When you Love the Story, but are Really Bad at the Gameplay

[Packetdancer]

Its mostly my reaction (or, often, lack thereof) to them to be honest. I don't often recall which mechanic does what and even when I do I often find myself a bit too slow to react.

As others have pointed out, "mechanics panic" is often a thing when you're less familiar with a fight. And the game tries to inspire that by making mechanics visually flashy/noisy in many places. So falling prey to that doesn't mean you're a bad player, it means the fight design is "working as intended", really.

But as I noted earlier in the thread, almost every mechanic has some easy mnemonic and some simple solution... the game just likes to play at being a stage magician and try to hide them from you behind those flashy visuals.

As such, I end up coming up with a lot of mnemonics to help folks in the FC, sprouts I encounter in various roulettes, folks in savage PF, etc.

A simple example are the chimeras you see throughout the game. (Or garms, shadowcourt hounds, whatever.) They have two noteworthy attacks: Ram's Voice and Dragon's Voice. In Cutter's Cry, it tries to teach you the difference between the two by throwing up a giant toast text of "The ram's eyes glow blue!" or "The dragon's eyes glow violet!"... but that's not really super helpful with any other chimera in the game; all the others will only show the Ram's Voice or Dragon's Voice castbar.

So what I teach sprouts in Cutter's Cry is "'Ram' means 'scram'!" -- e.g., Ram's Voice is the point blank AoE and you want to get away from the chimera (or interrupt/silence it to stop the cast, either way), while Dragon's Voice is thus the donut AoE (where you can stay close and keep fighting).

This mnemonic not only works for Cutter's Cry, but also for the chimera you fight for the Realm Reborn relic questline, the ones you can fight as FATEs in both ARR and Heavensward, the garms in Palace of the Dead, the garms in the World of Darkness raid, the shadowcourt hounds in one fight in Dun Scaith, etc. Because that mechanic is used many, many places throughout the game, you can use the same approach to encountering it basically anywhere.

And that's true of most mechanics: once you recognize the piece of the mechanic, it's easy to see it elsewhere in the game -- and usually, to apply the same resolution.

As another example, any time you see "Pyretic" -- or honestly, something like two-thirds of all casts involving fire in some form -- being cast, you need to be not moving by the time the cast goes off (including not auto-attacking) or you'll take damage. Any time you see something involving "Blizzard", conversely, there's a solid chance you need to keep moving, because if you are standing in place when the cast finishes you'll be frozen solid (and sometimes take a really nasty frostbite DoT).

Almost anything I can think of involving "Choir" -- "Imp Choir", "Toad Choir", etc. -- will either be an untelegraphed frontal cone AoE from the enemy casting it where, if you are standing in that cone, you will get turned into a thing... or a look-away mechanic. So if there's a "Choir" cast of some form and no look-away eye over the caster's head... don't be in front, basically.

Almost every time a boss tethers to every single player, they're going to then do a cleave towards each player, and you can only survive your own cleave... so don't overlap. Etc.

Moreover, the same thing will often appear with different names. "Pyretic" -- the fire-based "stop moving by the time this cast is done" mechanic I mentioned above -- also appears as "Acceleration Bomb" or "Extreme Caution" in other fights.

Usually Pyretic is a cast that puts a debuff on you for like 2 seconds once the cast finishes (and you cannot move until the debuff is gone), whereas Acceleration Bomb and Extreme Caution tend to be debuffs (sometimes with a visible countdown) on the individual affected players. And Acceleration Bomb is usually used by Allagan stuff, while Extreme Caution is usually used by Garlean magitek stuff, and Pyretic is usually used by casters or Voidsent. (Though that's not always true; Seat of Sacrifice, for instance, will put a countdown over your head a'la Acceleration Bomb's usual form, and if the Imbued cast was fire, you resolve that countdown as though it were a Pyretic castbar.)

But regardless of where they're used and in what context... they are all, functionally, the same exact mechanic under three different names: when the countdown finishes or the castbar is done, you need to be not doing anything.

And regardless of which one it is, when it's used as part of a fight, they're frequently used to bait you into moving during them.

For instance, putting an AoE marker directly under you, and then giving you Extreme Caution; the immediate instinct is to move out of the AoE to safely... but that'll cause you to explode due to Extreme Caution. If they do that, I guarantee you 100% of the time, the AoE telegraph will go off well after the Extreme Caution falls off -- the game baits you into moving immediately (because you're standing in the Bad Red Place), when the real solution is to still deliberately stand in the bad until Extreme Caution is gone, and then move to safety before the bad actually becomes bad.

Because as I've noted in other posts, this game plays with a fairly limited set of Lego bricks where mechanics are concerned.

And if you look at every single mechanic as "okay, this entire mechanic is this thing", you're looking at whatever Lego monstrosity they built using those pieces; there are so, so many individual mechanics with different names in this game, trying to remember every one of them is a recipe for madness.

But remembering the individual pieces? That lets you carve any mechanic up into bite-size chunks, and there's a whole lot less of those to remember; it's actually a surprisingly small set of Legos the fight designers play with.

(And breaking everything down into the reused pieces means the places that do have something relatively unique -- like the hot/cold mechanics in Delubrum Reginae, for instance -- are rare enough to be memorable.)

So like I said, if there's a particular fight you find you often struggle with parsing the mechanics quickly enough, feel free to name it here; many of us are used to looking at the mechanics in this game as "okay, which Lego pieces got used" and breaking down a fight into those bite-size pieces, as well as often having simple tricks or mnemonics to help folks remember how to resolve things.

But otherwise... I highly recommend trying to look at mechanics and recognize the components rather than trying to remember the entire mechanic. Because trying to remember every single mechanic in the game is a fool's errand -- even the best raiders aren't going to be able to reel off every single attack/cast of every fight in this game... but trying to remember and recognize the individual pieces used to build those mechanics?

That's absolutely, 100% doable... and honestly, within the capabilities of most players. Even those who feel intimidated. And recognizing those pieces early on tends to give you a lot more time to react to things than you think you might have.

The game's just really good at using visual flash to obscure that fact.