Targeted mitigation often does not work

[OdinelStarrei]

This is a pertinent topic actually for me personally. During Dragonsong Ultimate, I'm sure everyone by now has seen the Ultimate End cast. Unlike other versions of Thordan, during this Ultimate End, Thordan is targetable, and thus able to be inflicted with Addle, Reprisal, etc etc. Due to Ultimate End hitting the non-tanks for around 96,000 damage, it is mandatory that you have both shielding, and multiple forms of damage mitigation. So, we set up more soft, but frequent debuff-based mitigation options to make the transition into Final Chorus (around 95,000 damage) and the following Eye of the Tyrant less painful for our healers. However, during my progression after I had already mathematically discovered the bare minimum of mitigation/shielding needed, there were occasions where multiple party members would die anyway, and not by a few hundred, by thousands, far beyond what typical damage variance would be from a high-roll. And it would be almost like we were missing Addle, Feint, and Reprisal, even though all of those debuffs were clearly applied far before the castbar ended.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the game basically does a coinflip on the Ultimate End cast. Sometimes it comes from Thordan, and sometimes, it comes from one of his untargetable knights, despite Thordan always being the actor who casts Ultimate End on the enmity list. This makes all debuff based mitigation totally useless sometimes on one the hardest hitting attacks in the entire fight, placed right before you need every member alive to take advantage of Thordan's damage taken up debuff.

We moved things around, added more shielding for the squishiest of party members, but it doesn't change the fact that that is stupid, and not telegraphed whatsoever.