Chaotic Alliance Raid is a fun fight, but awful content

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rueby

I think in a vacuum this fight is nice, and I think that's what they designed/made it for, a vacuum. Perhaps JP has god-tier PF experience but farming and progging this has been a pain...

At some point I think I wanted to be out of this hell because my loot goblin brain wanted everything and couldn't leave things half finished.

There's way too many variables in PF...I spent more time outside the fight than inside of it when I wanted to prog, waiting for PFs to fill only to trickle players out into disband feels painful too

---

I unfortunately think 24 person statics will slowly become a thing, especially when we get more Chaotics.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lilapop

I unfortunately think 24 person statics will slowly become a thing, especially when we get more Chaotics.

---

and honestly it's not 24 man tower problem

i started progging this fight in pf and it's a nightmare not because of difficulty but because of casual players REFUSING to get help and acknowledge their mistakes, it feels like playing with squadron bots sometimes

if they remove 24 man body check later on, people like that will still drag everyone down, either they are entitled to play how they want or just "yeah i like to play games like football irl, when i can afk in the middle of the field and enjoy the view!"

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Madris

Additionally, the PF tool is horrendous, the way it automatically closes, the way it locks in specific jobs instead of locking in roles when someone leaves.

---

Maybe I'm coping but I sort of hope that a beneficial side effect of an influx of casuals to harder content is that they scream enough to get quality of life changes made. Anyone who thinks that square listens to sweaty gamers over casuals has not tried to use some of the arcane systems we put up with.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ExiaKuromonji

I don't get why people keep calling towers a body check. You can survive 2 towers being miss as long as they aren't 1-person towers. I've always considered "body checks" as being mechanics that have a 0 chance of recovery and an instantaneous wipe. Best examples would be High Concept or basically any mechanic in P12S but there were tons of body checks in EW. It's not a body check if you can survive with less than the required amount.

In short. If you can recover then I don't consider it a body check.

---

Something can be intended and recognized as a body check mechanic even if there's a corner case where it's survivable. Golbez EX was one. If towers and meteors were wrong, you could chuck the meteors into the towers to save the healer in the middle for LB3. But that was still considered one of the body check points in that fight.

I have cleared enough to have full gear set for healer. I will say this is by far the worst content they have ever shoveled at us. Not 1 second of progging or even clearing did I ever have an ounce of fun whatsoever. It was NOT rewarding feeling to clear, but felt like just the beginning of a horrible farm that I was not looking forward to experiencing at all. It's the same boss I've seen for YEARS doing roulettes, the same garbage mechs just recycled from a past Savage fight, merged with a horrible and boring old AR to make this Frankenstein monstrosity of "New Content"...if that's what they want to call it. lol. Just like Wuk Lamat, it's terrible, cringe, and just plain un-fun and griefing. I just chalked up the gil to buy the hairstyle and Dais mount, while not even caring to get the Cloud mount because of how much suffering I would have to endure for so long just to acquire it, only to not appreciate it all because of how un-fun the experience would be. 0/10 Content, just like the Story for Dawntrail. Hot garbage.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Capstone

Maybe I'm coping but I sort of hope that a beneficial side effect of an influx of casuals to harder content is that they scream enough to get quality of life changes made. Anyone who thinks that square listens to sweaty gamers over casuals has not tried to use some of the arcane systems we put up with.

---

There is not, nor will there be, such an influx. That said, I support QoL improvements for everyone.

The biggest problem with CODC is it's fundamental design. Its 1 trial/raid styled fight which was almost never what yhe playerbase was asking for. And for what it is it's simply just overtuned and too large. Having a 24 man savage boss raid could never have worked in xiv, it lacks the innovate designs of wow, so this content choice has turned into a pit of misery and toxicity.

Going forward there's only 2 ways to redeem Chaotic alliance raid. Make the content a little easier and stop with constant body/enrage checks. Seriously Mr ozma we are tired of this recycled formula, we didn't like it on p10 and we don't like it here.

Change the number of people down to 8.
If your going to copy the raid skeleton then just copy the player number too. This weird amount of 24 people feels heavily unbalanced

This content is dying rapidly as more and more people get the reward they wanted and leave it for good. It has no longevity, no future. Criterion is more alive. For all the effort in designing this fight just letting it die a violent and fast death has to be such a waste

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

Seriously Mr ozma we are tired of this recycled formula, we didn't like it on p10 and we don't like it here.

---

This may be a controversial take but I think they need to find a new raid designer; not only is Mr Ozma's raid design tired and unfun, but this is now the second time he's "accidentally" overtuned a brand new piece of battle content to be savage difficulty. If he's unable to do the job correctly, then he needs to be replaced with someone who isn't.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SkankyRoe

This may be a controversial take but I think they need to find a new raid designer; not only is Mr Ozma's raid design tired and unfun, but this is now the second time he's "accidentally" overtuned a brand new piece of battle content to be savage difficulty. If he's unable to do the job correctly, then he needs to be replaced with someone who isn't.

---

ooc what was the other piece of content?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SkankyRoe

This may be a controversial take but I think they need to find a new raid designer; not only is Mr Ozma's raid design tired and unfun, but this is now the second time he's "accidentally" overtuned a brand new piece of battle content to be savage difficulty. If he's unable to do the job correctly, then he needs to be replaced with someone who isn't.

---

When I worked in a job in which I commissioned content, if a creator gave me something that failed to meet the specs, I returned it with notes and asked them to fix it. I'd always assumed this was standard, but apparently SE just laughs and goes with it.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lilapop

I unfortunately think 24 person statics will slowly become a thing, especially when we get more Chaotics.

---

24 man statics becoming a thing would actually be a good thing for the game.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JimCasey_RF6

24 man statics becoming a thing would actually be a good thing for the game.

---

I can't see that at all? How?
Game dev is a zero sum game. Finite resources.
If you are encouraging 24 man statics, there is other stuff you are not encouraging.
I've been in many great communities (or great for a while)
Even quite large communities can struggle to put together 8 people.
A static of 24 people is going to struggle to have any reason to get together or be very social.
I only see 24 man statics being a place to recruit 8 mens from.
Each 24 man static will benefit 8 players at most and have no impact on the rest of the game as I see it.

How will 24 man statics be any good for the wider game? I dint see it being significant or budging the needle at all.

As someone who's done this enough to get both mounts:

Good:
Phase 1. This actually feels chaotic with all the people scurrying around, and has enough things in it to get people a decent chunk of the time (ex: remembering your hand while remembering the EnBlank mechanic, though that second one's in chat too)

Bad:
The body check towers. Idk how exactly I'd fix these though without making them worthless though. Make missed ones heal the boss maybe? It's just an issue that these so quickly spiral into an instant wipe from the damage/vulns going out, if SE wants this to be "hard content for everyone", that you can just roll up into PF and do.

Phase 2 Design: The fight feels like 2.5 mini-fights strapped together with duct tape. The interaction between the groups is pretty minimal, and when especially on the inside tiles you're only really interacting with 2 other people for most of the fight, it doesn't feel like it really had to be part of a 24 man at all. I get that in phase 1 there isn't really much "interaction" for a lot of the fight either, but being in the hustle + bustle, and keeping an eye out for hand pvp from 20 other people, makes it feel a bit more alliance-y.

Good in theory, bad in practice:
Looming Chaos. It's a fun idea and being forced to learn different parts of the fight is neat, but the fact that it's baitable throws that into the trash. It should be purely random (within your role), and happen at the start of the phase, to actually be chaotic / force people to learn all the parts of the fight.

The newbie bonus. I get that it was intended to help new players, but in practice it created this kind of "haves vs have nots" FOMO with mass bonus parties. I know people who got their 75x token mount off of 2 or 3 runs near the content release, where newer players who couldn't get around to it will take like 70+ runs to get the dais, and that discrepancy is insane to me. Either reduce the bonus (ex: 2 demi 2s per clear, 1 per person per bonus, prices adjusted accordingly), or maybe make the newbie help bonus only apply after a certain # of weeks (so that people who want to rush the content don't just get a bajillion gil of stuff, and it's still there to help people through the content who aren't able to get clears)

I get that at some level they likely wanted to overtune vs undertune and have people deem it a failure, but I can definitely feel that they overshot it a bit. In my successful parties, it seems like the vast majority are wearing ultimate / savage criterion / deep dungeon solo type of titles, which I don't think is the type of player that really needed a "hard alliance raid" type of content. Maybe the next Chaotic could be like UWU to UCoB and turn it down a bit just to get more different types of people into the content type.

I think that there's 3 things that they could do to make phase 2 less punishing while not making it that much easier.

1) Keep the 12 tower spawns, but make them all solo towers, that would make it less of a body checks because you'd only need 2 people per quadrant and outside platforms alive to complete the mechanic.

2) For the chaser beams after Looming Chaos, if the target dies, don’t retarget it. It makes the mechanic more deadly than it should be when it can just retarget and kill people who can't do anything about it.

3) Put in a platform that allows people from the middle to jump to the outside, make it a long stun or a high damage down to prevent people abusing it to avoid mechanics, but it should be possible to move from the inside to the outside because if the outer group wipes out, the middle group can't raise them or they're also stuck on the tiles, so all they can do is wait for a wipe.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by JimCasey_RF6

24 man statics becoming a thing would actually be a good thing for the game.

---

Elaborate?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

ooc what was the other piece of content?

---

The first Criterion was made in response to players asking for more difficult 4-man content, and like with Chaotic, it was intially pushed to be Extreme difficulty before they pulled the "oops we made it Savage teehee please look forward to it". Just like they did here with Chaotic.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mawlzy

When I worked in a job in which I commissioned content, if a creator gave me something that failed to meet the specs, I returned it with notes and asked them to fix it. I'd always assumed this was standard, but apparently SE just laughs and goes with it.

---

I dunno if Mr Ozma was reprimanded for messing up the difficulty of the first Criterion but either way he clearly didn't learn from/didn't care about his mistake.

The main problem (besides the rewards which are a whole other issue) with Variant/Criterion is the three difficulty levels go Very Easy -> Savage -> Savage++. Mr. Ozma is obviously very good at designing high-difficulty content but I worry that he'd turn this game into Wildstar if given the power.

For me, the raid is fine but the drop rate of the mounts is riduculous low, maybe lower than EX trial.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wingale

For me, the raid is fine but the drop rate of the mounts is riduculous low, maybe lower than EX trial.

---

That alone is a very good reason for me to never waste anymore time in there...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Wingale

For me, the raid is fine but the drop rate of the mounts is riduculous low, maybe lower than EX trial.

---

Only have 4 clears so far, but I have yet to see anything other than gear coffers drop, and most of those were during the bonus window. Two more runs to complete the gear set, then another 50 for the Cloud mount? I don’t know if I have the endurance! The Dais is going to be enough of a challenge with the first-timer bonuses trickling off; only have 25 of those tokens.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

Only have 4 clears so far, but I have yet to see anything other than gear coffers drop, and most of those were during the bonus window. Two more runs to complete the gear set, then another 50 for the Cloud mount? I don’t know if I have the endurance! The Dais is going to be enough of a challenge with the first-timer bonuses trickling off; only have 25 of those tokens.

---

The drop rates are bullshit.
I have 70+ clears...
I saw the hair like 5? ish times
I saw the minion 2 times
I saw the shroud 1 time
I saw the tile mount 2 times

You're definitely fighting layers of RNG. RNG of the farm group. RNG of the happy hour. RNG of the coffer drops. RNG of the roll. I hate layered RNGs personally...

But of course this could all be 'unlucky RNG'...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rueby

The drop rates are bullshit.
I have 70+ clears...
I saw the hair like 5? ish times
I saw the minion 2 times
I saw the shroud 1 time
I saw the tile mount 2 times

You're definitely fighting layers of RNG. RNG of the farm group. RNG of the happy hour. RNG of the coffer drops. RNG of the roll. I hate layered RNGs personally...

But of course this could all be 'unlucky RNG'...

---

70+ clears! *cries* I spend most of my time in PF waiting for parties to fill, and then hoping they see it through if the first pull doesn’t go perfectly. lol

But yes the RNG is a nightmare… and I do wish they had accounted for the way the first-timer bonus will eventually dry up when they went about setting totem amounts. If I don’t get lucky on a drop, the Dais could theoretically take me longer than the Cloud!

(Posting in 2 parts - I'm sorry I ramble lol)
I was able to clear it for the first time last night, and farm it 3 more times for a total of 4 kills. I was only able to clear it thanks to a friend inviting me to a pre-made group.
As for drops, only the Chest and Pants coffers dropped together for the first 3 kills. On the last kill, only the Gloves and Pants coffers dropped. I know it's just 4 kills but what the heck is that RNG....


Drops aside though, I think I overall have 2 major complaints:

1. Doing it without a pre-made is insane. It took 2ish hours for me to get 4 kills with a pre-made - most people had cleared already but me and a few others had only progged up to swaps. We also had to find new people between kills due to various net + power outage issues. Meanwhile, while initially progging through PF, it took 50 minutes to get a group to fill in the first place, just to get 3 pulls in, have someone leave, have everyone leave the instance to put the pf back up, wait another 30 minutes to get someone new, get another 3 ish pulls before someone else leaves - in which several people leave, wait ANOTHER 30 minutes or something (I was really losing track of time by this point) to fill and at least get a decent amount of time in instance before more people leave, the group leader leaves, and the whole thing disbands. Just to get very messily up to swap prog. Which in reality was like, Cleanly-3-Mechanics-Before-That Prog. So in 2 hours it took to clear with a good group, it took 3 hours to sloppily prog half way through the fight. Now of course, the pre-made I think was full of people who were ultimate raiders - most if not all probably were. But the main issue in pf was just the waiting game. The Find-24-People Prog. They need to take a page out of WoW's book here and have some sort of way to re-fill while in instance with some sort of waiting list type of feature. I don't actually play WoW (haven't since early Pandaria lol), but my bf who does has talked a lot about their wait list feature, and frankly it's just shown me how insane FFXIV's system can be with massive content like this. Even if not a wait list, do SOMETHING to make FINDING PEOPLE easier. I'm patient, but a lot of people aren't.

(Part 2)
2. Difficulty of phase 2 is probably too hard for their first chaotic alliance raid. Now I'm not here to complain about difficulty - there are plenty of other threads for that. But I think for the first ever Chaotic Alliance Raid, they should have gone a bit easier on the difficulty to ease people into this type of content. Phase 1 I think is fine. Phase 2 on the other hand.... I think the main factor of difficulty is individual player's responsibility. Think about the difference in an extreme and savage fight. In extreme, there aren't a lot of body checks. In savage, there are. Phase 2 had a lot of player responsibility that could cause a wipe. Yes, you could survive towers exploding if it was only 1 or 2, or you could tank LB it. Players dying on tiles wasn't too bad cause they could get rezzed quick enough and use the atomos pads to get back in. But, for a lot of those mechanics, it probably takes a more skilled player to make those quick adjustments. They probably should have toned it down a little to get more casual players into it. If the first barrier (actually filling a pf in less than an hour) is as high as it is, you have to make the rest feel attainable. Of course I don't want the devs to make it TOO easy; I really enjoyed the difficulty as it is now. But for content that requires 24 players, you need to have it be easy enough to pick from players of all (or at least most) skill ranges. IMO, tiles felt like a joke with how easy they are (at least as a phys ranged). Meanwhile, doing the outside platforms was really stressful sometimes, and I didn't even make it all the way through the phase.

Of course, there are other smaller complaints I have (such as dividing the parties up in a weird way as mentioned earlier; I realized one instance in that playing dnc was a bad idea cause my buff only reached like one person) but those have probably already been mentioned in other posts. I just wanted to list the main 2 things I think the devs should focus on. I agree with OP's points for the most part.

TL;DR: Make it easier to fill a group and keep it filled, and tone down the difficulty just slightly - make less individual player responsibility so that it's more on the level of an extreme rather than savage and you'll probably get more people doing the content. We need better midcore content and this was almost it, just a bit too difficult for most people imo.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

70+ clears! *cries* I spend most of my time in PF waiting for parties to fill, and then hoping they see it through if the first pull doesn’t go perfectly. lol

But yes the RNG is a nightmare… and I do wish they had accounted for the way the first-timer bonus will eventually dry up when they went about setting totem amounts. If I don’t get lucky on a drop, the Dais could theoretically take me longer than the Cloud!

---

They probably designed it that way on purpose. "oh the new player bonus dried up? lets get some more new people in!" Perfect on paper, not-so in practice.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

70+ clears! *cries* I spend most of my time in PF waiting for parties to fill, and then hoping they see it through if the first pull doesn’t go perfectly. lol

But yes the RNG is a nightmare… and I do wish they had accounted for the way the first-timer bonus will eventually dry up when they went about setting totem amounts. If I don’t get lucky on a drop, the Dais could theoretically take me longer than the Cloud!

---

I am very often very unlucky with rng. That's why I saved gil for a while so that I can just buy the hair.

Example: I have no clue how damn often I cleared Delubrum but I NEVER saw the hair from it drop. xD
I bought this one for 20.000.000 Gil and was unhappy later when they make those hair accessible with coins and the gil price droped a lot.

I bought the new hair for 25.000.000 gil and I like it. Now I have to farm gil again. But I prefer farming gil than running the same thing again and again never getting anything.

Funny thing: I was so often in Delubrum because I also wanted the golden Gabriel mount.
I never saw hair or mount. After 1 year I also bought the mount.

And then..., very short time after I bought it..., there was some reason why I was in delubrum again...
And then the mount dropped. xD
As if the game is maliciously mocking me. But worst rng for me is Khloe sticker girl. o-o
I want to throw stuff at her. qwq