It's crazy how many DPS players still don't know the basicsFollow

People didn't really appreciate it when Blizzard did something similar. AND it didn't improve the quality of players in the random dungeon queues.

I'd love there to be a way for the game to teach players how to play better, but I don't know a way to do it without it being punitive.

The problem starts early and just snowballs.

Earlier today, I had a GLA in Toto-Rak who only used 1 Flash in an entire battle, sparsely threw Provoke at random mobs, and was just using Fast Blade and occasionally a Savage Blade now and then.

I was a Rogue at the time, and I was pulling hate off of his current target, and he was also switching targets seemingly randomly throughout the battles.

It was just a mess, but yet we still got through the dungeon, AND he engaged the last boss while the other DPS was still in Cutscene. We managed to defeat the boss, but it was mostly me and the healer who carried the whole effort (took us forever and the healer almost ran out of MP). Thankfully the healer was skilled and was wearing seemingly endgame gear (huge glowing winged staff and all).

But the point of it is... said tank got carried through yet another dungeon and will enter the next dungeon while continuing to suck at his job and he'll probably get carried through that too. And the next, and the next.

That's the problem... the *required* MSQ dungeons Pre-50 are easy enough that you can carry a bad player if the rest of the players are skilled, and the 8-main raids are even worse, because most of them you can carry someone through too.

That's not to even mention someone who cleared them on another job and they just suck/don't care about the job they are currently leveling... the aforementioned tank had dyed gear and a shield I was pretty sure I recognized as being from a later dungeon, even. It could be possible that he has other jobs on 50+ and just doesn't know how to play a GLA or can't be bothered to put the effort in.



To be fair, it was not balanced very well, and not implemented well either and had glaring flaws. Depending on what class you were, it was either cakewalk or ridiculously difficult with little room for error, and if said tutorial required NPCs, the NPCs had ridiculously horrible AI that didn't behave like any sane person would. And the "Wave" system sucked too, it sucked to be at, say, Wave 8-9 and be 1 second short of killing the last mob.... yeah, have fun spending another 30-45min to get back to that wave to try again. It was a chore, it was boring, and it had very little to do with actual party situations.

FFXI has far better "New Player" tutorials, but they are neither required, nor are they tailored for each job. I wonder if perhaps they should make a Lv30, 50, and 60 "Tutorial" quest that requires you to use all aspects of your job, and if you suck at your job, you won't win the fight, period and not make it required, but yet add a nice reward to it?

The Lv50 class quests are kinda like that, but I don't feel they go far enough nor are they close enough to what you'll face in an actual party situation.

Edited, Mar 13th 2017 6:04pm by Lyrailis

Who gets to be the standard?

But who decides what that means?

The issue here is twofold:

1: New players don't know what they're doing
2: Veteran players don't want to teach but expect the newer players to learn anyway

If you're one of those players that thinks the BLM spamming Blizzard 3 in a dungeon is totally unreasonable, you need to step back a second and think about it from their perspective.

I've been playing MMOs in one form or another for over 20 years now. That's longer than most of these newer players have been alive. I can pick up a class, spend 20 minutes or so reading abilities and passives and generally work out which buttons should go where and basically how to play the class because I've been doing this forever. While others may not have quite THAT much experience in the genre, it doesn't take all that much to be able to do this and pick up a new class and play without a guide.

A newer player on the other hand, maybe on their first MMO, doesn't have those years or decades of experience working this stuff out. They know what the game taught them.

So it's not reasonable for, for instance, me to set the standard by which a player should be judged on whether they suck or not because my experience is so radically different form their's. Ideally the game should do this but I've never seen an MMO actually do that and I think that any attempt by a game to teach a full rotation would be correctly seen as taking something away from the community. You're supposed to go and ask people who are better than you how to do things, but a new player doesn't necessarily know that and if they're on their first MMO, they're used to the game showing them how to do things and this one doesn't do that.

Going back to the BLM example, the blizzard 3 spamming ice mage of iciness sees that the spell appears to do acceptable damage (it does) and they never run out of mp. They don't really understand how the fire aspect of their class works. Maybe they've seen that it does more damage but it also runs them out of mp. So maybe they figure they can compromise by sticking to ice and doing slightly less damage. They don't understand that it's a LOT less damage because they haven't done or can't do the math for themselves and don't know that they should look up a guide. FFXIV's rotations are also REALLY complicated. BLM is probably the simplest. When I was a NIN main my opener was something like 30 buttons long. That's absurd. And there's no reasonable way for the game to teach that without SE basically writing class guides.

It's hard to teach. Some people don't want to learn. Some people don't think they should have to. Some people think they know everything when they don't. But that's how an MMO is supposed to work. You're supposed to teach those that come after you how to improve. Not just write them off.

You're not wrong and there's no solution to that. If someone just refuses to learn and refuses to take help, then they're going to just suck permanently. Maybe one day they'll figure it out on their own, or they'll decide they need to look up a guide. But this is just an aspect of human nature and it's not going anywhere. The good news is that people like this will be kept out of high-end content by virtue of being terrible and not improving. The game doesn't need to take any action here.



Yep, that's the exact problem. Shield Lob produces a ton of threat that you simply don't get when you body pull a pack. So with a Shield Lob you have enough threat on the main target that you can flash, run through your enmity combo on all targets... flash again, and you're set. The biggest problem I run into with new PLDs is that they only Flash once. You've got to keep doing that because otherwise you're just not generating threat on things and your party IS.



Thing is that's a legitimate healing strategy most of the time. In this particular case it isn't because you're up against something with some form of tank buster that can turn a tank into salsa in a couple of hits. But most of the time this is fine and allows the healer to add some dps without causing a problem. It's a matter of experience to know when it's ok to do that and when it isn't.



You're right of course. DPS is just easier to quantify and so it makes for an easier conversation. Tanking and healing ability is a lot more nebulous and harder to figure out with a parser.

It's even more ridiculous given the ease of those early dungeons. I've been through that place with a tank who was basically non-existent and it really didn't even slow us down.

Bailed on Dusk Vigil because the two Black Mages were spamming Fire 3

Thanks, that wasn't working for me.

As a healer, I hate it when people try to overpull.

Seriously, I know that everybody thinks that their time is oh-so-valuable, but just pull the stupid mobs, one group at a time unless you're doing really well.

Start off single groups and if those go well then maybe add a few extra mobs per pull, that way we don't get an embarassing wipe near the beginning of the dungeon that just sours everybody's mood.

That and I hate when a tank grabs a group and then he keeps running (especially when he gives no warning that he's going to pull multiple groups). I can't cure him while he's running away from me, constantly running out of Cure range. And sometimes he ends up losing mobs to me because I have to pump heals into him because one, nay, two groups just aren't enough mobs to tackle at once.

The dungeons don't take THAT long, even if you do single group pulls. Seriously, what's the freaking hurry?

Edited, Mar 21st 2017 11:54pm by Lyrailis

Because you don't save any time if you mis-judge the group and end up causing a wipe? Any time you could have saved is wasted and everybody's mood immediately becomes sour if an early-dungeon wipe occurs.

That's why it is better to start small and add more as you see the group is handling well. That way if the group CAN'T handle it, you will know that before trying it and nobody has to wipe and start grumbling.

Far too many people treat death like it's something major...they get in foul moods and sometimes they bail or what-not and that's a huge waste of time, especially over something that's completely optional anyways.

I have no qualms with pulling the entire dungeon group by group, but yet I DO have qualms when I gotta spend 5 minutes sitting around waiting for a replacement because the tank wanted to pull 2-3 groups to start the dungeon and the DPS couldn't handle it, or he didn't warn me and ran out of range and he died and now I'm getting the blame put on me, blah blah. Then, I DO mind.

Yea that is the problem when you have no idea how far they are going and they stop and you throw a cure and they take off again. Every tank is different and we are supposed to read their minds on how far they are going. I like to make sure the tank has stoneskin just as they kill the mobs this gives me a little buffer as they make their next pull.

Honestly I think smaller pulls can be faster. If I can use my mp for damage instead of healing. Holy even gimped can help bring allot of mobs down fast.

So what you're saying is to just let the tank die, then.

When tanks do this, by the time they get the first group, I see their HP is down to like 80%. Okay... 2nd group, now they're dipping into the 60% region, and by the time they finally start flashing the third and final group, now they're down in the 30s.

I'm supposed to get a heal on them, a BIG heal that they're going to need, WITH a slow GCD and the 2-2.5s casting time, and somehow keep them alive from 30% health with three groups of mobs pounding on them?

*sigh*

Of course they're going to drop dead. I've seen tanks do this, and I always roll my eyes going "uh, why? You could see that you were getting badly hurt on the 2nd group, why did you keep running for the 3rd!?"

Tanks need to realize that our heals take 2 or so seconds to cast AND there's a 1.5s GCD to boot. The GCD is rolled into the casting time, yes, UNLESS it's an instant-cast spell. So even if I use Swiftcast, I STILL have to wait a minimum of 1.5s GCD to START casting the next 2-second Cure.

In Short: I don't like seeing 30% health tanks running up to a 3rd group of mobs to try to tank them, too. No way I can get their health back up in time. Seriously. Nor do I like spamming Cure 2/3 right from the start to try and beat the insane incoming damage. I had enough of that in WoW where that was the norm, where tanks went from 100% to 20% to 80% to 20% to 80% to 20% every couple seconds. It's NOT fun gameplay, and one of the things I love about XIV healing is that it doesn't have to be like this, you get actual TIME to make decisions on what to do.

Unless, of course, you get an overly impatient tank who just wants to pull pull pull even if he's in no condition to pull more mobs.