What are your unrealistic expectations for the upcoming Combat Live Letter?

[Lyth]

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It's not really about personal skill. You can learn any fight that you want with enough practice in PF, regardless of time/schedule constraints. As you learn more combinations of challenging mechanics across multiple fights, you progress through newer fights faster. I think if you just go into PF with the mindset that you want to see past the next mechanic, then you'll get there eventually. Even if you wipe prior to that point, you're still building up consistency. When you're consistent enough, the stars will align with the other seven players and you'll cross to the next prog point.

That's also how you can tell how far into a fight someone is. There's a complete difference in consistency between someone who is clear ready and someone who has just seen the mechanics and understands them on a theoretical level. You'll see that very quickly if you jump back into an earlier prog point just for a bit of extra practice.

It's not about difficulty. It's just that you have to face the discomfort of wiping and disbanding in order to progress and get better. It does help to do fights as close to release as possible, just because you'll get matched up with more consistent players. This is especially true for Savage tiers, where you save progression time by investing it early rather than late. But there's no 'challenge' without a failure condition and wipes, much like there's no 'platformer' without 'pitfalls'.

As for the in-game combat log, you have four panels, so you can easily customize one of them in the game settings to only filter through the relevant information. The problem with the default battle tab is that it gives you too much information. Debuffs are a really good one to pair with damage taken, because it often tells you what debuff was responsible for the lethal damage. You'll often see a double instance of damage if you take an effect under a vulnerability. Enemy casts are also useful because they give you a framework on what mechanic is happening at the time. This could be made more intuitive, but there are ways of making it more readable. You just need to get the settings right.