FFXIV: Hall of the Novice is still bad

[@WeskAlber]

Sorry I no release video often. Life happens. And also FRU happened.

[@markup6394]

Doesnt matter how often you upload, if its a Wesk Alber vidoe, it gets clicked XD

[@seriodenoyarohi7403]

Good Luck with your FRU-Prog!

[@BazzFreeman]

No problem. An A Niddhogg videos are an auto-click.

[@herebejamz]

Sowwy, I FRU up.

[@f_m_fferrera5483]

P5 is real

[@Xorua]

My primary gripe with the new tactical training is that at no point do you have to dodge/resolve mechanics while also fighting a boss. It just seems like a very weird choice to not lean into “Okay, now do all of that while smacking the enemy” as a final exam that can teach good habits for things like spacing and when to greed vs when to play it safe.

[@Scerttle]

For real. The new addition isn't even a half measure. It's half of a half measure.

[@slimfastsubaru2043]

Its prepping you for ultimate xD

[@HolyAarom]

quarter measure

[@Scerttle]

@@HolyAarom Quarter of a quarter measure!

[@NotRealAkira]

It's weird to me that they didn't put in a tutorial for things like Limit Break. I've seen tons of players not even put it on their bar because it doesn’t get added to their bar for them, or they think it's a personal resource, etc.

[@ashensage7968]

The amount of sprout tanks spamming LB1 on cooldown in the starter dungeons prove that people don't read popups XD

[@NotRealAkira]

@ashensage7968 Honestly I'm not any better, I just didn't have it in my hotbar until level 50 because I didn't know it existed until I saw someone use it and asked them what it was Guess it's what happens when you're conditioned to just close pop-ups due to how spammy they are on the net

[@notGeist]

@@ashensage7968 How do you manage to get a satasha run so long that you get multiple LBs?

[@liontamer4132]

i mean, i now know the difference between normal tank busters and cleaving tank busters now due to the new hall of the novice stuff so thats a plus anyway

[@vincentbeton]

I wish the new stuff would start with an NPC admitting "We came to find out that most of our lessons and recommendations don't get applied much in practical combat and everyone is doing great. So we tried thinking of something more useful to tell you this time"

[@BlackLight886]

Wesk, Square should be paying you since your videos are the real tutorial for this game. Your videos are the real Hall of the Noice and - as a Mentor - I will keep recommending sprouts watch your videos as long as you make them.

[@Ed-1749]

FIVE MORE YEARS OF CURE SPAM LETS GOOOO Also damn they really did keep the "if your tank is griefing and doing single target against 3 enemies this is how you dont draw aggro" lesson.

[@mosselyn5081]

Agree with you 100% about the focus target advice being bad, but there is one more example of when I, at least, focus target in a pack: Beeees (and bee-like things). Anything with Final Sting. Unless, of course, the dps is just so high that everything gets obliterated before it can go off. Happy to see a video from you as I was just wondering this morning if you were talking a break. 🙂

[@WeskAlber]

Modern DPS levels and power creep, Final Sting is almost never a thing anymore

[@thedefenderofeorzea3473]

@@WeskAlber there is also the final pull in Vanaspati where once one of the enemies die, it will spawn in the rest of the pull which makes it optimal to single target until one of the enemies die before going full AOE mode, but also that's just to be optimal, your only punishment for not doing this is having to wait a bit longer to kill the other enemies that being said just AOEing the enemies down is just the correct option 99.9% of the time meaning it would legit be a better teaching mechanism to have HoN flat never recognize the idea of having to single out enemies and to just let players find out themselves in the like dozen instances in the game where its false, especially since the player base will generally give a heads up about these things with markers or in chat

[@WeskAlber]

@@thedefenderofeorzea3473 Oh right! Yeah I usually am the only one focus targeting in Vanaspati... But yeah that's kinda my point. I have to pluck very VERY specific examples to show their advice being put into action. Exceptions proving the rule in this case.

[@SeshmasterSam]

The amount of times, especially during the mogtome event, where the tank would quickly be vaporised by the Divine Vespas in Neverreap is immeasurable.

[@etchyasketch2851]

I think my big complaint is that it doesnt show tge player how to watch for Boss Anination Tells. Things like Nidhoggs Hot Wings, or raising an arm for a half room cleaves. Non floor marker tells, and the like.

[@hunkynchunky]

I feel like this is reminiscent to real life job training where they give you the foundation and you have to learn the rest on the job. They cannot list off every single different example you're going to run into. A lot of your nitpicks are for different scenarios in different dungeons, and they can't give every single example. It's also up to the player to play the game and learn as well. Is the new hall of the novice great? Far from it, but I definitely wouldn't call it terrible or bad.

[@WeskAlber]

@@hunkynchunky No my nitpicks are the exact opposite. Saying the general way to handle things is wrong. I only go into specifics to show how wrong the advice is. If anything the advice is too specific instead of general

[@akiriith]

I dont think its useless... sprout in EW here, being told that there are Different Kinds Of Towers where the mechanic was the same but they looked different was good, and also I liked that they mixed up the mechanics and had us do them all at once in the end, but I do agree this is reeeeally not good training for how the multiplayer content actually works in this gams.

[@MaskedHeroLucky]

A tutorial on attacks that aren’t telegraphed by an aoe marker would be nice. I know stuff like glower and the swing moves are telegraphed now, but there’s still a few moves where you need to pay attention to what the boss is doing.

[@Boxkar24]

I'm just saying this loosely, as I agree with most of the video Wesk, but WoW tried that idea of "you must complete this training thing before you can que for (heroic) dungeons" in Warlords of Draenor and it went over terribly. Some players just aren't very good, and most of them are already painfully aware. Creating that barrier to entry usually just means you turn them away altogether. I get that for some people having a group that just can't get right sucks. The 3rd boss of the 2nd Endwalker tier on normal difficulty (the tree lady) wrecked the first group I tried it with till we ran outta time. Had to requeue to get it killed to see the story. I've had many things like that happen but that, to me, is just part of the mmo experience. It's just something you gotta deal with from time to time.

[@QuiteSpiffing]

The first instance of the homing AoE would be Cloud of Darkness in the Crystal Tower series. What makes it even worse is that one ticks really fast as well, so this slow tutorial version is just flat out bad.

[@SinHurr]

I remember my very first stack marker. It was on me, and I ran away from the group because I thought the "giant glowing sign" meant I was going to get hit with something big and I should _not_ cleave it to my team. Lol

[@ridoranalighthouse]

there's a chasing aoe in world of darkness, but only on like three people of 24, and feels like it doesn't always happen regardless? not sure, but it's been months since i had it hahah

[@WeskAlber]

Oh right Feint Particle Beam.

[@lucalopez9604]

I have gotten it ONCE in the thousands of hours I have played this game. is like 1/8 chances once. that one time really caught me by surprise how long it lasted LOL

[@TheVivi13]

It's only one person in the raid and it happens every single time as the first mechanic

[@ridoranalighthouse]

@@TheVivi13 ah, thanks for the correction! i haven't had the beam target me in so long i entirely forgot how it worked lmao

[@LarkyLuna]

I agree with all the proposed changes except for openers Since jobs change around to much between patches and expansions, it would be a huge overhead or would get outdated fast Maybe a damage check that forced you to use most of your buttons to pass? With rhe NPC yelling that you have more power than you are using?

[@WeskAlber]

I didn't say "teach one specific level cap opener." I said "maybe teaching the idea of openers." Which is very, very easy to do.

[@LarkyLuna]

@WeskAlber oh, I didn't interpret it that way, but yeah, that's much better

[@runasth]

All of this tells me that SE insists on pushing back on the standards set by the community. They apparently do not like wall to wall pulls, nor having the tank keep aoe'ing once they grabbed all the mobs. So long as the devs keep fighting with their own community, we're gonna keep having these problems.

[@WeskAlber]

@@runasth as I show in the video though, most of the advice is still wrong in single pulls. Most trash packs are 3 mobs minimum. Single pull mobs you focus down will die before they summon allies or are just one squishy mob. Even following their own assumed intentions the advice is still wrong

[@runasth]

@@WeskAlber Yup. If anything, this'll only cause more people to get yelled at by others, but it'll be even worse because they can now say: "But I did the Hall of the Novice! And it told me to do things like this!" It's yet another lose-lose situation. Sadly, SE might be too deep into their own design philosophy to change anything at this point.

[@iPlayOnSpica]

@@WeskAlber Imagine they read your feedback and change potencies on all jobs so AOEs are a damage loss even through 3 enemies and are only a gain at 4+ targets (i.e. PCT, WAR)

[@kita6502]

We need to teach players how gcds and ogcds work vs anything. Learning that alone when i first started improved my gameplay by 1000%

[@Someone_3lse]

An opener tutorial is not necessary and honestly would be bad for casual players. Openers are more for optimization than casual play. What we need is for job quests to focus more on telling players to use their whole toolkit. Encourage them to press all their buttons. Focus on the fact that certain abilities make other abilities do more damage. Teach them how one button activates another. We don’t need something that focuses on optimizing damage. Players will and have done the optimizing without the game telling them to. Just the basics of using every button. If people just press buttons duties would go a lot faster. Just put the tooltips into the job quests. Also would be a good idea that at the end of each expansions job/role quests it reminds you to read your tooltips. And since it was mentioned cure 1 is probably never going to be addressed in game. As bad as it is free cure is intended. The game will never tell players not to use it. It falls under the same thing as openers imo. Not using cure 1 is an optimization that players have discovered. Same as openers and burst phases. Only way it gets addressed is by SE making a change to cure 1. They either have it upgrade to cure 2 (I don’t think this is likely), remove free cure entirely (I see no point to this. Might as well just upgrade it at that point) or they change free cure so that it is an actual viable option.

[@kita6502]

I think openers are fine for casual players to learn. They dont have to do it perfectly but I feel like they should at least have an idea on what their class is about. In fact learning openers is literally how i learned the game. When players arent pushed a little bit, the harder content becomes way too daunting because they dont even know the basics of what their class is. Like with dancer you can give someone the idea that opening standard step and technical step is a good idea. There are different kinds of casuals. Casuals who want to learn and casuals who dont want to learn. Casuals who want to learn have barely any outlet. When i was first learning tank i remember just being told to aoe and everything is fine back when aoe didnt generate all the aggro so i can run through. I would lose aggro and not know why. People would run ahead i wouldnt know how to grab aggro back and no one would tell me about the ranged attack even. Nor anything about the aggro list.

[@Castersvarog]

Plus, rotations and openers are changing constantly across the expansions, meaning more time and a energy needs to be spent on changing the rotation tutorial times almost 20 for every job. Add in the possibility that the devs and players make differing rotations, and you’d have a time sink of a system

[@toychristopher]

@@Someone_3lse I agree. Maybe a line that hints at their existence but I don't think we need to waste a dev's time constantly updating openers in a tutorial that's meant to give you the very basics of gameplay. A lot of people seem to just want new players to download a savage raiders brain into their own. Most people can't absorb that much information at once.

[@WeskAlber]

@@toychristopher I mean at no point do I suggest having anything that needs to be constantly updated. Openers is a general concept. Specifically even say in the video"worry about individual jobs later"

[@thehearts9753]

I don't fully agree with the idea that in dawntrail you ignore the big guy enemies. They will likely die last but if they are positioned well in the pool of enemies, targeting them first is good. I've had it where they even die mid pull rather than be the last thing to die. But I do agree with 99% of what youre saying In the video.

[@SeshmasterSam]

The reason they're dying first is because AoEs centred on them usually aren't hitting as many other enemies due to the size of their hitbox. So it's a combination of more damage going into the bigger enemy, but also less attacks actually hitting the surrounding ones, therefore less damage going into them.

[@Bacunater]

In Alzadaal's Legacy, if the Ramparts are focused down, fewer groups of adds get added into the mix. It can be the difference in adding two or three more packs than needed if people AoE like normal. It's only one example in a multitude of others, but still worth mentioning imo. A kind of funny nitpick, despite this update being the one that added Tactical Training and instant cast Esuna, the NPC Conjurer still has to cast it.

[@Alex-tx7ih]

I'd LOVE the Duty Finder for a Hall of the Intermediate. That or a Mario Maker like setup for players to make the tutorials.

[@ashensage7968]

I think they especially need a tanking specific training level with basics about mitigation, boss positions, trash pulls, tank stance, enmity list, and co-tanking. Especially, especially, co tanking. The amount of sprouts that just grab aggro and spin bosses cause they think they have to be main tank, then proceed to cleave the party or die constantly only to rez and provoke on cd to be mt is really silly. I know there's probably guides, and tooltips but people don't read. Have them learn this pre-hard modes in arr. So before Thornmarch. They could have even done it naturally in a solo duty or something, but having a tutorial instance would be so good for helping new tanks not like... But then again there's also gnb/drk you can grab with no tanking experience too.

[@acehealer4212]

Good stuff. I hope they do make better tutorials going forward.

[@cordrac]

my favorite part of the hall of the novice tactics is the concept that different roles handle things differently, and then whether or not you play healer, the mechs end with an invisible medica instead of even the conjurer npc doing anything. Even in training mode healers are useless (except for yoshi p's favorite move, esuna)

[@lorgrenbenirus]

Yeah, do not agree at all. For starters FF14 is literally only game from multitude other MMO's I've played over few decades and absolutely none of them has anything like this feature. That's already a big bonus. Besides that, you assume too much from basic training what this feature aims to provide. At no point ever was the goal of this feature to teach to players all the boss tactics out there. It provides a solid foundation to a totally new player, introduces core mechanics, how to recognize them and what are the core actions to do to survive them. Specifics themselves come with gameplay and are learned while playing the game. Also are learned from more experienced players in their Free Companies who can teach the new ones about things, tell how to deal with some action in specific fight. All of that comes from specific experience itself and provides the final lesson. Expecting a novice hall to teach everything is like lazy man's dream - let others do the work so that I can avoid it, despite the fact that I have the experience and knowledge I could provide. You are also looking at Novice Hall with a view of an experienced player and that's a total oversight. It is meant for someone who is completely new to the game and knows nothing, knows not what to expect but wants to learn and that it does very well. After the lessons there new player can function considerably better in all the situations he or she will encounter for the appointed level and more complex mechanics will be learned as player unlocks and advances higher level content. As it is intended. Thus no, it isn't bad by any measure, it's quite the opposite. Can more be added to it, say so-called "expert tactics"? Sure. Why not suggest this to developers then, provide specific examples what to add and what to explain and, hopefully, see the Novice Hall get updated even further, with newer information? But it being bad? Sorry, absolutely incorrect. It provides very good basics to someone who is completely new to the game, to any and all mechanics and allows these players to encounter new things with better understanding and confidence. Yes, they will make mistakes at first anyway, like everyone does with new things, but they will make way less mistakes with Novice Hall lessons behind them and will learn things faster as well. Or in other words, as is intended with this feature.

[@GarnetDust24]

Love the no nonsense title! Never change wesk 🤣

[@lucestrasz2312]

Cloud of Darkness has a homing AoE, usually seen early in the fight. Granted, I only see it once per run and it's so easy to miss if you aren't the one targeted...

[@Cywion]

Single target priotisation used to be a thing in ARR when enmity management was important and swapping to tank stance reduced your damage, you also couldn't just AoE spam because TP would drain out fast. Some tanks would even mark enemies in kill order so you could focus one down at a time. I cannot remember too much about Heavensward, but i'm going to assume that this was still somewhat the case when Hall of the Novice released (3.2). That being said, Heavensward is almost 10 years old now and they should maybe update Hall of the Novice to more modern design...

[@WeskAlber]

@@Cywion I played in ARR. I can assure you, we spammed AOE back then too.

[@VGPorage]

And even if there are a few places where it theoretically could be beneficial to focus target people are still not gonna do it since it's old optional content and people no longer remembers how the mechanics in those works so they are still just gonna grug through it and just react to things as it happens.

[@kumoko3728]

this new hall is cool and everything but where my savage difficulty version of it?

[@tazersmurf4689]

The 1st chasing aoe is in WoD Cloud of Darkness uses one. As these exams are meant to show you things you'll run into up to the end of HW. Oh yeah the original training guides haven't changed for teaching bad habits. I understand that they want to teach the absolute basics, but any one doing them who know to do more than just that will fail these hard. especially when smn still had shadow flare. I also don't like how on the dps they used to teach people to go and grab any adds as a dps. the only time I've ever been fine with that advice is for the bees that spawn during the 1st boss of Quarn. I'd rather have a dps to die to final sting than the tank or healer.

[@scullzomben]

Consider as well that Yoshida made the comment that he "Would be very interested in watching high level streamers attempt the new hall of the novice". WHY? For a high level player these things were so rudimentary and boring. How could he possibly want to watch someone skilled at the game do it?

[@ProfessM]

Good step forward. But it better not take forever to get to the next step cause I've seen toddlers at sea walk faster then this teaching.

[@laerwen]

And so what if that time is taken? Is there a rush? Honest question.

[@regnimar]

How can people understand healers can and have to dps if the example healer npcs are basically a traffic cone that sits there waiting for the tank to receive damage

[@alexm-t9d]

Perhaps this feature shouldn't be optional (I believe it still is?). Edit: Ah I see you make the same point lol. Good going, keep it up

[@shanehunt3019]

Openers as a required lesson isn't something that needs to be covered. That's very much a natural skill expression you'll stumble on if you care about it. Remember, most people DO NOT interact with high level content. That's a minority in the community.

[@WeskAlber]

I never said anything about high end content so

[@medivh1035]

17:15 No, you are very wrong. That will kill the game. Warcraft actually did it. It was a disaster. Blizzard implemented proving ground during mist of pandaria. You got to pass that with silver rating to participate in heroic dungeon finder. What happened was people just quit instead of pushing their buttons harder. The participation rate dropped So Low, The dev team received an ultimatum from the higher management, and that feature was cancelled and never returned.

[@WeskAlber]

The fact that none of you see the error in your own logic kinda makes me believe you're one of the people who couldn't press buttons.

[@LightbladeRiulo]

Too bad I cant benefit from this as all my jobs are at least above level 61.

[@jasonlove5811]

Yeah. Needs something more for tanks ans healer. Was lvling bard and the tank was provoke then single target the mobs. I caught a lot of strays hits and arms length got a work out..try asking the paladin if they wanted a tip but the game is full of introverts like me and said nothing...... brings in the whole pain of mentor roulette with that.

[@markup6394]

I think there was one instance where you had to overlap AOEs because of limited room... but yeah, its annoying to do that first boss in current Praetorium and see everyone, sometimes even tanks, run for their lifes, hugging the wall... Question, am I banned for preferring X? I dont use it or the alternative (I have a life :P ) but I would prefer X if I did...

[@arknightsboi2050]

I… actually genuinely hate when people suggest hall of the novice or any other tutorial adjacent device is made mandatory. While I agree the actively discouraging dpsing on healer and actively discouraging aoe on dps is VERY bad. The rest is fine for casual content. I firmly believe that making this mandatory even if it was perfect would be kinda irrelevant and dumb. First you would lose players. Not just the lazy ones who would bash their way through but also the ones who want to try high end content and can but hate MSQ and are now being forced to do even more mind numbing content. The second reason…. Its a multiplayer game. Players SHOULD be willing to teach and help at least to some degree. There is already so little talking in duty already and the few times I can help in things its nice. Its encourages players to talk and chat together. So while I think hall of the novice probably does need some improvement like you listed it should never be mandatory…. Well maybe if someone story/job skips but only in that case. Also small side note. I think its the worst idea ever to suggest SE make individual job tutorials. The jobs change each expac and while some largely remain the same like RDM at its core some get reworked far too often. Its too many resources and leaves too much room for players to complain because SE taught the job incorrectly.

[@WeskAlber]

I didn't suggest the job tutorials, its a common ask

[@medivh1035]

Sounds like you don't know about this. Warcraft did something like that with proving ground during the mist of pandaria. You had to pass it with silver rating to join heroic dungeons. It was an attempt to improve the player base's skill level, and it was a disaster. A ton of people can't even get a bronze rating, and they quit instead of trying to push their buttons harder. It was so disastrous that the dev team received an ultimatum from upper management.. And that feature never returned.

[@Sonnabend00]

Proving grounds was recycled content and badly tuned for every class. It failed on every level because Blizzard could not be bothered

[@Sonnabend00]

..to tune it properly for every class, was bugged to hell and like virtually all of WOD was a colossal failure on every level. To use Blizzards own script....they just can't.stop.failing.

[@arknightsboi2050]

@@WeskAlber I wasnt meaning to imply you specifically wanted it if it came off that way. But I know its been brought up multiple times before. The best I could ever seen is SE attempting to teach what a rotation is but even that is wonky based on jobs

[@PhoenicisEstuans]

I think part of the issue with healers is phrasing. Your primary role is ironically not healer. Your primary role is "keep the party alive" and those are very different

[@WeskAlber]

@@PhoenicisEstuans like I say in the video the design is as they say. They want you to only need to heal. Yet Holy exists and continues to exist and is worthless for most solo stuff

[@SunnyDove]

Why do you like blue sky Wesk? Genuinely curious. I don’t use Facebook X or any of them really. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard endorse it

[@WeskAlber]

it's not twitter

[@toychristopher]

I don't think I've ever run into a healer that refuses to do damage for years now, why do so many still whine and complain about this? More often I find healers now who refuse to heal likely following advice that healers need to do damage and never cast a gcd heal. Granted this is mainly cohealers but still... it's annoying.

[@kumoko3728]

I run into them a lot Especially when i do my leveling roulette and get aurum vale..........

[@kita6502]

I run into them almost every run healers just spamming cure and medica nothing else

[@WeskAlber]

@@toychristopher did you just ignore the clip I used in the video of a healer doing exactly what I said they were?

[@michealsoto6722]

when i play ff14 in the fc i always want to say not everyone comes from warcraft or a game known as point and click. when a game has you click on something there tradtionally known to have mechanics. i hate mechanics, well there good because if you can dodge everything dont need a healer.but genashi impact is what im more use to an action based game 0 mechanics. so i like the new novice afther 5 trys i passed it. i hear warcraft explains everything before starting. i think ff14 is better then wow because its way more roll play friendly. to me every class/job in ff14 is simple and powerful but undertaking mechanics is what choosing the right job important. bard, summoner is for any one anything else can be a challenge

[@woolwort9979]

This is confusing to read, but Genshin Impact has mechanics.