The Dead Ends is yet another error in the push to make everything hardcore

[Renathras]

3. Literally every mechanic in all three bosses was visual AOE indicators. You would have to be visually impaired to have any problem with them. Apologies if you are visually impaired.

I'm not a hardcore raider, but have done Extremes as my endgame since late SB (been playing since ARR) and just finally tried Savages this raid tier (friends convinced me P1S is BASICALLY equal in difficulty to HydEx, so I finally gave it a try and got my clears and a couple P2S clears on the side). But the FIRST bosses' "wind blowing the AOEs" kept killing me. It's not immediately obvious what's going on there. While "weather" effects in fights are often not things they throw around for no reason, I think it was about 3 runs before I figured out what the pattern of the AOE movement there was based on - the wind direction. I thought they were just random and had no way to find the holes.

And I say this as a person who enjoyed those fights - I'm a healer main but when I got SCH/SMN to 90 at the end of Elpis, I swapped to my GNB I had been running dailies with and ran Laby 2.0 and Ultima on it, and that second Dead Ends boss fight was especially awesome as a tank. Rotating around the boss with that epic music playing is just a ton of fun if you AREN'T on a Caster/Healer.

So I loved the dungeon and the fights...but I can see how the difficulty was a BIT punishing for MSQ content. MSQ is supposed to be easy enough for just about everyone to clear and for people to even manage with semi-braindead-NPCs (or semi-braindead-PCs, for that matter). And several of the fights are a BIT harder than that.

Other than the wind blowing first boss, I didn't have TOO MANY problems (the only time I tend to take damage on the 2nd or 3rd fight are if I get greedy), but I can still see it was probably harder than it should have been. The glowing wing on the final boss is also easy to miss at first, especially since everything there is already bright blue and gold and the visual for the wing is bright blue-green so somewhat easy to miss. Especially since I wasn't thinking the fights would be Extreme-level difficulty in some of the mechanics. Savage raiders don't think much of Extreme heroes like myself, but Ex's are still a tier of difficulty above normal content and that matters in being able to recognize and survive mechanics. If you do harder stuff (like Savage) frequently, your uptake is probably far faster than average. Even doing Extremes you're a leg up.

So I can see how people who DON'T tend to do anything that isn't MSQ would have trouble with their first Dead Ends run(s).

EDIT:

Look at the floor, there are actual lines on the textures that mark the safe zones between the lasers.

Wait...the what now? o.O

I'm going to have to go do these again just to see this. This is the first I've ever heard of it and I never noticed it while running...that IS a raid thing; normal MSQ type content doesn't tend to have the arena layout as a hint to mechanics. That's wild...yeah, so the fights are probably even harder than I thought! I'll have to reevaluate, as this makes it clear OP is more right, not less...