This may sound like another of those threads saying "just copy pasta pvp into pve", but that's actually not it. I'm not here to tell you how great it would be that pve jobs would behave exactly like pvp jobs and same for encounters.
I want to go back onto the history of pvp, where the arena mode, the competitive mode that everything has always been designed and balanced around, was the Fold (which they removed very long ago) and the Feast, undergoing multiple partial redesigns. I want to bring forth the idea that this older model of arena pvp was more similar to pve than we may think it was.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Feast was a mode based around the trinity of healer/tank/dps with sub roles between melee and ranged. Every role had a precise job to do: Tanks were supposed to stun the target to burst precisely when the burst countdown ended and were also supposed to carry more medals gotten from kills (the more medals carried, the more damage taken), Healers were the pivotal point of teams and spammed heals to try and keep the current burst target alive, melee DPS were probably a third of the total burst DPS if not more and were the primary source of damage, and ranged DPS were silencers/debuffers supposed to specifically target the healer to disrupt their healing during burst while debuffing the burst target. The burst target was usually the melee DPS because killing tanks was the hardest thing to achieve, and killing healers, while juicy, was also a lot harder due to their purifying tools and heals. Ultimately if a team wasn't able to secure kills the winner was usually the one pushing the other to run out of resources (MP for the healer/individual elixirs), and the way to achieve this was securing the MP potions popping in the middle of the game.
As you can guess this made for an extremely scripted pvp that 99% of the time unfolded the exact same way with very little variations, and the little variations we had came from players being human beings and not a fully scripted boss like in pve. Now I'm not gonna explain what Crystalline Conflict is since the 6.1 rework, but at the risk of pissing off old Feast afficionados, I do think that what CC did exactly right beyond redefining truly flavorful unique job identities, was also to lower the skill floor dramatically and increase the skill ceiling pretty high as well. Feast had an incredibly high bar of entry for any new player: you had to setup macros specific to your role, you had to seriously learn how a game of feast was supposed to play because it was all but intuitive, you had to precisely know what you were supposed to do as the role you picked and execute it to the millimeter. But once this was done, you were already in Platinum/Diamond where not everything hinged on who had the better healer anymore, and you were already close to the skill ceiling if you were able to execute your script to a T in any circumstance. This is what made Feast closer to pve than what we think, and also focused to the extreme around burst cycles, like in pve.
Where I am going with this is that if pve could be finally be reworked finely like they did with pvp then perhaps that would be the shake up that the game actually needs. If anything, pve is also getting stale because it's been figured out since Endwalker. Nothing has changed, and compounded by a design that exclusively relies on brainless execution and memorization with less and less deviation from the script, then it's no wonder people are getting bored of it and complain whenever the devs introduce longer grinds, because they're not even here for the funsies anymore, just for the rewards, to get their clear, and move on.
Am I completely out of touch?
Continue reading...
I want to go back onto the history of pvp, where the arena mode, the competitive mode that everything has always been designed and balanced around, was the Fold (which they removed very long ago) and the Feast, undergoing multiple partial redesigns. I want to bring forth the idea that this older model of arena pvp was more similar to pve than we may think it was.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Feast was a mode based around the trinity of healer/tank/dps with sub roles between melee and ranged. Every role had a precise job to do: Tanks were supposed to stun the target to burst precisely when the burst countdown ended and were also supposed to carry more medals gotten from kills (the more medals carried, the more damage taken), Healers were the pivotal point of teams and spammed heals to try and keep the current burst target alive, melee DPS were probably a third of the total burst DPS if not more and were the primary source of damage, and ranged DPS were silencers/debuffers supposed to specifically target the healer to disrupt their healing during burst while debuffing the burst target. The burst target was usually the melee DPS because killing tanks was the hardest thing to achieve, and killing healers, while juicy, was also a lot harder due to their purifying tools and heals. Ultimately if a team wasn't able to secure kills the winner was usually the one pushing the other to run out of resources (MP for the healer/individual elixirs), and the way to achieve this was securing the MP potions popping in the middle of the game.
As you can guess this made for an extremely scripted pvp that 99% of the time unfolded the exact same way with very little variations, and the little variations we had came from players being human beings and not a fully scripted boss like in pve. Now I'm not gonna explain what Crystalline Conflict is since the 6.1 rework, but at the risk of pissing off old Feast afficionados, I do think that what CC did exactly right beyond redefining truly flavorful unique job identities, was also to lower the skill floor dramatically and increase the skill ceiling pretty high as well. Feast had an incredibly high bar of entry for any new player: you had to setup macros specific to your role, you had to seriously learn how a game of feast was supposed to play because it was all but intuitive, you had to precisely know what you were supposed to do as the role you picked and execute it to the millimeter. But once this was done, you were already in Platinum/Diamond where not everything hinged on who had the better healer anymore, and you were already close to the skill ceiling if you were able to execute your script to a T in any circumstance. This is what made Feast closer to pve than what we think, and also focused to the extreme around burst cycles, like in pve.
Where I am going with this is that if pve could be finally be reworked finely like they did with pvp then perhaps that would be the shake up that the game actually needs. If anything, pve is also getting stale because it's been figured out since Endwalker. Nothing has changed, and compounded by a design that exclusively relies on brainless execution and memorization with less and less deviation from the script, then it's no wonder people are getting bored of it and complain whenever the devs introduce longer grinds, because they're not even here for the funsies anymore, just for the rewards, to get their clear, and move on.
Am I completely out of touch?
Continue reading...