Quote Originally Posted by Aravell View Post
Honestly, Stormblood design was better for this. Fights back then started at full without the tutorial phases and they loop halfway through so you can never skip anything of substance. I think that was better for speed of the fight and also you can't actually skip the hard stuff unless you can somehow kill the boss within the first half of the fight duration.
It's kind of 'on us as the players' for that one though, I recall people complaining that the fight 'was over at 40%' and that the post-climactic ultimate sequence timeline was boring cos 'its just the same stuff again'. Getting past Hello World 2 meant you'd hit enrage, guaranteed (or clear), for example. I do think it was better with Kefka, and a lot better with Exdeath, where they didn't just 'loop' per se, but used stuff you'd seen already, albeit in a different order from 'pre GrandCrossOmega/pre Forsaken3'. But we can all agree that it went too far in the opposite direction as early as SHB. A good example is Shadowkeeper from E10, where the best mechanic, the one that makes you go 'oh that's a cool way to solve it', Voidgate 2 (everyone uses each other's clone to take the 2man towers), just gets skipped because 'we have damage'. Or more recently, Curtain Call got heavily skipped, reducing the healing required (wow, now the point is related to the thread topic). Dominion and it's double damage buff is a bit better, since it is a very 'simple' by comparison phase, so it's more like 'you cleared High Concept 2, getting to enrage is kinda free', like SB raids. And for P12S, the Hello World 2 of that fight is probably Pangenesis

I guess P12S is a good example of the better way to do it, actually. After Pangenesis (the big spectacle mechanic for twitch viewers to go 'wtf is this' at), it has remixes of the previous mechanics, 'Classical Concepts but it spins', 'Caloric but it's easy' and UAV 2. But yes, would be nice if the doorboss was used as a tutorial of sorts for the 'main boss' (and ideally was not the same duration AS the main boss). Again, P12S actually has this, kind of. the black/white towers of P1 are used again in Pangenesis. The sad part is that they're ONLY used in Pangenesis. Wouldn't it have been cool if, instead of just 'stack for this fire thing', the 2man stacks in Caloric, were black/white towers again? Or, what if there was a UAV phase that split you into 2 groups of 4, and when a player drops a tower position (like in P1), it appears on the other team's arena side to resolve?