SE, love the fight design but tone down the instant deaths a touch?

[Colt47]

I like savage in principle, having done it since the beginning of shadowbringers and watching it progress. But this last savage and a couple of the EX fights sort of got to the point that personal responsibility is ending up wiping the group rather than just punishing the individual and making the fight harder.

Shadowbringers fights were about as hard at the start but gearing up over the weeks made things easier even on e12s with points where the group could easily get killed off. With the way the difficulty progressed across the tiers this expansion, it was like devs decided that since they simplified the jobs they needed to push the difficulty on the fights themselves, so now there are way more cases where a screw up is a one shot on the tank, or a single person doesn't do a mech and the entire group dies off or struggles only to die a minute later.

This also increased the gap between normal and end game content even further than it was in shadowbringers, which already was showing some signs of the divide. Yes, mitigation matters MORE in this expansion than the last one, but this theme didn't do much to normal and did way too much to savage.

[Jeeqbit]

They don't have much in the way of instant party wipes in Extreme. The result? Everyone claims they are too easy; they can sacrifice themselves to solve a mechanic and get carried through it.

So who should they listen to. You? Or the people saying that doing that makes them too easy?

[Renathras]

They don't have much in the way of instant party wipes in Extreme. The result? Everyone claims they are too easy; they can sacrifice themselves to solve a mechanic and get carried through it.

So who should they listen to. You? Or the people saying that doing that makes them too easy?

Which Extremes?

ZodEx and HydEx aside:

Endsinger Ex has a mech that tends to kill people then a towers body check right after that: Wipe.

Barbarecca Ex didn't have any other than 2x Tank flares + party stack, which it does twice. If a Tank is dead, it's a wipe. If 2+ party members are dead, it's probably a wipe. Though you could push 1 dead non-tank (and non-healer) party member with enough mitigation. This fight was good since the otherwise body checks later in the fight (Mario Kart) scales down based on currently alive players. So it's the glaring exception.

Rubicante Ex has almost no mechanics for most of the fight, but then on the back end does the expanding cross pattern with 4x spreads and a 4 person stack that can quickly wipe the party. This is immediately followed up by an arena cleave (that easily kills people) and either party spreads or a full party stack, the former of those being fairly easily destructive to party members (if the cleave nicks someone, they die; if your friend isn't in the right place with you, you die; etc), and the latter of which kills people if too many are dead or got caught in the cleave. This is THEN followed up by Limit Cut, which is a hard body check if your group managed to limp through the former mechanics but have anyone dead. Rubi Ex was horrible for a lot of reasons, but the back-to-back-to-back either outright or near-body checks, culminating in a total body check, is awful.

Golbex Ex is the worst body-check fest in the entire game that I've ever played. Ultimates are probably worse, but this fight has, depending on how you count, 6-10 body checks...and maybe more. 2 man stack circles are used frequently, meaning if one partner is down, someone else is dying. While this alone isn't a body check, these mechanics are almost always (if not ALWAYS) followed up by one. The line meteors + 2 partner stacks are followed by flare/knockback/meteors, a hard body check. This hard body check is also repeated later. The in/out mechanics have either spreads or light party stacks, which CAN wipe the party if more than one person is dead or a key person (Healers) are dead and the parties don't readjust quickly. This also happens later with the ice walls where you have to go to one corner and form two light party stacks, making that a hard body check. Gales 2 is a hard body check, with two hard body checks within it (the stack and the 2 man circles). If a healer survives that, they can LB3, but that won't save the party if the party fails Gales 3 later since you won't have LB3 again by then. There is also another meteor/flare/knockback and another line meteors + 2 man stacks as well. Those are a LOT of mechanics that will either outright wipe the party if someone is dead or out of position OR can cause enough damage the party might limp through it, but likely will get wiped by the snowballing of things out of control over the next mechanic or two, and if they somehow manage to recover, the party will likely fail the Enrage anyway. Horribly badly designed fight. This should have been a Savage, not an Extreme.

Zeromus Ex is Barb if movement is decreased a bit. There IS a sorta body check, but it's more a positioning check (meteors). But this mechanic only happens once, I think. Everything else the party can deal with with one or even two people down, and the mechanics are usually fairly generous about giving you time to get into position and having enough time between mechanics after damage hits for the party to heal up and prepare for the next mechanic. Probably the best Extreme in the expansion in terms of pacing, damage, complexity of mechanics, and overall feel. It's a little hot, but fair.

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So I think it depends on (a) who you ask (some people think anything easier than P4/8/12S is "braindead") and (b) which Extreme we're talking about (GolbEx on the one end and probably ZodEx on the other). For my part, there are too many body checks overall, and there shouldn't be ANY in Extremes. If there are, it should be one mechanic done once relatively early in the encounter (unlike Rubi) so people can practice it and once they have it down, reliably see the rest of the fight.

If they want to cut down body checks, they probably have to remove non-healer raises and increase the cost of raising in general.

This makes no sense. We didn't have these rampant body checks in the past and we've had SMN Raises since ARR. Not sure how well to compare Raising's cost back then (before we had the static MP pools), but it wasn't an issue back then. Clearly we don't need this in order to not have them now.

[Saraide]

snip

Meteors on zeromus is the complete opposite of a body check. You can sac strat this mechanic deliberatly or even just on the fly.

[Worldofwarcraft]

IDC about other people. I want them to make the game for me. Listen to me exclusively. I want less instant group death mechanics.
I'm being serious btw this isn't me being sarcastic.

[KageTokage]

I honestly felt like I enjoyed the unreal versions of the ARR/HW trials more then most of the modern extremes specifically because the punishment for failure largely isn't as harsh barring situations involving fall deaths or death walls, though they tend to compensate for it by making the DPS checks less lenient.

[Sebazy]

They’ve really designed themselves into a corner with this one.

Healers are powerful enough and resources are plentiful that simply dealing more damage as a failure mode doesn’t work in the current meta.

Either you throw out damage downs to the point where it stops you beating enrage or you one shot people.

The only alternative I can see that actually punishes sufficiently would be bringing back the old petrify punishment. That was a good one and I’m sad to not see it in a while. It generally meant you were going to die to a following mechanic but it also gave healers room to try and pocket you through it which was surprisingly good fun

[Jeeqbit]

Healers are powerful enough and resources are plentiful that simply dealing more damage as a failure mode doesn’t work in the current meta.

Or maybe you get an Abyssos situation where Yoshi-P directly upped the healing needed in response and people started saying healers were avoiding PF because it's too hard to heal in PUGs.

The only alternative I can see that actually punishes sufficiently would be bringing back the old petrify punishment. That was a good one and I’m sad to not see it in a while.

Doesn't feel that long ago.

[Sebazy]

Or maybe you get an Abyssos situation where Yoshi-P directly upped the healing needed in response and people started saying healers were avoiding PF because it's too hard to heal in PUGs.

Maybe that's because chunks of the more experienced veteran healers had already quit out of boredom by that point? Abyssos was like a year too late IMO.

(Source, my pretty decent view of Ragnarok's high end raiding FCs at the time).

[Colt47]

Or maybe you get an Abyssos situation where Yoshi-P directly upped the healing needed in response and people started saying healers were avoiding PF because it's too hard to heal in PUGs.

Doesn't feel that long ago.

Considering they are blind to anything they are doing until they get feedback is it that surprising? They literally followed this same pattern every expansion with boosting difficulty of the savage fights going towards the tail end of an expansion, and for some reason it didn't seem to occur to them that making instant party death on one guy failing on multiple potential mechanics was a bad idea, especially outside of an ultimate, with the way they handled the gear squish. The older shadowbringers fights had some mechanics that were party wipes if a person died, but they were more lenient with them as healers could generally raise someone multiple times without it being a problem, and gear really could turn a lethal into a non-lethal blow. This expansion is like dancing on a knife edge. Even self healing to full sometimes isn't enough to live through an AOE if no one mits, or puts people to near death and then sticks a bleed on them, so even if they live by like 1% they die because the tick is stronger than their current HP + second wind.

Someone commented that they don't know who to listen to on either making things hard or easy, but there is no point in even listening to the guys who want it harder. SE made the game easy to play, dropped the skill ceiling, and raised the floor. The only thing they can do is make fights instantly kill people for sneezing, or people walk through them like the content doesn't matter. It's just a bad way of doing things all around.