FFXIV Nowadays

I know it's kinda a taboo(?) to mention FFXIV on ah.com, but still kinda want to go back and play it for a bit just because I want to play Machinist.

Sooo, anyone still play FFXIV on this website? :O How's Machinist in FFXIV? COR is my main FFXI and my main char in GW2 is Engineer, so I'm really into gun jobs with versatile ability. Does MCH fit into this category? I used to play BRD in FFXIV, but found it way too simple and not enough decision making, so I ended up quitting. Will MCH be different? I'm kind of COR that would build over 30 gear sets in FFXI, not just melee/ranged DD sets, but also /mage sets including cure/stoneskin/enhancing magic sets, because I can't stand only doing 1 thing when I play a job, I only enjoy playing as multiple roles. Is MCH just another dps job that spams same rotation over and over? Or is it versatile enough to do more than just dps? Does this job work more like engineer in GW2?

Registered code, checked in everyday at everyhour for the server I wanted to be open, it never happened(not even after maintenance). Meanwhile free period expired without logging once!

I had a blast.

Alot of us play x|v here, and this is a dual website for both XI and x|v so ya don't have to worry bout posting here.
MCN has alot to do based on luck and crit procs, with buffs/debuffs for both the pt and mobs, vyre on here can prolly give ya some pointers if ya can get ahold of him

There really are not multiple roles available to any job aside from the healer classes as they are expected to Cleric Stance and help DD.

Your range of cross-class skills is limited so you won't be doing anything like COR/SCH and one-shotting DRK in PVP.

The most variation in how you play is likely going to be something like which skills to use when burning down a group of trash mobs VS what to use when fighting a boss.

FFXIV might have flashier lights and little circles you have to run away from, but it is the pre-school of combat when compared to FFXI.

Well as long as I can do buff/debuff and dps with a gun I'm happy :) I wonder how strong it is as a dps job, from the look of it it seems more like a pet job instead of a support job that can dps?

I disagree heavily.

FFXI's combat system is nothing but a set of dice rolls between the player and the monster. You roll higher then the monster often enough, you win, roll lower then the monster too many times and you lose. Everything else that is done to stack your side of the dice and / or to lower the enemies side of the dice. That's just how FFXI is, it's stat A vs stat B because the game was a clone of Everquest which got most of it's gameplay mechanics from MUD's based on D&D. The developers never really had a long term vision for an interactive multi-level combat system. Over time us players figured out which abilities stacked best with each other and how to better manipulate those dice. Within a few years we had exceeded SE's original design parameters and they started trying to add depth to the combat system, but since it was never designed to have depth all you got was us ignoring those mechanics and just stacking dice even higher. Eventually SE just gave up and fully embraced dice stacking, which is how we got the current iLevel 145 stupidity. That is what makes GEO such an incremental requirement for all content, they stack dice best and in more ways then any other job available to the game.

In FFXIV the developers didn't make the same mistake, the combat system was built to be adaptable and expanded. And while there are some DPS checks and dice rolls, situational awareness, and strategy play a far bigger role in gameplay, which enables the developer to express difficulty in ways other then giving the boss 20,000 attack, 1,000,000,000 HP and a random attack that does 80,000,000,000,000,000,000 damage while also inflicting you with 1hr paralyze, sleep, doom, curse, petrify, amnesia, locked-SJ, locked-geared, unequipped-gear, silence, HP down, TP down, all stats -500, level to 1, and account deleted from game.

The last two I haven't seen yet but I don't doubt they will be in the next batch of iLevel 150 boss's.

There's no reason to compare FFXI's battle system with FFXIV's tbh. If you use 14's standard then FFXI is just "stand there and hit macros", if you use 11's standard then 14 is just cycling rotations(for the older jobs back when I play at least) and dodge circles.

I like 11's battle system + gear swap system a bit more, more freedom IMO. I'm just looking for a change ._. Also been waiting for gun jobs in 14 since 1.0 .___.

You are only seeing the battle systems from the UI, which isn't how you should be comparing battle systems. Instead you need to look at server side implementation and how the mechanics are handled. FFXI is a dice rolling system that hails for an era were "battles" were handled through table top dice rolling or selecting "Attack / Magic / Item / Flee" in a command window. FFXIV's is an action-RPG type battle system where the player has more immersion and direct control over their character.

Neither is superior, they just represent different ways to handle something. FFXI is far more stat intensive, it encourages manipulating various stats to get the desired results. FFXIV is more action intensive, it encourages the player to pay more attention to dynamic battle field content.

I can agree with everything but this. XI did this better, at least in the older content. I have not played since they introduced Ilvl stuff. 14 is just boring..

Not even a comparison, FFXI has practically zero interactivity in the combat system. FFXIV is almost purely about that interactivity.

The difference is FFXI doesn't tell you whats going to happen because TP move selection is nearly always random while FFXIV it's scripted. FFXIV you can see it charging a certain move, see it's area of effect and maneuver to avoid it, while in FFXI it just happens and you either curaga through it, use RNG's to avoid it, stun to avoid it or use vex + attunment to render it meaningless. The only reason FFXIV feels the way it does is because the developers went to great lengths to avoid all the UI mistakes they made with FFXI, it's just so much easier to control your character.

For the record I do play FFXIV, usually on Warrior as a tank.

I just don't see it Saev, and I am a FFXI > FFXIV convert.

Everything I have done in FFXIV, and I openly admit I have not done EVERYTHING, but so far it is all learn the "mechanic" aka learn when to dodge/turn/DPS. A few fights require things like the off-tank holding adds or something for a short time while DPS burn them down. Ultimately though it all boils down to stand in the right place while blah blah happens. Most content there is no need for a specific job to use a specific skill for example, you can do most content with any 4 DD, any 2 healers, any 2 tanks.

FFXI on the other hand I remember there being a lot of battles where there was a lot of strategy and planning going on in order to clear the content. You not only had to learn the mechanic for the fight, but also figure out how to utilize just about every job in the game together to beat it. I vaguely remember doing the big shadow dude with my LS in the newer Dynamis. You had Scholars popping embrava at the right time, dice rolls, summoners doing some crazy ***with Titan, RDM chainspell stuns, specific debuffs and specific gear and everything being executed at just the right time to have it all even work. I am sure it got easier over time and maybe someone figured out a trick for it, but for a good long time you had to have the strategy down, have everyone on the right jobs show up, and execute it, or you went home with nothing that night.

FFXIV is more, oh ***someone didn't dodge that one, maybe get your ilvl up to make it easier. It just isn't as interesting.

What you just described is interactivity.


Everything you did, every ability you used, was just to stack your dice bigger. There was absolutely zero strategy that didn't amount to stunning the random move of death, being out of range of the random move of death for the whole fight, healing through the random move of death and just using vex + attunement to ignore the random move of death.

Think about it, everything you listed is just stacking dice. Adding more numbers to your plate, removing numbers from the enemies. Things only got "easier" because power creep meant you needed less dice stacked to beat the enemies dice. Things are "hard" when you need to struggle to stack your dice large enough.

That's not combat interactivity, that's just dice stacking. This is the only difficulty FFXI has because the core game engine, the code running on the servers, simply can't handle anything else without a major rewrite.

There were very few fights in FFXI that had actual interactive combat mechanics, most being story line and the enemies dice were small enough that you could beat it anyway. The last real non-dice fight was the Diablos fight during CoP, where the floor tiles would fall down throughout the fight and you had to shift the battle formation or someone would get mauled by the monsters.

Every other fight, every original NM in sky, in sea, ground kings, even Dynamis Lord, all were nothing but stat A compared to stat B. Going into abyssea we started seeing a bit more dynamic content with battle mechanics starting to exist, but then with the end of abyssea we got three atmacites with one being extremely OP and thus rendering ever battle mechanic irrelevant. Into SoA we saw more battle mechanics introduced though they largely revolved around stacking the right dice. Then iLevel happened and the power boost made the players dice so much bigger that they could just ignore it and move on. Since then every single battle system has been centered on stacking dice so that your side wins.

The only battle system so far that hasn't been dice stacking has been the Yorcia Skirmish II where you summon monsters who fight for you. Dice stacking has zero effect in that system so we just run around killing stuff instead with one person on the book.

Interactivity implies a certain amount of choice, high-level decision making, and reactive variance in behavior. XIV mob behavior is carefully scripted, with very few meaningful branches. Correct responses follow accordingly. The most difficult choices you ever have to make are which direction to run to escape the random move of death and how to manage your procs and/or buff stacks, all of which can be reduced to very simple flowcharts with no need for further adaptation. You are not interacting on a meaningful level, but merely following the preset script the devs left for you to complete if you wish to win the fight.

Not that XI is a paragon of PvE interaction either. Instead of a script, XI simply forces you to content with a neverending series of dice rolls. Learning which moves to stun/what damage types you're dealing with/how to proc/etc are comparably "interactive" to XIV mechanics, which is to say that they're not really interactive at all.

That's not what interactivity means.

Interactivity has to do with control and how the player relates to the battle and environment not the decisions they make. Most decisions are an illusion anyway, the developer already made them for you and merely presents you the feeling you discovered something.

In FFXI you stand there and perform various preselected moves chosen to obtain a certain numerical advantage over the enemy. The environment and particular boss is merely window dressing, furniture assist the player in relating to the real battle, which is between the players dice and the enemies dice. In FFXIV the environment and boss are intimately tied to the player, they are dynamic and of course they are scripted.

Anyone complaining about FFXIV being "scripted" is clueless and ignorant as f*ck about how video games are programmed. All video game monsters are "scripted", there is a piece of code that's controlling the actions and it's, quite literally, called a script. More advanced games tend to have longer and more complex scripts, less advanced games just use a Random Number Generator to decide. This unpredictability isn't from some super clever AI coding that's trying the beat the players, it's just randomly choosing which actions to take like a blindfolded kid swinging a bat at a pinata.

FFXIV, like virtually all modern MMO's, use's a staged script that takes the players actions into account. FFXI, like Everquest and many older MUD's instead use a RNG that's potentially weighted to decided the action.

FFXI Script goes something like this

Start {
A = floor(Random(1,4)
if A = 1 then do_action A
elseif A = 2 then do_action B
elseif A = 3 then do_action C
elseif A = 4 then do_action D
end
Return
}

That's not interactive at all, it's just randomly choosing moves from a preselected list and then the player has to do a dice roll against those moves. This is why every fight is a zerg, statistically the more times you random the more often you get the "really cheap" move being used and the more likely you are to roll a critical failure (natural 1) against that move. You need to defeat the boss before you've rolled a 1 against the wrong move. Everything else involved is just stacking your dice so that you either don't roll a failure or the enemy rolls failures until you win. The actions of the monster are highly unpredictable with a few preselected moves used at certain times. Unpredictability means the only via strategy is to win dice rolls.

FFXIV's AI is far more complicated. It takes into account various environmental variables, player positions, status's and other mechanics involved in the fight, and then chooses an action based on those input. There isn't much randomness involved and thus it's predictable. Because it's predictable players can plan a strategy and know what to expect. And because players share information with each other they can analyze the AI and develop a player "Script" of things to do and not do. The more impact player actions have on an AI the more predictable and controllable that AI is, the less impact the player actions have the less predictable and more random it is.

I don't know how else to spell this out. FFXIV's battle mechanics are far more advanced then FFXI's because it was copied from a far more complicated game. FFXI was a clone of Everquest and the early MUD's where enemy AI was nothing more then a set of random selections that resulted in dice rolls. FFXIV was a clone of WoW which had far more advanced enemy scripting and interactive battle mechanics. There are many other MMO's that also have the more advanced scripting, DDO being one of my favorites. There are also other games that use the RNG method of AI scripting. Might and Magic X Legacy is a game I've been playing lately and it use's the RNG method to decide what actions the monsters / boss's do. It's very noticeable once you know what to look for.

But hey FFXIV bad!! FFXI not so bad!
Can I be with the cool kids now

Those choices are either really minor or non-existant at all, since, in my experience playing XIV, the only 2 variables that ACTUALLY matter when deciding AI actions seem to be a) boss HP percentage and b) time since the start of the fight. The only exception I can think of is the final boss in Stone Vigil Hard. Granted, I haven't really done any hardcore raiding, so maybe those encounters are different.

Interaction is a bidirectional process, one that by definition involves reciprocation. What you're describing is a one-way causal event.

This is interaction. This is not. XIV and XI are far, far more comparable to the latter than the former, and not merely because the former is PvP. If the latter were modified to require manual mid/high blocking, permit yomi blocking, and customize future probabilities based on past behaviors, you could start calling it interactive.

You do understand that the word "script" predates the concept of programming and has other relevant meanings in this context, yes?

There's not only minimal randomness, there's minimal meaningful branching (I said this already) and not even a hint of adaptation.

Yes and no. Done well, no. The problem is precisely that intelligent player actions inevitably lead to predictable or trivially different outcomes in XIV, and that the AI never attempts to compensate for this (nor does it possess effective means to do so even if it could).

Nope.

Nope

The rest is just you trying to argue yourself right, going as low as to bring in competitive fighting games into a PvE MMORPG when the topic of discussion is the computer controlled enemies AI script. Not even relevant anymore to the statement made.


Depends on the fight and player positioning, often there are things in the environment that change as the fight progress's based either on time or the boss's actions in response to the players. Garuda fight with the stone pillars for example.

And in all case's it's more interactive then choosing between 1 and 4 actions based on a random number generator.

Everything I've said so far as been about XIV having a more interactive and strategic combat system then XI. That doesn't sit well with people as they mistakenly assume that less interactivity and strategy is automatically a bad thing and thus get butt hurt and defensive about the imagined insult to their favorite drug. FFXI was designed before game studios had a good grasp on how to do interactive Cooperative multiplayer fights. It's reduced to a state of doing a random action on the target who's got the highest value for enmity and repeating this over and over until either the boss is dead or the players lose. The tool and experience simply didn't exist for them to make it interactive and difficulty was presented as numerical stats that you had to dice roll against. That was how things were done then and made perfect sense. Now MMO's have aged and gone into a more interactive action orientated direction that attempts to immerse the player deeper into the environment. FFXIV took a more cautious approach and still retained some elements of the previous era dice rolling while other games like DDO went full bore with parrying / dodging / rolling and timing mouse clicks to get addition combo hits in. So while FFXIV might not be immersive as some other action MMO's, it's still far more immersive and strategic then FFXI. I would wager that over 50% of FFXI's "gameplay" is in the gear building and stat crunching that happens before the fight even starts. It's really fun for those of us who like playing with numbers and manipulating systems to do fun and interesting things, but no so much for those who like a more fast paced action feel.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/interaction
k

In other words, you didn't click the second link or read anything I said after that point, which included a demonstration of how a PvE flash game could shift from noninteractive to interactive with relative ease. The GG clip was only included as a contrast to the Millia Blocker app, which was the real focus of that paragraph and entirely relevant to the discussion at hand.

FFXIV is REACTIVE but not INTERactive. The input of the player has little to do with the way the battle unfolds. You push the monster to a %, then it does the scripted thing. You react to little orange circles on the ground, and if you think there is some ingenious AI controlling where those go well...

If(HP = 75% && DPS1-4 HP > 0%){
Target RAND DPS
else
Target RAND TANK
}

It is probably some *** like that. Some attacks don't include the DPS or Tank in the condition, for example the stone vision crap in turn...7?

Hell FFXI is the same I guess but like you mentioned there is at least a table of skills an enemy may use at semi-random. That element of randomness I think sets it a bar higher because you need to be able to react to more potential outcomes than just scripted attacks at certain HP thresholds.

I guess you won me over Saev, in a way, as I now realize that both games are *** garbage.

Oh god, I created a thread to ask about a new job in FF14, now it turned into FF14 v.s FF11 again.

I knew it was a bad idea to ask here I knew it LOL.

Not sure, which part of the Garuda fight you mean here, but to me, that battle (as well as most others in the game, really) seems to follow a script that looks something like this:



It's extremely rigid to the point, where you could literally do it with your eyes closed if you practiced enough. The stone pillars being there doesn't really do anything to disrupt this scenario - it will just end the fight early if don't manage to negotiate that particular mechanic.

Haha what did you think would happen? There are a ton of emotionally invested hypersensitive people on here who wanted FFXIV to be some sort of savior MMO and were deeply disappointed when it was just a WoW clone with Final Fantasy flavoring. If you really want to know about stuff in that game go to a dedicated FFXIV forum and ask the players there. You won't get much objectivity here, too many hurt feelings and angry people.

From what I've seen of MCH they make a pretty good ranged DPS. Personally I'm more of a "smash head into monsters face until it stops moving" type of guy.

Back to talking to you about the job itself. Just so you know there will be a little tiny bit of heartbreak if you think of it as a pet job (there was for me). I was thinking the turret would be like a little buddy that would go around with me and pew pew, but sadly it is a static little thing that you deploy usually at the start of a boss battle or as different buffs are needed.

I was expecting Hellgate London style engineer or maybe something like PUP before it actually came out and that aspect of it made me have a major sad as I really like pet jobs.

Nope

You are oversimplifying it to the extreme in an attempt to win an argument, it's kind of dishonest. The environment and the AI are tied together, which is one of the core differences. In FFXI the environment has zero impact in the fight, it's just window dressing. In FFXIV the environment is part of the fight and must be negotiated with. That Garuda fight we are discussing, if the tank doesn't position it correctly then she'll blow all the pillars down early on, meaning at the mid point when things start to get ugly there will be nowhere for your healer to hide and they will die extremely fast. Annoying titan is the same way, that huge *** dragon I can't remember where you need to use siege weapons and sh!t to bring it down while dealing with adds and so forth. Many different battles where the environment is part of the fight and the player interacts with it.

In FFXI, you vs the boss rolling dice at a table.

Now rolling dice can be fun, especially if you like playing with the numbers, but it's not the same as manipulating the environment.

I'm not sure what kind of post-modern nonsense you folks have been taught in school but you can't argue yourself right. You can debate different points of view, different pros and cons of one thing vs another, but the strength and passion of a statement has no bearing to it's objective truthfulness. A sincere, deeply thought out and passionately administered argument about how man should fly will not change what happens when you step off the roof of a 40 story building.

This isn't about which game is better or more enjoyable, as that's a subjective statement, it's about which game has more interactive battle mechanics, which is a objective one. FFXIV has far more interactive mechanics by sheer virtue of it's era of design and creative source.

What you are talking about is environmental awareness, not interactivity.

That is like FFXI not having a Line of Sight on a target. Therefore FFXI the environment also matters and is interactive by your definition.

Straws, straws everywhere and none for you to grasp.

Here's your crow pie, may it ever be tasteful.

Oh ***, someone caught me in my own flawed logic. Time to reference the internet and post silly pictures instead of admitting that my argument is flawed.

Sure, individual mechanics may depend on stuff like positioning, buffs/debuffs, LOS and so on, but the overall flow of the fight is pre-determined and rigid. I.e. mechanic Y will always happen after mechanic X and mechanic Z will always happen 5 minutes into the fight.

Now, if failing the pillars led to, say, a hole appearing in the middle of the arena and a different set of mechanics to deal with, then it'd be more like something I'd consider an interactive fight.

The Stone Vigil Hard boss I mentioned before is also a pretty good example, since the choice of mechanics used there actually depends on player positioning and (or so it seems, at least) actions.


Uhh, I never said anything about XI. But, actually, I completely agree with the point you made about most of XI combat happening before the battle even starts and the combat gameplay itself being pretty lacklustre.

EDIT: on further thought, it seems like we might be talking about different flavors of interactivity here, in which case I concede that XIV is doing an alright job at letting players interact with individual mechanics and the environment involved in them.

That's too bad because this entire conversation is about battle system interactivity of FFXI vs FFXIV. My statement was that FFXIV's battle system is more interactive then FFXI's, there are obviously other games that are more interactive then FFXIV's and those are outside the scope of this topic.


Now your getting it. I'm not discussing FFXIV as though it's some sort of super example of combat interactivity because it's not. It's a halfway point between "rolling dice on a table top" and "fully immersive active battle mechanics". I even mentioned Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) which has a fare more immersive system. You can actively dodge / roll enemy attacks, block or parry them, and even time your mouse clicks to add extra hits to your attack combo. The fights and environments are far more detailed and complex then either FFXIV's or FFXI. But this is about those who got all bitchy that I said FFXIV is more interactive then FFXI.

Sorry But 14 is boring as boring can get. Your saying that tanking Omega and Ultima back during the 75 days with 5 people and winning almost every time when 12-18 people would normally wipe is not strategic when that was one of the funnest most strategic fights I did as PLD. Even the lvl 99 versions of them was fun low-man. 14 does not even give the option to low man stuff.