Euphrosyne feels a bit lacking

[ForteNightshade]

eh I feel Cid isnt that hard, I rarely wipe there and usually yet again, difficulty is arbitrarly relying on people understanding mechanics. The reason why Dun Scaith - Diabolos is still legit hard for casual content is because even when you do know the mechanics, you still can get caught off guard from a lot of the chaos going on during the last phase, huge tank busters, trying to not hit exploding balls that cause you to push into another one creating a chain reaction, look away stack markers etc. With Cid, once you know the dance, the mechanics themselves pose no danger. We need more bosses like Diabolos honestly

As already noted, Cid is comically nerfed to the point of being a complete chump. All three Alliances can outright fail Duskblade (the three person tower stack) nowadays and it still won't wipe you whereas on release, one Alliance missing it caused massive raidwide damage. It was still recoverable but spicy.

so...your reasoning is that you would want to have multiple wipes in a run? Like what are you even arguing for, I get you want the challenge but saying odd stuff like this is just not helping your argument for the general audience to get behind

How is anything I said odd? I said people want more of a balance between faceroll easy and challenging but doable fights. Everything you highlighted about Diabolos is what makes him memorable. Take my example with the now watered down Cid. He literally can't hurt you anymore. You have to go comically out of your way to fail. At which point, the whole fight becomes a complete slog. I'm not advocating for multiple wipes necessarily but an actual sense of intension to these fights. If there's practically zero chance of wiping no matter how many mistakes people make, the encounters become increasingly boring. Nobody is asking for endless wipes and two hour runs but rather they want something more than pushover bosses.

That general audience is who's complaining about Euphrosyne right now. And that same audience liked Weeping City and Dun Scaith. So I think they'll get behind a return to that level just fine.

You say this but it's one of the only instances of casual content with a hard enrage, one that groups have reached pretty frequently.

An enrage nobody even complained about when it was relevant. And outside of the initial few weeks, you weren't seeing Death Wing's enrage frequently at all. He may have come close but it wasn't all that common. Personally, I'm not even opposed to enrages in casual content as it gives the DPS some genuine responsibility.

[Payadopa]

All of that could be alleviated with an min ilvl roulette. It's optional, doesn't bother anyone who doesn't want to do it and it could give... I dunno... one job level per day or something. As someone who hates DF because it bores me out of my mind (healer main here), I'd be all over a roulette like that.

[Midareyukki]

That general audience is who's complaining about Euphrosyne right now. And that same audience liked Weeping City and Dun Scaith. So I think they'll get behind a return to that level just fine.

Here's what bothers me the most about this topic.

Keep in mind, I absolutely agree with ForteNightshade. Everything mentioned about Thunder God Cid and Diabolos were things that, at the time, made them memorable. Same for Ozma and Hashmal, two fights that were notoriously frustrating, but memorable due to the new mechanics that punished you if you didn't coordinate or keep up with the fight. But frustrating though the fights may be for some, they were very much doable by the casual playerbase and even seen as interesting despite the difficulty spike. People got past Ozma, people got past Hashmal, people got past Cid into Calofisteri, Rofocale and Ultima.

You didn't need to be good at Savage to clear these fights whatsoever. And no one expected you to be good. Simply understand what mechanics were. I personally don't think that's too much to ask for when literal dungeons spice things up just as much. And on that note, so too do NieR Raids have fights that wipe people or spam mechanics just as much. We're talking the Compound or the Red Girl.

All while keeping in mind the fact that many of these mechanics are first tested in these alliance raids and then later reused in dungeons anyway. Where do you think Camazotz got its pillars from? Or Her Inflorescence?

The general audience that is complaining about Euphrosyne being easy isn't limited only to the people who liked fights like Cid, Hashmal, Diabolos, Ozma, Red Girl, what have you. It's not just people who are comfortable with challenge and difficulty.

But there's also another "general audience" that I do know fights against these fights being challenging. It's the exact same group that went absolutely crazy back in Stormblood when fighting Shinryu. Despite literally everything Shinryu does is just recycled from old ARR trials or generic dungeon mechanics. Shinryu doesn't rely on you having a working knowledge of EX Trials or Savage raids, much less Ultimates. And not a single person in their right mind is asking for it. But it's that group, it's that part of the "general audience" that is going around fearmongering and acting as if whenever people say "Euphrosyne is too easy", they mean "we want Euphrosyne to be insanely hard and wipe everyone by simply looking at the wrong place".

People need to stop acting like Diabolos, Cid and other fights were the epithome of insanity. Yes, they're frustrating, but they're also doable. And if you can't handle standing in the right place and following very basic instructions, then you're the one failing, it's not the game being too demanding. Because you do this in dungeons already. This is just the same at a larger scale.

And what it feels like, especially after seeing not only Shinryu being lambasted for being "too difficult", but also people wiping to Cid after he got nerfed twice in a row, is that people want every fight in this game to be at the same level as Thordan or old Cape Westwind.

Why the insistance on making every Alliance Raid instance, a 24-man content, be the same as your blitz-through 4-man dungeon with barely any depth to it? Because last I checked, people are pretty fed up with those dungeons too, often calling those glorified corridors. So what gives?

[Gember]

If I can be honest here; the pacing of all Endwalker content has been kind of "off" after coming out of the woodworks of Shadowbringers. Like don't get me wrong; about all of the dungeons, trials, raids, and other things they gave us were all very beautiful and the fight designs were well thought out when it came to symbolism to lore. However.. the pacing feels off. Its always felt off since The Tower of Zot.

I do not know if this is the cause of the stat squish, the 2 minute job design, the way the fights were designed, or something else. It feels like the bosses take their time on mechanics compared to before, and they repeat a lot of them as well. I am not saying they didn't do that before, but it feels the repeats are coming in more frequent. I still can't put my finger on what is exactly tilting the gameplay a little.

Also, when Endwalker released; I was playing as a healer as usual. They focused heavy on mitigation on fights more so than before. A lot of jobs got a lot of mitigation tools compared to before. I felt it pretty heavily as a healer. I just think the fight design of this game shifted, and everyone can absolutely feel its changes. Not all of it is bad; but its kind of shifting from one good flavor to another. Of course its subjective on which flavor tastes the best for players.

Am I the only one who felt this way?

Euphrosyne is no different from what has changed. I do agree that maybe they could buff the bosses HP a little, but not by much. As some mentioned here; once the majority of the community learns these fights; the challenge is almost going to be near 0. All of the new players who come in will just follow the crowd as usual. I know this because that is exactly what Aglaia is right now.

[Naoki34]

The fights are fun, but too easy.
Except with a raid carpet the LB2 is enough.

And the glam isn't very interesting, too bad. In Aglae the Gold Saint armour was cool.
But otherwise, it's a nice raid and I love the Dedicated of Moonlight theme.

[TakumiHarada]

To me it doesn't have to be extremely difficult or unforgiving. People were annoyed with Nald'thal's balance mechanic because one person can possibly grief the whole alliance. That'll be too much for a casual content.

When we think of the previous raid, Byregot has the falling platform, Rhalgr has the huge knockback on an uneven platform,
Azeyma has the triangle knockback and the fan dances, and Nald'thal has the meteor sequence, knockback/chariot combination, flip-flop mechanics, etc.

But I can hardly remember any special mechanics/attacks from this raid's bosses other than the time manipulation of Athylk.
It's just that this raid's bosses are very unmemorable, especially Menphina as the last boss. All her attacks are just cleaves, cleaves, and more combined cleaves; that's it.
Her moon beam attack (O12's eye) is only used once at the beginning unless the raid is so weak you can barely see it the second time.
Even Halone has a more memorable attack by breaking the alliance into 3 and also did the 4 consecutive cleaves that you have to memorise.

The filler mobs in between the bosses are also lacking. In Aglaia we have the bird with the 90-degree mechanic, and the 2 dogs with sequential attacks.
This time we get actual fillers. No mechanics whatsoever (unless you count behemoth's proximity attack).
It's such a waste of opportunity because aesthetically and musically I really like this raid more than Aglaia. It's a shame that the gameplay is bringing it down.

[Cpt_Jack_Irons]

I agree, the Devs pay way too much attention to the complaining that happens on this forum in regards to difficulty. A lot of players don't want the game to be a punishing hell hole of wipes that makes uber casual people quit, me included. But we also don't want the game to be a snooze fest steam roll.

I highly enjoyed the Orbonne Monastery difficulty when it came out, and people were.... wait for it..... actually communicating and collaborating in chat to defeat the boss. What a novel concept in an MMO. unfortunately, the disadvantages that came with that is that the content was dead after it wasn't popular anymore because noone wanted to run it and risk wiping.

Maybe the solution to this problem is to make it difficult like Orbonne Monastery while the loot cap exists and the raid is current, and after the loot cap drops in the same patch give it a 20% echo that makes it a snoozefest, that way people won't mind running it for new players in the future.

Surely their design can standardize a 20 minute runtime for alliance raids on average with Echo tweaks so people don't cheat their way into CT all the time. But while its the hot item. Give us satisfying raids please.

i mean to be honest it doesn't really help the fact that all the Ivalice raid gear was pretty mid glamor wise

[Iyrnthota]

Agree with OP on this one. I enjoyed the spectacle and the music, but the gameplay fell a little short for me.

I like to think I'm good enough to never struggle on Araids, so their "difficulty" is never really something I care about, but I just don't really find myself enjoying the fight in this one like I did Aglaia.

Aglaia I'd queue up for when bored cause I enjoyed running it with different jobs, but for Euphrosyne it feels a little more chore-ish.
Run it for the gear or the coin, then go back to running Abyssos normal in my spare time.

I think the mechanics are just kinda basic.

Like for Nophica, I quite like the whole "dance between the two circles" bit, but there's basically no variation there. It's 1-2-1-2 then 1-2-1-2-1-2-2. Mix it up a bit more, you know?
Althyk/Nymeia I quite liked the idea of, with two bosses to deal with and the combined mechanics, but again, it didn't really feel like they did much with it. Mostly just "this gaze/pushback mechanic will go off sooner". Nymeia might as well be an untargetable wall boss for the most part.

[Kaliesto]

I loved that fight kupo <3 the voice over was awesome..7 something 7 hells something 777 you won the circles jk kupo <3 but i did like the voice for his fight kupo <3

Rubs voice was...not what I expected but doable kupo <3

I loved joking around with the Alliances by saying at the beginning in a ominous text -

BEWARE THE THUNDER GOD.