Merchant's Tale is boss HP sponges and carboard trash

[Valence]

Mind you, I haven't tried yet running this in parties so your mileage may vary. I have only done this solo. I am not BiS, but decently geared.

- Trash just keels over and dies before I can even start my burst. Incredibly frustrating.

- Bosses are literal HP sponges. I takes the last boss over 3 minutes to just show you all the basic sets of mechanics, and you'll probably need 6 to 8 min to solo it down.

Feels very lopsided to me. Is it any better in parties?

[SkankyRoe]

Mind you, I haven't tried yet running this in parties so your mileage may vary. I have only done this solo. I am not BiS, but decently geared.

- Trash just keels over and dies before I can even start my burst. Incredibly frustrating.

- Bosses are literal HP sponges. I takes the last boss over 3 minutes to just show you all the basic sets of mechanics, and you'll probably need 6 to 8 min to solo it down.

Feels very lopsided to me. Is it any better in parties?

It is better in a full party, but you still very much feel the sponginess; it's taking about as long with a party, as previous variant bosses took when solo. Even with great dps and minimal mistakes I'm seeing the endbosses taking over 5 minutes and looping mechanics multiple times before they are down.

The sponginess is especially painful against the secret boss while solo as once it goes through all its mechanics it'll start combining two of it's earlier mechanics at once together with its instakill mechanic, and will loop back to that awful combo like ever 90 seconds until it's dead.

[VictorSpoils]

They're literal sponges. As in, not sponges.

[RajNish]

It's only slightly better in a party. It's a very lazy job, I don't know why they did it, but it's boring and kills any desire to replay.

[Asari5]

the bosses need time to show you their mechanics step by step. how else would the players of ff14 learn the fights? *sarcasm*

[hydralus]

It only takes ~3 minutes longer than a regular dungeon on average unless people are doing horrible damage and is in-line with how long the rest of the variant dungeons took, I don't see the issue.

[Carin-Eri]

It's only slightly better in a party. It's a very lazy job, I don't know why they did it, but it's boring and kills any desire to replay.

Agreed. I won't be be replaying it, personally.

I mean, mobs were balanced pretty sensibly but I found the fights against the floating carpet lady and the dog-lion thing beyond tedious. I was with three other players and the fact that I am mediocre aside, the other players on the team seemed more than capable. On both runs I found myself looking at the boss' HP bar after probably five minutes of plugging away at them... and was dismayed to see that their health was still at something like 60%.

This is my opinion, and mine alone - and it isn't based on ANY fact..... but to me it felt like they dumped Extreme-level HP bosses onto a Normal-level map.

Anyway, my desire to replay this has completely evaporated.

[theunhappypotato]

It only takes ~3 minutes longer than a regular dungeon on average unless people are doing horrible damage and is in-line with how long the rest of the variant dungeons took, I don't see the issue.

you found the issue

[TaleraRistain]

Yeah I tried it on sage and it was just tedious. I was hoping they would adjust the actions to be more useful when at less than 4 or actually scale things for less than 4. I was actually interested in this Variant because I love the "going into a storybook" type of idea but I wanted to try to explore and learn things on my own since everyone will just be using guides (or already is from what I saw of PF descriptions) and they just didn't fix the damage sponge aspect from the previous ones at all. Plus you get hit and it takes half your health. So that lessens the enjoyment when you're soloing as anything that isn't a tank. If the bosses went down faster, I wouldn't mind as much. But the damage sponge nature just makes the whole experience unenjoyable.

I'll end up sticking to just doing it with friends or getting led around by the nose in matched groups that are just following a guide.

[Valence]

I had literally no issue with the older variant bosses in terms of HP durability. It seemed decently balanced to me, even though I could skip some late mechanics, which I assumed also came from me not playing a support job and being BiS back then.