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

[KarstenS]

I've seen loads of testimonials talking about how FCoB was not hard enough

I remember these threads. The message was: Are DPS checks all what they got to make Final Coil difficult?

(This thread got opened just some days right after the release of Final Coil)

Noticed something? FCoB had DPS checks. Something that ppl complain in AS while they say difficulty of FCoB was fine.

Whats happened at the end? We got more than DPS checks. Exactly what ppl requested.

[HorseBoots]

I remember these threads. The message was: Are DPS checks all what they got to make Final Coil difficult?

(This thread got opened just some days right after the release of Final Coil)

Noticed something? FCoB had DPS checks. Something that ppl complain in AS while they say difficulty of FCoB was fine.

Whats happened at the end? We got more than DPS checks. Exactly what ppl requested.

So instead we got a fight were the server infrastructure is just as much of a threat than the boss itself and a final boss who's mechanics were created with just egregious oversights that players have discovered ways to completely circumvent them.

In SCoB literally every single wipe I ever had I could point out exactly why it happened, who was responsible, and what needed to be addressed in order to fix it. "DPS was too low on the slime." "Masako, you didn't aim your voice away from group." "We missed a mine" "Oh meteors was too close."

SCoB had PLENTY of RNG associated with its fights, but I had plenty of control over it. No matter the situation I could call out a method to deal with it, and when we die I could almost always say "Oh that was on us." With the exception of a handful of extreme cases, even if a mechanic was failed to be preformed properly you still had hope to finish with a clear if you kept your cool. I can't count the amount of Nael kills I had from the jaws of defeat.

Due to the nature of A3S's RNG and the way plenty of it's mechanics are coded you can and will have plenty of wipes where you just go "well the way it came out there wasn't really much I could do." When you fail pretty much any of these mechanics you are almost guaranteed a TPK.

Tank got digititus'd? He's a dead man walking. DPS got digititus? Good luck beating the hand of pain check, or the liquid gaol if you're that late in the fight. Slime got to the edge, but you still managed to keep people from dying from the damage? Well too bad! You also gave Living Liquid a permanent damage up! If Cascade or the first x6 Splash wave doesn't kill you, I'm sure the second one will. All of which served within about 4-6 second windows, with plenty associated with plenty of actual travel (But don't touch anyone :^))

Since the game rebooted itself with 2.0 there are two design philosophies that have always rang true with the game's community. 1. A fight that is both difficult but also tuned in a way that allows a bad run to be recoverable with enough cool-headed determination will always be praised as good game design. And 2. A fight with unrecoverable fail-states have always been loathed within the game's community.

Alexander Savage's fights take 2 years of player feedback and development team experience and throws about 80% of all of it into the trash and instead serves an underwhelming first half and an over tuned latter half riddled with RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG with 6 second windows and arbitrary gear gates to pad out the entire experience because the development team thought it would be more impressive to create 2 bad, overturned fights to drag out the experience so they can gloat over "how long it took the best of the best to clear it" rather than just creating 2 good, quality fights that are actually praised by it's community.

Even if you somehow find the length it takes for people to clear bad content interesting, the first two clears weren't even cleared in the intended manner, instead exploiting Square's netcode.

So now we have this thread that has 300+ replies in less than two weeks and daily complaints over on the subreddit.

tl;dr: This raid is poopybutt.