The general player base needs to improve

[Iscah]

Now I just came out of an expert on my alt on aether and I really have to question people's situational awareness. I don't suppose this game teaches you what a vulnerability up stack is?

I get the general idea of it - if there's an icon in your 'negative effects' with a number against it probably means you've got some kind of vulnerability debuff - but that doesn't help at all with learning (a) what you did to receive it and (b) what you should do about it now. Is there a trick to removing it? Do I need to play it safe? Does it mean I should hang back and stop attacking? Do I just ignore it and carry on as I was?

And as a PS4 player it is extra hard to check the description of what the icon actually means. I have to let go of the controller, pick up the mouse, find where the cursor is on my screen, move it over to that very small icon (which can shift around as extra statuses appear and disappear)... and it probably still doesn't tell me why I have it or what to do now.

If you're talking about the sort of vulnerabilities that only affect you when you're standing in a marked floor area, that's a bit different - certainly moving out of it is one of the things you *can* do to work out the source of a debuff - but maybe some people might not realise the difference between an enemy-cast area spell and one cast by another player? It takes a long time to understand the "look" of different spells and understand which ones are player abilities. (It took me ages to realise that dangerous looking black circle with spikes was in fact a dark knight's attack and not some monster trying to drag us into the void! Also Rain of Death when you first get high-leveled enough to encounter bards using it.)

Steps of Faith was nerfed because it required a lot of coordination, DF groups were bad at that, and then people started quitting as soon as they got it. [...] That fight had a lot of moving parts pre-nerf and teams needed to know to do the correct things.

Hmm, maybe there could be a "Minstrel's Ballad" level or something that is just the original version of the fight? How did it actually work? Just more focus on needing to use the cannons etc?

Though on my first time through the trial, only recently, I didn't even realise any of the cannon mechanics were going on. Just went along on my usual way being a DPS and hitting things that were within range.... perhaps it needed some more prompts with featured speech bubbles urging us to use the cannons, get up on the towers, and so on. It would draw attention to the fact that they are there, and even if you're not sure how to use it yourself you could see what the other players are doing with it.