Thoughts from Shiva Unreal

This has been a really interesting trip through the time machine.

Seeing this as a non-trivial fight really calls back to older design philosophies. Mechanics are simpler in a way, but not necessarily easier. Phases are pushed not on a script, but depending on the party's DPS. And the boss has a rotation rather than a strict timeline of events that will happen until enrage.

But the thing that stuck with me most was how much I had to plan out my healing.

Now checking the logs for the raw amount heal, it's not that much higher than, say, pre-5.0-savage Innocence EX* (but it is still higher). But the way it is structured, I did really have to think about exactly how I was going to have to deal with the raid nuke spam, which CDs I was going to have to save for the tanks during certain moments, and so on.

(* I use this example because we were about the same ilvl then as Unreal's sync)

Even savage hardly does this. Oh, there's big hits - but with the exception of a few things like Shiva Savage at the very end - the damage is so infrequent there's just very little challenge to it. Pop an oGCD - maybe use some kind of augmenting CD - and back to DPS.

There's plenty of time for DPSing in Unreal too, but at least healing was much more on my mind and I was using more GCDs.

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With that said, I also want to thank the devs for making such a well-tuned fight. I was worried that, with no new mechanics/changeups, it would be pretty faceroll. Instead the challenge is right where it feels like it should be - and in concept the mechanics aren't hard, but they do need to be respected - and while unforgiving in some ways, there's also a fair bit of room for recovery instead of being pass/fail party-wipe checks.

And thank the twelve we can play it without losing so many of our abilities.

The new EX trial is pretty fun too and, hey, at least it has a heal check at the beginning. I hope to see more of this...

Actually I treated it no different from back then, in fact I was nuking more on my Whm now than I was back then and I'm more bored because it is way simpler, I remember actually doing Aero 1, aero 2, stoneskins, bigger mp management, Virus at key points, wanting people stacked for cure 3 during staff and much more that warranted an simpler design in fights, now however it is a simple fight with simple jobs and it is increadibly boring, I had more fun with the new dungeon than I did this Unreal at least as a healer, Dnc it was ok but it is rare I get to go so ham on aoes in non dungeons.

The fight was designed with a completely different kit available and it shows how badly these old fights need those kits back, cleric stance removal is the biggest offender to this fight, the design of the fight heavily punishes mis-timed cleric stance but that no longer exists and the dmg has not be scaled up enough to compensate that loss.

Asylum is up every time she switches from Bow to random staff/sword, party is covered with 1 Lily if co healer has no ogcds available, tank gets Benison going into Bow phase and medica 2 up if staff, all the extra healing tools just make me do spam more, will say this Whm is king here, Holy stun on adds trivializes the entire add phase so much, and truly begs the question why was Ast's stun removed.


TLDR Overall the fight is Shiva Ex no different just get to use full lv80 kit but because healers are so radically different from the design of ARR/HW healers the fight suffers majorly.

...I can only guess, then, that I didn't get a cohealer that heals nearly as much as yours did.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

...I can only guess, then, that I didn't get a cohealer that heals nearly as much as yours did.

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It is more a case of I knew what to expect 100% of the time and my co healer did too as multiple times we timed ogcds at same point that one of us overhealed but this was random pug party so communication was low and overhealing bound to happen if we both had same healing mindset.

This fight has a lot of things going against it that QoL or just general game improvements make issues that were there non existent now.

Few examples;
-Provoke was on a much longer CD, this CD was long enough that if she went staff->Bow->Sword->Bow->Staff, that the mt for second staff was taken extra dmg as couldn't tank swap yet as Provoke was still on CD, Unreal however it is up every weapon swap.
-Ast, Rdm, Dnc, Mch, Sam, Drk and Gnb were not a thing at this point, Ast, Rdm and Dnc being the most egregious at making this fight easier(Drk special mention to TBN).
-everyone's toolkit is vastly different from back then, tanks have multiple aoe dmg reduction skills, healers have way more ogcds, Dps have more self survival tools, they all work against this fight's original design.

This fight made me notice more than ever the drop in quality in the playerbase between low difficulty and no incentive to use kit, the designing style of the jobs and boss fights and vast netcode improvements.

On players: had a couple of groups refusing to do mechanics and kept dying in one party, another party had a dancer that never used technical step nor flourish, the one that i cleared had a whm that only used 6 buttons- glare, dia, medica, benison, cure 2 and raise. Fortunately the rest of the players in that clear party were excellent, even the sch who forgot to equip gloves
A frustrating number of players just don't want to use their full kits and worse is that fights don't require them either.
That said, this fight even if its the easiest extreme, did seem to require more frequent healing than other exs, but that's more of a damnation of modern exs than a point to shiva. note i said freqyent not harder- the damage itself is still poor on unavoidable damage

You'd be booted if you tried any of this back then

On jobs: Just wow... when I healed this way back, me and whichever scholar answered the shout (no pf in them days folks!) had a question each to answer- sch do i use eos or selene? while i had to ask do I set my hotbar for stance dance or stick to healing (if its new tank or sch co healer)
We could customise our hotbars. Healers were expected to and enjoyed dpsing and had a few options to do so, pure healers weren't a thing, shiva simply did not do enough damage. I would frequently start the fight with regen on tank, cleric stance, aero, thunder followed by stone.
Everyone had strengths and weaknesses, and you got better by doing other jobs. Each job also had a distinct playstyle and actions, skill floors and ceilings. Each job also looked like a bunch of rummage sale rejects :D

These days, healers are designed to be cure/physick/benefic bots even if all veteran healers and most new healers play like combat medics. Tanks and dps have so many more mitigation and self sustain tools. enmity is a joke as well, because shiva had frequent tank swaps. Positioning was and is absolutely critical in this fight with lots of very small safe zones and the boss frequently staying still instead of moving. You had to position correctly for the knockback in bow form- no immunity here folks, you learned to do things properly.

Overall, this makes for a poorer fight than the original. Because there are more healing tools available and more mitigation and self sustain tools for the tanks/dps, healers have proportionally less healing to do.
But unlike the original, healers nowdays have no dps kit beyond a dot and a nuke. So the increased downtime is incredibly dull and noticable

Boss design: The two key differences that stand out in this fight compared ot more modern fights is the mechanics timing and how most mechanics were simple and had tiny safe zones or fixed methods of being solved/avoided. More mechanics were also deadly (see glacier bash on none dragoons or tanks, 2 circle hits, shared damage+circle etc)
Shiva here does not have a fixed enrage timer, its based both on party dps and on her rotation. This is why one party i was in got enraged as soon as she triggered buff 11, but the clear party i had got several mechanics to finish her off in after she triggered buff 11.

Shiva does vulnerability stacks on most of her mechanics if they are failed and those that aren't, well she has a fixed damage share attack and does enough damage that squishy dps can get killed from max for having a single vuln stack. Contrast with most fights these days where 3 or 4 vuln stacks is suvivable.

netcode: Oh boy have things come a long way. for starters, your character syncs up much better with the server- within the small safe zones have less clipping by edge of the aoe. Autoattacks are also better timed. No more one of them accidently lagging and taking a double hit by mistake.
The countdown timer as well is an improvement. On occasion, partiuclarly with ps3, a tank could pull and it took a few seconds for everyone else to spot it.

tldr
Jobs trivialise some of it now. Its an extremely different and dull experience for healers given there is proportionally less healing required and better mitigation, but downtime kits have been gutted instead of compensating for it.

Can we stop pretending that the old Cleric Stance was good game design? Old CS felt awful to use as an unnecessary gate which served only to punish healers that timed it poorly with no other value. Did you accidentally misclick? Was your latency rough because you were a PS3 player? There were so many ways CS could screw you over for no reason other than the ability didn't go off when you told it to, or you accidentally double cast it because it didn't have a 5 second CD after you turned it off unlike when you turned it on.

Healer DPS can be well thought out, and it can interact effectively with the healing tools, but old CS was not the way to do it and it's removal in Stormblood was a blessing. The problems we have aren't that it's gone, but that there isn't a firm grasp on the relationship between damage received, healing potency, healing ability access, and DPS tools.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Can we stop pretending that the old Cleric Stance was good game design?

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I'm not gonna pretend it was. But it was a risk/reward skill. And as you improved and learned fights, pinpointing the moment you could go cleric felt sometimes satisfying.

Personally i hoped the "unreal" would be a difficulty between normal and ex, but with the harsh ilvl sync its just another extreme.
Well i can buy the mount from mb, so its ok i guess.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Can we stop pretending that the old Cleric Stance was good game design? Old CS felt awful to use as an unnecessary gate which served only to punish healers that timed it poorly with no other value. Did you accidentally misclick? Was your latency rough because you were a PS3 player? There were so many ways CS could screw you over for no reason other than the ability didn't go off when you told it to, or you accidentally double cast it because it didn't have a 5 second CD after you turned it off unlike when you turned it on.

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I agree. The old Cleric Stance was a clunky, annoying mess of an ability, similar to the Sleeve Draw we had until 5.3. I was so happy when it was finally gone.

Back when we had no oGCD heals (not counting Benediction, and Lustrate worked normally in Cleric Stance) the timing of heals was different. There was no "quickly throw a heal on someone between attacking". Especially when HW came and we got things like Asylum or Tetragrammaton, which were weaker in Cleric Stance, it became so much more annoying to use. It worked when we only had GCDs to heal with, but changing the system to mostly heal by weaving oGCDs made Cleric Stance unfeasible.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Overall, this makes for a poorer fight than the original. Because there are more healing tools available and more mitigation and self sustain tools for the tanks/dps, healers have proportionally less healing to do.

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This is completely delusional. Take off your nostalgia glasses and actually compare an old video of Shiva Ex and a new video of Shiva Unreal.
Shiva Unreal does more damage. Just pick any mechanic, say Hailstorm. Unreal drops people to way below half while Ex doesn't even break 50%. Overlapping two hailstorms actually kills you now.
In fact, take a look at an old Ex video and try to find any mechanic where the party ever drops below 50%.

Besides that, you are completely ignoring the fact that our upscaled HP bars means our heals are proportionally weaker. Yes, we have more tools, but we also have to use them to get the similar throughput.

The vuln doesn't make much of a difference in Unreal either, so I don't know why you're talking smack about the Savage fights. They're easy on week 7 with 500 average item level, but why wouldn't they be? You're outgearing them significantly. The over 20% HP increase alone is two mitigation spells you don't have to cast for any mechanic.

The fight brought back something I've missed in FFXIV since Shiva EX, the randomness factor. Depending on RNG you could have a very easy time as a healer as she pulls out nothing but swords after the bow, a stressful time as she only pulls out the staff and you have to raidwide heal a lot, or anywhere in between. How many EX fights can we say these days hit that sweet spot where luck has as much to do with things as knowing the fight?

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The fight brought back something I've missed in FFXIV since Shiva EX, the randomness factor. Depending on RNG you could have a very easy time as a healer as she pulls out nothing but swords after the bow, a stressful time as she only pulls out the staff and you have to raidwide heal a lot, or anywhere in between. How many EX fights can we say these days hit that sweet spot where luck has as much to do with things as knowing the fight?

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The new Ex has this.

Smn phase into lb3 hits quite hard and have to be fast on heals, the other 3 and any combination of lb nowhere near the same level, after add phase it is random which one of the 4 phases he does before Quintuple cast.

But all that is assuming everyone doing mechanics flawlessly, yet to see a group do that XD always someone greeding Pyrtic or staying still and getting frozen breaking my flow of nuke nuke nuke :p



As for old cleric topic that cropped up, I saw the removal of it as a necessary evil(I hated its removal but understood why), it needed to go because it was hampering newer players and less confident players due to its clunk of turning on and off with a cd(should've just made it instant or 1s cd both ways) but also fight design prior to its removal you can see where in fights that you can pop it and be 100% safe, now this was fun to optimise for myself and I'm sure a fair few others but we were a small group to the playerbase at large and that playerbase hated the very existence of the thing because wah wah healer not healed me because Dps all that stupid cleric stance's fault(has that changed or did the ability blame just shift, the latter ofc).

Shiva Unreal highlights how much they designed fights around certain abilities and Cleric Stance is the biggest one by far, Staff leaves just enough room between double burst aoes that you can pop cleric and get DoTs on before needing to turn it off and heal, whereas Sword gives plenty of Cleric Stance room with the odd taking off to either prevent kb with shield or heal MT when needed.

Shiva Ex came out in 2.4 same patch as Final Coil, videos didn't show up until after Final Coil(smaller community back then with far less posting content) was done so those videos have people with higher ilvs also Shiva EX ilv sync was 95 most people were 110 at her release. It only looks like it hits more because you are sync closer to her min ilv rather than outgearing it on its release like most EXs.

We also treat things vastly different now than back then, healers current motto is can ogcds handle it, yes i'mma nuke this, no fine I guess I have to gcd heal but imma nuke it straight after. Back then can Whm handle it or do I as Sch need to chime in and help outside Lustrates.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

As for old cleric topic that cropped up, I saw the removal of it as a necessary evil(I hated its removal but understood why), it needed to go because it was hampering newer players and less confident players due to its clunk of turning on and off with a cd(should've just made it instant or 1s cd both ways) but also fight design prior to its removal you can see where in fights that you can pop it and be 100% safe, now this was fun to optimise for myself and I'm sure a fair few others but we were a small group to the playerbase at large and that playerbase hated the very existence of the thing because wah wah healer not healed me because Dps all that stupid cleric stance's fault(has that changed or did the ability blame just shift, the latter ofc).

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Here's the thing: Cleric Stance was never intuitive. Yes, it did make you need to think about using it, and that aspect is something that's worthwhile, but it didn't do that because it was a well thought out ability. First of all, it was clunky and very much not friendly toward players with latency issues. When I was playing 2.X, I was on the PS3, and let me tell you I got screwed over several times because it didn't go off when I wanted it to, I accidentally hit it twice, or it didn't turn off when I wanted it to. Additionally, it also meant your DPS and healing tools need to be completely separate from one another. No, you can't Ruin II after you Broil to weave in a Lustrate when needed, and you wouldn't have been able to throw in that Stormblood Lord of Crowns after you cast Benefic II on the tank. At the end of the day, it was a button that existed for no other purpose than to give healers a hoop to jump through, and that just isn't intuitive design, especially now when we need to think about button bloat a lot more moving forward.

Here's my question for you, what's wrong with creating critical thinking tools that aren't clunky and actually contribute to your gameplay rather than just give you an extra button you need to press before and after DPS windows?

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

The new Ex has this.

Smn phase into lb3 hits quite hard and have to be fast on heals, the other 3 and any combination of lb nowhere near the same level, after add phase it is random which one of the 4 phases he does before Quintuple cast.

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Sort of agree, sort of disagree. The Summoner phase sucks, but I think the comparison sorta falls flat because Shiva can alternate between staff and bow until she dies (which is somewhat more intense than swords all day), while you only have to suffer through the Summoner bit once per fight. Now, Summoner > Quintuplecast > Summoner > Summoner > Summoner would make me cry if it were possible, though. :p

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Originally Posted by KDSilver

I'm not gonna pretend it was. But it was a risk/reward skill. And as you improved and learned fights, pinpointing the moment you could go cleric felt sometimes satisfying.

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Even if on SCH it was just to hit Cleric, Apply Dots, Remove Cleric.

It added an element of strategy.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

The new EX trial is pretty fun too and, hey, at least it has a heal check at the beginning. I hope to see more of this...

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The new EX is fun indeed and I was happy to see Doom, especially on Normal too, but putting it right at the start shows they don't really understand the disparity between the healers. ScH and particularly AST have ample aoe oGcD's to weave into the early fight but WhM has to clip like crazy then spam several GcD's which feels rough.

As a healer, I hate the trial because one of the main strategies is just to ignore the mechanics, eat the damage and let the healer deal with it.

Works fine in a coordinated group with everyone playing their jobs well, leads to chaos and wipes in PUGs.

So this week I decided to do solo healing, with a solo tank, very manageable just gotta be prepared if she does Staff -> Bow -> Sword otherwise yea fine little extra gcd healing for staff but nothing other Ex's haven't already thrown at solo healers before.

It really just feels like old Shiva EX (was solo healing farm parties back then) XD complete with Bow macro for the people not paying attention.

Since other Unreals are probably going to follow suit I expect solo heals parties to become more of the norm going forward excluding potentially Ifrit Unreal.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

As a healer, I hate the trial because one of the main strategies is just to eat the damage and let the healer deal with it.

Works fine in a coordinated group with everyone playing their jobs well, leads to chaos and wipes in PUGs.

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It's pretty much the go-to strategy if wipes keep happening to enrage. To be honest, this strat is for those who just can't dodge, or a party heavy in melee DPS. It actually requires less coordination. When I was in a party with a lot of melee for Hades EX who didn't resort to staying in the middle for the UFOs and still beat enrage, it was the easiest clear I ever got for that fight.

This fight in particular can and will catch a healer not familiar with the fight off guard. Even when told to prepare to heal a lot during Staff, they still underestimate how much.