Merchant's Tale is boss HP sponges and carboard trash

The new Advanced mode is absolutely great, and it's an very good middle ground of difficulty... Easy enough to do with just the Duty Finder, no need to form a specific party for it, just need 4 people who can play the game.
But the fights are complex enough that it's not a free win or just straight up sleep inducing, you have to actually pay attention to the fight.

So I'm actually annoyed at how lazy the job skill system is, they made it so HP on all jobs are the same. Further more Bosses take ages to go down like the thread implies but the trash feels so bad half of the content is bassically waiting around for the "actual content" which is the boss fights that take ages.

They need to firstly let us have more then 2 Actions, 5 like Occult Add actual custom actions that will change up how a job plays add PASSIVES that can make a job more tanky sacrificing damage output, Add a passive that will allow healing added healing spells to benefit from your jobs MAIN STAT; so taking a healing skill isn't really great unless you wanted to be a dedicated healer (reguardless of role) add wacky dps buttons so you can be a funny DPS white mage with quick casts ect. ADD COOL STUFF not generic tacked on occult actions or really bland skills like variant dungeons; you'd think they'd go wild on what you can do because the main game has such a stale BORING snoozefest of a job system but no it seems they aren't even capable of that.

Further more, cutdown the boss time and add ACTUAL AOE Trash damage. Right now this content suffers because it feels safe, everyone brings a rez pretty much and that heal skill so everyone feels safe, I personally don't like that you can solo this content in a MMO (I can see why because some people wanna be able to choose their path) so perhaps a solo mode that's slow and way less effective where you have a self heal skill and are defensive enough to tank works.

I think for me I rather they actually had a baseline party system instead of making isolation solo content constantly funnily enough I want to play a MMO not a solo boring game.

I tried all three bosses on gunbreaker tonight and the difference from sage was significant. The additional health and mitigation really makes the difference. Getting hit only took off a fraction of health, so it allows the mechanics to be studied and learned easier.

I think if they adjust Rampart to have a higher defense and a HP boost, that would help non-tanks a lot when attempting to solo.

I haven't tried it on viper yet.

Bosses were still HP sponges. I looked at some points after many mechanics thinking "They're still at X%??" but the better survivability serves to mitigate that factor more.

However, not everyone has a tank option so there are improvements they can make to the non-tank experience.

I have only done Normal so far, because I could only get to it today, but I am at 7/13 paths, I will probably do the rest tomorrow, and have fought all 6 bosses, both mid-bosses, all three path bosses, and the secret boss, though obviously I haven't seen all mechanics due to the path-specific mechanics. I've done it all on Machinist, because why wouldn't I, MCH is still the king of solo scenarios. With all that in mind, my takes on it:

The bosses take me just under 6 minutes to kill, like 5:40 or 5:50, consistently so. The fights are fun in themselves, but they definitely overstay their welcome a little, not by a lot, but enough that I start to feel it. I find the primary issue is the way that bosses need to showcase their mechanics every single time, the Genie will always do left and right fireworks, Darya will always give me flashbacks to KH2's Atlantica the exact same way. I understand the need for bosses to showcase their mechanics in a slower pace, but I feel that if it were possible, cutting their HP bars in half, and make them come out swinging full force right away would make the fights much more enjoyable. The thing is, I understand why it is designed this way, and I don't have a proper solution for it, sure it is annoying, but I think I would've died a lot if I had never seen that wind-up phase, the problem is less so with it existing, and with the fact that I have to go through that wind up at least 4 times per path boss, more if farming the glams strikes my fancy.

The secret boss felt remarkably harder than the other three, I died a lot before finally beating it, I don't think playing a Tank would have helped either, as what was getting me were either an instakill mechanic, you probably know the one if you fought it, or a mechanic that stuns you in place and causes you to get hit several times in sequence. I will probably fight it again cuz I didn't get its TT card on the first run, hopefully it will be easier now that I am used to its bullshit.

I don't have any opinions on the trash, the fact is that they want these dungeons to be soloable, independent how you feel about the solo aspect, it is like this for a reason, so I can't imagine an easy fix without radically changing the design ethos of the content, as they need to be doable by non-Tanks.

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

I don't have any opinions on the trash, the fact is that they want these dungeons to be soloable, independent how you feel about the solo aspect, it is like this for a reason, so I can't imagine an easy fix without radically changing the design ethos of the content, as they need to be doable by non-Tanks.

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Trash wasn't more challenging in the Variants from EW, but at least it didn't keel over after using 2 GCDs within my burst. I'm not asking for much here really..

I've not yet done it solo,

but with grouped play I didn't really notice anything notably sponge-y about this versus ones in the past.

Bit slow mechanically it felt like, but that's about it.

They also hurt quite a bit when solo. I remember doing Sil'dih for one mogtome event and being able to get away with not using variant cure on the bosses if avoiding extra damage and using variant rampart properly but it isn't possible to do that in the Merchant's Tale bosses who auto you for a good chunk of damage.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Trash wasn't more challenging in the Variants from EW, but at least it didn't keel over after using 2 GCDs within my burst. I'm not asking for much here really..

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To touch on this, I was actually doing some Sil'dihn Subterrane cuz I never bothered to do all paths so I figured to chip at it slowly, and I noticed this is true, trash is much sturdier, they also hit like wet paper tower, dealing about 2k per hit when I have around 101k HP when sync'd, trash in Merchant's Tale are just glass cannons, they hit like a truck on steroids, but fold just as fast, and if you are on a DPS, some of the "elite" mobs, like the Stone Puppet that is relevant to paths 9 and 10, will actually just kill you if you don't stop attacking it to heal, I say as much because it happened to me, path 10 was my last path and I dozed off super hard, just hitting my rotation without paying attention, when I suddenly kneel over. Second time was simple enough, I just had to cast Variant Cure once before finishing it off, but still.

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Originally Posted by Carin-Eri

to me it felt like they dumped Extreme-level HP bosses onto a Normal-level map.

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Yanno I think you just hit the nail on the head: it feels like these bosses kept their HP tuning from Advanced and only got their mechanics toned down.

Tho that doesn't much explain the secret boss who also feels just as spongey.

Ran quite a bit of variants for couple of days now, so I can finally chime in better.

Trashes are... trashes, lol. Red carpets hits harder that you just can't stand still to eat everything from them and still live like in EW Variants. But nothing like a little bit of kiting and use what self preservation cooldowns on your hand wouldn't do the job. Plus, if you're soloing on fragile dpses, that's what Variant Cures/Rampart are for.

Bosses are where the HP spongey-feels more noticeable. Like others had mentioned, their AAs also hit quite a decent chunk of your non-tank HP per hit (which is good imho). Mechanics wise they are... alright for what they provide for the intended audience. Not too hard that you cannot figure it out in first few runs & never have to think about them in subsequent runs anymore. But the stale job gameplay we have nowadays simply cannot carry the intrinsic enjoyment past mechanical mastery so unfortunately they're only 'great' for first 3 runs, then diminish to nothingness.

Speaking of 'spongeyness', I felt like they're way more noticeable in group runs. The addition of new action EES that's always accessible for all role means the devs must have tuned the bosses to include this additional damage output the party can put out. But groups, typically casual oriented groups/pug runs (means majority) would almost always opt to bring either Cure, Rampart, and/or Raise. Sometimes the supports also forgo their spirit darts in favor of their own survivability, further gimping their party. When I'm soloing, the overall length for each run was only about 2-3 minutes longer than from what I could vaguely recall of soloing EW variants myself.

Also yes, playing any of these solo with support/rDPS jobs are mind-numbing.