Baldesion Arsenal Feedback

[Epidendrum]

I had a private discussion with some colleagues yesterday, who have played in the NA/EU servers about it. One of the spoke about the difficulty of getting people to perform meteors and acceleration bombs correctly and likened it to his weekly party finder runs for savage. He asks for "blue and above" and gets all kinds of people in his party. I said that while I don't use any tools; in Gaia's duty finder runs for savage, "grey and green" are perfectly fine and have been for months. He dropped his jaw in shock.

First I reminded him that Gaia/Mana duty finder does not imply better skill. I replied that "grey" while queuing for savage duty finder in Gaia means that they can be counted to execute all mechanics flawlessly. The issue would be probably be dps uptime and rotation optimisation. However, with the completion of the Eureka weapon relic step, most players are in full i400. Hence, as long as the mechanical execution is flawless, "grey" is more than sufficient for a clear, and has been for a couple of months. JP macro strategies emphasize safety, margin of error, ease of understanding. Speed, or squeezing out the last GCD of damage are discarded. My colleague kept quiet for a seconds, sipped his coffee and quipped that in NA/EU, "grey" generally implies some problems with mechanical execution.

I think some players on reddit and other discussion platforms have pointed out what I've been reiterating, JP players are not more skilled. NA/EU have probably much better ways of maximising DPS. However, a poor optimiser ("grey") in Gaia who regularly pugs savage will have practiced enough to flawlessly execute the mechanics of O9S - O12S. All the while I thought it was the same for NA/EU, it was a culture shock to hear it is not the case.

Moving the topic back to the arsenal, I mentioned that it was similar for this content. These same players, especially during the Ozma fight can be seen contributing in a different way - acceleration bomb is coming, the sound goes off and the clustered group on the front left of the platform and the tank on the right, all shift slightly behind (to avoid using their own auto attacks) and freeze. Even if you are 100% sure acceleration bomb is not on you, you will freeze for the sake of the group. For that short few seconds, the entire raid dps drops to zero. This is a key example of playing it safe.

Meteors is another example. Markers come down, the cluster group on the left will stop all dps entirely and start to spread apart ever so slightly. Suddenly the meteor marked players jump and start sprinting. It becomes apparent the players with the meteors didn't even know the marker was on them, but this small step, a willingness to take the dps loss prevents a wipe. Similarly, Ozmashades, Ozma's mourning star or flare star and handled by taking a dps loss and performing slightly preemptive movement. My colleague drank more of his coffee and said, the loss of uptime like that will lead to more enrages. He shook his head and said uptime is the most important thing.

I nodded and said yes I have seen a lot of enrages for Ozma. Last week I had mostly 12-15% Ozma enrages. So far for this week, it's 6-9% enrages. More and more players have fully geared elemental bonuses. Playing it safe lets everyone practice mechanics. I concluded that NA/EU data centres seems to prioritise uptime, maximising every GCD. JP data centres prioritise safety, flawless mechanical execution, dropping dps to zero to execute mechanics is acceptable. Of course when both sides execute things correctly, NA/EU will be faster.

My colleague nodded and agreed with that point and said he never realised that "grey" in savage meant something so different across an ocean, and also understood more about why pugging in JP data centres results in clears eventually, but NA/EU wants their clear now, not later, so dps uptime is paramount. I just shrugged.