Enough

[AdvancedWind]

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But without a few one shot mechanics you greatly reduce a fight difficulty. It's hard to make something that doesn't harshly punish mistakes but remains challenging. Your example sounds good on paper, but would actually make Titan easier than Garuda because it allows too many mistakes. Fight would simply become "don't be stunned by the easiest move to avoid".

WoTl change would make it more forgiving and easy to avoid than Eruption. Mountain buster change would eliminate the only challenge a healer has during the fight.

Being punished due to mistakes, specially ones that are, let's face it, trivial (move from bad thing), is what makes fights harder on any game that allows the player to evade enemy attacks by moving. If you can be hit by nearly anything and not have that much impact outside of very specific situations, you might as well have the enemy just drop dead on engage. There's a reason the vast majority of the really damaging and dangerous moves in the game also happen to have the largest cast times, the most predictable patterns and simplest AoEs, with very few exceptions.

Heck, current Titan is actually not even as harsh as people make it out to be, the only real punishing move is landslide, and it also happens to be the easiest to avoid (it's a narrow line AoE that will most likely only target a single person) and has a big tell before the Aoe marker even shows up. Bombs doesn't kill you, you can eat 2 WoLs depending on your job, Heart dies easily with limit break, mountain buster is infrequent, etc. A slight overgear (ilv75ish) trivializes every mechanic but landslide.

[Dhex]

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The point was to show how a fight can be made less punishing.

Designing fights to take several attempts that requires players to be engaged - without the need to fall back on the crutch of one-shot mechanics.

Titan HM is not hard in iL75, and it's not hard in general; but it is designed so that if you're attempting it in lower gear setups that a single mistake means an eventual wipe. That's both punishing and frustrating - which should inspire you to do better; to seek out better gear. If you've got players that still can't clear it even after hours of attempting it, gearing, buying consumables - because of lag or one shots - it leads to a very discouraged feeling - a disenfranchisement with the game.

Yoshi-P has said before; older content will become easier as new content is added. You will likely see Titan HM become less difficult eventually - but if it's not soon enough for casual/less apt/handicapped/less-than perfectly connected players to beat it then it really doesn't make a difference. Titan EX is out - CT is out and another set of new content is being talked about already.

So, why is Titan HM still a thing for so many people?