Delubrum Reginae: my honest critique

I think the bosses in there were interesting and offered a decent challenge for going in blind, a lot of new mechanics i have not seen in other boss fights resulting in me dieing a lot to find out what their attacks do.

But here is my biggest problem, the unbalance of parties, my group got 1 healer and 7 dps, the poor astro couldn't keep up with the healeing and i had to help out spamming Vitaga, i used uo 75 charges of vitaga to keep the party alive. but another group got 4 healers in their party.
This resulted in a rather frustrating experience as people just died because they got no healing in time.

It would be a lot more enjoyable if parties were balanced as they are in normal alliance raids, 1 Tank, 2 healer, 5 dps.

what if you go in there and don't have a single tank or healer? you are screwed.

the problem exists since bozja was released, unbalanced groups and the ignorance of se to allow players to change gear after they joined a bozja cm or raid, is one of the reason why players decide to skip this content (death penalty from pre year 2000 games is another big point).

since ppl glorifiy yoshi so much, i would say it's also his fault to give all those design flaws, like matchmaking/groupmaking in bozja, a pass.

Thats not a problem because you can adjust with every class to everything.

I guess the bigger problem is the lazy design of the whole DR thing.
There you can perfectly see that SE does not know what to do with the healer classes because they get reduced to do 1 oGCD heal after any raidwide and rezzing.
Because if you misplay any mechanic = death.
Get hit twice by something = death.

And dont get me started with how lazy they try to keep Bozja busy without making you feel any stronger after doing DR.
Because these OP new Actions does not work in CLL or Bozja.
While you have no other option then using them in DR (savage) because they are uncontested the best action you can use...

Sadly DR is not the promised BA 2.0....

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Originally Posted by Curisu

Thats not a problem because you can adjust with every class to everything.

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so healers aint needed because all tanks and dds can make up for it with their self heal abilitys?

As a Tank, I was full healing the party using Savior essence and Lost Cure 4. Then I would only raise players with lost arise or phoenix down if they could raise players themselves.

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Originally Posted by Schwarzstahl

so healers aint needed because all tanks and dds can make up for it with their self heal abilitys?

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No you should have healers, there's a lot of raidwide damage. My mp is better suited for raising lol. People need to use more Lost Actions though, but that's a whole other problem.

SE literally expects people to use Lost Actions and some are crazy overpowered that can heal a whole party.

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Originally Posted by Undeadfire

SE literally expects people to use Lost Actions and some are crazy overpowered that can heal a whole party.

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When i Q up as DPS i dont wanna be in there spamming clunky heals, i literally never used any of the damage Actions ebcause i always need to heal myself.

Don't need to spam Heals if you do mechanics correct, or just go Red Mage.

There are unavoidable aoe attacks that deal 8o % damage.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

When i Q up as DPS i dont wanna be in there spamming clunky heals, i literally never used any of the damage Actions ebcause i always need to heal myself.

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It's not clunky, it's instant oGCD with a fairly generous range and the tank Raise is incredibly strong. The raidwides don't come that often so as hard as they might hit, just a few dps with Cure IV is more than enough if you lack a healer. The HoT it provides will do most of the work.
You also have no excuse not to use damage actions, because you get two slots + an Essence. So that's room for Cure IV, dps action and dps essence.

This whole idea of "I queued this role so that's all I'm doing" is selfish and straight up griefing your team. DR is not a standard Alliance raid. You are given lost actions and Essences for a reason and groups don't follow standard comps because you are meant to be utilizing those actions. If you don't want to use the toolkit given to you because you're a dps and feel entitled to only doing dps, don't queue.

Since DR consists of sparsely used non-lethal raidwides or instant-kills, defense boosting Essences are largely useless. This means all players should take a dps Essence. This is especially true for tanks and healers, who get 60-80% raw damage at no downside from the cheap Essences.

https://i.imgur.com/nd3ZsNY.jpg

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this took like an hour to clear.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

https://i.imgur.com/nd3ZsNY.jpg

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this took like an hour to clear.

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Where's your dps essence? profane? aetherweaver? actions like banner of noble ends? font of mana?

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Originally Posted by Mavrias

Where's your dps essence? profane? aetherweaver? actions like banner of noble ends? font of mana?

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i used most of them up during the first 15 runs

https://i.imgur.com/YnRIwRt.jpg

not a single tank in the entire raid, people left.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

this took like an hour to clear.

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It's a shame it ends up that way. WHM is an absolute monster of a dps in Delubrum. Font of Magic, Profane Essence and Lost Seraph Strike all stack together and create huge burst windows. I'm quite often top dps in runs, even when switching to Aetherweaver and healing my team. For example a recent run:

https://i.ibb.co/DRfSP7x/Misery.jpg

That's without dance partner, raid buffs and only using the cheap Profane rather than Deep, so you could easily go over 400k Misery's. A few tips for WHM:

-Always bring Essences, if you run out farm more. It's a habit people should get into when they're planning many runs for a relic to save everyone time. The Doblyns in the second section drop them and they're very easy to aoe farm with a tank. Or if you're a crafter, gather the mats for Coffee Biscuits, spam the crafter leve for a bit and buy fragments with the gil (nice trick for pocket change). The basic Profane/Aetherweaver are good enough.
-Get Lost Seraph Strike. It's incredible. It's actually 0 cost with Thin Air, a massive buff, deals high damage on use itself, and it has unlimited uses. Just one copy will last for all your future runs.
-Buff every Misery.
-If you've done the above that's plenty, but to push further Font of Magic or Noble Banner are best to pair with Seraph. Bring Lost Ether or Super Ether if you use Font, it'll drain a whole mana bar.

I wanna see a group tank it with Essence of the Veteran/Platebearer and Lost Incense.

I don't think someone is entitled for queueing as a dps and wanting to play dps. I'm a raid healer. I literally play healer almost all the time. I get home from work, get on my mch and queue up to knock a few timeworn artifacts out of the way. The group has no tanks and a single astro for all 24 of us. The other parties aren't visible, so it's hard to tell the minefield we just walked into until the the mob starts spinning like a top. Some poor dps needed to pull out Lost Incense and everyone else cure IV. What actually happened though was boss took a few people out before anyone knew the problem. Then the stack happened, there were no shields and a few more people died. By the time the second stack happened, it did 87k and anyone wearing a dps essence and not with the astro died. We killed the first boss out of spite and disbanded.

At the very least, showing us the make up of all three parties would allow us a heads up and the ability to plan.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

I think the bosses in there were interesting and offered a decent challenge for going in blind, a lot of new mechanics i have not seen in other boss fights resulting in me dieing a lot to find out what their attacks do.

But here is my biggest problem, the unbalance of parties, my group got 1 healer and 7 dps, the poor astro couldn't keep up with the healeing and i had to help out spamming Vitaga, i used uo 75 charges of vitaga to keep the party alive. but another group got 4 healers in their party.
This resulted in a rather frustrating experience as people just died because they got no healing in time.

It would be a lot more enjoyable if parties were balanced as they are in normal alliance raids, 1 Tank, 2 healer, 5 dps.

what if you go in there and don't have a single tank or healer? you are screwed.

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DR can be tanked and healed without any tanks or healers. The only issue one might encounter is Cleansing Slash if there are zero healers to Esuna the Doom, but that can be handled by Resistance Medikits or raising the tank and they can Incense the boss.

I've tanked DR on Scholar, Machinist, Samurai, and Dragoon. I've healed it on Bard.

The AST was likely dying to mechanics, because there is very little healing required in this raid - even so, players could have used Autopotions or Resistance Potions to selfheal, because damage is so infrequent.

Additionally, if players are so fearful of actually using the lost action system as intended, then they can reform parties inside of DR to address role imbalance. The parties in this example could have swapped the DPS and healers.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

not a single tank in the entire raid, people left.

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Somebody could have used Incense, Deep Platebearer, and Font of Power/Manawall, and tanked.

The tools are there, people refuse to use them. This is not the game's fault.

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Originally Posted by Espon

I wanna see a group tank it with Essence of the Veteran/Platebearer and Lost Incense.

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The biggest issue is aggro. I opened with Recite+Indom tanking on SCH, and I still think strong burst like Irregular WAR could rip hate.

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Originally Posted by Luin

The only issue one might encounter is Cleansing Slash if there are zero healers to Esuna the Doom, but that can be handled by Resistance Medikits or raising the tank and they can Incense the boss.

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One thing I discovered while tanking that fight is that if Cleansing Slash doesn't deal HP damage, it also won't inflict any debuffs. This might be easier said than done, though.

am i weird for preferring castrum?

Here's my very swift summary-- I have a more detailed critique and feedback in the works but I'll just summerize a few points here:

• Delubrum Reginae in itself is very lovely in it's visuals, it's bosses, the dynamics gameplay and the fact that it ties in seamlessly into the storylines-- really brilliant work
• The lighting in the area is simply GENIUS-- people who are into game design, creative art, game visualization and conceptual creators will perfectly understand what I'm referring to
• The fact that they tied it into the relic progression without making it unnecessarily tedious like the 24-man raid phase.
• The ability to gain more items related to obtaining the "Judges" gear, of which I am a massive fan, and that fact that the Devs uses Sochen as the theme -- I'm a FFXII fanatic, so you'll understand.

Okay that sounds all well and good but what could the Devs have done better?

• First of all fifteen runs is a bit much-- ten runs would have been aqequate-- perhaps they made it fifteen so that one would have enough coins to purchase one Law order's gear-- not sure.
• The ability to change jobs once inside-- to give a perspective, the last THREE runs I did on my main charcater, our party did not have a tank-- it was insane and the third time, we got through it because we had a tank in the alliance who turned out to be an excellent player

That's my coin in the pond on this one.

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Originally Posted by Arohk

i used most of them up during the first 15 runs

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This is the problem. They are expected to use them, but required to be farmed and they also give the impression of use only if you must. This creates the issues of not having them when you need them if you use them, and not using them if you want o have them when you need them

The problem for essences is that there are a handful of good ones, and a bunch of junk ones. I ran out of skirmisher a long, long time ago - and my apologies, but I'm not spending hours farming so that I can get enough for 3 more runs when I'm already 4/15 towards my 5th relic and I'm 95% just fishing for the absolutely abysmal chance at getting the hairstyle to finally drop.

My essence is the uptime you get out of me while I'm DPSing when everyone else is hiding in the corner on gunner, running around like idiots while the soldier is playing the shell game, and continuing to hit the bomber because trust me, you really don't need to be out of melee range standing dead center on the bomb to not get hit. Really, you can keep hitting the thing.

Honestly, not really a fan of the doom mechanic.

The fact that every single mechanic save the hot and cold one gives the exact same debuff no matter what boss just feels lazy, doubly so because it's an instakill mechanic that ignores everything, including invulns.

Instead of some interesting and boss unique debuff it just feels like the devs forcing you to not make mistakes otherwise you'll die because you have to play this way or else, at least with ridiculously damaging bleeds or a vuln stack that increases the damage you take by 200% there's a chance you might be able to save yourself or others if you have the lost actions or the right class for it.

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Originally Posted by Atma

The problem for essences is that there are a handful of good ones, and a bunch of junk ones.

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This is true. One problem is each fragment has a whole range of bad Essences or actions you might get instead of the good one.

I tend to just farm fragments via gil from craft leves, but recently I bought about 115 fragments and ended up with 1 Deep Profane, 0 Deep Aetherweaver, 4 Banners, 6 Ether Kits and 4 Font of Magic. The rest was rubbish. Considering how few of these drop in Castrum/DR, it feels using the better actions/essences to contribute to your team is some sort of expensive privilege, which doesn't feel right.

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Originally Posted by Dogempire

Honestly, not really a fan of the doom mechanic.

The fact that every single mechanic save the hot and cold one gives the exact same debuff no matter what boss just feels lazy, doubly so because it's an instakill mechanic that ignores everything, including invulns.

Instead of some interesting and boss unique debuff it just feels like the devs forcing you to not make mistakes otherwise you'll die because you have to play this way or else, at least with ridiculously damaging bleeds or a vuln stack that increases the damage you take by 200% there's a chance you might be able to save yourself or others if you have the lost actions or the right class for it.

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I agree in a way. I feel like it promotes safe play and not taking risks. Compounded with what Liam said about the fragments, it feels like you get punished.

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Originally Posted by Nothv13

they also give the impression of use only if you must.

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Lost actions do not give the impression "only use if you must."

Do you just auto attack mobs and use weaponskills only when you must? Ok, then why this?

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

This is true. One problem is each fragment has a whole range of bad Essences or actions you might get instead of the good one.

I tend to just farm fragments via gil from craft leves, but recently I bought about 115 fragments and ended up with 1 Deep Profane, 0 Deep Aetherweaver, 4 Banners, 6 Ether Kits and 4 Font of Magic. The rest was rubbish. Considering how few of these drop in Castrum/DR, it feels using the better actions/essences to contribute to your team is some sort of expensive privilege, which doesn't feel right.

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Further adding to this problem is for those doing Savage. It just isn't worth the expense. I go through so many Deep Essences right now, I'm basically flipping everything else I get to help off set the cost of buying what I need. Sure, I can farm. And I do. However, there is a limit to how much I'm willing to farm the same trash over and over again. And for what? To maybe make DR faster? If the choice is not using Essences/Actions adds another DR or two but I break even for my other expenditures. I'll be less inclined to keep using Essences once I've hit the 20-30 run point.

I've said this multiple times now, but if they want to encourage people to experiment. They need to make it rewarding. Seeing huge numbers can be tons of fun... if said fun isn't undercut by a boring grind where you'll spend more time not having fun.

I am going to piggy back on this and just say the essences really kill this for me too. I can honestly say I do not use them all the time, just because they are such a tremendous pain in the backside to get, that I just flat out do not have one to use. I have 8 more runs to complete my second and final relic and I just do not have it in me to spend hours farming a chance of maybe getting a decent essence just so I can spend hours farming the actual upgrade items. I went to buy some the other day as a way to get around it, but fragments were 7k a piece and that is just too big of an expense for the low low chance you have of getting a good one. Great in concept, poor in execution.

Outside of that, the dungeon is not too bad.

Honestly? I enjoy it. But your group needs to manage and use lost actions and not treat it like a regular 24 man raid. It may mean somebody has to pick up the healer or tank responsibilities. To take the mentality that your healer jobs are the only healer I think misses the point of this kind of content and the concept of how Lost Actions work has been given plenty of space before hitting this content. You can make any job fit any role, which to me is the appeal of them.

It sure as hell beats FATE grinding of Eureka and of the first Bozja instance (which at least is broken up by Critical Engagements)

But where I'd like to see improvement is in the acquisition of Lost Actions and the Essences, I think tying them behind too much RNG can make this more of a pain than it needs to be, because you have to keep stocked up on certain set ups and builds.

I see all these people complaining about grinding for essences when there is no grind really for the basic ones.. they come from the plant an fish enemies right outside the gate.. grab a friend or even by yourself an pick them all up in one go.. you'll get 10-20 essences per pack of mobs.. if you have friends they can give you the ones they get if they're stocked up.. I brought a new person into Bazja and while they were unlocking the quests just to go outside myself an another friend had already gotten them probably 20-30 fragments of skill.. its not hard it dosnt take long.. the only thing I see is people being lazy an not helping their teammates clear DR the way it is intended.

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Originally Posted by Baxcel

I see all these people complaining about grinding for essences when there is no grind really for the basic ones.. they come from the plant an fish enemies right outside the gate.. grab a friend or even by yourself an pick them all up in one go.. you'll get 10-20 essences per pack of mobs.. if you have friends they can give you the ones they get if they're stocked up.. I brought a new person into Bazja and while they were unlocking the quests just to go outside myself an another friend had already gotten them probably 20-30 fragments of skill.. its not hard it dosnt take long.. the only thing I see is people being lazy an not helping their teammates clear DR the way it is intended.

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I mean there's the rng element of essence grinding as well.

If you want 15 skirmisher essences then you need to get Awakening fragments, which sure you can farm off of mobs, but it's only a 1 in 7 chance of getting a skirmisher essence for every awakening fragment you get, and assuming that you get 1 fragment every 2.5 mobs (Which is very generous for the trash mobs outside of the starting zone) then you would need to kill 263 mobs for 105 fragments to get 15 essences out of that 1 in 7 chance.

That being said, you could also buy the fragments, Awakening fragments cost about 6k on Faerie, so you would need to pay about 660k (630k + ~30k in fees) for those 15 essences.

Call me crazy but wouldn't it be faster to just do Delubrum without jumping through the hoops of getting the essences? I get that it's common courtesy to use essences to make the run faster, heck I use them, but I also have a lot more gil than the average player and an income that's a lot more constant and reliable than most people.

Maybe if they made essences and deep essences more accessible they would see more use as a result

I like it but maybe add 10 more silver coins.

am i the only one that has lag/delay in DR? whole game everywhere else runs fine, i have a great pc and only issues i ever had was an occasional dc one a month, even the 48 man dungeon goes without hickups. but in DR i get 1-2 sec delay on everything every mercy attack i dodge apparently hits me, click a chest takes 2-3 secs for it to open up

My honest critique : The content is super fun imo even though runs are taking way too long when you know how short they can get. If everyone made a little effort, the relic grind would really be less tedious.

Been doing some optimized DRN speedrunning with everyone using essences and lost actions, we were averaging 22 minutes per run.
Now imagine if everyone was using basic essences at the very least, you can probably get runs around 35 minutes on average instead of the usual 45min+ in PUGs. Reading 40 minutes runs are considered "fast" in PUGs pains my heart, really.
If you're gonna farm this for a while, like I did (I'm at 6 weapons complete, doing a final one), there's a huge incentive in getting some essences in my opinion, not necessarily the rare/expensive ones. Plus some are fun to use.