The new 24 man alliance raids are a disappointment (mechanic wise)

[DarkMasamune]

I'm just disappointed the last boss used earlier bosses' mechanics instead of new ones (except for a few). It was underwhelming.

Otherwise the raid was OK, imo.

[Anarnee]

100% Agree. They started pretty ok with Aglaia. It wasn't hard at launch but it wasn't as exceedingly easy Euphrosyne and Thaleia were.

I love the raids aesthetically, and some of the mechs are really fun, but the raids were over all too easy for 24 man raids.

I was wondering if they made them so deliberately easy because they plan to make it part of the msq in the future... Either way it would have been nice to have them harder on release and then make them easier later instead of having them completely braindead at launch.

[Renathras]

(Also valid points)

Yeah, I think the community has gotten too tied up in the concept of "difficulty" or "hard" vs "braindead", but this is all kind of missing the point. With JUST a few exceptions, Jobs and encounters ARE harder now than they were.

The problem is, the hardness is mechanical, sterile, technical. It's not hard because of choice or thought, and if anything, seems to have removed a lot of it. Things are scripted, and so mostly the same every time. Most Jobs have pretty static rotations, with even the proc based ones having pretty rigid expected values of proc frequency and availability of things. It's complex in a technical sense, but not in a skill sense, per se, since it's not about the player choosing a best response from a slate of good and bad options, it's the player choosing the "correct" response, which is often very rigid, with all the other options being wrong.

That is, there isn't really choice, it's "did you fat finger the wrong button or not".

This is more Job design, but encounters are in a similar state as well. You either stood in the right spot or the wrong spot, and there are seldom multiple "right" spots. A simple example is Zodiark with the beast/birds/diagonal dash mid-to-late in the fight. There's exactly one correct spot you can stand and take no damage. And when you stand there, you take NO damage. There's the spot across the diagonal from it where you can stand and not get punted off the platform from the dash, but you'll get hit by the beast when it rotates to that location. You probably won't die, but clearly this was the "wrong" place. Then there are the other spots on the field where you'll either die to getting hit with both a beast and the charge's damage, or get punted off the platform from the charge outright (though you can Arms' Length/Surecast this, non-tanks would still die from the damage when it was current content).

That is, there's no player choice. You either did the mechanic correctly - and took no damage at all - or you did it wrong and died or lived but got one (or two) vuln stacks.

There aren't alternative ways to solve the mechanic for the most part, and this extends to most fights in the game. There's a clearly defined "correct" solution, but generally, nothing else. The only difference between "hard" and "normal" content there is whether the "wrong" placing of your feet kills you or not, and that "hard" content tends to have more body checks (though those have creeped their way into most content that is above MSQ level), and that "hard" content has enrages so your DPS actually have to push buttons somewhat correctly (see above on rotations).

There's a technical difficulty, but it's sterile and becomes stale as soon as the "new encounter smell" wears off.

I started a thread on Jobs here, https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...b-mechanically , because I've been thinking about this problem when it comes to Jobs, but in simple terms, I think it was that things used to be more flexible. There were "correct" answers, but the "wrong" answers included a lot more "good, just not best" type stuff, and there were more ways of dealing with problems. Now, we don't have that as much. It's one reason I do like SMN and PLD (and I guess BLM works this way, but I really don't like that Job): The player can shift their rotation around to deal with things. While minimal, it is a layer of choice which is absent in a lot of modern Job design.

I'm not sure the solution, but I think in both encounters and Jobs, it would be to return more valid choice to the players.

In Job design, this means having some choices that aren't "best" but are still close to best (not the best example, but imagine if SCH Ruin 2 did 10-20 potency less than Broil IV instead of 75, or 25% less - not necessarily that as the best example, but the point is, have "alternate thing still be mostly viable") as well as just wrong things. In encounter design, likewise, to have more correct options/solutions instead of things being so damnably scripted. And I get part of this is programming/AI limitations, but more fights that mix up order and execution of mechanics. While Seat of Sacrifice (Extreme) is ultimately a sequence of "mini-phases", it still gives a feeling of a less rigid encounter because the order they come in can vary and the phases are more than just Titania's Runes being "am I doing the doughnut or the point blank AOE?" or Hydaelyn's "Am I doing the doughnut or the point blank AOE or the plus sign shape?"

And hot take:

I think vuln stacks should be dumped. It's a mechanic that has outlived its usefulness. Hear me out. When people don't have any, they're super easy to heal, making healing trivial. But it has to be tuned THAT way otherwise getting merely 1-2 vuln stacks means death (and note that Humans making 1-2 mistakes in an encounter is hardly unheard of). If we must keep a "punishment" make it damage downs like Savage has.

Have safe zones that still do damage, have multiple safe/correct answers to mechanics, try to shift the order of mechanics rather than overwhelm players with visual diarrhea creating artificial, non-organic difficulty, have encounters mix up/randomize things a bit more (it's okay to have some rigid fights from time to time, but they shouldn't ALL be), and increase player choice and agency.

[fulminating]

Vuln stacks are a better option than damage downs. In well designed fights you can opt for melee uptime to have a bit more enrage buffer and eat a stack with the caveat that you need to mitigate a bit more next raidwide. Damage downs mean you have to solve the mechanic, usually in the intended way and instead lead to enrage being harder to meet if acquired. It provides the players semi meaningful choice instead of railroading into the timetable.

[Renathras]

Vuln stacks are a better option than damage downs. In well designed fights you can opt for melee uptime to have a bit more enrage buffer and eat a stack with the caveat that you need to mitigate a bit more next raidwide. Damage downs mean you have to solve the mechanic, usually in the intended way and instead lead to enrage being harder to meet if acquired. It provides the players semi meaningful choice instead of railroading into the timetable.

Right, but we're talking about 24 mans here, not Savages.

Not only that, vulns punish the healers, not necessarily the DPSers getting them, and Tanks can shrug off half a dozen anyway. And, as I said, it means that damage when you DON'T have a stack is undertuned from what it could be because they don't want 1 vuln stack to equal death to the next raidwide in non-hardcore content.

Damage downs (or even no penalty at all) would make more sense at this point than vuln stacks do for normal content. Or alternatively, Thrice Come Ruin like DR, though that again is more punishing healers than DPS/Tanks.

[SquishyPlushie]

I've said this before, but I guess it bears repeating again...

Pick one:
Timegate or Hard Content

[technole]

I've said this before, but I guess it bears repeating again...

Pick one:
Timegate or Hard Content

#3 Yoko Taro signing off on raids again, and threatening to destroy the data center servers.

[AmiableApkallu]

Not only that, vulns punish the healers, not necessarily the DPSers getting them....

When I queue into something as a healer, I expect and come prepared to actually heal people, and I expect that some fraction of my time in normal-mode content will be devoted to patching up the mistakes that others might make. Heck, when it comes to Bozja, I queue as a tank and still come prepared to heal, via Lost Actions.

Why am I supposed to feel that vuln stacks and <N-times> Come Ruin punish me?

[nguyentri11]

I wouldn't have minded the last boss using the same mechanics from the previous bosses if it actually used them in combination with each other. Like if they used Althyk's time acceleration tether to speed up one of Nophica's yellow or blue fields to go off before the other. Or if you had Llymlaen's tridents all drop at the same time to cover the entire arena but have Rhalgr's giant fist half-room AoE break half of them to create safe spots. I think combinations like that would have been fun and it's something I would expect from a fusion of entities. But instead the last boss uses the same exact mechanics we've seen before one at a time.

[Nanchi]

I personally base how good a new alliance raid is (in terms of difficulty satisfaction) on how many wipes we see in the first week of pugging. I still remember HW alliance raids all requiring some braincells to solve mechanics, not being too save, not too hard and thus leading to truly exciting encounters. I loved going into Mhach the first week and coming out of it thinking "Yeah that was satisfying to go through." But that excitement has lessened extremely ever since Shadowbringers. I really think it's a combination of jobs getting way easier to play and mechanics being more forgiving and requiering less brain power to resolve. This raid was a huge letdown, every mechanic presented was predictable and too lenient in how much time they give you to position yourself correctly, at times you spend several seconds just standing at one spot with the entire raid waiting for the cast bar of the boss to finally be done casting. It's really upsetting because Alliance Raids have been watered down to the same braindead content as experts run which you can essentially do in your sleep. There is no sense of being in a group of 24 people, you're just playing for yourself, dodging here and there and be done, no coordination, no strategy, nothing.