Predict the Fall of Garuda (4/13/2012)

[Cichy]

The problem isn't so much the contest, its them acting like "oh, THIS time, things'll be different~!!", as if they're touting some super-mega-awesome difficulty. If they were simply having a contest to see how fast people could beat up their new big bad, and it was assumed that the new big bad will be more new than either big or bad, it wouldn't be a problem. They're kinda crossing the streams here; they want people to guess on a measure of speed for something that's supposed to be hard to kill, but at the same time, they are absolutely terrible at designing bosses that are hard to kill.

I mean, if they're expecting this to go like the others and the boss gets cleared in half a day, then so be it, but shit, they make it seem like its going to be weeks or MONTHS this time, and yeah... it'll be 3 hours, but like I said, hey, free gear is free gear. No worries.

Here's the thing Lucavi. Yeah Garuda maybe beat in a day by one of the top guilds but it still will be super difficult to most of the other players.
For past two weeks I've been doing Moogle and getting people from shouts and it's crazy how difficult for them it is. Same thing with Ifrit.
We've been doing AV and CC speedruns and they do require alot of synchronization and optimal communication.
The only thing that I could see is them making dungeons and fights that require you to have the best gear out there. However, we wont see that till post 2.0 at best.
They promise tough fights and current endgame is very tough for alot of players since the learning curve is like a brick wall.

[Lordender]

If I was incharge of making the Garuda encounter this is how I would do it.

You have 20minutes total.

If you kill her in 5 minutes you get elite treasure boxes containing the best loot possible.
If you kill her in 10 minutes you get medium level treasure boxes.
If you kill her in 15 minutes you get the weakest loot.
If she's not dead by 20mins the entire group dies instantly from enrage.

Too much of the same type of damage causes her to quickly build resistance to that type to prevent class stacking, parties must be balanced with slashing, piercing, blunt and magic damages.


The fight itself:

Phase 1: 100-75% HP

Standard fight, every once in awhile she'll mark someone and a few seconds later a tornado will come after them, if you get caught the tornado expands catching everyone in a big radius for big damage, thrown back + massive gravity debuff that lasts several minutes.

Phase 2 75-50% HP

She goes up in the air out of melee range, she directs all aggro onto magic users with tornadoes, all non-magic attacks hit for 0 and the entire group starts taking dot damage from gale winds, magic damage is increased by 30% to her in the air, 3 adds come out which are immune to all magic, each time an add dies it stacks a 10% melee dmg buff on her when she lands.

Phase 3: 50-25%

After landing the adds fade away, the debuff from adds killed starts ticking down from 20 seconds which results in melee having to unload, tornados now only target a random melee.

Phase 4: 25-0%

She starts channeling her Astral Flow, she stops all damage and adds come back out, each add that dies puts a melee dmg debuff on her while magic DD can continue pew pewing as normal, if Astral Flow goes off everyone dies instantly.


So there you have it, people will beat her but maybe they won't get that elite level loot because they fucked up several times on the fight, win win for everyone imo.

[Lucavi]

Here's the thing Lucavi. Yeah Garuda maybe beat in a day by one of the top guilds but it still will be super difficult to most of the other players.
For past two weeks I've been doing Moogle and getting people from shouts and it's crazy how difficult for them it is. Same thing with Ifrit.
We've been doing AV and CC speedruns and they do require alot of synchronization and optimal communication.
The only thing that I could see is them making dungeons and fights that require you to have the best gear out there. However, we wont see that till post 2.0 at best.
They promise tough fights and current endgame is very tough for alot of players since the learning curve is like a brick wall.

Here's the thing, Cichy, and I love you bro, but difficulty to anyone but the top guilds isn't worth the paper it is printed on. When people talk about speed of clearing content, they're talking about top guilds. The people in this very thread that complain about the ease of content believe that they are elite. If the elite is complaining about the content, then the content should be made more difficult, as they are the best of the best. The only thing I will relinquish to you is that I should not be judging the difficulty of this game to a game like WoW. This game has fights that are nothing like WoW's difficult events, so I will not compare the two in the future. What I will do, however, is compare the time of completion, rather than the difficulty. I remember it taking at least a week for the top raiders (barring the ones who raided on the test servers prior to the main launch) to clear Professor Putricide's Hard Mode. How long did it take highly-proficient XIVers to clear Ifrit or the Moogles? That's just one fight. Putricide is, at best, what, the 7th raid boss in ICC? You still have to go through a lot, just to get to him.

Every single "end-game" fight should require a lot of synchronization and optimal communication. Don't make it sound like XIV is something special because the fights require it, especially if you can do like Kuro and clear Ifrit multiple times in a day, and have him on farm status. Failure should be the norm for quite awhile. Success should come either as a mistake, or a fluke, but never as a result of an exploit, although it happens in every game.

[Cichy]

I totally agree, I'm just saying right now they are catering to the most common denominator. Meaning, Ifrit/Moogle/Dungeons are tough for public groups but fairly easily managed by the "elite" players.
They still have a long way in terms of lying down the ground work. Like I said before we probably wont see anything like that till post 2.0. Which imo is a justified move.
I get that people want the top of the pyramid content but right now the slaves are still digging in the sand to set the base.
I only brought up the synchronization and communication thing because in my experience many players do not want to be on vent, etc. They want to have things handed to them.
Honestly, I dont know what the answer to this problem is. If the gear had more influence in this game they could make content that not only requires better tactics but also gear. Like in other MMOs.
I'm just worried that with people screaming for harder content and SE being retarded as they are they would come up with another AV idea and add mobs that are just straight retarded powerful rather than well designed.

[Achitophel]

Umm... yes? That's the point. Why have some sort of contest and spout nonsense about how long its going to take to kill the new boss when your track record of providing "tough" bosses have all been cleared in a matter of hours. I mean, this is the same company that made PW (not that I'm encouraging them to do that again; just stating that they used to know a thing or two about difficulty).

That doesn't make any sense. Either it's fun to guess when the thing will be first killed or it's not. Whether it's minutes or months really doesn't make a difference at all.

It's not like "Man, it sure would've been fun if I could've reasonably guessed two weeks, three days, 12 hours and 31 minutes! That would've been rad! Instead though, a more reasonable guess was one day, five hours, and 18 minutes. That wasn't a fun time to guess at all. I hate guessing short times! "

[Thiefami]

Pretty slick promo vid, very nice

[Kurokikaze]

Every single "end-game" fight should require a lot of synchronization and optimal communication. Don't make it sound like XIV is something special because the fights require it, especially if you can do like Kuro and clear Ifrit multiple times in a day, and have him on farm status. Failure should be the norm for quite awhile. Success should come either as a mistake, or a fluke, but never as a result of an exploit, although it happens in every game.

I wish I had a group that had Ifrit on farm status... that would be nice. I'm always pugging. Ifrit is really easy now, the only thing that makes the fight slightly difficult is server lag. -_-;

[Grey Jorildyn]

Shoulda transferred to Gungnir and joined us! Cichy did

[Corrderio]

/comfort Kuro.

BTW Kuro, you got your forum privileges back? I thought you had those suspended as long assed time ago.

[Kurokikaze]

Shoulda transferred to Gungnir and joined us! Cichy did

Couldn't leave my friends behind. Also I'm hoping that LS members that quit come back for 2.0. Already seen a few pop in to try out the game.

/comfort Kuro.

BTW Kuro, you got your forum privileges back? I thought you had those suspended as long assed time ago.

Nah I didn't. I'm posting with my friend's account (Timon Loon). lol

[Alkar]

I wish I had a group that had Ifrit on farm status... that would be nice. I'm always pugging. Ifrit is really easy now, the only thing that makes the fight slightly difficult is server lag. -_-;

And people who can't dodge Eruptions and die in the most remote corners of the battlefield. What I do hate about Ifrit is Eruptions/Plume when he's on the move. What you see on your screen then is not even the true position of the attack.

[Waraji]

What I do hate about Ifrit is Eruptions/Plume when he's on the move. What you see on your screen then is not even the true position of the attack.

The difference between regular players, and great players in this case, is that we are able to to adjust for such things. One way or another I've noticed patterns throughout the many fights while he's moving, that I am able to dodge all his attacks while he's on the move. Not only that, but we are able to adjust to the Lag aspect of the game, because whether you like to or not, you have to acknowledge the fact and use it to your advantage instead of sitting there on the floor dead bitching about how it's the game's fault for your death and that it was lag. Instead we shut our mouths and treat Lag as a game feature we have to master. Is it just? No. Do we care? No. If it has to be done, it will be done.

[Lucavi]

...And that's fucking Brock Samson saying that, so you know its legit.

Love that avatar.

[Niiro]

And people who can't dodge Eruptions and die in the most remote corners of the battlefield. What I do hate about Ifrit is Eruptions/Plume when he's on the move. What you see on your screen then is not even the true position of the attack.

To be fair, you want people to die in remote corners of the map. A dead body in a safe spot is just more eruptions under the people still alive.

As much as I hate job stacking, there's just no reason to not bring WAR WHMx2 THMx5 simply because of the nature of eruptions. A thoroughly familiar THM can go the whole fight taking 0 damage aside from HF while doing the most damage. When animation lock and lag are your biggest enemies the simple normal functions of most jobs become a liability.

[Kurokikaze]

Cannot wait for them to get rid of animation lock in 2.0. I don't even care of how fake it's gonna look to watch your character sidestep while shooting arrows or doing a WS. Gameplay > Realism please.

I'll draw the line on some WS. Maybe you shouldn't be able to move during Chaos Thrust or other end-of-combo skills that have unique animations to them.

[Nama]

Did they actually say they were gonna remove animation lock? I don't recall ever seeing anything about it but it needs to go.

[Alkar]

The difference between regular players, and great players in this case, is that we are able to to adjust for such things. One way or another I've noticed patterns throughout the many fights while he's moving, that I am able to dodge all his attacks while he's on the move. Not only that, but we are able to adjust to the Lag aspect of the game, because whether you like to or not, you have to acknowledge the fact and use it to your advantage instead of sitting there on the floor dead bitching about how it's the game's fault for your death and that it was lag. Instead we shut our mouths and treat Lag as a game feature we have to master. Is it just? No. Do we care? No. If it has to be done, it will be done.

When I'm dead on the floor it's usually because everyone else already is. I can dodge Eruptions and Plume without issues so thank you for assuming I'm always dead and bitching. I also don't see how my comment can even be considered "bitching", I was simply stating a fact.

[Spider-Dan]

How long did it take highly-proficient XIVers to clear Ifrit or the Moogles?

Ifrit took 74 hours.
Moogle took 6.

Some of the posters in this thread seem to be under the impression that Ifrit was released and immediately destroyed, like Moogle. One data point does not a trend make (in either direction).

Keep in mind that when you are comparing how long it took to beat [x] encounter in [y] game, in XIV's current status, these singular encounters have been the only new endgame activity when released. You can't exactly compare the time it took to kill Moogle on release to the time it took to kill Medusa when TAU was released.

[Spira]

shoulda thrown in a 'time it took to kill Absolute Virtue' for good measure LOL..

I like this contest. i think it breeds hype, any of which is good, considering how there arent that many people playing XIV atm or theyre waiting for 2.0

[Lucavi]

I tried to include non-borked mobs, Spira. If we were going that route, I woulda put in Pandemonium Warden for the lulz.