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

[RiceisNice]

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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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[HorseBoots]

SCoB Snip.

Second Coil pre-nerf definitely felt like the "sequel" to BCoB in every way. Bigger, badder, harder. You enter T6 and right off the bat it's already up there in mechanical complexity to Twintania. That being said your comments felt a little harsh. (Outside of Turn 7, which before A3S, was right at the top of my list as the worst fight they ever created in this game.)

My biggest gripe with Turn 7 was the pressure it puts on any party missing a SMN and the fact that pre-nerf, you could be doomed to a wipe for DPSing too well. And any fight that will fail you for doing your job too well was completely unacceptable. (Seriously, if they just started each of her phases rotation with a cursed voice, like 90% of the problems would have gone away. A bad push would lead to 6 voices up at once, which would have been difficult to manage but would have also made bad pushes survivable.)

I felt T8 was perfectly tuned for the kind of fight it was. The Avatar was a glorified training dummy and a team coordination check. Arguably the easiest fight to go through if you had that one guy just direct everyone (aka me.)

T9 took a long time to get used to visualizing what needed to be done in the final stretch, but other than Golem phase taking like 3 minutes longer than it should I felt the fight was fine for what it was.