New Tier

[Taranok]

Having done M5S and some of M6S, and also my own opinions of just encounter design, this has to be the worst raid tier the devs have made since Gordias, for very similar reasons to why Gordias was a garbage raid tier. Why?

• The fights are tested at 0 ping.
• There is a pretty stiff gear check.
• The fights are so badly designed and balanced within the implementation of job balance, that certain classes cannot do the fights.
• The fight design is further homogenizing the game (distinct from HW.)

To expound on this:

The first point, tested at 0 ping. M5S is a ridiculously inconsistent fight. I know, with certainty, mechanics are designed and intended to go off together and in time with the music. I see massive amounts of variance on mechanics. Sometimes I see things like the donut + funky floor fire off together, other times they're desynced.

I am on a 70-110 ping, very inconsistent, makes it extremely easy to tell when things are going wrong, and this is kind of my expectation on fight design as it gets faster. The mechanics desync more and more, they get harder and harder.

Where this becomes damning is I have a friend in Australia, who has cleared at both sub-10ms ping and closer to 200ms. They say the fight is insanely fun at 10ms or less ping. But at 200, it's a hair pullingly frustrating fight. This lines up with my experience. For those who were around for Gordias, its analogue would be A3S. For 3, the laser into autodeath dot based on server tic where healers lacked the time to react to the fight.

Solution: The devs can't make fast, reactionary mechanics. They need to be slow, and they need to be tested on real ping in real world conditions before releasing. There's a reason stormblood has the best fight design. Part of it is the fights are a lot slower.

The second point, Gear Check. While the fight is most certainly doable with competent players, anyone who steps into PF knows that competency is a bonus, not the expectation. Adds phase is a very, very stiff gear check for people who aren't actually particularly good at the game. Where have I seen a gear check like this before? Oh yes, gordias, where the fight took 3 weeks to clear. Obviously nowhere near as bad, it's still very much a "The devs vastly overestimate the average competency of the playerbase."

Solution: Have people of all skill levels test your fights. A lot of problems in fight design become a lot more obvious when you use people who aren't that great at the game. Including things like the dungeons being a nightmare of very much casual-unfriendly design.

Which leads into my next point: terrible class-job design and balance. Anyone who so much as glances at sites like fflogs can see stark problems in job balance. For example, bringing a summoner makes M6S orders of magnitude harder. But it's more than just this. Machinist is also awful. Honestly, most rphys are awful on this fight, if not period, right now. But if you bring a viper, significantly harder DPS checks become a lot easier, because viper fits the encounter design and dps check a lot better than summoner does. To the point where people are bringing double-viper+BLM at times.

But it's more than just this. A fight like M5S means the best iteration of BLM that has ever been made, Stormblood Black Mage, literally cannot exist. The fight is too fast, there's too much movement. Fight design like M5S kills good caster design. It also kills healer and tank design, but that's a problem that we can trace back to ARR and is more a 'This has been a recurring problem since the game has launched, solidified in stormblood,' instead of modern design where it's stale and boring. And, lo and behold, we have an analogue from Gordias. Anyone remember when Paladins weren't brought because blocks couldn't block magic damage, so every fight was DRK+WAR? How AST wasn't brought because, well, it wasn't so much fight design as class design in AST's case, but the point still stands.

Good fight design doesn't constrain class design. M5S has literally killed off good caster design completely. Though this is a problem we have been moving towards since tier 2 Shadowbringers. It's not exactly a new problem, just boiling frog syndrome for people who don't notice it.

Which leads to the final point: Homogenization. When you design fights like M5S, it's further homogenizing the game. Classes like BLM lose cast bars because of fights like M5S. But it's more than this. All cast bars are at risk. When even SMN becomes the most frustrating class to optimize in a fight like M5S because of having a mere THREE casts of 2.8, 2.8, and 3.0 per minute, it hearkens to a much, much bigger problem.

Fight design like tier 2 dawntrail forces a very strict class design. You can't have too many positionals (though personally I hate positionals anyways,) you can't have long cast bars. All healers need to be the same overpowered boring drivel they have been since SB found the hardest possible healer check (charybdis into AOE.) Tanks end up still tanking the same boring way (Guess I press 2-5 oGCDs and stop caring, I passed my binary check!) but this time with 2m bursts happening during these checks, so good luck DRK and GNB. Shoulda played a different tank! I am expecting classes like MCH/DNC/BRD to be further reworked because of the huge disparity on fights like M6S, and that just means more homogenization.

This raid tier is literally the worst raid tier this game has created since Gordias. It has restrictive class selection, gear checks, and fight design that doesn't understand the game's own infrastructure. It is hair pullingly frustrating for the dumbest possible reasons, and further proves that hard encounter design is worse for the game than easier encounter design.

I wish I was on a ping of 5 so I could experience how M5S was intended to be played, because it sounds a lot better than the hot garbage I get to play with.

[JadeCurtiss]

The second point, Gear Check. While the fight is most certainly doable with competent players, anyone who steps into PF knows that competency is a bonus, not the expectation. Adds phase is a very, very stiff gear check for people who aren't actually particularly good at the game. Where have I seen a gear check like this before? Oh yes, gordias, where the fight took 3 weeks to clear. Obviously nowhere near as bad, it's still very much a "The devs vastly overestimate the average competency of the playerbase."

Ah yes, because people who aren't good at the game should expect to be able to clear the highest end content in the game below Ultimate without being competent.

That is not how difficulty works. If you aren't able to clear something because you are not competent enough to meet the difficulty check, you work on getting better. Full stop. Handing players victory is exactly how we arrived at Endwalker encounter design in normal content. And now that we're getting more bite in hardcore content you are going to cry about it? Sorry, but get over yourself.

Whether or not the job or encounter design is in a good place is a separate issue. This specific statement is what I'm addressing. Players shouldn't be punished for being bad? Utterly ridiculous.

[Taranok]

Ah yes, because people who aren't good at the game should expect to be able to clear the highest end content in the game below Ultimate without being competent.

That is not how difficulty works. If you aren't able to clear something because you are not competent enough to meet the difficulty check, you work on getting better. Full stop. Handing players victory is exactly how we arrived at Endwalker encounter design in normal content. And now that we're getting more bite in hardcore content you are going to cry about it? Sorry, but get over yourself.

Whether or not the job or encounter design is in a good place is a separate issue. This specific statement is what I'm addressing. Players shouldn't be punished for being bad? Utterly ridiculous.

People should be allowed to select a difficulty that fits the content they wish to play. Which can be done with easier content and classes of variable difficulty. Which is how the game was designed in stormblood. And it was a lot better because you didn't see classes getting excluded from the content left and right. You could see lower skill players enjoy it. You could see people, like me, who sucked at multitasking being able to find a class that is challenging for me and still fit in nicely for every single fight that Stormblood had (except ucob, I need callouts to do nael 60% of the time because of how fast it is.)

And also, they managed to do that without making a single stupid mechanic that broke the game's own netcode.

So yes, people who aren't amazing but competent enough at the game should be able to do the hardest content. It need not specifically be fast, or particularly easy for them, but it should be doable. The alternative is the toxic garbage that has been shoveled down the player's throat since mid ShB, or do we need a reminder of how garbage end tier endwalker was?


I never said players shouldn't be punished for being bad. I'm saying encounter design is better when it's easier, and players of lower skill are more readily able to play the content. How does this work? Not having as many body checks, having looser DPS checks. Do they still need to learn mechanics? Absolutely. Should they wipe the entire raid off 1 mistake? Does literally anyone think that's fun? Does it create a fun environment for others?

Remember, on JP, these fights typically have closer to a 40-60% clear rate across all players (someone correct me on actual numbers.) It's intended to be decently accessible, not strictly hardcore.

[DivineP]

Whilst I do agree with you.

I do think a ladder of difficulty is needed.. I mean 50 - 100 you see alot of mechanics. (As a healer I know in new content a raid wides going out)

I think the think is.. with these 'road to, FC exp and food buffs' people are missing these because everything's so plowed through with I'll (CT is an example)

I do like the turn in DT - as a healer it gives me thing to watch out for instead of spamming glare.

[Taranok]

Whilst I do agree with you.

I do think a ladder of difficulty is needed.. I mean 50 - 100 you see alot of mechanics. (As a healer I know in new content a raid wides going out)

I think the think is.. with these 'road to, FC exp and food buffs' people are missing these because everything's so plowed through with I'll (CT is an example)

I do like the turn in DT - as a healer it gives me thing to watch out for instead of spamming glare.

Personally, I'd prefer that casual content be kept casual, and the devs actually fix the core problem of healers and tanks. The problem? Simple.

Medica 1 was overpowered in ARR, it continued to be overpowered. It's still overpowered. How do you threaten a healer that can heal 30-40% of their entire party in 1 GCD? Tanks have the same problem with mits. How do you threaten a paladin who can pop 5 oGCDs and have over 450% effective HP? How does a self sustain tank fit in a world with a boss that has a tank buster that defaults to at least 150% EHP in damage? How does a healer with smart heals fit into a world where every healer has free, instant cast medica 1s on extremely short cooldowns?

The answer is simple. Add more mits, make tank busters even more insane. Add more damage, make it faster. Kill people off of singular mistakes and give healers less time to react.

This is what the devs have been doing since ARR for tank and healer design. I recognized this problem by late HW, and Stormblood solidified it. I wish I actually talked about it back then, because now the devs have killed caster gameplay because they basically did to casters what they tried to do to rphys back in heavensward -- force them into gameplay that is woefully disconnected from how the role both wants to play and has played up to that point.

The solution is to completely redesign how tanks tank, and how healers heal. In order to let a WoW-style discipline priest with strong single target barriers and smart heals that bounce around the group, medica 1 must die. WoW learned this lesson in Wrath of the Lich King when they realized healers would just spam holy over and over because aoe healing was too easy and efficient. And, as one might expect, it's also insanely boring.

Nothing the devs have done in DT has been truly beneficial to healers, because there is nothing engaging about pressing 1 or 2 buttons and winning. Healers are, simply put, overpowered. They need to be nerfed into the ground, and how they engage with encounters needs to be completely rethought. Just as how the devs need to realize that core caster gameplay is a major draw of why players have loved this game in the past, and forcing casters into rphys gameplay is only going to drive people who love core caster gameplay away. Just as how tanks likely want more than just binary pass/fail checks attached to a bad DPS rotation.

This has always been what the problem is. Since ARR.

[JadeCurtiss]

People should be allowed to select a difficulty that fits the content they wish to play.

Remember, on JP, these fights typically have closer to a 40-60% clear rate across all players (someone correct me on actual numbers.) It's intended to be decently accessible, not strictly hardcore.

They can. It's called AAC Cruiserweight. And hard is AAC Cruiserweight (Savage). You don't make Normal and Hard difficulties then make Hard the same Normal difficulty.

JP clears more because they are generally better at the game and have more unified community consensus on strategies. Also they generally try not to burden others by prog-lying like people do in NA.