Arcadion M4 Thundering's soft enrage

This soft enrage in storymode where the boss blasts the party repeatedly until it drains healers out of resources is pretty nice to have in a normal mode. It's not very brutal or anything and that's fine, but good parties are already skipping this phase entirely, which I find is a great shame.

With gear going up this is only going to become more and more frequent until nobody sees this mechanic ever. Actually I think next patch this will already be a rare sight unless the run gets a lot of casualties. And in later patches this is just never gonna show up.

Would it be possible when designing such mechanics to force the boss into initiating that mechanic at like 15-20% HP left (where it seemed originally to trigger in average parties)? That way it would always show up, and it's pretty epic on its own that it's a shame when it doesn't. The boss even has lines for it and it tells a story..

It's funny, I didn't see this as a "soft enrage" but more as "cruise control" as a demi-reward for making it through the other mechanics, even if you didn't do it while keeping your damage up, and now you have a chance to catch up with damage.

It is not a soft enrage, since she doesnt get a damage buff for each wave, you could easily heal that phase for a good while unless too many people die.

Call it whatever you want, I don't mind the word being used, but that was really not the point of the OP...

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Originally Posted by Valence

Call it whatever you want, I don't mind the word being used, but that was really not the point of the OP...

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It should be obvious that you will outgear the boss and skip a good portion of the fight, i mean when you do Proto Carbuncle now, it often dies before it even does the Jumping Phase , thats like skippin 1/3 of the entire fight.

Basically bringing back phase pushes like back in the HW days? As much as I would like it personally, I don't believe that's SE's design direction anymore

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Originally Posted by Arohk

It should be obvious that you will outgear the boss and skip a good portion of the fight, i mean when you do Proto Carbuncle now, it often dies before it even does the Jumping Phase , thats like skippin 1/3 of the entire fight.

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Which is also a problem, but it's more tied to the lack of hard syncs for endgame raid content more than anything (see: how they had to introduce a hard sync for the end trial of Endwalker because the important phase cutscene and phase 2 would get totally skipped after a single patch.. hardsync they reintroduced for the Interphos btw in order to avoid the exact same issue).

This mechanic however is at the very tail end of the fight, and I think it feels epic/iconic enough for the fight storytelling to be considering keeping it in one way or another in spite of overgear.

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Originally Posted by EponaTBHSMH

Basically bringing back phase pushes like back in the HW days? As much as I would like it personally, I don't believe that's SE's design direction anymore

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That would be the idea but only for that kind of mechanic at the very end of a fight that is important enough to keep imo.

Going back to phase skips because everything is HP based like in ARR/HW rather than timer based is definitely not the intent of this thread.

Very much +1 for this request! I don't want to imagine what an absolute joke this amazing fight is going to be around 7.5, without any proper level sync to keep it on release day item level. Honestly, I would go so far and ask for a HP % based timing for all unique signature attacks, no matter if they happen at the end on repeat like on R4/M4 or anywhere in the middle, like Carby's Devour, Panda's Harrowing Hell or - if we look at other duties, too - the scales for Aglaia's final boss. It doesn't have to be that way for all attacks, I heard that caused some issues in the earlier expansions, but people shouldn't be punished for playing the game a few months "late" and miss out of specific attacks like these.

A good-sized portion of these signature attacks, are time wasters where you can't target the boss. M4 and Pandemonium (to a degree) are an exception in recent times, as they are still targetable while doing it. I don't care if they change it so you get to see these unique things, but don't make me stay longer in a fight than necessary just because something flashy is going to happen. If my group of randoms is killing it before signature time waster, I'm extra pleased.

I'm pretty sure it's not an enrage, as in, it isn't time gated, but HP percentage based. Iirc I had it occur after a second round of clones that hit half the arena with an AoE, and i definitely had that second round not occur.

But yeah, it feels pretty epic. In the end it's the same as with the final boss of the story, it has pretty much the same thing.

It phases to the forever cannon phase if below 17% and is currently not running a mechanic. So you could theoretically hold dps at 18%, then hard burst during next mech to whittle down how much you see. But yeah, with over thirty runs of the normal, it always transitioned if below 18% and never before.

It's good to know but unfortunately it doesn't work well enough then, because I've had many runs where the mechanic doesn't trigger and we kill it before (probably because she just started another mechanic at like 20-25% and needs to finish it first). This is going to become an actual problem later on, so I do question the point of having such a system if it doesn't work all the time.

I know a lot of people have already gave a multitude of reasons of why the laser isn't an enrage, but here's one more to throw into the hat: She does the laser phase in response to her HP lowering pas a certain threshold. If it was an actual enrage she would do it regardless of what her HP is. The fact of the matter is she will loop indefinitely until her HP falls below the threshold to begin cannon spam. This is just a scripted fight event. It's more so a boss RP event rather than any type of actual enrage.

I get it that people want to be precise about naming things, but isn't how it's called kind of entirely beside the point? From what I understood the point is that it's a thing people shouldn't miss out on just because they didn't get a chance to play it at patch day... For all I care you might as well call a fix for that strawberry cake. xD

I don't get the fixation over the bad choice of words (how should I even call it anyway?), but that's completely beyond the OP and totally missing the point.

I'm not so sure it's beside the point. You pointed out that you liked the concept, then literally requested the damage being increased, indicating that you literally saw it as a time punishment which should be harsher. That makes it really clear to me that you saw it as the "soft enrage" and not just "some name for end of fight mechanic"

This ties into the ilvl sync issue. The first and second tiers need a sync to prevent things like this from being normalized.

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Originally Posted by Jaxtaro

I'm not so sure it's beside the point. You pointed out that you liked the concept, then literally requested the damage being increased, indicating that you literally saw it as a time punishment which should be harsher. That makes it really clear to me that you saw it as the "soft enrage" and not just "some name for end of fight mechanic"

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I'm not sure what you're referring to. Where did I even said the damage should be increased and the punishment should be harder?

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Originally Posted by VictorSpoils

This ties into the ilvl sync issue. The first and second tiers need a sync to prevent things like this from being normalized.

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Yes and no. I do agree that hard syncs needs be introduced into endgame raid tiers, but for this specific phase we're already skipping it in many cases for a combination of different reasons (overgear and mechanical unfortunate timings).

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I'm not sure what you're referring to. Where did I even said the damage should be increased and the punishment should be harder?

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I must apologize, I read the last paragraph wrong, that's all on me

It's all good no worries