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

[Rapknife]

I get that they want content to be as accessible as possible but in an RPG, it just feels wrong that level 90 content is almost easier than level 50 content (mechanic wise, crystal tower is quite intense if it weren't for the ridiculously low hp pool these days...).

On day 2, the alliance bosses melted so fast, despite having about 8 new players that got the map achievement at the end. The final boss entered her second big-12 phase with less than 15% remaining. It just feels like they design their HP to only see that attack once it seems which is such a shame.

At this rate, running myth raids feel almost as fast as crystal tower series which is truly a shame after the peak design we had during ivalice era.
As long time FF player, I'm very tired of the condescending attitude of the devs, thinking I need to be babied at level 90 mechanics until the boss reaches like 10% -_-

^ This for real. It takes hundreds of hours if you play the story to get where we are. How many trials, hours of msq, 24 man, 8 man raids to get here? Like you're really telling me I can't figure out how to turn a square 90 degree or flip an arrow around to figure out an aoe while nothing else is happening? The raids were very aesthetically pleasing, but had no substance. If it takes till 50% for them to teach us the mechanics I rather they all had a cooler phase 2 like Oschon. Gear Score balancing has been atrocious for all the 6.x patches of endwalker. I dont even want to talk about the final boss of the myth raid. If they couldn't think of anything, couldn't they just relate them to the god's relationship in myth like you couldn't mix abilities together like Oschon arrow moving the Menphina's moon or something to show the movement of the moon's eclipsing or time abilities affecting couple of the multiple moon's speed.

[ACE135]

This was an issue I had. I have a neurological disability which makes it hit different, but regardless of that, the visual design of the bosses combined with the huge amount of player effects made it hard to see or learn new mechanics. Yes, you can turn off player effects, but many people don't know that it's even an option.

It was hard for me to see the boss a lot of times because of all the effects. And I think one shouldn't have to turn off the effects just in order to be able to play properly.

[Thurmnmurmn]

It was hard for me to see the boss a lot of times because of all the effects. And I think one shouldn't have to turn off the effects just in order to be able to play properly.

I feel like that should be its own seperate thread. It's an issue with the games visuals. Not so much the fight being difficult.

The turning off the spells is the bandaid solution they gave it. It's your choice if you wanna use it or not.

[Cidel]

Thaleia's alliance raid was indeed a disappointment. But I say that mostly because they previously said the difficulty would be something to the effect of Ivalice's; and it's not. If they hadn't said anything at all about the expected difficulty, I wouldn't have had any expectations above Aglaia and Euphrosyne- which was low, and it would be business as usual for the arguably lowest-effort expansion.

The alliance raids used to have something of a reputation of throwing completely new and annoyingly lethal mechanics at players which caused all kinds of day/week-1 repeat wipes, and as people have already pointed out, had sometimes resulted in vote-abandonments or time-outs (frustrating). I remember posting this gif as a meme years back about how the devs seemingly envisioned their alliance raids:


Almost as if the devs used to measure the "success" of their alliance raids by how many times you could completely wipe the players. It used to seem almost like some kind of cheap, fake difficulty- like for example, putting people in a room with large, shrinking ringed circles. Some people might think to stay out of them in case something happens after a point, others might think to stand in them as a "safe spot" for whatever was coming. Instead, the circles eventually explode in a cross-pattern after reaching a certain size. There's no prompt or hint about what's to come; you found out about the mechanic by either dying to it or watching it decimate half the alliance. I think this propensity was somewhat corrected during the Nier raid saga, but still seemed to be a fallback for the devs to increase the "difficulty" of their raids as a whole...

Now, the alliance raids seem to have gone from this:


to this:



-and as if the metric of determining the success of their alliance raids is now as little player deaths as possible via nonthreatening mechanics and leeway to survive multiple failed mechanics in a row (boring, but not nearly as frustrating). We've gone from punishing mistakes to nearly the other extreme.

However, I also can see where the devs may be coming from in trying to correct the frustrations of having to restart fights because alliance C wiped (repeatedly) because they have a SAM auto-piloting and nailing the rest of the party with marked AoEs and their 2 healers aren't much better either and haven't healed anything harder than single-pull Expert Roulettes. But it looks like they overcorrected in this regard, instead wrapping everyone up in bubble-wrap and making the alliance bosses giant piñatas with everyone beating on it for minutes on end only interrupted by different flavors of AoE dodging.

Like, I get not wanting to inconvenience everyone due to the incompetency of a few bad apples that accidently wandered into endgame alliance content, but there is a sweetspot between obscure lethal mechanics with no indication of what they do and fights that have the training wheels on until the boss is @ 20% HP or less and will be dead within the minute... The fact that a "new" team was in charge of this alliance raid saga seems to be a convenient fallback on criticism of the lack of engagement.

[strawberrycake]

VERY GOOD POINTS!

See I feel a lot of this to, in a lot of MMOs people with low skill simply are removed and told to do better, I understand the want to create a much more welcoming enviornment, but XIV to me, feels like the anti-thesis to what MMOs are in a lot of ways. When you look at how parties work in other games, it's not impossible to clear content if someones a bot, or a troll or new or outright uncaring. This usually encourages players to self moderate and help and or remove said player(s) and move on and worst case report them, XIV however has moved into this new extreme, counter to those MMOs, you should remove yourself, impose difficulty on yourself, and not be bothered by the lack of basic knowledge and competency, that one should have gained over doing the MSQ and all of its content, at least here in NA.

What needs to be done imo, and this ofc will be subjective to many, is to go back to having players not participating being an active detriment, back during Eden tier 1, I did normal raid roulette with a friend, we both tanked and it was Titan, Then entire party died to his car form and we ended up kiling him, just the two of us on DRK and GNB, from 70% health. This is a good example of how much they have removed needing others for content, a skilled duo of tanks or healers or dps can kill most content outside of Alliance raids with enough forethought. The only thing keeping Alliance raids from being that easy is the need of multiple groups, but even then With enough healing and kitchen sinking mit, have groups survived.

I wish these were extreme situations that were rare, but they aren't, and the fact that so much of the games content is becoming THAT EASY is worrying to say the least. It feels Yoshi P and his devs are scared of engaging the players in fair terms, and in many ways are babying us like we're incapable ot learning, and sad as it is to say, many players seem to act that way. I once asked a player if they had a job, they said yeah, I asked them if they can drive, they said yeah, I asked if they paid taxes, they said ofc they do. If we're all adults living life, controlling heavy machines, putting PCs together, all types of very difficult things, I'm sure we can learn to play a game, I wish the devs saw that.

[ChrysOCE]

What needs to be done imo, and this ofc will be subjective to many, is to go back to having players not participating being an active detriment, back during Eden tier 1, I did normal raid roulette with a friend, we both tanked and it was Titan, Then entire party died to his car form and we ended up kiling him, just the two of us on DRK and GNB, from 70% health.

Holy crap, I don't want to rag on your for this one point ( i agree wholeheartedly with the desire for there to be some difficulty return to "normal" content). But geez, if that was me in your party, I would have been pissed!

[strawberrycake]

Holy crap, I don't want to rag on your for this one point ( i agree wholeheartedly with the desire for there to be some difficulty return to "normal" content). But geez, if that was me in your party, I would have been pissed!

Oh I was wholeheartedly refusing to die, I won't justify it, but after a long week of very lack luster PF parties and rouls being filled with those type of parties I just ended up stubbornly wanting to prove a point xD

[ChrysOCE]

Oh I was wholeheartedly refusing to die, I won't justify it, but after a long week of very lack luster PF parties and rouls being filled with those type of parties I just ended up stubbornly wanting to prove a point xD

Lol ok, i respect that XD

[Renathras]

So I think a lot of people in this thread have most likely said...

I'm a bit confused about this, but also curious...how do these boss fights compare to, say, Crystal Tower ones?

I'm not trying to make some point, just trying to look at it as objectively as I can.

Contrast the final boss of Labyrinth to the Nald'Thal. There's a lot less going on there, isn't there? He does the cone slash and the arc slashes, both of which are telegraphed for a good little while before going off. He summons the hand adds, but those are obvious and easy to kill quickly. Then he moseys somewhat slowly to the middle of the room to start casting his big flare attack and people go to the pads to put up the shield while fighting an add. I don't think there's an enrage, and I'm pretty sure that's all he does. Maybe a tankbuster in there somewhere? The mechanics are super easy, well telegraphed so even my first ever time in there I knew what the ark slash was doing, and the only somewhat tricky thing if you've never seen it before is realizing you need to go outside and put the shield up. The only way to make that better would be if the arena starts with the shield up and the pads glowing then it turns off, kinda hinting that aspect to players.

Contrast Nald'Thal. He has a lot of mechanics that have a dual nature depending on what the outside of the arena is doing, something you can't even see if you have your camera at a normal 3/4ths down view or are at all zoomed in, especially on the shorter races. He has the PB AOE/Doughnut (depending on arena light or dark background) to establish this mechanic as a thing early, but a lot of people didn't see that with the very first mechanic. Many boss fights in the game don't use information from outside the arena, so it's not always something people are looking for (I think Kefka was the first fight that really REALLY did this that I ever played, because you HAVE to look at the goddess statue to see what it's doing, which no normal content I'd done before, nor the few Extremes I had done to that point [Bismark, Susaku, and Lackshmi] had done, either). He also has some chase mechanic, the cone cleaves, the party stack cleaves, the triple tank buster sets, the dark laser wings (the second time he flips doing it), "Thal's Balls" raining from the sky that requires use of movement tools or just not pushing DPS buttons (if a hard caster) to avoid, the beacons phase which is a bit of a memory game as you have to spot and identify which markers are pushbacks, which are AOEs and line yourself up to use the pushbacks to get into the safe spot for the following pushbacks or AOEs, an add phase where the location the adds die has relevance in the following ultimate mechanic and also feature stack markers and random room conal cleaves, and I think there's some other mechanic it adds to the list after the Ultimate but I don't remember it now since we overgear it so much we don't see it. And not all, but most of these mechanics have a shorter fuse than Phlegathon's attacks do, and they come at you at a faster pace in many cases, or are continuously mentally/executionally demanding, like Thal's Balls continuing to drop or the memory game where you have to keep that in your active memory for a while longer than anything Phlegathon does.

...oh, and keep in mind that rotations on all Jobs other than maybe Healers is more complex now than it was at level 50 in ARR. ARGUABLY even SMN, but I'll give you that one as well.

Regardless, Nald'Thal is clearly more mechanically and technically challenging than Phlegathon, agreed?

I'm not certain, but I feel we could go encounter by encounter and find this largely true comparing the ARR to the EW 24 mans. And while some people would like to dismiss this as the Devs being new back then, people are saying these 24 mans are the worst of all time, not merely the worst since the Devs got their feet under them. So the ARR ones still count. Nothing in ARR required a memory game like Tetrapagos that requires actively keeping knowledge in your head for recall over time, nor tells as difficult to see as Dalamud's wing + Menfina's barely visible ice aoe that blends in with the arena floor pretty bad. None are as frenetic as the latest 24 man, either. The eyeball, 5 headed dragon, Cerberus, and Cloud of Darkness are all much less visually and mechanically complex than their Thaleia counterparts. The only one that has a semi-run on that is Cerberus, but Cerberus' mechanics are not complex at all other than the belly gimmick, which is a gimmick, not challenge or difficulty, and has a VERY generous time horizon to deal with. More than any of the mechanics in Thaleia do.

We could do this with HW raids as well, and get a similar result other than a few random outliers like Ozma specifically. Likewise with Ivalice outside of, specifically, Orbonne. And a lot of the NeiR fights, too - many aren't mechanically that difficult, they just are HP sponges that take forever to kill but don't actually have a great deal of difficulty responsible for that. And even with Orbonne, the mechanics were often at a slower pace than EW's are. As I noted before, Cid's attacks are slow and have long telegraphs, they were just lethal in damage if you failed them at launch, which isn't mechanical complexity.

.

If we strip the encounters to their objective mechanics, I feel like a lot of the critiques are deflated as they compare favorably in the frenetic tempo and difficulty in resolving them, and they're about as lethal as their counterparts from the prior expansions. The main difference is that they require less party coordination/independent actions.

Which isn't nothing - I happen to like when the parties are splitting up to do things, so I feel that is a loss. But I'm curious how you feel looking at mechanical comparisons with prior raid tiers - and I mean nuanced ones like the above - since I'm not really seeing the mechanics here to be low effort or low tempo compared to a lot of past raids.

.

I do think there's a persistent thing where people have played for a long time and things are genuinely easier for them now, but then comes the hyperbole of saying that all the old stuff was harder when, in objective terms, that isn't always the case. I feel we need to keep that in mind.

Man you're still going at it eh. Are you this defensive on people saying it's too easy because you feel it's an attack on your skills?

The fact you say a wipe means it's savage difficulty is quite telling.

"No one attacks you personally."
<attacks personally>

People can have positions that are unrelated to "skills" or anything else. He asked a question, I gave an answer. If you don't like the answer, that's fine. If you don't like the answer and so have to disparage the person who said it, that's not fine.

Wipes are not common in normal content before clears. They are in Extremes, Savages, and Ultimates (and expected frequently, in Ultimates often for weeks). That isn't generally how normal content goes nor is designed to.

...

Here's the thing, when people make arguments, and your response is "No one mentioned...", you're missing their point. I know you're intelligent, so you got the point. People thinking that normal content shouldn't involve wipes if it's well designed as folks running it should be able to figure it out by seeing what's going on and get the clear fine, and that people shouldn't have to be normal runners of Extreme or higher content to see them.

You may DISAGREE, and that is perfectly fine, but the way you kind of just dismissed people's thoughts and arguments outright is not conducive to cordial discussion. Fair?

Me? I was there, I'd see a wipe or two for stuff like Ozma. That was normal. Never has that ever resulted in us literally timing out of the instance. And I farmed all three void arc raids weekly.

Yeah, same. I remember the occasional wipe weeks or even months after (again, CT's final boss even now wipes the raid from time to time), but I don't remember ever timing out of anything. The closest ever was my first ever Orbonne run where we finished with about 3 mins to spare, and that was launch day and I was playing in a role I don't every play on a Job I played very infrequently myself, that happened to be one of the hardest Jobs at the time.

[strawberrycake]

Very Valid Points[/hb]

So I have prior experience with other MMOs and have never found XIV to be as hard as people who have only ever played XIV have. I do agree that people who play the game over a long period of time find it easier but it's not really a matter of Difficuly, more a matter of engagement. Back during Crystal tower healers were more complex due to how the game used to be structured. In those fights back then, while being slower, you actually had to care about your down time, uptime wasn;t as important back then or focused, MP was managed differently, TP was a resource we had to account for, there was interplay between jobs and you had to manage all of that while doing mechanics. As we progress into HW and SB we saw more after that interplay and resource management while managing whats being done in the down time.

What the game lacked in engagement in the content itself, it made up for with job based engagement, I miss having to lvl multiple classes for their abilities and having to use them to help with mit and healing and resource management. Healers for example were more difficult because healing wasn't your only job, you dps'd, and your party had more then enough support to aid in the management of maintaining of the parties health, if you went OOM, casters and ranged could help you regen MP, TP users had to consider the downtime period and would adjust rotations accordingly.

What we're seeing now, long time players or not, is a lack of both engagement in the content and the jobs which makes for a lackluster gameplay experience as these two go hand in hand. it doesn't matter if Orboone was just a jumble of slow moving letal mechanics, it was fun because managing that along with MP, Tp, Job gauges and making sure you helped out with Mit meant you had a more fufilling experience, Orboone was boring prior to the nerfs because you no longer had to manage all that in SHB, you just dodged and did your rotation with no real forethought involved.

The complexity of XIV was born through multiple moving parts that formed the engine of the gameplay loop and experience that we used to have. We no longer have the engement of of either of those two things and because of that, this alliance raid sucked. It's rather simple imo.