Lyrailis wrote:
In WoW, you have LFR (easymode, but still get to see the sights and get a little taste of what epic gear feels like), Normal (you probably want a guild for this, but if you get lucky you can do it on a PUG or after a new tier is released) and Heroic (the End-Endgame).
The execution elements were still required to be successful in LFR. Yes, it was easier because bosses did less damage and had less health, but they still had one-shot mechanics. You played WoW and I'm not sure how recently you've played, but just look at Durumu in ToT as an example. This fight still had 'maze phaze' in LFR.
For those that didn't play, it was a round battlefield similar to Titan so imagine a round clock face. At some point in the battle Durumu would call down a fog that would cover almost all of the battlefield, but leave a small chunk open. So in the clock example from 2 o'clock to 12 o'clock was fogged out and anyone who stood in the fog would take damage rapidly. If you were on the other side of the battlefield you had enough time to get where you needed to be, but you'd definitely need a heal on the way or to use a defensive cooldown.
Now for the fun part... imagine a seconds hand that starts at 12 o'clock and moves clockwise until it makes a full revolution. If that seconds hand passed through your character, you're toast. As that seconds hand moved, small(enough that your raid members needed to stack basically) portions of the fog were removed to allow you to pass through safely. Once you went all the way through the maze(one complete turn through the battlefield) the phase was over.
Now the mechanic was forgiving enough on LFR that you could lose a few members(class dependent) and still defeat the boss. If you lost too many healers then those who were alive couldn't keep up, if you lost too many DPS then eventually the damage would ramp up beyond what the healers were capable of keeping alive, ect. ect.
Lyrailis wrote:
Ain't always the player's fault. One burst of lag and a healer goes down? Enjoy your wipe. Was it the healer's fault? No! Internet hiccups happen all the time. Hell, my Power Company IRL has these f---ing annoying 2-3 second outages at least a couple times a week. What about lockups, or framerate drops? Boss powers up a MEGAINSTASUPERDEATH move and my FPS drops to 15 for 2 seconds and causes me to get hit with said move.....guess what? Hope everybody else likes wiping. Oh wait, I'm going to get called a "noob" and a "scrub" because of something I had no control over.
I was referring to execution errors. Yes people have issues with their power or internet or even their system specs that keep them from being able to perform sometimes. Other games are no exception yet people still get through it. XIV has the issue with server latency, but WoW wasn't without it's issues either. A simple google search of Durumu turns up tons of results about how you can make the maze phase easier to see and navigate.
Where do you draw the line though? If you can't punish players poor execution with one-shot mechanics than content is overly easy. If you removed the execute or be executed parts of the battle, for many players(myself included); you remove the excitement. Should players who don't have internet/power/spec issues be punished as well?
Lyrailis wrote:
And just how do you prevent players who "aren't skilled enough" to enter the content from trying to do it? Add more attunements and more sky-high walls that very few people can ever hope to pass? Just what is the point of designing content that only 1% of the playerbase ever gets to see?
It's called progression for a reason. You should have to take one step at a time to reach your intended destination. This is undermined by events like hunts where you can obtain spiffy gear simply by participating in glorified(yet still braindead) FATEs. Players should progress through increasingly difficult content that 'preps' them for more difficult content that lies ahead. You shouldn't be able to obtain gear that allows you access to content unless you've gone through the necessary steps that train you up.
Thayos wrote:
I get what you're trying to say, but an important detail that you're overlooking is in XI, there were often different ways to mitigate those insta-death moves.
Perhaps XI was a poor example. The fights were much longer, many of them took place in open world and the options for communication and coordination were much smaller than people have now.
Also, there were many encounters that weren't balanced and players could often circumvent the intended mechanics. I really don't think KB were designed with the intent that it be kited around in circles. I don't think Kirin was designed so that the adds it spawned could be killed by an independent alliance. I don't think AV was designed so that players died and de-leveled several times over using zombie strategies, nor that it only be possible to defeat with a party of KC wielding DRKs.