Why do you fail at Hashmal?

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Originally Posted by VanilleFang

I'm sorry but I'd have to disagree that it being "too 1-shotty" is a bad thing. Other fights don't punish mistakes nearly enough and when a fight does you get people complaining that it should be like every other fight. Vuln stacks don't punish anyone unless you get like 3 or 4. Before that? People generally shrug it off and leave it to healer to top them up. And if you decide to not ignore mechanics between vuln stacks you just reset them meaning you can go back to ignoring everything.

People get away with being lazy or having tunnel vision too often in this game. Even casual level things should require you to pay attention and do the things.

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I agree with what you're saying and while I'm not advocating to remove 1-shot mechanics, I do have to point out that for people who can't grasp the 1-shot mech and keep getting hit by them just leads people to learn from external sources. Like me lol.

I mean, its either that or poke the next guy in my party and hope he knows how to dodge it. And its not like 24-man raids have all day to let you take your time to stand around and see the train coming at you so that you can be ready for next time. So for some, they're not gonna learn from the fight directly. Survivable but consequential dmg on the other hand is the kind of learning tool lets you do that imo. Especially if the punishment is aggravating that it can still lead to a wipe if you get into it again.

Again, the greater issue with 1-shot mechs is figuring out where it comes from. Dying instantly at something that barely registers your screen and doesn't give you enough time to pick up on clues leaves you puzzled and you can't really improve on information you don't have.

Yeah, I see where you are coming from as well. It can be hard to determine what killed or whatever but in those cases I would generally ask. But yeah, I can see why some people would have a hard time learning a fight if everything kills you out right.

You are asking too much of people to expect your average DF runner to do Hashmal well. I have to listen how someone in O4N was running to fight on the side with the tank, this is done in lv 50 trials, ramuh hard. It is the same reason people find it hard to push fire II quickly, tossing out thunders, having job quests cleared to 70 before entering expert. RDM that know how to use melee combos. Any dps that does not use all their tools on trash and keeps saving for boss and wonders why someone tells them 25 min runs are slow, tanks that never uses an OGCD, healers that never use a DPS ability, even refusing to assize once a whole run, list goes on of people lacking common sense.

In the end of the day people fail there because the game is too easy, too easy to carry them. If this was not the case, you wouldn't see people undergeared for DFs or trying to cheese the ilevel requirement.

Randomly spacing out during the pillar phase, lol. Didn't happen that often though. I died more to the aoe damage when healers were too slow to aoe heal.

It's so 1-shot prone because healing is too strong. Most stuff in expert doesn't one shot you and the result is that healers can just drag people through it, because it's so easy to burst everyone back to full HP. If stuff in Hashmal doesn't kill you, us healers would just heal you back up in seconds and you'd never die.

They need to significantly nerf all healing output if we want to see more fights that can really threaten you without one shotting you.

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Originally Posted by Tridus

They need to significantly nerf all healing output if we want to see more fights that can really threaten you without one shotting you.

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You realise that would make some Savage encounters near impossible right? I wouldn't want to do Neo Exdeath's Almagest where everything is spent while our healers are nerfed because the content for the casuals is too easy.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

You realise that would make some Savage encounters near impossible right? I wouldn't want to do Neo Exdeath's Almagest where everything is spent while our healers are nerfed because the content for the casuals is too easy.

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I feel like it's clear that Tridis' suggestion of a nerf to healing potency would require adjustments to Savage damage output as well. To suggest otherwise simply because something obvious wasn't explicitly stated seems sort of nearsighted to me.

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

I feel like it's clear that Tridis' suggestion of a nerf to healing potency would require adjustments to Savage damage output as well. To suggest otherwise simply because something obvious wasn't explicitly stated seems sort of nearsighted to me.

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Can't be too careful. I doubt many forum players even do savage so they might not be aware of the harder hitting things in the game and basing their experiences only on the faceroll content.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

Can't be too careful. I doubt many forum players even do savage so they might not be aware of the harder hitting things in the game and basing their experiences only on the faceroll content.

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Fair. I suppose I have more context because I know Tridus. That being said I am sure the suggestion isn't to make faceroll more challenging at the expense of Savage raiders even though from what I understand about Savage this tier some people might actually prefer a difficulty bump xD

Why not simply adjust the damage output of casual content to be higher instead of nerfing numbers people are used to already?

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

You realise that would make some Savage encounters near impossible right?

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It would - To be more precise, it would make every healing check that is based on the current strength of healers impossible, because the strength it's based on is gone. That's like having a fight that requires a silence and then removing silence from the game.

No big issue if it's just "one" fight, but the entire game is plagued by that.

Still no big issue for a vertical progression game like this, because you can fix that going forward without touching old content - You simply ramp up the health/VIT scaling. 20k healing on 20k HP is a full heal, 20k healing on 200k HP is only 10%, 40k damage on 20k HP overkill and 40k on 200k only 20%. It's uglier than going for a one-whole approach, but it's quite doable.

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Originally Posted by Zojha

It would - To be more precise, it would make every healing check that is based on the current strength of healers impossible, because the strength it's based on is gone. That's like having a fight that requires a silence and then removing silence from the game.

No big issue if it's just "one" fight, but the entire game is plagued by that.

Still no big issue for a vertical progression game like this, because you can fix that going forward without touching old content - You simply ramp up the health/VIT scaling. 20k healing on 20k HP is a full heal, 20k healing on 200k HP is only 10%, 40k damage on 20k HP overkill and 40k on 200k only 20%. It's uglier than going for a one-whole approach, but it's quite doable.

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But then you mess with the HP checks and tankbusters we have as well. No point fearing Halicarnassus's Critical Hit if I have 200K HP as it'll hardly hit me for more than 70K already without cooldowns.

The best solution is what Ameela said, make every other content turn up the damage a notch.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

But then you mess with the HP checks and tankbusters we have as well.

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You're messing with it, sure - But you're messing with it every single time you upgrade a piece of gear, every even patch when the iLvL gets raised, every expansion when unsynced comes along.

I see no issues "messing" with old content so long as it doesn't make it impossible to clear, it's old content. And if you go min-iLvL for the challenge? Well, you'll get your old HP values and properly fear that mechanic again.

In case you misunderstood: Ramping up the health scaling means newly introduced items get relatively more VIT to gradually increase the gap, not that you suddenly give every item thrice as much VIT overnight. New items already give you more VIT, they already make old mechanics lose their sting, go back into O1-4 at the end of SB and you'll have an easy time seeing as much (or just run some unsynced coil for the lulz). You simply accelerate that process until healing is relatively weaker.

Lol, nerfing healing would make runs in Expert pretty impossible for me since I have a hard enough time keeping tanks alive since things hit there incredibly hard and fast in those dungeons (only one that really doesn't is Temple of the Fist and even then you still need to pay attention or dead Tank).

But uhm, the red circle pools that chase you are what kill me the most, usually because I don't see them until it's too late because I am looking at hp bars making sure people aren't dead. I use raise a lot in Hashmal lol. And even if I do see them, if I'm not fast enough to move, I usually either get one shotted or get hit by two at once because they are all stacked on top each other x_x. Everything else Hashmal does I don't die to, just those dumb red circles and it annoys me to no end that I cant dodge those unless they far away.

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Originally Posted by AxlStream

You realise that would make some Savage encounters near impossible right? I wouldn't want to do Neo Exdeath's Almagest where everything is spent while our healers are nerfed because the content for the casuals is too easy.

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Yes. You'd need to rebalance most of the encounters in the game. But the point is to give more options than "do damage that isn't threatening at all", "do continuous damage fast enough that it's threatening", and "one shot people". Burst healing is so strong that the kind of periodic damage you see in experts is no threat whatsoever for a healer that's awake. Take Zenos. He likes to sit there if the fight goes long and spam Concentravity. Which is nice and all, except it's absolutely no threat whatsoever because it's extremely easy for the healers in this game to heal you back to full when he does it. So even he casts another one two seconds later, who cares?

WoW had this same problem back in the Wrath of the Lich King era, and they responded to it in Cataclysm* by dramatically increasing HP pools while not increasing HPS, effectively making it harder and slower to heal someone to full. That opens up options for fights where damage might not be lethal the instant it hits you, but because it takes more than three seconds to get your HP back up, the hits coming later may prove problematic.

Rabanastre is plagued by this, where you have damage that either one shots people (Hashmal) or damage that doesn't one shot people (both bosses after Hashmal), and on the latter ones people tend to not die as often simply because healers can get you fully recovered from any survivable hit before the next one.

*There was some pushback on it in Cataclym because lots of people didn't like the change, but I tend to think it worked better than what came before it.

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Originally Posted by Ameela

Why not simply adjust the damage output of casual content to be higher instead of nerfing numbers people are used to already?

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The solution to "too many things one shot people because that's the only way it's dangerous" is not "make more stuff one shot people".

I mean, if everything is "dodge" or "one shot", you don't need healers at all. At that point you just have red DPS and green DPS. The root of the problem is that burst healing is too strong relative to HP pool size, and you can't fix that by adding more damage.

I think one of the things that add to the difficulty and affects many players is the lack of visibility. In many fights you can see the full area so you have a better idea where stuff is and where not to go. With Hashmal you can't really get a full view of the field and the various towers, bells and such block an awfully lot of what can be seen. I know I spend probably as much time to reposition my view to avoid mechanics as I do focusing on targets.

How fucking condescending do you have to be? (Before I go into this rant I have to say I’ve been playing this raid since day 1 and have learned it like the back of my hand).

Not everyone learns something at the same pace as you. I mean look at the Angra Mainyu from world of darkness. People still struggle with this boss because there’s always an influx of new players. People don’t learn something to appease your sense of completion.

People are playing the game to enjoy themselves and part of that is accepting the fact that (Luckily for the game) there will be always be new people.

So get off your high horse and be more accepting for the community.

Reasons why they die :

-Hashmal's dive requires you to spin the camera to locate where the hell he is, then process which side is safe and run to it. If you fail this mechanic, unless you are a tank, it's a one shot; even knowing someone is about to die, server ticks prevent you from cleansing or healing in time on a dps or heal even at 340 ilvl. Later on, they add red circles, which can kill players running just because of random positioning.

-control towers are a mechanic with a weak visual tell. If a person tunnel visions or is at a bad angle where they can't gauge the direction, they can die. Also, many dps jobs can't always have a panorama of the whole map as easily as others.

-most of dust sphere deaths tend to happen from low dps; either raise sickness (SCREW RAISE SICKNESS, it was better to have them low HP than do half damage and heals) or people outside of their markers. Its actually possible to survive one dust attack if you are at full health; I always immediately top my party off after the stack and shield them. So you only can fully wipe if two alliances miss their dps check.

Thats about it, really. Nothing else is that unrecoverable from.

Edit: oh, keep in mind...a lot of people only do this raid once per week. To actually git gud at the patterns requires you to do more than that, which is why locking all incentives off per once a week sucks. Of course people wont be perfect if they don't do it that often.

I don’t know, I go into raba expecting shenanigans and it rarely disappoints. I actually think it’s pretty exciting, because of the number of deaths. One time on hashmal, myself and the two other tanks were the only ones alive. We took him from 7% to 1% (if the PLD had used clemency we would have killed him) The DRK and I (WAR) kept tank swapping to rebuild health. The rest of the alliance were cheering us on. Now the couple of FC members that went with joke “why don’t you just solo it?” xD.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

I think one of the things that add to the difficulty and affects many players is the lack of visibility. In many fights, you can see the full area so you have a better idea where stuff is and where not to go. With Hashmal you can't really get a full view of the field and the various towers, bells and such block an awfully lot of what can be seen. I know I spend probably as much time to reposition my view to avoid mechanics as I do focusing on targets.

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I die to his flaming fist mechanic almost every time and a lot of what you said is the cause of it. As soon as a notice he jumps and I start towards the middle whipping my camera around to find him. I see him and start my run away from his fist side and bam, too late! This is the only fight in the game I pull my camera all the way out and it still gets me. I don't die to the other boss's stuff at all or any of Hash's other mechanics.

I also do not understand how you can see the fight every single second. Even on a red mage, I need to look at my bar to see procs and cooldowns and stuff. When I am a white mage I need to keep my eye on the party and alliance bars. Even if I put this bar literally in the middle of the screen I still need to look at it for a second.

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Originally Posted by Minako_Nightsong

I also do not understand how you can see the fight every single second. Even on a red mage, I need to look at my bar to see procs and cooldowns and stuff. When I am a white mage I need to keep my eye on the party and alliance bars. Even if I put this bar literally in the middle of the screen I still need to look at it for a second.

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A lot of it comes down to reflexes and how fast you can do these things. Remembering to hit sprint is also a huge help. I suspect playing with mouse and keys is also quite the boon as I can swipe the camera from one side to the other almost instantly.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

I think one of the things that add to the difficulty and affects many players is the lack of visibility. In many fights you can see the full area so you have a better idea where stuff is and where not to go. With Hashmal you can't really get a full view of the field and the various towers, bells and such block an awfully lot of what can be seen. I know I spend probably as much time to reposition my view to avoid mechanics as I do focusing on targets.

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Pretty much this. If they'd do red warning areas people would instantly know where to go but for some reason the SE Dev team has shied away from them to artificially enhance "difficulty".

for me personally, the flaming arm and circles get me. for the arm i usually rotate the camera past where he appears before he shows up and by the time the camera pans around again he's already charging through the area. i suffer from this in any fight where this is a thing (like nidhogg ex) i could follow the other people but half of them are usually running the wrong way anyways. as for the red circles i usually find myself in a cluster of them and even trying to sprint out is usually futile because someone ends up running the same way as i do just a little ahead of me causing the 2nd circle to appear under me as i run. generally just bad luck.

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Originally Posted by AlexanderThorolund

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Seems like a nerve was touched. My point still remains. Generally, you'll know when you have new players in a run when you get a bonus message. I'm not referring to those runs, because I'll help out when I can if I see a bonus message. And notice I did not include the Crystal Tower or Void Ark raids. Those, I can understand because a lot of players coming in now rushed through ARR and HW to be able to access SB. I don't mind that. This is not being condescending...this is me sharing an opinion that others have that I agreed with, and have decided to openly share.

I am not suggesting that all casual players are bad, only a general huge portion. And I did ask why it appears that way, and many players here have shared their thoughts, which I respect and understand. Visual indicators, camera issues, monitor resolutions, spacing out...yes, I can understand that. I wonder, though, if that applies to whole parties? What is the reason when it happens to an entire party? Not talking about back in October - talking about now, when you don't have a bonus message for new players.

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Originally Posted by KaivaC

Generally, you'll know when you have new players in a run when you get a bonus message.

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You don't reliably get bonus messages in Rabanastre for some reason.

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Originally Posted by Tridus

You don't reliably get bonus messages in Rabanastre for some reason.

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No? That's surprising. Hmm... I wonder if that's intentional though, given Hashmals current reputation.

Terrible arena color and orange AoE markers get me every time

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I'm sorry but I'd have to disagree that it being "too 1-shotty" is a bad thing.

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My opinion is that if a fight has to rely on 1-shots to be difficult, it's not well designed. So yeah, I'd say it's a bad thing, personally.

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Other fights don't punish mistakes nearly enough and when a fight does you get people complaining that it should be like every other fight. Vuln stacks don't punish anyone unless you get like 3 or 4. Before that? People generally shrug it off and leave it to healer to top them up.

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This is very dependent on the fight. I know in O2S when my group was struggling to begin to consistently win it, the healers were complaining about people who would take even one vuln stack because that often meant the people on the lower side of HP would end up just being 1-shotted by Gravitational Wave (or whatever that regular room-wide attack is called). It already hurts enough without any stacks.

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Originally Posted by Fynlar

My opinion is that if a fight has to rely on 1-shots to be difficult, it's not well designed. So yeah, I'd say it's a bad thing, personally.

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Agree with this 100% One shot mechanics are generally a bad idea.

Vuln stacks work better in savage, name any 24 man mech with vuln stack and ill show you the mechs people will ignore and tank, because they believe healers can deal with it. This is specially bad with Scathach.

I feel like people put a bigger effort to stop DPSing and disengage when there's a real risk of death.

On Hashmal: Every problem people commented on having here can be solved by standing close to the center, and not taking 10 years to move your camera left or right to see where is Hashmal. The entire fight snowballs because people have zero positioning awareness, this is specially noticeable with the alliance marker mechanics.

The leading cause of wipes at Hashmal I’ve seen is poor situational awareness.
- what alliance are you in?
- where is your alliance?
- where should you run when X is happening?
If you cannot answer all 3 before the aoe marker vanishes, you’re dead or dying very soon lol

Im as casual as they come and I still don't understand how this fight trips up so many people. If you are dying because you're tunneling your party list/buffs/procs/insert other HUD related excuse here, imo you should probably adjust your HUD. His attacks all have huge tells. People shouldn't be eating them as often as they do :I

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Originally Posted by Rokke

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I'm more or less a midcore player myself, and it's just this one fight that just stops so many people. Honestly, Mateus has more mechanics going on for her simultaneously (the first phase, with the three water puddles, the ice skater, the numerous adds that need to be killed, and ice slaves if you let them spawn), yet as it stands now, a majority of groups can get past her, but not Hashmal. Now I can acknowledge some players may have issues, like with their screen resolution, tunnel vision, amongst others...

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Originally Posted by Rokke

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Ok, so what if you have already tried moving your HUD and rearranging things and that still doesn't work? What do you do then?

For me, I have to actually go through the party list, see who is dying or not dying, make sure certain buffs are still active, raise anyone that is dead after I check to see if swiftcast is available and so on. I can't do all of that in just half a second, sorry. I give props to people who can. Unfortunately I cannot, I've tried lol. Sometimes its not just situation awareness, sometimes its just that you just dont have the reaction speed necessary to react to everything that is going on at once. A lot of times I just leave people dead for quite a bit of time because I'm taking too much time trying to keep myself alive from all the aoes because if I look away to the party list for even half a sec I could be dead depending on what's going on.

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Originally Posted by AphraelAmarantha

Ok, so what if you have already tried moving your HUD and rearranging things and that still doesn't work? What do you do then?

For me, I have to actually go through the party list, see who is dying or not dying, make sure certain buffs are still active, raise anyone that is dead after I check to see if swiftcast is available and so on. I can't do all of that in just half a second, sorry. I give props to people who can. Unfortunately I cannot, I've tried lol. Sometimes its not just situation awareness, sometimes its just that you just dont have the reaction speed necessary to react to everything that is going on at once. A lot of times I just leave people dead for quite a bit of time because I'm taking too much time trying to keep myself alive from all the aoes because if I look away to the party list for even half a sec I could be dead depending on what's going on.

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Learn to use your peripheral vision. When Im staring at the center of my screen I can still make out when someone is has a debuff or was out of reach for a HoT. While you should always have an eye on your party's health, if you're not dead/locked out there you shouldn't really be just staring at it and not the actual battle.

I forgive people for eating the Rofocale's victory cry+trample combo towards the end of the fight cause if you're unlucky enough to be in a bad spot you probably aren't making it to safety even with a sprint or rescue as it happens so fast...but in comparison, none of Hashmal's 1 shot attacks are remotely as quick- the towers have a delay as they're "sliced", the hammers have a delay before they drop, even his tankbuster (that melee regularly die to lol) has a castbar. If you aren't new or dealing with godawful ping and are still getting hit regularly, you aren't paying attention.

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Originally Posted by Rokke

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Yeah, I'm not including Rofocale for that reason...aside from him not exactly being known for wiping parties, that Trample + Victory Cry easily catches so many people off guard and more often than not, he will catch a lot of people out of position at least once in the fight. I usually get clipped by that combo at least once in a fight - particularly the victory cry that follows immediately after...I like to linger near him so I can hide away in his safe spot.

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Originally Posted by Rokke

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So how do you train peripheral vision? I don't really have the best peripheral vision in the world and I have poor eyesight at that (not legally blind per se but I am required legally to wear glasses when I operate a motor vehicle else I could be cited x_x )

Hashmal is a swell guy. He reminds people of how awful they are and that's a plus in my book.

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Originally Posted by AphraelAmarantha

So how do you train peripheral vision? I don't really have the best peripheral vision in the world and I have poor eyesight at that (not legally blind per se but I am required legally to wear glasses when I operate a motor vehicle else I could be cited x_x )

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If your eyesight itself isn't great, your best bet would probably be to just sink time into healing and try to get used to taking in more info at once.
Some things that made it easier for me:
- I changed how may status effects I can see on the party list to 10
- I memorized my little buffs icons by their color (ie. if I cast medica 2 and someone is missing a little pink box next to their name I know something is amiss).
- I changed the nameplate colors and made it so that everyone on my team's name is neon pink while everyone else is green. Its hard to lose neon pink in a sea of green!
- I set swiftcast near the buttons Im pressing the most on my hotbar so Im not bouncing around looking for it. I know other people like to have a floating castbar that has important skills and make it big/place it somewhere easy to see.

As I said before, I consider myself casual. I have yet to step foot in savage, and rarely run EXs (I don’t even have all the ponies lol). If I can manage Rabnasty I feel like anyone can :>

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Originally Posted by Rokke

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I've done 1 and 4, so I will try 2 and 3 thx :3