Game difficulty, syncing, minimum ilvl and new players

[Packetdancer]

Congrats with doing that, it was QUITE hard, wasn't it? ;p So you did it MINE too or synced? MINE of course is only I-level 90 with no echo. We saw 3% last weekend and it was so heartbreaking to fail. I see you are a WHM so I guess you got stuck with being golem bait. LOL

I was WHM during T9, yeah, though I tanked the first Coil as GNB before the group makeup changed and I swapped back to healing. We did run with no echo, but I don't *think* we did min ilevel. (We had decided we were not *that* masochistic as a group for T9, after having done min ilevel for a few previous floors... but I wouldn't put it past the person who queued us in to have mischievously set that option without mentioning, and I admit I didn't check. It certainly hit hard enough...)

And yes, it was weird to be in content where I genuinely did need to remember healing habits from my first time around in the game, back when Freecure was valuable, and Cure II was genuinely excessive save for dire situations.

But it was also quite fun. I wish more content was made to work that way, to stay relevant and challenging. Maybe not min ilevel—then the gear you got from things like raids wouldn't actually have any value in said raids—but not so easily outgeared.

On the other hand, as I mentioned in the previous post, I feel like some older content might actually be more difficult synced now than it was when current. (Especially with min ilevel on.)

After all, when Coils was current, I seem to recall WHM (as an example) had a lot more abilities at level 50 than it does now. Protect and Stoneskin could be some pretty chonky mitigation (remember the days when everyone waited at the start of a dungeon until the WHM had put Protect on everyone?), Divine Seal was basically what we have now as Temperance in terms of healing potency buff with a shorter cooldown (albeit minus Temp's lovely mitigation factor), the Freecure trait was actually useful (as I mentioned above) and Cure could in fact proc Overcure as well as Freecure, plus you could pull in Eye for an Eye using cross-class skills, etc. And you still had most of our relevant good low-level friends like Cure/Cure II/Cure III, Medica/Medica II, Stone/Stone II, Aero/Aero II, Regen, and Benediction. (And Shroud of Saints; while it's gone now, Lucid Dreaming is basically just Shroud with the serial numbers filed off.)

If you do Coils now, in terms of relevant abilities you have basically Cure/Cure II/Cure III, Medica/Medica II, Stone II, Aero II, Regen, Benediction, and Presence of Mind. Plus the usual role stuff like Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast, Surecast, and friends... a few of which you admittedly used to have to pull in via cross-class skill slots if you wanted them. Though I suppose there's also some argument to be made for the fact that no longer needing to stance-dance with Cleric Stance does remove a bit of complexity.

Either way, you could make a fairly solid argument that it's not the same experience it used to be, even synced down to appropriate level and gear. But it can still be fun.

And I'd honestly still love to see the Crystal Tower raids done that way, where we'd get to see the return of mechanics that have been long forgotten. Make it an experience as epic as it's supposed to be, lore-wise. Make Praetorium a challenge again. Etc.

We can dream...