New Unreal is a an all around miserable experience.

[Ivtrix]

Which is why you learn the context first.
JPN uses an agreed on Macro for strats.
But it doesn't mean anything if you don't know the context.
Hell, people can yell mario kart and braindead as strat all they want. Anyone who doesn't know the context won't know what to do.

I have always been rather envious of JP PF raiding mentality. On NA everyone wants to do things their way which revolves around us trying to remember the 6 main ways people want to solve X mechanic, we have no macros, we get in the instance, people throw down markers and we fight over clock spots. Its special.

[Sunhwapark]

we have no macros.

That sounds like a chaotic nightmare.
I am definitely glad EU make use of macros to come to an agreement in which position they take for certain mechanics.

[SnowVix]

When I bring these issues up here, I find it rather mean-spirited that people, and mind you it's always the same people, who have to chime in and tell me that I need to "git gud" or that I just suck and the content should remain locked to me. It's gone even further as people used my parses to harass me with, to the point where I had to privatize my FFLogs. I have a very good memory, but the amount of mechanics and the extremely slim margin of error makes this feel more difficult than it needs to be. Many of the "tells" are very difficult to make out and it doesn't feel like Squeenix has done much to properly prepare people for Savage tier. This is why midcore is needed, after finishing the normal tiers of raids and trials, you are essentially thrown to the wolves and that is not a way to prepare someone for that level of difficulty. Especially when much of the difficulty feels fake since every mistake is pretty much a OHKO if not an out and out wipe.

So yeah, maybe what I need is a better way to ease in than to be entrusted to a random party that has 100% chance of failing or entrusted to a group of jerks who will kick me to curb if I don't rapidly meet their insanely high standards.

I'm going to be honest here, you did yourself no favors when you created a thread to ask Square to force people to not use [Duty Complete] in party finder while saying you were better than all the [Practice] parties. That was most people's first interaction with you, and it created a hostility from your side that people matched.

[Ivtrix]

That sounds like a chaotic nightmare.
I am definitely glad EU make use of macros to come to an agreement in which position they take for certain mechanics.

Yeah the fighting over ex4 TN vs Boss relative week 1 was legendary.

[Gararr]

I guess this is the result when you tie synced extreme trial to casual rewards (mounts and minions)

People thought this was more casual because of Ultima being such a joke fight. However, both Shiva and Levi showed most players what to expect. Real fights that run as EX's without the ability to overgear them. People knew sephirot would be a step up because they remembered him from HW.

I'd call these Premium rewards. These can be bought on the market board at a premium cost, won via Wonderous Tails, or earned via weekly clear rewards. They're just luxury items at the end of the day, much like the feathers from maps, or the fate mount for bicolor vouchers.

Casual rewards are things like the omni 80 mount, tanking mounts, 90 glamor head, etc. Things that can be earned without ever actually playing any difficult content / that aren't ticket items.

I pray they don't nerf him, but I'll give some advice for people that want to clear reliably:

1) if there's only 3 people up front for tethers, a tank can move up and invuln a 4th tether. Paladin is particularly good for this as they can cover a physical that had a tether. Make sure to step left to leave room on the right for melee dps.

2) there are three safe spots during earthshaker baits. One at the far left, right, and center. If you're in a group with someone who messes up the bait, you can use those spots to dodge away from the group. (Gotta hug the edge though)

3) caster should use Surecast for the knockback at wind adds phase and start casting LB3 when knockback for wind add comes out. Healers shield heavy and you'll wipe out the adds, wind, and a good chunk of boss HP. I play SMN to do this myself.

[hagare]

I have always been rather envious of JP PF raiding mentality. On NA everyone wants to do things their way which revolves around us trying to remember the 6 main ways people want to solve X mechanic, we have no macros, we get in the instance, people throw down markers and we fight over clock spots. Its special.

Oh yeah, I've heard NA doesn't use an agreed upon strat for a fight. I don't think I can do that here.
I think JPN server graduates bring the macro culture back with them to their respective server when it was finally released. I know there used to be a lot of EU players a long time ago in tonberry.

Or refusing to do tower callouts. Just one person has to type L or R in chat to call out an orange tower while the colored debuffs are out. The rest can worry about the other tower.

Why not just have a set up T/H left and DPS right?
Either way, I'm usually the one who goes for the tower aside the ball.

[Vrankyl]

I don't care anymore. My seething anger from week one has waned to simmering disdain and I've washed my hands of it. I'll just wander through Hello Kitty Island Adventure and my daily roulettes for the next 2mo until Criterion Dungeons inevitably turn into 4-man Sav (already hearing it will have a 620+ entry req) and I am truly fed up.

Just let this thread die.

I just want to point out that Criterion Dungeons have always been sold as 4-man savage content. What isn't the savage version are the Variant Dungeons, those would be the harder than normal dungeons but not Savage difficult. Then you have Savage Criterion which is looking to potentially be the Ultimates of 4-man content.

[NotACapitalist]

I think seph unreal came at a bad timing imo. Nobody wants to do it atm since Savage is fresh atm. And at the same time, the punishing mechanics come very late into the fight (Da'at spreads and the untelegraphed spread AOEs, knockback spam, and the last adds phase). Still a fun fight but feels more exhausting to run than say Barb EX

[Packetdancer]

Oh yeah, I've heard NA doesn't use an agreed upon strat for a fight. I don't think I can do that here.

I wouldn’t say that NA PF doesn’t agree on a strat at all; I would say “at some point in the first week, some strat becomes favored, and then NA PF will cling to that strat tenaciously even if it’s demonstrably flawed and something better comes out week 2.”

(You do, of course, still have a few groups that want to run something a different way.)

But often there are little things no one entirely agrees on, or bothers to put in the PF description. Like soaking the first towers in P5S, the ones scattered semi-randomly around; I’ve seen “go to your clock spot and just take the nearest”, I’ve seen “healers and tanks take the first one clockwise of true north, DPS take first clockwise”, I’ve seen the same in reverse (TH CCW, DPS CW), I’ve seen partners assigned with “take north if there’s one there, otherwise West, otherwise East” and such, and I’ve seen “just YOLO and hope every tower gets soaked.” And that is where stuff can get a bit scuffed.

Then, of course, you have the “I’m always W, I need to be W or I’ll forget what to do!” type scuffles over clock spots…

[Mika_Zahard]

Unreal is not a miserable experience .. what you just realized is that the playerbase in general is ... miserable.

Get friends and play with them instead.