Struggling with Endwalker endgame

[Ransu]

End game is supposed to be challenging, that's the entire point of it. That said, endsinger ex is only confusing at first. The mechanics can be simplified quite easily once you get its quirks down. You only have to remember certain aspects, not the entire mechanic itself. The rings on the players for example where you have to remember if you're spread or stack, 2 of the 3 mechanics are spread so really you only need to remember 1 number and that number is when you were in the middle stack. You can basically ignore the other numbers at that point.

[Espritduo]

EX content and up is all about learning through repetition. You're not expected to remember everything the first few times through the fight, not while you're learning, and not even after you get your first clear. Some fights are more intense than others, but don't expect to "memorize" the whole dance of an extreme or savage fight until you've got 10+ clears under your belt. Yah, some people be like "I had it down pat first clear no problem game2ez", and for them maybe it really was. For 99% of the player base though, we are just like you and WILL struggle to remember our steps throughout a fight we aren't comfortable with yet.

[brigantium]

Since you have that problem, this is the most simple solution I know:
- Follow the leader for planets and heads.
- Keep the only position marker relevant for you in your head.
- As said above, when the 3 attacks that will be rewinded come you ONLY need to remember when you stood in the middle since you will be going to your designated position for any other outcome.

I often narrate the fight to myself when I'm learning, it reinforces the process.

In my opinion, the hardest part of the fight by far is double fatalism, which is hard to execute if you get blue planets first.

[Rilifane]

I had a lot of trouble with this fight as well. While not diagnosed with anything that could make it more difficult for me, I have two habits that are terrible for learning this particular fight: pixel dodging and keeping an eye on the big picture.
Pixel dodging is something that BLM taught me and I often do it even when on other classes. I got an insane amounts of galaxy-sized red planets into my face because I miscalculated the size of the aoe. The same end again and again or something. I'm not used to "just run as far as you can, run for your life!" dodging. Aiming the knockback on the other hand was rarely an issue for me. It was always red that got me.
Keeping an eye on everything at once is just a habit in video games, mainly from playing healer in many games that required me to do just that. It still stuck. It means that if there's a complete clusterfuck of telegraphs and markers I'll have a hard time tunneling on that one tell that is actually important to know where to go. Heads gave me the most trouble because of this. I understood the mechanic, that wasn't the issue. I made a mental rule for myself, I know which part of the telegraphs is the important part, I narrated it to myself while playing it.
But in practice I just had a literal brainlag because I had to mentally (and sometimes audibly) remind myself to focus and switch from that broad picture view to a tunnelvision on one important tell view. So even if I did recognize the safe zone, it was often really late, by then the majority already moved and I sort of automatically cancelled the mental process of spotting the safe zone. Which was terrible for learning and getting the necessary practice in spotting it in. Even worse if I had call outs.

Some people will say the fight is easy and I believe that it is for them. I found some other mechanics easy that people keep calling roadblocks and difficult.
While there is a tendency, there is never an absolute difficulty that goes for everyone. The fight has a very lenient dps check so I think the devs expected people to die to some trickier mechanics even after having cleared a few times. If you can do something to help, like pinning notes to your monitor, narrating the fight to yourself, hop in with a friend and use vc etc. don't be afraid to use them. Everyone has things they struggle with. For me it's telegraph/ marker clusterfucks. Nothing to do but keep practicing.

[Colt47]

The problem you're running into isn't exactly what you might be thinking it is. You actually can learn the fight just as well as other people but it takes some tricks to get there. The first is to understand it's okay to make mistakes. The second is to block out the time you want to spend doing the activity so there's nothing else that is pressing. FYI this is not to eliminate distractions, but to help make sure that there's nothing else that is eating away at you inside.

"Oh, I got to go clean the kitchen, I'm behind schedule on it..." "I didn't finish that task I had yesterday, I got to try harder tomorrow", etc, are examples of thoughts that can eat away at you without realizing it, because it can turn into a self blame game where you punish yourself. If you forget to clean the kitchen, just do it tomorrow. You don't need to try harder to complete the task you didn't finish during the work day because the only one who is saying that is yourself, not your boss at work.

Kind of hoping that helps a bit.

[Colt47]

Honestly I think we need something like a training mode for people on savage at the very least. The problem is I'm not entirely sure how they manage to do that. A lot of games that do challenge mode content simply increase the frequency of attacks done in a normal version of the fight, but savage in FFXIV has the attack patterns being completely different and often hidden. Ideally the training mode should be the normal mode of the fight since otherwise the dev team would have to implement a trust system just to have a learning mode in savage, or make something like a normal mode, hard mode, and savage mode of every single fight. I'd probably be down for story mode, hard mode, and savage mode since it would let them keep the normal mode mechanic design untouched. It doesn't fix the accessibility issue when people are through the hard mode and just go strait for the savage mode, nor does it address the problem of savage mode stragglers that get stranded late in the season or come back from a break.

Like it is 100% true that using pure gear level is not sufficient as a catchup mechanic for end game. The trust system does have potential to help solve at least a few problems in this regard, but savage mode... I'd almost say they should make the gear pure item level boosts and let people dye their normal mode gear. Yeah you get more people into doing savage so they can glam, but that crowd is not made up of people that are doing this for challenge running, which is the whole point of this kind of content.

[namtap032892]

Endsinger is a perfect exampe of this where I need to remember what order things happened in and how I dealt with them earlier. It's not challenging at this point, it feels like it's punishing people for having the incapacity to memorize everything every single battle.

I myself have severe ADHD and my short term memory is pretty garbage, so I understand how you feel a bit, but fortunately, that's not an issue once you've figured out the tricks to the mechanics.
For the one with the five heads, and the one in the center is rotating, you don't need to memorize anything. The rings will indicate how far back it rewinds (1 rewinds to the very last mechanic, 3 to the very first), and the middle head always be rotating counterclockwise for this. The heads on the side are even easier: Odd number of rings will be the same AoE it just used (so donut or full circle), and 2 will be the other AoE. At the very end of the mechanic, only one quadrant will be safe, so just figure out which way the head will be facing, and determine which of the two heads left are safe. The last head you were at and the one diagonal from it will be safe if there's an odd number of rings, and the other two will be safe if there's 2.

And I believe others have mentioned this, but for the one with the AoEs, the only thing you need to memorize is which of the mechanics you were in the middle for. And same thing here: Rings indicate how far back it rewinds. So, if you were middle the first time you'll only be in if you have 3 rings. 2nd is 2 rings, and 3rd is 1 ring. Otherwise, you will be at your designated clock position.

Sorry if this is too wordy, but I hope it helps explain these two mechanics.

[Wilford111]

I have ADHD and, while it is difficult, I am able to remember things from like 30 or so seconds ago to perform mechanics. It gets much easier the more times you do each particular fight, because you become more familiar with your rotation, everything going around you, etc.
There aren't any mechanics I can think of off the top of my head that require you to remember something for more than like 30 seconds.

[namtap032892]

There aren't any mechanics I can think of off the top of my head that require you to remember something for more than like 30 seconds.

E12, but that's about it, afaik. And even that isn't too much longer.

[D6Damager]

One of the best ways of remembering mechanics is being on comms. Whether it's Discord or something else. Being able to speak to your group (and they speaking to you) can make all the difference as they tell you mechanics and buff windows etc. A simple "I forget what happens next" on comms and you quickly get back on track.

If you're doing stuff with randoms, then try finding an FC or static that is willing to help newer players (even if you're not new) as they will be willing to guide you.