i don’t think i have the skills/reflexes/focus under pressure for current high-end content, but damn if the old high-level content isn’t fun

there’s so much to keep track of and so many ways for things to go catastrophically wrong, but that makes it all the more thrilling when everything goes right

…i’m getting sucked into the raider pipeline aren’t i

@ruwuby i've got a secret. current high end content is the same. you just have more buttons

come finish dawntrail and do savage with me :3

@sam @ruwuby :bongo:

@erin @ruwuby :bongo:

@ruwuby @sam i do keep meeting more new friends who play this game, so genuinely forming a semi-static and just doing old extremes/savages for fun is not out of the question

@sam what little i know of the arcadion story/vibes-wise does make me want to

savages/extremes really don’t get harder each expansion though? i find that hard to believe

@ruwuby they get harder but you get more tools and more experience too

@erin @sam do you want me to introduce you to the group running the 3.3 minstrel ballad? it would be terrible o’clock for you but

@erin @sam alternatively yeah i’d be up for making our own static-ish thing at a more reasonable time

@ruwuby @erin yesssssss

@sam @ruwuby i mean yeah maybe

i have thought about making a separate xiv friends discord at some point, so perhaps this will motivate me to do something like that sooner too organize stuff like this across friend groups

@ruwuby I am ngl even just seeing people play mid-level FFXIV content looks terrifying to me 😨 there is so much going on all the time just in terms of dodging alone - let alone having to use all of your abilities while doing the dodging

I bet it’s like playing a rhythm game while also playing a bullet hell

@kasdeya i have zero experience with shmups/bullet hells and one (1) experience with rhythm games so take anythihg i say about those with a grain of salt but
the secret with ffxiv, and probably with rhythm games/bullet hells, is that you only see the one winning run, you don’t see all of the practice/planning on that specific fight/song/level and you especially don’t see how that one fight built on everything before it. ffxiv has a pretty consistent visual language for its fights, so once we got used to that it became easy (or easier at least) to look past all of the flashy attack animations and visual noise and interpret what we’re supposed to do

• a circle appeared on the ground under my feet, it’s a pretty blue/green gradient which i haven’t seen before, but shapes on the ground (especially circles) basically always mean i need to not be standing in them 2-3 seconds from now
• there’s a icon over my head so the boss is going to target me specifically with something, i don’t recognize the specific icon but it’s not the universal “huddle up to share damage” icon so it probably means i need to get away from the group to avoid splash damage
• the boss has a big long cast bar, i don’t see any shapes on the ground but their left hand/wing/shoulder/… is glowing with energy, they’re probably about to wreck the left half of the arena so i need to be on the right (and vice versa)

that doesn’t cover the, fight choreography i guess? the planning “this attack is always followed by that attack so we position the boss here to create a safe spot there” - that can get pretty complicated, but it’s less intimidating than it looks with practice and talking it out before the fight. so yeah tl;dr the game is flashy and overwhelming at first glance, 100%, but with practice it’s not as bad as it looks. i’d be happy to walk you through stuff if you ever try the game again

@ruwuby this all definitely makes sense! and it’s interesting that in FFXIV it sounds like the expectation is that you’ll fight each boss multiple times before you learn their patterns and are able to beat them. in the low-level WoW content that I’ve done there is almost no difficulty at all lol - bosses don’t even really have mechanics or attacks that need to be dodged. you just use your abilities like normal, and the difference is that bosses might have more health and/or do more damage

but yeah if I think of it in terms of a game that’s meant to be technically challenging and practiced repeatedly (appropriately, like a rhythm game or a bullet hell) then it definitely makes sense that the level of difficulty wouldn’t be too overwhelming - especially since I assume it gradually ramps up over time

I tried playing a game on Steam called Rabbit and Steel which is a 2D roguelite version of FFXIV, and I found it extremely difficult and overwhelming - but I think it was probably made for people who had already played a lot of FFXIV. and when I was playing FFXIV, the combat wasn’t actually difficult at all - so I think the difficulty curve is probably pretty reasonable there

and thank you for the offer! I think at this point I should just stay away from FFXIV as much as I’d love to have an MMO that we could enjoy together. I’ve kept it installed this whole time but I might just uninstall it so I’m not tempted to try it anymore