Redesigned Test/Practice Mode for harder fights

[Kyana]

I like the idea of creating a "taining mode" for endgame content.
The current state is that people watch videos to see the whole fight and get an idea of what's going on in different phases.
Being able to just go in and try for yourself would be a cool thing, especially if you have players who just need more practice to get comfortable with a mechanic.

It would also help if SE increased the number of waymarks we can set, or a "party map" where everyone sees the same map and where people can place markers and draw lines on it to explain tactics.

I think people forget that in a fight you might carry over parts/items/adds from the first phase to the last phase, you can't just seperate the phase as if they're their own fights. For example, T5's neuro-links has a important placement requirement throughout the fight, or T6 feeding honey glazed players before you transition into the last phase, or T9 stardust placements before going into golems phase or as far back to even T4 back then when players would leave the first dreadnaught alive and carry it into the next phase for feeding..etc. Wouldn't this have an impact on raid design? as in you can't design the fight as a continous one in order to make this practice skipping phase thing work.

Good point.
There are 2 ways to approach this.
a. Instead of splitting the fight into phases, let people select specific mechanics to experiment how to handle them.
b. A "Continue" system. Your progress is saved everytime you manage to get to a new phase. If you wipe you can continue from one of the "savepoints".

I'd prefer b.

[Crevox]

Too much work and effort for something unneeded. Learn the fight by doing the whole thing. Even if you're struggling only a certain phase, you're still getting better and more practice at the previous phases as you go.

It's just not necessary.

[Colvin]

I wonder if this idea has been run by the devs yet?

[Mayoyama]

I personally feel a segregated "phase selector" would not be the solution because
1) If your DPS is higher in one group over another you may end up skipping parts of a phase. You then learn to expect a "set" amount of moves in the phase, instead of learning to just deal with things as they come up (reflexes and actually paying attention)
2) Being able to handle transitions BETWEEN phases is vitally as important as the phases themselves.
3) There is no guarantee that you will even find a group of 8 willing to practice ONLY that particular phase over and over, making the feature pointless (incoming 90+ min queues to just try practicing a specific phase in a specific fight)
4) People who are not confident on their class outside of trashy dungeons will always struggle more than experienced players

I believe that a simulator dummy would be much more beneficial overall. The dummy could use a variety of moves allowing people to practice dodging mechanics (especially DPS who have a bad habit of dying by focussing too hard on DPS and not enough on actually doing the fight). This would be especially helpful for black mages to help improve casting AND dodging (and actually getting a spell off).

I saw someone mention the Golden Saucer. You could make it a mini-game with varying difficulties where you have to do a certain level of damage without getting hit :P.