New Alliance Raid is severely undertuned.

[PangTong]

Aglaia is aesthetically spectacular and the design of the fights are fun, but it's only week 2 and bosses are dying before you even see all their mechanic patterns.

To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying that Alliance raids should be back-breakingly difficult or long, but Aglaia is easy even compared to other Alliance raids in their release state. Mechanically it's about as complex as Paradigm's Breach, but everything is tuned lower. The only other Alliance Raid I can think of which was this easy on release is Void Ark.

• Boss HP is low, they seem to be tuned on the assumption that some portion of the raid will be dead at all times (like on day 1) but as soon as you get a group that's done this before, they fall over super fast. This is not premades either, this is just with the average DF group.
  
  
• Mechanics come out extremely slowly and one at a time. This not only gives you ages to react but reduces the total number of mechanics you see in the fight. For example Rhalgr's punch mechanic takes like 30 seconds to resolve start to finish including the cast times and various animations.
  
  
• With the exception of certain one-shot mechanics like stuff that knocks you off the platform, almost all mechanics in the raid are very survivable if you fail them. Many can be ignored if you don't know how to resolve them as they don't do threatening damage.
  
  
• There are almost no mechanics which require group coordination/performance, almost all are individual responsibility, meaning it's extremely hard to have a full wipe as long as at least one tank and one rezzer knows what they're doing, as there are no mechanics which they need the other people alive for. They can just keep fighting and rezzing indefinitely. Even on day 1, I had a pull where about 20 people were dead on Azeyma, two of the alliances released assuming it would be a wipe, and the remaining alliance just took the boss down by themselves.

The raid has clearly been designed for first-time blind runs, and it's fun in that capacity, but for something intended to be run weekly where most if not all players already know what to do, the unusually low difficulty makes it dull to rerun even compared to previous Alliance Raids. Considering that we're only in week 2 of the release patch and new tiers of gear in 6.2 and 6.4 will make it even easier (because alliance raids don't have ilvl sync for some reason) it's something I'm concerned about.

I would like to request that the devs step up the difficulty a bit for future Alliance raids. Your players are not as dumb as you think they are.

[Vrankyl]

I do have to agree that they feel fairly under tuned. Week 1 the raid was fun and difficult, but now you can easily defeat all four of the bosses before an LB3 is even available. That really just should not be a thing until the next main raid tier is out at the very least. These bosses should be able to survive long enough for LB3s to be used and for you to have to question if it should be saved for healer LB3 or if a dps needs to use it.

[Ronduwil]

Week 1 the raid was fun and difficult

Then the raid is not undertuned. The alliance raids in the roulette are meant for new and casual players to get a feel for the fight before moving on to Savage and Ultimate modes. You're complaining that a bunch of players who are now ready to move on to Savage and Ultimate modes are still queueing for this content. That's not the same as the raid being undertuned. The roulette rewards are in exchange for helping out new and casual players, not for your Herculean efforts. Every time you queue into the raid, keep in mind that there are still players in your group who still find the raid fun and difficult. You're effectively asking SE to ruin their experience. Some of us don't immediately rush through the MSQ on day one to unlock the raids.

[Kuritzkale]

Then the raid is not undertuned. The alliance raids are meant for new and casual players to get a feel for the fight before moving on to Savage and Ultimate modes. You're complaining that a bunch of players who are now ready to move on to Savage and Ultimate modes are still queueing for this content. That's not the same as the raid being undertuned. The roulette rewards are in exchange for helping out new and casual players, not for your Herculean efforts. Every time you queue into the raid, keep in mind that there are still players in your group who still find the raid fun and difficult. You're effectively asking SE to ruin their experience. Some of us don't immediately rush through the MSQ on day one to unlock the raids.

Not all content in the game that isn't savage/ultimate is for new players, bro, and it certainly shouldn't be designed for them. But regardless, anybody doing the new raid isn't really a "new" player. They will have played through all of ARR, HW, StB, ShB, and EW before getting to this content. They should have a grasp on the mechanics of the game by that point and shouldn't need to be catered to like children. And again you people are completely unable to engage with what anybody is saying, nobody is asking for the alliance raids to be insanely hard, just for the content to be engaging past 1 or 2 runs, which seems to be a good idea in a game where a lot of the endgame revolves around repeatedly completing content.

[Ronduwil]

Not all content in the game that isn't savage/ultimate is for new players, bro, and it certainly shouldn't be designed for them.

I was specifically talking about stuff in the alliance raid roulette. The roulette is designed to reward experienced players for assisting random players who are queueing into that stuff for the first time ever. I'm surprised that, as experienced as you claim to be, you haven't understood that yet.

But regardless, anybody doing the new raid isn't really a "new" player. They will have played through all of ARR, HW, StB, ShB, and EW before getting to this content.

That doesn't change the fact that it's going to be their first time running this raid. As many of you flexers have said, the raid was challenging and difficult for you on week 1. That was how it was intended. It was never meant to keep challenging you forever.

[Ath192]

I have to add my two cents here as well that nothing stays challenging after being repeated multiple times.... by the time we were getting close to being BIS we were reclearing the savage raid tier in less than two hours for all 4 fights and we weren't a week one static or anything.

I would love for all alliance raids to have the same level of kill potential this one does if you don't respect the mechanics however. And they all mostly did when they first came out, but now the gear/potency creep makes them extremely dull.

quite frankly UNREAL shouldn't exist. That is what they should do with all content. I.E. Ultima Unreal is just Ultima EX rebalanced so the difficulty is close to what it was back in the day. There shouldn't be an Unreal EX in my opinion.... It should just be the OG Ultima Extreme trial if balancing was done right from the get go.

Likewise, Unreal Alliance raids should just be normal alliance raids rebalanced so they can be close to the difficulty they were back in the day.

Unreal is just admitting the games older content lives in a state of disrepair.

[Kuritzkale]

I was specifically talking about stuff in the alliance raid roulette. The roulette is designed to reward experienced players for assisting random players who are queueing into that stuff for the first time ever. I'm surprised that, as experienced as you claim to be, you haven't understood that yet.


That doesn't change the fact that it's going to be their first time running this raid. As many of you flexers have said, the raid was challenging and difficult for you on week 1. That was how it was intended. It was never meant to keep challenging you forever.

Again you are completely incapable of engaging with what people say, and I have to say your smugness falls completely flat given how stupid you've made yourself out to be. It's everyones first time running the new raid, not solely new players. They will have done alliance raids before. Nobody is asking for the raid to be challenging forever, you're just making things up in your mind to get upset about and then projecting them onto what I said. And if you were talking about the alliance raid roulette you should have said that originally instead of editing your comment after I responded to it and getting pissy that I didn't somehow divine you were specifically talking about that. And I haven't claimed anywhere to be experienced, yet another thing you're just making up.

[Ravor]

Yeah, i think they should add the boss hp a bit, just 10% or 20% perhaps? And have some skill to be casted 1 sec or 2 sec faster orrrrrrrr just make a harder version...... a man can hope......

[Recon1o6]

Its not just me then who found this horredously undertuned. Didn't even see a second tankbuster from byregot last night

also is it me or is it a pain to queue for in aether? thats 2 weeks now and usually duty roulette will dump me straight in the new raid, and the new raid will always be instant que. yet this fortnight at peak times i've been struggling to queue for it, last night took almost an hour before i got in

Edit: i concur with Ravor, I would absolutely love to see a hard extreme or mid level savage difficulty raid vs the 12 because it didn't feel that it was tough enough with how slow stuff was cast. but thats ew in general, nothing hits hard, or its instant kill

[Jin-]

Its not just me then who found this horredously undertuned. Didn't even see a second tankbuster from byregot last night

also is it me or is it a pain to queue for in aether? thats 2 weeks now and usually duty roulette will dump me straight in the new raid, and the new raid will always be instant que. yet this fortnight at peak times i've been struggling to queue for it, last night took almost an hour before i got in

Edit: i concur with Ravor, I would absolutely love to see a hard extreme or mid level savage difficulty raid vs the 12 because it didn't feel that it was tough enough with how slow stuff was cast. but thats ew in general, nothing hits hard, or its instant kill

On Light DC queues can easily take up to one hour on prime time. Lack of dps is heavy in these queues.