I hope that Crystal Tower gets rebalanced.

With the redesign of so many low level dungeons, and the general rework of old content in order to bring the earlier content up to date with current standards, there is no better time to take a look at one of the few remaining bits of slog content.

Fundamentally, the Crystal Tower raids are broken. Their mechanics are either unclear (Bone Dragon, Scylla, Amon, Five Headed Dragon), inconsistent with modern standards (Atmos, Behemoth King, Atomos Prime, Cerberus), or entirely irrelevant (Behemoth King, Scylla, Glasya Labolas). Sometimes, they are a combination of some of the above. But this post isn’t really about me complaining constantly - and I don’t really want to come off as whining. As they say, criticism is import but it must be constructive. Fortunately, there are relatively small changes that could be made - at least from my point of view - to the encounters in order to fix some of the small amounts of slog that build up into a much larger amount of exhaustion and burnout.

Firstly, one thing that I’ve noticed the most is that some of the raid mechanics either force noninteraction, or are too quick to be interacted with. For example in both the Amon and Scylla fights, there is a mechanic whereby players are encased in ice - forced to watch as their fellow party members get to press buttons and engage with the raid while they wait for the moment to be unfrozen either by someone with a slow moving tether or an errant frog who forgot that if you unfreeze people in the Amon fight, the party wipes. These are not particularly easy to change, especially without redoing the fight as a whole. A possible idea might be to have Scylla’s tethers replaced by circle AoEs centered on the target player which fire after a set time, and to have Amon’s attack drop Ice Meteors instead of encasing players in the ice themselves.

Secondly, some bosses simply do not live long enough to do the things that they are supposed to do. The most egregious example of this is Glasya Labolas, though Thanatos comes at a close second. Ever since I created my account 6 years ago, I have seen Glasya Labolas do two entire mechanics, and that includes the one where he summons his robots to increase the rate of his charge. I understand that ultimately, as players consistently gain access to higher level gear certain bosses become much less challenging. This can be seen already with the first boss of Copied Factory, who barely managed to get a single Systematic Suppression off during the final patches of Shadowbringers. However, there is a difference between a boss being less challenging, and being a glorified punching bag. That, of course, is why Cape Westwind was removed. The easiest method to rectify these sorts of things is to simply add a few zeroes to Glasya Labolas’s HP…. But I do not particularly see this boss fight being properly brought up to modern standards without at least reworking how Glasya Labolas’s charge mechanic works.

Thirdly, there are many mechanics which are entirely out of line with modern QoL standards. For instance, in the Atomos and Atomos Prime fights, any player can instantly begin the encounter with little regard for the continued happiness of their fellow raid members. In this situation, a grand number of players will be forced to accept the ‘teleport to locked area’ prompt which appears 15 seconds later. In many cases, periods when the Alliances are split up and asked to take on their own respective bosses are common and not a problem. For instance, Puppet’s Bunker does an absolutely stunning job of this. However, in the case of Atomos and Atomos Prime all those who join the battle late will not be allowed to enter alongside their teammates, but rather be forced into the leftmost lane/circle no matter what alliance they belong to. This leaves their alliance at a loss for manpower - occasionally to the fatal detriment of the entire raid. For this, I would simply ask that the Alliances be automatically sorted in a manner akin to the Royal City of Rabanastre.

Finally, some mechanics are just confusing. For instance, Amon will turn three players into frogs. Then, Amon will summon snakes. The Snakes will aggro onto the frogs and chase them down. The snakes will be able to use their transform skill to deal damage to the snakes - With the exception that if a snake is aggro’ed onto said frog, their attacks will do greatly reduced damage. Similarly, in order to slow Glasya Labolas’s charge, one must willingly throw themself into an AoE so that someone else can DPS down the Clockwork Wright creating it.