PotD floor 200 solo clears

[Commander_Justitia]

...Are we playing the same PotD?

Yes, if you would be running solo 200 attempts, you would know it. The gelmorran shard treasures contain it way more often past 100. The runs are self sufficient if you don't ignore the treasures because you are scared of them containing mimics. HoH on the other hand is not, you have to spam 20-30 multiple times to get enough sustain potions, because the shards from hoh100 runs are not enough.

Somehow I doubt that PotD soloability is really anywhere in their considerations when doing job adjustments, considering that SMN was one of the only other classes that was a contender for pulling off a PotD solo until they took away pets' ability to tank.

They only added aoe to rdm for low level scenario, everything else is the same. The aoe is useless for PotD, redmage is exactly the same as before the addon despise combat formula changed. So they think at least about redmage imo.
Most jobs will wipe at the 180 boss because the heal check at the end is too big. The best try for summoner is therefor 180.
The only guy that managed to get past 180 as something else than a healer or redmage, is a mnk on a jp datacenter who reached 184.

The changes required to make it soloable for every class but still keep the difficulty for redmage are difficult to make.... I know you want optimization, but propose a method to do it without changing the whole experience it had for several years

[Alleo]

Well redmage is the only job that can even try to do this because of the healing and DPS necessary to get through that.

And it takes a huge amount of time, skills and sadly luck to even get there and one DC can kill hours of work..so honestly its not surprising to see the numbers of clears for the different countries. Try to do this and then be kicked out of it at the floor 150 boss because the game just said "no" without any fault on your side..and it surely stops from being fun.

I mean the EU DC chaos is known for being horrible at times.

[Rowde]

Pomander of Benediction maybe?

Since it'd be a Pom, still keeps it kinda sorta RNG and has limited uses.

[XiXiQ]

really the rng of the poms is the main bugbear. a small tweak to the poms distribution would help. Making sure each floor has at least one each of strength/steel would be a start. some others they can apply a minimum of X per 10. they can do something similar for HOH. That leans it all more towards skill/tactics than plain old RNG. Failing that, they can change the amount of poms you can store instead, when you're looking at 200 floors, 10 is probably a reasonable number.

[Louvain]

Not even the Centurio Tiger is this gated and hard to get.

Sorry to pop this bubble, but centurio tiger is ridiculously easy to get with xworld now as long as you put forth the effort. I do agree with the rest of the sentiment though. There have been threads in the past asking for a nerf or some sort of adjustment to make it more reasonable ie identifying solo players and letting them have more pomanders to hold, etc. But nothing came of that either.

[MagicalLoli]

Hi! Just figured I'd leave some of my thoughts here. Some of you might know me as the one who writes the POTD/HOH solo/party guides :3

I think SE has learned a lot from POTD solo, and HOH was designed with that in mind (boss damage is sustainable with potion/steel). HOH is very solo-friendly and people have cleared on all sorts of classes. POTD solo is definitely a more questionable experience than HOH. Not only is the climb long, but it's a lot easier to get screwed by unfavorable RNG due to a smaller amount of tools to deal with things (e.g. concealment in HOH can get you past some nasty rooms, where in POTD you might have no option but to rage a room of proximity-detection monsters sitting on an exit). Moreover, mechanics such as the 180 boss's enrage, as well as the insane damage output of the 190 boss, means that any class that's not RDM has next to no chance (there are some niche strategies to delay the 180 boss rotation and burn it down, as well as methods to sustain through the 190 boss, but such techniques are very hard to execute). But, I think that's ok. As much as I would love to see POTD soloed on more classes, it's probably tricky for them to retroactively balance content, even though we know it can be done, seeing how they tuned HOH.

I see a lot of people complaining about the difficulty, or RNG-nature of the content. As weird as this might sound, I think the RNG is the most exciting part of it. I've done a lot of savage raiding as well as some dabbling in ultimate and the interest of those encounters is a lot less than deep dungeons for me, due to them always being the same - you eventually memorize a rotation for them and do the exact same thing every week. With deep dungeons, there's a lot of decision making on the spot. Moreover, the sheer length of the content ensures that nobody really gets "RNG carried" to a victory. Though, it is definitely balanced in a way such that, with garbage luck, you can play perfectly (which myself, and many other long-term deep dungeon soloists cannot manage to do) and still not be able to clear. If it was balanced to be clearable with said garbage luck however, then it'd be far too easy should you get above-average luck.

[Eldevern]

...

Exciting?

With my garbage luck, since I never manager to clear at least the first ten levels, I wouldn't call that exciting XD

I see what you mean but... the problem is garbage luck is punished the first levels. I could understand luck matters more and more the levels we climb, but at the start, it kills the possibility to acquire experience and somehow, find some way to, at least a little, deal with garbage luck (even if we can't hope to clear all the levels).

[RyuSaarva]

Exciting?

With my garbage luck, since I never manager to clear at least the first ten levels, I wouldn't call that exciting XD

I see what you mean but... the problem is garbage luck is punished the first levels. I could understand luck matters more and more the levels we climb, but at the start, it kills the possibility to acquire experience and somehow, find some way to, at least a little, deal with garbage luck (even if we can't hope to clear all the levels).

you do know that you can avoid every floor trap right?

[Eldevern]

...

Yes, that's not the problem. You... probably don't get what "garbage luck" means. You need to experiment it to know what it really means and... there's no fun at all. If... luck is between -5 and +5... I'm... around -4. Hopefully, it mainly applies to games, thought real life isn't really fun.

[Kobalos]

Can anyone explain why it can only be done on RDM?