Unreal vs Extreme

[Amarande]

The quality drop off in bosses and raid mechanics is really sad because everything is being sacrificed in the name of uptime, damage balance, and accessibility.

Honestly the game feels stale now a days not because we've been playing for a long time. It actually is becoming stale and people have less and less things to do in game because the game does it all for you.

I expect it's really both. We've been playing for a long time, and because of that, it's getting harder and harder for devs to find novel challenges - especially with such a small group size meaning that not every job can be included (the 8-man format is a real downer in a number of ways, between this and the lack of wiggle room for error which is a heavy contributor to the culture issues that have developed with raiding in recent years), but somehow every job more or less has to be viable (especially if we are going to continue having gearing systems where even though you can "play" every job, you can only gear up one or two per tier due to the shared weekly locks, and you more or less lock this in the moment you spend your first weekly tomestones).

Then you add the fact that many types of mechanics turned out during the early experimental days of 2.x to be unviable within the XIV's engine limitations (for instance, T5 and T8 showed that complex terrains are too exploitable), making it hard for SE to do much besides basic AoE dancing, debuff juggles (which themselves are problematic because of the server side system, often ending up feeling drawn out because of presumably the need to give the server time to register each step), and DPS races (which really bring the small group size and needing to keep jobs tightly balanced to the forefront).

Add to that the sheer number of jobs we have, and it's getting hard to keep everything balanced without succumbing to the "you must play meta" that almost every other game with small teams with large numbers of options tends to fall victim to.

Sophia is a much better fight than Rubicante for other reasons imo: She introduces all of her mechanics early into the fight and then remixes them, rather than backloading the actually fun mechanics as hard as Rubicante or for that matter Zurvan.

Yeah, reminds me of the difference between Stormblood and Shadowbringers fights. StB fights were almost always front loaded in this manner, and it led to a situation where things kept you on your toes while still being reasonably chill (the main one that I recall that did not was Shinryu Ex, and there's a reason this fight was a notorious salt mine).

But apparently, hardcore raiders whined about the fights being boring after halftime, so ShB decided to go with backloading, and it led to further inflaming the negative aspects of the community, because who wanted to deal with the likes of Black Smokers or, oh Twelve, Cycles?