MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Packetdancer]

I hit my post limit earlier and got put in the forum's "Talky Timeout" for a bit, sooooo let's just dump all the stuff I couldn't post...

Limit Cut and Kampos Harma [my static before we had to break because our raid leader is currently on night shifts were progging P2S] are the two mechanics I'm having issues with. Kampos because of the random nature with which he chooses who to hit first, Limit Cut because I can't see the damn marker if I'm in a crowd.

I mean, I know plenty of people who had trouble with the chaotic nature of Kampeos Harma without any other factors in play. Especially since, unlike most other things that get referenced as "Limit Cut" in this game, you don't have different colors for odd vs. even numbers.

(Whether or not it is a limit cut is a matter of debate; my ultimate static actually has a "Limit Cut Alignment Chart" a'la D&D alignments, based around what you consider to be a limit cut.)

Contrast that with P3S Darkened Fire, or the Flood Ray mechanic in Diamond Weapon EX, or most other limit-cut-like mechanics where you have the odd numbers in blue and even in red, meaning you have an additional visual cue to sort of 'speed up' recognition of the count over your head; if you think at first glance the number over your head is "six" but the pips are blue, time to double-check.

That said, even with Kampeos Harma, the mechanic can be broken down into only a couple of possibilities -- albeit by doing so in several steps.

1. Do you have a tether? Two possibilities: yes/no.
2. If no tether, just read the number and head to where that number is stuck on the map. (Four possibilities.)
3. If you have a tether, without thinking too hard about the number over your head, just notice if it's odd or even. If it's odd, go opposite the boss. (O = Odd = Opposite.) If even, huddle under the boss. (Two possibilities.)
4. If the other person at your square has fewer pips over their head than you, you ought to be further back than them for the first hit. If you have fewer pips, get up front. (Two possibilities.)

I have a friend who has memory issues, and who raids savage, and I like to come up with bite-sized approaches like that to mechanics to help her. Plus, little bite-size approaches do tend to make a mechanic easier to teach in learning parties, which I also enjoy periodically running.

Mind you, Kampeos Harma is also a perfect example of what I mean when I say I wish that marks like those also appeared as a debuff on the status bar; for folks who are visually impaired, they can put the status bar somewhere clearly visible and blow it up to like 180% of the default size -- for mechanics that do give you a debuff, that tends to make it much easier for them to resolve than relying on a visual cue that may be harder to make out, especially in a crowd.

Because frequently it's not that mechanics need to be easier, they just need to be communicated in a way that is accessible to more people.

And I suspect if the game was better about that, a large number -- not all, but many -- of the folks who feel they have issues with higher-end content would find at least some of their struggle went away.

I play with a keyboard and mouse. My shaking, when it gets really bad, makes it so that pressing the proper key or mouse button becomes enormously difficult ( I either miss, press a nearby wrong key by mistake, or press the key/mouse button multiple times).

As I sort of expected, this maps 100% to the issue Bryan had: he'd jitter and hit a key multiple times, or he'd hit a nearby key by mistake.

The software I was writing for him basically solved those two problems by 1. letting him hit any key near the key he wanted, and have it process as the key in question, by mapping sections of the keyboard to stuff (and sometimes even to a series of things, where it advanced one each time you hit something in that area), and 2. repeated taps of a key within a certain window of time were 'eaten'; e.g., if he tapped '2' three times in 400ms, it would read that as likely a mistake and swallow two of them before passing the input on to the game.

I'm now tempted to go dig up that old codebase and see whether finishing it out might not be beneficial in situations like yours.

If you haven't tried a controller yet, it might be worth a shot, I think with the ergonomics and how spread apart the buttons tend to be, it might be easier.

Obviously I can't speak for Eraden, but I know the issue my friend faced was that with the tremors, he'd jerk the joystick around -- moving his character or shifting the camera unintentionally -- and it made movement more difficult for him, rather than less; not twitching the mouse a huge distance was easier for him than not having a thumb twitch on the controller joystick, especially since you can adjust mouse DPI.

I mean, it never hurts to try, though!