Baldesion Arsenal Feedback

[Liam_Harper]

I highly doubt anyone entering BA has the intention to “mess it up.” (and if they are, it’s a small minority.) They are participating in content available to them.

...Which is a major flaw in the content. They are entitled to enter by design, but they have almost no chance of success. You simply can't just throw yourself at Savage level content, blind, in a group with no coordination and of varying skill levels and expect to succeed. Difficult content isn't designed for this. It's designed for organized progression.

Enix is shooting casual players in the foot by saying "here's a new instance, you're entitled to try it!" and then shoving something way above what they can handle in their face and punishing them with a de-level. They're also using the casual player as an artificial difficulty. By design, a few casuals or unprepared players are meant to slip into those portals and naturally that makes the run harder overall. They'll have no idea why it's so impossible, after all they're "entitled" to go in, it should be content designed for them, right? They should stand some chance, why do they seem to suck at it so badly? It's almost cruel tbh.

[Crushnight]

this is the problem with just pugging BA:
- to get BA unlocked you just need to unlock mounts in Hydatos this is a very low ceiling on skill level
- The fights are on par with extreme primals
- Some fights have mandatory jobs required, Twin boss/Ozma require multiple tanks all require a healer especially AV
- 6 tanks are needed for spawning fate
- There are hard enrages to AV and Ozma
- Logos actions are required (Perception is mandatory to finish BA)

The skill ceiling difference from those that can enter BA to those that can clear BA is wide with no way to mitigate it, You are forced by content design to have specific set ups to an extent, Mandatory actions with no way to guarantee them outside premades

This content for the West really is not designed to be puggable

[Barraind]

Arsenal is a stupid design.

It's a chunk of legitimately great content stuck inside eureka, at least for the first few runs ( I'm not looking forward to +2ing multiple full sets of gear).

Theres an increasing amount of nonsense chat spam about portals, people trolling portals in response, and a lot of whining on both sides.

Eureka is a 140+ person instance. That's 2.5x the size of even a fully max preform. You arent entitled to anything. Especially the claim of "we worked so hard to get in there". Whatnow? You helped kill a nm that spawns when people arent inside the public dungeon, and presumably have some mnemes on you? Stop the presses holy crap you DID work super hard. Wait, no. You did what everyone else in the instance did.

The worst part of BA is that it being run means most right side NMs arent getting touched (I've yet to see more than 3 right side nms spawn in a single 3 hour session, even with 6 groups working on them), which means its actually hurting the instance in a way to be active.

Would be much better if BA was it's own 5th eureka unstances even if you had a debuff after going in that kept you from chaining it back and forth.

As much fun as watching people spaz out in shout chat regularly, it's not at all productive.

[NarikoStar]

I've had the pleasure to challenge and defeat The Baldesion Arsenal multiple times over this past week through both full pre-made groups and simple PUG parties thrown together pre/during Omvi spawn. While I really enjoy this type of content and would love to see this content elaborated on in the future- I believe there is room for improvement with the current rendition and would like to suggest some quality of life changes that I believe would create a positive experience for all types of players attempting to challenge the Arsenal.

1. Provide better means for players to easily organize and cue large scale groups into the Hydatos instance server.
   
   The Arsenal is designed and balanced around having multiple parties working together cooperatively to complete the entire dungeon successfully. But the game currently lacks the tools for players to coordinate such scenarios easily. Because of the lack of tools available to players, parties spend ample amount of time attempting to organize, create, and get all parties within the same instance server through means of 3rd party programs to foster efficient organization (such as discord servers). While I actually think this is great, and really shows the effort and commitment players will go into to achieve a common goal- For content longevity and sustainability I believe having a system built within the game to aid in party organization and cueing into the same instance would go a long way to create a positive experience for all players involved.
   Diadem had the ability to cue a full alliance via airships- I really think even just allowing use of the party finder to create an alliance then allowing three parties to cue into the same instance with that alliance would be very welcomed.
   
   
   
   
2. Allow the changing of jobs during the start of The Baldesion Arsenal
   
   Due to the way players are able to enter The Baldesian Arsenal parties are not always guaranteed to have an optimal or sustainable party composition to successfully challenge the Arsenal. While some of this can be fixed with the use of certain logograms- it is by no means a fix for the later bosses and the mechanics they use. I'd like to suggest that due to the current way players enter The Arsenal, that the development team strongly considers allowing players to change jobs within the segregated starting area of The Baldesian Arsenal near Magia Board and Logogram Manipulator to account for a lack of specific roles that may have not entered the dungeon.
   
   
   
   
3. Credit better rewards to all participants of "The Baldesion Arsenal: Expedition Support" FATE
   The Baldesion Arsenal employs a few gimmicky mechanics that force parties both inside and outside of the Arsenal to work together to successfully complete a common goal. In theory- I actually really like that the development team decided to go this route. It creates a sense of accomplishment to all parties involved knowing that they came together for a common goal to achieve something. Unfortunately I feel currently, rewards are greatly one-sided to the main participating parties within The Baldesian Arsenal as the Support FATE only opens eight additional BA portals but requires more than eight players *in most cases to successfully kill in the given amount of time.
   In retrospect, this has caused the "Support Fate" in many instances to go completely untouched, or rarely challenged unless the group that is currently challenging BA has specifically put together an outside group to take care of the FATE. While I'm not sure if this was the full intent of the developers- adding a slightly better reward to this FATE would greatly incentivize outside groups to help with the completion of the FATE and see to the success of the instances BA run even without expecting guaranteed entry. Personally, I believe adding 3-5 "Eureka Fragments" to be a 100% drop off this FATE would greatly incentivize and promote the instance working together.
   
   
   
   
4. Address the issue of boss mechanics not being cull priority under heavy player load.
   While I'm not sure if this is possible to be fixed without some heavy underlying system changes- I did want to touch on this so that the development team can consider system limitations when going forward with future content that may be similar. In instances where 56 players with addition to certain classes having pets boss abilities seemingly get counted as a "player" rather than boss object and will not appear. This clip shows how AV's first "Hostile Aspect" circle puddles do not appear under the players (There should be 4 but only 2 are rendered to the player due to heavy player/pet load and get excluded in the render order) While I can only assume this is a underlying system problem that is occurring and would probably take some deep core code changes that may not be possible in a simple update- I'd really like to put emphasis on the importance of stress testing and knowing system limitations that comes with larger scale content if the development team decides to add more of it in the future so that players experience a positive non-bugged reaction while progressing.
   

With that said, to the Development Team who worked through Eureka:
I really do like Hydatos and still have plans to enjoy all aspects of Eureka until Shadowbringers, I think at it's core its a fresh breath of fresh air and really hope you try to incorporate more content like The Baldesian Arsenal in the future~

Thank you for your considerations!

[Rockette]

Agreed on the boss mechanics culling. I've had instances in AV where I go to attack the Wyverns and they just disappear then reappear then disappear...

[Vasala]

Due to the random team aspect this dungeon should allow class switching at the start and it should at least allow all logos related res actions to work due to the fact the game has issues displaying the boss aoe markers with this many people in the instance.

[zuzu-bq]

About culling on bosses and mechanics:
This game for some reason prioritizes players over enemies if your Object Limit is set to High or Maximum. Setting it to low or minimal solves this issue entirely. Highly recommend doing this, it's not anything new but I guess it hasn't been a big of a problem since ARR hunts were at their peak of popularity.

[Nora_of_Mira]

That is elitism because those portals are for anyone who fit the criteria, not just people who preform before entering Eureka. Stop with the entitlement already.

You're not wrong by any means, those portals are entitled to everyone in the instance. Telling people to stop being elitist/entitled, however, is not looking at the big picture and just fuels more arguments.

The reality is (based on my own 6-7 runs of BA and all the anecdotes I've seen in this thread and discord) going in unprepared is just asking to wipe early with few rewards. This contrasts harshly with the motive of the pre-made groups. All of the pre-made groups have 1 goal: maximize success probability. The biggest/easiest way to maximize success is to reduce the randomness to as close to zero as possible with Discord (voice chat, callouts, maps, assigned groups, dedicated logos users, warning the Hydratos instance of the support fate, etc). Every single group I've been in has said the same thing to everyone before we jumped in the portal: "If someone is attempting to take your 'assigned portal', ask them nicely to let you in and send them a link to the Discord so they can join the next run. If they refuse, do not harass them and good luck otherwise."

Its been said a thousand times before, but I agree with the notion that "this is just how the NA servers operate". The fact we're dedicated to re-queue 50 times in order get the same instance is a testament that we do not operate in the way SE intends for us to. We operate to clear content in the least amount of time with the lowest chances to fail, possible. I can see both sides of the situation as it is currently a hot topic in my FC and both groups are getting heated over it.

[Myon88]

Arsenal is amazing, outside of some issues the biggest of them being zoning in together as a premade and portals being made for a pick up group experience while the content being appearently planned for a organized raid. Its truly a great raid unlike any other. Of course, it has more issues but they aren't as major as the ones I've listed.

I hope SE takes this as a hint that Savage Alliance raids can be a thing in the future. Or even do a scaled down version of the Arsenal for the next exploration cotent they bring us.

If you ask me this is exactly what the game needs less of. Once is fine as Eureka is XI nostalgia side content, but it would be a big mistake if they decided to lean harder on things like this in the game's future, there is a reason mmos are not designed like that any more.

The issue with large raid sizes is that by virtue of scale, it has to be tuned to be mechanically easy but logistically difficult to compensate. What this means is that the accessibility of the content now depends less on personal skill and more on your ability to network with people. This may be a novel experience for those who have only seen XIV's 8m raids, but it makes for very shallow, unsatisfying content in the long term. I do not play games to devote time to linkshell politics and whether I'm going to stay in someone's good graces and keep my spot. When content leans more on logistics and socialization than actual difficulty to function, you need only look at things like hunt communities to see the kind of petty drama it creates. It also exacerbates communication issues on datacenters where multiple languages are spoken.

In contrast, XIV's 8m savage and ultimate raids are some of the most meritocratic and egalitarian raid frameworks that exist in mmos right now. You 'only' need 7 other people to function, which means you have a considerable degree of freedom to choose who you want to work with. That's why I'll take savage 4m dungeons and more potd/hoh over savage alliance raids any day. BA would've been amazing as content like potd with its hallways and random traps, the people with the skill and persistence to solo HoH to 100 deserve rewards like this more than someone who can sit in discord for several hours.

If there is one bright side to BA, it's that the harsh resurrection penalty imposes real stakes to every encounter and makes jobs like BLM more attractive options. If they ever feel like jobs' access to resurrection abilities are hindering their fight design, they can pull out a solution like this again.

[Youkulm]

The main issue with BA in my opinion is things that have already been stated. It looks like super fun content but logistically its a nightmare to get a party together. I've been in BA 4 times and the entirety of the time sat at the entrance and did nothing because only half a party showed up in an instance of 140 people. So either it's impossible to get in with a full party because of organized discord groups laying claim to public portals or no one even wants to bother with frag runs.

I really don't want to see this content die with Eureka in 5.0. I really hope SE find a way to keep it alive or removes the eureka gate to be able to enjoy it. Heck I would just like to be able to enjoy it before it dies as well, and it is going to die a glorious death just like the rest of Eureka unless the dev team does something about it. The same goes for /everything/ in eureka, mounts, minions, glamour drops, relic armor, relic weapons. It just makes me overall sad to see this content go to utter waste soon.