Do encounteres FEEL different now?

[Renathras]

As much as everyone says that the game and encounter design have always been this way, I got to thinking...they don't.

I don't know about Savage since I haven't played it at level before EW, but people have said a lot of Savage fights are easier, more wall bosses, body check mechanics, etc. But I have played Extremes as my end-game content since SB (technically REALLY late HW), and collectively, they feel different to me.

Go back and play through the SB Extremes. They largely feel more technical, methodical. There's not the same emphasis on coordinated dancing, exactly, but the fights seem more structured somehow. Susano and Lakshmi, even later in the expansion with Suzaku. There were often large periods of transition and intermission in the fights, calm phases interspersed with them, and far less twitch reflex mechanics. Suzaku's "Simon Says" phase is clearly telegraphed and immediately understandable, and easy to execute on sight. Byakko's falling phase takes up a decent chunk of the fight and doesn't require any direct combat at all.

Even in ShB, fully in the "modern FFXIV paradigm", the fights were pretty different. The standard two X.0 fights featured one technical dance (Titania) and one more free-form encounter (Innocence), but the only really tight mechanics on them were Titania's add phase (largely due to a single 3-5 part attack that you had to manage while under the boughs of trees that would obstruction good portions of your view), and in Innocence's case, the tricky mechanic was where you HAD to blow up one of the stars correctly and it was a single point of failure if the person targeted didn't get the mechanic. Well, that and plyers sending their sword lines through the party. The last fight of the set, Diamond WEAPON, wasn't really HARD, just the damage output was somewhat high if players were in the wrong places. The only pass/fail mechanic was Limit Cut into Towers (I can't remember if towers adjusted for if you had less than 8 people alive when the mechanic started, but I THINK it did? Making it more forgiving). And during the Limit Cut section, LITERALLY nothing else is happening, allowing players to fully focus on the mechanic and executing it. Yes, people still mucked it up, but the pace of the fight was slow enough to allow for this.

Now then, we get into EW.

EW started standard enough; the two starting fights were one technical dance (Hydaelyn, this time) and one free-form fight (Zodiark), but they were...different. Hydaelyn was a lot harder for people to figure out on sight since "hiding behind cyrstals" wasn't something non-Savage players were at all familiar with. Generally, things on the field don't do much unless the players have control over placement (such as the rocks before Behemoth uses Meteor in Labyrinth of the Ancients). I remember many of my first runs, the entire party being completely confused why they were dying in those sections. Hydaelyn is also teleporting around quite a bit and there is a lot of running around by the party, including the two most wipe causing mechanics after the first Lightwave phase, Chackrams being a big offender (6.0 Expedience was amazing for this, though), and the final phase doing two sets of stack/spread during Lightwaves. And this was the more technical of the fights, which is typically the one with less movement.

Conversely, Zodiark...was Danger Dorito. A lot of people had trouble with the rotation mechanics, particularly the Snakes, but if you had a good Dorito, everyone could just hug their butt for the entire fight (other than the tankbuster/swap mechanic) and be fine. For the less technical fight, it required a relatively low amount of movement and pretty much zero coordination, which is why it was solo healed (and solo tanked) extremely early in the expansion's lifecycle.

But things just got weirder from there.

Patch 6.1 saw the introduction of the time traveling, multi-ring head insanity that seemed to catch a lot of people off guard. While HadEx and SeyuEx were both pretty challenging, the pace of the attacks along with the mechanics for this one was again a step up that seemed to throw a lot of people off, and the mechanics again seemed more confusing than anything, with guide creators writing various "cheat sheet" ways to remember that the ring arrangements meant and how they should be handled. Something we'll see again in Ex5. Overall, I only ran this a few times because...well, no one really WANTED to run it much after getting clears.

BarbEx was completely different again. While RubyEx had a fair amount of movement, the mechanics were mostly straightforward and there were large periods of time to attack the boss, as well as a checkpoint (which Emerald would also inherit). But BarbEx was different. The damage spikes and mechanics being thrown out were high pace and high intensity compared to the norms for Extremes. It was more akin to a Savage fight, and consequently, Savage raiders loved it, but it seemed far less methodical or technical than Extremes typically are, and had several points of failure and body checks, despite having a somewhat lax Enrage. It ultimately wasn't so much hard as it was an endurance fight of just dealing with a constant wave of unending attacks for 10 minutes straight with a few transitions to briefly catch your breath while also not being able to do anything.

Then we have RubiEx. This fight is just weird in every way possible. There are EXTREMELY long periods of downtime with no unavoidable damage coming out, yet the damage that does come out is often lethal if you DON'T avoid it. The maze game is much less understandable than things like Suzaku's field mechanic, which by contrast is super easy to identify and understand, and combines several annoying things together: (1) it's a slow mechanic in one way, since it takes so long to happen and the boss is doing LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE while it's happening, (2) it's extremely fast once it DOES happen, giving you little time once the platforms are actually all in place to determine the safe spot (again leading to guide creator "cheat sheets" like the M trick), (3) it repeats the rotating weirdness that seemed to throw people so hard in ZodEx, (4) but because so much of his fight is this one mechanic, much of the REST of the fight seems somewhat boring by comparison.

His only other big mechanic is all back-loaded where he does the expanding + attack (which doesn't even look like a plus once it opens into a box, throwing people off on trying to identify the safe spots as there's no kind of telegraph or normal mode equivalent) combined with stack and spread (which are only indicated by small debuffs -again, normal for Savage fights, but a-typical in Extremes which normally have more obvious markers on party members like BarbEx having the stack on a party member and 2x flare markers on the tanks), followed by a alternating stack or spread mechanic which is ALSO paired with the boss doing one of two attack patterns depending on a tell on his model (also something typical of Savage fights but less so of Extremes, though this isn't AS unheard of, like Titania's Rune attack, though in that case she always does one then the other so you always know what at least one of them will be), which he follows up with a body check mechanic (now that everyone's dead - hope you have a Healer up and saved the LB3..!) combination Limit Cut DOUBLE tether swap. As far as I'm aware, this is the most difficult version of Limit Cut in the game's history, but definitely the most difficult one ever in an Extreme, and it comes right after a body check.

Collectively, during this series of mechanics, RubiEx does the vast majority of the ENTIRE FIGHT'S damage and pass/fail mechanic checks, after about 6-7 minutes of standing around with a thumb so far up his butt that this fight has already been solo-healed WITH NO TANKS because a DPSer can "tank" his general mechanics as his damage output against his primary target is so low to render a Tank meaningless, and unlike BarbEx or even ZodEx doesn't seem to have any mechanics forcing a Tank swap or high mitigation.

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One of the distinctions in the past between Savages and Extremes was that Savages generally require people to die a bunch to piece together the mechanics while Extremes are more intuitive, and that Savages are more about proper and precise execution of the dance while meeting Enrage DPS requirements while Extremes are more about execution of slower paced, more understandable mechanics. While Savages often require twich reflexes and precise positioning, Extremes tend to be more technical and forgiving, and while Savages have long had mechanics that require full party coordination and single point failures (one person messing up likely causing a wipe and two messing up guaranteeing one), Extremes often have it where if you mess up, it kills you but GENERALLY not the entire party, with a few exceptions.

Extremes also tend to have smoother damage curves on the party, with less damage stacked all at once outside of some specific mechanic (Miztek often calls those the "whombo combo" of the fight, like the multiple tree attacks in Titania) that generally consist of 3 or so mechanics going off together, while Savages have this more frequently through fights in general.

But these Extremes often have multiple "whombo combos" throughout them, sometimes repeated several times, and even the non-combo mechanics often kill players and wipe parties, sometimes with and sometimes without these odd "dead" periods between them when nothing is happening. Further, the "body check" point of failure and collective party coordination has edged into Extremes. One can argue why this would be good (teamwork makes the dream work, and it's an MMO!) or bad (many people who don't have Statics run Extremes as their endgame - they don't have Statics, so they don't have that level of coordination accessible to them as they're dependent on what PF has "blessed" them with that day), but it IS a change. The pace of mechanics is either higher (all except Ex5) OR the mechanic sets up slowly but then executes all at once rapidly/faster (Ex5 in particular).

Finally, the biggest change seems to be that the mechanics are far less visually apparent/intuitive - something that USED to be a big distinction between Extremes and Savages. When the party needs to stack to catch the thrown tank in Byakko, there's a very clear stack marker. When the party needs to stack in RubiEx, there's not, just a small debuff on one player and small spread marker debuffs on 4 others.

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I dunno, there are a lot of words here, but the short version is:

Extremes FEEL different to me now than they did in ShB and SB. They feel almost like they're made for Savage raiders to do when they're bored, which is a different audience than the mid-core non-Static-having PF hero of expansions past.

It's almost like they tried to bridge the "difficulty gap" between Extremes and Savages by just making the Extremes harder like Savages and making the first boss of Savages basically the same difficulty. The entire reason I dipped my toe in Savage and did P1S (and then P2S, and two patches later, P5S) [...other than my OCD being annoyed I always had one ring slot lower ilevel than the rest of my gear] was because of friends telling me if I could do HydEx, ErikSav was the same difficulty rather than the customary Savage boss being a step up.

...but that hasn't made the situation better, it's just made it worse by making Extremes more of a chore.

And it also shows: While normally Extremes are PFed through the entire patch they're current, and often even in the next patch, now, after a few weeks of the patch coming out, people just aren't running these anymore in PF. You might see a few PF adverts, but it's 1-3 or so, often 0, where in the past, you'd see dozens and they'd fill and launch and new ones would pop up. It just seems like less people want to do the content, and people are just doing them for the clear/achievement and then MAYBE a couple more times for the weapon (up through Barb; with the Relics now no one needs to do Extremes anymore, especially since the Relics are essentially free), and people seem to have the mindset of "I'll farm the mount later when we overgear the content so it's less annoying to run."

Collectively, something just SEEMS different. I can't entirely put my finger on it (though the above is my attempt to try), but something just feels...different, I guess?

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Agree or disagree with my assessment on the changes themselves: Does anyone else feel this way? That something HAS changed in Extreme design?

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EDIT2: For the interested, considering this is a more general topic than just Healers, cross posted it to General to get a wider audience discussion: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...35#post6246235

[Semirhage]

I have disorganized thoughts, so I'll just stream-of-consciousness them. Having skipped about half of Stormblood, I barely raided that expansion. Friends went on hiatus, I'm not one to play an MMO alone, hated WHM's design direction, had an...unskilled AST "I only heal, I don't do any of that damage nonsense" cohealer (cool, so you'll take care of all the healing then? Oh, I see people dying still? Why am I outhealing you, you said that's all you do)...digression. My point there is I can't comment -too- much on Stormblood's design, other than that Lakshmi EX was so easy I wondered if we'd actually queued into the story fight for a moment.

I was around for most of Heavensward though. Didn't have a static for the back half, so I did Extremes casually with friends. Fights back then felt different for sure. Current fights feel, hm. I'm not sure exactly where to put my finger on it. Overdesigned? The body check mechanic critical mass is definitely a thing. Heavensward fights felt more steady. There were breaks between mechanics sure, but very few of them wiped your whole party if one of you screwed up. I think some of the outcomes are the same, but the way we get there is different. And the way modern FFXIV fight design does it feels "cheaper".

If someone fell off the platform in Sophia EX, you could Raise them and keep going. Modern FFXIV "hard content" fights you can do the same thing, but for somewhat different reasons. In Heavensward I guess it's because the next mechanic coming up needs to be done, but few of them will cause instant loss if one person steps a toe out of line. Now, you can Raise someone because there's a ridiculous dead zone between mechanics when the boss teleports to the center, starts casting for the next 10 seconds, then the mechanic animation swirls around for another 15 before the actual attack goes out. At the same time, if you didn't get everyone up for the next mechanic in Heavensward, it was rough. But you could probably make it with a little finagling. Now, the mechanic adjusts itself in a way that wipes your party for daring to only have 7 people around.

I think the biggest change that causes this is whatever they did sometime post-Heavensward (I don't remember exactly when) where they did an Akh Morn on all targeted mechanics to pre-empt sacrifice cheese. Back then, if you got a marker and died, the rest of the party had to coordinate and handle it but were otherwise fine. In modern fights, the mechanics all assume 8 living bodies, auto-retarget someone random if one of those 8 bodies dies, etc. So all remotely difficult mechanics behave like Akh Morn; if the tank dies after the second space laser, the dragon just starts blasting through the rest of the party instead of the mechanic being "over".

[WaxSw]

I think that's an interesting topic, fight have changed, they've become more streamlined and sterile and its clear they're trying to reduce the player friction among all the levels of play (massive hitboxes, damage downs in savage, bosses that reposition themselves or that are straight out immobile) but I don't think this discussion should be here. It fits more in the general discussion as its nothing healer related (more than saying how low X trial demands the healing and all that).

[Renathras]

...

Agree with all that, too.

So it's not just me. Glad to know that, at least.

EDIT:

I think that's an interesting topic, fight have changed, they've become more streamlined and sterile and its clear they're trying to reduce the player friction among all the levels of play (massive hitboxes, damage downs in savage, bosses that reposition themselves or that are straight out immobile) but I don't think this discussion should be here. It fits more in the general discussion as its nothing healer related (more than saying how low X trial demands the healing and all that).

I did start thinking that, so I posted it there after posting it here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...35#post6246235

...however, it got exactly one reply, which the person then deleted for...I'm not really sure why, actually.

Feel free to go there and contribute to the discussion there, though. I think this is actually an important topic that never gets talked about. And I think Roe's right on it - the encounters felt less sterile and more steady. Less lots of dead space and spikes of activity, less body checks, more forgiving but also more consistent, etc. Basically what I said condensed.

[WaxSw]

I did start thinking that, so I posted it there after posting it here:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...35#post6246235

...however, it got exactly one reply, which the person then deleted for...I'm not really sure why, actually.

Feel free to go there and contribute to the discussion there, though. I think this is actually an important topic that never gets talked about. And I think Roe's right on it - the encounters felt less sterile and more steady. Less lots of dead space and spikes of activity, less body checks, more forgiving but also more consistent, etc. Basically what I said condensed.

I see, nevermind then since it'll probably more active here.

Can't elaborate much due to time contrains but my point about Exs is that they've always been quite creative, however its clear that recently they're trying to sterilize them, especially when it comes to their main mechanics and the checks they propose.

For example lets compare them in a case by case with Shb so I can elaborate on what I say and kinda put in order my thoughts at the same time

EW Ex1 vs Titania and Ex vs Innoncence: None of them are particullary difficult but both fall under 1st Ex is the easy one while the 2nd is a bit harder but if you look at how they challenge the players you'll find several differences.

-Ex 1 vs Titania: Are both the "easy one" but if you look at Ex1, as you said, its danger dorito all the way basically because there is no party coordination involved more than a tankswap and stacking, meanwhile Titania already ask for light party stacks, tanks to be conscious of not cleaving the party with a cone tankbuster, add coordination while also proposing uptime challenges when the branches grow. I'm not saying X or Y are harder or not, I'd say they were both similar in difficulty but in that difficulty Ex1 removes player agency for a more automatic fight while Titania gives more control to the players and as such can create more friction.

-Ex 2 vs Innocence: First I want to rebute one point "Ex2 was a lot harder for people to figure out on sight since "hiding behind cyrstals" wasn't something non-Savage players were at all familiar with" this is not true, not only as you said crystal tower ask for that, but its a mechanic that is seen several times through the MSQ, a few examples that come to mind are "the burn" and "atiascope" the lv89 dungeon, but moving from that point. Ex2 and Inno like Ex1 and Zodiark are similar in challenge and their fight design are in fact much closer that Ex1 and Titania ,then, why I say that Ex2 is more sterile? Player responsibility. The main mechanics of Ex2 (basically the role attacks and the lightwaves) while being far more player involved than Ex1 are largely automatic and don't ask for any kind of individual responsibility more than self preservation and the ocassional tank movement/tankbuster meanwhile innocence is not afraid to make individual players choose where line aoes will hit but this goes all the way to even allowing the players to decide which safe spot to create in the latter parts of the fight. Once again both are similar in difficulty but its clear which of the two gives the least to the player to play with.

-Endsinger vs Hades: Honestly I don't think I need to elaborate on this one, Endsinger as an Ex is a dissapointing one while Hades is almost a savage level fight with much much more mechanics and overall things going on, but even if we leave that aside you'll find how player responsibility is much higher on Hades than in Endsinger with stuff like flamethrower-like proteans, group divisions to take the ascians, the tether mechanics, etc...

The rest of the fights follow similar trends and if we compare them to the Sb ones the amount of things left in the player hands increase even further. If I were to put it in a pharse would be that the more into EW we are the less the fight is a dance between players and the boss and the more is simply learning the boss choreography.

On a Savage+ level the difference has been much more clear as they tend to be not that experimental as with EXs but to be concise we're now seeing an increase in body checks and mit checks (which has devalued combat raises), the 2 min meta and the increase of the dps checks, removal of player agency and also an increase in the mobility requirements of the fights which is creating an imbalance in the caster role (to the point that in TOP P6 BLM is the job with the lowest rDPS of the game at the 95% percentile and its below MCH in aDPS) but that would take more time than I have now.

[Renathras]

...

Oh, you can post in that thread - or both - I wouldn't mind trying to get that discussion going in there.

Ex1 should compare with Innocence - both are the personal action ones - while Ex2 compares with Titania. Most people in ShB also insisted Innocence was the easier one. The way my brain works, Titania (and HydEx) were easier, but that's because I can remember patterns and orders of things while Innocence and ZodEx require reacting to randomization more. And I stand by the light crystals thing. I genuinely couldn't think of any other fight besides Behemoth and Amon where you have to do something like that, and in BOTH CASES, the players choose where to make the rocks since they're targeted on the players AND they don't explode when interacted with another mechanic. I think the big problem there was how few people could tell that what happens is the crystals explode when struck by lightwaves. I honestly couldn't figure it out and had to watch a guide (Miztek's, I think) and was like "OOOoooh, THAT'S what's happening". Literally no one in any of the PFs I did in the first two weeks could figure it out. It's one of those things that's obvious once you know it, but a LARGE swath of the playerbase DID NOT figure it out on their own. Contrast Titania, whose mechancs were largely "stand in puddles" and "swap the teather" and "don't stand in the telegraphed AOEs" and "get out of the way of the spreading roots", all of which are both easy and intuitive. The water puddles had the timers on them so it was obvious they were ticking up to something, and in FFXIV, "tower" mechanics are so normal everyone gets the idea, not to mention the failure doesn't wipe all non-Tanks in the party instantly with a wave of damage, it spawns a big blue add and the puddle goes away so you can see why you needed to stand in them. Likewise, the fire stack mechanic doing less damage in water makes intuitive sense - water makes fire burn less. The only kind of tricky thing for hear early on is realizing which of the two Runes she's doing, the point blank AOE or the doughnut. [NOTE: You may be having more trouble with the comparison here since you're trying to compare it to Innocence instead...]

Innocence and Zodiark are largely the "self preservation", as neither fight requires party coordination other than stacking for the laser in Innocence and stacking for the multi-hit lasers in ZodEx. I think Innocence also had a forced Tank swap mechanic. Basically, Ex1 and Innocence are the parity here, with Ex2 and Titania, not the other way around. Talking in terms of mechanics, not necessarily difficulty. As I said in the OP, people in 6.0 frequently said HydEx was a Savage level fight, and honestly, I found Erik easier as long as you don't have THAT ONE party member that can't figure out Fourfold... <_< There's a lot less movement and tight specific actions in P1S than Ex2 I felt at the time, and still do.

I did also think it was neat that they made HydEx (goddess of order) a very structured fight and ZodEx (god of change) a more freeform one.

HadEx I do remember being intensely painful when it hit live. But it was MOSTLY more understandable outside of the add phase. Once people figured out the knockbak "take lethal damage" vs "be healed to full" business, it made a lot more sense and just relied on people not cleaving the Tanks while they were catching meteors (though I still wish the Healer in the cage could do SOMETHING other than go make a sandwich while waiting to be freed...). Ex3, on the other hand, to this day people still don't understand what's going on with the order and the music notes thing is totally random as far as I can tell and kind of hard to see since the trajectory angles can be weird on your screen.

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I'll defer to you on the Savages and Ultimates, though, for...obvious reasons.

[ForsakenRoe]

Shinryu EX on content slapped pretty hard I recall, so much so that people were ranking it as 'in between O2S and O3S' in terms of DPS check leniency/tightness, PFs were not having a good time with the mechanics there. If anything, it feels like EXs have, overall, moved down the scale to be more comparable to, at most, 'first savage fight', whereas before they were a crapshoot of being anywhere from 'barely qualifies as a normal raid fight' like Lakshmi (god what a disaster that fight is) to 'between 2 and 3 Savage, leaning towards 3' like aforementioned Shin, or Thordan

Difficulty has moved away from 'execution' and more towards 'puzzle solve' I think. I'm supertrash at Rubi and the circle crap, I cannot visualize it at all. But I had no issues with Barb because it's not a 'puzzle', it's more straightforward dodging orange AOEs and constantly getting blasted by Knuckle Drum. I think they need to go more towards Barb design, and stop doing puzzle mechanics so much that can be dorito'd. Rubi is super hard for me as previously mentioned, but as long as one of the other 7 players in the team knows how it works, then all 8 of us get through the fight fine. That's weird design choice to me, because it means I cleared the fight without 'understanding' it

[AmiableApkallu]

Difficulty has moved away from 'execution' and more towards 'puzzle solve' I think. I'm supertrash at Rubi and the circle crap, I cannot visualize it at all.

My disappointment with Rubi is that the solution to the second puzzle is always the same, and there are shortcuts for the third and fourth puzzles. So, they have all the pageantry of a puzzle, but far less of the actual solving that one -- or least I -- might expect.

[Renathras]

I think it was more variable, but the difficulty was different. Generally speaking, the big X.0 fight in Ex form (Tordain, Shinryu, Hades) are typically beastmode "Ultimate-lite", but the rest of the Extremes are often...not, though the difficulty can vary a lot like you said.

But looking at the launch Extremes as an example, Bismark/Ravana, Susano/Lakshmi, Titania/Innocence, Hydaelyn/Zodiark; there are some pretty different changes. Hydaelyn is probably the hardest at level of the bunch both to figure out and do at level and gear that it came out in. Bismark I don't remember being hard, though that was a LONG time ago, so much as it's just a long fight. Susano was the first Extreme I farmed at level for the mount from (Bismark's I got later in the expansion when PF was doing stuff like hard farming stuff for achievement Tank mounts and Ex mounts and such), oddly, I felt Lakshmi was harder than Susano. Huh. Zodiark is a matter of if someone in the party gets it or not. If no one does, it's borderline impossible since it's total luck if the party meanders to a safe spot or not, but if even one person does, then the Dorito saves the party.

I guess I just feel the older fights were more of a "steady strain" of sustained decent play, while the newer ones are tighter on the in the moment responses to big comboes of "throwing the kitchen sink" at the party, complete with badly telegraphed moves (no telegraphs is supposed to be a Savage thing, not an Extreme thing), then a body check to fail if someone messed up, but then have these odd downtimes where nothing happens and everyone gets bored trying to pump out max DPS to meet the Enrage.

Contrast that with something like Bismark or the ARR Extremes that often didn't even have Enrage to speak of in the modern sense and it's just...quite different.

Again, Extremes seem more like Savages now (and Savages...a bit less like Savages, oddly), but there's now a content semi-gap as a result.

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I think what I didn't like about BarbEx is there's just so much going on at once - Savage people love this, but there's no chill. Contrast with Rubiex or Byakko that were just much more...chill, I guess? A more steady pace. There are places in BarbEx where there are something like 5-7 mechanics overlapping in short sequence and a lot of forced movement. Part of this is toolkit evolution - HW had FAR less movement tools, so fights could be a lot more turret-friendly, and indeed, had to be - but I feel like that was better and more enjoyable in a lot of ways.

I'd love to see a poll of this to see what people overall feel, but as I said in the OP, it's striking how much less people seem to be running Extremes this expansion vs the past two.

[Post]

I guess the discussion's happening here too, but they certainly have a habit of putting in cheat solutions for newer fights with interesting puzzles. I'd argue this starts in StB when almost every extreme or savage mechanic would target you based on your job role and not on other, non 'meta' parameters.

I'm sure this is fine for designers, especially when it comes to making content that can be approached and cleared by anyone without much trial and error, but it feels lame when it's used as a cop-out for why you have to adhere to the standard party comp, and straight ass when you're trying to clear a fight using a team of BLUs.

My least favorite fight for this design paradigm was e7s. That fight had so much goddamn puzzle potential when I ran it on normal, and then it ended up having only 2 permutations in savage. What a letdown!

Actually, now that I think about it, I don't know that there has ever been a 'puzzle' in a fight that hasn't had some cheat solution. The first one I can think of is Sophia Ex and her Quasar comets always drop for a weak push if the sides are odd/even, and the odd side always has a blue (worth 3 reds). I get that they couldn't make the even side have a blue in a 4/3 split, but like, they never bothered to have 4 red 3 red or 4 red 2 red or even 1 blue 4 red or whatever. They even mentioned something about having more patterns in the Unreal, but she's exactly the same right down to the cheat solution.

Hidden for sorta meandering complaining about some extremes:

I for one am running less extremes in the current expansion because overall they're less fun. I can't quantify that, but just in general, beating the boss is less fun. The last Extreme I beat until I had all the weapons for (never cared about the mount) was in StB and was Byakko, and that was a chore because of the inordinately long interphase that wasn't even appreciably different than normal mode, so it quickly became boring to actually play.

I think Hades is as much of a letdown as Endsinger when compared with Thordan and Shinryu Ex. Hades is probably more fun if you've not seen the mechanics he does, but from where I'm sitting all his fancy mechanics were basically solved by 'go to your clock position.' If you need to stack with someone else its 'dps rotate cw to the next person' and if you need a light party it's 'collapse to your healer on your side.' That fight also had way too much goddamn downtime. They also kept the whole transition from normal mode, so we got to hear a crazed man yell three separate lines separated by like 3 seconds of silence every time he transforms. They kept in the same button mashing "event" that was stale since StB, and to top it all, they added a minute long extra cutscene where he just kinda gets red and gets two more hands.

Compare this with Thordan Ex who got a unique theme, a medley of Ishgard, Azys Lla and Heroes, and the entire fight is introducing mechanics that he combines in unique ways on the back half, and Shinryu who requires you to have 360 degree awareness for most of the first half of the fight, flings you across a gap, and creates a goddamn bridge for you to sprint across in the 11th hour.

Hades was just a huge, huge letdown. At least it introduced getting 2 totems per clear, a recognition that it took too long and a silent affirmation that Extremes basically only exist at this point to give people that love to collect shit a slightly easier time getting another glowy mount to throw in their sack.

From a design standpoint, if fights exist to be re-cleared they should lean towards 'fun to execute' standpoint, imo. Especially extremes, given the catchup/raid-ready weapons and mounts. If there are any fights that should be puzzle-it-out fests, it should be Ultimates, because nobody but the first people through a fight are going to learn the puzzles for real, anyways. Think of how much folks hated the Slime boss in the Copperbell, it's sorta similar.

Actually, now that I think about it, the fact that Unreals have entirely skipped Ramuh and Moggle Mog kinda shows that their design standards have shifted drastically away from their early game, huh?