Thordan EX is a minstrel's ballad fight. THORDAN EX. So is Nidhogg, Tsukuyomi, and Hades. A fight having 'the minstrel's ballad' in the title isn't a sign of the fight being easy/just a harder version of normal.
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Admittedly, I forgot they started that with Ultima. Regardless, the moniker is entirely misleading because Ultima is nowhere close to the difficulty of those who came before or immediately afterwards. Even the oft mentioned "easy" EXs in Garuda and Shiva were noticeably harder than Ultima.
Would it kill them to scale the Unreals to a uniform or even similar difficulty when they upscale them? If UW is so faceroll compared to the rest then all it did was lure people in and then punt them back out after one patch. It's not like people are going to magically be able to handle Seph Unreal unless they can already handle current Sav. At which point Unreal just becomes another piece of content that only <20% of the population gets to clear.
The whole point of Unreal fights is to experience old EXes as they were originally, just with current cap kits. And they actually DID nerf Sephirot, it's originally harder. So idk why you expect them to be all the same, since they've never been all the same. Even current EXes aren't all the same.
And people who did Ultima Unreal probably also did the previous ones, which were nothing like it, and if they ddn't they should know they existed.
Also there's literally no obligation to clear Unreal, it's something you do for fun. The rewards are quite grindy and you can get them with much less effort with gil, from the mb, since they're tradable. Why do you even wanna do them if you don't like them? Same with everybody else. It's not fun for you, just don't do it.
I liked UW, I could do it without feeling brain-friend afterward. I felt I was being adequately rewarded for my time even if the rewards were somewhat random/grindy. I could clear it on my main an alt in 90min total each week. I could carry as a healer and not have to worry about the braindead DPS eating every mechanic. I could make a mistake or misjudgement without immediately dieing or wiping the party.
Seph might as well be a Savage in terms of personal responsibility. One f-up by one person missing a mechanic is frequently a wipe. And with how tight the DPS check is, 3-4 deaths in p3 is a wipe to enrage so you might as well just wipe and reset if there are any deaths and save the time.
Welcome to Sephirot.
There's plenty of content in this game that's doable without hours upon hours of misery. What I think you mean is you want more content that's at Unreal Ultima level difficulty added to the game.
What you want you will not be able to guarantee with Unreal fights given their purpose. It will always be dependent on how the fight was when it launched as to how easy or hard it will be.
Hopefully the upcoming Criterion dungeons will be that for you for at least one of the modes being added.
Which is made all the more frustrating because for a whole 4 months there was content that I enjoyed doing that was difficult without having to invest 100% of my brain power for hours every week. Now it's back to a) mind-numbing Normal/Expert or b) meatgrinder Sav/Ex for a whole patch cycle again. Only this time around there nothing drawing me into Sav because I don't like the armors nor do I like the weapons for Ex4.
With how the end game is currently being designed as two difficulties; "coloring book" vs "spinning plates, while dancing the tango and calculating advanced math" I am really losing hope the Criterion Norm/Sav will be any different.
I'd say Ultima difficlty was about the same as an alliance raid, so there is content of that difficulty, just it's 24 men. And I guess normal raids are also about the same tbh, I'd even say this tier of normal raids is harder than ultima unreal.
Yeah that's what normal mode content is for... Where people frequently get carried and still clear within the length of a weekly Netflix episode. If that's enjoyable there are 4 brand new normal raid bosses to do every week.
So stop dying and missing mechanics in a clear party. Not being able to fail mechanics doesn't mean it's savage level. Every extreme has had mechanics you can't ignore.
If the problem is only other people making mistakes, here's a tip. Don't go for the hand holding parties with a comment saying something like "let's try it and no salt please :)". Those attract players who are unsure about the mechanics and expect gentle guidance. Meaning you'll spend the next 2 hours teaching them the first phase until people begin to leave and you get to start fresh with a new batch of inexperienced players.
I don't know about that. I write no salt often in my PFs and it's usually chill and smooth experiences, while wehn I don't write I get people who play horribly and keep wiping the party while at the same time getting angry and blaming literally anyone else but themselves for failure. Not being salty doesn't mean you wanna be carried, it means you're mature enough not to throw a fit, and rather discuss mistakes with calm and contructive criticism. Bad attitude doesn't equal high skills at all.
My best clear parties in different patches have been the ones with something like "2 wipes = disband", "don't waste my time" or "fail and get kicked". Got my clear today in one of those. They ended up being more lenient and handled a couple of wipes without any salt, but the description did its job filtering out people who go into a clear party unprepared. The leader was competent as well. He just didn't want his time wasted anymore lol.
I feel for you Issaella. I tried sooo hard the last 2 days to get a party to go the distance and it was just failure, failure, failure. PF people simply assume they can go in with little to no experience and clear this in a hour. Sorry, ain't happening.
Finally I got into a 'clear' party that people seemed to know what they were doing. It still took 2 complete 60 min sessions to get our act together, but we finally did it and I got my 'duty complete.'
The hard part was that DPS check though. Even if you know what to do mechanic wise: if too many people die there is no chance to beat the enrage. We saw 0.*% soooo many TIMES! We had to resort to potting to get the DPS to kill it.
Well, that's PF parties for you, you take what you can get and hope for the best. LOL
Raid statics though seem to have little trouble with it, which is not surprising being expert players and all ;)
And the best thing about this fight? The HEALING! My God is this fight a healing challenge! Soooo much fun as I cleared as a White Mage. Yeah, for healers that complain about no challenging healing, try this fight. :D
I would suggest to find old HW videos of the Sephirot EX fights to get a better understanding of the mechanic flow that occurs at sync'd and at launch patch ilvl. And also perhaps turn down some of the skill effects if they are too bright?
Maybe I've been into low dps teams but I cannot recall his HP to be this high. I'm sure the first phase only repeated like 2 times for most parties and healing felt a lot easier too.
I just hope people won't get discouraged trying out faux hollows again as it's a fun piece of weekly content
One thing to note about healing feeling more intense than you might be used to is that in 3.2 you relied a lot more on GCD heals and all three healers had strong tools to make their GCD healing stronger during that time (such as divine seal on WHM)
So if you aren’t actively making use of heal up buffs like temperance, dissipation, physis 2 etc then the healing is quite high for an extreme because back then the devs actually balanced fight healing expecting you to use every tool you had, not like 2 out of 15 pick of the box like now
Some of the unreals are gonna be harder than others, just like the extremes they're based off of.
Consequently, I made the decisions both to run Ultima as much as I could, and to not touch this fight with a 10 foot pole. It'll switch to something easier again eventually.
oh yeah. It IS a marked difference than ultima.
Everyone has to be on the ball here.
especially during the debuff phase.
And my condolences to the healers. xD
a trick if you just want to learn the mechanics, do the EX fight unsynced and let him do his mechanics so you can practice it.
Why is it awful? Because you're not clearing it? Because the other players are struggling? Constantly having to repeat P1 and P2 only to get quickly owned in P3, and then not even get past P1 on the next attempt? Things like that?
I hope you realize that not only is the fight a step or two up from the previous Unreal trial, you also recognize that it is only day 3 after the patch, and players are still learning these mechanics. Some of them for the first time.
I know! So friggin awesome!Quote:
Four hours last night with nothing to show for it except missing clumps of hair and cracked teeth. Saw repeat of p3 mechanics twice, in 4h, 38% best run. Numerous insta-wipe mechanics, hard to see telegraphs (the ****ing flash before the pillars!). It might as well be 2 entirely separate fights, because p3 has no mechanical overlap with the previous phases.
You may not share my enthusiasm, but to me this sounds like total fun. Grouping up with others. The game providing actual resistance to a clear. Players talking to each other. Passing on strats; answering questions. Struggling, dying, crying, and laughing with other peeps who are also new and just wanting to learn, and maybe get a little better in the process. Dinosaurs like me remember a time when this was the MMO experience, opposed to all the instant gratification given to players today. It is a shame that you cannot acknowledge and also find enjoyment is what is a very unique mmo experience.
I think you can find the answers to this yourself. What I can tell you is there is definitely no reason for you to participate in the unreal trial if you do not enjoy it.Quote:
Unreal was the one piece of high end content I could do reliably on a weekly basis without wanting to smash my head against my desk. What purpose does this massive ramp up in difficulty serve? Chase off all the people who were doing UW reliably in PF last patch? Because I sure as hell don't want to waste another 4h trying to get a clear, I did Sav in PF last tier where weekly reclears were a complete crapshoot, I have no desire to repeat that.
I'm the only one in my FC running this fight. No big deal. I join a PF and try to bring add a friendly addition and not try to mess up too much. Practice parties to me are like the fruit among the PF foliage. I will always pick these when looking to have more fun, and duty complete parties when expecting a clear. Interesting and saddening that there are already clear parties so soon after the patch. Not even a week. Good grief.Quote:
Thanks for giving me one less reason to log in. I bet 1mil gil that my fc wont even be able to fill a group next week after last night without 4/8 PuGs. I don't want to do it again, that's for sure.
Comparing Sephirot to Ultima is a real apples and oranges thing. Sephirot was hard in it's own day where as Ultima never was. They probably should have done the HW trials in order for a more gradual step up in difficulty, Bismark and Ravana were not mechanically difficult.
I actually loved Sephirot in HW, it was my favourite trial by far. The music, the dance, so good. But, I can see how much of a shock it would be if you were hoping for Ultima difficulty.
I can promise you I am terrible at gaming. Each time I join an extreme or unreal, my first reaction is that Ill never be able to clear it.
Five runs and I wonder what was I so afraid of. You got this.
Maybe if I felt like i was making progress, maybe if the end point weren't hours more down a lightless PF tunnel. I raided in WoW vanilla-Wrath, no boss fight in those raids ever made me half as angry or feel half as bad at failing as any high end fight I've attempted in this game. I always leave feeling like **** even if we do manage to clear. Especially having done Sav in the PF last tier, because clearing once in no way guarantees a clear the next week. 1-2h per week for a clear were more likely than a 1 or 2 shot group by a mile. I don't enjoy repeated failure and I really don't enjoy repeating the same ****ing phases over and over and over for 6-8 minutes just to wipe 1 minute into p3. Regardless I'm done with it, it's not worth the frustration for 10 weeks just to get a mount or minion, I'm not wasting any more energy on it when it makes me miserable. I'll just hope next patch it's something more reasonable.
Having done p1s and p2s, I can tel you I feel exactly the opposite. It's always as bad as I anticipte. And it's not fear, it's pain aversion. The amount of frustration and mental investment for me to clear content like this is massive.
Armor skins I wanted from last tier savage, I managed to stick it out for 6 weeks to get what I wanted then I was done. I did Seph Unreal last night expecting more challenging, but doable in a reasonable amount of time and get my weekly currency. I didn't expect Sav level difficulty and 3 hours of wiping just to see p3 and start progging that for 30 seconds before wiping. With the future being multiple more hours re-clearing p1/2 just to even prog phase 3, then eating enrage for hours more and then maybe getting a clear just like Sav. Then doing it all over again the next week. The rewards just aren't worth it.
EDIT - Daily limit.
People still clear Sephiroth Ex with less usable skills, pugging the mentor roulette and it can still work with enough cooperation and understanding.
If its so frustrating maybe you are just in the wrong group.
Countless times I tried to clear hard content without being able to after numerous tries only to join a different group and clear it first try.
For anyone that is healing but gets frustrated I really suggest sticking to dpsing until you properly learn the fight. A healer that isnt accustomed to the mechanics can make the run near impossible for everyone in the end.
Content like Unreal Trials that are advertised as being more difficult and around the level of EX fights at min ilv should be hard to clear. Players should wipe over and over and over again. You may very well go a whole week without getting a clear. There isn't a guarantee. That is challenging content. You are rewarded IF you when. Not WHEN you win. It makes getting Rowena's Lanner all the more sweet when you obtain it. This is called delayed gratification
Sephirot wiping the floor with his contenders is an experience mid content players need. Humbling those who grew complacent in the 'break' in Unreal difficulty with UW, and those who think additional skills will trivialize the content and somehow make them better at mechanics. The strict requirements I am seeing in PF are also a testament to this very frustration I speak of. Don't get me wrong, I don't find enjoyment in players not having fun; but players who can't handle it when they've hit a little bit of an incline are provided a service I feel is long overdue.
The energy expenditure griping about the matter is enough to help multiple players get better at this trial, and your choice on how to spend this energy doesn't benefit anyone. Even yourself. Just think about that for a minute. If you truly choose to bow out of this content since you feel it is the best direction, then definitely leave it behind you.
As a veteran who has done all the unreal since it was released in ShB, I think you have some misunderstanding about what is unreal.
Unreal is upscaling the ilvl of an old extreme fight to the current level 90 ilvl. What you experience in an unreal is pretty much what you’d experience if doing a fight on minimum ilvl.
That being said, Ultima has always been the easiest extreme trial even on min ilvl. It was also the very first extreme trial the game released, in which the difficulty and gameplay is far out of the scope of the current fight design.
Now about Sephrioth, the extreme version was indeed a step up when released in HW compared with other HW extreme released beforehand. Compared with Ultima unreal, it’s nature to feel the difficulty ramp in Sephrioth unreal. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. The fight’s design is a lot closer to the current fight standard. It also helps players to understand things like mitigation & cooldown usage, personal responsibility, and adjustment.
In case you wonder how difficult is Sephiroth unreal comparing with every other unreal, it is slightly easier than Titan unreal (which is still the hardest). In Titan unreal, you cannot get rezzed if falling, and there’s constant dps check on the gaol every few minutes. Then Sephiroth unreal is a bit harder than Shiva unreal. It has tight dps check and some personal responsibility (like the knockback marker during the bow phase). Then we have Levithian unreal. It wasn’t a super difficult fight, but still has mechanics that wipes the party, which is the adds. It is also challenging to healers who need to keep an eye on healing off-tank which can give them a stackable debuff.
In the end, I would say if you expect Ultima unreal to be the standard (or slightly below the standard), then you’re pretty wrong about that. All other extreme trials are far difficult than Ultima ex (the only other easy extreme I can think of is Bismarck ex), not because most extreme trials are usually super difficult, but it’s because Ultima ex is way too easy.
why game so hard *waves pitchfork*
I love it, previous unreal was too easy although somehow I did manage to find people in 2x clear groups that were perma dead and caused us to hit ENRAGE, I had no idea he even had an enrage till I met such people...
It's meant to be old extreme's made for today, and sephirot was hard and it is cool I can see how hard he was on release today. If you find this one too hard you can skip it, the next one will probably be easier. At least I shouldn't find so many obviously hard carried people in pf this time around..
The whole purpose of Unreal is to scale fights to current level while retaining all of their original design, flaws and all. This is why fights like Leviathan felt extremely janky given they've long since abandoned percentage phase skipping and that fight was notorious for having awful skips if DPS was inconsistent. I do agree that releasing Ultima was probably poor foresight on the part of the dev team since it was never intended to be an Extreme fight in the first place. Ironically, they intended for Sephirot to come in 6.1 but Yoshida changed it to Ultima due to the ARR rework. Make of that what you will. As for the whole 20% argument. A lot more people than that can and will be clearing Sephirot. Just because you can't doesn't mean others have the same problem. If anything, it'll be the poor reward structure of Unreal that deters people as the weeks go by rather than the difficulty.
The fight can be a real party destroyer, but it always had been, even during current content. It was designed to be hard content during a time when the game itself expected you to know how to play your job and to learn how to push it. Either keep trying to clear, or give up and never step foot in it again. Your choice.
Like momma always said. "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen"
i'm kinda on the fence on this to be honest. on one hand i do actually think that sephiroth is "too hard" given it's nature as time limited content that doesn't offer any player power (and even the mounts/pets you can just buy or wait for the next unreal)
people can say "just gid good" but the fact of the matter is i know the fight in and out from when it was current and my first kill still took me 13 hours of wiping in party finder groups because "me knowing the mechanics" doesn't help much when others don't, or the group literally can't beat the enrage.
that said, i actually absolutely want the fight to be as unforgiven as can be, because that's just what sephiroth was back than, and that's the very essence of unreal trials and i don't want to dilute this.
final thoughts on this whole thing ? given that Sephiroth is the current unreal trial than hard as it be for a pf group i welcome it. that said i think something like Sophia would have been a better "level" for an unreal fight and i'm kinda happy that unless they decide to do thordan unreal next it pretty much can only get easier because doing Sephirot in pf was killing my soul.
At least you managed to see Phase 3, Issaella.
My group only managed to reach adds three times (and wiped during towers+tethers in P2) within 2 hours of practice. Note that my group is a mix bag of regular savage raider, non-raider (yours truly), and slow learning casual. The new Unreal is definitely tougher. Compared to UW, this time will probably be harder to farm weekly faux in PF/average skill group. In fact, I don't think my group will get our clear this week (considering our next session will be an hour sephi practice then E12S). It's too bad but we know what our pace are and will keep practicing.
Having said that, I really enjoy the new difficulty. Unreal Trials is something I look forward to since beginning because I find older EX are more fun mechanically; but I refuse to experience the fight using boring lv 50/60 kits snync. I'm glad to see posts here confirming Sephirot is just as difficult as it was before.
Do what I'm doing: just don't do it. Problem solved.
Finally beat it with randoms. Got a group that could stay alive. After that the second time went smooth.