Healer role design change?

[Sebazy]

Agreed, IMHO SE should try to go back to having 1 or 2 gimmick fights per tier.

They've had some flops for sure, but then these gimmick fights have also spawned some absolute classics IMO;

Solo healing Ratfinx on AST whilst also handling potion and bomb duty to pad my cohealer's damage ranks as maybe one of the most enjoyable raids I've ever done in this game. Every last GCD counted, the pinnacle of being a busy healer IMO.

Meanwhile farming Lamebrix with the static all trying their hardest to murder each other with traps was a highlight of the tier. If you've got a static that's never run it, go try it, it's not a hard fight and honestly that's a good thing as it gives the group plenty of headroom to have fun++

Lastly, Chadernook was a good demonstration that gimmick fights don't need to be memes to be good, it was a great fight with a solid gimmick. It had tons of room for optimisation, it had teeth and would merrily eat tanks but wasn't so unforgiving as to be annoying.

Personally, I'd merrily sit through a few more Catastrophies if it meant the chance of tiers with fights as fun as the above. Anything to help mix up the recipe and get things feeling fresh again.

[fulminating]

Agreed, IMHO SE should try to go back to having 1 or 2 gimmick fights per tier.
...
Personally, I'd merrily sit through a few more Catastrophies if it meant the chance of tiers with fights as fun as the above. Anything to help mix up the recipe and get things feeling fresh again.

Would you call e9 tiles (or e3/p7 to a lesser degree) too tame in the shifting floor gimmick, or are they not quite what you mean because they're more on rails? I can't really think of any recent examples of gimmicks beyond that.
I don't know that I would call puzzle fights a strength of the game - high concept etc - but I would also class them separately to purer gimmicks where the players are more able to influence things. I know it's quite arbitrary, but there's a definite difference in my mind, mainly in that gimmicks still have to be interacted with in some way after being cleared once.

On a similar note, do you think the "tier's favourite mechanic" approach to combat makes things feel cohesive or unnecessarily samey? e.g. tethers in asphodelos/bleeds in abyssos

[ForsakenRoe]

On a similar note, do you think the "tier's favourite mechanic" approach to combat makes things feel cohesive or unnecessarily samey? e.g. tethers in asphodelos/bleeds in abyssos

too samey, a fight should have it's own theme re: mechanics but selfcontained, not 'this is the theme for the whole tier', ie I think doorboss this tier is cool, as it's theme is 'superchain theories' and 'light/dark towers', and the phase 2 is god awful because it's mechanics are just all over the place thematically (shapes, 'move limited distance' Caloric, light/dark towers come back, UAV). She's a researcher/scientist, so Superchain 1 fails to work on you, and she goes 'ah that theory is scuffed, let's try this' and updates it (responding to new evidence, as it were) to Superchain 2, then 2B. She only uses her 'Caloric Theory' twice, and the second one is somehow more simple to execute than the first, her theory's gone backwards

Like, I'd rather have seen something like, go all in on one theme for the fight. I'd vote for the dark/light towers because they're quite interesting, especially with how one person in the Pangenesis ones can be 'unmarked', which is an interesting twist on the usual 'you need X debuff to soak this tower'. So picture for example, you're marked with 'small/big light/dark towers', and if you have small you have to drop it in the UAV because the person taking it has to get small to fit into the tower. Or, when UAV occurs, split the party into two light parties, and when a tower is placed in one side's UAV bubble, it appears on the other side's bubble, in the same location, stuff like that, basically keep the theme running from the previous phase, Pangenesis is my favourite mech in P2 for that reason

Going back to the original question though, think of like, any SHB raid tier, any SB raid tier, what was the 'tier's favorite mech' in Sigmascape? I don't recall anything being used with as much frequency as Aspho's tethers, Abyssos bleeds or this tier's... I guess Limit Cut numbers? The only thing that comes to mind of 'this got overused like hell' is twice/thrice come ruin, and that's not a mechanic, thats a 'mech fail checker' to make sure you didn't do dumb stuff in Basic Relativity to cheese it. To be equivalent to the way things are now, it'd have to be stuff like... every fight in Sigmascape having a Trine of some kind?