Quote Originally Posted by Kuwagami View Post
Please tell me what's difficult in Coil once you have mastered the mechanics. I'd love to change my point of view.

Also, don't give us the "die-and-retry games were difficult". They were not difficult (ie, possible in one go by some random skilled player), they were designed to be impossible for 99.99% of the people and for the arcade.
It would depend on how you define mastering the mechanics. By mastering the mechanics of a specific fight, by definition you are amazing at that fight, so it should no longer be that difficult. I will say that T5-9 is content difficult enough that defeat is still a possibility even after you have mastered it. However, it's kind of a trick question.

Well I mean even other MMOs like WoW and Rift are far more mechanic heavy than this, while having a much faster GCD, more complex jobs, and more responsibility in some cases. Anyone who has come from raiding in one of those games (or comparative) shouldn't find any of the mechanics so far jarring or especially difficult at all.

Look, I think one key is issue is gearing up doesn't really effect the fight mechanics. No matter how geared you are, if you eat a landslide its game over. If you eat a twister it's game over. The question is then, where is the gear and echo buff that actually increases player movement speed to help compensate "poor" players with lower reaction time?
To be fair, you're specifically picking instant kill mechanics. Gearing up/echo buff helps with things such as overall fight duration (lower = easier, less time to mess up, DPS burst is more significant, healer MP pools are less likely to be strained), tanking high damage encounters such as Caduceus (to the point you can ignore its slime mechanic); tank swapping in T2 (the penalty for swapping slowly or even not at all is greatly reduced); T4 is far easier by virtue of the fact that its difficulty always lay in the large amount of simultaneous mobs - a dps/hps output check, basically, which was trivialised by Echo; T5 - Death Sentence requires no/less preparation, Conflags die a lot easier, Divebomb=>Asclepius phase (hardest of the fight) is far easier; Titan HM - Tumult damage and DPS checks trivialised; Garuda EX - tank checks trivialised (in terms of survival anyway); Titan EX - this is one of the few fights which Echo does not benefit a huge amount because it was never a massive dps/hps check. It increases the margin of error significantly however; Ifrit EX - tank checks greatly reduced. Higher DPS can actually cause issues here!

tl;dr: some mechanics remain painful, but the vast majority of each Echo fight is much easier, with some mechanics becoming completely irrelevant/trivialised.

I read the OP twice and I really like the post. I have Dyspraxia and I CANNOT memorize rotations, my brain just doesn't let me, so I work on a reaction time basis. I've cleared t5, not yet attempted second coil, I've cleared all the ex-primals so far as well. I wrote this massive post and deleted it because it was a ramble fest.
You don't need to, honestly. As long as you know what a mechanic does and roughly when it is coming, you will be fine in almost all instances.

Mechanics are really ridiculous sometimes, look at the Sunken Temple of Qarn, as a WHM I was getting yelled at for not constantly saving people because of the hornets are doing 3k+ dmg and people, aside from WAR, only have about 2k, but if one person dies before hornets are killed its over, I wouldn't have the MP to finish the battle if I Raise them and there won't be enough dps to kill them off, even if i slept 1. I understand avoidable instant wipe mechanics that a few people can save the raid from or each individual person has to do their part, but never should single target death mean that the group is going to wipe.
The hornets are very squishy and you'd have to be wilfully ignoring them to fail the mechanic. What would then be an acceptable cause of death on that first boss? There is no difficulty in it aside from its mechanics. You could boost its damage and remove the mechanics, but that makes the fight far easier - you'd just stand there hitting Cure/Cure2 every GCD for the entire fight and that'd be it. Losing one member in a 4 man group is a 25% loss in number of members - this should be extremely significant, else the question would be raised - how is it possible to wipe?

Enrage timers were meant so people wouldn't just Zombie run and throw weakened bodies at it until they beat it, it means now that 1 person's death means that you fail because they spent 2 minutes waiting for a safe time to get up and your dps fell too low and now you haven't a chance.
Enrage timers in MMOs tend to be harsh - far harsher than in XIV. They are intended to provide an output goal and prevent you using too many healers. Their role isn't solely to stop zombie tactics, it's to demand a certain level of competence with your job and with the mechanics of the fight. It's not like XI where they were so laughably high that you'd actually have to go afk and eat a pizza or something to fail them - they are now a required part of the fight to beat.