Is it even possible to make an even harder raid?

[Evira]

if they added a difficulty slider to each dungeon/raid like they do on levequest it would let everyone decide how difficult content is. Higher the difficulty the higher the reward.

[Firepower]

I remember difficulty, where even though it drops the best items in the game it is completely ignored because nobody can kill it. When Absolute Virtue was first introduced it went years and years undefeated by conventional means (people glitched it and pulled it to tether lines where it stopped attacking which was fixed pretty quickly) Even so long that the playerbase was crying out to square enix to release some sort of information on how the heck to beat it, in which square then released a video of the dev team beating it, which still offered little to no information.

When a boss has insane regen, can instacast a bunch of teir 5 spells or cast meteor uninterrupted or even worse when almost dead just benediction himself, that was the point of stupid difficulty. Nobody enjoyed that.

[Garlyle]

Absolute Virtue

Absolute Virtue fascinates me because I don't believe his 'solution' ever changed throughout the entire time he existed, but it still took people years to realise that a boss actually reacted to their actions and had what were basically unique mechanics (For the unfamiliar: Absolute Virtue had access to every "Two hour ability" in the game, to use at will - these being player character super abilities. However, if you used a matching 2HA right after he did, he lost the ability to do it again). It seems, in retrospect, so astoundingly obvious - especially in the modern era of MMORPGs. Of course, even knowing that back then, he would have remained hell for the other nonsense like instacast top tier magic.

But yes. XI's had a few bosses over the course of its life that were examples of difficulty that didn't make for a good player experience, usually through obscene stat allocations.

[Delorean]

we need moar chainsaws to juggle on slippery ice with our laser jump rope pls

[Mazerat]

I don't think so. FWiW my static's two clears on t10 have been post soft-enrage and on the second the entire party was dead (lightning finished off our last player right after the boss died) so I think it's perfectly balanced for people in i110 gear. I'm not a fan of the crafted quint-meldable gear as it trivializes gear-checks but I'm not sure "farm t10 and cap poetics for a couple weeks before you can clear t11, then farm t11 for weapons for a few weeks, etc." is desirable game design.
You can't realistically make a doable mechanic that pouring raid hours into would defeat. So what else is there? I mean, you could have some completely indecipherable mechanic that players have to guess at but that sounds terrible.
Overall there's a lot to learn in SCoB and FCoB with enough instant-death mechanics that it's going to be difficult for players to brute-force them--FCoB even buffs the bosses every time someone dies and every boss requires two tanks. So I think design is fine.

[KarstenS]

Yosida statet it in a Liveletter.

They have a big collection of data, that give them an overview, how skilled the playerbase is.

They have set a percentrange of the amount of players that shall be able to beat the content in a specified period of time.

Based on these two points they audjust the difficulty.

[Sapphic]

Contrary to belief that final coil was ezpz, I believe it's more so that the hardcore playerbase has just gotten that good. And with savage final coil coming out, they're likely just going to get much better. So is it even possible to make the next raid in 3.0 even more difficult? Without throwing in broken mechanics like prenerfed twisters?

As I posted in another thread, If the same designers keep creating the mechanics for the raids then yes, they will become easier. As with TV shows, after a while they introduce new writers/directors/whatever to add new ideas. Same can apply to raids. Everyone has a certain level of imagination and a certain way of thinking. Thus the process of originiality will eventually become drained. Hence the introduction of fresh minds.