A serious question....

[DkFusion]

I woke up this morning, slowly had my morning caffeine and a smoke. Did some light reading and from my random post hopping, I found a common theme: Difficulty of the game. Many players are complaining that fights are just dodge fests and that the fights should be random, with tactics that require split second decisions. Every time I see comments a long these lines I'm always quite curious and look them up and if their achievements are available check exactly what they have cleared. Most commonly they have the first 4 coils cleared and I'd say 50% of them have Extreme primals cleared. But I regress. After reading these comments I thought of the countless players I've come across that I wouldn't let take an order to mcdonald's let alone trust with primary roles in a random mechanic/difficult encounter.

So my question is: If you can't dodge patterned mechanics, how in the world are you going to dodge them if they are random and only allow split second decision making?

/Discuss

[Kuwagami]

I woke up this morning, slowly had my morning caffeine and a smoke. Did some light reading and from my random post hopping, I found a common theme: Difficulty of the game. Many players are complaining that fights are just dodge fests and that the fights should be random, with tactics that require split second decisions. Every time I see comments a long these lines I'm always quite curious and look them up and if their achievements are available check exactly what they have cleared. Most commonly they have the first 4 coils cleared and I'd say 50% of them have Extreme primals cleared. But I regress. After reading these comments I thought of the countless players I've come across that I wouldn't let take an order to mcdonald's let alone trust with primary roles in a random mechanic/difficult encounter.

So my question is: If you can't dodge patterned mechanics, how in the world are you going to dodge them if they are random and only allow split second decision making?

/Discuss

They won't.

Randomness implies unavoidable mechanics (or at least no AoE feast like titan) which you can heal through, avoid or bypass by an implemented mechanic (like X person get a 90% damage reduction debuff for Y time if they do Z thing in time, only doable at certain times and stuff). Or if there are AoEs, they need a way longer cast time than those that we currently have. I mean, there is no way someone who doesn't know a single thing about Titan can dodge plumes in time. (speaking of people going totally blind here. No previous explanation, no guides, nothing). They'll see it, take it in the face, and die. If things were to go random, cast time should be 1.5 times slower at least, if not twice the time. There should also be an option to avoid deadly combos like bomb rock + plumes same time.

So the bosses would be less unforgiving, but we would get a reflex-based game. Not sure many could beat it though

[RevDeroy]

People that call for this sort of thing have no idea what they are talking about. If this ever got implemented, the same people would say that's too hard and call for a reverse. People have a hard time dodging patterned mechanics like you said, i can only imagine what they would do with random stuff thrown in.

[Ramzal]

It's a mixed bag of nuts honest. Some complain for the sake of complaining. Some of them really want a random battle set up (Which i think is lunacy. Oh look, Ultima just used Defractive laser 3 times in a row due to a random generation of moves. 4 titan table-flips in a row), but others want changes because they get bored so very very easily and mistake certain things as bad design.

[Synapse]

With random mechanics, you get a bit more time to avoid and the penalty is not life or death situation.

Usually with Random mechanics, the boss has couple of sec of "charge time" and you need to have the knowledge of the attack and and animation to avoid it.

For example, many ppl might know this but in Titan HM, Mountain Buster is followed by a "swipe" animation(i save a cool down for this animation and a good healer will rdy a heal or benediction or lustrate).

Some mobs may charge different parts of the body to indicate a type of attack, if a Bull charges up the horns or similar animation, chances are a frontal attack is incoming.

Random mechanics add life to fights. I bet with Pattern mechanics, there is a chance you can create a bot for your character that will do things automatically according to mobs HP and avoid flawlessly.

[Zfz]

When people talk about randomness it doesn't mean completely random. It means skills are based on cooldowns plus shared cooldowns and no fixed rotation.

Patterned fights are fine every now and then, but all encounters in this game have fixed patterns down to the skill rotation. That is just boring.

OP also forgot how people tend to use alts to post on official forums. Don't judge a book by its cover. ;-)

[cotti]

There's only one coil.