Updating the Coils of Bahamut

[Packetdancer]

I'm not sure why you're thinking the story would need to be transferred over to a trial rather than raid format. I would expect that the overall structure would remain: three lots of four boss fights, just like all the other raids that have come since.

Because asking them to do it as a modern raid series means—as you note—three sets of four boss fights. Right now, while Coils is 13 fights long, some of those fights are little more than tiny dungeons, lacking any actual central "boss" to fight. So not only would they be taking fights like Twintania and Nael and so on and making them more like modern fights—plus, likely, rebalancing them for what jobs have at level 50 now, because a level 50 kit now is fairly different than a level 50 kit when Coils came out—they're also having to come up with entire new fights to fill the other spaces out in the tier.

Turning it into a trial series means you can take just a handful of the 13 fights—e.g., the more memorable actual boss fights—and update them. Now the story can still be accessible to players, but you don't tie up the combat design team to make them do an entire raid series worth of content reworking.

I'm in favor of making Coils accessible to new players who want to get into that story. I'm also in favor of not tying up the combat design team with level 50 content indefinitely; that steals time away from level 90 content... which is content I also very much want.

I haven't healed them in EW, but when I last healed them (in Shadowbringers) I still had to manage MP. With so few abilities available I was healing constantly and just barely kept my MP up with Lucid Dreaming. Sometimes I had to use Energy Drain just to get some back.

When the Retro Raiders did Coils during ShB, realizing I was actually actively fishing for Freecure procs as WHM during certain fights made me feel so dirty—even if it was necessary, as literally my only oGCD heal was Benediction—that it drove me to finish the rest out as SCH instead. (The other healer was AST and was not going to budge.)

[Iscah]

Right now, while Coils is 13 fights long, some of those fights are little more than tiny dungeons, lacking any actual central "boss" to fight.

I'm pretty sure that Turn 3 is the only turn that lacks a boss. Some of the others have a mini-dungeon leading to a boss fight, but there's still a fight in the end.

[Packetdancer]

I'm pretty sure that Turn 3 is the only turn that lacks a boss. Some of the others have a mini-dungeon leading to a boss fight, but there's still a fight in the end.

Turn one, sure, Caduceus is a boss... [ insert "I GUESS?" meme image ]

Turn two is just a whole bunch of minibosses, though I guess the last ADS variant will use the abilities of the previous ones so has a bit more variety in attacks; you could count it as a boss.

Turn three, you yourself mention; it's a weird duck by any standard.

Turn 4 does not have an actual boss, as I recall; isn't it just multiple waves of adds? Even if you consider the dreadnought a "boss", there's more than one of them.

I will grant that the Second Coil and Final Coil are more easily adapted, but I feel like the Binding Coil is something of a mess; if the goal is to take Coils and update the storyline to play like more recent/modern content, if you target doing a full three-tier raid series again, I feel like it's not as simple as just "tweak the mechanics slightly, chop Turn 3 altogether, and call it good".

[Iscah]

...

Fair point on Turn 4, but we still have Alexander 2 that is just waves of adds, and now they're going the opposite way in dungeons and we have the first "boss" of Troia.

In any case I don't think they would need to change it. The primary thing to be updated isn't the structure of the battles, but their difficulty level and accessibility.

As for the others, Caduceus and the final ADS in Turn 2 are definitely bosses in my limited experience, mainly a few early attempts to clear via DF and then a failed BLU party (not the high-efficiency version) that couldn't get through the Caduceus fight.