Why do you fail at Hashmal?

[Alisi]

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I haven't been in a raid that has wiped on Hashmul in a while... But if you want an actual reason, I will have to say: shitty healers who ignore the other alliances. I actively heal and/or rez people in other alliances. Alliances don't generally all die at once. It's a DPS then a healer and everyone else fails from there. Hashmul has enough mechanics that are easy to get killed on for a variety of reasons (from being crappy to having lag.) We are alliances, not armies of 8 people. We're supposed to be supporting each other. Often times, I'll support other alliances and they'll have no issues but when that support isn't reciprocated, our alliance often dies. If one alliance is dead, and you're a healer in another that's alive and well, then you take a share of the blame on yourself. If one alliance actually has to ask another to rev one of the healers (especially when the whole alliance is dead), then congrats: you're a shitty alliance healer.

[KaivaC]

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Oh trust me, I agree. It may take me a bit because it's a bit difficult targeting other alliance healers on a PS4, but I will get to it once I'm sure I can miss a heal on my own alliance - I generally do not trust my co-healer due to experience. But yes, I agree on this aspect.

[Tridus]

But all of them are avoidable if you pay attention and... actually do the mechanics?
Is it bad that it punishes you with dying if you, yourself, don't move out of the way? I don't see it as oneshot in itself because it does NOT kill you instantly if youa ctually manage to... move. Like, what else should not doing anything do? Faceroll the whole thing without ever doing a mechanic?

Never said it wasn't. But an encounter where everything one shots you if you fail it is a somewhat limited design. We've got that because burst healing is so strong that anything in these fights that doesn't one shot you simply isn't that dangerous, which goes back to what we were talking about a couple of pages ago.

Hashmal has lots of deaths and wipes because most of what he does is fatal. The other bosses tend to do nonlethal damage in one hit, so you need to fail multiple things very close together to die, or fail so many things that you stack vuln up enough times that it becomes lethal. Because they tend to do damage with mechanics that are spaced out, you're usually back at full after failing one and before the next one, so it's not a big deal. Same as pretty much everything in expert.

That's where the issue is. Doing moderate damage once and then doing no damage for a few seconds isn't terribly dangerous because the healers can burst the entire group back to full in that time relatively easily. So to actually threaten people, stuff has to be lethal or it has to come so fast that it can outdo our extremely strong burst healing.

People have so many problems with Hashmal compared to the others because it skews so heavily in the direction of one shots, and the healers can't effectively save people getting hit the way they can on the other fights. You put enough humans together and some of them will screw stuff up, because that's how groups of humans are.

Being punished for doing nothing just isn't bad design, i don't think ozma is a problem, i don't think Scathach is aproblem, i don't think anything punishing is a problem. Its fun if you actually have to pay attention instead of just standing at one spot the whole fight because regen-ticks are enough to keep you alive.

But see, that's my overall point. Healing shouldn't be so strong that you *can* eat everything and regen is enough to keep you alive. That's the problem. If healing is less powerful, standing around eating everything is going to whittle your HP down and eventually kill you without it being a one shot, because the healers won't be able to bring you back up to full so easily. That lets encounters be risky in terms of incoming damage without having to resort to one shots all over the place.

[Sieben79]

I haven't been in a raid that has wiped on Hashmul in a while... But if you want an actual reason, I will have to say: shitty healers who ignore the other alliances. I actively heal and/or rez people in other alliances. Alliances don't generally all die at once. It's a DPS then a healer and everyone else fails from there. Hashmul has enough mechanics that are easy to get killed on for a variety of reasons (from being crappy to having lag.) We are alliances, not armies of 8 people. We're supposed to be supporting each other. Often times, I'll support other alliances and they'll have no issues but when that support isn't reciprocated, our alliance often dies. If one alliance is dead, and you're a healer in another that's alive and well, then you take a share of the blame on yourself. If one alliance actually has to ask another to rev one of the healers (especially when the whole alliance is dead), then congrats: you're a shitty alliance healer.

I resurrect other alliance healers only if either my group is doing fine, swiftcast is ready or it's totally safe to hard cast. It's no good for you to ignore the next mechanic for a res because you can die to it or the hard res gonna be interrupted. In between your party can also die, you have to wait for the right moment. If you're dead, be patient

Hmm, for Hashmal: like many mentioned before it's safe to stand near him while he does his Tower Control, because after this he'll jump away for his ?Jagged Edge?. Or you stand on the middle line, so he can only spawn ahead or behind you. The mistake that many does is standing near the edge of the half moon arena, so if their unlucky they won't do it (even with sprint) in time. Here is a picture:

Arena look kind of this



The brown area is the ornament ground color. The black dot is Hashmal, the yellow are the towers. After he jumps away, he appears either A or B, so if you're standing near the middle or at least in the brown area you'll have plently of time to react for his dive. The players at the northern and southern edge at the halfmoon area have a 50/50 chance they'll survive.

You also don't have to run too the edge on the opposite. It often looks like this picture:



So now you can imagine what happend if some players get the purple or the other AOE's and running all at the same direction

[RiyahArp]

Oh trust me, I agree. It may take me a bit because it's a bit difficult targeting other alliance healers on a PS4, but I will get to it once I'm sure I can miss a heal on my own alliance - I generally do not trust my co-healer due to experience. But yes, I agree on this aspect.

There's a easy way to do it on ps4. Do you see the little group of 8 boxes that indicate another alliance's party? Use the PS4's mouse button, slide your finger which moves the cursor over the box that represents the healer, and tap the button. That will target the healer, and then you can raise them. Most people don't realize that you can just rub the middle button and it moves the cursor like a touchpad, with tapping like clicking, and that you can target people from the alliance list. It even shows the current target of the boss in red.

[Lord_Zlatan]

The most common reason is it is a positioning fight. Since there is a level of RNG for where the pillars drop and what half of the map will be instant death when he does his dash; you can't learn the mechanics as easily as the other bosses. That and all the havoc people also are out of place when the orbs spawn and are afraid to run through the bleeds to get where thy're needed.

This is odd (i totally agree with you) but its odd because SE has driven home the idea on countless times that if you stand in an AoE your dead. It was like back in the day when Garuda Ex spawned 3 tornadoes... there was a short period where u could run through them without taking damage, and people never seemed to want to run through them (in the DF runs that I did way back when) out of fear of dying and causing a wipe.

[Sieben79]

Forgot to mentioned it: after he bruise through the arena, you can already move to the other side, even if the groundanimation is burning so if players would stand near the center, they would have more place and time to decide where to go either with their aoe marks or without them.

[Cheremia]

Well i don't see it as a problem in design but you've got a fair point anyways. Don#t need to have the same opinion for that, you think it is, i think its not really.
Just saying that, if you pay attention, you should not die. Or at least minimal deaths. Nobody expects you to be a god behind a screen.

Funnily enough, the most i'm dying is during the fish(dude, don't know the name ) when the add freezes me because i mistake the iceskater for anything but that. But that can be healed through if the other healer notices...


The problem is just, how would you balance, say... Whm so its actually dangerous? I don't mind oneshot mechanics as whm at all. I don't mind throwing a Medica 2 through quacke and be done with it, either.
The Game just doesn't punish people enough for not doing mechanics. And Hashmal does.


And like i said, bad design are mechanics you can't really do because they either work or not -crush helm, the debuff does whatever it wants because the esuna cast time is actually too long and server latency and all that. The Hp either drops minimal, or a lot, even if you do not esuna the debuff.
or can be cheesed to the point its not even a mechanic anymore- confuse on the last boss by spamming your move button
or the ones that are just plain out wrong - scatter
at least for ME.

Edit: Holy hell my qoute button literally does not work at work, but its Still for you tridus, i didn't expect all these posts...

[KaivaC]

There's a easy way to do it on ps4. Do you see the little group of 8 boxes that indicate another alliance's party? Use the PS4's mouse button, slide your finger which moves the cursor over the box that represents the healer, and tap the button. That will target the healer, and then you can raise them. Most people don't realize that you can just rub the middle button and it moves the cursor like a touchpad, with tapping like clicking, and that you can target people from the alliance list. It even shows the current target of the boss in red.

That's what I do. It just takes me a minute because I have to physically use the thumb that I use for activating my GCDs, so I have to be very sure that my alliance can survive for a few seconds before I go to resurrecting like this.

[Tridus]

Well i don't see it as a problem in design but you've got a fair point anyways. Don#t need to have the same opinion for that, you think it is, i think its not really.

Yep, that's fair.

Just saying that, if you pay attention, you should not die. Or at least minimal deaths. Nobody expects you to be a god behind a screen.

While that's also true, the data on this fight shows a LOT of deaths. So, what should be and what actually are don't line up. A lot of the playerbase finds this to be a difficult fight.

Funnily enough, the most i'm dying is during the fish(dude, don't know the name ) when the add freezes me because i mistake the iceskater for anything but that. But that can be healed through if the other healer notices...

If you don't stand on the ice and people aren't failing something else, you should never be frozen.

The problem is just, how would you balance, say... Whm so its actually dangerous? I don't mind oneshot mechanics as whm at all. I don't mind throwing a Medica 2 through quacke and be done with it, either.
The Game just doesn't punish people enough for not doing mechanics. And Hashmal does.

I'd reduce all healing effects in the game by a third (and rebalance fights appropriately as needed). Someone taking 25k in avoidable damage, while not lethal to a geared character, should be a bad thing that takes real effort to recover from. It doesn't right now. Moro and I coheal Rabanastre together weekly and combined we can bring the entire group back up from 1hp to full in less than 5 seconds. Then we go back to DPSing. Moro thinks that's just fine, I tend to see it as an issue with how healing works.

And like i said, bad design are mechanics you can't really do because they either work or not -crush helm, the debuff does whatever it wants because the esuna cast time is actually too long and server latency and all that. The Hp either drops minimal, or a lot, even if you do not esuna the debuff.
or can be cheesed to the point its not even a mechanic anymore- confuse on the last boss by spamming your move button
or the ones that are just plain out wrong - scatter
at least for ME.

Yeah there's some wonky stuff in there. Figuring out what that last boss actually wants you to do was a hassle, although it's not quite as bad now that the text was changed to be less misleading.