mob damage is high enough that it leads to deaths more often than not. And grabbing threat back is just seen as the tank reasserting the correct state, which leads to ...
2)Successfully holding threat isn't interesting because it's a static state. It's expected and things are going as normal.
3)Holding a massive lead on threat isn't interesting because there's no benefit to being that far ahead. Pre-ShB, It only meant the tank could transition to their dps rotation fully, for the rest of the encounter. But then, why not just transition to the dps rotation sooner? or transition and then use the extra enmity rotation later once or twice, only when it's needed to keep ahead.
but
the trusts can handle double pulls
if thancred and alphinaud can handle it
humans definitely can
Yeah! A system like that would be cool. Even leave design space for a tank cooldown that gets the target to focus All attacks on them for a short time. Or an encounter design where the main tank doesn't want their threat to be too high or the extra attacks sent their way would be too much.
Would be necessary to have that level of information easily visible to the party. but it's more interesting than a static "Is threat highest" true/false Boolean.
It would need tweaking if it were to go into ff14, I feel, no desire to increase button bloat yet again. Though Provoke wouldn't be needed in it's current state if a tank's auto attacks (or first ability usage, just so there's not a delay between targeting a mob and the first auto-attack swing) is enough to get basic threat automatically.
One of the Eden bosses already kind of does that. He'll auto attack the two top players on Threat. Which is why when one goes down, better to provoke for a second, then shirk over to the other tank.
Provoke puts you on the top of threat, no matter how much has been generated. So if you shirk with no provoke before hand after getting rezzd, then you moved 0 threat over to the other tank.
Steam: pandas_gota_gun
Everquest shows you a list of the top ten things you have any hate on, and your hate percentage as a number. If you have 100 hate, it also shows you the second highest hate percentage. It's brilliant and I wish some other MMOs would steal it.
So as a tank you see
100...42
100...01
100...14
100...89
100...27
And you know that you need to switch down to mob number 4 right quick because the wizard is forgetting to use his deaggro spells. Or don't switch, if you would rather he contribute some hit points to the benefit of the group.
Mind you.
This is also the game that launched with a level 50 cap, and where the designers decided that since all raid mobs were level 53 and up then the taunt skill should be capped at 52.
Then they forgot to raise the taunt cap for, mmm, four years or so, despite normal mobs going well past 52. Taunt just didn't work as a skill, and there was no success or failure message to tell you that.
So I'm not saying they ALWAYS did hate right.
I spent ten minutes trying to tell them in party to be met with silence as they kept killing one at a time having it revive by the time they killed the second. so i just let them die and left.
For the other tank, all it really shows is when and when not to use Shirk.
Steam: pandas_gota_gun
Yeah, I've talked about that exact thing. but it's not perfect because it is only one target and only shows the threat levels as they sit at that moment. It has no data on rate of threat gain/loss or showing any hint that maybe a dps is moving up on threat and could overtake eventually. For a meaningful threat system and mechanic, wherein threat and damage output are expected to be balanced by the tank, I would want some data that will show if the tank needs to start putting out higher threat abilities or not.