Unreal Trials

[Amnmaat]

This would have been a great opportunity to resurrect Ravana or Bismark or even Susano or Lakshmi. Seems someone at SE really loves them some Shiva, back to back patches.

[Espritduo]

Sounds like a terrible and unnecessary design choice, IMO. Limited time only + exclusive rewards + EX+ level difficulty = I ain't doin it and most people won't either. If it's just a level 80 slightly enhanced version of the original trial, then that's 50% okay, since arbitrarily limited time content is stupid no matter what it is.

Honestly, I do think the fundamental idea of making max level versions of old content is a cool concept, though. I'd love it if they made a level 80, 8-man version of the old Crystal tower series to allow people to really experience that content in a less faceroll state.

[ReiMakoto]

Sounds like a terrible and unnecessary design choice, IMO. Limited time only + exclusive rewards + EX+ level difficulty = I ain't doin it and most people won't either. If it's just a level 80 slightly enhanced version of the original trial, then that's 50% okay, since arbitrarily limited time content is stupid no matter what it is.

Honestly, I do think the fundamental idea of making max level versions of old content is a cool concept, though. I'd love it if they made a level 80, 8-man version of the old Crystal tower series to allow people to really experience that content in a less faceroll state.

Extreme Trials are midcore difficulty and you only have to clear it once a week. If it takes you over a week to clear an ex trial then the FOMO is a perfect excuse to learn how to play better

[Espritduo]

Extreme Trials are midcore difficulty and you only have to clear it once a week. If it takes you over a week to clear an ex trial then the FOMO is a perfect excuse to learn how to play better

It's not a matter of getting good. I used to clear ex primals with my static back in the day and we usually cleared them day one in one lockout before moving onto savage progging. I refuse to go through the insufferable experience of pugging them with strangers, though. That is the real reason most people don't bother with EX trials, not their difficulty per se. I believe the vast majority of the playerbase is technically capable of clearing an EX trial, in terms of skill alone. It's dealing with the human garbage that you tend to find in random groupings that makes it invariably not worth the effort until you can unsync them. I remember clearing Zurvan EX with my group, getting it on farm in a few hours, then trying to do it with pugs later on. Never again. And I've certainly served my time in Shiva EX at level enough that I never want to do that again either.

[Hanayumi]

Its fine, EXs are the easiest of endgame fights, so its not that big of a deal really. And from what its sounds like you will have the entire patch complete, serious doubt they'll have an exclusive reward every week, very very likely rewards will be cycled like WT. I like the idea, breaths new life into old fights, people would otherwise burn through or even miss out on, cause of high level/gear or no need to do. Old days of primal fights where even titan was one hell of a wall to beat and was straight up a requirement for arr relic, lol.

[Nestama]

From what I heard, they were originally gonna start with Titan, but then decided to go with Shiva. Shiva is a pretty easy EX Primal, whereas fights like Moggle Mog have a mechanic that I don't think has been done again since Moggle Mog EX.

[Barraind]

How many of Shiva EX mechanics made it into E8S? From what I saw, not many.

Basically everything but Ice Brand, which gets a tankswap mechanic and "everyone stand in front of her" instead.

You have the updated versions of "dont stand in the circle of bad", "stand behind her", "heres a tankbuster", "the floor is frozen" (combined with "dont stand in the bad"), "kill the rocks", "watch her ponce about whilst frozen", "gimme a hug", "DONT GET KNOCKED BACK TOO FAR LOLOL" and "cold damage to errybody".



Really not looking forward to the timing of limited-time trials. Its going to be a pretty hectic month for a lot of people. Especially since theres no reason to make them limited.

Mentor roulette

mentor roulette giving an EX trial is almost always a signal that I'm going to be wasting 60 minutes of my life talking at a wall.

[Hanayumi]

Limit time deal prolly has more to do with future aspects in mind, so rather than having the fights more or less set in stone like normal and ex's, they can rotate them out and make changes to them but more importantly increase the difficulty once next expac comes around. So like next expac comes around they can easily bump up the difficult for level 90 or w/e and tweak the mechanics.

[PyurBlue]

Limit time deal prolly has more to do with future aspects in mind, so rather than having the fights more or less set in stone like normal and ex's, they can rotate them out and make changes to them but more importantly increase the difficulty once next expac comes around. So like next expac comes around they can easily bump up the difficult for level 90 or w/e and tweak the mechanics.

I wonder if that really requires that much tweaking though. The more precise control they want over the difficulty, the more tweaks will have to be made, but do they need to account for every single skill outside of Ultimate? When we get new levels/abilities they mostly increase DPS, HPS, or some other metric that's pretty easy to scale. With CC being non existent the trickiest one I can think of is shielding (ie max damage capacity).

I'm glad to see more high level content, but I think it was a mistake to make these limited events. If they felt that it would too difficult to tweak them perfectly to keep pace with the evolution of the game I think I'd rather have a slightly less than perfect fight that would remain relevant/interesting for a long time. In that case they could also spend the time it takes to make new limited content tweaking the existing ones as well, so it doesn't seem like there is much of a time/resource loss. Going back to Stormblood content unsynced doesn't really change anything except that enemies die too fast/don't do enough damage.

[SamRF]

I definitely believe it's a good thing that these are limited and on rotation since it wouldn't split the playerbase any more (party finder) and also make them feel more special. The original one is always there anyways.