A Binding Coil review and discussion

[Liander]

Now that all of the current Binding Coil has been cleared and things have calmed down I wanted to take a moment to look back and review the instance from the standpoint of a hardcore raider. What I'll attempt to do in this review is give a rundown of the pros and cons of each turn and ways I can think of to improve them for instances in the future.

Before we start breaking down each turn though I'll have to address the dungeon and raiding as a whole. Binding Coil is the first raid dungeon in Final Fantasy 14 and is going to be a multi-turn/zone instance where Free Companies of eight member can tackle bosses in most zones for glorious loot. Currently there are five such turns, four of which contain bosses, which drop ilvl 90 loot and was stated that it would be so difficult that they did not foresee more than 100 people completing it before the December patch. That is all of the true raid content in the game at the moment. Another raid instance, 24 man Crystal Tower, is slotted to be introduced in December but will drop ilvl 80-85 gear. Along with extreme primals though I'm not sure at what gear level they will drop, presumably at or below ilvl 90.

These details are critical in understanding the first basic problem with Binding Coil, it is simply under tuned. That is all bosses either do not hit hard enough or the mechanics of the fight do not press the players hard enough to account for having lower than intended gear levels, in most cases it is a combination of both. Currently at the end game content outside of raiding the average player has access to two sets of gear, Ampador Keep greens which are ilvl 60 and Darklight token gear which is ilvl70. This means most guilds walked into Coil in a mixture of 60-70 gear yet were easily able to challenge and defeat the first three bosses and progress much in to the last boss, Twintania, with the sprinkles of ilvl 90 that were picked up. This presents a problem since we have our next raid content coming out next month and it is supposed to bridge the gap in gear and help us down coil more easily. Essentially what this mean is Coil, which should have been tuned to push the limits of ilvl 80-85 gear, was beatable in i70 gear thus allowing a large jump in power for raiders. This leaves Crystal Tower in a horrible spot and will end up being a large waste in development time.

Raiders are now faced with a large problem. Geared in i90 we'll be too powerful for Crystal Tower and left to sit for six months with very little to do as raid production cycles happen. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to fix this outside taking Crystal Tower and quickly retuning it to be higher than i90, which I suspect won't be feasible, thus SE can only take it as harsh lesson on the importance of tuning and raid production cycle as most raiders will probably drop their subscriptions. As I hope to have illustrated that there was a large miss in their tuning for this instance. It was listed at not a 100 people completing it but likely more than 500 will before December.

Another huge point in the overall design that needs to be addressed, at least for 8 man, is whether or not bringing at least one bard is required. Right now with a bard healing is fairly trivial with infinite mana. The problem is do you design fights with mana song in mind and require a bard or not require mana song and for those who have it healing is easy to manage. Personally I feel mana song should probably be removed from the game and healers given access to other sources of mana and bards a different type of song to play. It's too much of a design headache to force a class on raids or have it be trivialized.

Well that got a bit wordy but I feel it's a very important piece to take to heart as we look into each turn.

Turn 1: Caduceus

When delivering great content in any environment the first area of a zone has a large job of setting the tone of an instance. Turn 1 does so in both an amazingly great way and then in an amazing horrible way. How is that possible you might be asking, being able to do both so amazingly? When you first set foot into Coil you're surrounded by crystal and metal a fusion of science and the more magical aspects. As you walk through the area you the area breathes to you that evil stuff is going on and I applaud their work on the environment. As you progress you run into the murder ball himself ADS. ADS is such a fantastic start to the instance I can't praise it enough.

ADS is a science construct in the form of a large ball that sets the tone of the instance as it is the first block many had on their first night in Coil as there is a few things to learn before being able to down him. ADS' abilities are those of a boss many abilities to get of in a tight hallway before they kill you, an ability that needs to interrupt or it severely damages and paralysis the raid, and adds to deal with that will buff the boss. So most raiders who were feeling this out I'm sure were in the mind set that ADS is the first boss of the instance. All those abilities, the boss lockout wall, everyone was really pumped to see our first pieces of loot when we first downed him. Then the reality set in, ADS was no boss. ADS was merely a really strong piece of trash and while bummed over getting no loot it set out expectation of the instance really high. This place was going to be no joke, we were going to have to slog through who knows how many strong mini bosses to get loot. That thought was exciting.

But then you turned the page. The rest of the turn you wade through an odd assortment of beast type monsters in aoe packs with zero challenge. It was a pretty large let down in my opinion and really changed to the tone of the instance to being something great to being something badly routine. This theme sadly follows the rest of the instance, a little bit of good and behind the curtain a lot of mundane and bad.

Now the boss of the floor, Caduceus, is a large snake and that's about it as far as looks go. Not everything has to be about looks though so I'll give them a pass on it. What really shines on this fight is some pretty neat mechanics. The first thing free companies will find out about our snake friend is he hits like a truck. A truck which through the rest of the fight gets bigger and bigger then grabs his 18 wheeler friend to truck over you some more. The core mechanic behind the fight is Caduceus gets a stacking buff which increases his damage and about around four to five stacks is supposed to be unhealable. To counteract the stacks through the fight parts of the floor will light up, those standing on the lit up parts will spawn a slime which you then run into the snake in order to get him to eat it thus lower his stacks. The problem with the slimes is they have to be kited to the snakes carefully, get too close and they hit you pretty hard and apply a long slow. Get too far and they blow up and kill anyone close. Then even if you do all this correctly the slimes will heal Caduceus for about 10% of his hp bar unless you dps down the slime to low hp before it is eaten. A pretty fun mechanic which can cause positioning to get a bit tricky if the floor which gets lit up is on two platforms that are up a ramp and the lights don’t last too long.

At 60% or so Caduceus presumably calls his cousin to come wreck your day. These two snakes have to be pulled far apart or they'll fusion dance and start gaining the damage buff every couple of seconds which can't be removed by slimes any more. Then the rest of the fight is dpsing down both snakes and feeding them slimes till finally killing both at about the same time or they enrage and gain super buff mode. Great fight on paper, really fun the first time. Now when you peel back the curtain what's wrong with the fight.

Most notably, and it's been mentioned by SE that they don't like how it turned out, is after the split phase (or the whole fight if you got some good dps) you can't ignore the slimes completely and dps the boss down. This is mostly due to the boss just having too low of an hp pool that you can kill it but it also stems from what else is wrong with this fight and that is that there is nothing keeping the dps off the boss. The only other two abilities that Caduceus has is an acid spit and a tail whip. Acid spit is a roughly 700 damage nuke on a target that leaves a puddle on the ground which I presume does damage but you simply sidestep it and continue on your merry way. Tail whip is a cone attack from a snakes tail that will only trigger if someone gets behind them.

Thus you see the problem. The fight is devoid of any challenge besides tank damage. If things were implemented to keep dps off the snake the feed the slime mechanic works really well. Say acid spit instead of leaving a damage puddle either put a large ticking dot on the person it hit which has to be healed through so you can't allow snakes to stack up. Another idea is some sort of character disable, perhaps a smaller snake randomly chooses a dps and constricts them and it has to be killed. Really anything to drag the fight out longer will make slimes work. Tail whip is also pretty nonsensical, while the cone is pretty large it does little to affect the fight beside be a nuisance to melee dps. Changing it to another mechanic, perhaps Caduceus will charge up in throw out his tail in a line direction across the room. Something to avoid, people may mess up and spawn a slime that has to be delt with, you get the general idea. Mechanics need to have some meaning in what they do and raider generally don't enjoy standing in a spot and shooting a boss. We like having things to avoid and controllable havoc being thrown at us. There are lots of ways to improve this fight, I liked where they were headed with it but it needed some extra to make it a real challenge.

Turn 2: Super ADS

Turn 2 takes a different approach than Turn 1 when it comes to level design. Instead of having any trash you are given what basically amounts to a choose your own adventure boss. What lay before you is 7 tiny ADS the each have a different buff and ability. After killing one of these mini ADS the boss gains the buff of the killed add. Also through the fight the boss eats the remaining mini bosses left alive and take on their special ability. So you kind of get to create a boss fit for your raid. I find this to be a pretty fun mechanic, it adds a lot in terms of player interaction.

The major problem though is each mini ADS is the same monster with a different attack. These different attacks barely affect the raid in any meaningful way besides two special cases which I'll discuss in a moment. The problem when learning the fight is it is a pretty tedious task of reclearing each of these mini bosses with their mostly weak special ability and pretty large amount of life. The reason you have to reclear them is when you start the encounter and clearing the adds you're on a timer. Fail to kill the boss for before the timer expires and you all die. Interesting if the timer wasn't so lenient that even in the worst of gear I never saw the timer tick all the way down. I'd like to see some more meaningful abilities given to the adds, so some thought is given to avoid certain abilities instead of just the passive buffs.

The only exception to this are two certain adds, one which give allagon rot and the other chain lightning. Allagon rot is an ability given by the special out of the way add that places a debuff on a random player. After 15 seconds or so the debuff expires and explodes killing everyone. The way to survive this is to pass the rot to another player but you can't just pass it back and forth between to as you gain a debuff not allowing you to regain the rot for quite a while. So your raid must spread out and pass the rot through several members. Now general you're always going to have this for the boss fight as killing the mini ADS that has this ability gives the boss haste which is pretty soul crushing in the fight. To my knowledge no one has killed ADS with the haste buff, if there is extra to be gained for making the boss harder I'll give a lot more credit to this fight but doesn't quite fit SE's encounter designs. Anyway, you'll almost always have rot, to deal with rot you need to spread out to avoid making everyone immune to rot pick up. Doing this makes chain lightning, the only other ability that isn't trivial, useless. So they designed the fight in a way to counteract their own mechanics by doing another mechanic.

There isn't a whole lot that needs to be done to this encounter to really fix it. Some stat adjustments and a bit better ability selection could really push this fight to another level. The beginning mini ADS phase could probably be cut a bit in time as it is a bit tedious and given a bit tighter timer on the boss itself or make each ADS a bit more unique instead of clones with only one ability difference.

Turn 3: Why?

It was stated they were happy with how Turn 3 is. Remember that for the rest of this. Turn 3 is a zone where you work your way down through packs of random beast type monster in aoe packs with zero challenge at all with a random golem thrown in for kicks. Sounds familiar? The kicker of Turn 3 is there is no boss. There is no story. For all free companies it is a 4 minute annoyance as they run through the zone bypassing all the monsters. I ask why are you happy with how Turn 3 is when you're capable of so much more SE. This is development time, art assets never used anywhere else, and nothing gained from having Turn 3 in the game. Sadly there was at least conspiracy theories and mystery behind Turn 3 but that was quickly killed off devs on the forums. Gamers love a mystery, having that empty zone begged for a hidden boss. It got down on its knees and pleaded for something more. Adding something special for a lucky group to find definitely would have spiced things up. Don't leave areas unused in raid content!

Turn 4: Elevator Boss

Like Turn 2 there is no trash in this Turn, but instead of a true boss you're given waves of mechanical monsters to fight in a single room as a timed event before the room starts to blow you up. There's not a ton of strategy involved in Turn 4. Hit the things you do damage to and aoe the rest. This is mostly a gear check fight. Its hard to consider this a boss fight since there really isn't many mechanics worth mentioning. Once you've beaten this fight once there’s little room for improvement or much to pay attention to. Turn 4 suffers in such way that Turn 1 does, you're just attacking the monsters around you without much thought. The fight needs to breathe and keep the players engaged, not just hit attack buttons.

I wont go in depth in to this fight since there isn't much to analyze but I'd like to see more wave interaction such as mobs in wave 2 dropping something on the ground that wave 5 can't be allowed to get to or each wave destroying a monster drops a void zone that limits the area you have to fight in. At the very least each wave should have an ability that needs to be dealt with beyond not letting spiders get near the big guy, which is a good mechanic in itself but the fight demands more. Wave fights can be interesting and fun but you can't really leave the raiders with nothing to think about or the fight becomes nothing as it has become now.

Turn 5: Twintania

A large wyvern dragon, who looks pretty awesome I might add, and his three buddies there to ruin your day. A quick rundown of the fight is in phase 1 you punch his adds till they die as they fire fireballs (heh) that leave a puddle under the feet of those hit. After the adds die you move over to Twintania, who uses an ability called death sentence throughout this phase dealing very high damage, and punch her down 75% or so where his tail ring will break off and leave a visible area on the ground. After this Twintania gains three new abilities, the first a incredibly high damage fireball that has to be split between several players to survive but for each player hit by the fireball Twintania gains a stack of Waxing flesh which causes his next ability to blow up more quickly, the second ability is a disable called firestorm or conflag which locks a player and any others that are too close in a swirling vortex of fire that last for a certain amount of time depending on how many stacks of waxing flesh Twintania has gained and has to be destroyed to save the players inside before it explodes, and last his death sentence gains a debuff that cuts healing by a large amount for a while.

After punching Twintania to 50% another ring breaks and leaves behind another puddle. Twintania then flies into the air and begins to divebomb plays in an attempt to push them into the sides of the room which will immediately kill the player. After three sets of divebombs three snakes will spawn, 2 small 1 large, which must be dealt with. Above all else killing the small snake near the large one to apply a damage increase buff to be able to cut through the large snakes massive hp pool. After a minute or so Twintania will divebomb three more times and spawn an additional two small snakes. All that needs to be cleared up quick and players stack into the dropped rings before Twintania decendes and explodes dealing massive damage to anyone not inside the circle and hitting those inside for a hefty amount.

Phase 3 involves three mechanics, death sentence which is the same as before, summon dreadnaught which will summon an add down in the center of the room who you focus on to a person stunning them in place, if the add reaches this person they die, and the last ability is twister which summons an invisible vortex of death under your character which must be moved out of to survive. Surviving these and punching Twintania down to 25% will cause the last phase will begin.

Phase 4 Twintania continues to death sentence but gets two new abilities to use. One is to fire five of the fireballs used by the adds in the beginning of the fight at a single player. Second is to summon a doom orb which will lock on to a player and fly to them and deal deadly damage to anyone that gets caught in its path and not standing in a dropped ring puddle. Repeat these mechanics and punch Twintania down to 0% to win the fight before too much time passes and she enrages and one shots everyone.

A pretty complex and on paper a really great fight. Unfortunately what was given to us to deal with was an extremely bugged, poorly tested, and under tuned encounter with several game breaking bugs. So lets go down the list of most of the bugs that plagued this fight for months at a time.

The major bug, which most are probably familiar with, was the dc bug which would cause Twintania to stop all movement and attacks which allowed for some early kills.

Phase 1: Sometimes the conflag graphic wont show up - The tank can step in to the conflag and cause twintania to stand still and only use attacks - players could sleep conflag and cause it not to explode and bypass having to dps it down

Phase 2: (Personal opinion with lots of evidence)Divebomb not being able to consistently dodged without near exploit - snakes that went to 0% hp while stunned would not die - snakes that went to 0% while stunned would pulse several stacks of the debuff

Phase 3: Players could become perma-stunned if dreadnaught was killed at a certain time - dreadnaught could be bugged to not move from the center of the room - (personal opinion with lots of evidence) twister not being able to be consistently dodged

That's a pretty large collection of bugs for a single encounter when there is only four raid bosses to have tuned before release. This fight is also pretty underwhelming in what it asks of players. Twintania doesn't really hit that hard outside Death Sentence, which is dropped heavily by debuff rotations, and the mechanics themselves are simple and not really going to kill anyone on their own. This is a fight took two months to down only because of the bugs to Divebomb and Twister.

Now Divebomb and Twister are a hotly debated topic and I'll give my opinion on that matter. Divebombs currently strategy is to stand in the edge of the room and cause Twintania to fly off the screen. This position causes probably 80% of her hit box to never come on to the battlefield thus this near exploit strategy allows players to move out with little effort by using .01% of the room. This would be viewed anywhere else as a pretty large bug, but it is the only strategy that allows players to dodge divebomb with any consistency. Standing anywhere else in the room and trying to dodge the mechanic in a more logical way will 50/50 be able to get out in time with how it's currently coded. It definitely needs to be rewritten of fixed to be dodgable as it feels it should be.

Even after spending two months on this encounter people are still in the belief that Twister was not bugged. It confuses me, after spending dozens if not hundreds of attempts on the mechanic and seeing the widely varying outcomes, how people see it as so. Many point to the dev posts about Twister but not once is it said it was working as intended and not bugged only it is called not random. Certainly it's not random, it picks four players every time and they must move to survive. What is random and was able to be proven with countless hours of video footage was weather you survived or not. Given the behavior of the ability after the fix, unless they completely rewrote the mechanic which is a much larger problem to talk about if true, the intended mechanic was always to move when twister is being cast. The bug being the game was updating your position and whether or not you were moving correctly at odd times and killing you when it shouldn't have. Eventually players found ways to semi consistently force update that you were indeed moving but was never reported as being 100% consistent. At which point it was less about dealing with the mechanic and more about dealing with the game's general unresponsiveness and updates. Its fairly obvious to me and others that the twister mechanic was never functioning properly and the fix took much too long to get out.

So what can be improved to make this fight over all besides bug fixes? Not whole lot needs to be done in the first three phases of the fight. I would call each of these pretty solid mechanic wise besides fixes to Divebomb to make it an actual ability in the fight instead of using .01% of the battle floor to deal with it, and twister which after the changes to it went in function like a real mechanic. Phase 5 is what needs to most work. There’s almost no threat from the fireball attack and the doom orb can usually be absorbed by your off tank and take very little damage. The last 25% of a fight, especially of and end boss fight, should be truly epic and interesting. A good start would be requiring healers to quickly be able to switch and heal those targeted by fireball. Right now the fireball does a very small amount of damage and is generally ignorable by having the person target kite. Another good step would to have the doom orb spawn in more random locations forcing those targeted to be on their toes and not just mindlessly eaten by the off tank. Another small change that maybe be interesting would be to have the outside fire ring slowly creep in to make the area smaller for less kiting room, give the fight a sense of impending doom. Dealing with mechanics and affecting players emotions is a pretty important aspect of raid design that needs to be kept in mind.

So I apologize for those who stayed and read the whole thing. It got a bit rambly and poorly constructed but I think does a fairly good job at pointing out key weakness in the current raid design and what should be avoided in the future. Of course SE may be happy with what they have on the floor now and continue to make content for more of the casual raiding crowd and that's perfectly alright. But from a hardcore raiding standpoint I can only give the Binding Coil a C grade and only on the potential that I can see under the lack of experience in creating true raid encounters. Thank you for reading and feel free to discuss what is written here if you have questions, have your own ideas on how to improve design, or disagree with any of my points. I'll be happy to respond as I can.

[Vantol]

Bump for great justice. The only thing I wholeheartly do not agree with is that Turn 4 is not interesting. In my opinion it's best designed fight in whole game and only one fight in whole game, which is "fun". Everything else involves strategy "run in circles like a chicken with a cut head" which I hate sooo much. I really miss those days, where you could stand for hours in 1 spot and actually think, which ability to use, observe the fight, keep an eye on other party members and etc. That was interesting, that made you think. Now, as DD I never watch nor mob, nor other party members, nothing, just faceroll keyboard and that's it. I use just the same rotation on random ladybug and on Twintania, too. Nothing changes. Except Turn 4, where length of my rotation triples and it stops being "rotation" and actually becomes situational chain of abilities. That is why I like it so much.

[Godlafell]

there were no red circles telling me how to dodge twisters i would rly like that next time. also i wish divebombs and twisters were never bugged. how come every other fight shows red circles to help us dodge. but none for divebombs and twisters? i still dont believe they arent bugged. also no deadly boss mods telling me when to move. i have to rely on parser to tell me. rng fight. thank god they finally fixed the fight. still no red circles but at least i can close my eyes and still dodge.

[Zdenka]

there were no red circles telling me how to dodge twisters i would rly like that next time. also i wish divebombs and twisters were never bugged. how come every other fight shows red circles to help us dodge. but none for divebombs and twisters?

There's plenty of fights that don't display the red circles.

Coincounter doesn't display for 100 Ton Swing nor Eye of the Beholder and Chimera doesn't have red circles for Radient Breath, Demon Wall doesn't have one for Repel, Anataboga doesn't have one for Immienent Catasrophy, and the list goes on and on. Also as discussed in the Twister thread I am not sure SE has it coded to just display the red circles on a single PC's screen, therefor if they are the bulls eye shape the entire arena would be flashing red as everyone was in everyone else's "run to far and die" zone effectively making it the same as not having it.



Read entire post, the only real problem with Divebomb is that it targets a specific player. Since he has a limited number of Dive Positions (6? I think we confirmed) he always spawns in the same spot if the player is standing in the same spot. Divebombs instantly give you the Nostalgic feeling of Felmyst where it went up into the air, had 3 spots he could fly, and if you got hit you were MC'd the rest of the fight. (same as Twin nailing you into a wall) So to really fix how dives work, they should have just allowed Twintania to just randomly appear at any of the 6 dive locations and not target a player.

Again how you'd be that is to by stacking up, the same as Felmyst, and only moving if it chose a location that would hit where you are standing, which ends up being exactly the same as how you dodge it now, except you'd have to dodge it even less.

[Liander]

There's plenty of fights that don't display the red circles.

Right, generally in raiding you don't want a whole lot of red circle action going on. If the design is well enough and speaks the intentions of the mechanic you can usually do the guess work on how to avoid it in the future. A bit of hidden challenge is fun and keeps raid group on their toes. Like on Caduceus her tail whip cone is a visible red circle, instead of feeding that information to the player you keep it hidden and a few attempts someone dies to it. That's interesting! It gives players a piece of the puzzle to solve even if it sucks those few attempts but if you stick with it you get a sense of overcoming part of the fight.

There not a lot of uses of the red circle in Binding Coil and pretty much each one can be removed and given different alert which doesn't just give you the information on a plate whethere you survive or not. There are not too many abilities in general in Coil which is that major problem so it is hard to say for certain how SE will use them effectively.

The only thing I wholeheartly do not agree with is that Turn 4 is not interesting.

I can agree with you, Turn 4 does really break up the sit and spam attack without thought that goes on in the rest of the instance. I play a healer so I don't have this view point so I'm glad to see it brought up. I just wish it was expanded on, not just on turn 4 but throughout all of coil. Right now theres little to engage raiders outside a few abilities that are not really that scarey, so Turn 4 is probably the best from a dps stand point where what you're doing and how your doing it matters since the time crunch between waves.

The problem I have with it is there's nothing else going on in the fight, the only ability worth of mention is the dreadnaughts cleave which you have to position for. That's not really fun raiding, if they took turn 4 and took it to the next level with mechanics that made it not safe to do the more interesting dps combos it would be a much better encounter in my eyes.

[Alkimi]

Nice analysis of it all, but the problem is that this opinion is from one of the groups that is the 0.01% of people who have actually cleared coil, and SE won't make their hard dungeon even harder just to satisfy such a small selection of people. You have some interesting suggestions to make the earlier turns more difficult, but a lot of them would just encourage more ranged attack stacking (like we need more of that).

Also I strongly disagree that there's "nothing to think about" on turn 4. Yes it does boil down to being a DPS check to be able to beat it, but it's far from a mindless one.

And people who want to make Twintania harder just baffle me.

[Liander]

Also I strongly disagree that there's "nothing to think about" on turn 4. Yes it does boil down to being a DPS check to be able to beat it, but it's far from a mindless one.

Those were only a few ideas that came off the top of my head. I could sit down and think of some more engaging things to keep melee in the loop as, yes, they do feel a bit underwhelming right now. This is more of a class balance issue since there isn't too much to punish melee in fights.

Sadly, yes, I don't expect SE to focus heavily on developing content for the hardcore raiding crowd. We can hope for a normal / hardmode raid instance split kind of how WoW does it which would be fantastic but I don't know in which direction they want to take the game. This review is merely a discussion on improving raid design so it doesn't feel like a longer four man dungeon and more like an epic raid.

Turn 4 is probably the best turn in the instance when coming in with low levels of gear. The pressure of the tight timer is such a key factor in the fight intensity. The problem comes with any amount of gear, say if you walked in after having farmed Crystal Tower before hand, the fight becomes something less interesting. The common theme in the first four turns is not a whole lot to break up the dps cycle. You sit there, nuke, move out of not so deadly spit/lasers without missing a beat.

Turn 4 falls highly into this trap, as once you down the fight once there's little to no variance in your kills each week. You dps what you can dps and aoe the rest. Twintania, actually, is an example of how a fight should be, there's times to dps but times to think about the mechanics of the fight that are non-trivial (but twin has its own problems of course). Right now Turn 4 thought process is; Are you a mage? Don't hit the thing that reflects your damage and destroys your soul. Does it cleave? Don't stand in front if its fist, bro! There's not really anything else to test your raid group.

It is a good fight, but I don't want mediocre and okay in my raid environment when there is so much potential for more without a ton of work. Very much so when there is so few fights to go around I expect what I'm given to go above and beyond.

[carraway]

One of the major design choices that inflects most of 2.0's content has to do with bosses' usage of a completely or mostly static rotation of scripted events/abilities. Sometimes I appreciate this; sometimes I don't. Difficulty progression, or escalating difficulty, can be evoked with small changes like turn 2 ADS not always using abilities in a predictable order (though something like High Voltage should probably retain its predictable timeframe); these changes can be made in addition to more fundamental changes to mechanics. There were some interesting interactions during the Twintania fight with how certain abilities pushed other abilities back to establish a very particular rhythm, but in the end it's easier to just burn through it and deal with how things line up. I agree with the sentiment that it is too easy to circumvent 90% of the Caduceus fight; though my FC and I (and, I'm sure, others as well) love finding ways to apply what we call "advanced burn strats" (inside joke) to change how encounters work, there is usually a way to hew closer to the line in fight design.

Overall, I was personally pleased with Coil, but I want a lot more (more fights, more interesting ways of approaching difficulty); my expectations were not very high after 1.0, but I had some optimism after seeing the Legatus (Hard) fight being designed within the constraints of that engine. I feel the raid design team was hampered by the rushed release schedule, and I hope to see a wider breadth of mechanics and fight types in 2.1 and 2.2. I also hope that they can get back on track with tuning according to expected player ilvl.

[Yenn]

Interesting note about the Divebomb strategy: There were alternate strategies to avoid Divebomb that involved actually dodging it and having Twintania dive across the arena.
In the first maintenance for Turn 5, SE made most of these strategies no longer possible. If you attempted them, Twintania would automatically hit everyone, even though her animation didn't come near them, and they would be thrown in completely random directions (not the direction of her dive). This forced us to switch to BG's strategy, which feels like it's an exploit.

The major problem with every single encounter in BC is that there are no hints or indicators as to what mechanics do/how they should be dealt with. This is terrible design and needs to stop; it moves 90% of the difficulty from executing the encounter well to, instead, bashing your head against it long enough to figure out what every mechanic does. This isn't to be confused with coming up for strategies; I think figuring out a strategy that works for your group should be a major part of every encounter, but in the particular case of FFXIV, this is overshadowed by too much of the encounter being unknown. I hate to compare FFXIV to WoW, but WoW did it right, and FFXIV should draw from it's success; mechanics were hinted at in tooltips, and the difficulty was coming up with strategies and executing them correctly, instead of spending dozens of hours using trial and error and guessing at how abilities work.

This favors groups like BG who have nothing better to do than throw themselves at it for god knows how many hours, instead of favoring groups who are highly skilled but don't want to spend dozens of hours each week on an encounter that they're wiping to for no obvious reason. Exhibit A being the SCH in their video; I don't even remember how many times it died, and they still downed it. This type of design feels very FFXI-esque.

Again, Divebomb is a great example. We have no idea how SE intended for us to counter it, but judging by that ridiculous patch, it seems the intended strategy was for the entire group to stack in a small location and force Twintania to dive out of the arena. Which makes zero sense, and no indication is given to suggest this.

[Misery1337]

My major concern is that by the time 2.1 comes out I'd be full ilvl 90, why would I ever step into Crystal Tower? I'd go there once just to see how it is but...yeah no.