So finished the fight with some rather amusing reactions from people last night, including a "WTF THIS IS NORMAL?!?" winning. But the fight itself? Honestly I didn't enjoy it in the slightest compared to previous content.
Phase 1 isn't that bad, if anything it's a pretty standard boss battle with some creative aoes mixed in like the liquefy attack. By itself that part would have been alright for a new trial. But phase 2
Oh phase 2 . . .
SQ you really REALLY need to tell your fight designers that multi wipe mechanics with stupid short enrage timer windows on top like this are not fun. Forcing your players into perfect execution of mechanics instead of perfect execution of their job role and knowing your class (not that there is much to know after tanks and heals got dumbed down) is the wrong direction to go.
This got compounded when one of the tanks in our fight had never done the Ivalice chain and therefore had never seen the arrow mechanic. Not a good thing when that part can again easily result in a wipe if your tanks and healers don't know it.
We need more boss battles that are engaging and less fights that have players looking for videos to explain why they just wiped before or after a failure, i consider myself lucky to have a group that stuck it out through five.
And we need more fights that don't veer into spending more time assigning positions then actually battling the boss. My time in Titania EX comes to mind where we did just that. And the fight itself became trivial in the process. It wasn't about knowing my class, it was about knowing where to stand.
There is no skill in rote memorization of a wipe mechanic. Anyone who says "But it's harder" is missing the point because it's not. The only challenge is learning the mechanic. after which I honestly found the fight stupidly easy. Stand here, DPS, repeat, yawn. This is where cinder drift fails because you've made the fight repetitive and boring.
It's going to play out the exact same way every single time because of top heavy mechanics. Tanks must do X, healers must do Y, damage dealers must not derp after both. Failure of any of the above inside some silly short enrage timer window will result in wipe and do it again. And it doesn't matter after that what class, what role, what level of knowing your job comes into the fight if you have "assignments" instead of "gameplay"
Compare this to some of the SB content like the four lords battles (byakko being my fav) or the entire Ivalice arc with some hard as heck bosses, but none of which that had to rely on stupid wipe mechanics to the degree ruby does. Or Copied in ShB. I'll never get tired of taking on the giant mecha or seeing which room I end up in to play death dodge with ring lasers and floor traps. But after doing cinder once I have zero desire to go back to it past helping friends. And even less of a desire to go anywhere near the EX version, least not without looking at a video first [/sarcasm]
Continue reading...
Phase 1 isn't that bad, if anything it's a pretty standard boss battle with some creative aoes mixed in like the liquefy attack. By itself that part would have been alright for a new trial. But phase 2
Oh phase 2 . . .
SQ you really REALLY need to tell your fight designers that multi wipe mechanics with stupid short enrage timer windows on top like this are not fun. Forcing your players into perfect execution of mechanics instead of perfect execution of their job role and knowing your class (not that there is much to know after tanks and heals got dumbed down) is the wrong direction to go.
This got compounded when one of the tanks in our fight had never done the Ivalice chain and therefore had never seen the arrow mechanic. Not a good thing when that part can again easily result in a wipe if your tanks and healers don't know it.
We need more boss battles that are engaging and less fights that have players looking for videos to explain why they just wiped before or after a failure, i consider myself lucky to have a group that stuck it out through five.
And we need more fights that don't veer into spending more time assigning positions then actually battling the boss. My time in Titania EX comes to mind where we did just that. And the fight itself became trivial in the process. It wasn't about knowing my class, it was about knowing where to stand.
There is no skill in rote memorization of a wipe mechanic. Anyone who says "But it's harder" is missing the point because it's not. The only challenge is learning the mechanic. after which I honestly found the fight stupidly easy. Stand here, DPS, repeat, yawn. This is where cinder drift fails because you've made the fight repetitive and boring.
It's going to play out the exact same way every single time because of top heavy mechanics. Tanks must do X, healers must do Y, damage dealers must not derp after both. Failure of any of the above inside some silly short enrage timer window will result in wipe and do it again. And it doesn't matter after that what class, what role, what level of knowing your job comes into the fight if you have "assignments" instead of "gameplay"
Compare this to some of the SB content like the four lords battles (byakko being my fav) or the entire Ivalice arc with some hard as heck bosses, but none of which that had to rely on stupid wipe mechanics to the degree ruby does. Or Copied in ShB. I'll never get tired of taking on the giant mecha or seeing which room I end up in to play death dodge with ring lasers and floor traps. But after doing cinder once I have zero desire to go back to it past helping friends. And even less of a desire to go anywhere near the EX version, least not without looking at a video first [/sarcasm]
Continue reading...