If You Are Tired Of This Game Or Just Want A Break

Barely anyone that plays an mmorpg cares about skill, there are legit skill based action combat mmorpgs and they have less players than ffxi. These games attract a certain kind of gamer and they aren't lusting after skill based combat.

I've played skill based mmorpgs and they are very mentally tiring, the kind of hours we put into these games that's a massive negative.

I never get the praise people give for Shadowbringers. I've completed the story and it was nowhere near some incredible storyline people paint it to be. The visuals are nice but it still has a huge chunk of fetch quests and pointless stuff and the overall story wasn't anything impressive in my opinion. Oh no Yshtola sacrificed herself again for the 50th time, I'm suppose to care!

I think there are just a lot of jaded long time players here. XI isn't "piss easy" in my opinion. It has its own unique style of play and you don't just hit a button to win (automation aside, every game can have that option even XIV), some big exaggerations going on here. It is more about preparation than anything else.

XIV's battle system is just the worst to me. No matter how many times I try it, it just doesn't seem fun to me. Memorizing fights and having to execute everything perfectly or you restart. I was watching a youtube video of someone trying for 5 hours on the same boss and constantly losing at a mechanic at various parts. It just doesn't seem fun to me. If they would allow people to recover react accordingly and not have to memorize entire fight patterns to win, I think it would be more fun in addition to more variety in gear and ability to influence combat. No weaknesses to exploit outside of mechanics and no gear options that make a difference, can't think of any FF game that has that.

They do have some pretty neat visuals though, I wish XI got that HD treatment.

ShB is obviously full of fetch quest and watered down stuff to make the story last longer, just like every other FFXIV MSQ so far.
A couple of parts surprised me (in positive) though.
The full story behind the ascians, finding out all the tiny details of how things worked, how our world(s) came to be etc... well it was cool.
We already know a lot of stuff but it was just bits here and there.

It wasn't "OMG BEST STORY EVER" mostly because of the boring fillers that are pretty much everywhere, but I can't deny it had some pretty cool parts, imho.

So much this.
FFXI and FFXIV are hard to compare honestly, I find it easier to compare FFXIV and WoW.

First of all I get the impression a lot of people here are not aware that "difficulty" is not an absolute value that you can easily measure with objective means.
A lot of people who posted in this thread likely have very different concepts of "difficulty".
Furthermore, what's difficult for someone, doesn't necessarily mean it's difficult for another one.

With that said, FFXI and FFXIV are "difficult" in very different ways.
In general I'd say the "challenging" stuff of FFXIV (savage modes and so on) are harder than the "hard" stuff of FFXI.
But that's also because you're comparing a game who's currently living with full support and offers a lot of hard stuff, vs a game who's barely alive and doesn't really have any difficult content, if at all.
Some new content released over the last 3+ years was all but "easy" when it was fresh.
Of course we didn't get any new content past that, so people developed solid strategies, got used to it, and the intense gear creep did the rest.

But in general yeah, in FFXIV for most fights you don't have many strategies/approaches but one, and you need to execute it regardless of your setup. There's little space for errors and you need a certain level of gear for every player. The better the gear, the more space for small mistakes.
Everything is streamlined really, and you need fast reaction times, depending on the fight and your job.

FFXI is like Taint said, it's about different strategies, different approaches, number of people (for content with stuff that scales with players), gear, exploiting the virtually infinite combinations of jobs/buffs/debuffs, and frankly we've got so many broken combinations of gear/abilities that it's hard to "balance" something and make it really hard.
Which is exactely why FFXIV and WoW use a different approach, where everything is strictly homogeneized, combinations are not "virtually infinite", you can control them, and with that you're able to create content that's more "balanced" in its difficulty levels.
In a game like FFXI... heh, you can hardly do that.

That's what people liked though.

I love it when people say X game is easy, after they spend months or years honing a specific skill set.

that game is so obnoxious u have to buy potions that gives u like 10% strength to use in between rotations or when ur ending for parsing and every 1 and their moms are doing it lasts for 20 seconds or something so lame, so basically if u cant do 90% parse on the top 10% DPS, good luck joining a raid static, not just that if u returned just for raids good luck on gearing because ur locked out on the weekly point system since u did not play for long, there is that argument go buy HQ armor for 5-15 mill a piece no thx, back on early Shadow bringers i was 89 stars on immaculate extreme, and hades extreme 92, still could not find a group its just stupid to min max for 1 arena and repeating it until a new patch.

I have never once seen anyone do this in an expert dungeon in all 7 years of me playing. I sounds to me like you have encountered one bad apple and then tarred the rest with the same brush. General expert dungeons are "o/" or "hello" and then "GG" or "goodbye". I could understand shitters getting kicked from Savage/Ultimate raids because well theres mechanics to do and dps checks to meet if you dont you wont clear. As for parses the vast majority of people that use them wont say anything in game about dps numbers because its an easy way of getting banned.

I take it you havent seen the vast amount of strat videos for fights? There are a lot of ways of doing things at the start of a raid tier and the more the fights are done the more people iron out the strats to make an optimal up time strat. A month or so in and you have the easy pug strats that are more about safety and up time strats that require more coordination as a group. This tier alone my static have tried a few strats already before we settled on one we liked.

Eyes have been glazing over the 14 talk in this thread, but this caught my eye. What do healers do in 14 other than heal? Buff? Debuff? I'm just curious.


ANYWAY, back to the question. What are healers responsible for other than healing?

one time i was spaming Holy Circle Aoes, while tanking and i went down to 10% hp i healed my self and the healer got mad and left the party because i used a skill on my bar that is not a DPS button, even the buffs are all DPS related, and the tank materia is all about adding DPS materia, Yoshi tried to fix it by adding a Tenacity MAteria that gives u slightly more damage taken and slightly more Damage, but no its bad because u cant have 30% crit

Main reason people play FF14 is the art style, the FF brand and other similar cosmetic reasons, it's not the combat, the skill or anything else they pretend it is.

Anytime I ask someone that plays it if they would still play it if they changed the art style to look like GW2 they don't answer.

Having said that, there is quite a lot of that in the mindset of FF11 players too. It's of less importance than on FF14 though.

Also, the toxicity of the community is more in terms of say something bad about the game and they will lose their minds. There was an mmorpg youtuber that gave a negative review of the game and they went after him like crazy. He was getting death threats, he was getting brigading where they were posting links to the video on every ff14 forum to attack him. This is a popular person that covers all mmorpgs, so the community of ff14 were shown up as babies to this persons large audience. Asmongold said it best, if you critique wow they agree with you but if you critique ff14 they get mad at you.

This youtuber not only deleted the video but he totally refuses to even talk about the game anymore, he talks about every other mmorpg.

In most fights the damage going out is very scripted so healers are expected to do damage when they arent healing. Dungeons are slightly different tanks pull wall to wall normally and healers are supposed to keep the tank above 1 hp and should be doing AoE heals. Each healer has a lot of healing tools that arent on the GCD and these are generally enough to keep people up. There is a small minority out there that do not want to do anything but healing.

There is a general social consensus that the faster a mob dies, the less healing a healer has to do so it's more beneficial to them to DPS up to a point. Ideally, your responsibility is to maintain party health while being able to contribute as much DPS as possible. Ths FFXIV mind set is quite prevalent due to two things related to game design as listed below:

Part of the conundrum of healer design in XIV is the fact the raid boss fights are designed to be heavily scripted and cause either death or eventual death on the person who keeps failing the mechanics - so there is less to heal and more to... Raise if you will, lol. You can't really have whack-a-mole HP in XIV like you can in XI due to the nature of the encounter design.

Additionally, FFXIV healers have incredibly powerful oGCD abilities that heal an incredible amount of HP and are on relatively short cooldown. Think being able to Martyr without the HP loss and on 1 minute or 30 second cooldowns, and each healer toolkit has several of these available to them. Additionally, if used properly, your MP tools on each healer kit make MP management a joke and the only time you would be at risk of running out of MP is if you, the healer, die and are raised since you only come back with 20%-ish of your max MP.

The above two paragraphs combined means that the healers have many DPS opportunities to use their DPS spells since their healer kits are very powerful and instantaneous and encounter design only requires healing at A, B, C, etc. timestamps of the fight to ensure no one dies (unless that player screws up the mechanic, and thus that death is on them). It's quite counterintuitive to FFXI healing design as you can imagine since FFXI tends to throw out damage and enfeebles significantly more frequently and the FFXI healing kits aren't as responsive and powerful as they are in FFXIV.

You get a bit more healing craziness with the "Normal" raid fight is freshly released and no one knows exactly what is going on. I carried a E9N normal fight [first level of the current raid tier on casual difficulty] for 20 minutes on WHM since the normal tiers don't have hard enrages and all four DPS kept dying to every third of fourth mechanic and there was nothing I could do about it. For reference, in a good and knowledgeable party, you can probably get this fight done in 8-10 minutes. Those types of "hectic-ness" is more the exception than the normal though and will be ironed out in a few weeks once the vast majority of players understand what must be done to clear the fight.

I don't mind a heal only healer in dungeons when I get partied with them, but they certainly won't get my commend either since they are making up a very small portion of their kit to succeed in the dungeon. Admittedly, with the way kits are designed right now, healers have to contribute very little to "succeed" at their role so becoming more optimal and taking advantage of more and more of your kit SHOULD become second nature if you are a good player.

Yep.

I don't mind it as much with AST in dungeons, but SCH and WHM really have almost no excuse unless someone is totally new to the job or you're in a really low level dungeon. SCH's faerie gives you incredible leeway to do other stuff, and WHM's Holy is AoE DPS+Stun. Even a little practice can get you to the point where you really don't need to be casting GCD heals at all.

Healing is all they're responsible for. That does not mean they are incapable of doing DPS if they want. Same goes for DPS who have pot healing like Rdm. If a Rdm tosses out a Vercure here and there, that's cool but they don't have to.


No, not at all. You may be on a lucky server. I've talked in several FFXIV forums and what I described is not uncommon at all.


Ideally for some but not all. Healers job is to heal. And even in SE's code of conduct, it's stated to respect people's unique playstyles. And they've said that content is not designed around healer DPS. Now, the "treatment" of healers who don't DPS is a forum-only thing. I've read many forums where people call healers who don't want to DPS "bad" and all kinds of derogatory names. I've seen them make countless threats towards them, anything from death threats (wtf?) to "I'll immediately kick you from my group" and it's all a joke.

As someone who healed in that game for a long time, any time I didn't feel like doing anything but healing (including raids, extremes and duty finders) , I've never ever once been kicked for it. Nobody has ever asked me to do it either. And I've even received full commendations for it many times. All it is, is empty scare tactics to try pushing people to play how you want them to play. If you want to do that stuff, do it in your FC, not with randoms. It's no different than in this game. If someone was a rolls-only COR, that's their business. Don't have to invite them to your LS or your ambu group.

What makes a player a good player in that game is entirely opinion-based. I've seen so many seasoned players describe their definitions of what makes someone good and they're all over the place. My favorites are they try-hards who set the bar for "good player" so high that it probably constitutes less than 10% of players. To me, if a healer only heals and keeps everyone alive with no near-misses, they're a good healer. They may not be an extraordinary healer but they were good. Same with a tank who holds hate. If mobs are going all over the place but you're more concerned about topping a meter, you're not good in my book.

You clearly don't play, and forum posts from people who are pissed off are not a representative sample. Does it happen? Sure. Is it common? Not remotely.

XIV is not without its flaws, and its community not without its problems. You don't have to invent new ones.

Again, most people won't kick for it in dungeons, and trials/raids can require a lot of healing. What we're saying is that if you are ONLY healing in a dungeon, the dungeon goes a lot slower. Also, given how little damage there is to heal in a dungeon, you'd have to be bored out of your damn mind. I toss out Broil just so I have something to do.

Nobody was inventing anything. I was skeptical about it at first too until I saw those very things. I never meant to sound like it happens every single time but yes, it does happen.


While I only mentioned the "treatment of healers" comment to give examples and not for a back/forth on the boring subject, I would definitely not say its "a lot faster" when they do. I've read more threads on the subject than I cared to and all of them that had a healer DPSing were marginally faster. I remember one thread where a guy posted a bunch of math on it. In many best cases, it made some runs a minute faster. The ones where it was "a lot faster" were where an end-game geared healer joined a random PUG of under-geared DPS".

If you're bored and want to do it, knock yourself out. Nobody is telling you that you can't. But what's fun/boring to you does not equate to what is fun/boring to others.

You don't have to buy potions to get in the 90th percentile. There are varying levels of statics, from casual to hardcore. If you try to get into a hardcore static with casual numbers, then you're going to have a hard time. Extremes aren't great examples of Savage performance, but would be a fine resume for an entry-level savage group.

I've had enough of the healer DPS debate on XIV on the OF so I don't feel like getting too involved with it, but my opinion is this. You should not be kicked for doing your primary role on your job - you did your role, no misses, we're gucci. At the same time, you can also certainly play your role a lot better if you take the time to understand your kit and know when to use different tools. Different tools for different situations. When the opportunities arise to let you use your DPS tools on the healer, use 'em. The only time you should be kicked is if you don't have the skill to maintain your parties health and that's the only thing you have been trying to do. Then you sort of need to re-evaluate how you play the healer role at that point.

I will make this comment towards Mattelot though.

You sound like someone who has been marred by the opinions of elitest from the game and it's made you jaded when dealing with situations that differ from your opinion. Maybe I am mistaken, but with the way you discuss this it sounds like you have a very narrow viewpoint on how things should be done and cannot accept other styles of play. Like I said, I could be mistaken, but that's how I am currently viewing your posts thus far.

To quote you:


You also have to consider what you deem as unreasonable does not equate to what is unreasonable for them. In my mind, you are essentially the pot calling the kettle black right now.

To reinforce Rooks' point:


^ This I am in complete agreement with. Please do not make a mountain out of an anthill by generalizing and demonizing the entire XIV community.

That's fine. I don't personally psuedo-analyze others on a forum myself. I've always found it asinine, superfluous and contributes nothing to the discussion. It does nothing more than create an unnecessary pissing contest where one person wants to show their dominance and feel like the smartest person in the room, which most of the time, they're not.


Not at all. Unreasonable as in what? Shouldn't be expected? What one expects out of another and what they get (especially randoms) will not always equate.


Nobody was at all doing that. Not sure how you can misconstrue anything I said to come up with this conclusion.

I've already stated it was a good game but was just stating an objective flaw. I know that fanboys hate when people do that but it's good to know the pros and cons. Even games I love, critics will state some of their gripes or known gripes. I love Breath of the Wild master mode. Amazingly fun but the enemy health regen is stupid. Doesn't mean its still not an enjoyable game.

It is and it isn't. If you want to ask someone all the details about what characteristics make a good role, you'll find as many answers as people. That'll be the same in XI, or any other game, especially multiplayer games.

However an objective measure of being a "good player" are traits that facilitate progression through difficulties. You're not going to clear a Savage fight at minimum iLv with two zero DPS healers. You're not going to clear an Ultimate with zero damage healers.

This would be comparable to a WHM in XI refusing to enfeeble because it's a RDM's job. Or a BRD refusing to build a melee set because they're a support.

While I don't disagree with your method of thinking, that's still a subjective measure of what a good player is. Any opinion on what makes someone good is subjective. On the flip side of the spectrum is the bad player. You'll get just as many opinions on what a bad player is. Until a game developer defines what makes a player good or bad, it's all opinions.

I'm with the healer dps debate. It's a tired subject that somebody heard me mention, took my comment out of context and blew it way out of proportion.


Hard comparison though. I know I'm not on a big server like Asura but I know 1 Brd who melees. I don't know any Whms who enfeeble if there is a Rdm in the party. Why would you want a Para 1 if you can get a Para 2?

I see your point, however I also don't take companies at face value on these kinds of things. A good example is XIV's stance on player play-styles and punishing people who are critical of others, but when contrasted to their tutorial for newer players, and their content design, the two are at odds. I think this is largely in part due to conflicting policies. The former is about reducing player harassment because there are a lot of people out there who are unkind and do not know how to present constructive criticism, and this was becoming a problem for XIV's new players. I don't personally have any problems with this but it is nebulously worded and causes problems in some other areas. On the other hand, we have the design team's policy on content structure who are focused on building creative content within the parameters of the roles. These two are contradictory in that one is open and welcoming, and the other is narrowly constrained. You can't have an effective ethos on what makes a good player with this kind of contradiction.

Yeah, the analogy falls apart the deeper you look at it because the inherent differences between games. In XI, adaptability is key. Much less so in XIV.

I do not disagree that it sounds very contradictory. Players can do something if they want and in this regard, the tutorial says you can do something, not should. It's a great way to let someone know that it's ok.

Now, punishing those who are critical. If you're offering someone advice, it's a 2-way street. Someone may be grateful while others may not like unsolicited words from a random. On the same token, if you're simply badgering or harassing someone for not playing to your personal standards, you should be punished.

In WoW (when I played), people loved to insult others and justify it with "I was just trying to help." If you're a baker and known for making an absolutely delicious apple pie, just offer a piece of it. People are likely to love it and want more. Smash the pie in their face and they will want nothing to do with you.

Agreed. This is the same in XIV.

Well, you did in your first post on the thread:



You just dunked on the entire community of XIV right then and there so, yeah. I don't want to be a white knight here - I see XIV's flaws (IE healer design and balance is definitely up there as a flaw for me)

If that wasn't your intent, that's fine. Just be cogniscent of your presentation, that is all.

That's not even remotely the same thing. What I said isn't even my personal opinion. I said "is known" not "it is." And anybody who doesn't read far too much into a comment will clearly know that even if a community is known for that, it's not 100% of the population. A community with a worse reputation like LoL doesn't mean every LoL player is like that. It just helps to raise awareness so anyone going in isn't blindsided. Mileage obviously varies or there are the rose-tinted people but that's neither here nor there.

And I'm very cognizant of what I'm saying. Even the most cognizant person cannot control the emotions of their readers.

Each to their own I suppose, but FFXI is enough. I read so much negativity about XIV (aside from its story) that it's not worth the time or extra money. The gameplay has never sounded interesting to me, and my experience from the original Alpha test was seriously dull.

I'd rather buy a different game or replay some of the classics than start again on a game supposedly made to rival WoW. Despise the idea of having outdated gear every six months. FFXI would've died a long time ago if that happened back in the day.

Despite what you've heard, it's worth checking out. It's overall not a bad game at all. Check out a free trial and judge for yourself.