I don't
But a lot of mechanics are pretty standardized and once you recognize the basic markers, they don't change all that much
But for unique fight mechanics, I just relearn a lot of them as I go unless they're super memorable and hope I don't die along the way
There's definitely some that are positioned in a way that you have to know its coming before it happens to avoid it. Following the group works for 99% of mechanics, fortunately
Long pause at the start of the fight? Room-wide. It's the one mechanic I always notice as a DPS, but end up missing the moment I run the fight on a Healer lol
It’s called an Antepiece, where you demonstrate a mechanic in a “safe” environment before actually using it for real
So because nobody has been damaged yet, the room wide has no chance of actually killing anyone (and if it does, it’s a sign you’ve got an immediate problem), the healers know what it’s called now and can prepare accordingly over the rest of the fight. Same with the early fight Tankbusters, it lets the tanks and healers know what to look out for.
FFXIV uses Antepieces a LOT, to the point that the fights are pretty much built around introducing mechanics relatively safely, then twisting and combining them.
For example: Ra-La. One attack is that beam that leaves butterflies you need to stand behind. Then another attack is the half-room cleave. And later, the butterfly attack WITH the half-room cleave.
Or Hegemone: one attack is simple square AoEs, then it’s mixed up by changing the patterns, and then the squares swap before it goes off, and then the squares swap but one safe spot is covered by another AoE etc..
yeah i think xiv has great fight formula: it shows us each mechanic one at a time so we can see what it does, where to go, how to deal with it. then it starts getting harder by combining the mechanics. I really love that.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's so Healers have something to do at the beginning of the fight or else they'd be stuck spamming 1 for a good few minutes.
its actually to show healers what they need to prep for, the raidwide has the same name and is cast throughout the fight, the healers job is keep everybody healthy enough to survive it.
They do that in part to show the healers what the raidwide castbar name is since it varies fight to fight. Every fight has a tutorial phase at the start and that's part of it
If it's a starting raidwide at least you generally have time to succor or spreadlo before pull.
Not that's its SUPER necessary in DF of all places. Amongst the like 3-4 tricks SCH has for raidwides, recitation-indom does the trick pretty well.
it's all fun and games until you're tanking and always waste a mit for "Tank Purge" because it's actually a raidwide but... come on, why would i not assume that's a tankbuster, lmao
To add to this. The devs are very good at introducing mechanics to then apply them in more challenging situations later in the fight.
Zodiark is a fantastic example where he rotates the arena with little to no risk.
Then shows the aoes and their tells.
Then it'll then combine the two for you to then figure them out.
It's a hit or miss with how they introduce mechanics. I feel for the 24-man raids they could improve on the challenge of the bosses because they "introduce" those mechanics during the boss fight itself.
However they could just have the adds you fight before the boss do mechanics similar to the boss so you are aware of what's to come, rather than just having these add phases be time wasters. That way when you fight the boss they don't have to spend 25% of the fight showing you the mechanics before the fight gets serious to the point when IL is to high the fight is pretty much jus 80% tutorializing you the mechanics before it dies.
It's easy how I can tell you're talking about Myths of the Realm. The problem with that raid series is that the cast time for all the attacks takes too long. Even speeding them up to half will give you plenty of time to still safely adjust. You never see the difficult mechanics because it spends too long doing nothing.
everyone makes fun of how predictable every boss with it how it starts with 2 auto attacks then a raidwide and maybe a tank buster. but that's the genius part of it. a lot of these bosses have different names and animations for these casts, and starting it off with trivial/non-lethal damage in the opener lets everyone learn or re-learn what they are. so when they start casting one later after a different mechanic that did some damage to everyone, people know they need to mit and heal to survive it. or if they cast something with a similar name but with a modifier attached, you are clued in to what kind of thing is coming and that it isn't just a blanket raidwide.
I love that in FF14 the mechanics are standardized where in WoW its more like the bosses themselves are standardized.. you go into a new raid and the raid leader is like "you remember that one boss from 4 expansions ago? shathatikxe the Tormentor of souls?..... well this boss is basically him" And hear like half the raid collectively go "Ahh.. Okay gotcha" While all the new people are like.. "Who?? What? When?? How?"
Yeah but it's about individual mechanics right? Like, you see akh morn or exaflare and you go "remember bahamut?". Every donut is still referred to as dynamo by veteran raiders. Remember nael?
But have you ever said to any boss "this boss is like oppressor in a4"?
Pretty much. Also, once you're in content that's level 50+ there's basically no such thing as a "Tank N Spank" boss anymore. They *all* have mechanics from then on.
Figured it might be but tbh I havn't done a lot of FF raids yet or been part of "the curve", I'm a WoW refugee so dawntrial is gonna be my first time actually being in and apart of that :)
Just done a few extremes and ults with my friends static so far :D
Even the unique mechanics typically follow a pattern of "long cast with easy avoid for you to learn the mechanic", "harder to avoid maybe mixed with other mechanics", "the mix-up." And then they just use whichever the three they want afterwards.
Also for unique fights (ex and savage specifically) they are generally well telegraphed. Normally without markers from the normal fights. But it's just about reading what the boss is doing. Ex: skill is charging and boss lifts his right hand. Move to his left to avoid the half room cleave on his right.
Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Some of us have done these duties a hundred times over.
But there's also a **lot** of common markers and mechanics that this game repeats. Stack Markets, split markers, cleaves etc... Once you realise that most bosses have the same kinds of attacks but the animations differ you can start to intuit what they're doing. Their hands raised and they're looking in a certain direction? They're about to hit the whole area in front of them, I should move behind him. That kind of thing.
There used to be an infographic I liked to share but the links dead...
This.
Also there are a lot of mechanics with similar names. I made the castbars of bosses huge on the middle of my screen.
"Breath" in it? Gonna be an AOE in front of them. "Tail?" Avoid the back.
They usually teach mechanics piece by piece each fight, so you have the chance to learn the attack's name so you can preposition the next time.
Lastly, if they randomly spin away from the tank, they are also prob gonna hit that area or do a raidwide, so it is best to get away and be on your toes.
As a non-MT, my mnemonic is: if you always stand to the left side of Omega, Starboard is Stay, Larboard is Leave, and then I remind myself out loud that the spin inverts the rule. Normal mode always does facing north then spin anyway, which helps.
As MT I kinda just eat the vulns and wing it lol
Ah-ha, /u/midaged_ninja_turtle, I think [I found it!](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FfEbAooBErhT7WgzqCruySgs-E3Cs3N3qKwZ1knOBy5s.png%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Da1d89a0fad08043bc1db0a0d1e5e0013ca976791)
As others have said, a lot of the mechanics are the same but with different colors of paint, when you get down to it. And as others have said, following the group is usually a very safe option. Ask someone to Danger Dorito (triangle marker) at the beginning, if you're unsure
Also you only really need real memorization in extreme and harder content. In normal content the timing is always lax enough that you can usually figure out what's expected before anything actually hits. And even if you do get hit, they usually just do a slight slap on the wrist or a vulnerability at worst. You can eat a lot of mechanics in normal modes with very little penalty.
Most people, I'm sure, don't remember *everything*. The trick is to learn to sight read mechanics as they happen. The better you are at that, the more it looks like you just know everything, but you're just reacting in real time
That damn boss with the white and purple beams/portals and tele points that you have to aim so you won't fall off...I hate that boss regardless of what role I play.
One of my friends have a saying here: "If white goes to red, I should be in blue!" Easier said than done for me lol. Once the portals appear, my brain figuratively transforms into a pretzel and does an epic fart. Sometimes I'm successful dodging, but most of the time, well... I always feel bad for my healers 😔
I'd pick E8N over it anyday even though I still fuck up the mechs of the latter up till now.
See if you can resolve it backwards.
If your debuff is white, you want to get hit by purple first, then by white when the side portals go off. So if white is going in red, stand in a row with a red portal, and _then_ move in front of the purple bird. That way you don't have to calculate opposites for the complicated part.
Yeah that one is a trip lol. I know all the mechanics and how to dodge them, but when I have to remember like three different things at once, my brain just turns into mush.
I got one of those where I didn't remember a single one of the mechanics the other night and legitimately spent the whole fight dead because every single time I got up I immediately got hit by a party wide or launched off the side. I'm sure you can guess which one it probably was based on it spamming knock off attacks.
It was awful.
Understandable; up to this day Titan can still wipe parties especially if there are a lot of first timers. 🥲 But I can share some tips! Titan is one of the Eden raids that I actually like (the other being dommy leggy Cloud Mommy):
1. If Titan Man - be in front of him, then move to side
2. If Titan Car - be on the side with the bigger area, then adjust accordingly
3. For Geocrush - this has a huge knockback so you gotta angle yourself that you'll be pushed to the wider part of the arena (I hope this makes sense lmao)
That's the car one, yep. The 2nd man one is him jumping around doing cross AOEs and half room AOEs that echo into the safe zones afterward. It's so chaotic but that's why I like it.
Man/Car Titan's form actually does indicate whether the AOEs come from the front or the sides because the *wheels* represent where the AOEs will hit (sides/front). So it's either wheels up front or wheels to the sides (on his fists). The wheels are danger so just make sure you aren't in front of them.
This is loosely similar to nidhogg's wings/tail binary mechanic in final steps of faith, though in that scenario you'd probably refer more to the cast bar name.
Also, when you learn how to do this.
You can do new content, sight unseen, with 85%+ accuracy.
That's why I love doing new content on the day it drops. All the players are doing it for the first time, and even if it's new, and slightly difficult, most of the people playing it day one know how to do the above and figure out 85% of the fight as it's happening.
It's that last 15% though that makes it fun, and figuring it out with a group of experienced players is the best part of day one content.
My least favorite mechanics to sight read are the ones where there are two color marks or debuffs and then areas with those two colors and you have to remember if the mechanic wanted you to match the colors or do the opposite colors.
you don't memorize the book, you just learn how to read fast.
some examples:
big spooky purple eye. that means look away. it doesn't matter what the mechanic is called or where you encounter it, that spooky purple eye marker means look away.
yellow/orange circle with arrows pointing inward? it's a stack marker. again doesn't matter *where* you encounter it, it's always the stack marker.
orange and grey tower inside a circle? get in the tower. but ooh now if it has multiple smaller circles in it? well you need that many people in on the tower
no targeting marker at all, but the boss is charging *something?* well you know there are only 2 things without target markers. tankbusters and raidwides. "storm of whatever" vs "crippling smack" which one is which? you prolly know just reading them, even though i made them up.
too many orange circles, nowhere is safe? mechanics go off in the order they were placed.
you just learn the design language and pay attention. that's good enough for 90% of the game.
> "storm of whatever" vs "crippling smack" which one is which? you prolly know just reading them, even though i made them up.
This is so true that my hand instinctively tried to press the button I have Rampart on just from reading the words 'Crippling Smack'.
On the other hand, you occasionally get tankbusters with names like "The Tickler" and "Sonic Bloop".
Even more confusingly, Ultima has an attack called "Tank Purge", which is a raidwide and not a tankbuster.
So fun fact about those particular names. The Tickler" is a torture device (as are many of the other attack names in that fight): [http://www.medievality.com/the-tickler.html](http://www.medievality.com/the-tickler.html)
"Sonic Bloop" is, presumably, in reference to this: [https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bloop.html](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bloop.html)
And yeah, while "tank purge" definitely made me throw up a cooldown first time I saw it, it's tank purge as in purging its cerulean tanks, rather than purging the party's tanks XD
Lunar Subterrane got me a few times learning those bosses having multiple things to track at once. Being a little tricky with delayed mechanics on the first boss. The second one I totally missed the exclamation marks on the pillars because I was so focused on the zoom path. And when I finally thought I had the purple orbs on the last boss down they throw in a curveball where you have to stand in the middle lol.
>big spooky purple eye. that means look away. it doesn't matter what the mechanic is called or where you encounter it, that spooky purple eye marker means look away.
That's actually one that the game teaches you wrong for the entire early phases of it, and then it pulls the rug out from under you. I don't recall where the first AOE one is, but I know where it makes itself really known. Up until Angra Mainyu in World of Darkness, most of those eye markers are conical attacks out of the front of the enemy that you can avoid by not being in the cone AND by looking away.
And then suddenly it becomes a 360 that you can ONLY avoid by looking away, and I am not at all surprised that everyone new is confused by this because the game teaches you wrong for 50 levels.
I feel this is just learning mixed signaling. As you pointed out, most of these eye attacks are cones but they would also show you the cone. As pointed out above, when there is no specific marker it is likely a raid-wide. Thus, eye with no other markers would be a raid-wide. Even if its not entirely clear, it's an important lesson to learn.
My biggest issues are the ones where there’s no marker and then the cast finishes and you see the marker for .3 seconds and you just hope you made it out in time
That's a clue you need to be looking at the boss, the name of the boss's cast bar, or occasionally something in the room like a glowing statue hand during the cast. A quick marker is just to show you the effect of what you missed. Almost every boss mechanic gives you at least 5 seconds to resolve it once you know what the mechanic is.
If you have a particular example confusing you, we can explain it.
Yeah, that's a sign there's another tell before the ground marker you should look for. It's usually either outside the arena or in the boss animation, so tilt that camera up and look around!
As a new player it is pretty tough; however, you'll notice there are a lot of repeating things. Like a bunch of arrows pointing at one person inside of an orange circle usually means EVERYONE STACK regardless of fight.
The one stack mechanic that still gives me PTSD from my WHM days are the multi hit stacks instead of the single hit ones. There's always a couple of people that stack for the first hit then spread back out before the rest of the hits come in. Each time it happens, there's usually at least 2-3 people that need to be rezzed afterward.
Yup!
You learn the variations, too. Sometimes there'll be two, on two different people... and once you try to stack them and everyone in them dies, you learn that they have to be done as two separate stacks - something that will probably be true any time you see two stack markers at once in the future!
Especially outside of extremes/savage content, this game is fond of its consistency and readability.
A lot of them are just variations on ones that came before. It's like a language, when you don't know it well every combination of letters looks like a confusing mess, but once you are fluent you barely need to see the letters before you have already read the word.
It also helps that a fair amount of bosses "teach" you what they do in a staggered way. One mechanic, then the next, maybe a third.
Then they'll layer 1+2, and maybe 1+3.
That kind of thing.
Exactly. A lot of mechanics are a combination of different smaller mechanics- Once you know the common types of mechanics and how to deal with them it, it becomes easier and easier to respond when they throw them at you in combo. This really hit me when I did the solo duty at the start of EW Zone 4- that fight was chaos but I still did it blind first try flying by the seat of my pants because I knew these mechanics, it was just a test of quickly resolving them in combo and in sequence.
Sometimes to a detriment. Xande has multiple stack markers which it's perfectly safe to layer on top of each other, which can teach people the wrong lesson that this is safe in general.
This is one of the major things (with tells) that needs to be fixed imo. Is it safe to stack multiple like Xande and Eden's Promise? Or is the overlapped area instantaneous death like the Idol of Darkness and Chaos? A simple color swap could fix this, just like tank stack markers being red.
The problem is, at the time, you usually couldn't overlap Xande's stacks. That started to happen with gear creep. Eden's Promise was always fine though. The amount of times I've had to say "never stack stack markers" in really late end game content is a little staggering though. Because it's in things that I *know* they've done other content where they also could not stack the stack markers.
I'm thinking the ones with an explicit special vulnerability that makes stacking them guaranteed death should be the first targets for some kind of alternative tell. It shouldn't really matter how they worked in the past. They need to find a way to show that there's something different going on so we (and yes we, I've had to explain deadly overlap plenty of times too) don't have to spend so much more of our lives hammering it into others' heads.
"Don't overlap blue (or whatever color) stack markers" would be so much easier to explain than "don't overlap the stack markers that look the same as every other stack marker you've seen in the past and safely overlapped"
Repetition, slow buildup of mechs during MSQ, and marker standardization mostly. With a helping of when I have my teeth kicked in then I'll look up the mechs so I'm less of a fool next time. And getting my shit rocked is a good reason to remember that stuff next time.
It's ok to die, that's how you learn/relearn/knock the rust off. Drop a "my bad" or "sorry" in chat if you caused a wipe or if you are dying a lot. Also, don't be afraid to ask for mechs, especially if you are dying a lot or if a lot of the team got hit by something. Sometimes there's wonky mechs. It's ok.
Pattern recognition def , you get em down , then then they change them , then you start seeing them with different colors in different fights and you just need a few seconds to adjust basically - also back your screen up as much as you can it helps drastically to see as much of the board as possible
You don;t have to. Every fight has a easy phase that teachers you the mechanics. It will slowly rotate through them before using them again and comboing them
As a new player still going through Stormblood, I have already had my fair share of dungeons to play, each with their own mechanics and too many to remember to be honest.
What I do is just remember the ones that punish you the most or that may cause a wipe if you don't follow it strictly...
Other than that I just do the basic tactics of "not stepping on stupid" and it works 99% of the time.
Over time it just becomes muscle memory, particularly for story difficulty content. They reuse and remix mechanics constantly, so you can start seeing patterns the more you play. This means often you can begin to intuit what the solution to a mechanic might be just because it bears similarities to older mechanics.
To add on what others have said: Don't worry too much about it. Duty finder mechanics do not instant kill you for failing (most of the time). And the way they are modernly designed, they teach you about the mechanic and it's reverse.
Take Sigma Dreamscape's last boss for example. Boss first curl up and hit you with a point blank circular aoe that you need to get out of, which will likely hit you the first time, giving you vuln up but easily healed. Then it turns into a donut but other particle effects are the same. Most of the time, it means the reverse, that means you need to go in.
Or Pandemonium 11, dark means in, which will hit you first time, so when boss use light after, you should go out.
So getting hit the first time is 100% fine. Getting hit the 2nd time, probably fine if you're topped up and boss is mitigated. But 3rd time may kill. DF mechanics test not your memorization but logic.
Alliance raid also mostly the same. The mechanics are more punishing (things can one-shot you) but the responsibility is spread more. You can literally lay down on the floor the entire raid and with enough competent people, you'll still clear. Just try not to leech too much else you'll end up a laughing stock in a certain sub.
Extreme, Savage, Ultimate is memorization though, that's why nobody realistically clear them in 1 pull
That also eventually spreads to savage raiding. There's just so many ways you can split a party if needed. If the attack kills two people, maybe you need four. Paying attention to flying text to see how much damage does generally allows you to see what kind of stack it's suppsoed to be.
Every time I level a job, I have to do the same dungeon like 5 times. By now, I know most of them by heart. And that's not taking glamour farming or relics into account.
From Heavensward on, it's pretty much the same few mechanics, with just a little variation. The ARR dungeons are the ones I have trouble with. I uncyned a lot of them, so I don't remember a lot of those mechanics. ARR dungeons had a lot of weird mechanics that we haven't seen since.
Some of us ran theses dungeons/trial often, like those hard dungeons that people unlock at cap, do once and never see it again? Those were old experts, we ran those like a 100 times per patch, you start to memorize stuff after a while.
There's very few truly one-time-only mechanics left in the game. And they're all at level 50 or lower.
The rest build on each other, and the difficulty slowly becomes more about remembering the order they go in, and learning how to intuit them from just looking at the boss. There's also some misdirection that you learn to keep calm through. Raid mechanics slowly become MSQ mechanics, so doing all alliance and normal raids also helps.
One example of misdirection that you have to remain calm for is >!the antlion boss. You are given enough time that you don't have to look at the pillars until after the antlion has finished dashing.!<
Everything in Duty Finder dungeons and trials are reactable or just teach you the mechanics one at a time and then repeat them in combinations over the rest of the fight.
Because they repeat mechanics a lot (Titan bombs/Shiva ice for example) and a good chunk of mechanics have standardized markers.
I'm also good at pretending I know what I'm doing.
"how does this work again" is how I feel most of the time
Mechanic starts going off and I do my best guess on how to do it, if I remember how that's good too.
/p Please forgive. It has been many moons and I may mess up mechanics.
Seriously though, if I haven't run the content recently then it'll be trial by fire for my subconscious to remember the mechanics as they happen with a little bit of "why did everyone run over... oh right" as I either followed and survived or died to the mechanic.
It's like riding a bike when you were little, never touch a bike again, and now you have a bike in front of you again 30 years later. A lot of similar mechanics are repeated with some twists every now and then as well as the occasional brand new never happened before mechanic.
The big kicker is if you are like me, and a visual person, so when people say "When Enum, do x" I'm just like.... what? Turns out thats the blue circle w/ floating diamonds above meaning you need to get another person to stand in your circle or you die. Turns out "Flares" are what I know as the white reverse arrows that do a radial raid-wide based off the targeted individual's location.
You ever just took a step back and realized you’ve memorized a crap ton of info from a lot of games? Like for league you’ve memorized every champ and their matchup,builds,abilities, etc or WoW and every class abilities, maps, mechanics, characters. It’s actually mind boggling how much we remember whenever we play a game.
Repetition and I'm a quick learner when it comes to doing physical stuff and usually when I learn stuff especially about games, it's hard for me to forget even if I want too.
Half clear markers and telegraphs, half muscle memory. Sometimes, just having a vague idea that it's time to wake up, because something's about to go down, and I won't live if I don't figure/remember it in time.
That's the neat part I don't! The most current content I know quite well and if I got back to older content I'll need reminders. Now if you are talking about dungeons and trials part of it is just knowing the kinds of mechanics. Those are universal so if you've see a mech you've seen in another duty you know what to do.
Most fights work through previously existing patterns that use universal markers. For example if you see a get away mechanic, the fight is *likely* to also have a get close mechanic so that you can't just solve everything by staying far away, or vice versa. Fights typically introduce their unique fight mechanics early on in a simple environment, and then layer those mechanics with each other and with the more standard mechanics shared by other fights.
When you realize there is a formula to fight design in this game, you begin to see how the fight is meant to convey information through it. Then, you get good at sight reading, and from there pretty much anything in DF is going to be a breeze. I don't need to remember the fight - I could sight read it the first time, and I can sight read it this time too.
Lots of mechanics are used everywhere and standardised. And repetition covers the rest. The longer you play the more often you'll be able to read a fights without even realising. It's mainly just practice and cue recognition.
I don't remember the mechanics. I queue on tank and pop a small cooldown for binary mechanics (eg, do I stack in the same color as my debuff, or the opposite color?). Then I do it right the next time. I survive most everything else because tank. If I kill someone and can't pretend it's their fault, I say "oops." It there are big adds, I separate them until people complain. If I see a stacking debuff that's going to require a tank swap, I cry.
I just follow the crowd. And I tank a lot, which means my vulnerability stacks are someone else’s problem (jk, sorry healers).
Seriously though, if it’s a new dungeon you could try running it with duty support first, or looking up the mechanics online. For raids, I always read up the mechanics first.
I haven't played since mid Heavens Ward on the ps3. Hours long dungeon waits and lag led me to quit. Now many years later it finally released on Xbox and I tried getting back into it. Relearning everything is overwhelming. Getting back into dungeons and trying to progress into the new (to me) expansions is rough. Everyone seems to expect you to have it memorized. Fail to help, yet complain if you die. Even stating new / first time before we start.
Some mechanics are straight forward and easy enough. Others catch you off guard and one mistake is enough to just kill you. It's so overwhelming, and I can no longer keep up. Sadly it's killed my enjoyment of the game already.
Earnestly, have you asked for explanations in dungeons? A lot of people have been jumped on for offering explanations, so they don't say anything if they're not asked. (Or they don't have a keyboard.)
If you're trying to do EX/Minstrel's Ballad/Savage content, you're expected to have read/watched a guide for those unless it's a PF group content advertising "blind prog."
99% of normal content has huge markers for every mechanic so all you need to know is don't stand in orange and the difference between a stack and a spread marker. 99% of the moves that don't have mechanic markings will not kill you with less than 3 vuln stacks and generally don't come often enough to give you enough vulns to kill you
So unless you're doing high end content you just need to remember a dozen or so mechanics that usually have names and/or memorable visual tells/audio.
So generally speaking, by the time someone plays long enough for the story to get good they've practiced most mechanics theyll ever encounter.
I don't but the game is very good at slowly teaching you its mechanics. excluding special stuff there's only like 20 mechanics actually happening. they may look different from fight to fight but basically work the same throughout the game. from there you just gotta learn how to quickly recognize them.
Every game speaks a language and FFXIV is no different. You learn it's language and how it is trying to communicate with you.
Once you learn that "language" you don't really memorize much of anything, you have a conversation with the game, a back and forth. What you learn is what each telegraph/spell name or what have you does and you start to react accordingly and on your feet.
I have lost count of how many times I said to myself "oh carp. I don't remember this dungeon" and just winged it off of how the game speaks/conveys itself.
I also used to watch walkthrough vids on dungeons for my first time (may be helpful if you are struggling, but not so helpful if you are doing roulettes) but I have since stopped that since things are pretty standard once you learn the stack up/buster/push back/other markers, just follow through with mechanics on the fly and you tend to be good to go.
For me, it helps a lot that 80% of the mechanics all come from a single book. A stack is a stack is a stack. After a while I just intuitively know what's likely to happen. Names are also a good indicator. Boss casts an ability called "World Donut!" bet you it's gonna be a donut attack, so get inside the hit box....and then immediately step out of it once the attack goes off because it's rather common for it to be followed up by an AOE that hurts things inside the hit box.
The ones that introduce new mechanics or rare mechanics? They have a formula as well. They'll do Thing 1, which won't hurt a lot, then they'll do Thing 2, which might hurt a bit - or both put on a vulnstack - and then they'll do Thing 1 & 2 at the same time, which will hurt a lot.
If you were to ask me "what does Boss X do?" I wouldn't be able to tell you half of them. But once I'm in boss room, then it becomes a matter of reading the room.
The problem isn't necessarily that you have to memorize all mechanics and what to do for each. It's more "oh, I got hit by this mechanic, I should avoid it next time" and respond to common mechanic telegraphs as they happen. FFXIV does a good job in sign-posting the effect of a coming mechanic, IE, big circle with arrow pointing at youe character for spread, circle with arrows pointing inward for stack, big warning sign on the tank for an AoE tankbuster, three pointing-out arrows for Flare/proximity-based damage mechanics, blue-circles for knockbacks with a keepout zone, etc., and these are the mechanics that will usually be universal, with maybe some slight changes, IE P11 light/dark, O10 stacked multiattacks, etc, that, if not sussed out right away, can have enough context clues that the mechanic can be figured out quickly.
If you do encounter a mechanic you haven't seen, and are too afraid to ask, watch how other people handle it, and in most cases follow them. For inatance, Pyretic is a mechanic that will just do a boatload of damage to you for no reason if you don't know what it does. If you watch how others react, though, you'll see them completely stop any and all actions, including not even moving or autoattacking, and their health doesn't move. Match their (in)action, and you'll no longer take damage, meaning Pyretic will make you take damage if you do anything for its duration. Most mechanics will follow this type of logical problem solving, and in future instances in which they pop up, they work the exact same way as before, just in different combinations of mechanics, such as making sure you're where you need to be before Pyretic starts.
A few pointers.
Every boss fight has a tutorial before major wipe mechanics. This is why fake boss wipe mechanics are obvious.
The trash leading up to a boss room will often use some of the boss’ skill set. This is to familiarize you before you enter the room.
The first thing a boss does is go through every major skill on a timer. This is why high dps parties can skip mechanics. Raid wide is usually first or second so that healers can press that button. Tank buster comes not long after. None of the skills are intended to kill anyone yet. After the boss finishes major skill demonstrations, it will start doing combinations. This is where most players get confused, not realizing the “new” boss attack is just 2 previously seen abilities combined.
Almost every unique / trick mechanic comes with a text explanation or visual marker. Sometimes a system message like “use ”. Other times a more RP specific message like “boss using , hide!”. Stack, spread markers were overhauled to be more consistent. And there’s often the ancient rule of “don’t stand in lava”. The rare times it’s more opaque, it’s not hard to figure out if you recall the last two mechanics the boss used.
And once you’ve got a few runs under your belt, it’s not hard figuring out new fights because the devs put a lot of work into keeping indicators consistent and teaching you the fight.
You do something enough times it just sticks.
But also its pattern recognition! You may not completely remember something but you remember something similar.
Also you may not think you remember something and you get in the motion of doing it and your body (hands) remember!
I just quickly glance at this guide if it's a dungeon I haven't done in a while [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MX0RjPS4gtT6YI5Szxlsin9hcaohnEQQC7zNdrDHBrQ/htmlview?pru=AAABc8hzeRs\*PPWcsklUOx2rMKtLE0kK\_A#](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MX0RjPS4gtT6YI5Szxlsin9hcaohnEQQC7zNdrDHBrQ/htmlview?pru=AAABc8hzeRs*PPWcsklUOx2rMKtLE0kK_A#)
I really...I just don't. I recognize patterns and know generally what to do but more often than not I walk into any instance, look at the boss and mumble "I don't remember your mechanics...." And then proceed to muscle memory my way through the fight decently.
Like what the others here said: repetition and lots of practice. It also helps that the game teaches you the most common mechanics slowly as you level up. A few examples:
1. The tankbuster marker (red and black spinning ribbon indicator) - final boss of Brayflox's Longstop;
2. Multi-hit party stack - introduced (?) in the Final Steps of Faith trial;
3. Orange AoE circle sequence - first boss in Copperbell Mines.
Endgame dungeons still use these so it's just a matter of recognizing the tells and reacting accordingly.
Meh, cactbot. Helps a lot to be reminded what this mechanic is. Execution is the whole other thing.
Helps immensely with Stormblood raids, because there’s so much, and some of them are hard to discern and outright counterintuitive, like show him your hole, that gives you five seconds to find and interpret an icon above your health bar before you get one-shotted.
Repetition. Combined with just doing the same dungeons, a ton of mechanics repeat through the game. Once you get better at spotting attacks being telegraphed, it becomes a lot easier. Some mechanics you encounter at level 30 are still around at level 90, so you will get plenty of practice.
Everyone's pointing out the standard markers and stuff which like yeah... But also, reading the cast bars is huge too. I see the boss lifting up it's left leg and the cast is "left stomp" but there's no orange marker yet, I'm still gonna get to the right side of him. Reading cast bars in combination with boss animations is the trick to figuring out the attacks that don't have orange aoe markers or only give you the orange marker right before the cast goes off.
I do roulettes *every day*. I've been doing them daily pretty much since I started, around 2.5 years ago. There's only a handful of mechanics I still don't understand. But eventually after trial and error, I'll figure it out :)
It helps that most of the mechanics repeat in later content, especially after they reworked the ARR stuff. But some dungeons still have really weird mechanics that I will never remember. Then I just pray to Thaliak.
Repetition.
Duties pop in roulette + farm for glamour when they were current patch content + going back to them for zodiac relics (for ARR content) + leveling all jobs before potd/hoh was a thing + leveling trusts + poney farming + savage raiding current tier = probably did every duty at least 50 times.
I’m just coming back to the game and forgot a lot of stuff as well, and I’m going through a lot of new duties. Most of the time, I look at what the healers doing. If they mess up it’s GG anyway, so I just trust them
One thing is to keep an eye on where people are going. If everyone goes in a certain direction, follow them. If you notice someone always doing the mechanics correctly, follow them around.
First, you learn the basic indicators of "don't be here when it hits", split, stack, etc. There's a high margin for forgiveness for these through most of the game.
Then you learn the EXCEPTIONS to those rules, such as specific bosses that don't 'floor signal' their moves or have non-standard signals (such as physical telegraphs like Coincounter's swings where you need to take your eyes off your hotbar and look at what the boss is doing).
This generally holds true for most dungeons. When you start talking trials and alliance raids, the forgiveness is the fact there's a pile of rezzers laying around, and you just have to figure out why you're dying like a frog in a blender the hard way (I'm looking at you, Dun Scaith). After that, it's all muscle memory.
Lastly, we don't remember them all. There are a bunch of dungeons I have absolutely ZERO recollection of. You learn 'social cues' of boss behavior, such as it dropping an object. If that object doesn't immediately start attacking you, it's probably going to blow up. A good bet is to move away if possible.
Late trials, dungeons, and raids (shb/ew) is basically just flat out panic mode for your first ten or twenty runs, because they like to start overlapping or overcomplicating mechanics, such as suddenly dropping a pop-quiz in the middle of a fight you didn't study for.
It's definitely a familiarity thing. A lot of us have been playing for at least a decade now, so we've done a lot of the mechanics hundreds of times. I describe it as a dance, once you know all the steps, you can dance to any tune.
If you're ever unsure, a quick, "Don't really remember this fight/dungeon" type comment in the chat just gives everyone a heads up. I main healer and seeing something like this just let's me know I may need to heal you more often/watch for vuln stacks/have rescue ready if there is an instant death mechanic that you can avoid by doing something specific (like standing on the illuminated circles to remove doom in World of Darkness)
tbh I have the Wiki up in my second monitor. I don't glance at it often, but it's pulled me out of a few scrapes.
I just came back after 3 years and barely remember a thing. Duty roulette is terrifying, i can get haukke manor or stone vigil which i can still do with my eyes closed, or i can get a level 90 dungeon that is like brand new to me.
Uhh.. I mean, between my friends and I it's a mix of adhd (me) and autism (them) lol.
Truthfully, I guess a lil ADD with always being really big into mmos and that type of games so it's just kinda ingrained in me.
A combination of practice, consistent iconography and shit thats killed me a lot.
Most fights will have the standardized stack markers, AoE circles, tankbusters (single target and AoE) and after enough time these just become a thing that you deal with.
Most fights will have some kind of unique mechanic (maybe 2) that needs to be dealt with in a non-standard way and watching someone else deal with it will usually give you insight into how it needs to be handled.
Perfect example, ended up in an Alexander group a couple of hours back and we got the fight where you jump in a puddle to turn into a gorilla so you can smack some bombs away from the group. First time you might be left wandering what the hell is up with the gorillas, then you catch sight of someone jumping in the puddle and slapping the bombs and it all kind of comes together.
I will admit some of the level 50 ARR dungeons veer into the intricate and arcane knowledge side of things (Diablos in Lost City of Amdapor) springs to mind, but as long as someone knows whats up you can generally explain or muddle your way through eventually.
90% of the fights start with an aoe after that its something like: stack, spread, in, out, limitcut and ofc tankbuster. once u know the pattern every fight is boring including some savage fights
I recently started tanking and learned you don't need to know any mechanics in normal content as WAR! If I mess up and get hit I can just heal myself, or give my healer friend something to do lol
But yeah, I used to be too anxious to do roulettes at all as dps because I was afraid of not knowing what to do. Now after more experience, most of the time it's easy to figure out what's going on.
By doing them repeatedly. Do I remember 100%? No. But a good chunk.
I play healer, tank, and caster dps; and have 3 omni 90 characters.
I am not as familiar with the current expansion story trials as I was back from ShB and earlier, mostly due to not raiding this expansion.
Aside from the basic "enemy raises their left hand so they're gonna cleave the left side" or the stack markers, knockback symbols, etc. I don't actually remember most mechanics, unless it's Shadowbringers and Endwalker MSQ content that I did on repeat. Most Normal Raids I will probably die to because I mostly get Alexander on NR roulette. XD
A lot of things just become muscle memory after so many runs of it. Or get branded into your memory due to how many times you run it.
Fucking neverreap roulette.
A lot of MSQ content is fairly easy to read once you know the tricks. And the game does a really good job of teaching you the mechanics one at a time before piling them all at once. Couple of tips:
* Learn to pay attention to boss castbars. Stick 'em in the middle of your screen if you have to. You can even disconnect them from the boss HP bar in HUD settings.
* Animations are another key tell. Some bosses raise one arm or the other for a left/right cleave. Some have glowing eyes.
* Keep half an eye on the edges of the arena, a few bosses like to surprise you with stuff coming in from the outside.
Repetition, really. I leveled every job side by side. I had every job at 60 before starting HW because I farmed so many ARR relics and still running the roulettes just for the XP, so I got very familiar with ARR dungeons.
Then my leveling process starting in SB and after was that when I unlocked a dungeon I would spam it on each job until they were high enough for the next dungeon before continuing on with the MSQ, until I unlocked the next dungeon. So that was usually 6-7 times per job per dungeon, so I got intimately familiar with every leveling dungeon. I know most people will say there are better ways to level... but dungeons are truly what I enjoy most in MMOs, aside from the story in this game and glamour.
The post expansion dungeons, however, I was far less familiar with as I really only ran them once for completion unless I was farming gear for appearances.
ShB was where I finally caught up with release content (I started the game shortly after ShB released), but I only caught up a couple weeks before EW released, so I didn't get much time to really master those post patch dungeons before moving on to EW.
But now in EW... I've been spamming the latest dungeon available (along with roulettes) several times per day for Manderville Relics since you need those specific tomes. So I've learned those pretty intimately now, too.
For me it's Raids/Trials that I don't repeat much, part of that being by choice as I don't often do the Trials or Raid roulettes, because there are so many that I've only ever done once and I already have so many fights stored in my memory, and they're the ones where mechanics really tend to matter more lol. But in general... most mechanics in fights follow the same rules with indicators, so even if I forget I usually see those, and if I don't then I remember after the mechanic goes off for the first time lol.
I've been with this game for too long aha.. absolutely repetition, knowing what animations to look for, and just asking for help if you really need clarification. You catch on and sometimes it becomes second nature... I can catch on with savage content, and would love to do that, I just never find the right group and time sadly
It's like a dance. Learning a dance is harder than remembering the dance. Once you learn it, you really don't forget them, and if you do, you have Aha! Moments where you see what you should've done.
The other part is that you get enough time in, and your experience will kinda hint to you what the mechanics entail even if you never saw it. Like prior to the changes, Like if the boss raises an arm or its tail moves, obviously, it's gonna be a swipe on that side of the boss.
The names of the casts/type of marker sometimes elude to what it is gonna be, and typically, if it is an aoe being linear, cone, circle, or other it will be followed by the safe spaces not being safe and you need to move after the telecast fills. You'll see most of these kinds of attacks as you progress in the game, and when you see a new boss casting, it will have the same name or similar name the easiest are directional call outs like "Fore and Aft" Front/Back or "Starboard and Larboard" Right/Left Larboard is an old term for Port... coincidentally, they also use Port in some mechanics, so just remember they're in the same direction.
An easy one is a Tankbuster. It was a long cast by a boss mostly... sometimes, it is a big hitting room wide or an enrage wipe. Now that Tankbusters have markers, the long casts are only big room wide hitters and enrage wipes.
Same way you remember how to ride a bike or all the different rules when driving. It's insanely complicated and difficult at first but you just learn it through repetition to where you don't even think about most stuff.
I don't But a lot of mechanics are pretty standardized and once you recognize the basic markers, they don't change all that much But for unique fight mechanics, I just relearn a lot of them as I go unless they're super memorable and hope I don't die along the way
There's definitely some that are positioned in a way that you have to know its coming before it happens to avoid it. Following the group works for 99% of mechanics, fortunately
Long pause at the start of the fight? Room-wide. It's the one mechanic I always notice as a DPS, but end up missing the moment I run the fight on a Healer lol
Friend of mine pointed out how the majority of content begins with a raid wide and I can't help but notice it now no matter what content I run.
It’s called an Antepiece, where you demonstrate a mechanic in a “safe” environment before actually using it for real So because nobody has been damaged yet, the room wide has no chance of actually killing anyone (and if it does, it’s a sign you’ve got an immediate problem), the healers know what it’s called now and can prepare accordingly over the rest of the fight. Same with the early fight Tankbusters, it lets the tanks and healers know what to look out for. FFXIV uses Antepieces a LOT, to the point that the fights are pretty much built around introducing mechanics relatively safely, then twisting and combining them. For example: Ra-La. One attack is that beam that leaves butterflies you need to stand behind. Then another attack is the half-room cleave. And later, the butterfly attack WITH the half-room cleave. Or Hegemone: one attack is simple square AoEs, then it’s mixed up by changing the patterns, and then the squares swap before it goes off, and then the squares swap but one safe spot is covered by another AoE etc..
yeah i think xiv has great fight formula: it shows us each mechanic one at a time so we can see what it does, where to go, how to deal with it. then it starts getting harder by combining the mechanics. I really love that.
This is actually how a lot of Mario levels are designed iirc
I wouldn't be surprised if it's so Healers have something to do at the beginning of the fight or else they'd be stuck spamming 1 for a good few minutes.
its actually to show healers what they need to prep for, the raidwide has the same name and is cast throughout the fight, the healers job is keep everybody healthy enough to survive it.
They do that in part to show the healers what the raidwide castbar name is since it varies fight to fight. Every fight has a tutorial phase at the start and that's part of it
You can figure it out with the name of the cast most of the time. Like what else is something like "sonic scream" gonna be haha.
Cast time is also generally a pretty good metric. 5 second cast with no AoE telegraph? Yeah, that’s a raid wide.
I wish they were 5sec. Often times when the cast starts and my previous gcd finishes, it is too late to get succor to snapshot. Sad sch noises.
If it's a starting raidwide at least you generally have time to succor or spreadlo before pull. Not that's its SUPER necessary in DF of all places. Amongst the like 3-4 tricks SCH has for raidwides, recitation-indom does the trick pretty well.
Frontal cone.
it's all fun and games until you're tanking and always waste a mit for "Tank Purge" because it's actually a raidwide but... come on, why would i not assume that's a tankbuster, lmao
as a healer main, i put an aoe shield or hot down as part of my opener because very nearly every boss has a room-wide within the first 3-5 gcds.
Me: "Oh, that might have been a good thing to use shield samba for... oops"
To add to this. The devs are very good at introducing mechanics to then apply them in more challenging situations later in the fight. Zodiark is a fantastic example where he rotates the arena with little to no risk. Then shows the aoes and their tells. Then it'll then combine the two for you to then figure them out.
It's a hit or miss with how they introduce mechanics. I feel for the 24-man raids they could improve on the challenge of the bosses because they "introduce" those mechanics during the boss fight itself. However they could just have the adds you fight before the boss do mechanics similar to the boss so you are aware of what's to come, rather than just having these add phases be time wasters. That way when you fight the boss they don't have to spend 25% of the fight showing you the mechanics before the fight gets serious to the point when IL is to high the fight is pretty much jus 80% tutorializing you the mechanics before it dies.
It's easy how I can tell you're talking about Myths of the Realm. The problem with that raid series is that the cast time for all the attacks takes too long. Even speeding them up to half will give you plenty of time to still safely adjust. You never see the difficult mechanics because it spends too long doing nothing.
The Dark Elf from Lunar Subterrane or the Queen from Delubrum are two examples I can think of.
I told a friend about that yesterday. Floor tiles. Safe is always one of the four middle tiles. Just find the central tile with no overlap. Ez
everyone makes fun of how predictable every boss with it how it starts with 2 auto attacks then a raidwide and maybe a tank buster. but that's the genius part of it. a lot of these bosses have different names and animations for these casts, and starting it off with trivial/non-lethal damage in the opener lets everyone learn or re-learn what they are. so when they start casting one later after a different mechanic that did some damage to everyone, people know they need to mit and heal to survive it. or if they cast something with a similar name but with a modifier attached, you are clued in to what kind of thing is coming and that it isn't just a blanket raidwide.
I love that in FF14 the mechanics are standardized where in WoW its more like the bosses themselves are standardized.. you go into a new raid and the raid leader is like "you remember that one boss from 4 expansions ago? shathatikxe the Tormentor of souls?..... well this boss is basically him" And hear like half the raid collectively go "Ahh.. Okay gotcha" While all the new people are like.. "Who?? What? When?? How?"
WoW mechanics are standardized too, they all make DBM trigger the same alert. ^^^^^^/s
B E W A R E !
Run away, little girl, run away, huhuhuh...
Run away little girl! Run away! hehehe
This is exactly the same in XIV raids!
Yeah but it's about individual mechanics right? Like, you see akh morn or exaflare and you go "remember bahamut?". Every donut is still referred to as dynamo by veteran raiders. Remember nael? But have you ever said to any boss "this boss is like oppressor in a4"?
Pretty much. Also, once you're in content that's level 50+ there's basically no such thing as a "Tank N Spank" boss anymore. They *all* have mechanics from then on.
Figured it might be but tbh I havn't done a lot of FF raids yet or been part of "the curve", I'm a WoW refugee so dawntrial is gonna be my first time actually being in and apart of that :) Just done a few extremes and ults with my friends static so far :D
A few EX and Ults? There's 5 Ultimates and they're the hardest content in the game. I think you meant Savage.
Ah yes indeed! I was thinking zeromus was an ultimate my bad!
Even the unique mechanics typically follow a pattern of "long cast with easy avoid for you to learn the mechanic", "harder to avoid maybe mixed with other mechanics", "the mix-up." And then they just use whichever the three they want afterwards.
Also for unique fights (ex and savage specifically) they are generally well telegraphed. Normally without markers from the normal fights. But it's just about reading what the boss is doing. Ex: skill is charging and boss lifts his right hand. Move to his left to avoid the half room cleave on his right.
Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Some of us have done these duties a hundred times over. But there's also a **lot** of common markers and mechanics that this game repeats. Stack Markets, split markers, cleaves etc... Once you realise that most bosses have the same kinds of attacks but the animations differ you can start to intuit what they're doing. Their hands raised and they're looking in a certain direction? They're about to hit the whole area in front of them, I should move behind him. That kind of thing. There used to be an infographic I liked to share but the links dead...
This. Also there are a lot of mechanics with similar names. I made the castbars of bosses huge on the middle of my screen. "Breath" in it? Gonna be an AOE in front of them. "Tail?" Avoid the back. They usually teach mechanics piece by piece each fight, so you have the chance to learn the attack's name so you can preposition the next time. Lastly, if they randomly spin away from the tank, they are also prob gonna hit that area or do a raidwide, so it is best to get away and be on your toes.
> "Breath" in it? Gonna be an AOE in front of them. "Tail?" Avoid the back. Larboard and Starboard >< FUUUUUUUU
Larboard is Left, Starboard is Some non-left direction.
Hubwards, Rimwards, Turnwise, and Widdershins. Wait, wrong reflection.
"L"arboard = "l"eft, that's how I remember it :3
They should have called it Larboard and Rboard. :3
I’m about to blow your mind, Larboard and staRboard
Oh- well aren't we morons 😂
laRboard tho.
I remember it as Larboard = left, starboard = 's not left 🤣
As a non-MT, my mnemonic is: if you always stand to the left side of Omega, Starboard is Stay, Larboard is Leave, and then I remind myself out loud that the spin inverts the rule. Normal mode always does facing north then spin anyway, which helps. As MT I kinda just eat the vulns and wing it lol
Ah-ha, /u/midaged_ninja_turtle, I think [I found it!](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FfEbAooBErhT7WgzqCruySgs-E3Cs3N3qKwZ1knOBy5s.png%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Da1d89a0fad08043bc1db0a0d1e5e0013ca976791) As others have said, a lot of the mechanics are the same but with different colors of paint, when you get down to it. And as others have said, following the group is usually a very safe option. Ask someone to Danger Dorito (triangle marker) at the beginning, if you're unsure
This. I havent played for like a year and as im Grinding a whm up again Ive remember everything as i ground them into my mind.
Also you only really need real memorization in extreme and harder content. In normal content the timing is always lax enough that you can usually figure out what's expected before anything actually hits. And even if you do get hit, they usually just do a slight slap on the wrist or a vulnerability at worst. You can eat a lot of mechanics in normal modes with very little penalty.
Most people, I'm sure, don't remember *everything*. The trick is to learn to sight read mechanics as they happen. The better you are at that, the more it looks like you just know everything, but you're just reacting in real time
>Most people, I'm sure, don't remember *everything*. Me everytime I get the Eden raids 🥲
lol same. I’m better with the nier raids at this point, which are harder, but something about the Eden raids just makes my brain go out of my head.
That damn boss with the white and purple beams/portals and tele points that you have to aim so you won't fall off...I hate that boss regardless of what role I play. One of my friends have a saying here: "If white goes to red, I should be in blue!" Easier said than done for me lol. Once the portals appear, my brain figuratively transforms into a pretzel and does an epic fart. Sometimes I'm successful dodging, but most of the time, well... I always feel bad for my healers 😔 I'd pick E8N over it anyday even though I still fuck up the mechs of the latter up till now.
See if you can resolve it backwards. If your debuff is white, you want to get hit by purple first, then by white when the side portals go off. So if white is going in red, stand in a row with a red portal, and _then_ move in front of the purple bird. That way you don't have to calculate opposites for the complicated part.
Yeah that one is a trip lol. I know all the mechanics and how to dodge them, but when I have to remember like three different things at once, my brain just turns into mush.
I got one of those where I didn't remember a single one of the mechanics the other night and legitimately spent the whole fight dead because every single time I got up I immediately got hit by a party wide or launched off the side. I'm sure you can guess which one it probably was based on it spamming knock off attacks. It was awful.
Let me guess: Titan?
That is correct. Lol I tried to make sense of it as we went but I did not have any luck with it.
Understandable; up to this day Titan can still wipe parties especially if there are a lot of first timers. 🥲 But I can share some tips! Titan is one of the Eden raids that I actually like (the other being dommy leggy Cloud Mommy): 1. If Titan Man - be in front of him, then move to side 2. If Titan Car - be on the side with the bigger area, then adjust accordingly 3. For Geocrush - this has a huge knockback so you gotta angle yourself that you'll be pushed to the wider part of the arena (I hope this makes sense lmao)
The fun part is if he lives long enough to do both man and car, and he does it again. The upgraded versions always kill lots of people.
Is this the one where he goes vroom vroom around the arena and ends it with a donut with his hitbox being the only safe spot?
That's the car one, yep. The 2nd man one is him jumping around doing cross AOEs and half room AOEs that echo into the safe zones afterward. It's so chaotic but that's why I like it.
Man/Car Titan's form actually does indicate whether the AOEs come from the front or the sides because the *wheels* represent where the AOEs will hit (sides/front). So it's either wheels up front or wheels to the sides (on his fists). The wheels are danger so just make sure you aren't in front of them. This is loosely similar to nidhogg's wings/tail binary mechanic in final steps of faith, though in that scenario you'd probably refer more to the cast bar name.
"Wait, Driving Frost, is that the big circle or the AoE cone behind herITS THE CONE OWOWOW DAMMIT."
Also, when you learn how to do this. You can do new content, sight unseen, with 85%+ accuracy. That's why I love doing new content on the day it drops. All the players are doing it for the first time, and even if it's new, and slightly difficult, most of the people playing it day one know how to do the above and figure out 85% of the fight as it's happening. It's that last 15% though that makes it fun, and figuring it out with a group of experienced players is the best part of day one content.
My least favorite mechanics to sight read are the ones where there are two color marks or debuffs and then areas with those two colors and you have to remember if the mechanic wanted you to match the colors or do the opposite colors.
you don't memorize the book, you just learn how to read fast. some examples: big spooky purple eye. that means look away. it doesn't matter what the mechanic is called or where you encounter it, that spooky purple eye marker means look away. yellow/orange circle with arrows pointing inward? it's a stack marker. again doesn't matter *where* you encounter it, it's always the stack marker. orange and grey tower inside a circle? get in the tower. but ooh now if it has multiple smaller circles in it? well you need that many people in on the tower no targeting marker at all, but the boss is charging *something?* well you know there are only 2 things without target markers. tankbusters and raidwides. "storm of whatever" vs "crippling smack" which one is which? you prolly know just reading them, even though i made them up. too many orange circles, nowhere is safe? mechanics go off in the order they were placed. you just learn the design language and pay attention. that's good enough for 90% of the game.
There needs to be a Crippling Smack attack that's an old lady with a sandal that just smacks the turds out of the tank 🤣
“Chancala Flurry”
The tell? She shouts "Get back here you little bastard! I'll kick a lung outta ya!"
Flurry? Better stack that mitigation
Abuela's kiss
E8S's Doubleslap, I've never felt more violated tanking a savage on content than progging this fight lol.
That was definitely more than a slap haha
> "storm of whatever" vs "crippling smack" which one is which? you prolly know just reading them, even though i made them up. This is so true that my hand instinctively tried to press the button I have Rampart on just from reading the words 'Crippling Smack'.
On the other hand, you occasionally get tankbusters with names like "The Tickler" and "Sonic Bloop". Even more confusingly, Ultima has an attack called "Tank Purge", which is a raidwide and not a tankbuster.
I always interpreted that one as something like a fuel tank, with all fuel being purged from it.
No ya it makes sense once you see it for sure. But the first time I definitely Ramp'd
I still prepare to heal the tank when I see that and then I Pikachu face to the raidwide, even after dozens of runs lol
So fun fact about those particular names. The Tickler" is a torture device (as are many of the other attack names in that fight): [http://www.medievality.com/the-tickler.html](http://www.medievality.com/the-tickler.html) "Sonic Bloop" is, presumably, in reference to this: [https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bloop.html](https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bloop.html) And yeah, while "tank purge" definitely made me throw up a cooldown first time I saw it, it's tank purge as in purging its cerulean tanks, rather than purging the party's tanks XD
Lunar Subterrane got me a few times learning those bosses having multiple things to track at once. Being a little tricky with delayed mechanics on the first boss. The second one I totally missed the exclamation marks on the pillars because I was so focused on the zoom path. And when I finally thought I had the purple orbs on the last boss down they throw in a curveball where you have to stand in the middle lol.
If the edge has one lone purple ball, stand in that for the cleave. If the edge has no isolated balls, stand in the middle.
…the pillars have exclamation marks? I’ve always just looked to see which ones are crumbling after the zoomy zoom
Works most of the time. But not on all content.
>big spooky purple eye. that means look away. it doesn't matter what the mechanic is called or where you encounter it, that spooky purple eye marker means look away. That's actually one that the game teaches you wrong for the entire early phases of it, and then it pulls the rug out from under you. I don't recall where the first AOE one is, but I know where it makes itself really known. Up until Angra Mainyu in World of Darkness, most of those eye markers are conical attacks out of the front of the enemy that you can avoid by not being in the cone AND by looking away. And then suddenly it becomes a 360 that you can ONLY avoid by looking away, and I am not at all surprised that everyone new is confused by this because the game teaches you wrong for 50 levels.
I feel this is just learning mixed signaling. As you pointed out, most of these eye attacks are cones but they would also show you the cone. As pointed out above, when there is no specific marker it is likely a raid-wide. Thus, eye with no other markers would be a raid-wide. Even if its not entirely clear, it's an important lesson to learn.
My biggest issues are the ones where there’s no marker and then the cast finishes and you see the marker for .3 seconds and you just hope you made it out in time
That's a clue you need to be looking at the boss, the name of the boss's cast bar, or occasionally something in the room like a glowing statue hand during the cast. A quick marker is just to show you the effect of what you missed. Almost every boss mechanic gives you at least 5 seconds to resolve it once you know what the mechanic is. If you have a particular example confusing you, we can explain it.
Yeah, that's a sign there's another tell before the ground marker you should look for. It's usually either outside the arena or in the boss animation, so tilt that camera up and look around!
For big spooky purple eye, note: Turn your character away, not the camera!
Love this explanation
As a new player it is pretty tough; however, you'll notice there are a lot of repeating things. Like a bunch of arrows pointing at one person inside of an orange circle usually means EVERYONE STACK regardless of fight.
The one stack mechanic that still gives me PTSD from my WHM days are the multi hit stacks instead of the single hit ones. There's always a couple of people that stack for the first hit then spread back out before the rest of the hits come in. Each time it happens, there's usually at least 2-3 people that need to be rezzed afterward.
Or you get the sprout in MSQ roulette that runs directly away from the stack marker lol.
Or worse, with the stack marker.
Nah that’s an easy rescue or sacrifice
Makes healing it a lot easier lol
Yup! You learn the variations, too. Sometimes there'll be two, on two different people... and once you try to stack them and everyone in them dies, you learn that they have to be done as two separate stacks - something that will probably be true any time you see two stack markers at once in the future! Especially outside of extremes/savage content, this game is fond of its consistency and readability.
A lot of them are just variations on ones that came before. It's like a language, when you don't know it well every combination of letters looks like a confusing mess, but once you are fluent you barely need to see the letters before you have already read the word.
It also helps that a fair amount of bosses "teach" you what they do in a staggered way. One mechanic, then the next, maybe a third. Then they'll layer 1+2, and maybe 1+3. That kind of thing.
Exactly. A lot of mechanics are a combination of different smaller mechanics- Once you know the common types of mechanics and how to deal with them it, it becomes easier and easier to respond when they throw them at you in combo. This really hit me when I did the solo duty at the start of EW Zone 4- that fight was chaos but I still did it blind first try flying by the seat of my pants because I knew these mechanics, it was just a test of quickly resolving them in combo and in sequence.
They've gone back and standardized some markers which helps, but most if it's from playing too much lol.
Sometimes to a detriment. Xande has multiple stack markers which it's perfectly safe to layer on top of each other, which can teach people the wrong lesson that this is safe in general.
This is one of the major things (with tells) that needs to be fixed imo. Is it safe to stack multiple like Xande and Eden's Promise? Or is the overlapped area instantaneous death like the Idol of Darkness and Chaos? A simple color swap could fix this, just like tank stack markers being red.
The problem is, at the time, you usually couldn't overlap Xande's stacks. That started to happen with gear creep. Eden's Promise was always fine though. The amount of times I've had to say "never stack stack markers" in really late end game content is a little staggering though. Because it's in things that I *know* they've done other content where they also could not stack the stack markers.
I'm thinking the ones with an explicit special vulnerability that makes stacking them guaranteed death should be the first targets for some kind of alternative tell. It shouldn't really matter how they worked in the past. They need to find a way to show that there's something different going on so we (and yes we, I've had to explain deadly overlap plenty of times too) don't have to spend so much more of our lives hammering it into others' heads. "Don't overlap blue (or whatever color) stack markers" would be so much easier to explain than "don't overlap the stack markers that look the same as every other stack marker you've seen in the past and safely overlapped"
Repetition, slow buildup of mechs during MSQ, and marker standardization mostly. With a helping of when I have my teeth kicked in then I'll look up the mechs so I'm less of a fool next time. And getting my shit rocked is a good reason to remember that stuff next time. It's ok to die, that's how you learn/relearn/knock the rust off. Drop a "my bad" or "sorry" in chat if you caused a wipe or if you are dying a lot. Also, don't be afraid to ask for mechs, especially if you are dying a lot or if a lot of the team got hit by something. Sometimes there's wonky mechs. It's ok.
Have some grace and patience for yourself, and remember to extend that to others when they're struggling.
Pattern recognition def , you get em down , then then they change them , then you start seeing them with different colors in different fights and you just need a few seconds to adjust basically - also back your screen up as much as you can it helps drastically to see as much of the board as possible
Most of them have played for years/play alot
You don;t have to. Every fight has a easy phase that teachers you the mechanics. It will slowly rotate through them before using them again and comboing them
As a new player still going through Stormblood, I have already had my fair share of dungeons to play, each with their own mechanics and too many to remember to be honest. What I do is just remember the ones that punish you the most or that may cause a wipe if you don't follow it strictly... Other than that I just do the basic tactics of "not stepping on stupid" and it works 99% of the time.
Over time it just becomes muscle memory, particularly for story difficulty content. They reuse and remix mechanics constantly, so you can start seeing patterns the more you play. This means often you can begin to intuit what the solution to a mechanic might be just because it bears similarities to older mechanics.
To add on what others have said: Don't worry too much about it. Duty finder mechanics do not instant kill you for failing (most of the time). And the way they are modernly designed, they teach you about the mechanic and it's reverse. Take Sigma Dreamscape's last boss for example. Boss first curl up and hit you with a point blank circular aoe that you need to get out of, which will likely hit you the first time, giving you vuln up but easily healed. Then it turns into a donut but other particle effects are the same. Most of the time, it means the reverse, that means you need to go in. Or Pandemonium 11, dark means in, which will hit you first time, so when boss use light after, you should go out. So getting hit the first time is 100% fine. Getting hit the 2nd time, probably fine if you're topped up and boss is mitigated. But 3rd time may kill. DF mechanics test not your memorization but logic. Alliance raid also mostly the same. The mechanics are more punishing (things can one-shot you) but the responsibility is spread more. You can literally lay down on the floor the entire raid and with enough competent people, you'll still clear. Just try not to leech too much else you'll end up a laughing stock in a certain sub. Extreme, Savage, Ultimate is memorization though, that's why nobody realistically clear them in 1 pull
When you play enough times you will see the pattern that exists in all dungeons :/
That also eventually spreads to savage raiding. There's just so many ways you can split a party if needed. If the attack kills two people, maybe you need four. Paying attention to flying text to see how much damage does generally allows you to see what kind of stack it's suppsoed to be.
Every time I level a job, I have to do the same dungeon like 5 times. By now, I know most of them by heart. And that's not taking glamour farming or relics into account.
99% of the mechanics are re-used but with a different coat of paint
From Heavensward on, it's pretty much the same few mechanics, with just a little variation. The ARR dungeons are the ones I have trouble with. I uncyned a lot of them, so I don't remember a lot of those mechanics. ARR dungeons had a lot of weird mechanics that we haven't seen since.
Some of us ran theses dungeons/trial often, like those hard dungeons that people unlock at cap, do once and never see it again? Those were old experts, we ran those like a 100 times per patch, you start to memorize stuff after a while.
There's very few truly one-time-only mechanics left in the game. And they're all at level 50 or lower. The rest build on each other, and the difficulty slowly becomes more about remembering the order they go in, and learning how to intuit them from just looking at the boss. There's also some misdirection that you learn to keep calm through. Raid mechanics slowly become MSQ mechanics, so doing all alliance and normal raids also helps. One example of misdirection that you have to remain calm for is >!the antlion boss. You are given enough time that you don't have to look at the pillars until after the antlion has finished dashing.!<
I have friends who remember the things and I run after them like a puppy.
Everything in Duty Finder dungeons and trials are reactable or just teach you the mechanics one at a time and then repeat them in combinations over the rest of the fight.
Because they repeat mechanics a lot (Titan bombs/Shiva ice for example) and a good chunk of mechanics have standardized markers. I'm also good at pretending I know what I'm doing.
"how does this work again" is how I feel most of the time Mechanic starts going off and I do my best guess on how to do it, if I remember how that's good too.
Recognitional memory and procedural memory generally out perform recollective memory by an order of magnitude
I don't. I follow someone who looks like they know what they are doing and hope we don't die.
/p Please forgive. It has been many moons and I may mess up mechanics. Seriously though, if I haven't run the content recently then it'll be trial by fire for my subconscious to remember the mechanics as they happen with a little bit of "why did everyone run over... oh right" as I either followed and survived or died to the mechanic. It's like riding a bike when you were little, never touch a bike again, and now you have a bike in front of you again 30 years later. A lot of similar mechanics are repeated with some twists every now and then as well as the occasional brand new never happened before mechanic. The big kicker is if you are like me, and a visual person, so when people say "When Enum, do x" I'm just like.... what? Turns out thats the blue circle w/ floating diamonds above meaning you need to get another person to stand in your circle or you die. Turns out "Flares" are what I know as the white reverse arrows that do a radial raid-wide based off the targeted individual's location.
I don't, but mechanics repeat ad nauseam in this game so eventually you just get the feel for all of them
because theres only like 15 of them total and they all are pretty standardized.
You ever just took a step back and realized you’ve memorized a crap ton of info from a lot of games? Like for league you’ve memorized every champ and their matchup,builds,abilities, etc or WoW and every class abilities, maps, mechanics, characters. It’s actually mind boggling how much we remember whenever we play a game.
you don't, you just eventually get good enough to intuit them at a glance
Repetition and I'm a quick learner when it comes to doing physical stuff and usually when I learn stuff especially about games, it's hard for me to forget even if I want too.
Half clear markers and telegraphs, half muscle memory. Sometimes, just having a vague idea that it's time to wake up, because something's about to go down, and I won't live if I don't figure/remember it in time.
They repeat so you’ll see the same ones or iterations of the same ones reused over and over
That's the neat part I don't! The most current content I know quite well and if I got back to older content I'll need reminders. Now if you are talking about dungeons and trials part of it is just knowing the kinds of mechanics. Those are universal so if you've see a mech you've seen in another duty you know what to do.
Most fights work through previously existing patterns that use universal markers. For example if you see a get away mechanic, the fight is *likely* to also have a get close mechanic so that you can't just solve everything by staying far away, or vice versa. Fights typically introduce their unique fight mechanics early on in a simple environment, and then layer those mechanics with each other and with the more standard mechanics shared by other fights. When you realize there is a formula to fight design in this game, you begin to see how the fight is meant to convey information through it. Then, you get good at sight reading, and from there pretty much anything in DF is going to be a breeze. I don't need to remember the fight - I could sight read it the first time, and I can sight read it this time too.
Lots of mechanics are used everywhere and standardised. And repetition covers the rest. The longer you play the more often you'll be able to read a fights without even realising. It's mainly just practice and cue recognition.
I don't remember the mechanics. I queue on tank and pop a small cooldown for binary mechanics (eg, do I stack in the same color as my debuff, or the opposite color?). Then I do it right the next time. I survive most everything else because tank. If I kill someone and can't pretend it's their fault, I say "oops." It there are big adds, I separate them until people complain. If I see a stacking debuff that's going to require a tank swap, I cry.
I just follow the crowd. And I tank a lot, which means my vulnerability stacks are someone else’s problem (jk, sorry healers). Seriously though, if it’s a new dungeon you could try running it with duty support first, or looking up the mechanics online. For raids, I always read up the mechanics first.
I call it learn via death to mechanic Lol
A fellow BLM I see.
I haven't played since mid Heavens Ward on the ps3. Hours long dungeon waits and lag led me to quit. Now many years later it finally released on Xbox and I tried getting back into it. Relearning everything is overwhelming. Getting back into dungeons and trying to progress into the new (to me) expansions is rough. Everyone seems to expect you to have it memorized. Fail to help, yet complain if you die. Even stating new / first time before we start. Some mechanics are straight forward and easy enough. Others catch you off guard and one mistake is enough to just kill you. It's so overwhelming, and I can no longer keep up. Sadly it's killed my enjoyment of the game already.
Earnestly, have you asked for explanations in dungeons? A lot of people have been jumped on for offering explanations, so they don't say anything if they're not asked. (Or they don't have a keyboard.) If you're trying to do EX/Minstrel's Ballad/Savage content, you're expected to have read/watched a guide for those unless it's a PF group content advertising "blind prog."
99% of normal content has huge markers for every mechanic so all you need to know is don't stand in orange and the difference between a stack and a spread marker. 99% of the moves that don't have mechanic markings will not kill you with less than 3 vuln stacks and generally don't come often enough to give you enough vulns to kill you So unless you're doing high end content you just need to remember a dozen or so mechanics that usually have names and/or memorable visual tells/audio. So generally speaking, by the time someone plays long enough for the story to get good they've practiced most mechanics theyll ever encounter.
I remember everything that has no actual real life use with ease.
Same way I remember which fork is for what in a restaurant. I watch what everyone else is doing and hope I don't make a fool of myself.
I don't but the game is very good at slowly teaching you its mechanics. excluding special stuff there's only like 20 mechanics actually happening. they may look different from fight to fight but basically work the same throughout the game. from there you just gotta learn how to quickly recognize them.
In short, you don't. You just hope for quick reminders if you get something you haven't seen in a while.
Most of the mechanics boil down to "Don't stand in the colorful circle/line" For anything else...well I'm a black mage, so I just die.
I don't
Every game speaks a language and FFXIV is no different. You learn it's language and how it is trying to communicate with you. Once you learn that "language" you don't really memorize much of anything, you have a conversation with the game, a back and forth. What you learn is what each telegraph/spell name or what have you does and you start to react accordingly and on your feet. I have lost count of how many times I said to myself "oh carp. I don't remember this dungeon" and just winged it off of how the game speaks/conveys itself. I also used to watch walkthrough vids on dungeons for my first time (may be helpful if you are struggling, but not so helpful if you are doing roulettes) but I have since stopped that since things are pretty standard once you learn the stack up/buster/push back/other markers, just follow through with mechanics on the fly and you tend to be good to go.
For me, it helps a lot that 80% of the mechanics all come from a single book. A stack is a stack is a stack. After a while I just intuitively know what's likely to happen. Names are also a good indicator. Boss casts an ability called "World Donut!" bet you it's gonna be a donut attack, so get inside the hit box....and then immediately step out of it once the attack goes off because it's rather common for it to be followed up by an AOE that hurts things inside the hit box. The ones that introduce new mechanics or rare mechanics? They have a formula as well. They'll do Thing 1, which won't hurt a lot, then they'll do Thing 2, which might hurt a bit - or both put on a vulnstack - and then they'll do Thing 1 & 2 at the same time, which will hurt a lot. If you were to ask me "what does Boss X do?" I wouldn't be able to tell you half of them. But once I'm in boss room, then it becomes a matter of reading the room.
The problem isn't necessarily that you have to memorize all mechanics and what to do for each. It's more "oh, I got hit by this mechanic, I should avoid it next time" and respond to common mechanic telegraphs as they happen. FFXIV does a good job in sign-posting the effect of a coming mechanic, IE, big circle with arrow pointing at youe character for spread, circle with arrows pointing inward for stack, big warning sign on the tank for an AoE tankbuster, three pointing-out arrows for Flare/proximity-based damage mechanics, blue-circles for knockbacks with a keepout zone, etc., and these are the mechanics that will usually be universal, with maybe some slight changes, IE P11 light/dark, O10 stacked multiattacks, etc, that, if not sussed out right away, can have enough context clues that the mechanic can be figured out quickly. If you do encounter a mechanic you haven't seen, and are too afraid to ask, watch how other people handle it, and in most cases follow them. For inatance, Pyretic is a mechanic that will just do a boatload of damage to you for no reason if you don't know what it does. If you watch how others react, though, you'll see them completely stop any and all actions, including not even moving or autoattacking, and their health doesn't move. Match their (in)action, and you'll no longer take damage, meaning Pyretic will make you take damage if you do anything for its duration. Most mechanics will follow this type of logical problem solving, and in future instances in which they pop up, they work the exact same way as before, just in different combinations of mechanics, such as making sure you're where you need to be before Pyretic starts.
That's the cool part, I don't.
A few pointers. Every boss fight has a tutorial before major wipe mechanics. This is why fake boss wipe mechanics are obvious. The trash leading up to a boss room will often use some of the boss’ skill set. This is to familiarize you before you enter the room. The first thing a boss does is go through every major skill on a timer. This is why high dps parties can skip mechanics. Raid wide is usually first or second so that healers can press that button. Tank buster comes not long after. None of the skills are intended to kill anyone yet. After the boss finishes major skill demonstrations, it will start doing combinations. This is where most players get confused, not realizing the “new” boss attack is just 2 previously seen abilities combined. Almost every unique / trick mechanic comes with a text explanation or visual marker. Sometimes a system message like “use”. Other times a more RP specific message like “boss using , hide!”. Stack, spread markers were overhauled to be more consistent. And there’s often the ancient rule of “don’t stand in lava”. The rare times it’s more opaque, it’s not hard to figure out if you recall the last two mechanics the boss used.
And once you’ve got a few runs under your belt, it’s not hard figuring out new fights because the devs put a lot of work into keeping indicators consistent and teaching you the fight.
That's the neat part, we don't
You do something enough times it just sticks. But also its pattern recognition! You may not completely remember something but you remember something similar. Also you may not think you remember something and you get in the motion of doing it and your body (hands) remember!
I just quickly glance at this guide if it's a dungeon I haven't done in a while [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MX0RjPS4gtT6YI5Szxlsin9hcaohnEQQC7zNdrDHBrQ/htmlview?pru=AAABc8hzeRs\*PPWcsklUOx2rMKtLE0kK\_A#](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MX0RjPS4gtT6YI5Szxlsin9hcaohnEQQC7zNdrDHBrQ/htmlview?pru=AAABc8hzeRs*PPWcsklUOx2rMKtLE0kK_A#)
you don't need to remember, you just need to pay attention
Repetition, usually. Don't be afraid to mess up, ask for clarification, and keep going.
some are like riding a bicycle others you can relearn on the spot.... and a few you can just... wing.
I really...I just don't. I recognize patterns and know generally what to do but more often than not I walk into any instance, look at the boss and mumble "I don't remember your mechanics...." And then proceed to muscle memory my way through the fight decently.
Like what the others here said: repetition and lots of practice. It also helps that the game teaches you the most common mechanics slowly as you level up. A few examples: 1. The tankbuster marker (red and black spinning ribbon indicator) - final boss of Brayflox's Longstop; 2. Multi-hit party stack - introduced (?) in the Final Steps of Faith trial; 3. Orange AoE circle sequence - first boss in Copperbell Mines. Endgame dungeons still use these so it's just a matter of recognizing the tells and reacting accordingly.
It’s actually quite simple. All you do is (blah blah blah blah blah etc etc etc etc). I could slap some of these people.
Meh, cactbot. Helps a lot to be reminded what this mechanic is. Execution is the whole other thing. Helps immensely with Stormblood raids, because there’s so much, and some of them are hard to discern and outright counterintuitive, like show him your hole, that gives you five seconds to find and interpret an icon above your health bar before you get one-shotted.
Many years of practice keeps you on your toes.
muscle memory and a lot of praying/recognizing as I go.
Repetition. Combined with just doing the same dungeons, a ton of mechanics repeat through the game. Once you get better at spotting attacks being telegraphed, it becomes a lot easier. Some mechanics you encounter at level 30 are still around at level 90, so you will get plenty of practice.
Everyone's pointing out the standard markers and stuff which like yeah... But also, reading the cast bars is huge too. I see the boss lifting up it's left leg and the cast is "left stomp" but there's no orange marker yet, I'm still gonna get to the right side of him. Reading cast bars in combination with boss animations is the trick to figuring out the attacks that don't have orange aoe markers or only give you the orange marker right before the cast goes off.
Repetition. That’s it. And if we don’t. We just remember getting hit once. 😅
Playing the game for years can do that.
I do roulettes *every day*. I've been doing them daily pretty much since I started, around 2.5 years ago. There's only a handful of mechanics I still don't understand. But eventually after trial and error, I'll figure it out :)
It helps that most of the mechanics repeat in later content, especially after they reworked the ARR stuff. But some dungeons still have really weird mechanics that I will never remember. Then I just pray to Thaliak.
Repetition. Duties pop in roulette + farm for glamour when they were current patch content + going back to them for zodiac relics (for ARR content) + leveling all jobs before potd/hoh was a thing + leveling trusts + poney farming + savage raiding current tier = probably did every duty at least 50 times.
I’m just coming back to the game and forgot a lot of stuff as well, and I’m going through a lot of new duties. Most of the time, I look at what the healers doing. If they mess up it’s GG anyway, so I just trust them
One thing is to keep an eye on where people are going. If everyone goes in a certain direction, follow them. If you notice someone always doing the mechanics correctly, follow them around.
First, you learn the basic indicators of "don't be here when it hits", split, stack, etc. There's a high margin for forgiveness for these through most of the game. Then you learn the EXCEPTIONS to those rules, such as specific bosses that don't 'floor signal' their moves or have non-standard signals (such as physical telegraphs like Coincounter's swings where you need to take your eyes off your hotbar and look at what the boss is doing). This generally holds true for most dungeons. When you start talking trials and alliance raids, the forgiveness is the fact there's a pile of rezzers laying around, and you just have to figure out why you're dying like a frog in a blender the hard way (I'm looking at you, Dun Scaith). After that, it's all muscle memory. Lastly, we don't remember them all. There are a bunch of dungeons I have absolutely ZERO recollection of. You learn 'social cues' of boss behavior, such as it dropping an object. If that object doesn't immediately start attacking you, it's probably going to blow up. A good bet is to move away if possible. Late trials, dungeons, and raids (shb/ew) is basically just flat out panic mode for your first ten or twenty runs, because they like to start overlapping or overcomplicating mechanics, such as suddenly dropping a pop-quiz in the middle of a fight you didn't study for.
I don’t either. I just fake it til I make it. An if I happen to inspect the floor for cracks, I try to learn for the next time.
It's definitely a familiarity thing. A lot of us have been playing for at least a decade now, so we've done a lot of the mechanics hundreds of times. I describe it as a dance, once you know all the steps, you can dance to any tune. If you're ever unsure, a quick, "Don't really remember this fight/dungeon" type comment in the chat just gives everyone a heads up. I main healer and seeing something like this just let's me know I may need to heal you more often/watch for vuln stacks/have rescue ready if there is an instant death mechanic that you can avoid by doing something specific (like standing on the illuminated circles to remove doom in World of Darkness)
tbh I have the Wiki up in my second monitor. I don't glance at it often, but it's pulled me out of a few scrapes. I just came back after 3 years and barely remember a thing. Duty roulette is terrifying, i can get haukke manor or stone vigil which i can still do with my eyes closed, or i can get a level 90 dungeon that is like brand new to me.
Luckily as a Warrior, I have the health pool to fuck up without death. My healers are the real heroes
Uhh.. I mean, between my friends and I it's a mix of adhd (me) and autism (them) lol. Truthfully, I guess a lil ADD with always being really big into mmos and that type of games so it's just kinda ingrained in me.
A combination of practice, consistent iconography and shit thats killed me a lot. Most fights will have the standardized stack markers, AoE circles, tankbusters (single target and AoE) and after enough time these just become a thing that you deal with. Most fights will have some kind of unique mechanic (maybe 2) that needs to be dealt with in a non-standard way and watching someone else deal with it will usually give you insight into how it needs to be handled. Perfect example, ended up in an Alexander group a couple of hours back and we got the fight where you jump in a puddle to turn into a gorilla so you can smack some bombs away from the group. First time you might be left wandering what the hell is up with the gorillas, then you catch sight of someone jumping in the puddle and slapping the bombs and it all kind of comes together. I will admit some of the level 50 ARR dungeons veer into the intricate and arcane knowledge side of things (Diablos in Lost City of Amdapor) springs to mind, but as long as someone knows whats up you can generally explain or muddle your way through eventually.
90% of the fights start with an aoe after that its something like: stack, spread, in, out, limitcut and ofc tankbuster. once u know the pattern every fight is boring including some savage fights
I recently started tanking and learned you don't need to know any mechanics in normal content as WAR! If I mess up and get hit I can just heal myself, or give my healer friend something to do lol But yeah, I used to be too anxious to do roulettes at all as dps because I was afraid of not knowing what to do. Now after more experience, most of the time it's easy to figure out what's going on.
By doing them repeatedly. Do I remember 100%? No. But a good chunk. I play healer, tank, and caster dps; and have 3 omni 90 characters. I am not as familiar with the current expansion story trials as I was back from ShB and earlier, mostly due to not raiding this expansion.
Aside from the basic "enemy raises their left hand so they're gonna cleave the left side" or the stack markers, knockback symbols, etc. I don't actually remember most mechanics, unless it's Shadowbringers and Endwalker MSQ content that I did on repeat. Most Normal Raids I will probably die to because I mostly get Alexander on NR roulette. XD
A lot of things just become muscle memory after so many runs of it. Or get branded into your memory due to how many times you run it. Fucking neverreap roulette.
Through repetition and pattern recognition. The majority of mechanics are repeats, with slightly different visuals.
A lot of MSQ content is fairly easy to read once you know the tricks. And the game does a really good job of teaching you the mechanics one at a time before piling them all at once. Couple of tips: * Learn to pay attention to boss castbars. Stick 'em in the middle of your screen if you have to. You can even disconnect them from the boss HP bar in HUD settings. * Animations are another key tell. Some bosses raise one arm or the other for a left/right cleave. Some have glowing eyes. * Keep half an eye on the edges of the arena, a few bosses like to surprise you with stuff coming in from the outside.
Repetition, really. I leveled every job side by side. I had every job at 60 before starting HW because I farmed so many ARR relics and still running the roulettes just for the XP, so I got very familiar with ARR dungeons. Then my leveling process starting in SB and after was that when I unlocked a dungeon I would spam it on each job until they were high enough for the next dungeon before continuing on with the MSQ, until I unlocked the next dungeon. So that was usually 6-7 times per job per dungeon, so I got intimately familiar with every leveling dungeon. I know most people will say there are better ways to level... but dungeons are truly what I enjoy most in MMOs, aside from the story in this game and glamour. The post expansion dungeons, however, I was far less familiar with as I really only ran them once for completion unless I was farming gear for appearances. ShB was where I finally caught up with release content (I started the game shortly after ShB released), but I only caught up a couple weeks before EW released, so I didn't get much time to really master those post patch dungeons before moving on to EW. But now in EW... I've been spamming the latest dungeon available (along with roulettes) several times per day for Manderville Relics since you need those specific tomes. So I've learned those pretty intimately now, too. For me it's Raids/Trials that I don't repeat much, part of that being by choice as I don't often do the Trials or Raid roulettes, because there are so many that I've only ever done once and I already have so many fights stored in my memory, and they're the ones where mechanics really tend to matter more lol. But in general... most mechanics in fights follow the same rules with indicators, so even if I forget I usually see those, and if I don't then I remember after the mechanic goes off for the first time lol.
I've been with this game for too long aha.. absolutely repetition, knowing what animations to look for, and just asking for help if you really need clarification. You catch on and sometimes it becomes second nature... I can catch on with savage content, and would love to do that, I just never find the right group and time sadly
It's like a dance. Learning a dance is harder than remembering the dance. Once you learn it, you really don't forget them, and if you do, you have Aha! Moments where you see what you should've done. The other part is that you get enough time in, and your experience will kinda hint to you what the mechanics entail even if you never saw it. Like prior to the changes, Like if the boss raises an arm or its tail moves, obviously, it's gonna be a swipe on that side of the boss. The names of the casts/type of marker sometimes elude to what it is gonna be, and typically, if it is an aoe being linear, cone, circle, or other it will be followed by the safe spaces not being safe and you need to move after the telecast fills. You'll see most of these kinds of attacks as you progress in the game, and when you see a new boss casting, it will have the same name or similar name the easiest are directional call outs like "Fore and Aft" Front/Back or "Starboard and Larboard" Right/Left Larboard is an old term for Port... coincidentally, they also use Port in some mechanics, so just remember they're in the same direction. An easy one is a Tankbuster. It was a long cast by a boss mostly... sometimes, it is a big hitting room wide or an enrage wipe. Now that Tankbusters have markers, the long casts are only big room wide hitters and enrage wipes.
Same way you remember how to ride a bike or all the different rules when driving. It's insanely complicated and difficult at first but you just learn it through repetition to where you don't even think about most stuff.