A Binding Coil review and discussion

[Taemek]

Nice analysis of it all, but the problem is that this opinion is from one of the groups that is the 0.01% of people who have actually cleared coil, and SE won't make their hard dungeon even harder just to satisfy such a small selection of people. You have some interesting suggestions to make the earlier turns more difficult, but a lot of them would just encourage more ranged attack stacking (like we need more of that).

Also I strongly disagree that there's "nothing to think about" on turn 4. Yes it does boil down to being a DPS check to be able to beat it, but it's far from a mindless one.

And people who want to make Twintania harder just baffle me.

If PUG raids are clearing Coil that doesn't require any form of VoIP communication or FC organized scenarios, then your assumption of 0.01% of the player base is, wrong.

People who always seem to chime in assuming that raiders make up a stupid value of the player base like this just baffles me.

[Sleigh]

My major concern is that by the time 2.1 comes out I'd be full ilvl 90, why would I ever step into Crystal Tower? I'd go there once just to see how it is but...yeah no.

If it only has iLVL80ish gear, two reasons: alt gearing, and a new source of tomes.

[Casper]

If PUG raids are clearing Coil that doesn't require any form of VoIP communication or FC organized scenarios, then your assumption of 0.01% of the player base is, wrong.

People who always seem to chime in assuming that raiders make up a stupid value of the player base like this just baffles me.

Well, pugs are clearing turn 1, but that's about it. I have yet to hear of a pug group that cleared turn 2 on my server. There are some, like, groups of 5 friends that pug the 3 others that do it from time to time (rarely), but never did i heard a success story of a pug group started from scratch and killing turn 2. So please stop about "pug clearing coil" -- they don't. Moreover, if they enforced somehow the raid to deal with spawning adds in second phase instead of burning and kiting, i'm pretty sure almost none of the pug would clear that as well.

[Onolock]

Nice analysis of it all, but the problem is that this opinion is from one of the groups that is the 0.01% of people who have actually cleared coil, and SE won't make their hard dungeon even harder just to satisfy such a small selection of people. You have some interesting suggestions to make the earlier turns more difficult, but a lot of them would just encourage more ranged attack stacking (like we need more of that).

Also I strongly disagree that there's "nothing to think about" on turn 4. Yes it does boil down to being a DPS check to be able to beat it, but it's far from a mindless one.

And people who want to make Twintania harder just baffle me.

What most people don't realize is that these "hardcore" people generally bring the most attention to a game. Casual people don't stream raids, min/max their characters, and push the limits on fights as well as beta test. You need hardcore people in order to tune your fights well, you need to know what the best guilds are capable of doing. Hardcore raiders are very important for a games longevity. WoW in vanilla was all hardcore raiding; the gear distinction between someone who is casual and someone who raided was massive. The feeling of killing bosses after working on them for sometimes weeks was very rewarding. WoW grew massively in popularity because it offered competitive hardcore raiding(Naxx 40 and AQ 40 were amazing if you got to see them), challenging content, with generally smooth and bug-free raids and they have continued this. The mechanics even in their newest fights are new and different.

MMO's that are released nowadays fail because they don't offer anything WoW hasn't done already and the PvE is too easy. Coil really offered no mechanics that anyone who has raided in WoW for years hasn't seen. Coil overall was ok, but CT from a development standpoint is a horrible failure since pretty much most of your raiders are going to unsub. I know of at least 2 guilds on my server and some people personally that have already unsubbed or sold their accounts from lack on content.

But to stay on topic I agree mostly with Lianders review. Badly designed mechanics which allow players to then use questionable tactics in defeating them is terrible design. I haven't seen a fight in a very long time that was as bugged as Twintania was. Coil should have been tuned much higher or lower and tune CT higher. Releasing any meaningful progression content that won't come until possibly April-May timeframe is going to lose them many subs. This is especially since you have D3 xpac, WoW xpac, EQ Next, Wildstar all looming on the horizon in that time frame as well. I just don't see this game lasting long at all.

[Ariyn]

After reading that entire post as well as all the comments I figured I would put in my 2 cents here since after all we are all looking to better the end game.

I agree with about all of your post if not exactly then in some variation.

In turn 1 I felt that the bosses should have had more to them. It was just far too simple for "the hardest end game" content. To my understanding BC was supposed to be the hard mode esque type raid with CT being more on the puggable side. And that I am ok with. However if that is the case then we should not have been able to down this turn in sub 5 pulls. Boss hits tanks fairly hard but with rotating proper cd's it becomes a joke.

Your idea to have mini snakes or something that would distract the raid is a good one. Personally I would have them spawn from his acid spit and have them cocoon so to speak the player stunning them until the 10k or so hp of them was killed off. This way if a healer was to get it tanks with high stacks would probably die thus needing to minimize stacks through out the fight as well as having dps force switch lengthening the fight.

For turn 2, I actually thought it was a decent fight. Minimal room for error with the auto wipe mechanic and the high voltage if not stopped could easily be the cause of a wipe. This is probably the only one that I don't have much to say about (one with bosses anyway).

Turn 3, waste of time and dev resources. Nothing in this is anything more then a complete waste. Fun to jump around but without a boss in it you may as well remove it completely. Even an optional boss would have been good.

Turn 4 was tightly tuned, but it was tuned to ilvl 70. For an instance that should have been tuned to ilvl 80 overall it was too weak. Considering they screwed the pooch so to speak on getting CT in the game at launch I can understand why the tuning was low. If they had made it unbeatable the community as a whole would have raged.

For turn 4 I agree that while the positioning and things were pretty crucial to figuring out the fight, once you had it down the first time there was no one challenge at all. This is one fight that has zero rng factors in it. While rng can be a bad thing having none is just as bad because there is no complexity to the fight. Basically don't under or over do it with rng. Need to find the right balance between them. Having Soldiers give a slow upon hit as well as the knights doing their draw in would have been a good way to force groups to split heals since most just kite the adds in the last wave. Buffing the leech from the spiders would mean that the dps required gets pushed higher. Having Rooks explode on death creating a void zone that does high damage to anyone in it would have been a good idea.

While I have not killed Turn 5 as of yet I do feel that this fight has a lot better tuning and RNG involved, somewhat too much rng at times. While the dev's DID confirm that twister was not broken and BG found the trick was to not leave the area you were in but to just do a small circle, dev's instead nerfed it making it pretty much a useless mechanic. More of a pain having to move then actual challenge to it.

The bugs in the fight (and the 2 weeks to find fixes) is more what hurt then anything. This fight was not properly tested and the internal testing (if that is what is planned for the future) needs to be done much better then it was.

All in all I think turn 5 mechanic wise is a good fight. There is the element of possible rng deaths but for the most part everything you can time out and plan for. There really is no fight that you can't time down to a T since they all follow a set script. This however is true for just about any game to date.

As others have said, CT (since it wasn't in at release) needs to either be now tuned for the highest progression OR we need the next wing of coil released at the same time! If you go with the plan and release CT as easier then current content you will bleed subs the second any other game or xpac comes out. Hell even with CoD: Ghosts dropping yesterday your subs are going to start falling off as there is nothing to do end game but level other jobs/crafts after your hr long coil clear. Yes we are spending time on t5 for those that have not beaten it but I don't expect that to be much longer for most FC's now.

[chocotaru]

Thank you for posting this informative guide.