Why the hate with endgame fights?

[Reinha]

I myself have said multiple times, increase difficulty, not with harder hitting mobs or more mobs, but with introduction of mechanics normally seen in savage fights. That does not mean, say in Fractal Continuum Hard Mode, the mobs need to drop our HP to 1 with Charbydis.

But aren't a lot of savage mechanics already seen in casual content? That's what the normal mode raid is: an easy version displaying some mechanics which are present on the savage version. And some mechanics not shown in the normal mode fight carry over from previous expansions or tiers.

For example: Charybdis is displayed in O1, so players should know that mechanic when stepping into O1S and O4S. Earth Shakers is an old mechanic which is recycled for Shinryu normal and extreme, then reused once again in O4S. Shared tank buster is a mechanic used in O1, O1S, O4S, Shinryu normal and Shinryu ex. The dice mechanic is shown during the Ozma fight (iirc), then Susex, then O4S.

There is plenty of repetition of mechanics already and I for one don't want savage and extremes to be just a mixture of mechanics I've already seen. There has to also be new things in there to challenge players and keep things interesting.

[KaivaC]

The normal mode boss uses charybidis too yeesh. The difference is the follow up attack does 6k damage instead of 14k. They already use a lot of mechanics in general, you guys dont seem to get the big difference is that they one shot you and that they have an enrage. thats it. Literally thats it, virtually every normal mode fight uses a lot of mechanics, but they don't kill you so people complain, except for a few add phases. Some even do kill you; midas normal height correction does that for example. They can't add much more; without turning it into intro ex level content.

No one seems to get this. The only way you can make a mechanic hard is if failing it kills you, or if it will kill the whole party unless quick action is done. So when people talk about increasing difficulty, they tend to just be abstract about it. Especially when they say the one content that actually does this, shin hard, is still very easy.

if you want to seriously think about this, take one dungeon boss 60 and up, and tell me how you will make it harder. Like take the mol at the end of bardem's mettle. How will you make him gradually harder?

For the most part, I feel that the dungeon bosses are fine. I don't have any particular issues with most dungeon bosses as I feel they are in a fairly good spot. But, the issue is with the dungeons and the mobs themselves - the latter part which I have personally touched on repeatedly. Tone down the number of mobs and start giving them unique mechanics. Like I said before, after level 50, dungeons start turning into grab mobs and AOE them down. There's no challenge in that aside from big heals and mitigation. That does a terrible job at preparing players for high-end content, if they so choose to go for those fights.

If you look for it, you can find few savage mechanics found in dungeons...certainly not enough to prepare players for endgame because, again, an overwhelming amount of dungeons amount of tank grabbing mobs and everybody AOE them down.

Take a look at Pharos Sirius and the Aurum Vale. Those dungeons punished you for trying to faceroll them in the DF. They didn't one-shot you, although the possibility of that happening was high depending on what the party was doing wrong. This is ideally what Hard Mode should feel like. You know...actually hard. If they aren't tied into the MSQ, they should start to feel hard.

I dunno how many different variations I can give about how dungeons could prepare players, only for you to turn around and say the same thing again. Stop taking things to the extremes - you don't have to one-shot players in dungeons just to tune up the difficulty. The devs just need to stop being complacent and throwing in mobs related to the dungeon and giving players the script of 'Pull, AOE, Pull, AOE'. Why is there not a middle ground with you? That's what I really want to know. Why is it 'it's either this or that' with you?

But aren't a lot of savage mechanics already seen in casual content? That's what the normal mode raid is: an easy version displaying some mechanics which are present on the savage version. And some mechanics not shown in the normal mode fight carry over from previous expansions or tiers.

For example: Charybdis is displayed in O1, so players should know that mechanic when stepping into O1S and O4S. Earth Shakers is an old mechanic which is recycled for Shinryu normal and extreme, then reused once again in O4S. Shared tank buster is a mechanic used in O1, O1S, O4S, Shinryu normal and Shinryu ex. The dice mechanic is shown during the Ozma fight (iirc), then Susex, then O4S.

There is plenty of repetition of mechanics already and I for one don't want savage and extremes to be just a mixture of mechanics I've already seen. There has to also be new things in there to challenge players and keep things interesting.

Charbydis varies wildly depending on what boss is casting it. For example, a Behemoth Charbydis is just a large tornado. So no...they tend to not be the same thing. In some forms, there are watered down Savage mechanics, but nothing to really remember as these mechanics tend to pop up in a different expansion. Akh Morn for example. How you handle that mechanic with Niddhog is fairly different from how you handle it with Shinryu.

I do agree about seeing new mechanics and not rehashed versions of them. I thought O2S and O3S did well to shake up the formula, especially O3S...I don't recall fighting a boss that made you perform the way she did. Also, I wouldn't suggest that mobs get the SB version of Charbydis...with auto-attacks, it could kill a run very quickly.

[RiyahArp]

Why is there not a middle ground with you? That's what I really want to know. Why is it 'it's either this or that' with you?

Because you can't make people better at a boss endgame by reducing the number of trash and making you burn one down at a time to prevent them exploding or paralyzing you. The difficulty in savage is mostly due to a handful of things that can't be introduced gradually; its too binary for the most part because if you can survive an attack you can be topped to full in seconds, and even if you don't, you can be insta raised with only a stat penalty. There's very little middle ground in this game that can be translated into casual play to make people better beyond what they have.

If you want to be good at savage, you need to do mechanics perfectly while maintaining high DPS. There's no gradual way to do this, you study the encounter and repeat it over and over till its second nature, because each failure is a death and increases the chance of needing to start over. The only way to make people better at this in lower level content is to replicate it. If you make the attacks survivable, it doesn't teach you how to do savage, because the whole point of it is that the attacks now one shot you if you screw up and the fight is tuned to prevent you from doing this too much.

[Reinha]

Charbydis varies wildly depending on what boss is casting it. For example, a Behemoth Charbydis is just a large tornado. So no...they tend to not be the same thing. In some forms, there are watered down Savage mechanics, but nothing to really remember as these mechanics tend to pop up in a different expansion. Akh Morn for example. How you handle that mechanic with Niddhog is fairly different from how you handle it with Shinryu.

I do agree about seeing new mechanics and not rehashed versions of them. I thought O2S and O3S did well to shake up the formula, especially O3S...I don't recall fighting a boss that made you perform the way she did. Also, I wouldn't suggest that mobs get the SB version of Charbydis...with auto-attacks, it could kill a run very quickly.

There is variation between expansions but the Charybdis in O1 is the same as in O1S. Akh Morn in Shinryu normal is the same as in the extreme mode (although less damaging). We already get to see some mechanics in normal modes of the same bosses and even get visual ground indicators to learn to dodge better (Clamp, Earth Shakers, Icicles). If we assume the normal modes aren't enough to train players for savage/extreme, I don't see how dungeon trash is going to do it any better. The idea of harder trash is appealing to me after doing high PotD floors but it's not the same as fighting a boss and it will never train people for boss fights as well as the normal versions of those bosses.