A Binding Coil review and discussion

[Godlafell]

there were no red circles telling me how to dodge twisters i would rly like that next time. also i wish divebombs and twisters were never bugged. how come every other fight shows red circles to help us dodge. but none for divebombs and twisters? i still dont believe they arent bugged. also no deadly boss mods telling me when to move. i have to rely on parser to tell me. rng fight. thank god they finally fixed the fight. still no red circles but at least i can close my eyes and still dodge.

[Zdenka]

there were no red circles telling me how to dodge twisters i would rly like that next time. also i wish divebombs and twisters were never bugged. how come every other fight shows red circles to help us dodge. but none for divebombs and twisters?

There's plenty of fights that don't display the red circles.

Coincounter doesn't display for 100 Ton Swing nor Eye of the Beholder and Chimera doesn't have red circles for Radient Breath, Demon Wall doesn't have one for Repel, Anataboga doesn't have one for Immienent Catasrophy, and the list goes on and on. Also as discussed in the Twister thread I am not sure SE has it coded to just display the red circles on a single PC's screen, therefor if they are the bulls eye shape the entire arena would be flashing red as everyone was in everyone else's "run to far and die" zone effectively making it the same as not having it.



Read entire post, the only real problem with Divebomb is that it targets a specific player. Since he has a limited number of Dive Positions (6? I think we confirmed) he always spawns in the same spot if the player is standing in the same spot. Divebombs instantly give you the Nostalgic feeling of Felmyst where it went up into the air, had 3 spots he could fly, and if you got hit you were MC'd the rest of the fight. (same as Twin nailing you into a wall) So to really fix how dives work, they should have just allowed Twintania to just randomly appear at any of the 6 dive locations and not target a player.

Again how you'd be that is to by stacking up, the same as Felmyst, and only moving if it chose a location that would hit where you are standing, which ends up being exactly the same as how you dodge it now, except you'd have to dodge it even less.

[Liander]

There's plenty of fights that don't display the red circles.

Right, generally in raiding you don't want a whole lot of red circle action going on. If the design is well enough and speaks the intentions of the mechanic you can usually do the guess work on how to avoid it in the future. A bit of hidden challenge is fun and keeps raid group on their toes. Like on Caduceus her tail whip cone is a visible red circle, instead of feeding that information to the player you keep it hidden and a few attempts someone dies to it. That's interesting! It gives players a piece of the puzzle to solve even if it sucks those few attempts but if you stick with it you get a sense of overcoming part of the fight.

There not a lot of uses of the red circle in Binding Coil and pretty much each one can be removed and given different alert which doesn't just give you the information on a plate whethere you survive or not. There are not too many abilities in general in Coil which is that major problem so it is hard to say for certain how SE will use them effectively.

The only thing I wholeheartly do not agree with is that Turn 4 is not interesting.

I can agree with you, Turn 4 does really break up the sit and spam attack without thought that goes on in the rest of the instance. I play a healer so I don't have this view point so I'm glad to see it brought up. I just wish it was expanded on, not just on turn 4 but throughout all of coil. Right now theres little to engage raiders outside a few abilities that are not really that scarey, so Turn 4 is probably the best from a dps stand point where what you're doing and how your doing it matters since the time crunch between waves.

The problem I have with it is there's nothing else going on in the fight, the only ability worth of mention is the dreadnaughts cleave which you have to position for. That's not really fun raiding, if they took turn 4 and took it to the next level with mechanics that made it not safe to do the more interesting dps combos it would be a much better encounter in my eyes.

[Yenn]

Interesting note about the Divebomb strategy: There were alternate strategies to avoid Divebomb that involved actually dodging it and having Twintania dive across the arena.
In the first maintenance for Turn 5, SE made most of these strategies no longer possible. If you attempted them, Twintania would automatically hit everyone, even though her animation didn't come near them, and they would be thrown in completely random directions (not the direction of her dive). This forced us to switch to BG's strategy, which feels like it's an exploit.

The major problem with every single encounter in BC is that there are no hints or indicators as to what mechanics do/how they should be dealt with. This is terrible design and needs to stop; it moves 90% of the difficulty from executing the encounter well to, instead, bashing your head against it long enough to figure out what every mechanic does. This isn't to be confused with coming up for strategies; I think figuring out a strategy that works for your group should be a major part of every encounter, but in the particular case of FFXIV, this is overshadowed by too much of the encounter being unknown. I hate to compare FFXIV to WoW, but WoW did it right, and FFXIV should draw from it's success; mechanics were hinted at in tooltips, and the difficulty was coming up with strategies and executing them correctly, instead of spending dozens of hours using trial and error and guessing at how abilities work.

This favors groups like BG who have nothing better to do than throw themselves at it for god knows how many hours, instead of favoring groups who are highly skilled but don't want to spend dozens of hours each week on an encounter that they're wiping to for no obvious reason. Exhibit A being the SCH in their video; I don't even remember how many times it died, and they still downed it. This type of design feels very FFXI-esque.

Again, Divebomb is a great example. We have no idea how SE intended for us to counter it, but judging by that ridiculous patch, it seems the intended strategy was for the entire group to stack in a small location and force Twintania to dive out of the arena. Which makes zero sense, and no indication is given to suggest this.