We need more HARROWING HELL

[Valence]

It's not really that new of a concept. Many past savage raids have ended with lots and lots of raid-wide aoes that keep the healers on their toes.

I don't normally heal savage, but I healed E2S and they were in that fight and you also had to do a lot of dodging and memorization whilst also healing so the party lived. If you didn't do the dodging and memorization as a healer, RIP, you didn't just die you also potentially wiped the party right before the kill. It also applied damage downs to make it harder to beat the enrage. Don't get me wrong, that was an easy fight overall, but PF would give you the complete opposite impression.

Nobody said it was a new concept. I'm saying it's a forgotten concept.

And it's not just on healers, that's what I like about it. It's a team effort.

E2S was a serious wall for PF, and still a sharp step up after E1S. It's not that dissimilar to P10S, even if on lesser scales.

I want to see something like this in the fight with an expansion boss. Make the damn things threatening, even on Normal. Not insurmountable, but at least a little challenging. If any Normal mode fight has a right to wipe the party once or twice, it's them.

They did it once or twice, notably with Nidhogg (3.3), and with Shinryu (4.0). People cried tears of blood on social media because the fight was too punishing. I disagreed with them, they all cleared, they had to work a little for it, that's all. I remember a lot of parties voting abandon, sure, but it's not like it walled players out of the clear for more than a hour.

It was just as hard for tanks as well. I know I had to have all of my mitigation available for harrowing, and both tanks needed to be in sync to not overlap reprisal. P10s imo...SHOULD be the standard difficulty for savage going forward. P10s made me THINK about mitigation, and make myself plan much more around mechanics. Understanding when to use nascent flash, holding mitigation for real damage. Not using bloodwhetting on cooldown, but actually using it for those moments when I needed.

Harrowing Hell was just the best part as BOTH tanks NEEDED all of their mitigation to keep the damage down, and the healers needed to blast their oGCD's and use their big heals for it. I'm so glad we beat p10s without using tank LB. Such a good fight.

I have also been an advocate that healers....NEED TO HEAL....complain about mashing a single button all you want. If you had to actually heal under real threat of members dying at all times....that would be MUCH more compelling then mashing a single button. I have always said bosses need to do MORE damage, mechanics need to bring us so close to death. I'm not a fan of one shots as it's just a clear indicator of what you can and can't do, but damage should be what you can get away with instead. If I had a nickel for every time I was near death in p12s due to our healers just spamming broil/fall malefic....I would prolly make $20 a raid night. Then I'm screamed at when I use clemency....I have died so many times to just auto attacks because my healers are greedy and want high DPS. I want to counter that by keeping them from mashing the single DPS button and force them to heal me. Increase auto attack damage, increase tank buster damage, increase bleed damage, make the tanks feel the pain. And force the healers to heal EVEN MORE.

Harrowing Hell is a clear example that it can be done, but as long as the community is obsessed with DPS numbers and the color of the number they do....healers will always ask for more meaningful dps rotation.

I'm not gonna lie, I don't like P10S much, especially with all the body checks and finicky mechanics (like Bonds 3), which is very indicative of all the designs that greatly tend to get on my nerves with ShB and EW. But Harrowing Hell is the opposite, because it brings back what used to be more of a thing before. On top of it it provides different options to clear it, like using tank LB for it. On its own, it's okay I guess, but imagine if you had multiple mechanics that aren't just based on DDR but on actual party resource management, and you had to CHOOSE where to use your valuable LBs and cheeses? A bit like you CHOOSE when to use tank invulns for busters?

I'm just asking for more of this. More player agency please.