Endwalker Raids (possible Spoiler)
So i´ve played through them and i´m convinced that you can do it a lot better SE.
First of all, it´s again just more of the same, which is sadly no surprise. "Stack, spread, antiknockback, move to ABCD" in short form.
First
- The castbars seems to be endless long just to get "stay left from the boss, stay right from the boss"
- The major mechanic is about debuffs. But you do nothing else than swapping between fire / ice groundplates to avoid an aoe or you move to fire / ice based on your debuff.
It´s nothing special, we had all of this before and i can already smell how savage is going to work. Imo it looks a lot like E9 in kind of aoe´s, but we don´t have platforms which might fall down.
Second
- You´ve 4 platforms to move onto. They might have some meaning in savage, but imo they´re pretty much irrelevant.
- The whole fight is just a lot of aoe spam combined with stack / spread and antiknockback mechanics.
Again nothing special.... at first i thought it´s going to be something like alexander with its platforms, but nothing so far happened. Just the standard telegraphed attacks with less space thanks to water everywhere.
Third
- A bit more mechanical deep and things to care about since telegraphs are shorter or just visuals.
- Both tanks will share the autohit damage. (Or the 2nd in the aggro-list)
Seems to move into the right direction, but instead of a bunch of spread / stack mechanics, it´s "in or out". The "pause" in the fight because the boss is untargetable is really not needed... you´ve like 100 years to move out of the mid anyway.
It could be atleast more interesting in savage.
Fourth
- This fight has everything and away from a fast knockback you´ve seen once or already smelt through the wateranimation, you´ve a bunch of time. It´s always stack, spread, antiknockback, move to the corner, move to the side.
- Not really new but turned around are the job based orbs and stacks. Instead of going to your job-symbol, you move in one which is not yours. But even that is marked with a fed red cross.
I personall expected more from the last fight. This one has no deep mechanics overall. The standard stuff is just based behind some new ground-animations but still getting telegraphed afterwards. Never thought i´m going to say this, but even E12 with the picture-aoes has been more interesting and something you needed to remember.
I know they´re just normal raids, but so far they´re actually easier than the normal 89 / 90 primals and way too obvious. I don´t know what SE is going to bring us with savage, but all the stuff seems pretty obvious imo like "no telegraphs, faster animations, knockback into stack / spread instead of just solo knockbacks, 3 fire/ice debuffs at once and you need to preposition on the correct platform, you can´t swap in between." Something like that.
For my personal taste the graphics and music are fine, but the environment and animations aren´t so far. E1-4 wasn´t that big of a deal too, but E5-12 (except E9) has been great. Don´t know... feels a bit like we´re set back to ARR, even if it´s a prison.
In comparison to Shb the raids lack hard in kind of something new and depth. While E9-E12 wasn´t superior as E5-E8, all of them had some uniqueness between the standard raidwide stuff. E10 with all the random shadow-attacks has been a great feature. Same with the pictures in E12, pretty much everything about E8 or that you needed to kite and swap between colors in E7 combined with teleports and so on.
P1-4 is losing hard against everything we had before. I thought it´s not possible since the latest tier was already way to static and easy, but SE found a way to prove me wrong once again. I don´t get why we can´t get content atleast on the level of E8. Using medigation, dispells, cc, silence and dps checks should been major requirements for any raid.
(And again, yes it´s just normal, but common... Ppl wipe more to Hydaelyn than this.)