Why is it so common to join extremes without watching a guide first?

[Packetdancer]

This pretty much sums up how I felt when I got extreme fights in Mentor Roulette. It's not that I didn't want to help or mentor (I was there to do just that, after all); it just made no sense whatsoever to ask for the strat and not make an effort to look for it yourself. This just reeks of laziness (or maybe ignorance, in which case the mentor has the right to tell the person the proper way these fights should be approached without being accused of not wanting to "do their job").

To be fair, in my experience when I get an Extreme in Mentor Roulette, no one has prepared because generally the folks who queued in don't even know what an Extreme is, much less that they might want to read up on mechanics first.

I got Garuda EX a week or two ago in Mentor Roulette, with seven enthusiastic first-time sprouts who had no clue what they'd gotten into. This was the exchange:

Me: Hi! Before we start, do folks know the mechanics to this fight? Because unlike a lot of what you've done so far, you can't easily just brute-force this blindly.
Tank #1: *has already YOLO'd straight across the arena and pulled before I finish typing*
Party: *wipes to adds, unsurprisingly*
Tank #1: Apparently, we do NOT know the mechanics.
Party: *general chorus of agreement with tank #1*

(They hunkered down and we talked about the fight, and got them the clear.)

But once they do understand that, oh, hey, this fight has actual mechanics, it's often tricky to ask them to go look up the fight and read all the instructions, or watch a video guide.

For one, someone may be on a Playstation and not have a laptop handy to go hit up a guide. (And reading some of those guides on a smartphone isn't always easy.) Going "hey, go watch this 8-minute video and remember all of it" isn't necessarily any better. But for another, people in this thread have mentioned before that they learn better from seeing the mechanics; that's true for lots of people.

I tend to figure that once Mentor Roulette drops me into an EX, if the folks there are willing to learn the mechanics, I'm happy to teach them.

If folks are willing to learn the mechanics but want to try the fight blind, I'm also open to that; there was a fairly fun Ultima Weapon EX I got in late Shadowbringers where folks successfully blind-progged (almost) the entire fight. The only thing I did end up eventually having to point out was the Aetheroplasm debuff the tanks would accumulate; it's the first place I think there's a forced tank swap mechanic, and so they just weren't thinking to look at the slowly-accumulating debuff. When they went "Okay, we give up, what keeps killing the tanks?" that's when I pointed that bit out (and that even debuffs which a healer can't cleanse are worth looking at the tooltips for).

I always do stress to them that in the NA datacenters, extremes are usually done via pre-made parties in PF -- which gives you the freedom to pick how you want to approach the fight, and whether or not you want to try it blind -- and so on, and generally folks are receptive.

But if someone says "Yep, I read up on the mechanics," I admit I'd be shocked, because frankly the game gives them no reason I can think of to believe they should bother doing that before queuing into their first extremes.

[Reinha]

Going "hey, go watch this 8-minute video and remember all of it" isn't necessarily any better. But for another, people in this thread have mentioned before that they learn better from seeing the mechanics; that's true for lots of people.

I'd like to comment on these two things. I've seen many people say they can't remember the whole video after watching it. The point is to remember something, so you don't zone in and ask someone to explain mechanics for the first 5 minutes. At least be ready for a few pulls and have an idea what the tether is for, what damage to share or avoid, which adds to kill first and/or what you need to do for tank busters. You can see, hear and read the mechanics on a good video, so there is something for everyone.

And if seeing the mechanic, hearing about it and reading it's name and cast bar in the video is not your style of learning and you need to die from the mechanic in game to figure it out? Don't ask for someone to type it in a chat box before the first pull since that's not your style of learning.

No one will convince me that "hey, ask for someone to slowly type mechanics for 5 minutes before pull and remember all of it" is the secret sauce for making people learn while graphs, videos and text guides do nothing for them. Please. The best thing a mentor can do for clueless newbies is to point them to useful resources like Party Finder, YouTube and The Balance. This game's etiquette at high levels does not include asking to be spoonfed information that is readily available.

[Packetdancer]

No one will convince me that "hey, ask for someone to slowly type mechanics for 5 minutes before pull and remember all of it" is the secret sauce for making people learn while graphs, videos and text guides do nothing for them. Please. The best thing a mentor can do for clueless newbies is to point them to useful resources like Party Finder, YouTube and The Balance. This game's etiquette at high levels does not include asking to be spoonfed information that is readily available.

I mean, if you get an extreme in Mentor Roulette, it is almost always because the sprouts don't know what an extreme is, so obviously have no idea they should prepare for it. I will always tell them that in the future it'll be smoother if they use Party Finder, and that unless they're specifically organizing a blind run it's generally good etiquette to study the fight.

(Though, keep in mind, free trial users are not allowed to create parties, whether in party finder or otherwise; queuing in directly is one of their only options.)

But once that's been detailed? It is absolutely faster for me to explain the fight in chat than make them all go watch an 8-minute video for a fight from back in ARR. Especially if I break it into bite-size chunks. For instance, to use Garuda EX as an example (since it's recent enough that I can easily remember more or less how I summarized it):

First explanation:
In the first half of the fight, there's only really two things to remember.
First, when those feathers spawn, one of them is a 'Satin Plume' instead of a 'Razor Plume'. We need to kill that one *first*; it's the thing that puts us all to sleep there.
Second, when the adds show up, the tanks will want to each take one and drag the two of them a bit apart from each other; the party can focus on Chirada first, and then go finish off Suparna.
Let's get through the adds, and then I'll cover the rest of the fight. Sound good?

Second explanation, after we'd gotten through adds cleanly:
When we get more Razor Plumes again, the special one this time will be a 'Spiny Plume'; we want to *not* kill that one.
The Spiny Plume will start stacking a debuff called 'Thermal Low' on whoever has aggro on it; if they get three stacks of Thermal Low, they explode and we all die. So we can't let one tank hold aggro the entire time if it takes too long.
Once Garuda leaves the arena again, *then* we want to kill the Spiny Plume; that'll give us a safe spot to stand in for when she comes back and does a ton of damage.
After that, there'll be some whirlwinds that appear and make chunks of the arena unsafe. The adds and the Spiny Plume will come back, and you deal with them the same way as before, just dodging whirlwinds.
(But honestly, we'll probably kill her fairly soon after the whirlwinds land, so you probably won't need to deal with that last part.)

Et voila, explanation given. The only stumbling block was that people would kill the Spiny Plume early with AoEs, but the group figured where that was going wrong pretty quickly, cleared out the Razor Plumes near the Spiny Plume individually, and then AoE'd the ones farther away down.

My typing that explanation was almost certainly far faster than trying to find a strat video for an ARR extreme and having them go watch it.

[AmiableApkallu]

I mean, if you get an extreme in Mentor Roulette, it is almost always because the sprouts don't know what an extreme is, so obviously have no idea they should prepare for it.

Yes and no. I remember queueing for ARR extremes in Duty Finder as a sprout. An "extreme" is a more difficult version of the "hard" and/or "normal" version of the fight. The game all but tells you that. And like every other dungeon and trial you've done, there's this journal entry you want to get rid of, and you've always used Duty Finder in the past, so that's where you turn to yet again.

The problem is that as a sprout, you don't realize how broken the item-level sync is in ARR. All those dungeons and trials labeled "hard" don't actually seem that much more difficult than the "normal" version, so there's no expectation that an "extreme" would be any worse of a jump up in difficulty. And indeed, at least for a few of them, once someone explains the one tricky mechanic, the party powers through by sheer force.

[Packetdancer]

The problem is that as a sprout, you don't realize how broken the item-level sync is in ARR. All those dungeons and trials labeled "hard" don't actually seem that much more difficult than the "normal" version, so there's no expectation that an "extreme" would be any worse of a jump up in difficulty. And indeed, at least for a few of them, once someone explains the one tricky mechanic, the party powers through by sheer force.

That's more or less what I meant; the game gives them no reason to think "Hard" -> "Extreme" will be any more dramatic of a jump than normal -> "Hard" was. If "The Howling Eye" and "The Howling Eye (Hard)" were both facerolls, what reason would a sprout have to think "The Howling Eye (Extreme)" would not be?

When you're talking about groups in PF for current-level extremes that state a specific progression point, yes, it's rude if someone joins without any experience and expect people to explain the strat. But if they're at endgame and looking for groups in PF anyway, it's safe to assume they know enough about the game to know that extremes take a little preparation; if they want to be spoon-fed the mechanics in a group that isn't expressly a fresh teaching party, they're being inconsiderate of other people's time at best.

(Though, I will note, sometimes we have enough different strats used in PF—more in savage than extreme, admittedly—that asking for strat clarification isn't a bad idea; P7S can be interesting if someone labels the PF "JP Harvest" and half the group thinks you're doing Inumaru for War's Harvest and the other half thinks you're doing far tethers. But in that case, you usually know the fight in general and would just like clarification on which strat is being used.)

But when you're talking about getting an ARR extreme in mentor roulette, I don't actually think it's fair to expect anything other than sprouts coming in unprepared; the game gives them absolutely no reason to think they should read up on the mechanics.

[Eien713]

Snip

I won't mind explaining mechanics if they're simple, but some fights have so much going on that text would probably cause more confusion than help, not to mention how much of a waste of time writing and reading walls of text would be. You also need people who are actually able and willing to learn mechanics and don't just wanna faceroll through the extreme fights out of ignorance. There are also instances where even after you explain stuff, people don't follow the instructions for some reason. And if you get thrown into a party where the other members don't speak the language(s) you do, welp, you're out of luck.

People easily throw around "That's your job as a mentor!" "If you don't want to help, don't become a mentor!" "Earn that mount!" etc., but they don't stop for a second to consider things from other (valid) perspectives. (This last part isn't directed at you, by the way XD)