Raider to Non-Raider: an exhibition on thoughts and misconceptions

[ShaneDawn]

I agree with a lot of posts here. We had to replace several people in the first few weeks of Savage and trial a lot of people for the sake of progression. Then we got a decent static and were steadily heading for server second of A3S. That is until our SCH suddenly called it quits, which resulted in a chain reaction of people leaving after their closest in-game friend called it quits. It's sad, as that's not even an uncommon issue. Raiding teams that have been raiding for years together are suddenly disbanding as it's no longer fun/rewarding to keep on going.

[Warlyx]

I think the issue with Alexander is that it's a bad raid. The story left a poor first impression. The latter half of Savage feels poorly tuned, over designed, and with a larger jump in difficulty to the rest of the raid unseen since Psychonauts' Meat Circus. The loot tables for each individual floor is a linear joke, completely ruining the fun of gear optimization by making it completely linear and the excitement of clearing fights in general.

You didn't see this amount of complaining from Coil. The common joke response when someone would criticize Coil's fights was "yo get gud". I have yet to have another player come and defend any of the actual design in the latter half of Savage.

My group blazed through floor 1 and 2 in the first two weeks of release, while floor 3 has sandbagged us since. And it's not a team failure, I'd feel confident in claiming that 60% of our wipes have been due to the obnoxious amount of RNG tied to it's tight instant-death mechanics. Nothing is more infuriating than wiping when you KNOW that you are attempting to preform the mechanic correctly, only for the game to just say no.

If I didn't absolutely love actually playing with my static, I'd have dropped this raid and probably taken a break. Chatting up with my friends is fun, the actual fights are not.

I really hope Square has payed attention to the points being made, and take them into account when designing the next part of the raid.

couldnt said better myself , im in the same situation....so frustrating....im almost burned out, i still keep going because my static ....else i would quit raiding...Alex is everything u dont want from a raid , horrible story , poorly tuned raid , and tight instand death , and once one member dies is over ,wipe and wait for potions cds ....

another thing that infuriates me , is food time, why is 30 min? come on put it on 60min already , on progression when waiting on potions , food only last what 4-5 trys at best...

Feast - food (best wow idea ever) can i have it? - yes ,please

[KarstenS]

and once one member dies is over ,wipe and wait for potions cds ....

That was always the case before outgearing.

[HorseBoots]

Snip.

The over-design is outrageous. Let me list off some examples from Living Liquid alone.

Failure to preform Hand of Prayer/Parting gives the entire raid a 2-minute long debuff nerfing all stats by 30%. Pretty harsh right? But there's more, failure also gives the entire raid a 2k per tick bleeding DoT, which will drop the 30% nerfed party in literally seconds. You already have a 2 minute debuff as punishment, might as well just pick me up and throw back up the entrance and save me time restarting the entire fight.

Failure to kill any add during Tornado phase will give out a heavy raid wide hit and a nasty DoT on top of that. Even if your SCH is quick on the gun with Selene's AoE Esuna, you'll still probably lose a DPS in the process. But once again, there's more. Every time a slime reaches the water, Living Liquid gains a permanent damage buff for the final phase. At the current maximum gear level you can be at this point (ilvl 206) This will eventually wipe you by at least the third Cascade, you don't have the HP to survive it.

With Liquid Gaol, the hand will drag the party member in the direction closest to the edge of the water. If the mistake is made and his path leads him into one of the three puddles, he will most likely kill the member prematurely with the Dropsy DoT, and then proceed to hit everyone with a 22k hit, starting with your main tank. This alone will probably wipe you, but of course, the puddle also has to give the arm a 153K PER TICK REGEN HEALING 20% OF ITS HP PER TICK.

It's like the planners hit that point where it's pretty clear that you should stop, but kept going anyway. I feel the need to point out that this isn't even Savage SCoB levels over overdesign. A good handful of us in the static actually did raid SCoB, and we all agree that this goes beyond even that. It feels like they pushed out the first draft that internal playtesting actually cleared and didn't bother to chew the fat.

THAT'S what I mean by bad design.

Funny enough, we're pushing the final phase now (2/3rd of his rotation down, we just need practice on the Drainage/Embolus/Protean portion, which honestly doesn't seem as hard as it sounds.) and we're pushing it faster than the earlier portions of the fight because while the RNG batting chamber is still there and they suddenly introduce four new mechanics exclusive to the final phase, it's not stacked on like three different mechanics at the same time. Which makes it much more controllable.

[MaxDetroit]

The over-design is outrageous. Let me list off some examples from Living Liquid alone.
...

Me and my static just cleared Alexander Savage Floor 1, and we will take our time on Floor 2, so I'm still far away from 3.
@Topic: I mostly raid because of social interaction and teamplay with my fc-mates. I don't really play MMOs for solo-content, I love good teamwork and group coordaination stuff.
I just hope that with 3.1 we will be able to get the relic weapon with ilvl 210 and maybe some other good stuff around that item level. Especially crafting gear with ilvl180 is really overdue.
I guess now, with ilvl190 - ilvl200, and what I just read about the unforgiving mechanics in AS3, we will hit even a harder wall then you guys, because we needed already some weeks for AS1 (we practice two, three times a week for 2 hours, and mostly with alternating members out of a pool of more then a dozen members).
I hope, as always, that with a higher item level comes a higher compensation for RNG and small mistakes. It seems to me that AS3 and AS4 were designed for fully ilvl210, and even then I guess they are pretty damn hard.
Let me try explain: If one really small mistake means a wipe (sooner or later), that's bad design, agreed. But if you go with ilvl 50 into, let's say, Ifrit hardmode, it will be the same: small mistakes = wipe, that fight gets a lot harder. I guess (really, just a guess) the mistake was balancing the fight for an item level that is at the moment unreachable for most of the players.

[RiceisNice]

...

I'd argue that SCoB design (even in normal mode, before the DF nerfs) were in the same in concept, just not the degree or how it punished you; just punishes you by immediately wiping the entire raid rather than mechanics that would become recoverable.



T7- Had renauds that'd one shot even the tanks...with a melee swing. It's not even a skill, just a plain melee swing. Then they'd run loose and proceed to one shot everyone else following aggro list per normal. Then you have pertrifaction where it's a death sentence since masculine will always aim her circle fire toward you, if it's not that it's the allagan poison that'll do you in.

T8- Towers that would lead to photon rays, missing a landmine, getting grazed by any incidental damage source with allagan field (homing missile, cleaves or defense reaction)

t9- Every. Single. Thing. But special mention to divebombs just because it becomes so convoluted to figure out that your best shot is looking up a guide than going through hte phases over and over to try to figure out the pattern at the last phase.

It's one of the biggest reasons why SCoB is my least favorite coil raid by a long shot, with FCoB being my most favored one balancing the numbers (emphasis on number checks so you can't afford to have someone slacking, and allows for the fight to naturally get easier as you get for it), and mechanics (failure to execute doesn't necessarily mean a wipe, but instead makes the fight all that more difficult).
SCoB and Alexander Savage has one or neither of these; you can't overgear SCoB mechanics, and apparently Alexander Savage requires the entire party to be geared up to at least esos (and even that's cutting it really close), which throttles the gate in a bad sense because both esos and gordian drops are blocked for a fairly long time via lockouts and caps.

That was always the case before outgearing.

You can't overgear mechanics though. And even then, some mechanics are contingent on having all of your party members alive else it'll throw it out of order, T10 and alarums for example.

Let me try explain: If one really small mistake means a wipe (sooner or later), that's bad design, agreed. But if you go with ilvl 50 into, let's say, Ifrit hardmode, it will be the same: small mistakes = wipe, that fight gets a lot harder. I guess (really, just a guess) the mistake was balancing the fight for an item level that is at the moment unreachable for most of the players.

One person dying in Ifrit does not mean the entire party is SoL due to mechanics. The DPS check in that fight is still fairly loose and you're not gonna combust the entire party for dying or standing in the puddle. Titan on the other hand, had a fairly stingy DPS check on heart fight that you couldn't afford anyone to die, but they can survive getting hit by an incidential AoE like weight or even landslide until the last phase due to arena size. Most of the difficulty from titan came from the latency though from what I hear, especially on release.

In the context of SCoB or Alexander Savage, the entire party takes 20k (each, not collectively) damage if you place a meteor next to each other, or the raid gets a 30% stat debuff for two minutes if an add gets through, on top of a 3k DoT and adding damage stacks to the boss that'll guaranteed a wipe on the next casscade. No amount of gear will mitigate that, and certainly going into SCoB with ilvl210 isn't helping you survive meteors either.

[HorseBoots]

Snip.

Unfortunately I doubt any over-gearing will ever help with the tears factory that is A3S. The examples I listed pretty much make it impossible to gear past the most minor of mistakes, since for some asinine reason they decided to associate every failure with a one-two punch of boss buffs and player debuffs sealing your fate.

Or you're just given a bad roll on the dice and get yourself thrown into a bad spot for either first Digititus or Drainage tethers. Which still gets us at times. Which is why I point out that the final phase actually feels easier than Hand or Tornado, simply because all of it's major RNG mechanics come in one at a time, instead of 2-3 RNG mechanics coming in at once during Hand and Torando.

[KarstenS]

You can't overgear mechanics though.

You can't outgear one shot mechanics. But everything else. FCoB got ways easier with gear.

A1S and A2S is after the couple of IDs also ways easier that at start. We kill them even even if we have to rezz one or two times.

[MaxDetroit]

One person dying in Ifrit does not mean the entire party is SoL due to mechanics. The DPS check in that fight is still fairly loose and you're not gonna combust the entire party for dying or standing in the puddle. Titan on the other hand, had a fairly stingy DPS check on heart fight that you couldn't afford anyone to die, but they can survive getting hit by an incidential AoE like weight or even landslide until the last phase due to arena size. Most of the difficulty from titan came from the latency though from what I hear, especially on release.

Well, don't get hung up on Ifrit HM, that was just an (bad) example.
My hopes were that with patch 3.1 we get to a point where some of the minor mechanics (not all) in AS3 can fail, e.g. if just one player dies accidently, and you are still able to beat the fight with a good recovery move.
I don't like fights that are such unforgiving, and then, as you told me, mixed with RNG, it sure is no fun fight.

So I guess I wait till the moment comes (maybe with 3.5, when we hit ilvl250 ...) where the fight is still pretty hard, but you are able to recover if minor mechanics fail (but the major ones still mean: wipe).
As an example: We cleared Coil from T1 to T13. And yeah, we did T13 with the echo buff. And yeah, I was okay with that, because the fight was fun at that moment but still a good challenge. T13 unsynced, for example, doesn't feel right to me, that's too much of an easy mode.

You can't outgear one shot mechanics. But everything else. FCoB got ways easier with gear.
A1S and A2S is after the couple of IDs also ways easier that at start. We kill them even even if we have to rezz one or two times.

this.

[RiceisNice]

You can't outgear one shot mechanics. But everything else. FCoB got ways easier with gear.

A1S and A2S is after the couple of IDs also ways easier that at start. We kill them even even if we have to rezz one or two times.

Which is why it's a terrible design imo to have fights that have their difficulty based solely on a gear check you can't necessarily meet (needing ilvl210 when you can only get 5~ pieces per week from drops, and not necessarily the ones you need) and mechanics designed to combust your entire raid for stepping on an allagan puddle (which is what we have in spades when it comes to A3S). FCoB got easier with gear, but it wasn't necessarily a breeze that you could get through it within the first week of release.