Do encounteres FEEL different now?

[Semirhage]

Yeah, having mechanics that force you to spread out for extended periods of time would definitely help the ranged DPS shine. Instead we have bosses with hitboxes the size of Noah's ark. I think Yoshi knows he f'ed up with that change.

P7S is the most egregious. The Samurai look ridiculous just waving their katanas in the air hundreds of feet away from the actual boss. The center of the boss is so far away that I can't even hear my own spells hit it when I'm standing in the back. It's kind of disorienting.

[ty_taurus]

P7S is the most egregious. The Samurai look ridiculous just waving their katanas in the air hundreds of feet away from the actual boss. The center of the boss is so far away that I can't even hear my own spells hit it when I'm standing in the back. It's kind of disorienting.

I agree. Not that Bismarck is the best designed fight out there, but I liked that rather than just attacking the flying whale, there's a process of reeling him in with harpoons. I wouldn't mind massive bosses like P7S, or Engels from Copied Factory if rather than just attacking the air, there was a method to getting in close. Imagine something like the final fight with Sin in FFX, where perhaps the team has to split up. The melee's and one healer leap onto the body of the boss to take out pieces of the boss and dismantle it part-by-part, while the ranged stay back with the other healer and chip away at the boss' total health, not directly being attacked but handling things like static adds and orbs to pop, or things like the crystals from E8S.

[ForsakenRoe]

I agree. Not that Bismarck is the best designed fight out there, but I liked that rather than just attacking the flying whale, there's a process of reeling him in with harpoons. I wouldn't mind massive bosses like P7S, or Engels from Copied Factory if rather than just attacking the air, there was a method to getting in close. Imagine something like the final fight with Sin in FFX, where perhaps the team has to split up. The melee's and one healer leap onto the body of the boss to take out pieces of the boss and dismantle it part-by-part, while the ranged stay back with the other healer and chip away at the boss' total health, not directly being attacked but handling things like static adds and orbs to pop, or things like the crystals from E8S.

This game's lack of a Z axis makes it a nuisance, but something like Dathea could be done, I'd assume. The gist for those who can't really see what tf is going on in a WOW raid (understandable) is that when the big add dies, it does a knockback blast from it's location, everyone needs to position to not get knocked off the platform. However, when the add spawns, an additional large add, and multiple little adds appear on one of three outside platforms. The strat is that you have two groups of players who alternate, who stays down and who goes up. The tanks are forced to alternate because the boss's tankswap debuff increases how far the TB knocks them, so they eventually would just be launched off the platform. So you go up when it's your turn, kill the small adds who are bombarding the raid with stacking damage, then kill the big add to get another KB blast to get back to the main platform. There's also a suck-in, a Nisi/Rot thing that spreads via contact, and tornadoes that randomly zoom across the arena and knock you into the air if they hit you (big fall damage), but the main point is the alternating 'add kill group' thing, because we have EG the Syrcus Tower boss where he starts powering up and you have to jump all around the edge platforms (now skipped because of ILVL gap)

Imagine if, instead of being a static phase of the fight, in E8S the boss would occasionally start channeling 'Flood of Light', and you had to send people out to deal with the add phase. Too many go, and you are wasting potential boss damage, too few go and you fail the phase and enrage, something like that. Or another example, the Time Jails in A12S. More stuff like that

Oh and specifically for the point about Engels, since you brought it up I'm gonna unleash the world's coldest take: the last boss fight (9S) should have been on top of Engels, not some random ass platform so far out into the fog it can't be seen

[Post]

I think they're hesitant to include mechanics like Leviathan's Switch, Dragonkillers, Shrinking Hydraulic Missiles etc. in general anymore. If there's a major change in dungeons, 24 man and normal raids (and even extreme trials), there are far fewer encounters that require at least 1 person to "do a thing" to prevent a wipe, instead heavily favoring "you mess up, you die alone."

Take the old 24 man standby, starting with Xande: Stand in the puddle to prevent it from exploding and hitting the whole raid, happening while there's a boss to fight.
This mechanic shows up in Syrcus for the first time, World of Darkness (endboss), Void Ark (3rd boss at the very end, often skipped), Mhach (2nd boss), Dun Scaith (endboss), and forms of it in dungeons beyond. It shows up more complex, less punishing forms in Ivalice raids: Mateus' 3-person puddles, Belias' Time-bombs, T.G. Cid's 6x 3-person stacks, Ultima's "catch" angels. They only show up in two bosses in The Puppet's Bunker, and the bosses basically do nothing while they're out. They're gone so far in EW.

They probably make this shift away from higher proactive play to prevent wipes because it feels bad in extreme cases like Ozma or T.G. Cid where one (even non-tank) player can wipe a raid and feels even worse to be the player that messed up, doesn't know why, and has a shitty party that just berates them for it. I don't know if dying over and over, getting rezzed (or healers even giving up rezzing you) and having the party win the fight with you barely contributing and you learning nothing about the fight is much better, though, because that's currently how all levels of difficulty of the game work up until Extreme, which sometimes only enforces not dying because of an eventual enrage.

And +1 that savages are NOT characterized by always throwing something at you every moment. More and more they're characterized by doing one big messy puzzle thing every minute or so, with long periods of downtime that have maybe a couple token raid-wides and tankbusters to give purpose to 60% of tank/healer/dps mitigation toolkits.

Alexander Creator was absolutely the first 'modern' raid tier, they said that that was the level of difficulty they wanted to strive for from then on. Additionally, with things like cooldown resets, fights could be even more scripted from a job perspective, so the expectation of damage and mitigation could be a lot more predictable, rather than Hallowed Ground potentially being a thing you'd save for the next wipe (though players often started simply waiting for cooldowns due to the excessive tuning of Gordias).