Unreal vs Extreme

Sofia unreal is way more fun as an extreme than the new EX raid boss designs with the giant hitboxes and uptime focused mechanics.

The quality drop off in bosses and raid mechanics is really sad because everything is being sacrificed in the name of uptime, damage balance, and accessibility.

Can't have those melee losing a GCD so lets make the hitbox be the entire arena I guess. While we are at it, we can't have the tanks doing the moving of the boss, that would certainly be too crazy. Lets make the boss reset itself to the center every time.

Honestly the game feels stale now a days not because we've been playing for a long time. It actually is becoming stale and people have less and less things to do in game because the game does it all for you.

I mean, not only are the jobs watered down, so are the bosses.

I love the game but these fights are really becoming disposable. Devs please give the players back some agency and responsibilities.

Tanks still can make some things easier for melee players - positionals are still in the game and melees love a reliable tank: Keep the boss facing east after it ignites the forest.

You can immediately have the boss face north after the add phase rather than awkwardly maneuvering it back to mid, then taking mt spot again so that it faces north again only for it to *again* change direction for the next mechanic.

I don't know whether it's possible to invuln an ordeal or immolation to prevent the boss from turning around immediately after.

Also some ordeals configurations allow only a relatively tiny space to both keep uptime and not geht hit at the same time. Many melee players have lost uptime by being bound slightly outside of max melee range while fiddling with the distance. There are still some things to optimize in the fight.

However all of them are rather lame. But so is trying to not lose uptime on Sophia after putting down quasar proximity aoes.

Sophia is a much better fight than Rubicante for other reasons imo: She introduces all of her mechanics early into the fight and then remixes them, rather than backloading the actually fun mechanics as hard as Rubicante or for that matter Zurvan. You are kept on your toes and if you slide off or get knocked back or lazered by the daughter or miss a yin yang, it's because you fd up. Not because you didnt know the mechanic.

Progging Rubi means repeating phases over and over that teach you nothing about the mechanics your party is actually stuck on, turning them into mere busywork and the more complex mechanics aren't fleshed out much designwise in turn.

Immolation and limit cut are the most fun mechanics in Rubi Ex, more interesting than the ordeals, harder to learn, yet each occur only twice/once in the fight and have little variation. I think they got hung up hard on the ordeals and missed the potential in developing those other mechs further.

I agree with the above poster that tanks still have positioning to do in modern fights, although it's far more subtle, less obvious and less frequent than certain old fights. Even just how it's pulled at the start or how tanks are turning it when swapping can affect how much you are wiggling the hitbox for the DPS. Even in the game as it is now, there are numerous, subtle ways that you can demonstrate being a good player instead of a nervous player that has no idea what they are doing.

Honestly I haven't heard anyone praise the new raid design in game or claim that EW raiding has been their favorite. I think I have a theory as to why.

It's possible that SE has flipped the tables and started designing raids with balance at heart. And this balance requires big hit boxes, all jobs to perform about equally, and miscellaneous standardization to them. This is why fights all end up feeling kind of samey.

I think they really ought to go back to designing fights that are really engaging and fun to play, and that players will enjoy doing over and over again AND, after they have that fun fight, balance the best they can around that. Titan's fight was really unique, leviathan was fun (ARR), Seiryu, Byako, Chaos, O4S, E4S, E8S...

The most engaging thing thats come out of EW is probably the P5S devour mechanic.

Essentially: Make fun fights, and then do your best at making them balanced, not make balanced fights, and then do your best at making them fun.

I feel like Sophia Unreal's Quasar hurts more than what I remembered in EX when it's still related. Overall I love Sophia Unreal more :)

can't wait for the next unreal.
SKIP SOAR OR DISBAND!

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Originally Posted by Ath192

Honestly I haven't heard anyone praise the new raid design in game or claim that EW raiding has been their favorite. I think I have a theory as to why.

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Oh, I'm not particularly praising the raid design changes, but the raids themselves are great. P5S is one of my favorites ever. This tier, P7S is the one I do for fun when I'm bored.

That's not to take away from how much I love P5S, it's just when you prog P5S for fun you're going to land in a devour prog party, a Ruby 3, Ruby 5, Ruby 6 prog party, dash prog or some prog.

In the last tier, P2S was what I did for fun. I thought they were all good in that tier overall, but the music in the first 3 was not exactly what anyone would be likely to put in the top 1,000 tracks in the game.

For extremes, my favorite this expansion would be EX1 followed by EX2, then followed by EX3 and then EX4. EX1 is something I remember fondly and would do again for fun, whereas it's nice that EX4 was fast-paced but now I've got my totems I don't wanna do it for fun. I'm not sure if SE will top EX1 and EX2 for me this expansion.

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It's possible that SE has flipped the tables and started designing raids with balance at heart. And this balance requires big hit boxes, all jobs to perform about equally, and miscellaneous standardization to them. This is why fights all end up feeling kind of samey.

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SE has just become aware of things they were ignoring in the past, like tiny hitboxes. They want to polish the game and make it intuitive. You see this in the old dungeon revamps. Fights that don't need to be adjusted to work for trusts are clearly being adjusted for another reason: to make them intuitive (which means obvious). In Keeper of the Lake, the closest dragon add was supposed to stay near the boss and the add near the back had to stay at the back or took reduced damage. People didn't know they should use the limit break on the add and that the add represented most of its health. So the fight was changed to be intuitive.

I agree with the increase in hitbox size, but this is a bit excessive. It benefits the DPS because they can do most mechanics without needing to stop DPS, but I don't think it's particularly necessary. I can give an example of a small hitbox size that worked perfectly fine and provided almost 100% uptime.

E2S, where if the tank positioned the boss correctly, nobody hardly lost uptime in the fight.
https://i.imgur.com/qoxIju6.png
If the tank messed up, they lost a lot of uptime. See how if the tank had the boss up north it would be not so good for the melee DPS. But then the tank just needs to learn how to tank rather than the design being changed.

You mentioned Chaos and that's another great example, because so many of the mechanics happen near the boss. You do have the odd run away type mechanic, but guess what, P6S has that and if you run to the corner for it you lose uptime still.
https://i.imgur.com/fXu23To.png

I agree 100% with op about the utter state of the game. Next xpac there will b no more hitboxes, positionals or mitigation, just a bunch of lobotomized jobs like summoner or sage standing around pressing 3 buttons, and then moving to another spot and doing their rotation because the only mechanics in the raids is stand here then move over there for a bit then stand in another spot for a bit for 10 minutes hooray. Remember when mmos had crowd control, kiting, talent trees and specializations, interacting with objects, teamwork and synergy, boss positioning, weaknesses, resistances, debuffs, no battle res, trash packs, puzzles, healer classes, challenge, a meta that’s not just 4 melee attacking Hephaestus or tree from anywhere on the map it doesn’t actually matter where you stand anymore cuz you can do the whole fight without even looking in the boss’ direction yadda yadda, I still love the game cuz im an addict but it’s definitly time for ff17, 10 years for this game is stretching it and now it’s too popular so they’re making it real dumb to cast the widest net

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

SE has just become aware of things they were ignoring in the past, like tiny hitboxes. They want to polish the game and make it intuitive.
https://i.imgur.com/fXu23To.png

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I’ll be honest. They are polishing the fun out of the game. And as far as intuitive goes, it’s becoming so intuitive it’s bordering on obvious. No one likes obvious things. Maybe the first time it’s ok, but that’s exactly the sort of content you never revisit.

I do like sophia's way of telling you to deal with boss position on your own, although I would argue she isnt the best example of this because her positioning really isnt that deep. I think kefka savage is a really good example for this however. When I did that fight it really felt like melee uptime wasnt free.

I haven't really been enjoying this expansion Extremes at all.
Heavensward and SB had the best Extremes imo, its been going downhill since EW.
Same for this Savage tier.
I find P6S and 7 so annoying and dull that I taxi passed them and I've never done that before and I've raided all tiers basically.

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Originally Posted by Eisi

I don't know whether it's possible to invuln an ordeal or immolation to prevent the boss from turning around immediately after.

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You can invuln the cleave during immo. It makes the spread so much easier. There's a magic vuln debuff, but it fades before busters go out.
Ordeals can generally be shrugged off, if it's just the one. (I haven't tried two) The vuln stack will generally fade before any busters come out.


As for the comparison, I've been enjoying this expansion more than the unreals that have come up. What bugs me about unreal is people had time to learn mechs ahead of time and they didn't. :p

Bosses teleporting themselves has kinda stifles how much you can interact with the raid. If the boss is going to be planted in one place there should be a good reason for it, like refurbisher or doom train.

I've been playing since Heavensward and I don't know, I didn't think Sophia is really all that interesting as a fight? It's of course not a bad fight (the music, aesthetic and scales mechanics are cool)but it's never been in my top 10. I've been farming every single EX for their mounts since Susano EX and from my POV SB had the best EX trials and Shadowbringers had the worst trials. (SoS+Hades were great but that's it) Endwalker's have been superior to Shadowbringers thus far with Barb EX being one of my favorites they've ever done. But Endwalker's biggest flaw is they really want to do puzzle mechanics now and those tend to only have a few solutions so we end up with boring follow the leader situations like the newest EX+Zodiark. I never got bored farming Barb because it was so fast paced and I was always on my toes. I want more of savage+EX to be like Barb and less like Zodiark/Rubi.

In terms of savage raiding stuff has gone downhill though. I did think P8S was really great even if snakes were jank on controller, but I can think of more fights I dread in the past 2 savage tiers than ones I love. And the flaw with the big hitboxes on everything isn't that melee gets free uptime. I'm telling you as someone that's been doing serious content as NIN since Stormblood that getting 1 extra GCD and then walking away isn't really interesting fight design. The problem with the big hitboxes is it actually robs jobs with gap closers of cool moments. It was really fun doing E5S, getting the perfect greed and then doing the perfect corps a corps on RDM into the boss. Giant hitboxes mean things like corps a corps have 0 purpose because you're just going to awkwardly move 2 inches. I don't think I've really touched my shikuchi macro that puts me onto the target a single time in Endwalker because outside of Ultimate there aren't many times I need it.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

The quality drop off in bosses and raid mechanics is really sad because everything is being sacrificed in the name of uptime, damage balance, and accessibility.

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Honestly the game feels stale now a days not because we've been playing for a long time. It actually is becoming stale and people have less and less things to do in game because the game does it all for you.

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I expect it's really both. We've been playing for a long time, and because of that, it's getting harder and harder for devs to find novel challenges - especially with such a small group size meaning that not every job can be included (the 8-man format is a real downer in a number of ways, between this and the lack of wiggle room for error which is a heavy contributor to the culture issues that have developed with raiding in recent years), but somehow every job more or less has to be viable (especially if we are going to continue having gearing systems where even though you can "play" every job, you can only gear up one or two per tier due to the shared weekly locks, and you more or less lock this in the moment you spend your first weekly tomestones).

Then you add the fact that many types of mechanics turned out during the early experimental days of 2.x to be unviable within the XIV's engine limitations (for instance, T5 and T8 showed that complex terrains are too exploitable), making it hard for SE to do much besides basic AoE dancing, debuff juggles (which themselves are problematic because of the server side system, often ending up feeling drawn out because of presumably the need to give the server time to register each step), and DPS races (which really bring the small group size and needing to keep jobs tightly balanced to the forefront).

Add to that the sheer number of jobs we have, and it's getting hard to keep everything balanced without succumbing to the "you must play meta" that almost every other game with small teams with large numbers of options tends to fall victim to.

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Originally Posted by Eisi

Sophia is a much better fight than Rubicante for other reasons imo: She introduces all of her mechanics early into the fight and then remixes them, rather than backloading the actually fun mechanics as hard as Rubicante or for that matter Zurvan.

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Yeah, reminds me of the difference between Stormblood and Shadowbringers fights. StB fights were almost always front loaded in this manner, and it led to a situation where things kept you on your toes while still being reasonably chill (the main one that I recall that did not was Shinryu Ex, and there's a reason this fight was a notorious salt mine).

But apparently, hardcore raiders whined about the fights being boring after halftime, so ShB decided to go with backloading, and it led to further inflaming the negative aspects of the community, because who wanted to deal with the likes of Black Smokers or, oh Twelve, Cycles?

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Oh, I'm not particularly praising the raid design changes, but the raids themselves are great. P5S is one of my favorites ever. This tier, P7S is the one I do for fun when I'm bored.

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I also really like P5S. It's great for a first tier fight. All the mechanics are different to one another and require you run around the arena.

I hate P7S. If I don't skip it on a given week, it's to fall asleep on my keyboard. It's all non-mechanics until you get killed by a teammate messing up their Death/War positions.