SE, love the fight design but tone down the instant deaths a touch?

[MisterNublet]

Damage Downs is probably the better alternative to Vuln stacks.

Should just have both if you fail a mechanic, and make the damage downs stack as well.

Wouldn't say no to Twice/Thrice comes ruin too.

[AnotherPerson]

I think I'd rather see an increase in mechanic failure = instant death. Vuln stacks are worthless. All they really did was make things more forgiving.

In that case, I want to see healers with less healing skills and more variety in their toolkit if instant death makes healing skills are virtually useless until players get raised.

[Derio]

Body checks are there to simply extend the content. If they made it to where you just get damage downs then you could still progress you would just be stopped by the dps check at the end. Body checks are hard stops to most groups because if one or 2 people mess up its over which is why RDM is in a bad spot in terms of prog groups.

With raises being so easily accessible, they had to do something and body checks are their answer.

[ThaCa]

If they want to cut down body checks, they probably have to remove non-healer raises and increase the cost of raising in general. Either that or put in harder DPS checks but those basically result in people having to wipe after getting like 2 damage downs.

[Sebazy]

Or maybe you get an Abyssos situation where Yoshi-P directly upped the healing needed in response and people started saying healers were avoiding PF because it's too hard to heal in PUGs.

Maybe that's because chunks of the more experienced veteran healers had already quit out of boredom by that point? Abyssos was like a year too late IMO.

(Source, my pretty decent view of Ragnarok's high end raiding FCs at the time).

[Colt47]

Or maybe you get an Abyssos situation where Yoshi-P directly upped the healing needed in response and people started saying healers were avoiding PF because it's too hard to heal in PUGs.

Doesn't feel that long ago.

Considering they are blind to anything they are doing until they get feedback is it that surprising? They literally followed this same pattern every expansion with boosting difficulty of the savage fights going towards the tail end of an expansion, and for some reason it didn't seem to occur to them that making instant party death on one guy failing on multiple potential mechanics was a bad idea, especially outside of an ultimate, with the way they handled the gear squish. The older shadowbringers fights had some mechanics that were party wipes if a person died, but they were more lenient with them as healers could generally raise someone multiple times without it being a problem, and gear really could turn a lethal into a non-lethal blow. This expansion is like dancing on a knife edge. Even self healing to full sometimes isn't enough to live through an AOE if no one mits, or puts people to near death and then sticks a bleed on them, so even if they live by like 1% they die because the tick is stronger than their current HP + second wind.

Someone commented that they don't know who to listen to on either making things hard or easy, but there is no point in even listening to the guys who want it harder. SE made the game easy to play, dropped the skill ceiling, and raised the floor. The only thing they can do is make fights instantly kill people for sneezing, or people walk through them like the content doesn't matter. It's just a bad way of doing things all around.

[Colt47]

If they want to cut down body checks, they probably have to remove non-healer raises and increase the cost of raising in general. Either that or put in harder DPS checks but those basically result in people having to wipe after getting like 2 damage downs.

They basically screwed up because they followed the old formula of upping the difficulty each tier going towards the end of the expansion when they were already hitting the wall in Abyssos. Though honestly, they should just put rez on a timer and make in instant cast to save on things because the way the fights are setup you can't spam rez anyway in savage. Not with how they got it set now. The healers don't have quite as much to do as in abyssos but MP management and not having the party heal ready will kill everyone just as much as the rez. Like p12s is like multiple e12s lions progs stacked in the first half. It's really ludicrous.

[Aravell]

Should just have both if you fail a mechanic, and make the damage downs stack as well.

Wouldn't say no to Twice/Thrice comes ruin too.

Bring back the A12 damage down, 50% each and stacks up to 2, get 2 stacks and you do 0 damage.

[Renathras]

They don't have much in the way of instant party wipes in Extreme. The result? Everyone claims they are too easy; they can sacrifice themselves to solve a mechanic and get carried through it.

So who should they listen to. You? Or the people saying that doing that makes them too easy?

Which Extremes?

ZodEx and HydEx aside:

Endsinger Ex has a mech that tends to kill people then a towers body check right after that: Wipe.

Barbarecca Ex didn't have any other than 2x Tank flares + party stack, which it does twice. If a Tank is dead, it's a wipe. If 2+ party members are dead, it's probably a wipe. Though you could push 1 dead non-tank (and non-healer) party member with enough mitigation. This fight was good since the otherwise body checks later in the fight (Mario Kart) scales down based on currently alive players. So it's the glaring exception.

Rubicante Ex has almost no mechanics for most of the fight, but then on the back end does the expanding cross pattern with 4x spreads and a 4 person stack that can quickly wipe the party. This is immediately followed up by an arena cleave (that easily kills people) and either party spreads or a full party stack, the former of those being fairly easily destructive to party members (if the cleave nicks someone, they die; if your friend isn't in the right place with you, you die; etc), and the latter of which kills people if too many are dead or got caught in the cleave. This is THEN followed up by Limit Cut, which is a hard body check if your group managed to limp through the former mechanics but have anyone dead. Rubi Ex was horrible for a lot of reasons, but the back-to-back-to-back either outright or near-body checks, culminating in a total body check, is awful.

Golbex Ex is the worst body-check fest in the entire game that I've ever played. Ultimates are probably worse, but this fight has, depending on how you count, 6-10 body checks...and maybe more. 2 man stack circles are used frequently, meaning if one partner is down, someone else is dying. While this alone isn't a body check, these mechanics are almost always (if not ALWAYS) followed up by one. The line meteors + 2 partner stacks are followed by flare/knockback/meteors, a hard body check. This hard body check is also repeated later. The in/out mechanics have either spreads or light party stacks, which CAN wipe the party if more than one person is dead or a key person (Healers) are dead and the parties don't readjust quickly. This also happens later with the ice walls where you have to go to one corner and form two light party stacks, making that a hard body check. Gales 2 is a hard body check, with two hard body checks within it (the stack and the 2 man circles). If a healer survives that, they can LB3, but that won't save the party if the party fails Gales 3 later since you won't have LB3 again by then. There is also another meteor/flare/knockback and another line meteors + 2 man stacks as well. Those are a LOT of mechanics that will either outright wipe the party if someone is dead or out of position OR can cause enough damage the party might limp through it, but likely will get wiped by the snowballing of things out of control over the next mechanic or two, and if they somehow manage to recover, the party will likely fail the Enrage anyway. Horribly badly designed fight. This should have been a Savage, not an Extreme.

Zeromus Ex is Barb if movement is decreased a bit. There IS a sorta body check, but it's more a positioning check (meteors). But this mechanic only happens once, I think. Everything else the party can deal with with one or even two people down, and the mechanics are usually fairly generous about giving you time to get into position and having enough time between mechanics after damage hits for the party to heal up and prepare for the next mechanic. Probably the best Extreme in the expansion in terms of pacing, damage, complexity of mechanics, and overall feel. It's a little hot, but fair.

.

So I think it depends on (a) who you ask (some people think anything easier than P4/8/12S is "braindead") and (b) which Extreme we're talking about (GolbEx on the one end and probably ZodEx on the other). For my part, there are too many body checks overall, and there shouldn't be ANY in Extremes. If there are, it should be one mechanic done once relatively early in the encounter (unlike Rubi) so people can practice it and once they have it down, reliably see the rest of the fight.

If they want to cut down body checks, they probably have to remove non-healer raises and increase the cost of raising in general.

This makes no sense. We didn't have these rampant body checks in the past and we've had SMN Raises since ARR. Not sure how well to compare Raising's cost back then (before we had the static MP pools), but it wasn't an issue back then. Clearly we don't need this in order to not have them now.

[kidknee]

I think power of heals should be reduced. Mana cost as well. And introduce bosses with soft enrages.
I.e boss does 2k DMG everyy1 second to the entire raid, but stacks and every stack goes to 3k 4k 5k etc... Towards the end it's unbearable aka dps race.
A dps race which gets better with gear as healing would be better.

But for soft enrages to work, healing power has to be decreased, mana cost also and hit points must be doubled.
So it's not like one heal you to zero to 100% but it's a bit of effort to top someone to full hp