The disapointment that is Alexander

[HReincarnate]

I'm not usually one to complain in the forums but this has to be said.

Alexander sucks. It really does, and most people I know agree with me - so I can only hope people on the forums also agree so we can make it loud and clear to the devs that we expect, and demand, better.

The Aesthetic:
Alexander as a whole looks poorly designed.

A1 starts off as a corridor that's oddly reminiscent of FF13 and ends in a rectangular arena. The distance between the start & end is so small it's a wonder they didn't shove us at the boss in the first place. The boss is a large machine that is very forgettable. The whole area looks bland and is a poor start to the raiding experience.

A2 is slightly better since it has a longer wind up the boss (not saying I like having to deal with the adds, but at least it doesn't seem as poor an effort as in A1). The arena is a large rectangle that has no interesting details at all. The fight is basically a poor substitute for T4 - with silly looking goblins and those large bulky machines that pale in comparison to dreadnoughts.

A3 is actually kind of nice. The varying hues of blue from the electricity and the lighting at the top make for a nice change from all the brown in the previous floors. The boss looks good, if somewhat silly but the arena is just a plain old circle with a dark background.

A4 is basically A1... plain arena, clunky forgettable boss (that doesnt even move) and a poor end to the raiding experience.

Contrast these turns with Coil & regardless of whether you like the steampunk theme of Alexander you can tell there's a large drop in quality.

Opening raids: T1 had a long wind up to the boss with interesting details such as Bahamut's fossilised wing in the background. T6 had so many different elements to gawk at. T10 was a very large area with all those pods and was absolutely fascinating.
Meanwhile A1 is a small and dull corridor & rectangle.

Final raids: T5 was on bahamuts hand - all that needs to be said. T9 had so much detail, an amazing looking boss, and two environment changes that kept the fight fresh. T13 looked brilliant also, with a larger arena than most, amazing detail on the animations and Bahamut himself, as well as the special effects in the arena during the final phase change. All these things made it one of the best looking fights in the game.
Meanwhile A4 is small circle with a stationary clunky robot.

Also when you beat T5 & T9 you enter an area where you get to see Bahamut's head and this massive area! After beating A4 you see a metal cube...

The Difficulty:
This is a grey area: people have differing opinions on this & I accept that, but this is my take on it:

Normal mode is easy and on the level of Crystal Tower bosses - easy for most individuals, and only difficult because of duty finder baddies - which is perfectly fine.

Savage mode: (full disclosure: only have first hand experience in A1S and second hand knowledge of A2S & A3S) A1S is similar to A1 with very little difference in mechanics - the difficulty is artificial and made of only tight dps & healing checks. The mechanics themselves aren't difficult to execute (4 lasers instead of 2, resin bomb leaves poison & now there's a tank buster.... ooooh). A2S has more differences between the two version but ultimately its still not a stimulating experience. Edit: Since I've got no exp in A2S, I'll leave it to people with exp to state their opinions of it. Seeing & hearing isn't the same as doing it.

I'm told A3S is very complex and should be pleasing to those who want more challenging mechanics but that means nothing to groups stuck on A1S (or possibly A2S) which are boring fights only made interesting by artificial difficulty (that is to say, while a balance of high dps & good execution of mechanics is expected in raids, artificial difficulty tips the scale more towards the dps side to raise the difficulty without making the fights more mechanically complex).

The Story:

The story of Alex is pretty poor also. I do understand that coil was established before the start of 2.0 with the events of the calamity, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have tried to set up a compelling story for Alexander.

Who on Earth can take those silly little goblins seriously as a credible threat with those looks and that ridiculous way of speaking? Who cares about the threat that Alexander poses when it's barely emphasised and there's no visible evidence of the risk he poses. Supposedly he drained all the aether in the hinterlands, but I can't see that as a player. Everything still looks the same, no desolate wasteland formed, and I can still go about my merry day and fly past him to get those Morels or Cloud Bananas.

The Raiding System:

SE introduced normal & savage with Alexander to better meet the needs of the playerbase. There were many people in ARR that wanted to experience the story of Coil but couldn't or didn't want to raid. The echo & nerfs were used months after the release of the raid to make it easier for some people to get the experience but it was still too difficult for some, and others were displeased by the nerfs.

So, they gave people two versions to hopefully satisfy all those people, except by having normal mode predate savage mode, and by having raiders farm normal mode to get gear to be able to do savage, those raiders had nothing to look forward to except gear. The excitement of seeing each arena & boss and progressing the story was gone within the 3rd week of HW for basically everyone & instead those raiders only have gear to look forward to which greatly devalues the raiding experience. People may still want to do savage because it's the hardest thing in the game atm, and they want gear- but surely it would be a much richer experience if it could be experienced as coil was!

That's not to say I think they should have followed the raiding scheme of ARR, locking the majority of the playerbase out isn't right - but this current scheme is also very flawed and they need to find another way.



TLDR: I think Alexander is a poorly designed & implemented raid & outline the reasons why. If you don't agree: fair enough - I'd be interested to hear why you like it. If you do agree: great!

Edit: many people are saying that we shouldn't compare Alexander to coil as a whole, only the first part. I think that's absolute rubbish! It may be the first part of a set of raids, but having experienced ScoB and FcoB why on earth should we players have to settle for a lower quality raid? We've seen what they're capable of delivering, so as a player I expect to be wowed from the beginning - instead I'm being told to wait 5 months for patch 3.2 for the story and fights to be more interesting.

[echoica]

Thanks for this post. It's pretty much exactly how I've been feeling about Alex too.

[CGMidlander]

I find the theme of Alexander pretty boring too. The environments are, like you said, not very varied, and the story is pretty lame so far.

[Drood424]

This is why my raid group fell apart after running Alexander normal for a week or so. No one really felt like doing Savage mode - just a harder version of the same boring fights without a compelling story to motivate us to continue.

[MisterLucie]

I do agree that the story is absolute garbage. Goblins? Really? That's what we're going with? One of the most incredible and powerful summons in the Final Fantasy universe is being centered around the most annoying comic relief characters in this game? Come on.

I do not agree on your assessment of Savage difficulty. Performing perfectly under intense pressure (at least before last week anyways. esoteric gear trivialized A1S pretty terribly) is legitimately difficult, and no matter how many people mindlessly regurgitate the worn out "artificial difficulty" phrase, it won't change that it is actually difficult for a lot of people. If it being "artificial" was truly such a bore, I feel like we would be seeing a lot more people with A1S clears, which is very clearly not the case.

Normal mode is... whatever. It's not relevant for anyone who cares about difficulty.

[Eisen-Zorn]

While I don't agree with the complaints about the Aesthetics, I'll say that Alexander could stand to be a bit longer and more than just corridors.

However, on the other hand, Alexander is meant to be a cramped space simply because it's a giant hulking robot meant to also act as a mobile bastion of knowledge. I mean, it can only be so big before it just gets ridiculous. The sheer logistics of an Alexander the size of what we saw in The Coils would be far too large to be plausible.

That said, I did like the steam and mechanics of Alexander.

[Waeksyn]

I really like the approach of having the initial release be more like CT in terms of complexity of boss fights, with a later Savage mode for the more hard core. I don't do any content that requires a static raiding party so haven't experienced Savage. I've no idea if that design works well as a more challenging fight.

I look forward to further Alexander content, which I expect will be released in dot releases similar to how CT was rolled out. Hopefully SE will amp up the simple aesthetics while keeping the steampunk theme. I expect, though, that the art design for the whole series is probably already done.

[Adventica6]

Stop throwing the word artificial difficulty around, just because you seen someone else use it doesn't mean it works in your post, savage has new mechanics to deal with, that isn't artificial.

And I don't agree with anything you've said.

seeya.

[4gotmypassword]

I'll post later to write something more detailed, but for now I simply want to say one thing:

Timing is everything.
Dragoon has issues with Wheeling Thrust being, purely due to the timing in which it is given, the worst ability in the game (it's a literal downgrade and the only one that exists).
Alexander has issues with the story, environments and- to a much lesser degree- the mechanics being uninteresting and non-compelling because we've already seen all that before. I mean, I get having story mode's gear being good for savage and all, but if the system were different such that Alexander story mode was released in 3.1, savage raiders would have the entirety of savage fresh to them, story and all, and it'd be far more interesting. It doesn't work considering savage is merely a bard's exaggeration of the real story mode, but it's less interesting. I've done every old savage fight and am on A3S at the moment, because I love hardcore raiding, but it's undoubtable that the impact and feel of Alexander Savage has been severely lessened due to the timing with which story mode and savage were released.

EDIT: Adventica, while this is true for A2S, A3S and A4S, A1S's difficulty IS, actually artificial. It has next to no new mechanics- I can only think of one- and the difficulty comes pretty much 100% from the lack of gear people have from the fight. So, you're wrong. "See ya".

[SDaemon]

I personally think the aesthetics of Alex is pretty cool. I love the grinding gears and steam, the feel and color of the place. The only grip I have is the size of the inside doesn't match the view from the outside lol, but I can honestly look past that.

Difficulty wise I haven't gone into Savage as my static is still in flux, but I remember when normal was at release and with the gear people had back then. While it wasn't grueling it was still a headache and even with people performing things could go awry. Just like with the CT series the majority of the community has moved past that though and it is easy to carry people now, but that is what the normal difficulty was designed for.

Story-wise this is starting from scratch. I much prefer to enjoy and watch this story as it evolves without a detailed back-story of why I should hate this thing like with Bahamut. Accompanying Mide on her quest for the codex and seeing what the goblins have planned next now that the Knot is shut down, I'm actually interested in this. Much prefer Mide over Alisaie too.

Not sure why you would be expecting a desolate wasteland right off the back? Nothing they've said or suggested would indicate the aether would be drained by Alexander at such a blazing speed. Y'shtola went to Matoya and they are working of figuring out what to do about its effects on the environment and I'm sure as the raid progresses we will see some of those effects.

Savage has added mechanics and difficulty alongside better gear. Other than the aesthetics of the place being the same I don't see the issue.