Post-Mortem Discussion: 2.X Series

[Kaisha]

Outside of FCoB in 2.4 we've had two difficult fights (Ramuh/Shiva) in the past year and a bit.

How terrible is your server for you to consider Shiva difficult, lol. It's by far the most lenient of the extremes. You can nearly full wipe twice and still kill her before her enrage, assuming it even exists since I've still yet to see it.

first Binding Coil was fucking boring.

I enjoyed it more than final. That mini-ADS encounter in T1, handling slimes and split snakes. The hot potato + silence rotation race in T2 before people ruined it by cheesing enrage. T3 jump pad race-to-the-bottom-kite-fucking-everything shenanigans, followed by DPS-race elevator and not trying to MPK the tank with twisters.

Man, T4 in bare minimum gear was good times, you were always riding the wave-spawn timer and elevator enrage.

[Rocl]

There's an Enrage but it happens at like some absurd number of Damage Up stacks. Eight? Eleven? Something like that and she'll Diamond Dust for 25k. I saw it once, ever and I can't even remember the circumstances.

I just remember the laughter and amazing amount of shame and anger I felt towards everyone involved.

[Alym]

I'm sorry, but I hear this as a common complaint and I don't really understand it. What is it that you are actually "grinding" for that needs to be addressed?
1) Grind MGP for glamour - Solution would be to lower the cost of glamour items because who cares, its glamour.
2) Grind MGP for card packs - Solution lower the cost of card packs and/or change the RNG distribution so that we can collect all the cards sooner/easier?
3) Grind MGP for Chocobo racing things - I think they did this already. Breeding is rng too so requesting the MGP cost to be lowered makes sense so you aren't hit twice.
4) Grind TT npcs for card drops - Solution would be to increase the drop rate on the rarest cards so that you can collect all the cards sooner/easier?

While I feel for the people who did 50+ Dragon's Necks for a single super rare Triple Triad Card....or the guy who bought a Fenrir mount just from farming TT npcs, I gotta ask how fast do you want to get this stuff?

Edit: holy moley at the post above me...

Basically, yes to everything above. Triple Triad and Gold Saucer is side content. There is very little reason to make it so grindy. To get Fenrir using the Indolent Imperial (the most efficient way to get MGP) on wins alone, you need to beat him 11,106 times. This is lessened by getting lucky with the daily cactpot, jumbo cactpot, and card drops. This is for a glamour mount in side content. What reason is there to make someone do that much grinding for a glamour mount except to make it so unfun that no one does it and Fenrir stays rare OR to try and make up for a lack of things to do? It doesn't make the content fun, it makes it tedious. That's the core of the complaint.

[Kaslo]

I know that there are people that enjoy playing dodgeball and they enjoy their endgame with their dodgeball mechanics and feel rewarded when they beat it because it was tough to get through. For me though I could care less about doing it, and care even less about having to slog through bland content with 7 other people and deal with all the bullshit that comes with people's schedules not matching up periodically for said statics.

Name-calling mechanics really doesn't help your argument, it actually weakens it (coming from someone who argues for a living)

[Kaslo]

What a lot of you guys seem to be missing about all the 2.1 nostalgia was that, aside from turn 5, first Binding Coil was fucking boring. It had excellent levels of breadth, but the main endgame during that patch kinda sucked. Second Coil provided the first real difficulty and set the standard for what to expect from each turn, not just the final one. That's a curve I really, really hope they keep for Alexander.

God I loved kiting on Turn 7, it was so fun to just be doing my own thing and getting praise for it. Also, killing people with fireballs

[Hiryo]

It doesn't make the content fun, it makes it tedious. That's the core of the complaint.

Idk, I feel like this is at least 80% Player driven. You can use this logic toward anything in any game ever made. Developers put in something behind some daunting gate. Different players look at it differently:
Player A) "Wow, what an amazing thing. If I get lucky/patient/save/abstainfromallelse I think I can get/do this in X time."
Player B) "Wow, what an amazing thing. What do I need to do to get/do this in the shortest time possible."

But eh, maybe I'm not seeing it the same way you(and plenty of other players) are.

[ColenzoRidesAgain]

Basically, yes to everything above. Triple Triad and Gold Saucer is side content. There is very little reason to make it so grindy. To get Fenrir using the Indolent Imperial (the most efficient way to get MGP) on wins alone, you need to beat him 11,106 times. This is lessened by getting lucky with the daily cactpot, jumbo cactpot, and card drops. This is for a glamour mount in side content. What reason is there to make someone do that much grinding for a glamour mount except to make it so unfun that no one does it and Fenrir stays rare OR to try and make up for a lack of things to do? It doesn't make the content fun, it makes it tedious. That's the core of the complaint.

You have to take into consideration that the "side content" is going to be there for the rest of the game's life and maybe they don't want to just hand it all out to people within the first few weeks? Its all just a diversion anyways, its not like you absolutely have to have it. Its just there so people can grind and have something to gloat about for wasting their time. Sure, they could keep releasing other things for gold saucer for people to earn and they will but things tend to look a bit more attractive when they take a lot more time/luck to get. This encourages some people to actually play the content and to do it for something more than just a 5 minute diversion.

[layoneil]

What reason is there to make someone do that much grinding for a glamour mount except to make it so unfun that no one does it and Fenrir stays rare OR to try and make up for a lack of things to do? It doesn't make the content fun, it makes it tedious. That's the core of the complaint.

people are crazy? you're not suppose to get the Fenrir mount unless you win a Jumbo Cactpot prize. That's my opinion on why those things were put there. What's the point of having a Jumbo Cactpot if there's nothing to buy?

[ColenzoRidesAgain]

Name-calling mechanics really doesn't help your argument, it actually weakens it (coming from someone who argues for a living)

Trust me, I was mostly ranting and I never expect people to take me 100% seriously. If I did I probably wouldn't use such abrasive language.

[Alym]

Idk, I feel like this is at least 80% Player driven. You can use this logic toward anything in any game ever made. Developers put in something behind some daunting gate. Different players look at it differently:
Player A) "Wow, what an amazing thing. If I get lucky/patient/save/abstainfromallelse I think I can get/do this in X time."
Player B) "Wow, what an amazing thing. What do I need to do to get/do this in the shortest time possible."

But eh, maybe I'm not seeing it the same way you(and plenty of other players) are.

That's entirely possible. I only post from my perspective. I don't see any other way to get Fenrir in what I could consider a reasonable timeframe without getting lucky at the jumbo cactpot. I'm sure some people love the way it's set up, I am just not one of them.

You have to take into consideration that the "side content" is going to be there for the rest of the game's life and maybe they don't want to just hand it all out to people within the first few weeks? Its all just a diversion anyways, its not like you absolutely have to have it. Its just there so people can grind and have something to gloat about for wasting their time. Sure, they could keep releasing other things for gold saucer for people to earn and they will but things tend to look a bit more attractive when they take a lot more time/luck to get.

This is precisely what I mean, though. It's side content; either you see it as worth it or you don't. This means Gold Saucer is either grindy content or no content. I don't like that. I want to see more of a middle ground. Additionally, if we assume that it'll be added to over time then we should also assume more rewards will be added as well. Thus, there will always be more to work towards. I see very little value in making one of the first rewards added take actual months of daily grinding. I'm glad some people like it and think it's reasonable, but it's content design that I just don't like on a personal level.

[ColenzoRidesAgain]

Gold saucer is a place for entertainment and minigames first though so whatever lol rewards are just there for those who want them. Hopefully they just flush it out a lot more and make more attractive lower cost items. I think that might help change the opinions of it.

[TheDirtyHobo]

I enjoyed it more than final. That mini-ADS encounter in T1, handling slimes and split snakes. The hot potato + silence rotation race in T2 before people ruined it by cheesing enrage. T3 jump pad race-to-the-bottom-kite-fucking-everything shenanigans, followed by DPS-race elevator and not trying to MPK the tank with twisters.

Man, T4 in bare minimum gear was good times, you were always riding the wave-spawn timer and elevator enrage.

The thing with BC was that pre-5, each fight was just 1 simple mechanic. Turn 1, stack management. Turn 2, hot potato, Turn 4 DPS race. It was designed to ease you into having to deal with mechanics while maintaining DPS, a concept that was tightened further and further as coil progressed. If you liked the more casual endgame, then that's absolutely fine. I didn't care for it.

[Sephiroth]

How terrible is your server for you to consider Shiva difficult, lol. It's by far the most lenient of the extremes. You can nearly full wipe twice and still kill her before her enrage, assuming it even exists since I've still yet to see it.

Which is why I went on to say:

Add to that the fact they weren't even that hard

Which is part of my complaint. They were meant to be difficult fights but failed. When Garuda, Ifrit and Titan extreme were introduced they were on par with BCoB fights (minus T5) but they have gotten easier with every patch to the point where SE didn't even bother making an extreme version of Odin. Why make two versions of the fight, one being super easy and one that requires thought when you can just release one somewhere inbetween?

[TheDirtyHobo]

You guys seem to be confusing absolute difficulty with relative difficulty. Titan EX is not harder than Ramuh/Mog/Shiva EX. Titan EX seemed hard because there was very little up to that point that demanded that level of precision. The jump from the next hardest fight to Titan was pretty huge. It had high relative difficulty. But once players got that down and expected that level of play, the gap between that and Leviathan/Mog was relatively small. But they weren't, by any stretch of the imagination, easier fights.

Titan EX is the training montage of this game.

[StUfF]

You guys seem to be confusing absolute difficulty with relative difficulty. Titan EX is not harder than Ramuh/Mog/Shiva EX. Titan EX seemed hard because there was very little up to that point that demanded that level of precision. The jump from the next hardest fight to Titan was pretty huge. It had high relative difficulty. But once players got that down and expected that level of play, the gap between that and Leviathan/Mog was relatively small. But they weren't, by any stretch of the imagination, easier fights.

Titan EX is the training montage of this game.

In mechanical difficulty I would agree with you, but if you take into account gear levels I feel as though Titan may have been tuned a bit tighter/appropriately - this might just be a hazy memory but it always seems we are significantly overgeared for ex- fights as they are released nowadays.

[Jem]

Titan Ex was most certainly harder than Ramuh/Shiva/Levi Ex because there were significantly more insta-kill mechanics and far less leniency on DPS checks. I won't compare to Moogle EX because I literally jumped in once, cleared it and never went back (but that does suggest it was easier)

If 1 person messes up virtually any mechanic in Titan Ex tit was extremely punishing to them and they generally had less time to react to the mechanics too. With the others if you failed to dodge or messed up a mechanic, you still had a decent chance to survive.

I mean Leviathan is a terrible comparison imo. All people had to do was dodge dives/slam (which had more leniency than Titan dodging) and otherwise not be shit. And even if you got hit, it wasn't guaranteed death. Whereas in Titan virtually anything that hit you was death and unless all the DPS were good, you were probably missing a DPS check of some sort with a DPS down (whether that's heart or gaol or superbombs).

[TheDirtyHobo]

2.even patches get 'easy' fights because they coincide level cap increases but have to be geared for the previous level of gear, so you outgear them very fast. 2.odd patches get relatively long-lasting 'difficult' fights because they're tuned towards being near the level cap.

[Seravi Edalborez]

Personally I agree that first coil was boring but we were also all gimp/wtf back then so it was still relatively challenging. I'm retroactively kicking myself for thinking healing T1-5 was ever hard, in comparison to today's fights. Second was also good. Final I'm pretty torn on. It has a lot of mechanical going-on but on the flip side, every single turn feels like a chore. The more demanding turns, imo, were frontloaded also. T10 has very little wipe forgiveness, T11 was hell riding the gear barrier and was a bitch and a half to get tethers right for everyone. T12, while it took us as long as any other turn, did not feel as individually demanding outside of pushing certain numbers of Bennus. T13 was "just" spike damage and the fight-long DPS check. I know that whole run-on is a hell of a way to frame it, but seriously all of them feel more tedious than T9.

While I think Steps of Faith is tuned very weirdly for casuals and there's too much clicking on stuff, I do appreciate for the first time in like a year we get a fight that is not in a circle arena (or a square fuckyou Leviathan) and runs on for some time. I would love to see another fight on that scale or like 1.0 Darnus going forward into HW. I hope Alexander also is ever so slightly more varied. Though you can only really do "mechanical jumprope" tied with "gear gate I guess maybe kind of oh you powered through it lol" in so many ways.

[Cocoa Coala]

To the remark about DRG being 'dumbed down'

I'm sorry, but DRG wasn't dumbed down just because the restraints on it's positionals were removed. The fact that if you happened to miss the flank in some funky way, whether it's because of latency or just because the hitbox is off, and you had to redo HT again, like.. that was just poorly designed. The Impulse drive change was whatever, but for me without the changes anyway, it would have just meant DRG would have seen zero use. Well that, and the mdef buffs, but yeah. That's coming from a DRG lifer. I don't see it as dumbed down, moreso quality of life. They're still 3rd on the list of DPS, so still aren't all used all the time, but it just means your party won't suffer for bringing one.

Dumbed down is probably the wrong word, I think it's best to say "homogenized". I guess this is the problem with our current simplistic raid design, everyone needs x DPS and y effective HP for mechanics, the rest doesn't matter... not that it's wrong, just boring imo.

Second Coil provided the first real difficulty and set the standard for what to expect from each turn, not just the final one.

This is exactly the problem I have with it, if I'm farming the same instances for 6 months I'd rather have them different than trials. Difficulty goes out of the window once you have enough practice (unless skills are semi random like ADS) anyway. I've been having more fun with the T11 trash race between groups than the boss itself...

[Arthars]

ramuh > titan ex >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the rest in terms of learning

2nd coil is >>>>> final coil in terms of mechanics

1st coil was longest because everyone havent got their story/titan done way back lolllllll

savage still own 99% of the playerbase which is sad because here we are asking for challenge, yet only 1% of us are trying (im only cleared turn 1 lol havent even attempted the rest, except 1 round of turn 3)

maybe if better rewards are thrown in, that 1% might become 10%