MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Packetdancer]

That reminds me of my first run of Sastasha as a Lala WHM. I had not yet learned line of sight was a thing... Let alone that ambient furniture mattered...

To quote the wonderful Josh Stryfe Hayes Anime Healers vs MMO Healers video...

"Can't heal through walls, can I, genius?"

1.0 got a lot of things right but damn if nael and the rivenroad encounter isn’t still one of my absolute favourite encounters in the game up until this point, that fight was so iconic

I would say that 1.0 got a lot of things right -- sometimes more than it gets credit for -- but it also demonstrably got a breathtaking number of things wrong; it's just easier to focus on the good stuff now, from a safe distance of many years. But if I actually think back, I remember the frustration of getting lost in a maze of copy-pasted trees in the 1.x Black Shroud. I remember market wards. (Imagine everything that's wrong with our current housing system... and now make that the basis for the player marketboard system! WOO!)

I remember running out of anima at one point and thus not being able to use aetherytes for the rest of the day, because I had only 1 anima point and I needed 4 even to teleport within the Black Shroud, much less to anywhere else... though I'll own that one, as I depleted my anima entirely through my own stupidity in bouncing around the realm haphazardly. (But man, of all the regions to get stuck in...)

...but yeah, the Rivenroad was pretty dang cool. You're not wrong. I mean, there's a reason it came to mind and I used it as my example of a non-standard, interesting arena design that wasn't just a single circle or square.