Quote Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo View Post
To be clear, I'm in no way complaining about the difficulty, but I'm curious to hear what others think.

For the first time since I did the MSQ, I was matched into Alexandria last night. And my team wiped repeatedly on the first boss's X's and O's mechanic before we finally beat it. Which is fine; it was funny and I like something that can give a bit of a challenge before it clicks and you beat it.

But I was reflecting on it afterwards, and I realized that I personally think that single mechanic is more difficult than anything in the normal Arcadion, including when multiple mechanics overlap. Specifically, that the window to move between each X or O had significantly less wiggle room than any other mechanic or set of mechanics that I could think of. Even the most frantic moments in Arcadion — like Bomb-Boy's spin with overlapping AoE's into a double-lariat — felt like they happened at a more relaxed pace with more wiggle room than this single mechanic from the first boss of a dungeon.

But that's just my subjective experience, and I'm curious to hear what others' experiences are. Did you find this move to be one of the more difficult ones to avoid? Or not? Different things can be harder or easier for different people, so I want to get outside of my head and hear your thoughts!
In my opinion this boss is badly designed due to the two layers of mechanics superimposed over each other. Almost every player understands how to solve the + and o mechanics, even if they sometimes get hit. The problem is the other mechanic that's being added on top of it which is the two types of cones, which in themselves aren't a problem either, but the way they happen requires frankly fast movement and reaction (too fast for normal mode imo), leave relatively small spots to stand in that are on top of it hard to see, and the faint blue they have is relatively hard to discern being put beneath all the + and o markers and their orange AoEs. Combined, those two mechanics WILL kill people, because if you get hit by both, you die.

So in my opinion it's not that the boss is hard or anything due to mechanics, it's that there is some manner of artificial difficulty gated behind a (too) fast paced overwhelming visual vomit for the average player. Maybe it wasn't intended as part of the difficulty, or maybe it was, hard to say.