MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[vetch]

I disagree. Participating in high-end content since Creator and watching it require less and less healing even during progression is what I’m basing my statement on. And if Savage is suffering from lower and lower healing requirements, the content below it will suffer even more. I keep hoping to be proven wrong, and sometimes there’s that one fight that makes me feel like maybe content will becoming challenging again; but I’ve been waiting for several years to see this. One fight that actually challenges you every year or two years just isn’t acceptable, in my opinion.

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

I’m hoping Sephirot Unreal will be a real throwback to his original HW fight, which was actually really challenging and hard. He was, more or less, a Savage fight. But again: that’s one fight that will only be around for ~4 months and then go offline when the next Unreal comes out. I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

I don’t think the MSQ needs to be Dark Souls levels of hard, but making Extremes and Savage feel like Extreme and Savage again would be nice.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

Problem being for healers that, when it comes to Extreme and Savage which should be the Medium and Hard to the MSQ's Easy, they end up being 'Easy 2' and 'Easy but you have to press W'.

Jobs used to have skill interactions that were a lot more nuanced than “fill gauge to 50 then press button for big hit”. ...

I've read about most of those, but thank you for the recap.

[HyoMinPark]

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

I can agree that they need dedicated healer mains on the development team. Having devs that actually play the role regularly in all forms of content could help improve the state of them. That said, listening to feedback is also important; and I hope they can also take some of the reasonable suggestions people have made and consider incorporating them as well. Having real healer devs might help facilitate this.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

I agree. It doesn’t. I wish they could figure out a way to maybe rotate them in and out. Kind of the way PvP rotates things like Frontlines, Rival Wings, etc. to incentivize and pull people into each mode. I don’t know how successful an Unreal Roulette would be, but maybe picking one each week that gives you an extra replay on the Fox board or something to keep the older ones alive. I think this could be down without having to upscale the old 80 ones to 90—or the 80 and 90 ones to 100, assuming that’s where we’ll be in 7.0.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

He said they were removing the proximity damage from the earthshakers. I have heard nothing about the removal of the tower mechanic, which is not an exclusive tank mechanic. When the orange and green vulnerabilities are out, it becomes a responsibility of anyone with an orange debuff. When they aren’t, then it’s a tank mechanic. I think the promixity removal is fine. You’ll still need to do earthshakers properly to ensure there’s no overlap that will lead to people dying. I can’t imagine it being the double stack since you technically only need three people to live that (if you’re talking about the two jumps he does during Phase 1). The MT never stacked in that when it was relevant—it was DPS in one and healers/OT the other.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

I kind of wish solo instances could have the opposite options of Very Easy—maybe add a “Hard” option to them so if people find they want a challenge, they can take it. And then leave the “Normal”, “Easy”, and “Very Easy” for those who don’t want it. More options would be good; and I don’t think it would hurt. Especially if you were given the option to choose without having to wipe first.

[vetch]

That said, listening to feedback is also important; and I hope they can also take some of the reasonable suggestions people have made and consider incorporating them as well. Having real healer devs might help facilitate this.

I would go so far as to say that it's required. Without someone who plays healers regularly to parse the feedback, it falls to the current team of DPS mains to do it. Accordingly (if they even take any feedback) they will pick the suggestions that seem feasible to DPS mains.

Crucially, DPS and healer mains often differ on their idea of fun. For example, as a healer main I like to feel like my party is in actual, real danger of dying to damage in difficult content and it's my skillful play preventing it long enough to win the fight... whereas DPS mains probably prefer it when they don't remain at low health, barely alive, one mistake away from death because I'm too busy doing triage healing on people who've been chosen for unavoidable damage.

You really need some healer mains on the design team to reconcile this.

I wish they could figure out a way to maybe rotate them in and out ... to incentivize and pull people into each mode.

Doesn't even need its own roulette entry. I'm in several large discord servers dedicated to re-running old extremes and savages that would jump all over the ShB Unreals.

He said they were removing the proximity damage from the earthshakers. I have heard nothing about the removal of the tower mechanic, which is not an exclusive tank mechanic.

I re-checked what I read and you're right about the proximity damage.

"Earthshakers, where two people get targeted for cones, used to have proximity damage, but it was too mean and so they removed it."
"Also there was a mechanic where Tanks had to position left or right, but they kept getting confused. "Our right? Sephirot's right?""

I don't know what the left-right mechanic they're referring to is.

[Lauront]

I kind of wish solo instances could have the opposite options of Very Easy—maybe add a “Hard” option to them so if people find they want a challenge, they can take it. And then leave the “Normal”, “Easy”, and “Very Easy” for those who don’t want it. More options would be good; and I don’t think it would hurt. Especially if you were given the option to choose without having to wipe first.

Agree with that. The other thing is, if they're rolling out trusts to all trials and dungeons, could they not in principle add such a feature to those too (in the sense of easy/very easy)? At present, they don't seem to have plans to, but it would get around this issue of having to make the MSQ normal content so braindead. I get that the MSQ isn't where the most challenging content is meant to be found, but considering how it's meant to include some very potent foes - and the extremes are mostly just made up versions - I'd like to see difficulty a bit closer to the .3 fights, or even a bit tougher, in the regular trust/DF stuff. It's becoming jarring to me, and tacking on easier modes to the trusts is one way to provide an easy completion option for those who just want to get through the story fast, since SE seems unwilling to demand more of them, to give some flexibility with the difficulty in regular modes.