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For those of y'all who did Sephirot extreme on launch, how does it compare in terms of difficulty? Is this unreal a faithful rebalancing? Having finally gotten around to doing unreal this week, it's a pretty fun fight. Lots of stuff happening, pretty beefy damage on my tankbutt.
It's a pretty faithful balancing. Everything is as dangerous as it was back then, and the fight is just as unforgiving. There's a reason why we feared Sephirot EX back in HW, and now you all know why.
It may seem like they increased the difficulty in this Unreal compared to the old Extreme. It's the same. You are essentially doing it at Min iLv. Extremes are not created equal. If I remember correctly, Yoshi-P refused to personally call Ultima's Bane an Extreme because of how easy it was compared to Garuda, Ifrit and Titan EX that was added with the same patch.
The general rule is that Extremes that are available when an expansion launches are easier than those added with later patches. The exception is ARR where it was the reverse.
I tried clearing it one time back in HW when it was new. Didn't return to it until Stormblood launch and even then it was still pretty dang awful. I don't take part in Unreal trials, but it's nice to see that they can still challenge people appropriately.
My intro to this was the Morbol Mount hunt. Even with mech skipping, it was still pretty rough, especially Phase 2. This feels very much the same with all that seems to trip people up.
It is essentially exactly what I remember from when the ex came out.
A good team will have no problem killing it before his full attack rotation is done. A struggling team can limp their way through with lots of deaths.
I have cleared Sephirot synced many times and also as a blue mage and it feels much the same as the current unreal version, except you skip a lot most of the first phase. I've done it minimum item level as well where the first phase has to be done and the parties got to second phase but usually couldn't clear it.
The only differences I've noticed are that it telegraphs the earth shaker proximity because it wasn't intuitive to people, we no longer experience permanent death when we get knocked off and we all have more abilities available to tackle it with. When tanks have stronger mitigation available and stronger self-heals, it does reduce the burden on the healers to keep them alive so they can focus on the rest of the party.
In Sephirot specifically, I don't think the impact of being level 90 is as great as in Ultima. In minimum item level Ultima, one of the biggest difficulties is actually the healing and mitigation which was easier in Unreal because of all our level 90 traits and abilities. In Sephirot, you have to bait everything right, the right status effects need to go to the right spots and the dance overall needs to be done right and if it's done wrong it's usually a wipe, whether in Unreal or in Extreme synced/minimum item level.
So it's not completely faithful compared to minimum item level, but it is probably faithful to how it was at the time (beside not having permanent death) because extremes are not usually done minimum item level even when they release. Minimum item levels are below what competitive players are wearing at the time, so the incoming damage is lower than it's designed to be. In Unreal we lower the incoming damage with our extra tank and healer abilities that are not available at 60.