The new 24 man alliance raids are a disappointment (mechanic wise)

[Nestama]

If you want harder content go play ultimate or unsub thats what the director said and the community agreed.

Bad take, mate. The most I expect from 24man raids in terms of difficulty is Ivalice (not super hard, but also not snoozefest easy). EW 24man raids have just been glorified Light Party dungeons where every boss spends most of their time "teaching us" one mechanic at a time, rather than just... throwing us into the deep end.

Also not a single Ozma/Thunder God/Superior Flight Unit fight. What's up with that? Also every boss I feel does not have enough HP. Like it seems they set the boss HP to be AT the minimum ilevel, making it so that anyone who farmed the 6.4 raids, or always stayed up to date on their tome gear would be way to powerful for them.

[OgruMogru]

It's beautiful aesthetically but the mechanics are toothless and there's still something about the presentation that feels too closed in and squished even though the areas give the impression of sprawling spaces. I've felt this with all 3 AR this tier. The space we get to actually move around in feel very stifling compared to Ivalice and Nier and even the Void ark series. I can't put my finger on why tho

[Post]

Menphina straight up aims her attacks at 0 players out of 24 sometimes. She's got the mechanics of the level 75 Ronka dungeon first boss, but is easier because the tells are more obvious and take longer to resolve. Even if you die, odds are there's at least 5 other rezzers that didn't so who cares.

Nophica has a combination of the Chimera from the level 38 dungeon from a decade ago and the last boss of Sirensong, the 61 dungeon, from 6 years ago. Both mechanics are way more telegraphed because you get far more time to process and far more obvious, giant, glowy tells. And she manages to deal less damage and be less punishing than either if you somehow still get hit.

Alliance raids more than any other content should lean into player kills BECAUSE there's so many more ways to rez, especially if they're not going to lean into the fact that they have 3 organized parties that could be given many more numerous tasks than 'ok, now dodge THIS'. This worked really well for Bozja, I think lots of players had fun there despite dying tons in CEs, and you wouldn't even have a penalty for dying in a 24 man...

[Payadopa]

I don't understand what the point of having an alliance is, honestly. You have 6 healers yet no damage or threatening mechanics. 3 tanks yet a single one is usually enough. There are no diverging paths, no interplay, no nothing. lol It's like a regular dungeon only with six times the people. Like... is having six healers no enough of a fail-safe to have more uh... daring mechanics?

[Jeeqbit]

They are definitely not a disappointment.

There were definitely adds and the adds had interrupts for once again. So many in fact that the tanks either could help the raid by alternating interrupts on different adds, or by ranged physicals helping out with every other interrupt.

Regardless of some of the comments here, many of the bosses had new mechanics. However, said mechanics were pretty intuitive and something you could figure out based on the indicators or the cast names or prior experience doing, really, any content blind. But intuitive is just how SE designs fights now so that's not unexpected or anything.

Spoiler:

The last boss using the mechanics from every boss was great and considering many of the people in the alliance died to them, I would say that no, a toddler wouldn't solve them. But them being from the prior fights meant you had an idea of what to do, it was just they were all packed together in the same fight so that you really had to know all of them or one of them gets you. I thought it was a great way to conclude the raid.

[TomsYoungerBro]

Visually and aesthetically the alliance raids were great. Great music too. However, I think the alliance raids have been turned into more a 24-man normal raid where you fight the whole set of bosses in one go then its own unique piece of content like it used to be.

[fulminating]

It's beautiful aesthetically but the mechanics are toothless and there's still something about the presentation that feels too closed in and squished even though the areas give the impression of sprawling spaces. I've felt this with all 3 AR this tier. The space we get to actually move around in feel very stifling compared to Ivalice and Nier and even the Void ark series. I can't put my finger on why tho

maybe because of the comedy hitboxes? even though you're miles from the boss you're still "in range"?

[Avoidy]

crystal dutyfinder's got it down not even 12 hours after release. with 18/24 of its members being first timers, we still never wiped. i went in blind and did eat some shit, but none of it killed me and my gear's like... crafted healer sets that i bought this morning until i met the ilvl. i also haven't played the game combat-wise in like 2 months because i took yoshi's advice and played other games, and i got a new pc so all my settings/keybinds got reset. I was in there relearning how to play and reconfiguring keybinds midfight and turning off the "everyone's skill effects are visible" settings midfight and still only died once on the final boss, to something admittedly blindsiding but not too bad after you see it one time. so the mechanical difficulty could arguably be called low.

the music, idk man. people kept saying it was great. but now that i've logged out and i'm sitting here, i couldn't even hum it if you put a gun to my head and told me to do it.
i want to try it again later, just to solidify my thoughts because right now i literally just did it and somehow can't remember anything meaningful about it, which is weird.

[Jeeqbit]

Visually and aesthetically the alliance raids were great. Great music too. However, I think the alliance raids have been turned into more a 24-man normal raid where you fight the whole set of bosses in one go then its own unique piece of content like it used to be.

I don't feel that alliance raids were ever really that hard, they just weren't necessarily as intuitive ie. avoiding aoes and then later standing on aoes in one of the weeping city fights to avoid death was not obvious like it would be today, so first timers simpler died to it.

Ozma involved a little coordination with the back and left stuff and learning animations (or at least following others excluding the tank). It was never that hard either, just people weren't good sometimes. I remember people wiping to the spider boss sometimes as well, which is especially not a hard boss. Like how can you wipe to that? But you would have stuff like nobody going down and solving the dps check, people looking at the gaze or dropping all the webs in bad places so you got sucked in, nobody soaking orbs. All of which are the sort of mechanics we see in dungeons.

Probably the main thing I don't recall seeing from back then recently is the sort of mechanics that involve you permanently dropping aoe puddles or tanks absorbing orbs or mechanics like Scylla's or Amon's which involve elements and buffs interacting with eachother to free eachother and prevent a deadly cast from wiping everyone. And the tethered adds thing. They don't want to let one player wipe the whole raid by accident anymore so the mechanics are more personal responsibility now it seems.

[TomsYoungerBro]

I don't feel that alliance raids were ever really that hard, they just weren't necessarily as intuitive ie. avoiding aoes and then later standing on aoes in one of the weeping city fights to avoid death was not obvious like it would be today, so first timers simpler died to it.

I wasn't referring to the difficulty, but rather the style of the content. I think there can be AR bosses throughout ARR, HW, and SB that could definitely be downscaled into 8-man normal raid bosses, but there were many that had a unique 24-man AR feel. This EW ARs were 100% 8-man bosses scaled up IMO with very little that would need to be removed. I'm not even saying its necessarily a bad thing as i'm not someone who is queueing up HW or SB alliances for fun here and there lol. Its just my observation.