Am I genuinely too old for this game..?

[Flufficuss]

Not really a hardcore raider in FF14, as much as I enjoy them I only do the casual daily ones on the roulette, so not experienced with the raiding mindset all that much.

But I feel like I'm just not able to react to this game fast enough. The entire screen lights up with 4-5 different mechanics at once on hard, and by the time I've processed the 5 of them and can start moving to react, they're going off and I die. Or, more accurately, I'm hitting my team with twenty "you were supposed to stack stupid" mechanics. And then my corpse sits there hitting them with more and more and costing us the run, and it feels so incredibly, horridly bad. My whole team is punished because I'm a braindead deadweight, and that's the biggest issue by far.

I can solo normal without issue, and normal online isn't much trouble either, so there's no challenge and no fun left there. But moving up to hard mode, and my last 5 or so runs I've just been absolute garbage, genuinely feels like I hold all my teams back. I just can't process so many mechanics so damn quickly, and I'm on 1-2 hearts by the second or third boss at most.

I had similar issues with the dragon boss on normal solo. Her attacks came out too fast for me to process them fully, or my bunny just wasn't fast enough to move into the one or two safe spots she allotted once I had, particularly after her charge off screen phase, when she returned my poor bun was just too slow to react in time to the following random mechanic. Took me 11 tries to beat her on normal solo.

Which leads me to make this thread. I genuinely feel like my brain doesn't move fast enough to process all 5-6 mechanics of every attack from every boss in time. Am I just unable to play this game due to lacking reaction speed/brainpower..? Or did I miss something here?

[hisv]

The dragon boss is disgusting, really the worst part of the game imo.

[DaBuYuu]

The jump in difficulty from normal to hard is pretty harsh. You pretty much have to stick with a group of people willing to learn how your group going to do particular mechanics.

[Toltage]

Personally I feel like it's just combining the aspects of learning a roguelike's mechanics/rules and learning raid boss patterns. Yeah you'll probably bash your head against boss patterns for a while because they're pretty quick, but there's always an intended way to dodge the mechanics. You (and others) will have to practice to land them smoothly, assuming you can't cheese it with abilities or loot and haven't ruined your movespeed. Plus you'll have to be on top of any defensive invuls you have to dodge things you miss.

All that being said, Solo Normal dragon definitely kicks my ass still. Work in progress on my part and I'm not even going to reattempt Solo Hard yet.

[patron saint of gaslighting]

yea it's normal. youre not "supposed" to beat it easily, you generally have to practice it over and over. it's a common raiding idea that casuals tend to not be exposed to, but rest assured it's supposed to be like that. my suggestion is to state in your lobby description that youre learning or it's just for practice, or join a lobby that has this to some effect. as long as youre on the same page, most players will not actually mind if you guys wipe over and over. if they leave, it's most likely because they have to go so dont take it personally if that happens.

*it may seem sort of "impossible" to react to all the mechanics fast enough at first, but thats just how the experience goes. the first time you see a difficult unfamiliar pattern, it takes over 100% of your brain to process and it resolves before you can process it (and then you get hit), but with enough practice it will start to take less than 100% of your brain to process and you can eventually beat the mechanic before it resolves.

one thing seasoned raiders tend to do is preposition themselves for the next mechanic by being in a position where regardless of any randomness in the next mechanic, theyre in a spot where the travel distance to every possible mechanic solving location is minimized, before the mechanic even shows up (because what the next mechanic is going to be tends to be predictable, e.g. bosses tend to do the same mechanics in the same order with the same timing every run you see them in). this maximizes the time they have to react to it, giving them an edge that you might not be able to immediately identify as a newer raider.

[Elmdor]

I'm in the same boat as you. Normal is too easy, but hard is too much of a difficulty jump. I'm starting to beat hard modes now, but it's a decent amount of attempts before I learn them well enough.

I don't really think it's an age thing though. As others have said it's really more of a experience issue. You just need to practice and practice.

Also memorization is the biggest limitation on someone completing it in my opinion. If you can memorize all the fights and phases you can pre-position to give yourself the best chance to do the next mechanic. If you can't then you probably aren't going to be able to win no matter how much you practice.

Lastly if you're learning the fights on single player you can pause the game when a new phase starts to try to decipher what the solution to the mechanic is. Very helpful for Renalie.

[skm4tic]

If you haven't done anything that remotely requires looking at the screen in FFXIV, of course you're going to find Hard hard. Generally, if you're progging, and you're not one of those "midcore" raiders that take the entire patch to (not even) clear the tier, you're going to be doing a lot of vod review, in order to make sense of mechanics. You're not intended to one shot the mechanics, but they're predictable, and you can memorize the general patterns over repetitions. You don't necessarily need to vod review, but you'll need to know what the mechanics are in the fights if you want successful runs.

[The Grand Mugwump]

I'm an old raider, and I felt slow at first too, but that's really just the rose tinted goggles. "Oh, I used to be so good, and now I suck." Yeah, but how much work did you put in to be that good in the past? Isn't it reasonable to have to put some of that work back in to be good again?

I've gotten to where this game isn't too hard for me anymore, but it took a lot of work and just failing repeatedly until I figured out wtf the game wanted me to do to dodge that mechanic.

[Ravenwild]

I'm at a point where I find normal easy to clear but still enjoyable, and hard is fun enough to try but I fail most of the time (cleared a run yesterday for the first time but was carried hard by one of the other players).

I'm gonna compare it to another co-op game that I put hundreds of hours into (Vermintide 2) to illustrate a couple of issues here. In vermintide, making the jump from champion difficulty to legend is huge, I also got to a point where champion was easy but legend was too hard. The thing is that game has character progression so it doesn't feel pointless to keep replaying the difficulty you've already cleared because you're still getting xp and gear. Also when I wanted to try learning legend I could play solo with bots to avoid bothering other players online with my icompetence, eventually I got good enough to be the one carrying legend runs and moved on to getting wrecked at cataclysm instead.

Here, even though I still find normal enjoyable, it feels lika a waste of time to keep playing it instead of trying to learn hard (I still have a couple of equipment sets that I could unlock playing normal, but don't really care). And while I can practice hard solo, it's pretty much a different game with 3 other people on screen. Also pretty annoying that when trying to learn a boss, you die and then have to restart and go through like 7 mid bosses before getting to try again.

[Flufficuss]

General summary of what I picked up: That's how raiding goes, failure isn't the be all end all, and it's way more memorization than it is reacting to all those mechanics happening at once on the spot. Improving bit by bit and keeping at it more than anything else.

Thanks y'all. I looked at the cluster of shiny lights on the screen and my brain just utterly died immediately in terror, good to know there's another focus than on the spot reacting. And it's neat to know in case I decide I actually want to PUG prog things in the new FF14 expansion too. I'm way too young to ever feel too old for anything

[Jetm]

Youre not too old, youre simply going about it the wrong way.

Each mechanic is a unique puzzle with one or two expected solutions. Dont try to rationalize every submechanic happening during and attack. Learn the general features to indicate "this specific puzzle is happening", work out the solution, then apply it. Maybe record you trying it to see what happens and think to yourself "where is safe?"

Mechanics become way easier if you can simplify it down, such as one of the frog's color matching mechanics really just being "match color > stack center > repeat" or one of the crows teleport attacks effectively being "make a rectangle with your team's teleport lines"

You wont beat these if you just try to react. Hard, and especially Lunar need preplanning and understanding to reliably pass.

[JohnTravoltage]

Personally I like this kind of difficulty because it feels like there is actually a serious challenge. So many coop games nowadays just don't push back enough, and I really miss that in a lot of games.

I think a big thing is just the mentality around it, or people being too scared to fail. This game seems to have one of the nicest communities around it, so I wouldn't feel bad about struggling in some hard modes and feeling like a let down. everyone was there at some point learning the mechanics.

[Macavity Omega]

There needs to be a practice mode, like Touhou so you can work out the patterns of individual fights.

[Ace]

Originally posted by Flufficuss:

Not really a hardcore raider in FF14, as much as I enjoy them I only do the casual daily ones on the roulette, so not experienced with the raiding mindset all that much.

But I feel like I'm just not able to react to this game fast enough. The entire screen lights up with 4-5 different mechanics at once on hard, and by the time I've processed the 5 of them and can start moving to react, they're going off and I die. Or, more accurately, I'm hitting my team with twenty "you were supposed to stack stupid" mechanics. And then my corpse sits there hitting them with more and more and costing us the run, and it feels so incredibly, horridly bad. My whole team is punished because I'm a braindead deadweight, and that's the biggest issue by far.

I can solo normal without issue, and normal online isn't much trouble either, so there's no challenge and no fun left there. But moving up to hard mode, and my last 5 or so runs I've just been absolute garbage, genuinely feels like I hold all my teams back. I just can't process so many mechanics so damn quickly, and I'm on 1-2 hearts by the second or third boss at most.

I had similar issues with the dragon boss on normal solo. Her attacks came out too fast for me to process them fully, or my bunny just wasn't fast enough to move into the one or two safe spots she allotted once I had, particularly after her charge off screen phase, when she returned my poor bun was just too slow to react in time to the following random mechanic. Took me 11 tries to beat her on normal solo.

Which leads me to make this thread. I genuinely feel like my brain doesn't move fast enough to process all 5-6 mechanics of every attack from every boss in time. Am I just unable to play this game due to lacking reaction speed/brainpower..? Or did I miss something here?

See, people come in expecting a "raid boss" game, and it KIND of is....but it's mostly just a bullet hell.

I'm 30 and I don't find it too fast, but I'm also experienced with competitive fighting games where we're talking about things happening in less than a second and having to react and think ahead of such actions....but, compared to other bullet hell games, this game is fairly forgiving with attacks and patterns because every single character can become invincible at any time. Some bosses do disable this, but those attacks tend to be extra forgiving to compensate.

Hard mode (and Lunar mode beyond it) are meant to be hard. If normal is too easy and there's no fun for you there, then yeah, it's time to move up to hard, but you shouldn't expect to clear it on your first 5, 10, maybe even 20 tries. Bullet hells are games of memorization, timing, and learning very particular patterns because the patterns are set. They come out in random orders, but the patterns themselves are set.

Another thing to remember is that most characters, in some form or another, can also change their movement speeds via a skill. Sniper for example has a dash with her invincibility, and Assassin can turn invisible which makes them dodge everything until they next attack.

The only real "Final fantasy 14" aspect to this game is the idea of Global-cooldowns. That's about it. FF14 gives you time to walk from point A to point C to point B while the boss sits around summoning a meteor or whatever. It's very slow paced, and if you're used to playing games like that this game will eat you up and spit you out.

But, no matter your age, you can learn and do well. It'll just take longer if you're coming at it from the angle of "MMO Raid boss" and less if you're looking at it like a Danmaku/Bullet Hell/Touhou game.

You don't get to be like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8kGxcBdXYs because you "reacted" fast enough. You get there because you spend 200 hours learning when, where, and how to dodge every single attack after dying to it thousands of times, memorizing little tells and learning what is important to dodge and what is there to throw you off, because some of the attacks onscreen ARE there just to fake you out.

And in those games, you get a VERY limited number of bombs (Which are essentially your escape options) and in some of them the bosses can REQUIRE you to use that limited resource with some of their attacks, and that means you're on a DPS timer of sorts. Here in R&S, your invincibility usually comes with a way to quickly reset it, either via items or with gems, or even just as a core part of the characters kit.

It's just a matter of how much you really want to be good at the game. There's no shame in saying "Hey, normal was fun and that's all I'm here for." But if losing a handful of times is enough to make you question yourself, that might be the right answer for you.

But if you're strictly wanting to know if the game requires you to have the reactions of a 15 year old on adderall, no, no it does not. It doesn't even have the required reaction speed of most games of it's own genre.

Lastly: Don't beat yourself up so much. You're not dead-weight because you died on hard mode in a bullet hell game. Trust me, anyone who has played a game with actual difficulty to it will tell you that there's no shame in losing. Anyone who blames you for their death is just saltier than the dead sea, and should be ignored and avoided. They're mad at their own inabilities and are just taking it out on you.

At the end of the day, take your time, practice against the bosses you struggle with the most, and you'll be at Lunar before you know it.

[PewPew]

If they add practice mode where you can choose which boss to fight, I'm sure everyone will be able to beat the game on higher difficulty at some point in their life. But right now, unless you are very skilled it's impossible.

An ultimate fight for example in ffxiv lasts 20 min ish if you win. A run in this game lasts an hour (not counting in game time since that seems to pause? at certain spots). You ain't going to be 100% focus 100% of the time for that long.

Also rng being a thing means unless you are consistently getting the same items every run on the same character, your rotations and the way you play the game will vary every run. So there's another layer of memorization (muscle memory) that comes into play every run.

So anyways tldr, don't sweat it, the game is hard. The difficulty spike is huge, but it's not impossible to clear them all. But clearing them all in 1 run is, and multiplayer is where the real difficulty is, so don't expect clearing that anytime soon lol.

[Mizstik]

I can tell you I rely far more on memory than on reflexes in this game. Once you actually remember what's gonna happen next (instead of waiting to see it), it gets a lot easier. Well over half of patterns are exactly the same time/place regardless of player positions.

Also, I found that hosting my own game greatly increases my success rate. I don't know if it has to do with lag or what but that has been the case.