Euphrosyne feels a bit lacking

[Zaniel]

I have mixed feeling about this raid, it wasn't bad but it was, as you say, very by the book. The mechanics were mostly "dodge AOE cleave". All the post ARR alliance raids including Aglaia have been pretty creative with their mechanics and this fell short.

Also the spell effects/warnings/colours and so on were just a mess. While the zone and models themselves were utterly gorgeous the visuals of the combat were an epileptic's nightmare and didn't have the same "oh I see what this is doing" learning experience that other ARs have had.

I don't think Alliance raids should be nightmares of wiping and suffering given the story elements and diverse playerbase doing them but I think they went a bit too low with this one. On one of the bosses we had 5 people still standing at one point and they managed to revive everyone and keep going for a no-fail run when everyone was blind. The pendulum has probably swung a bit too far.

[Kaliesto]

This is another problem with Alliance Raids. The argument that everything needs to be as easy as Crystal Tower otherwise people will just dodge it is not a problem with the raid being too hard, it's a problem with Alliance Raid tuning in general. For the life of me I don't understand why they won't implement ilvl sync into Alliance Raids because it creates such a ridiculous gap between the 1st tier raid and the 3rd tier raid despite having the same rewards. Crystal Tower itself is a whole entire problem on its own since it's mandatory for MSQ. I feel like at this point it should just be separated into its own roulette.

Even worse is that it makes the older raids into jokes and you never get to play them as intended once their patch is over and everyone outgears them. Regardless of how you feel about Alliance Raid difficulty, who really thinks it's a good thing that you can just skip the balance mechanic in Nald'thal because he dies so fast? By 6.5 and onwards when people outgear the raid by 60-70 ilvls a new player will NEVER get to see that mechanic unless they do a PF group that runs min ilvl or stops DPS on purpose. The devs are just ruining their own content they worked so hard on.

When I was floating around in the Japanese Forum even they are complaining about Crystal Tower.

But yes i-lvl sync is one way to address this permanently or simply speed up every mechanic in this game.

[PangTong]

Sir, if you're gonna engage with me on the forums and wanna be taken seriously, I'm gonna ask one thing of you: Don't assume I'm implying something I didn't say outright and don't attribute statements to me that I never made. I've always made my Forum posts very clear and I don't talk between the lines, even for some controversial stuff. If you can do that, then we can have a discussion.

For the record: I barely raid Savage, I've never and will never do Ultimate, and I couldn't even handle Criterion Sil'dihn. So no: I'm not an elite player or whatever you wanna call it. I'm not trying to "gaslight" you or anyone. I can only speak for how I feel about my experiences. I've been in groups with plenty of wipes and groups with practically none when every raid was current content, so to me it always balanced to be somewhere in the middle. I'm not a "god" at this or at any game. Any more of that weird speech and I just won't bother to reply again.

Sorry if there was any offense, I was more just using your reply as an example of a comment that always seems to get made when past Alliance raids get brought up which is "they were always this easy". Which is just... not true. Like there's no other way to say it. The mechanics were not necessarily any more tricky, but they happened faster, there were more mechanics that required group coordination, bosses had more HP, and DPS checks were stricter.

As an example a very common mechanic in older Alliance Raids was for a boss to summon three adds that needed to be separated and dealt with by each individual alliance. There hasn't been anything like that in Myths of the Realm, instead if there is an add phase all the targets are rooted in place and players are free to just attack whichever they like, no coordination necessary. And it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people are dead because the ones left alive can usually kill all the adds with time to spare. Or take Agrias in Orbonne, where one alliance gets sent to the shadow realm and has to deal with adds, one alliance gets trapped in crystals, and the remaining alliance has to free the second alliance. That was cool! But they'd never make something like that now because it would be ruled as too difficult, too much responsibility.

This is not to say they need to bring back those exact mechanics, it's just an example of how current raids are different to how they were before. A decent majority of the group needed to understand the fight for the raid to progress. You could carry a few people, but in general you move on when most everyone has learned and contributed something. That's satisfying group gameplay, and it is more satisfying on an individual level to solve the fight instead of just watching as others drag you through.

[Carin-Eri]

Honestly reading these comments makes me bummed as hell about myself, because I find the latter two bosses extremely painful to understand telegraphs of. We did a 23/24 blind FC run and we all died a bunch, and in my second run a lot of the times on Menphina I'd no clue what telegraph I was looking for.

I'm probably just going to be called bad but I personally would have screamed if things were any harder or faster.

Yeah, me too. I've been playing for slightly over a year now. So far as I can tell, I've hit my skill ceiling and it is, sadly, very low - I've tried and tried and tried but I just don't seem able to either react to mechanics quickly enough and never actually remember the patterns. More often that not I just end up confused and therefore dead.
And I've followed advice, watched guides etc - none of which helps. Video guides are no help as I don't have the reaction speed of the person in the video. Written guides don't help much as I can't apply what was written into my gameplay. Practice? Yeah, definitely do that but again, my reaction speed lets me down.

I guess I'll be called bad too - which is fair, because I am - however, I can't help but agree with what DiaDeem said:

Unlike what some will tell you, difficulty in PvE content is rather subjective imho. What's easy for some may be hard for others and vice versa

but I feel that sort of objectivity is mostly lost on a forum.

[NekoMataMata]

Died a bit on Halone, but that was mostly just because I stopped paying attention. I could've easily just followed the group through the entire raid though. I'm not sure how I'd do with a bunch of fresh randoms but I was mostly trying to make mental notes of the cues as I ran around.

[DiaDeem]

Sorry if there was any offense, I was more just using your reply as an example of a comment that always seems to get made when past Alliance raids get brought up which is "they were always this easy". Which is just... not true. Like there's no other way to say it. The mechanics were not necessarily any more tricky, but they happened faster, there were more mechanics that required group coordination, bosses had more HP, and DPS checks were stricter.

As an example a very common mechanic in older Alliance Raids was for a boss to summon three adds that needed to be separated and dealt with by each individual alliance. There hasn't been anything like that in Myths of the Realm, instead if there is an add phase all the targets are rooted in place and players are free to just attack whichever they like, no coordination necessary. And it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people are dead because the ones left alive can usually kill all the adds with time to spare. Or take Agrias in Orbonne, where one alliance gets sent to the shadow realm and has to deal with adds, one alliance gets trapped in crystals, and the remaining alliance has to free the second alliance. That was cool! But they'd never make something like that now because it would be ruled as too difficult, too much responsibility.

This is not to say they need to bring back those exact mechanics, it's just an example of how current raids are different to how they were before. A decent majority of the group needed to understand the fight for the raid to progress. You could carry a few people, but in general you move on when most everyone has learned and contributed something. That's satisfying group gameplay, and it is more satisfying on an individual level to solve the fight instead of just watching as others drag you through.

All good.

As I told Harun, and what I think is true, is that what we're missing is variety in the presentation of the mechanics. I would love to see them go back to some of the stuff they were trying in Crystal Tower. Say what you will bout LOTA, but it's a very unique feeling when you know everyone has to work together when reaching the Atomos and the Agrias mechanic you mentioned was rather fun. I don't doubt they can still make something like this, being that CLL, DR and Dalriada are all fairly recent in comparison, but I guess they wanted to keep it straightforward this time.

So yes, NGL: Despite enjoying Euphy, I will agree that they could try to do more. That said, I still think the issue is more general with how they're making ARs more than just Euphy.

[Tint]

As an example a very common mechanic in older Alliance Raids was for a boss to summon three adds that needed to be separated and dealt with by each individual alliance. There hasn't been anything like that in Myths of the Realm, instead if there is an add phase all the targets are rooted in place and players are free to just attack whichever they like, no coordination necessary. And it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people are dead because the ones left alive can usually kill all the adds with time to spare. Or take Agrias in Orbonne, where one alliance gets sent to the shadow realm and has to deal with adds, one alliance gets trapped in crystals, and the remaining alliance has to free the second alliance. That was cool! But they'd never make something like that now because it would be ruled as too difficult, too much responsibility.

That's not exactly true. While they are rooted in place, the alliance has to split up and kill 3 adds in the Halone fight. The groups are then sperated by some ice walls. Also there are 3 damage split towers at the same time and I already got killed once because there were not enough people with me.

It's not super difficult or whatever, but the alliance should spread out for these mechanics. You can't heal though the ice wall. And you need enough people to kill the add in time of course. And the fact that the adds are rooted in place is also nothing new. World of Darkness had adds like that and many other alliance raids as well.

[Slayer25c]

The raid is is perfectly fine what u think is easy might not be easy to others I have did that raid many times this week I seen it all. When you have 24 people mostly looking out for their selfs mechanics are going to kill u.

[DiaDeem]

Yeah, me too. I've been playing for slightly over a year now. So far as I can tell, I've hit my skill ceiling and it is, sadly, very low - I've tried and tried and tried but I just don't seem able to either react to mechanics quickly enough and never actually remember the patterns. More often that not I just end up confused and therefore dead.
And I've followed advice, watched guides etc - none of which helps. Video guides are no help as I don't have the reaction speed of the person in the video. Written guides don't help much as I can't apply what was written into my gameplay. Practice? Yeah, definitely do that but again, my reaction speed lets me down.

Something you can try to do is ask a friend who knows safe zones if you can mark them with a Square of Safety which is one of the markers you can have, and just follow them as best as you can. Something you can try too, is see who's remained alive for a while, select them and pick Focus Target. You can do that with any player as only you will see the constant marker above them, and then you can follow them around. I've done this before sometimes. And as general advice (that worked for me) try to think of XIV as a dance you have to learn. Most fights are choreographed, so you can learn the dance by following friend or Focus Targeted player. Then you can start gaining more confidence next time you're participating in the content.

Best of luck!

[Alleo]

I agree with you OP when it comes to the fights themselves. I dont know why but it does feel a bit lacking compared to the first one.
I disagree about it being too easy. Balancing something like that is hard imo. I guess I got lucky and had quite a few people in the raid that already did it. Thus we did not wipe once. I watched some youtube videos from streamers and it was a wipe fest for some of them.

In the end, as you said, this content is meant to be run quite a bit. If its so hard that the mistakes of one group can bascially lead to a wipe it would get too annoying. Do you really wanna wipe again and again because one group is full of newer players while you are on your xth run?