Quote Originally Posted by Absurdity View Post
Those are problems entirely of SE's own making. They made the mechanics for TOP, they made gigantic hitboxes and they made the 2 minute meta, I don't need to be sold a solution to a problem they themselves created.
This... mostly.

I wouldn't mind if the "solutions" were something that helped players for whom such "clicks" less to then more easily engage with complexity. And often that can even be something relatively subtle.

Let's take the recent raid buff range increases. It's a solution to a problem of "It's annoying when randoms won't get in range of buffs," but it's not the only solution. An alternative, for instance, would be a raid buff display, with noticeable timers for when those raid buffs are coming up. At the most extreme, maybe even a visually-integrated macro-warning and/or ping system (similar to how the countdown is a visual indicator of something otherwise found only in chat). It still eases up players getting into range, but in a way that eases engagement with that point of engagement, rather than simply removing it outright.

Similarly, let's take frequent positionals, as per Monk. Cutting its positionals down to a third of what they were an expansion ago is a solution to "Having chosen the iconically positional-heavy class, I'm getting overwhelmed by positionals, especially since I feel tuned around getting 100% positional accuracy, but due to fight design I must often rely on a Role Action gimmick to even do that." But, again, it's not the only such solution. We could have instead, for instance, just revised positionals and their interactions with bosses suddenly turning or affixing themselves to the edge of the arena where positionals would be impossible regardless of what the tank does. We could, for instance, have positionals re-check for positional success a half-second later, such that so long as the positional was correct either before or having predicted the boss spin, the attack still succeeds. And rather than making certain fights rely on True North, we could also just have the boss temporarily become successfully attackable from any/all sides, or convert the front into a 'rear' (e.g., as per original Demon Wall), when they affix themselves to the edge. Etc., etc.

Either way, though, we'd need to roll back the more recent "solutions" already given, and change that route to reduced annoyance from reduction to, instead, polish and facilitated engagement.



:: To be clear, though, I don't think the "2-minute meta" is a problem, or at least certainly not a new one. It just does what we were obliged to do previously in HW and StB anyways: to stack a single CD template. It merely removes that chance of playing basically without raid buffs when we're somehow allowed into the Savage party despite being the odd one out (and not even being a BLM/SkS-SAM). I'll agree that having no competing reasons to hold CDs, etc., beyond boss jumps or phase-shift cutscenes makes things more dull, but that's more an issue with fight design (e.g., lack of short-term checks) and, just as importantly, how quickly we could out-gear competing challenges anyways.