Alexander Ultimate

[SaitoHikari]

I'm just going to sidestep the Fynlar show here and give my thoughts on what I think the new Ultimate is going to do in regards to mechanics.

UCoB was a relatively slow-ish fight, but it was separated into many distinct phases that forced all party members to adapt to whatever mechanic they were being targeted with - and what mechanic you were targeted with was usually 100% random, aside from the ranged baiting fire puddles.

UwU had very strict mechanics in comparison that had little in the way of randomness aside from Titan gaols and Ultimate Suppression, but they came out FAST one right after the other, and mistakes were usually non-recoverable and spiraled into an immediate wipe. Some mechanics also required a bit of planning, like forcing the Primals to 'awaken' by intentionally failing some mechanics and carrying debuffs from Garuda all the way to Ultima at the very end to survive some of Ultima's attacks.

My guess is that Alexander might lean heavily into the time travel/paradox mechanic from his fight in the raid series. As in, let's say that you're fighting one of Alexander's lackeys (like Cruise Chaser), and he throws out a few AoEs. Said AoEs look suspiciously easy to dodge by Ultimate expectations, but your first hint that something is off is that you see a visage of Alexander watching from the sidelines for a while. Then when you fight Alexander proper, he suddenly throws everyone back in time, so you see that Cruise Chaser is alive again along with copies of your party members. So now you have to handle both Cruse Chaser and Alexander's mechanics at once while taking care to ensure your past copies don't die due to present time mechanics. A tank LB3 may be needed at some point to save your past selves and/or one mechanic may involve Alexander targeting one of the past characters with a stack marker that all of the past selves and present day players have to soak together.

But the mechanic isn't entirely against you either - your past copies will do everything they did once again, so you could end up getting free heals and party buffs from your past selves. (You can also join your past selves in nuking Cruise Chaser faster, and some people could probably set up the phase in advance by using powerful AoE cooldowns to hit both Cruise Chaser and Alexander when the phase happens. Knocking past Cruse Chaser down into a disabled state grants your past selves a buff that prevents them from being hit by present day mechanics, though they will still repeat everything they did until the phase ends.)