Is it even possible to make an even harder raid?

Contrary to belief that final coil was ezpz, I believe it's more so that the hardcore playerbase has just gotten that good. And with savage final coil coming out, they're likely just going to get much better. So is it even possible to make the next raid in 3.0 even more difficult? Without throwing in broken mechanics like prenerfed twisters?

Of course it's possible, they could make an encounter have a hundred phases of which each phase lasts 5 minutes then randomly switching to another from that 100 phase list, could take 10 hours to complete due to insane high boss health plus making every hit or skill a one hit kill on the players...but I hope they do not and any hardcore who hopes they do will never complete it without hacks or cheats.

Easily. In fact it can be done many different ways.

DPS/Healing/Tank checks that are more tightly tuned with max available gear rather then min available gear. If they were tight enough they would never be beaten until people fully farmed poetic/earlier turn drops for each step. Though this would alienate a huge % of people who could never perform well enough to maximize effectiveness.

Longer fights / & / or more late phases. Fight length increases the time it takes to learn each phase of an encounter. For example If it takes 20 minutes to get to the last phase... rather then 5... it will take exponentially longer for any group to learn each later phase (especially pre guide). It will also increase the opportunities for people to make mistakes each pull. Long fights with late phases really tend to kill player interest when in sub par progressing groups with low amounts of progression time, and long enough and you would kill all but the most dedicated of players motivation.

Larger party size. If you keep the same tightness of dps/healing/tank checks but increase the party size, the potential for mistakes increases for every single pull. It also becomes harder to recruit the number of people, harder to organize mechanics and resources, harder to get everyone's internet to not randomly lag, ect ect. Normally devs just make content easier for larger parties and the logistics make them seem harder.

Faster reaction time checks. Matched with poor netcode would alienate slow minded / laggy / bad computer / ps3 players. Even if netcode is improved... many people think they are far faster then they really are.

More "random" scripts. An increased in the randomness of an encounter would increase difficulty for groups that rely on guides, memorization to overcome an encounter. But contrary to many peoples beliefs (see lag/slow minded peoples posts on titan) it is possible to beat many encounters without knowing what will come next. It would just require faster thinking and adapting players, and far more time spent, than is the current standard for this game. Remember random scripts can also be easier... when things line up right...

Novel mechanics. Mechanics outside the norm can also increase relative difficulty. For example if a fight reversed mechanics of the game and our dps spells healed fellow players and our healing spells hurt the boss.... peoples highly practiced norms and rotations would be thrown out the window and require a whole new subset of skills to learn. Which while interesting would hurt the casual player far more then anyone with time to relearn things.

In the end I think the current setup is very well done. Although being so close to the line means sometimes fights will be too easy.. and sometimes too hard.. to any group below or above the norm.

You can always make the fight harder in many ways. Boss does more damage, has more life, faster enrage timer... There could also be very difficult mechanics they could possible introduce that require faster reaction time and adaptability.

They shouldn't though, because then the encounters would be much too difficult for players outside the .1%. If they tuned T13 to required perfect dps @i130, the fight would be impossible to beat by anyone outside of the very best raiders. That's not good for the game at all.

just take 1 to 4 or even more "new players" with you and even t1 will be hard .

Simply jusy apply iLV sync on these contents or for example make the enter requirement as AF1. ^^;

Now matter how good someone is at the game, learning and memorizing unique mechanics will always offer a challenge. The only subject in which you could easily plow through on your first try, if you were a skilled player, would be DPS checks.

Could raids be harder? Yes. Of course they can. They always can. Whether that actually constitutes a good experience or not though is another question entirely.

Just add in rng. Like pure rng and not stuff like if u do this then the boss will only aim at a random dps.
Also make a fight include that ppl who are marked with this debuff has to die or they will explode and wipe the raid within 1 minute lol.
So the stacks of weakness/ brink of death will start making the fight harder as the fight progresses.

Add this mechanic into any of the raid :" During the raid, if one member get hit by any of the mechanic, he/she will get a debuff last for 10secs. Within 10sec, if the boss is not dead, GAME OVER to the party. In addition to, all the gears, weapons accessory of all the party members will drop on the floor, un-pickup able and the party will exit the raid instance with no equipment.. " Here have fun!!!!

if they added a difficulty slider to each dungeon/raid like they do on levequest it would let everyone decide how difficult content is. Higher the difficulty the higher the reward.

I remember difficulty, where even though it drops the best items in the game it is completely ignored because nobody can kill it. When Absolute Virtue was first introduced it went years and years undefeated by conventional means (people glitched it and pulled it to tether lines where it stopped attacking which was fixed pretty quickly) Even so long that the playerbase was crying out to square enix to release some sort of information on how the heck to beat it, in which square then released a video of the dev team beating it, which still offered little to no information.

When a boss has insane regen, can instacast a bunch of teir 5 spells or cast meteor uninterrupted or even worse when almost dead just benediction himself, that was the point of stupid difficulty. Nobody enjoyed that.

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Originally Posted by Firepower

Absolute Virtue

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Absolute Virtue fascinates me because I don't believe his 'solution' ever changed throughout the entire time he existed, but it still took people years to realise that a boss actually reacted to their actions and had what were basically unique mechanics (For the unfamiliar: Absolute Virtue had access to every "Two hour ability" in the game, to use at will - these being player character super abilities. However, if you used a matching 2HA right after he did, he lost the ability to do it again). It seems, in retrospect, so astoundingly obvious - especially in the modern era of MMORPGs. Of course, even knowing that back then, he would have remained hell for the other nonsense like instacast top tier magic.

But yes. XI's had a few bosses over the course of its life that were examples of difficulty that didn't make for a good player experience, usually through obscene stat allocations.

we need moar chainsaws to juggle on slippery ice with our laser jump rope pls

I don't think so. FWiW my static's two clears on t10 have been post soft-enrage and on the second the entire party was dead (lightning finished off our last player right after the boss died) so I think it's perfectly balanced for people in i110 gear. I'm not a fan of the crafted quint-meldable gear as it trivializes gear-checks but I'm not sure "farm t10 and cap poetics for a couple weeks before you can clear t11, then farm t11 for weapons for a few weeks, etc." is desirable game design.
You can't realistically make a doable mechanic that pouring raid hours into would defeat. So what else is there? I mean, you could have some completely indecipherable mechanic that players have to guess at but that sounds terrible.
Overall there's a lot to learn in SCoB and FCoB with enough instant-death mechanics that it's going to be difficult for players to brute-force them--FCoB even buffs the bosses every time someone dies and every boss requires two tanks. So I think design is fine.

Yosida statet it in a Liveletter.

They have a big collection of data, that give them an overview, how skilled the playerbase is.

They have set a percentrange of the amount of players that shall be able to beat the content in a specified period of time.

Based on these two points they audjust the difficulty.

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Originally Posted by Danbo05

Contrary to belief that final coil was ezpz, I believe it's more so that the hardcore playerbase has just gotten that good. And with savage final coil coming out, they're likely just going to get much better. So is it even possible to make the next raid in 3.0 even more difficult? Without throwing in broken mechanics like prenerfed twisters?

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As I posted in another thread, If the same designers keep creating the mechanics for the raids then yes, they will become easier. As with TV shows, after a while they introduce new writers/directors/whatever to add new ideas. Same can apply to raids. Everyone has a certain level of imagination and a certain way of thinking. Thus the process of originiality will eventually become drained. Hence the introduction of fresh minds.