Unreal vs Extreme

[Jeeqbit]

Honestly I haven't heard anyone praise the new raid design in game or claim that EW raiding has been their favorite. I think I have a theory as to why.

Oh, I'm not particularly praising the raid design changes, but the raids themselves are great. P5S is one of my favorites ever. This tier, P7S is the one I do for fun when I'm bored.

That's not to take away from how much I love P5S, it's just when you prog P5S for fun you're going to land in a devour prog party, a Ruby 3, Ruby 5, Ruby 6 prog party, dash prog or some prog.

In the last tier, P2S was what I did for fun. I thought they were all good in that tier overall, but the music in the first 3 was not exactly what anyone would be likely to put in the top 1,000 tracks in the game.

For extremes, my favorite this expansion would be EX1 followed by EX2, then followed by EX3 and then EX4. EX1 is something I remember fondly and would do again for fun, whereas it's nice that EX4 was fast-paced but now I've got my totems I don't wanna do it for fun. I'm not sure if SE will top EX1 and EX2 for me this expansion.

It's possible that SE has flipped the tables and started designing raids with balance at heart. And this balance requires big hit boxes, all jobs to perform about equally, and miscellaneous standardization to them. This is why fights all end up feeling kind of samey.

SE has just become aware of things they were ignoring in the past, like tiny hitboxes. They want to polish the game and make it intuitive. You see this in the old dungeon revamps. Fights that don't need to be adjusted to work for trusts are clearly being adjusted for another reason: to make them intuitive (which means obvious). In Keeper of the Lake, the closest dragon add was supposed to stay near the boss and the add near the back had to stay at the back or took reduced damage. People didn't know they should use the limit break on the add and that the add represented most of its health. So the fight was changed to be intuitive.

I agree with the increase in hitbox size, but this is a bit excessive. It benefits the DPS because they can do most mechanics without needing to stop DPS, but I don't think it's particularly necessary. I can give an example of a small hitbox size that worked perfectly fine and provided almost 100% uptime.

E2S, where if the tank positioned the boss correctly, nobody hardly lost uptime in the fight.

If the tank messed up, they lost a lot of uptime. See how if the tank had the boss up north it would be not so good for the melee DPS. But then the tank just needs to learn how to tank rather than the design being changed.

You mentioned Chaos and that's another great example, because so many of the mechanics happen near the boss. You do have the odd run away type mechanic, but guess what, P6S has that and if you run to the corner for it you lose uptime still.

[Ath192]

SE has just become aware of things they were ignoring in the past, like tiny hitboxes. They want to polish the game and make it intuitive.

I’ll be honest. They are polishing the fun out of the game. And as far as intuitive goes, it’s becoming so intuitive it’s bordering on obvious. No one likes obvious things. Maybe the first time it’s ok, but that’s exactly the sort of content you never revisit.

[Petite]

Oh, I'm not particularly praising the raid design changes, but the raids themselves are great. P5S is one of my favorites ever. This tier, P7S is the one I do for fun when I'm bored.

I also really like P5S. It's great for a first tier fight. All the mechanics are different to one another and require you run around the arena.

I hate P7S. If I don't skip it on a given week, it's to fall asleep on my keyboard. It's all non-mechanics until you get killed by a teammate messing up their Death/War positions.