Good job on the Second Binding Coil of Bahamut

[ticdup]

At this point, looking back on the new coil turns (at least 6 through 8) my feelings are mixed. T7 feels like the only well designed encounter between 6-8, especially when you look at longevity (this crap has to last us 6 months).


Turn6, even in all i90 we were able to ignore any mechanic past 40% and just burn the boss down. I still don't even know how those mechanics are supposed to work between the slimes and the slugs. This turn will be even more of a complete joke once people are geared up even more. It already is on loot piñata status. The sub 40% mechanics should have been more pronounced for i90 so that ignoring the mechanics and just burning the boss should not have been viable.

Turn7, I like it. Too much dps and you push phases in weird directions or cause chaos by having too many things going on at once. It becomes wise to manage the timing of mechanics (with more and more dps will require constant group tuning of when to push). That combined with a large section of mistakes being autowipes gives this turn fun-longevity in my opinion.

Turn8 currently is the worst designed turn in my opinion. Allagan field and timing towers is a good mechanic, but there are three major problems with this turn that make this turn already easier than t7 for progression groups (and should be in the top10 of a "Do not do" list in raid design).
It is a veritable striking dummy (so if you have the means to do so, going 3 monks and a bard is ideal). Combined with the fact that in essentially i90 gear if you push dps enough you can skip tower phases, god knows what will happen when you are fully geared.
At the top of the list of poor design choices, though, is brainjack. It is trivial to bypass the mechanic by just placing a person near the center of the boss. It should have been designed to obligate a tank swap: It is embarrassing that this turn can be single tanked, let alone have the ability to never need to tank swap if you do bring in 2 tanks.
Ballistic missile is also too easily countered. Stacking trivialized any of the challenge involved and it devolves into a very simple algorithm to solve it. Simply altering the mechanics so that if the yellow markers overlap causes instant death would make ballistic missile a lot more fun by requiring more than 3 people to be accountable for passing the mechanic check.

[SarcasmMisser]

I sorta agree with turn 8 but want to add a few things.

I think it was intended to be either 1 or 2 tanked from launch, I don't think it was a mistake SE would know that the DPS check would be insane with 2.1 level gear. The tradeoff is that mechanics become more difficult to execute and the DPS have to do some things they wouldn't normally do. The thing that will trivialize it is not 5 dps but when it is easily done with 4 DPS, as mechanically it's an incredibly flat fight with proper composition. Having a tradeoff for uncommon compositions is fine, people were doing it with Twintania and it is still a well designed fight.

I think it is intended to be a job check fight and this game did really need one. Regardless of your composition DPS need to know their job to do it, and not do garbage DPS and I hope this filters out a lot of the DPS out there that don't take their role seriously enough. I see DPS with full i90 do barely half of their output potential in turn 1, they really need this to slap them across the face for that sort of performance. I don't particularly enjoy the fight, t7 is still my favourite and t9 so far is fun too.

Also boss mechanics being undermined is something that always happens with gear, it's why the early progression is so fun because you are doing the fight with what it is tuned to. I think it shouldn't be a concern that people will gear stomp this down the road, what matters is what's possible with launch-level gear. My only complaint therefore is phase 3 of turn 6, because it is possible to ignore mechanics even with i90 and I think they clearly dropped the ball in tuning that phase.

[Xellos2099]

I freaking hate Rafflesia, some time the chain will just REFUSE TO BREAK even when 2 people run in opposite direction fort a few seconds.

[Kimura410]

I freaking hate Rafflesia, some time the chain will just REFUSE TO BREAK even when 2 people run in opposite direction fort a few seconds.

depending on when the chains occur, if the two people chained begin very far apart, you can't break them. for example, you have to always break a 10 yalm chain, no matter what. if you and the other person are 10 yams from each other when the chains pop up, then you will have to go 20 yalms to break them. thats why everyone needs to stack. sometimes the OT will get a chain when he's moving from the boss when the new tank provokes, causing extra distance to run.

[Eldaena]

I think mechanics are okay, but server responsiveness and some random stupid elements we could do without. Why does it seem that everything is based on HP % triggers? Parsers and such are not legal, but you have to make sure not to go over certain percentages or you're going into the next phase. Then if you go into the next phase and haven't completed some mechanics from the phase prior, it can mess up the timing of pretty much everything and screw the run. People can know the fight back and forth and stupid randomly generated things can still kill the run. Why should players be punished for good dps? Why should players be punished because status timers are not equivalent to what is actually happening on the field? There are a lot of little factors that I believe can make the turns a lot more stable without destroying difficulty. It's almost like a certain percentage of luck is required to win some of the fights, instead of just pure skill. =/

[xxalucard]

I think mechanics are okay, but server responsiveness and some random stupid elements we could do without. Why does it seem that everything is based on HP % triggers? Parsers and such are not legal, but you have to make sure not to go over certain percentages or you're going into the next phase. Then if you go into the next phase and haven't completed some mechanics from the phase prior, it can mess up the timing of pretty much everything and screw the run. Why should players be punished for good dps? Why should players be punished because status timers are not equivalent to what is actually happening on the field? It's almost like a certain percentage of luck is required to win some of the fights, instead of just pure skill. =/

While it seems like you may get punished for too much DPS, I think it is a factor of skill to "control" your group's damage output at certain points, rather than just go all out the entire time.

As far as the hp% of a boss and timers for mechanics-- recording videos is allowed and if anything you can take a snapshot of the boss's hp bar when a phase changes and just have the group remember what it looks like. You could also make macros for timers (a member of my group has done so since dive bombs in turn 5).

Nothing in Turns 6-8 and as far as my group has seen from Turn 9 is completely random. Sure, targets chosen for certain skills and the location of some mechanics can be random, but the way to handle those things remains the same regardless.

There is no luck required to beat any of the turns (as far as I can tell).

[Ninix]

We're making it to about 25% on turn 8 and the fight is awesome, especially as a healer. It's probably my favorite encounter in the game so far. The mechanics are very cool and it's challenging without being as quite as punishing as turn 7 was. And hell, even though Melucine seems to be frustrating the crap out of a lot of groups I still think it's a really well designed fight and a lot of fun too.

All in all I'm really happy with the job the encounter design team has done with the first three turns and I'm looking forward to seeing what turn 9 is like. I just wish the raids had a few more bosses!

I think it is intended to be a job check fight and this game did really need one.

I think so too. The mechanics are not super difficult to pull off but DPS, healers, and tanks (or the tank, I guess) all need to be very good at their job to succeed in this fight. Just going by my observations of the other healers I see while doing party finder EX runs and such, I think many of them are going to struggle to manage their MP properly on this fight when they can't rely on the bard to constantly be playing Ballad.

[Alise]

I think they need to add more of mid-difficult content.
For now, dungeon is too easy, while second coil is little bit too hard. There is no content that stay around the middle of both. Old coil has not rly much point to do tho.

[Megido]

There seem to be quite a bit of one shot mechanics that would be challenging for even an epic geared group of newbies weeks down the line. T7 anyone? While having the fights also doable at i90 gear. And them being rather fun. I would indeed say its a great new coil! I hope it keeps us occupied throughout the inevitably boring trolly sickening new CT.