The barance evolution meta was always fascinating. I used to daydream what it would be like to be in there meeting where they discuss the player behaviours and reaction to their content
The barance evolution meta was always fascinating. I used to daydream what it would be like to be in there meeting where they discuss the player behaviours and reaction to their content
To this day I still actually do dream/day dream attending their internal meetings and discussions. Must either be comically serious or they're all just sitting in and there meme'ing. I would also love to meet AV's parent if it had one (instead of the team responsible for designing Sea/NMs/system), because the amount of times AV gets patched is rather funny.
AV mechanics were eventually figured out but implementing them was a huge pain because you needed several of each job (because you had to activate the 2hrs within like 1~1 server tick of him using them to lock them. Also, 2hrs are 2hrs so you had little room for mistake. Meanwhile PLDs for 400-500 damage without bracelets and 700+ with bracelets. PLDs back then usually only had ~1600 HP. He had huge DEF/MDEF and Evasion so dealing damage was a pain in the ass, you could forget about melee other than kraken DRKs (till they nerfed SE).
BTW we never figured out PW mechanics even to this day I think. We don't know how to prevent him from summoning 10 avatars and making them all execute AF simultaneously. I always thought it may have somethignt o do with using the Soulcatcher, since the whole chain of ZNM involved snapping photograpghs of things, and maybe by snapping photos of the lamps it would lock them from turning into avatars. *shrug*. Matters little these days because 10 Astral Flows from level 85 avatars to an i119 player does <100 damage.
Ah but wasn't PW legitimately defeated at 75 post patch? I'm aware the 10x Astral Flows seems dumb because it was a bit of a "fuck you" mechanic, but through zombieing/rotating teams in it was possible to eventually bring it down assuming good co-ordination.
Pre patch, I did wonder if Ruke's LS reached its final form or if there were more (if I recall they started faltering and falling back at the true form of PW as the Astral Flows couldn't be managed). How it got past QA is rather mind boggling; I mean, it must've been tested right?; I would love to see the truth of that too lol
You're right. I think it was defeated by sacing the avatars superrrrr far away and then pushing PW below the threshold. I guess what I meant to say was, PW was never defeated "as SE intended" because they claimed he could be defeated with only 18 people, whereas I think PW was beaten by the player base using over 30+ people taking shifts.
Let's be real here. These things weren't designed to actually be beaten.
The rewards weren't that great, even at 75.
Destroyers > Shenlong's Baghnahks
HQ Staves > Dorje
Hagun > Nanatsusaya
Hachiryu haramaki was pretty good though, I think it was one of the best bodies for Rampage/Blade Jin.
Nothing really *ground breaking* considering the difficulty.
We could get AV's 2 hours mostly in check at first, but bracelets mode reset everything and meteor spam, charm spam, and bene were all just BS moves.
As for PW, there was legitimate ways to beat and handle each of his tricks. You didn't even need to kill the 10 summons, just pull away and super take until the current phase died (and each phase didn't have much HP once patched).
As for the avatars, they were kind of weird. It wasn't a normal AF where the avatar is just summoned for half a second, AFs, and dissapears. There's a good delay between them being summoned and Astral Flow being hit, so if you diaga'd them and ran away, they'd follow and AF the kiter only.
Honestly the post nerf time limit was the most annoying part about PW. And the fact that it was so fucking time consuming to get a single pop to test anything.
Yeah in reality it feels like that, but then now that you say it like that I think of the F-Zero GX Chapter 7 rant quote:
Besides sucking our sub fees to keep us playing with a pretense that it might be beatable, for FFXI/SE is evil like that back then. But upon reflection on it this long after, one does really wonder about the story of these 2 encounters and what exactly is the thoughts/reasoning behind them lolIt's not any fun if I can't win, you faggots. I want to move on. I want to unlock whatever piece of poo poo clown car you have hidden away from me so I can start racing and get pissed off with that too. When your game prevents me from fully enjoying the product I have bought you have failed in your loving mission to deliver a game. You lose! You break the contract!
What's Tanaka up to these days. Someone make him do an AMA lol
Well supposedly, it's possible to beat PW with only 18 people, without zombying or supertanking or other soft-exploits. To me, this means there's some other way that SE intended us to handle those mechanics other than sacrificing a PLD to hold the avatars. It was beaten "legitimately" but perhaps not the way it was intended to be beaten.
It was cool when PW was beaten with zombie blus and other alt tactics. Imagine being featured on the main site for your accomplishments. It is pretty unique to be complimented that way.
I could have sworn the dev team said the AV and PW battle was designed to be beatable with only 1 alliance and the only content that was designed with more players in mind were things like Dynamis/Einherjar and the like. I doubt they would encourage super-tanking since it's sort of an exploit of the poorly coded enmity mechanics and supertanking is actually counter-intuitive compared to actual tanking.
They made some statement back then about how it should take like 12+ hours and based on the game day changing of the video it looked like 2 vanadiel weeks from what I could tell though it's heavily edited so hard to say 100%. Also remember they tried and failed and had to actually postpone giving us the vid by a few months because of it.
The devs can say what they want but it's clear they didn't want them beaten until it got serious bad press
I thought that a super unbeatable except for the top 0.01% of the player base sort of monster would be part of each expansion. I was really disappointed that wotg didn't follow through on the theme, particularly considering what a rubbish overlong slog the whole thing was on the back of the excellent TOAU
WotG had some cool HNMs. Sandworm, Dark Ixion etc.
Tracking them without a zone bot was annoying but they were well made fights IMO.
Having fights like AV were just wasted resources (he didn't even have drops at first). PW after the HP patch was ok, but popping him was a grueling process.