Quote Originally Posted by tdb View Post
That will give you a message of all of Ozma's attacks though, not just the shape shifting. You can configure the chat window to give an audible alert, but it will be dinging constantly and you can't tell when you should react in which way.

External combat trackers, on the other hand, can give alerts on only specific enemy abilities, or they can give different alerts for different abilities. They can use timers to give an alert five seconds before the ability begins (provided the fight is predictable enough, but quite a lot of boss fights are). I'm having trouble remembering when the tankbusters in O10S occur and such an alert program would help with that. I won't do it though because it would be cheating.
Likewise you can have party members calling that out based on a timeline and muscle memory of the mechanics themselves. In fact, all of the groups I've been in have had people call out mechanics, and most raiders I know make sure they have a good shotcaller in their group; mixed stimuli (sound + sight) allows for easier learning and memorization.

Is it right to use machines to do the sounds for you instead of raid members? I'm not gonna make a call there. Personally I think I would prefer having a shotcaller to having ACT do it for me, having never done the latter. But I can see the use of some things, such as setting it to sound off when Trick Attack goes up so the airwaves aren't filled with unnecessary chatter. As well, some fights this expansion do very much the same thing with voice-queued lines when they attack; Susano, Byakko, Tsuki, Suzaku, and Seiryu come to mind with voice lines signifying major mechanical happenings, and I can appreciate giving us sound cues as well in fights like this.

In Ultimate, I use the music itself to tell me what's going to happen because past Garuda, every song is normalized to the fight's timeline due to the fact that there is no variable start time.