DualShocker Interview - 3.5 pt 2 next week, supposedly

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Originally Posted by Magic-Mal

One fight I like that's not 100% dependant on DPS? Diabolos Hollow. In the end it turns into a fight for survival rather than DPS DPS DPS DPS. Healers HAVE to heal. And they usually heal a ton. Raising. Using that LB3. Winning at that point is all on the healers. That makes the fight unique. It also makes it headache-worthy when healers are bad...

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It still doesn't change the fact that higher dps will break Diabolos Hollow's Void Stoneskin faster. The longer that stoneskin is up, the longer all of his hits does guaranteed critical damage.

Honestly, I think the "if you dps too hard, you wipe"-type mechanics are pretty cheap. That's one big reason I mentioned the Sword boss from the fight in WildStar, because it's a mechanic that can be used if you are careful to lead to a very effective kill, but it's also not an insta-wipe if you don't.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

Have you actually done Ifrit EX when it was current? That and T7 were notorious for having parts where you'd basically have to stop attacking or else you hard-wiped (Ifrit) or had a phase transition so awkward it 99% of the time led to a wipe (Melusine). T7 in particular had a lot of skilled raiders complaining about the awful phase push once their DPS started to get decked out in full 110s. All mechanics were being done properly, there was no "cheese" involved. (How would you even cheese those fights, anyway?)

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Ifrit EX and T7 are both cases of poorly designed phase transitioning.

Ifrit EX doesn't actually begin its phases until it uses certain abilities and it won't interrupt it's current action to do them. You end up pushing pass the summon nail trigger and into the "are all nails killed" trigger so a wipe occurs when it finally uses the summon nail ability. After Ifrit EX, add phase triggers and their summon ability has priority over everything but phase change triggers.

T7 is the result of "soft" phase transitions. The previous phase isn't cleaned away so phase overlap ends up causing problems. Pretty much every phase change since 2.2 has been much harder.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

Honestly, I think the "if you dps too hard, you wipe"-type mechanics are pretty cheap.

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Most of the time those are unintended side effects of poorly designed phase transitions. The wipe happens because the wrong variable is true/false and the priorities of phase changes put wipe at the highest level.

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Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo

... you'd basically have to stop attacking or else you hard-wiped (Ifrit) ... a lot of skilled raiders complaining about the awful phase ...

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I think skilled raiders did not get wiped, because skilled raiders, when nails comes out, instantly goes to them to get rid of them. Most likely, some raider were not so much 'skilled' and continuing dps Ifrit at that time. Being geared and being skilled has proven multiple times not being correlated.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

I think skilled raiders did not get wiped, because skilled raiders, when nails comes out, instantly goes to them to get rid of them. Most likely, some raider were not so much 'skilled' and continuing dps Ifrit at that time. Being geared and being skilled has proven multiple times not being correlated.

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You don't get it lol, without holding back dps you won't even see the nails. The phase skips directly to the ulti attack even before the nails appear. Same thing with levi, you have to hold back until the balls appear, if you keep dpsing normally levi will do the ulti before the balls appear.

It's stupid that the mechanics that determine an instant wipe is skippable.

Personally I've never had problems with Ifrit and Leviathan's phases when they were current. T6, T7 and Ramuh on the other hand were pure BS as they weren't just a case of being overgeared (holding back in T6 and T7 at i90 was just depressing)

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

You don't get it lol, without holding back dps you won't even see the nails. The phase skips directly to the ulti attack even before the nails appear. Same thing with levi, you have to hold back until the balls appear, if you keep dpsing normally levi will do the ulti before the balls appear.

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There was a tell for when the nail phase begins, it is very easy for melee dps to miss, but right before a nail phase begins a ring of flames will appear in front of Ifrits head. The long animation from the auto-attack cleave flame breath would delay this tell and the tell's long animation (and its quote text) often gave dps not paying attention enough time to push through the relatively small phase window.

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It's stupid that the mechanics that determine an instant wipe is skippable.

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Which is why in later fights the boss' have much more obvious phase transitions, much larger hp buffers or gain damage immunity, and when an add phase can be skip the wipe doesn't trigger.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

It's stupid that the mechanics that determine an instant wipe is skippable.

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If you wipe, that haven't skipped. You skipped the "save me" button before it, instead.

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Originally Posted by LalaRu

If you wipe, that haven't skipped. You skipped the "save me" button before it, instead.

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That "save me" button is what determines whether or not you wipe, so my point stands that it's stupid to make that part skippable. You're literally punishing people for gearing up or getting better. Imagine ravana ex giving you an instant wipe if you skip the butterfly phase, that's how stupid it is.

Well at least the devs have learned not to make the same mistakes, afaik none of the recent fights wipe the groups that have "too much" dps. There are some awkward skips that makes having a bit less dps to be more beneficial (first optical sight skip in a11s makes you deal with the add, while not skipping the optical sight allows you to skip the add for faster clear), but none that will instantly wipe the group for doing too much dps.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

There was a tell for when the nail phase begins, it is very easy for melee dps to miss, but right before a nail phase begins a ring of flames will appear in front of Ifrits head. The long animation from the auto-attack cleave flame breath would delay this tell and the tell's long animation (and its quote text) often gave dps not paying attention enough time to push through the relatively small phase window.

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Thanks, I knew about the text indicating that the nail phase is coming soon, but the rest are new to me. I always find this kind of pushes annoying. If you skip the trigger (nails/balls/adds) phase they should automatically count it as if you completed those phases and not give you an instant wipe. If you look at a11s for example, skipping the lapis lazuli phase won't make the group wipe to eternal darkness (which is what happens when you don't kill them in time, I think?), that's much better than ifrit/levi/ramuh, especially considering that we will be able to do it unsynced later in 4.0 and later expansions.

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Originally Posted by St0rmchild

You're not being punished for overgearing/being gud, you're being punished for cheesing the fight (pushing through and thereby disregarding mechanics phases)

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So what is the point of getting better gear and being stronger? Is it not to make previous fights easier? What reward do we get for working hard obtaining better gear? All it does in fights like that is hinder mechanics. In any other mmo I played or game for that matter, it def made fights easier and impossible to fail...in this game it causes instant wipe. Kind of sad.

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Originally Posted by Iromi

So what is the point of getting better gear and being stronger? Is it not to make previous fights easier? What reward do we get for working hard obtaining better gear? All it does in fights like that is hinder mechanics. In any other mmo I played or game for that matter, it def made fights easier and impossible to fail...in this game it causes instant wipe. Kind of sad.

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"Getting better gear" works on a cycle. You get better gear to beat current content, and when the content and gear cycles out you start again. You don't "get i270 gear" to challenge leviathan because the content is long become irrelevant. The instant wipe is an unintended side effect of the fight not being intended to allow you to cheese it in that way and unsynced was likely not even considered at that point in development.

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

"Getting better gear" works on a cycle. You get better gear to beat current content, and when the content and gear cycles out you start again. You don't "get i270 gear" to challenge leviathan because the content is long become irrelevant. The instant wipe is an unintended side effect of the fight not being intended to allow you to cheese it in that way and unsynced was likely not even considered at that point in development.

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It's the dev's fault if they don't take into account overgearing though. Especially considering this game is heavily based on vertical progression.

The simplest albeit not necessarily the best solution to this would be enforcing ilv syncing on every fight to the highest ilv obtainable during the patch when they're current (e.g. 210 for thordan ex and gordias savage, 240 for sephirot/nidhogg ex and midas savage, etc.), though it seems like certain fights from 2.x still have problems with bad pushes even at the intended max ilv (?), can't say for sure since I started playing after 3.0.

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Originally Posted by aleph_null

It's the dev's fault if they don't take into account overgearing though. Especially considering this game is heavily based on vertical progression.

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You can't design for a problem you do not know is there or know can be there.

Garuda Ex, Titan Ex and Ifrit Ex along with Ultima's Bane were not originally planned for and made primarily by reusing existing assets. The i90 "Primal" weapons were originally going to be ~i80 rewards for LotA.

The fights were made in a bit of a rush and Ifrit EX was the first appearance of the problem. Levi, Ramuh and Shiva were all given much larger hp buffers to prevent it from happening.

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The simplest albeit not necessarily the best solution to this would be enforcing ilv syncing on every fight to the highest ilv obtainable during the patch when they're current (e.g. 210 for thordan ex and gordias savage, 240 for sephirot/nidhogg ex and midas savage, etc.), though it seems like certain fights from 2.x still have problems with bad pushes even at the intended max ilv (?), can't say for sure since I started playing after 3.0.

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Please note that no fight in 3.X suffers from the "to much dps equals wipe" problem that occurs in 2.X. They fixed the problem by allowing phases to be skipped when pushed through instead of triggering the enrage.

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

Please note that no fight in 3.X suffers from the "to much dps equals wipe" problem that occurs in 2.X. They fixed the problem by allowing phases to be skipped when pushed through instead of triggering the enrage.

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Yeah which is what I meant by saying that they learned from their mistakes in the past in a previous post. I still think that they should go back and "fix" those old fights since they feel awkward or to some extent buggy, but it may not be worth the effort and time to do that.

I have no exp with game designs, but I think overgearing/overlevelling should always be taken into account in any game that has level system, since naturally people will get better gear and higher level which implies dps will naturally go higher. Triggering enrage by skipping phases due to higher dps than intended seems like a major design flaw to me, but then again everyone makes mistakes, the important thing is that they learned from those mistakes.