Do encounteres (specifically Extremes) FEEL different now?

[Renathras]

I suppose it does just come down to personal skill with each fight.

Probably. Though with the addition I made at the very bottom of this post - skill AND mind.

Earlier you said you believe that Hydaelyn EX was harder then Titan EX,

Did I? That may be the source of the confusion - that was probably a typo for "TitaniaEx". I agree Titan Ex was beast on release, but as you say, it wasn't because the mechanics were harder, it was just players weren't as good (and that once KO'd, you were out of the fight)

Player skill levels have risen quite a lot, that may be why the fights just seem a lot easier to me personally.

The one problem with this is we have new players (who don't have that skill) joining the game all the time. As the skill of various brackets of content changes, it generates a problem where the barrier of entry for those players becomes increasingly higher. This is doubly a problem since there's no difficulty between Normal and Extremes that is generally accessible to players to serve as a bridge. That's always been a problem, but it's worse now. The bigger problem is that people who don't have reliable people to run content with (e.g. people without Statics) have more difficulty clearing content that requires party coordination. I can't tell you how many HydEx fights I did that ended with one of the Role players going to the wrong spot and cleaving everyone. It was...a lot. Even relatively simple coordination to a coordinated party is a crap shoot when doing parties with a bunch of randoms.

What part of Titania was 'more orderly' than Innocence? What part of Zodiark is 'less orderly' than Hyadelyn?

Innocence and Zodiark generally don't let one person wipe the party. Everyone is responsible for themselves, and there are no EXACT locations any players need to be for most mechanics. Where you bait the sword line/T doesn't matter as long as you don't run it through the party. Whether you go to the front or back of the field for Zodiark's diagonal rush generally doesn't matter. There are no mechanics with party spots, no in-out paired mechanics, no teather you have to swap between people, no light party stacks OR spreads. Zodiark requires the party to stack for the lasers and DEBATABLY the bait puddles super late in the fight, Innocence for the line laser which you also have to use at exactly one point to blow up a far star to create a safe spot. And I think both have a Tank swap. The big thing - the disorder - is that they aren't the same every tie. Innocence targets random players with the sword lines, and I'm not sure if he throws out the swords to the same spots around the arena (for the return trip) every time. The people in the later phase targed with the 3 prongged AOE lines are also random, as are the people targeted for the line AOE. Zodiark's mechanic sets come in patterns, but the rotation is random. His sweep across the field is random. The Snakes he summons with Akadia ground pounds are random (sometimes the front one is on the very front line, sometimes it's one space away from the front of the grid, so the party has to adjust), and the meteor patterns, while there are a few sets, are randomly chosen. That is, you can't just memorize the fight, as you have to adjust to the parameters adjusted, hence less orderly.

Contrast Titania and Hydaelyn. Each have some of the list of party coordination things I listed above. It's been literal years since I've done Titania, but offhand, it had water puddles, light party stacks (in puddles and possibly rotation), two sets of tether tradeoff mechanics, 3 adds where 2 required tanking and ideally focused fire to take them down quickly to reduce the number of overlapping mechanics, and her in/out runes that she'd use which also had to be worked out with the puddles, maybe a tank swap in there somewhere, too, I don't remember. Hydaelyn has stack, spread, and light party stack mechanics, and these repeat several times with other overlapping mechanics. She has in-out abilities, sometimes paired sometimes not. multiple cleaves by role, that require players to not only stack by role but also do so behind crystals to not get clipped by another mechanic. Chackrams requires both coordinated stacking and movement (people have to stack in two parties correctly in the initial safe spot and then yolo out of it), and the last phase also requires two sets of party stack, spread, and somewhere in there a light party stack. But both of these happen in VERY strict and set patterns, with only a little variance.

Titania's only variances are whether the party has to rotate clockwise for the light party stacks when the vines come out, who is targeted with the stack and which two with the spread markers in the add phases, who is targed first with the teather, and the order she does the in/our rune the second time. While that seems like a lot, the order is very structured and there aren't a lot of variations. Compare Titania Ex's puddle spawns (always the same spot) to P5S's (which are not). And her in/outs are paired. Hydaelyn does a similar thing with her three stances, and for much of the fight, the stances are always the same (like her always using the Tank stance after...I think it's after, been a few months...Chackrams, where she also uses spread/ice there; she also always uses Water [light party stacks] with Chackrams, never Earth [full party stack] or Ice [spreads]). In fact, a lot of the "random" stuff isn't. At several portions of the fight you might initially think she randomly uses a stance and element, she ALWAYS uses that stance and element at that point in the fight with those mechanics. I think she also always uses Water for the Lightwaves (first set) at the end after the spread + tank stack mechanic. In theory, they could have programmed her to use any of them...but they didn't.

The variations that those two fights have area also smaller, such as an in paired with an out, which is a bit different and easier to predict and react to than...Snakes with a random choice of spawn pattern and rotation.

As to why to pair them up - because it's the logical pair. Even the rewards (weapons vs accessories) are paired up that way. Finally, people wanting to compare them the other way to make the case that EW's aren't really harder/are less hard by comparison, leading to a faulty conclusion. There's nothing "random" about trying the MORE LOGICAL pairing.

If we went back to SB it gets weird, as Lakshmi was the more ordered (use of Vrill at specific points in the fight, specific ideal places to drop the AOEs) despite being the accessory one with Susano being a bit more random with targeting and such and dropping weapons, though both of those fights were more scripted owing to the way mechanics were designed back then.

the only way to designate fights is the order you do them in the story, EX1 EX2.

That makes ZERO sense. We're talking about mechanics, not narrative. Hell, even if you paired them up by "what reward drops" it would be Hyd/Tita and Zod/Inno.

It sounds like you're trying to ascribe a design decision to Hyd/Zod based on their Light/Darkness lore thing, which is just weird.

No, that's what you're doing with the Ex 1/2 thing based on when you encounter them in the story.

To try and say that (from a lore perspective) Titania, king of pixies, who are known for playing tricks on people and being generally unpredictable in their behavior/temperament, is the 'orderly' fight? And Innocence, the 'literally a being made by the corrupting effect of a pure Order-aligned element (Light, in FFXIV lore)' is the 'not-orderly fight', is nothing more than a case of 'I struggled more with X than Y' in disguise, I think.

Maybe you should have waited for my answer (above) before making this statement? As it seems to be pretty embarrassingly wrong now... <_<

As to the getting better...

My biggest problem with Titania (and Innocence...AND Hydaelyn...AND Zodiark...) was more PF. As you say for Titania, "me and the group I did it with watched an overview guide". I was teaching people mechanics in PF. I did that with Titania, Innocence, Diamond, and Warrior of Light (in that order) as well as Hydaelyn and Zodiark. Playing with randoms in PF gives you a MUCH different experience than playing with a Static or other skilled players. Heck, my PF P1S and P2S runs were often "Everyone gets it but 1 or 2 people...and they wipe the party."

The difference between Titania and Innocence, even according to the developers, was that Titania involved party responsibility and you could wipe the party by doing your mechanics wrong. In Innocence, you only really wiped yourself most of the time. That design choice for each of them was intended to differentiate them, they said.

This, exactly.

When I use the word "orderly" I mean a combination of three things - (1) party coordination required, (2) punishment for failure, (3) how constrained the randomness is/how consistent the mechanic order and execution is. More orderly fights tend to require more coordination, but are essentially the same, or very close to the same, every time you run them. Titania's only real variations are the in/out and which way the vines run and the party has to stack for the light party hits. The fight is pretty much "you know the dance steps, it's the same every time with minor variations". While every fight ultimately isn't TOTAL chaos - they can only be so random - some have more variations on the possible mechanics and the mechanics can be different levels of punishing. Zodiark's rotations being random is more significant and harder to react to than Titania's in/out being randomly chose (and in THAT case you know what the NEXT one will be because they're paired).

The biggest wipe causes I saw in Hydaelyn were (1) people not being in the right spots for the Role cleaves, (2) Chackrams killing too many people, (3) people forgetting they had ice and overlapping, killing themselves and their neighbor(s), (4) the first Lightwave phase people being out of position in some way and getting clipped by one or more of the explosions; if enough people or key people (Tanks/Healers) died it could be a wipe. Zodiark Wipes were generally too many people getting clipped by Meteors, too many people following the wrong person and getting destroyed by the rotating fire, too many people standing in the Snakes just before the multi-laser hit, or too many people running ahead of the party for the puddle baits, killing too many people to survive the following multi-hit laser THAT time (though that was often late enough in the fight the remaining members could finish his health bar...but not always)

Oh I suppose innocence was easy as well, I forget how many pulls it took but I winged all the tank mechanics blind because I had a feeling the ex version of what I'd seen could not possibly be hard and the only thing I didn't guess first try was bowtie.

I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting how people split on this. My FC was split roughly down the middle between people that thought Innocence was the easier one and those that thought Titania was. I was on the Titania half. Several things in Innocence weren't immediately apparent to me (like the sword return path after thrown out, took me a few attempts to realize they just take the same paths as before, and I'd still occasionally die to them since I'd forget about them while dealing with the mechanics in between the throw and return), but Titania I got down super fast. It's just a pattern of dance steps that repeat more or less identically every time, and the variation is pretty small. The problem I had getting my first clear was...apparently the majority of the PLAYERBASE (at least the playerbase in PF at the time) was in the Innocence half, lol So there were so many attempts and wipes because someone in the party didn't quite get how to do something and it could wipe the party if it was at a bad part (like someone not getting in their center puddle for the puddle + stack + vines phase, and then the vines would grow where we both had the ADD spawned AND no second safety puddle), stuff like that.

But I distinctly remember the playerbase of both PF people and friends and FC people I talked to about it coming down on one or the other side of that divide. It was pretty clear.

The same divide happened in EW with Hydaelyn (the Titania side) and Zodark (the Innocence side), which is why I feel confident in those pairings.

But yeah, that goes back to what Dixiebell said, with an added feature:

It comes down to both player skill AND what kind of mindset/brain people have.

[ForsakenRoe]

[hb]Innocence and Zodiark generally don't let one person wipe the party.

Contrast Titania and Hydaelyn.

Titania has randomness on whether you're NE or NW (as tank/healer) for the tether break in the add phase, or which of the puddles to stand in for the stack fists in phase 2, or where to stand to best dodge Shiva (if you're not just standing in it like everyone ended up doing). Hyadelyn has randomness on whether the NE or NW crystal is going to flare up first, which element she'll use (therefore which of stack/spread/LPs to do after the mechanic) and which corner is 'safe' for Flood of Light. Both of these are 'find the right spot to stand in' as much as Zodiark's rotation thing or his meteor shower. The only mechanic in Hydaelyn that comes to mind as 'one person can cause a wipe with their actions' is if a healer stacks with the wrong group for Water. If that's the criteria for what is considered an 'orderly fight design' we'll have to agree to disagree because I think that's ridiculous logic

Oh, and in Innocence, one person CAN wipe the party by aiming the stack laser wrong when there's all 4 balls (And you're meant to pop one with the laser to make a safespot), so, y'know. Not that it matters to me, I go by EX1 and EX2 based on 'when you encounter them while doing the story' as the playerbase has for like 8 years now. Funny that your 'pattern' falls apart at SB though, they say 'twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern', what about HW? Which is more 'orderly', Ravana the weapondropper or Bismarck the also-weapondropper? Or do they not count because neither drop accessories? At which point, how should we refer to the two of them, though even EX1/EX2 kinda falls apart admittedly, because you'd do EX2 first to get a weapon to tackle EX1 with, weird design back then