A Disabled Raider's Review of Patch 7.0 Duty Design

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

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EN

This is a LONG one. And unfortunately I was unaware of the limit of 20 images per post when I made my sections, so I had to split up the subsection reviewing the Patch 7.00 MSQ duties. Sorry, Japanese readers, I would have reserved more posts if I knew that in advance!

Introduction

1) Design Principles

2.1) 7.0 Duty Review - MSQ (two posts)

2.2) 7.0 Duty Review - Optional Dungeons

2.3) 7.0 Duty Review - Normal Raids

2.4) 7.0 Duty Review - High-End

3) Honey B. Lovely, Redesigned (this is the exciting example, start here if you want to see the principles in action)

JP

これは長い記事です。そして残念なことに、セクションを作ったときに投稿ごとに画像が 20 枚までという制限に気付かなかったので、パッチ 7.00 MSQ の任務をレビューするサブセクションを分割する必要がありました。申し訳ありませんが、日本の読者の皆さん、事前にそのことを知っていたら、もっと多くの投稿を予約していたのに!

はじめに

1) 設計原則

2.1) 7.0 任務レビュー - MSQ (2 つの投稿)

2.2) 7.0 任務レビュー - オプション ダンジョン

2.3) 7.0 任務レビュー - 通常レイド

2.4) 7.0 任務レビュー - ハイエンド

3) Honey B. Lovely、再設計 (これはエキサイティングな例です。原則の実際の動作を確認したい場合はここから始めてください)

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

Dear Respected Forum Master / Webmaster,

Would you please kindly forward this letter to Yoshi-P and the duty design team?

Thank you very much for your help.

Sincerely,
Aurelle

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Dear Yoshi-P and the Final Fantasy XIV development team,

I must first apologize for not bringing you this feedback more swiftly. I experienced health and safety issues with the graphical update, and was thus unable to partake of any Dawntrail content at all until over three weeks after the beginning of Dawntrail Early Access, when I found a postprocessing method that enabled me to see the game safely. As a result, I was unable to complete the Patch 7.00 Main Scenario Quests (MSQ) until the day before the release of Patch 7.05 and AAC Light-Heavyweight (Savage), so I judged it better for me to first complete the Savage tier and review all of Patch 7.0's duty design together and thoroughly.

I see that you have been working hard to bring players enjoyable duties, in particular responding to feedback about Endwalker's duty design. I am not advocating for a return to Endwalker's duty design, nor for making the game easier in general. In fact, I have completed every single duty available in Patch 7.0, and each and every one of them has made me bored in three completions or less!

I would very much like to attempt and complete harder duties, such as Futures Rewritten (Ultimate) (FRU) coming in Patch 7.11. Indeed, I completed The Omega Protocol (Ultimate) (TOP) during Endwalker, so it would be the logical next step for me to aim to complete FRU on-patch before the release of Patch 7.2.

But I will not get to do that, and may not get to complete FRU at all. And that is also because of Patch 7.0's duty design.

You see, I am a disabled player. Without getting into medicine or biomechanics that may be difficult for readers, especially in translation, my muscles respond slower than those of a "normal" human body. I have to use both arms through the shoulders in order to give inputs fast enough to play competently at all, and even then it puts a bit of a damper on my reaction time. Obviously not that much of a damper, since I can do TOP; but enough that during progression (practicing the mechanics of a high-end duty) I study the fastest mechanics more to learn to process them efficiently. Enough that I prefer to avoid reliance on "follow the leader" or callouts, and instead solve everything myself, because the extra delay from reacting to someone else's processing the mechanic can get my character KOed while everyone else makes it to the safespot. Enough that even with all the work I put in, I move like someone who has been slowed down by simple aging or high latency.

The vast majority of Duty Finder players could play with me and never notice. (I have often been "the leader" in Duty Finder, teaching parties the mechanics!) Even the vast majority of raiders could play with me and never notice unless I told them - though I do wind up telling raid groups sometimes, when they ask me to switch to a job I avoid raiding on due to poor input patterns for my body, or ask me to go past the raiding time limits I set to avoid injuring myself.

Why the time limit? Having seven other players' enjoyment relying on my giving all the inputs fast enough means that I hold myself to a higher standard. My body can only keep that up in a healthy way for so long; remember, I am already using both arms in full to play at all. I had to build up my stamina gradually when I started playing the game, and if I go beyond my baseline of raiding hours I will start having to stretch frequently, eat more and with a very particular nutrient balance, be more strategic about when I raid to give my body recovery time... just like an athlete has to when training intensively. (I cannot keep up hours beyond my baseline for more than a few weeks, either.) I sure notice the difference between me and an able-bodied player, because I am the one putting in all the work behind the scenes to still be able to play.

(Most people do not notice when meeting me on Earth either, unless tasks requiring high physical speed or high strength come up. I can hold a variety of jobs when offices do not insist on every last employee being able to lift heavy things or work unproductive overtime. There are some sports I can do for fitness, after consulting with my doctors. I can even drive a car - I passed all my road tests and my emergency situations training without knowing I was disabled, because my unconscious compensating skills were good enough on their own. (For example, it was years later that I found out that most drivers use their shoulder check as the first sign that a car is in their blind spot, not a confirmation check on continuously tracking the surrounding traffic.) There are lots of people whose disabilities result in worse performance than mine.)

Before Dawntrail, my baseline raiding hours were 9 hours a week. I had never gone beyond 12 hours a week until the very end of Endwalker, when I pushed to 14 hours a week in order to complete TOP before Dawntrail Early Access - despite progressing in Party Finder. At the time, I thought what I had to do for that was incredibly intensive. A rigid schedule of 2 hours every single day, not counting the time I spent practicing outside the instance using completion video footage and a striking dummy, with no days off. (Make no mistake, Party Finder does not make that easy - I had to tally up my time with each party each day.) Stretching not just immediately before, at the 1-hour mark during, and immediately after each session, but several additional times throughout each day. Eating ravenously and still having to carefully plan to pack all the protein, fats, and micronutrients into my diet. I even barely typed outside of my party chat, in order to reduce strain on my hands. Even with my Earth schedule allowing all these measures, the only reason I was willing to push my body so hard was that I knew I would get a natural recovery week - or two, if I needed it - from Dawntrail's launch and the accompanying MSQ.

Spending 9 hours a week progressing AAC Light-Heavyweight (Savage) was harder on my body in every way. Not just in stretching and food and sleep; Dawntrail was the first time my hands have hurt from playing any game, despite everything I do to care for myself. (I could not just stop as soon as I felt any pain, since the pain came afterwards - and took a full month of deliberate care to stop.) Dawntrail is the first expansion where I have had to contemplate applying my time limit to regular duties, not just raiding. Dawntrail is the first expansion that has effectively pushed my stamina down - rather than it slowly increasing with exercise - and caused me to seriously contemplate lowering my time limit to match.

In light of these results of Patch 7.0's duty design, I cannot know whether I am physically capable of completing FRU at all without personally analyzing the entire duty in depth - which I of course cannot do until well after its release, when large amounts of completion footage are available to properly understand the many possibilities arising from mechanic randomness. Likewise, even if I knew that I could physically do FRU at all, I cannot know whether it would be sustainable for me to do at least 9 hours a week of FRU progression without an even deeper analysis. (I was happy to commit to TOP and even Dragonsong's Reprise (Ultimate) (DSR) before their respective launches, because I had my baseline of 9 hours a week by the beginning of Endwalker.)

And with less than 9 hours a week, clearing an Ultimate in its launch patch becomes statistically highly unlikely, even with a static raid group (often shortened to "static") that goes from launch day through the remainder of the patch and uses its time efficiently. (I have spreadsheets that examine why this is, but the raiding consistency math is beside the point.) One simply does not get enough time to properly learn the mechanics to the high standards of consistency that Ultimate demands.

Knowing this, I cannot in good conscience commit to any static intending to complete FRU - and multiple friends have asked my interest in FRU statics! Doing so would be dishonest to the group and a disservice to my own health. I knew that even before you told us all to take care of our health when challenging FRU in Live Letter 83. And progressing an Ultimate through Party Finder in its launch patch requires even more hours per week, as I experienced with DSR: not just to compensate for time wasted in groups that are ill-prepared for the party's stated objective, but to keep up with the strong players who are putting in 30+ hours a week to complete the duty quickly. Fall behind them and one's parties start getting worse rather than better, and from there it is a vicious cycle.

So it is with great sadness that I find myself forced to sit out of FRU, at least until late in Patch 7.2 (when player interest returns after AAC Cruiserweight (Savage)) and possibly permanently. I have the interest in and dedication to difficult duties. I have the complete maximum Item Level Best-in-Slot set for SCH, designed for FRU progression rather than purely for maximum damage output, and the books to adjust the set if I want to. (And I can pick up weapons for other jobs if I want, since I have been repeating the Savage tier every week.) I even have the nostalgia for Eden Savage. But as much as I find myself bored by Patch 7.0's duties, my body simply cannot take the physical demands of the current duty design direction.

It is an unfortunate result of Dawntrail's overall design direction so far, both duty design and its interaction with job design, that the current duties are mentally very easy and physically very difficult. This is an exceedingly poor state of affairs for any game that is not designed as a form of exercise - and those games accept being limited to the niche of players who want that specific form and intensity of exercise. For an MMO that wants both broad and enduring appeal, this will not do. In the remainder of this letter, I will provide more detailed feedback aimed at correcting both sides of this issue.

Not just for myself, but for the many players who complained about the Strayborough dolls and the Honey B. Lovely duties - which garnered widespread complaint precisely because their mechanics are so heavily reactive that even young and able-bodied players find them frustrating. For the world progression raiders who are disappointed that they completed AAC Light-Heavyweight (Savage) in less than 10 hours, and the experienced raiders in general who find that tasks they have little trouble with are crowding out the interesting difficulty. For players who are forced to have slow reaction times purely by aging. (This game used to be considered "the retirement home for fighting game players" - a genre where the highest echelons of play do rely on fast reactions, and so top players outright age out of the genre!) For the players who unsubscribed a month or two into Dawntrail out of sheer boredom; combat design is not the only problem leading to such a precipitous drop in subscriptions that you saw fit to run a Free Login Campaign in the launch major patch of an expansion, but it is definitely on the list. (Yes, World of Warcraft released its own expansion, The War Within, but that was almost a month after Patch 7.05. Dawntrail got to show its graphics, story, and endgame first, so many more players would have stayed if it gave a good overall showing.) For the players who stopped saying "this is too hard" not because they adapted - they cannot adapt if they hit a physical or working memory limit - but because they were shouted down by other players or quit in frustration. (Notice that the interview in which you mentioned that was over two months after the start of Dawntrail Early Access. Even players who subscribe through time cards would have had the opportunity to unsubscribe by then, and would thus no longer be able to post here.) For everyone, really.

(I am not expecting you to change FRU's mechanical design at this stage. Surely it is already locked in by now. And Ultimate design is so exquisitely precise and interlinked that even if I had delivered my feedback upon Patch 7.05 launch, you probably could not have fully responded to it in time for FRU. (I have a great respect for the Ultimate duty designers, who take on the task of pushing us to our limits but not beyond them!) But I hope that you will be able to make use of it for Patch 7.3 onwards, if not also Patch 7.2 duties such as AAC Cruiserweight (Savage).)

In the interest of thoroughness, I have divided the remainder of this letter into three major sections. First, I will discuss design principles and overall style, with particular emphasis on those aspects where current duty design is falling short. Second, I will break down the Patch 7.0 repeatable instanced duties from my perspective, both the good and the bad, in order to provide many examples of how I experience mechanics. For those readers who find that tedious, I encourage skipping over the second section to the third: my complete redesign of Honey B. Lovely's duties, both Normal and Savage, to show the design style I want applied to a Dawntrail concept.

As I will be extensively discussing duty mechanics throughout the game's history, and sometimes their relationships to the lore behind the enemies, fellow players take heed: the remainder of this letter is full and open spoilers through Patch 7.05, including duties outside the MSQ.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

As a reminder, I am not asking for the game to be made easier in general, nor for a return to Endwalker's duty design. In fact, if I had to describe the duty design style I want by reference to expansions rather than principles, the closest existing expansion would be Stormblood.

(Note to newer players: Do not judge Stormblood's duty design style by how its duties play with the Dawntrail jobs, or even most of the Endwalker jobs. Duty design style must shape the duties to create the demands on the player from playing their job in the duty, as that combined demand is what the player will experience. The Stormblood jobs were significantly more demanding across the board to reach acceptable competence for every type of duty, from MSQ dungeons to Ultimates. On top of that, there are several forms of expansion power creep involved: better food and potions becoming available each raid tier, better effective gear from syncing down, lenience in the stat squish applied with Patch 6.0, newer expansion jobs having outsized potencies below their original cap level, and easier raid buff synchronization due to the "2 minute meta" implemented with Patch 6.0.)

Stormblood's duty design style aims to challenge players at every level of play. It is not just the expansion that introduced Ultimates, it is also the expansion that put trios - otherwise an Ultimate mechanic type - in an Alliance Raid (Ultima, the High Seraph in The Orbonne Monastery). The expansion that gave us the original Thunder God Cid, which has since been nerfed three times. (And two of those are because it dared to ask Duty Finder for Extreme levels of party coordination.) The expansion with the infamous MSQ solo instance fighting Sadu. The expansion that made tanks check boss buffs for Local Resonance / Remote Resonance and move Omega-M and Omega-F accordingly... in Normal Mode. Of course, it has memorable and iconic Savage mechanics too - Playing Field, Grand Cross Omega, Forsaken, Hello World - but it does not limit the challenge to high-end duties.

Remember Omega's motto: "Fight, win, evolve." As a duty designer (and as a job designer), you should be inspiring players to apply it to themselves.

Challenge is necessary to avoid boredom and spur growth. Accordingly, you can and must challenge players. That means having penalties for failure, as it is those penalties that create the difference between success and failure. Hand out the avoidable hits, the Vulnerability Up stacks and Damage Downs, the KOs, and even some party KOs in regular duties.

But the immediate goal of duty design is not for the duty to "win" over the player by pushing the player into giving up. The goal is not even to push the player into trying to complete the same duty indefinitely, since eventually the player will lose patience and give up - and "eventually" is not that many attempts for most combinations of player and duty. The goal is for the player to complete at least the regular duties and improve in the process, so the failures need to be motivating rather than demotivating.

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Which raises the question: what is the difference between a motivating failure and a demotivating failure?

We have some intuitive understanding of this, but we also have existing scientific research that can give us more details. From my previous writing on balancing the magical ranged DPS role, in January of this year:

I must make a brief detour to psychology. In particular, I must explain Brehm's motivational intensity theory, which has not only been tested in video games and held up, but overall has been replicated so extensively that Richter, Gendolla, and Wright's summary paper had to direct readers to narrower summary papers. For brevity and clarity despite machine translation, I will explain only the points of the theory that relate to the question of balance at hand, and I will explain via example.

Suppose a player is considering a goal with a fixed difficulty, such as completing a dungeon. If they had to do something ridiculous to accomplish that goal, like find three other people and teach them the game in order to have party members, the player would almost certainly reject that goal and find something else to do with their time. Likewise if they had to do something blatantly impossible. This illustrates that they have a maximum amount of effort that they find worth it or possible, which we call their "potential motivation" in the context of that goal.

However, even if the player can complete the dungeon within their potential motivation, that does not mean that they will put forth that maximum amount of effort - they may be willing to spend an hour in the instance, but if the party completes the dungeon in twenty minutes, they will not then spend the remaining forty minutes in the same instance pressing their buttons with no targets. (They may well spend it in the same instance exploring the environment, but that is a new goal.) Rather, they will put forth the minimum amount of effort needed to accomplish the goal, and no more than that.

This theory makes intuitive sense from the perspective of conserving energy. A rice farmer who insists upon moving to a desert and constructing new rice paddies there will probably produce no rice and starve. A rice farmer who insists on hauling their harvest back and forth for no reason, not even physical training, will not put themselves in a good position either. The many experiments confirming the theory show that it is very much correct - conserving energy in this way is an evolved imperative of the human brain, and games for humans must bend to it.

At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious: Motivation is all about the player's perspective. They are working with their own information, interests, and capabilities, not those of a duty designer or even a different player.

(In general within this letter, I would rather state something you already know than omit something and be misunderstood. It is all too easy to wrongly believe that some knowledge is already shared, and working through a language barrier does not improve the situation.)

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From the player's perspective, the effort they must put in to complete a duty is fixed but initially unknown. (The same is true of longer-term goals, such as completing the MSQ up to a fixed point or completing a Savage tier.) Before entering a duty, the player has an estimation of the effort they must put in to complete it, based on factors such as their prior experience with the game and their understanding of the available duty difficulties. If that initial estimation gives too high a chance that the effort they would need exceeds their potential motivation, they will preemptively decide "not worth it" and not even attempt the duty. (Which is often a good thing - this is what keeps players with no desire to raid from joining progression parties for high-end duties anyway. But it can also keep a player who perceives themselves to struggle with MSQ from pursuing optional regular duties such as Normal Raids and Alliance Raids, even if they would perform acceptably there.) If they enter the duty, they will continuously refine their estimation of the effort they would need based on the feedback from the duty itself, the effort they put in and the mechanical successes and failures they experience... and if at any point that refinement gives too high a chance of exceeding their potential motivation, they will declare "not worth it" and quit the duty in frustration.

Hence the first major design principle of this letter:

Every time you tell a player that they have failed something, they must correctly perceive a way to do better next time that will lead them to success within an effort they find reasonable.

(There are two exceptions. One is when dealing with the small minority of players who thoroughly refuse to learn, as they will do that no matter how carefully you teach. The other is in high-end duties that players can enter while woefully unprepared in prerequisite foundational skills, where it becomes necessary to tell unprepared players "this is not currently a productive use of your time" to discourage them from making themselves and their party members miserable. TOP is admirably designed in this regard: its first two phases carefully test many mechanical skills required for the later phases, so players who are not ready to tackle the later phases will generally fail out in frustration early on, rather than after their whole party has each invested several dozen hours into the duty to reach the special surprises.)

Allow me to go over this wording in more detail to present sub-principles.

"Perceive": The existence of a route to success does no good if the player does not understand at least the first step.

For example, it is well within casual players' capabilities to avoid KO from Judgement Nisi in Alexander - The Burden of the Father (A4N); they need only arrange their characters such that the two healers avoid contact with each other and all other player characters for the 30 second duration of the Nisi debuffs, and have the healers heal themselves periodically. (The Nisi debuffs start with one type on each healer, spread by contact, and having more than one type is an instant KO.) But casual players cannot be relied upon to read their debuff bar, even in the healer role but especially outside it - and that is the only indication of the Nisi debuffs in A4N. Thus, players whose characters are KOed by Judgement Nisi often do not perceive even the immediate cause of the KO, only that their character "mysteriously exploded". And they are correct about their own state of confusion!

Accordingly, they become frustrated at a penalty that seems out of their control, even though technically the duty has given them both a way to succeed and the information to discover it. If preceding duties had taught casual players to reliably notice when their characters are debuffed, then they would perceive the information given to them and take it as a clue. Likewise, if the Nisi debuffs had an additional indicator that casual players would reliably notice, such as the overhead markers in The Epic of Alexander (Ultimate) (TEA), once again they would perceive the information given to them and take it as a clue.

In the Patch 7.0 duties, violations of this sub-principle (and the next) regularly manifest in the form of mechanics that discourage the player from looking in the correct place to understand the mechanic, whether by overwhelming visuals, forcing the player to fight their interface, or sometimes even actively unhelpful non-diegetic cues. When that happens, the player enters a mindset of "try to constantly look everywhere", which is not a fun kind of stress. (Notably, it is not physically possible at high fidelity, due to the layout of the human eye where details require using central vision. Plus, the player has no way of knowing if they can relax out of that state without learning the duties.) In high-end duties, it can sometimes be appropriate to ask the player to figure out what information is mechanically relevant, but that requires too many attempts to be viable in regular duties.

"A way to do better next time": The player must learn something from every failure, but not necessarily a complete solution to the mechanic. The player's evolution is the cumulative effect of many small steps they take to improve.

If the player correctly thinks "okay, I got hit by this attack, I should watch out for where it comes from", that is acceptable. If the player correctly thinks "I misjudged the timing of that attack, I needed to move earlier rather than staying to deal damage", that is acceptable at low frequency; it is necessary feedback for a player developing their timing, but they will require long practice over many duties to significantly improve those skills rather than always moving early and cautiously. (Which is why so many players come to love snapshots at the end of castbars, despite the visual mismatch with attack animations - the castbar provides a fair and consistent cue to use in timing judgements.) If the player correctly thinks "I need to learn the duty timeline to plan for that before it appears", that is only acceptable in high-end duties; not only is the practice and memorization too much to expect for regular duties, but requiring advance knowledge of the duty timeline often diminishes the story experience of regular duties. If the player correctly thinks "I need a reference sheet for this mechanic", that is only acceptable if it is one small reference sheet for the entire duty, that they can write or draw out themselves rather than relying on a second device or monitor. (Which is why The Ridorana Lighthouse is acceptable - a dyscalculic player can write themselves one small reference sheet based on the notes in the instance before the "math boss" or given to them by other players.)

If the player correctly thinks "I moved as soon as I knew where to go, but I was not fast enough", that is only acceptable insofar as they perceive an actionable step to know where to go faster on their very next attempt and are willing to take it. (Which not only limits the speed one can demand of players, it largely confines such demands to high-end duties.) "Oh, this cast is always followed up with another attack in a corresponding pattern, I do not have to wait to see the follow-up" is actionable so long as you can get the player to notice the connection between attacks. "I should be looking at my debuff bar when this cast finishes" is actionable, but only reliably perceived in high-end duties, since casual players as a whole have not currently learned to reliably look at their debuff bar at all. "I should drill my planned movement sequence for this mechanic" is only actionable for players who already have such a sequence and are willing to dedicate external study time to a single mechanic, qualities you cannot rely on at all below Savage - and even in Savage and Ultimate, there are strict time bounds to that before the player gives up instead.

"I just have to react faster" is not actionable under any circumstance, and therefore not acceptable. Even the vast majority of Ultimate raiders will not perceive "make time in one's schedule for generic rapid processing drills, and keep that up over weeks to years for at most 10%-20% improvement, before returning to progressing the duty" as an option - and if you directly tell them to do it, they will balk!

Proposed changes to the player's Earth circumstances are almost always not actionable either. The speed of light and the Internet infrastructures of different regions introduce unavoidable latency, but that does not make "move to live beside the servers" actionable unto the player. (Indeed, players may have moved away from their original region due to a variety of Earth circumstances, but not be able to move their character without losing various server-bound features (like housing!) and/or the ability to play with their friends on that region's Data Centers.) Even "get a VPN" may not be actionable for a player on a tight budget, let alone "change Internet Service Providers" or "find housing that allows for a hardwired Internet connection". Likewise, "get a better computer / console beyond the declared minimum specifications", "play on PC to use accessibility third-party tools", and "get another monitor to flip through many diagrams" are not actionable on budget grounds.

"That will lead them to success": The player must succeed eventually, rather than getting stuck in a dead end or an infinite regress of failing by ever-slimmer margins, or you will exhaust their potential motivation and they will give up. Simple enough, and another reason players find the prospect of "just react faster" demotivating - they often know intuitively that training reaction time reaches a dead end eventually, and are loath to invest heavily into it without knowing if they can improve sufficiently.

(Puzzle mechanics are an interesting case here. From the perspective of a player aiming to solve the puzzle, some reasonable directions for potential solutions may be dead ends, and that may even be necessary for the difficulty of the puzzle. But a well-designed puzzle mechanic will give the player clear feedback on all wrong potential solutions - even if only with some random variations of the mechanic - that tells them their plan is wrong rather than imperfectly executed. That feedback is what prevents the player from getting stuck in a dead end even if they enter it, since it shows them to rule out the potential solutions in that direction eventually. As for that "eventually", see the next sub-principle.)

"Within an effort they find reasonable": The player's cumulative effort put into the duty, both every mechanical failure you hand them and every mechanical success they work for, must not exceed the effort they are willing to put into it. The player does not have Omega's relentless drive to evolve, at least when it comes to your game rather than their life as a whole. They can walk away at any time. You have to work with the time and effort they are willing to give you.

Obviously the player's definition of "reasonable effort" will vary massively depending on the context - just about anyone will be quite frustrated if they cannot complete a regular duty before its instance timer expires without advance knowledge of the mechanics, while raiders tackling an Ultimate would be understandably angry if they could complete one that quickly.

"Correctly perceive": If the player believes incorrectly that a way forward exists, they will try what they believe to be a way forward, continue failing, then give up. If the player believes correctly that a way forward exists but is incorrect about what it is, they will try the route they perceive rather than the route that works, adding to their cumulative effort spent. Accordingly, the further your intended solution is from the player's existing mechanical knowledge, the more extensively you must guide them to the answer. The easier you want the duty to be, the more extensively you must guide the player to mechanic solutions. This is why regular duties cannot have puzzle mechanics - Duty Finder's matchmaking cannot even guarantee the presence of a single player who can solve the puzzle in the party, let alone the patience from the whole party to wait - and all the most elaborate puzzle mechanics are in Ultimates.

But the implications are not limited to puzzle mechanics. The Duty Finder population can actually learn quite a wide range of mechanics, but teaching through regular duties must be done in small incremental steps. There, the player is trying to finish their quest or roulette, and does not have the interest in studying anything outside of attempts at the duty to learn a complex concept all at once. (A key point in which Shadowbringers and Endwalker did better than Stormblood is the guidance and teaching: using markers, NPC commentary, and sometimes even NPC demonstrations to teach players in those small pieces.)

"You tell a player they have failed something": If a player in some sense fails but perceives no penalty, it does not matter whether they perceive any steps to improve; they have no reason to take them regardless.

This is often a matter for job design, as duty mechanics are themselves pass/fail, but it is relevant to duty design where jobs create multiple degrees of mechanic success. If a casual player only undertakes regular duties and never actually sees an enrage cast, it is fine for them not to understand any steps they can take to increase their damage output without upgrading their equipment - including mechanic resolution techniques such as slidecasting for jobs with frequent cast times or gap-closing back to a boss immediately after the snapshot of a mechanic that requires leaving melee range. Not accomplishing such things will not frustrate them, even though it is "failing" relative to optimal performance. Should they choose to pursue greater skill at their job, whether to undertake harder duties or simply for intrinsic enjoyment, then they may come to perceive the downtime / lower potency output as a penalty, and at that point the rest of the principle once more applies.

This is also relevant to regular duty design when it comes to giving feedback to the player(s) who can act upon it.

For example, Alexander - The Fist of the Son (A5N) contains a "tank swap" mechanic: a series of attacks targeted at the player character with highest enmity that are especially dangerous if the same player character takes all of them, encouraging or requiring the two tanks in a full party to swap who has highest enmity in order to split up the series of attacks. In A5N, the relevant series of attacks is very slow, with layers of feedback. The boss, Ratfinx Twinkledinks, grows dramatically before using four individual Gobjab attacks, each of which inflicts a stack of Headache. The Headache debuff description reads: "Suffering mild head trauma. Damage dealt is reduced. Increased trauma results in a Concussion." If this does not clue the player in, the Concussion debuff makes the player character unable to act with a special animation, which becomes quite obvious to the player. Only after that does the boss use the Gobstraight tankbuster, which deals massive true damage if taken by a player character with Concussion, thus producing a KO. Tank swapping at any point between the first Gobjab and the start of Gobstraight will avert the KO, and tank swapping at any point between the first and fourth Gobjabs will avert the Concussion as well.

The biggest problem is that all of this feedback is given to the player whose character has the current highest enmity, the "main tank". The player who needs to act in order to take highest enmity, and therefore needs to receive feedback, is the other tank, or "off tank". (Nowadays, the main tank can Shirk the off tank, yes, but that will not actually swap the off tank to highest enmity unless the off tank already had at least half the main tank's enmity. And Shirk was added in Patch 4.0 Stormblood, so tanks did not have that option when A5N was current. The off tank absolutely had to be the one to act, in an environment of job designs where the easy ways to have high enmity involved sacrificing damage output.) And the off tank perceives none of this unless they not only look at their co-tank's debuff bar, but read what the debuffs do - which the vast majority of casual players will not do! They will perceive only that their co-tank "mysteriously exploded", and will likely attribute it to a failure of mitigation or healing.

Given this duty design, what must happen for the casual player off tank to learn to do better next time, without the unrealistic expectation of reading their co-tank's debuffs? First, the main tank (or another party member watching the whole party's debuffs) must work out that it is possible for the off tank to act to split the attacks. Second, whoever figures this out must tell the off tank that they failed the mechanic, which requires both social willingness and some typing speed. Third, the off tank must accept this rather than blaming another party member. Fourth, some party member must break down the relatively complex concept of tank swapping so that the off tank understands when to take the highest-enmity spot, how to do so, and that the former main tank will have to take the highest-enmity spot back in a future tank swap at some point.

Casual players see all of these steps as significant hurdles, and so A5N could not teach the Duty Finder population to tank swap. (Players pursuing high-end duties do manage it, because the expectations surrounding high-end duties create a player population that is more dedicated, expecting to put in more effort to learn, and willing to kick players who cannot or will not take feedback from others.) More broadly, casual players cannot be relied upon to give others feedback or receive it, so you as the duty designer have to give the feedback to players who can act upon it.

(Indeed, Heavensward is further from the design style I want than Stormblood not because of its attitude to challenge, but because it did worse at teaching players. Alexander - The Burden of the Son (Savage) (A8S) is the duty that convinced me to pursue Ultimate, because I thoroughly enjoyed the difficulty and the intense focus required.)

Want to teach casual players to tank swap? You can, but not like that.

First, create a marker for attack sequences that should be tank swapped, so that players have a cue to apply the concept in future duties before seeing the enemy finish the dangerous series of attacks. (That could be on the castbar, like the "interruptible cast" marker introduced with Patch 5.0 Shadowbringers, or it could be on the boss's current target like the various tankbuster type markers introduced over the course of Shadowbringers and Endwalker. Either offers the opportunity to give extra feedback on a successful swap, over the "target of target" HUD element or by moving the marker to the boss's new target.) Then create a solo instanced duty with an NPC co-tank who can instruct and demonstrate. For example, if you wanted all players entering Dawntrail's endgame to learn it, whether they currently play tanks or not, the solo instance could have been in the MSQ as an Echo vision of Wuk Lamat's combat training with Gulool Ja Ja. (Even players who dislike Wuk Lamat as a character can still come away with new mechanical knowledge, and it would fit the themes of the existing MSQ.) In that duty, have the player character be the main tank first, while the boss begins a very slow and flashy tank swap mechanic that will show the player the new tank swap marker for the first time. (A5N did the "slow and flashy" part right.) During the series of attacks, have the NPC co-tank comment on the danger and demonstrate a correct tank swap to the player, taking the end of the series of attacks and moving into position to keep the boss still. Then, after a short "spacer" period of familiar mechanics, have the boss begin the same tank swap mechanic again targeting the NPC, showing the player the tank swap marker for the second time. Now that the player has seen a tank swap demonstrated, the NPC can comment that the player character needs to take the boss's attention back, and the duty can even give a non-diegetic prompt as some solo instances do. If the player correctly takes the highest-enmity spot from the NPC during the mechanic and keeps it through the end of the series of attacks (using Provoke and their tank stance), give them some appreciative feedback from the NPC and carry on. If not, KO the NPC and start the duty (or section of the duty) over.

(Concepts building on that foundation, such as when to use Shirk and double tank swaps, could be covered immediately afterwards but are best covered once players have solidified the basic form.)

Do that, and they will try to tank swap when they see the marker again on their co-tank in future duties. (And since they have seen both sides, they will not be confused when another tank swaps off them.) They will likely not be quick about it the first few times, but that would have been a good opportunity for the first two Dawntrail trials to allow players to practice with Duty Support without any fear of embarassment. For some concepts, you really have to guide the player's hand to get casual players to pick them up.

"Must": Why not "should"? Because "should" creates temptation to put the responsibility back on the players instead of the game design, without first seriously considering how the game can be designed to improve the player experience.

If a casual player mistakenly thinks that Normal Raids are Serious Raiding and avoids them accordingly, that is not the community's responsibility to fix - that is your responsibility to tell them otherwise. (Players who complete the MSQ through Duty Support may barely talk to other players at all!) If a colorblind player struggles to tell the difference between the two types of fists in Alphascape V3.0 (Savage) (O11S) or TOP, that is not their fault - that is because you did not make the shapes distinct enough without relying on color cues. (Everything else in TOP is thoroughly distinct for colorblind players... in contrast to the tethers in Asphodelos: The Fourth Circle (Savage) (P4S) Act 2, which have no distinguishing features at all other than the colors shown over player characters' heads. Likewise, the orbs in Emerald Weapon (Extreme) are distinguished only by their colors.) If a player cannot complete the Active Time Maneuver (also known as a Quick Time Event or QTE) in Seat of Sacrifice Normal, or injures themselves trying, that is not their failure to learn - that is your design error in considering what pace of inputs the game should really require or make players think it requires.

And yes, I am aware that that particular QTE has a "fakeout" where the first 75% of the bar depletes rapidly to make the player think they are always on the brink of failure. I have seen the metronome demonstrations that it can be completed at 200 actions per minute (APM), even though it looks like the player is about to fail. I am aware that QTEs in this game do not require clicking specifically; any button that does not open a menu, send input to the chat window, or cause the operating system to take focus off the game will do. It is still an unreasonable demand to make of players, because your actual gameplay is not nearly that fast even on fast jobs, so it needlessly excludes players who are capable of the interesting challenges you want to set them.

Let us take a very fast job and work through the math. Suppose a player is able to do a perfect MCH Hypercharge window, hitting Heat Blast / Blazing Shot every 1.5 seconds and hitting a Gauss Round / Ricochet / Double Check / Checkmate evenly in between every Heat Blast. That is two inputs every 1.5 seconds, so one input every 0.75 seconds. Suppose the player is able to keep up this pace of inputs continuously, not just during the brief period of Hypercharge. One input every 0.75 seconds is 80 inputs every 60 seconds, so 80 APM. Even if the player uses only one hand for actions with animation locks (primarily job and role actions), leaving their other hand completely free for movement and targeting, and they are capable of the same APM with their other hand while keeping both hands perfectly staggered... that is still only 160 APM. A player can be comfortably able to play one of the fastest jobs in the game and still be physically unable to succeed at that QTE. (Or be at high risk of injury from attempting it repeatedly!)

And since the penalty for a single player failing that is an instant party KO, in an MSQ duty, that locks them out of the rest of the game.

That math pretty much matches my APM, by the way. I deal with QTEs in this game by giving up on controlling what keyboard keys I hit for the duration, and instead devising an elaborate method of hitting multiple keys with each finger motion by "rolling" each finger along one axis with staggered timings while "rolling" each hand along a different axis. (Note that this method will not occur to most players, and is very demanding on the player's motor coordination, which means that a player with limited APM is quite likely to be unable to do it even if they think of it.) And even then I nearly did not make it through the sustained input requirement of the Seat of Sacrifice Normal QTE. It is absurd that anyone who can clear an Ultimate was nearly hard blocked from completing the MSQ. This is a clear design error.

In contrast, the QTE in Alexander - The Heart of the Creator (A11N) is entirely acceptable, as it requires one input in several seconds to avoid an individual KO, and that capability is likewise required for even beginner gameplay. Likewise, the required use of the Omega Jammer in Alphascape V3.0 (O11N) is entirely acceptable even though failure generally results in a party KO, since the Omega Jammer has a 1.5 second cooldown and the party has significant leeway on the number of collective uses they need to form the shield. That does not require any more input speed than playing a very slow job casually, nor does it require better input cadence, and the players who struggle most can still be helped through the duty by their party members contributing more inputs. They match up to tasks that are both much less demanding and inherently necessary for core gameplay, so you already have a good reason to require them.

Since QTEs are not used in this game for anything mechanically interesting, you could have an accessibility setting to remove them or turn them into single button presses like the A11N one. Or you could replace them for everyone with forgiving cadence checks like the Omega Jammer, which would still function well to represent the player character fighting independent of their job actions. You have the technology. But you need to think about that sort of thing every single time, or design errors will slip through.

Every expansion has various good mechanics, even Dawntrail. But having mostly good mechanics is not enough. It only takes one bad mechanic to ruin a duty. It only takes one bad duty to ruin a roulette. It only takes one mechanic a player simply cannot do to prevent them from continuing.

You must meet the bare minimum standard of the duty being playable without pain or undue injury risk every single time. It is simply the rigorous nature of the task.

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The first major principle comes of considering how the player's required effort estimation changes. What about how the player's potential motivation changes?

Well, what moves the player to enter a duty in the first place? Not the effort that they expect to put into the duty, but everything they expect to get out of it: story progression, power fantasy of playing their job, access to and power in later duties, access to other game systems and areas, cosmetics, light entertainment, personal accomplishment, socializing, completionism, ... Gear is either cosmetic, for access to and power in later duties, and/or a form of accomplishment. Gil is similar, though it can also be used for non-duty gameplay. The meaning of an in-game item comes from the journeys we take for them and/or with them, without which they are just pixels.

And from the player's perspective, the total rewards of completing a duty are fixed but initially unknown, just like the required effort to complete the duty. (Even if they know how many times they must do Expert Roulette to get all the tomestone gear they want, they do not initially know how much and what forms of enjoyment they will get out of the duties or the gear.) So they likewise continually refine their estimation of what they will get from completing a duty, changing their potential motivation. If their potential motivation drops below their estimation of the required effort to complete the duty, they will also declare "not worth it" and quit the duty - depending on the cause, this can be out of frustration, boredom, or apathy.

Hence the second major design principle of this letter:

When trying to make the game challenging, do not lose sight of making it fun throughout. You must challenge the player to avoid boredom, but you can only challenge the player in proportion to what they get out of undertaking that challenge.

Let us examine some corollaries.

The player is constantly refining their estimation of how much they will enjoy the game later based on how much they are enjoying the game now.

You cannot expect the player to persist in improving at combat for very long at all without giving them regular positive feedback of actually succeeding at something related to that improvement, even if the success does not take the form of a duty completion. Thus, especially for casual players, "fight, win, evolve" is actually the correct order of operations. The improvement comes by learning from failure, but it needs success too. Even Ultimate raiders get frustrated by spending hours on progression without doing the mechanic they are working on correctly.

Likewise, the player's estimation will naturally include factors outside of duty design, and outside of combat entirely. If the player is interested in the story, their finding Wuk Lamat poorly written will mean that you have less opportunity to challenge them in the MSQ, where they reasonably expect to see more Wuk Lamat for their trouble. If the player wants something specific out of their job, not having and funneling them into a job that matches that desire will make them get less out of duties, and so have less tolerance for putting effort into duties. If the player wants to play their Warrior of Light as a morally upstanding hero - which most players do - and considers the Endless to be people, forcing them to genocide the Endless has likely permanently put them off of all future storylines and the associated duties, even if they continue the game at all. Dawntrail has done rather poorly at giving players who are not already "good at combat" a reason to persevere.

(Personally, I started playing the game for the old crafting system, and pushed through my initial struggles with the MSQ duties to reach to new zones to craft and gather in. Indeed, I first started attempting high-end duties in order to prepare myself for future MSQ requirements, and then discovered that I prefer the planning-oriented design style of raiding and its encouragement of job mastery to any design style so far for regular duties. And that got me far enough to start seeing improvements in how I work with my physical limitations outside the game, which is an extremely strong motivation to raid. When it comes to player persistence, I am very much an outlier... and yet someone just like me who started playing today would not make it to the endgame at all. The new crafting and gathering actions are good for restoring rotation depth, but they are not nearly enough to sustain someone like me through the discouraging aspects of the Patch 7.0 MSQ duties.)

Of course, the player's expectations of enjoyment of future duties will be informed by the duty they are currently in, whether they complete the duty or not. (And the player almost always has some interest in completing future duties of similar difficulty if they have a healthy interest in the game - pretty much the only non-concerning reason for a player to lack that interest is pursuing a single Ultimate for glamour purposes.) Push the player too hard, and they will not enjoy the duty even if they complete it. And if they keep not enjoying a category of duties, they have good cause to give up on the category. This can arise from their party "carrying" them to completion, or in solo instances where the panic of repeatedly scraping by and worry about future duties push out enjoyment. Most players want to feel useful to their party, even in casual story-oriented play.

(When The Copied Factory first released with Patch 5.10, I struggled with certain mechanics and found them overly reactive. Having that experience once is one thing. Completing the duty several times in the first week, in order to get a specific gear piece for raiding purposes, and still having reaction problems with mechanics is another thing. When subsequent weeks still did not improve matters, I made a detailed plan for each such mechanic just like I did for final Savage floors, complete with prepositioning not only my character, but my hands, eyes, and camera... which resulted only in my character being KOed in the safespot instead of out of it. I then asked several raider friends to help refine my plans, including one who had already completed TEA, and none of them could suggest improvements.)

(At that point I had gone above and beyond to rise to the challenge, only to find that my initial impression of a reaction time problem was correct. So not only did I stop entering The Copied Factory, when The Puppets' Bunker released (with Patch 5.30) I refused to unlock it - to avoid further worsening my chances of getting a personally enjoyable duty in Alliance Roulette - and pointed anyone who protested on gearing grounds to my Eden's Verse Savage gear. To anyone who protested because they thought I would enjoy it, I replied "ask again when I clear an Ultimate." Not as a deliberately absurd statement, but as a logical conclusion: having already exhausted all the rapid ways to improve my practical response time by better planning and HUD Layout, the only remaining option was to undertake hundreds to thousands of hours of practice efficiently processing mechanics and hope for improvement... and already being comfortable in Savage, the only remaining higher difficulty that could show that improvement was Ultimate.)

(I knew full well that the other 23 players could carry me through an Alliance Raid even if my character spent the entire time KOed. I was even already playing a DPS. I was miserable regardless, and naturally unwilling to attempt the extended reaction time drills in the same duties that were making me miserable. Needless to say, the vast majority of players who see frustrating lack of personal improvement in a regular duty are not going to even attempt to fix that in Ultimate - they are just going to quit the game.)

It is also worth noting the game's repetition-based gameplay loop. If the player knowing all the details of a duty makes it boring - or frustrating - they will not want to repeat that duty. In particular, based on the Patch 7.0 duties:

• Delaying the first indication for what random variation of a mechanic the enemy is doing does not make the duty interesting or fun. It only teaches players to learn when that first cue appears and wait until then in boredom, despite the brief moment of stress from resolving the mechanic once the delayed cue is finally given. The result is a boring experience punctuated by brief moments of stress, and at no point is it fun. Even stressful and difficult duties can be boring; this is why I have been more likely to fall asleep in Dawntrail duties than those of any previous expansion!
• Movement sequences that push reaction within the sequence are not fun, nor are they interesting. The player is denied the opportunity to plan, and instead learns that there is no recourse but reacting repeatedly - with the result of being bored even during the reaction stress. (If you are expecting the player to get some sort of enjoyable adrenaline rush out of reacting, well, I do not get that, and the mixed player feedback makes it clear that I am not alone in that. It is annoying at best to people like me, and your player population has been shaped by the older turn-based Final Fantasy games, along with this game itself historically being quite lenient on reaction time for a real-time game. Anyone who does get a reaction thrill has lots of other options.) Instead, give the player the information needed to plan the movement sequence, and then ask them to execute it at a speed appropriate to the duty and intended effect of the mechanic.
• Making needed visual indicators difficult to see is anti-fun. (Mind that there are significant differences in style of visual processing even between able-bodied and fast-reacting players using the same console / computer setup! Plus a screenshot that gives a clear view of a mechanic is not an accurate representation of what the player sees with limited time, since the human eye does not have high detail outside central vision and various action effects briefly blur the screen.) For players with any sort of visual impairment, photosensitivity, reliance on rapid processing, or simply visual processing style you did not expect, it is an active detriment. And for everyone else, it does not matter either way. Have visuals that suit the lore of the duty, yes, but do it in a way that prioritizes visual clarity.
  (The word "needed" is important. The A8S Mega Beam obscured by explosions is quite fun, because it is actually a planning test - its earlier appearances teach the party that it is baited on a random player character, so they need only arrange their solution to the preceding mechanic to create a safe zone no matter who the boss chooses for the bait. Plus every duty has visual elements that are not mechanically relevant, included for other reasons, and those may be as subtle as the artist and/or lore writer creating them desires.)
  In fact, ensuring visual clarity makes for more fun mechanics that are easier to design. Why? Obscured visuals delay some players much more than others, while clear visuals eliminate that delay, therefore yielding a relatively uniform discernment time among the player population attempting the duty. (Many forms of obscured visuals also vary how much they delay the player based on random variations of the mechanic.) You can then plan around that discernment time when leaving time for other tasks in the mechanic, such as making a decision or moving their character. This gives you finer control of how long the player has for those tasks, allowing you to tune the challenge level more precisely while ensuring that it remains achievable.
• Adding randomness to a duty does not automatically make it more fun, or even less boring. To be helpful, the randomness must contribute to something interesting, while ensuring that all possible duty timelines created by random variation have a similar skill floor (required competence to complete) for every job. (Branching timelines regarding the order of mechanics, such as those in Alphascape V1.0 (Savage) (O9S) and Abyssos: The Eighth Circle (Savage) (P8S), are generally fine. (There is a limit, in that the player who puts in the effort to plan out all possible timelines reasonably expects to get to use all those plans before they stop returning to the duty.) Major variation in what mechanics are presented at all is prone to unexpected differences in skill floor, and therefore is best avoided.) Randomness in the wrong places can even make the duty less fun, by denying the player opportunities to plan uses of powerful job actions.

To reconcile giving the player an encouraging first-time experience with avoiding boring repeat experiences, encourage and reward skill expression so that the player will add more challenge to the duty at their own pace. Skill expression should be welcomed, not feared. (Which does not have to make fellow players feel bad, since the skill expression need not be clear to any player other than the one doing it.) This is tightly linked to job design, as it relies on the jobs to define what skill expression for each job is. Again from my previous writing on balancing the magical ranged DPS role:

The fifth problem [with relying only on the duties to provide difficulty] concerns the longevity of any given duty, even one of appropriate difficulty for the player. As I am sure you have experienced in raiding, one finds that any given duty gradually becomes much easier as one learns that duty's mechanics. Even if the duty incorporates randomness, one must still learn the variations to reliably complete the duty. In effect, familiarity with a duty lowers the skill floor of completing that duty with any given combination of job and equipment. (Though less so for jobs in different roles that have different parts to play in mechanics.) As a result, any duty that one can complete occupies less than one's full attention on subsequent completions, at any difficulty level from story to Ultimate, even without better equipment. What, then, can occupy the rest of one's attention in order to prevent boredom? Not the duty, by necessity - only the jobs can do so.

However, duty design can and should give the player both the opportunities and the tools to express their skill with their job. Having frequent cast times is what makes moving no more than necessary valuable, but it is duty design that can allow the player to know exactly where an AOE will hit so that they can remove unnecessary movement. (The Patch 7.0 duties have a recurring lack of floor geometry for the player to use as reference points.) Being limited to melee range to effectively attack is what makes staying close to enemies valuable, but it is duty design that can allow a tank to reposition enemies towards a safespot for a later mechanic. Having limited usage of mitigation and healing tools is what makes planning their use valuable, but it is duty design that creates the timeline and its patterns to plan around. (In particular for dungeons, fighting two packs at once - known as "double pulling" - is a form of skill expression. If you are going to deny the player that option for a given trash pack, you should present some other form of skill expression in that trash pack instead.)

Satisfying mechanics actively reward the player's skill expression, adding enjoyment and longevity to the duty. What makes a mechanic or player strategy satisfying to execute is not just the opportunity for the player to show their skill and/or knowledge of the duty, but also clear confirmation of doing well. An earlier mechanic leaving room to handle a later mechanic, or even being used to counter the later mechanic, because the party set it up that way. A spinning AOE dodge where the final hit comes almost but not quite to the player character's position, not by accident but because the player knows how far it turns. A healing and mitigation plan that effectively uses a cooldown exactly on cooldown multiple times in a row, because the party mapped out the fight timeline to make that happen. (This is not even limited to high-end duties - Eden's Promise: Anamorphosis (E11N) allows a magical ranged DPS to Addle three Burnished Glory raidwides in a row by using Addle early on the first Burnished Glory and then exactly on cooldown twice thereafter. Drift the cooldown and the last Addle will be too late.) And yes, sometimes a sequence that the party gets to watch resolve after they have set it up - a flashy sequence is a good way to let the party see the results of their work and create a breather before the next mechanic. The existing Dawntrail duties are sorely lacking in such mechanics, which does their longevity no favors.

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Since players have so frequently remarked on the demands on working memory and reaction time in Dawntrail so far, these two aspects of duty design deserve special attention.

Working memory mechanics are like soy sauce on sushi: a small amount enhances the flavor, too much overwhelms it. (Which is why the soy sauce is supposed to go on the fish, not the rice!) Totally aside from the appropriate difficulty of memory mechanics, Patch 7.0 has too many of them, crowding out other mechanics that could provide other forms of difficulty. The result is boring and repetitive duties.

As for the appropriate difficulty of memory mechanics, the player does have a working memory limit inherent to their brain, which they cannot change... and which they need to use for playing their job in the duty, not just doing the mechanics. (Yes, even for downtime mechanics - jobs still have healing, buff-based mitigation, and resource-building tools to think about.) The player finds a job and/or a duty less memory-intensive with practice not from expanded working memory, but from learning bigger "chunks" that they can work with fluidly. For example, an intermediate RDM can think "basic melee combo" for what a beginner has to break up as "Enchanted Riposte, Enchanted Zwerchhau, Enchanted Redoublement, Verflare / Verholy, Scorch, Resolution".

Plus the player cannot be expected to offload the task of remembering to their chat log - even if they have the APM to type in combat, they may be using a controller without a keyboard in reach or extra hotbar space for text macros. They can only be relied upon to have one tool for storing a duty-provided piece of information outside their brain, and that only if surrounding mechanics permit: moving their character to a location related to the mechanic, such as a direct or conceptual "first safespot". (Prior to Patch 5.2, the party as a whole could also agree on moving waymarks to remind themselves of the random variation shown, but since players can no longer move waymarks in combat, that is no longer an option for memory mechanics.)

What is the working memory limit of the human brain, then? Well, the classic "seven plus or minus two [items held in memory]" is at best an upper bound, and newer experiments best fit the idea that there is no fixed number of items at all, but instead pushing to remember more items results in less complexity and detail for each, until eventually there is too little detail to usefully be a memory. If all the items to be remembered are very simple and familiar, such as individual digits of a number, then "seven plus or minus two" is roughly accurate. (Indeed, telephone numbers without area codes provide a ready demonstration of that specific working memory task, called "digit span".)

While memory mechanics can often be broken down until the player only needs to remember appropriately simple and familiar concepts like "spread" or "left", the rotational chunks of the jobs are not that simple - and making them that simple would be terribly dull. So we must take the low end of "seven plus or minus two" - that being five items - and set aside not just one item, but at least two and possibly more, for the player to continue playing their job. (As well as potentially more room to plan ahead for other mechanics!) Therefore, the total of "stored items not yet released" from memory mechanics may never exceed three simple items at any point in a duty's timeline, and should almost always be less. If the player has a good working memory, they can and should occupy themselves with their job, looking for hidden patterns, planning for later mechanics, ...

Examples:

• Some recurring sets of mechanics where the boss randomly choosing one counts as "one item" for a memory mechanic: {spread / pair / light party stack / full party stack}, {left / right / front / back}, {in / out}, {Deep Freeze / Pyretic}.
• In Eden's Promise: Eternity (E12N), the stored primal combination ground AOEs count as two items, since first-time players will generally remember the primals individually and work out the overlapping safespots. In the Savage version (E12S), the same primal combinations start as two items and end as one item, since the player will see them enough over the course of progression to memorize the overlapping safespots and work with those rather than the individual primals. (And for a final Savage floor, if the player is having problems with how fast they remember the safespots, they can actively study the five possibilities outside the duty, which does not take that long.) FRU would be able to treat them as one item from the beginning, due to the high expectations for external study and number of attempts at the duty in Ultimate.
• In Seat of Sacrifice Extreme, Quintuplecast looks like it violates the three item rule. However, the party can arrange themselves to do the whole mechanic in their clock spots for the Absolute Stone III proteans and close to each other (and the boss) for the Absolute Holy III stack, which allows the player to not bother remembering where those attacks are in the sequence. The remaining three attacks perfectly fit the three item rule, even if the player is not comfortable reconstructing the last attack from the previous two.
• Mascot Murder, the Living Memory World FATE against Mica the Magical Mu, is in flagrant violation of the three item rule. First the boss prompts the player to remember cards (all numbered from one through six) and displays six cards covering the arena, putting the player up to six items to remember as the boss hides these cards before the next section of the mechanic. Then the boss draws a card out of its hat, which the player must match to the cards covering the arena, though they stay at six items to remember since they can move their character to the matching card. (Though later repeats of the mechanic drop puddles on player characters after the hat cards are shown, which can drive them off the card in the arena if they are not careful about how they dodge.) Then the boss draws a second card out of its hat, which the player must again match to the cards covering the arena, and this time they have to remember the location as a seventh item. Then the boss draws a third and final card out of its hat, allowing the player to match the drawn card to those covering the arena once more before dropping the memory of the latter. Depending on how fast the player does the matching, they may briefly jump to eight stored items before dropping down to two. (Finally, the boss asks the player to answer which card it drew first, second, and third, with later repeats doing so in a random order and with other AOEs in between.) But even seven is wildly unacceptable, seeing as they are playing their job the whole time and not just doing a digit span test!
  Just because World FATEs are casual duties and players who struggle with working memory can be carried, that does not make it appropriate to make them miserable! (In my experience there is a hidden pattern (that the safe cards on the arena floor do not share any edges), but that does not matter - not only does the player need to have a good experience before finding any hidden patterns, but noticing them is harder under high attention demands.)

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As for reaction time, I wrote about this back in January, but I must expand upon what I wrote:

The second problem [with relying only on the duties to provide difficulty] you have also already experienced with Anabaseios Savage, but more subtly: there is only so much you can demand in duty mechanics. A player can only react so quickly, move so precisely, focus for so long, and so forth. They cannot improve these attributes much by "natural" practice once they have learned the basics of gameplay. And even a player who is dedicated enough to undertake deliberate and thoughtful practice on these attributes will only have so far to go before they run into the hard limits of their body, including their brain. Running into such limits as a player feels awful, especially if it is due to disability or being outside the human body's brief physical prime - a concern for both the aging MMO playerbase and the family members they may want to share the game with! (As a disabled raider, I could talk about this all day, but that would be outside the scope of this series.)

Both regular duties and Ultimates have been grappling with these limits for years, and Extreme and Savage have gradually started facing them too. (For one example, consider Anabaseios: The Tenth Circle (Savage) and its Jade Passage orbs. The fact that they appear within the Pandaemoniac Ray animation and fire shortly thereafter makes them quite reactive, especially when they are later combined with Daemoniac Bonds adding more flashy animations and movement requirements. This sort of design even encourages players to use third-party tools to remove the flashy animations or otherwise get information more quickly, and Anabaseios Savage is full of it.) Players have already started remarking on the fast pace of duties.

These physical attributes limit not only the range of battle mechanics you can make, but how hard you can make them, and how hard you can make them if you want high-end duties to be possible outside a brief player age range. If you refuse to place difficulty in the jobs, these same limits will extend to how difficult you can make the top end of the curve at all, and not in a satisfying way. A player who is currently stuck on an aspect of skill they can improve may aspire higher, reach further, remain motivated to play. A player who is stuck on a physical limit and knows it - or sees the highest difficulty held back by other players' physical limits - is necessarily demotivated, for they know that no amount of effort they can put into the game will fix it.

When I wrote that, I was imagining a continuation of the game's slowly increasing pressure on reaction time over the course of Shadowbringers and Endwalker. I was not expecting Patch 7.0 to take a flying leap into more reactive mechanics! (Especially since your engine and the inherent latency of long client-server trips do not suit reactive mechanics well.) In this regard, Patch 7.0's duty design direction has been the exact opposite of helpful.

Obviously this is a real-time game, and therefore requires the player to meet some standard of reaction time. (If a prospective player sets up their HUD Layout and keybinds to their liking, and still cannot react to a basic ground AOE in less than ten seconds, they probably do have some limitation you cannot reasonably accommodate.) But the real-time nature of the game only requires the player to meet a fixed standard and stay there - it is not necessary to demand that the player react ever faster. Indeed, demanding that the player react ever faster is only useful in niche games that are designed as reaction time trainers, since even action games will eventually have players hit their physical limits. Since Final Fantasy XIV is carrying on the legacy of the originally turn-based Final Fantasy series and attracts many "non-gamers" to play with their family and friends, a generous reaction time standard is best for the game even aside from the aging MMO playerbase.

Why, then, is it intuitively correct that the updated version of Copperbell Mines paces its mechanics slower than The Royal Menagerie (Shinryu Normal) and The Ghimlyt Dark? After all, all those duties are required by the MSQ.

• The player cannot be assumed to start the MSQ with familiarity with video games in general, let alone the genre specifics of tab-target and holy trinity MMOs. They can be expected to pick those up over the course of gameplay. In Copperbell Mines, they may still be getting used to the sheer volume of information on their screen, along with foundational concepts like "class / job", "party", and "target". You can show them something slowly, but at that point you cannot rely on them seeing it at all! By The Royal Menagerie, not only are they used to the game's basic systems, they have built on their fluency with foundational concepts to be comfortable with recurring mechanics like "stack", "tankbuster", "raidwide", "add", ... Without any change at all in their reaction time, they understand more quickly what the duty is asking of them because they are better able to organize the information given to them and fit it into their existing concepts.
• The player starts the game with the default HUD Layout and keybinds, which are almost certainly not ideal for them - and may even be downright difficult and counterintuitive to them. (For example, nothing in the game tells the player to try both Standard and Legacy movement modes.) In Copperbell Mines, they may well not know what to consider in setting up the interface to suit them, and may even still be slow with their movement keybinds. By The Royal Menagerie, they have gotten used to their interface and looking over it, even if they stick to the default rather than adjusting it for themselves.
• One way to improve and maintain the human brain's generic rapid processing is real-time video games. Like this one. If the player does have any easy improvement in reaction time available to them, they get it over the course of the early MSQ and other regular duties!

Out of all these reasons, the only one that continues essentially indefinitely is expanding the player's library of game-related concepts, the mechanical layers of which are also known as "mechanical vocabulary". The average player in Stormblood duties will handily beat the average player in early A Realm Reborn duties in mechanical vocabulary, overall game familiarity, interface comfort, and reaction time. The average player in Dawntrail duties will handily beat the average player in Stormblood duties in mechanical vocabulary, but nothing relevant to their speed at dealing with mechanics.

Accordingly, Dawntrail duties can expect the player to make better guesses about what the duty is asking of them during their first time, use their existing concepts more effectively, pick up new mechanical concepts faster, ... than they did back in Stormblood. But the player in Dawntrail duties cannot practically respond to mechanics any faster than they did back in Stormblood. Indeed, one reason that Stormblood is the closest existing expansion to the duty design style I want is that it is the last expansion before mechanics that were still too fast even with practice started creeping in.

Some players have complained of mechanics being too reactive and feeling split-second, and other players have replied that the game does not actually give the player less than a second between presenting the first cue for a mechanic and snapshotting whether the player character has completed the necessary action(s) to resolve the mechanic successfully. While that latter statement is true, it is not a useful response to player frustration for two reasons:

• There are many steps other than the player's conscious perception of time to decide / react between the server sending the first cue for a mechanic and the server checking whether the player character is in the correct state to resolve the mechanic successfully. Those include the server sending the packets indicating the cue to the player's game client, the client system's latency in processing those packets and giving the cue to the player, the player's sensory nerve conduction time, for visual cues the player moving their eyes to focus on the cue (unless they are already looking at it or trained to manage it by peripheral vision, whether by planning or accident), the player's sensory perception processing time, the player's motor planning time converting their decision / reaction into nerve signals, the player's motor nerve conduction time and muscular response, the client system's latency in processing the player's input, however long the player character takes to perform the required action(s) (such as moving over a distance) client-side, and finally the player's game client sending the packets indicating the completed action(s) back to the server.
  Subtract all those other steps out, and the player may well be left with less than a second to decide / react even for a completely individual mechanic, and be accurately reporting that length of time! (For mechanics that involve acting relative to the party, including such basics as stacks and spreads, there are more steps unless the party has prearranged positions.)
• More importantly, [B]it does not matter to the player's motivation whether they have actually hit the hard physical wall of minimum reaction time imposed by their body. What matters is whether they have hit the soft wall of the practical reaction time they have now[B], such that their wanting to do better next attempt is not leading them to an actionable way to improve - and if they are complaining, that is already the case! (If they perceived a way to improve that they consider reasonable and actionable, they would take it instead of complaining.) Remember, motivation is all about the player's perspective.

When I find something too reactive now, I probably really am hitting my hard physical wall. But if you ask a player to jump through all the hoops I did to get there, they are almost certainly not going to oblige you. They are instead going to say "that is ridiculous to expect me to think of, let alone do" and quit.

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Let us examine what it means to avoid pressuring the player's reaction time in different types of duties through an example.

The basic spread is an A Realm Reborn mechanic, that has recurred over and over again in both regular and high-end duties. It recurs so often that it is the very first marker you teach in the new section of Hall of the Novice added with Patch 7.10. So why has the Duty Finder population never mastered it after 11 years? Why will experienced players still sometimes get their characters hit by two or more spread AOEs in regular duties, and even occasionally have a slow party KO by stacked spread markers KOing all player characters who can raise?

Because Duty Finder does spreads by reacting to each other, and asking the player to react to another player's choice will always inherently pressure their reaction time. No matter what fixed standard of reaction time you or I desire to set, one player meeting it in such a situation will give their party members less warning - and thus less time to react - due to client-server delays. The player improves up to a point by learning heuristic guidelines like "run away from other party members" and "let those with frequent cast times stand still", but that route will never save them from getting stuck in a loop of adjusting to another player. Even continuously tracking the positions of every party member will not lead to perfection.

(Client-server delays are not the only reason for adjustment loops. People do experience them face-to-face, classically when trying to pass each other in a hallway and both moving the same way. But the resolution is usually much smoother in a hallway - there is no "I was ahead of you on my screen!")

In contrast, the Party Finder and Raid Finder populations spread perfectly, even players who are new to high-end duties and doing their first Extreme. And this is not because the players in Party Finder / Raid Finder are better at the game - Duty Finder matchmaking can put a party full of world-class raiders together, and they still might fail a spread in that environment! Why is this?

Because Party Finder and Raid Finder do spreads by planning, not reaction. The party agrees upon a spot for each player character to go to, and they expect each other to go to their own assigned spots. They may react to seeing the mechanic appear again in progression, but they are not reacting to each other. (And they can make such plans for regular duties if they please, as world progression groups used to do back when Normal Raids were released alongside their Savage versions.) In fact, trying to react to each other instead of following the plan is often frowned upon, with phrases like "never adjust".

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More broadly, regular duties must be designed for the Duty Finder population and player expectations.

Imagine the "worst reasonable" party that Duty Finder could matchmake together: all first-timers with no foreknowledge of the duty, all at minimum Item Level, only casual knowledge of their jobs, no knowledge of how to plan for specific mechanics even if they want to, never met before, some returning to the game, others tired and under-hydrated after a long day of work and/or caregiving. (Yes, the latter will make their reaction time worse.) They are all trying to finish their quest and continue the story attached to the duty, and they are a little impatient. They are trying their best in the moment, but not looking beyond the moment, and they certainly have no grand plan of personal evolution.

That party should generally complete the duty before the instance timer expires, and if they do not complete the duty they must correctly perceive that they have come away with enough knowledge to individually queue back into matchmaking and get it the next time. Either way, they should enjoy their time spent in the duty. Challenge them - perhaps even hand them a few party KOs - but without discouraging them from continuing the story. As a result:

• Duty Finder does not prepare outside the game, and rarely prepares outside attempting the duty. Part of why the Hall of the Novice update is so welcome is that "try this solo instance" is about the limit of what casual players can get each other to do, even when the whole party is cooperating. (After all, the player may be on console without a separate device to watch videos or browse guides.)
• Duty Finder is perpetually operating on reaction, since first-timers cannot plan for what they have never seen and even players who complete the duty frequently are unlikely to have its timeline memorized.
• Duty Finder's practical response times are not fast, so the player needs a generous lead time and long periods of information visibility. They are not looking in the right place when the duty first gives them the information they need, they have never actively thought about how they can efficiently move their eyes between information sources in the interface, and they will take time putting it all together - which have so much impact that I often beat my matchmade parties to safespots. (They may also be looking away from cues entirely in order to raise or read party chat.) I have even been regularly beating able-bodied and experienced healers to raising KOed party members in current duties ever since I settled into endgame, despite that being a reaction test that is not even from the duty timeline - because I have taught myself to notice KOs while keeping my party list in my peripheral vision, and they have not. (Sometimes my party position tracking is enough to alert me of the impending KO before it happens, and I can target the player character and use Swiftcast before they even go down on my screen.)
• Duty Finder does not prepare for specific mechanics, as a natural result of not knowing what mechanics are coming. This is why Thunder God Cid did not work out and had to be nerfed: getting three player characters into each tower and getting all of the six Shadowblade AOEs to avoid overlap are more advanced versions of spreading, and thus reliability requires planning who will go where in the Party Finder and Raid Finder style.
• You can get Duty Finder to do a tightly limited amount of general preparation - roughly one thing that is useful without foreknowledge of specific mechanics - before players run from the starting area of the duty in impatience. In Stormblood, that one thing was "wait for the healer(s) to cast Protect on every party member." In Heavensward and A Realm Reborn, that also included waiting for Stoneskin if the party had a CNJ / WHM. In an alternate timeline, that one thing easily could have been agreeing on "clock spots" via a macro or around a waymark, that would then be reused for a variety of mechanics just as Party Finder and Raid Finder do now. (If you really wanted to, you could still do that, but it would require a substantial amount of teaching players new expectations from Hall of the Novice up.)
• Duty Finder requires most mechanical mistakes to allow for recovery and duty completion within that attempt. With no plan and no foreknowledge, they are not going to reach the standard of making very few mistakes per attempt in any reasonable period. As such, mechanics should be carefully examined for what sorts of mistakes can result in an immediate or delayed party KO. Most mistakes should not even guarantee an individual KO for players with good equipment, healing, and mitigation.
• Duty Finder accepts only infrequent penalties for its lack of preparation specifically. The player, so long as they are reasonable, will not be angry at their party members or the game for occasional stacked spreads and similar mishaps. But they will get frustrated by too high an incidence of such things, so mechanics that invite such mishaps are ill-advised.
• Skilled players in Duty Finder will have a completely different experience than the baseline, and it is up to you to make sure they also have a good experience by giving them opportunities and rewards for skill expression. Do not neglect those opportunities in even the easiest of duties. As I have explained regarding healer design and magical ranged DPS design, anything that is appropriate to put in front of casual story-oriented players will not challenge a party that is comfortable in Extremes, let alone Ultimates. (And even the "worst reasonable" players will have a very different experience the 90th time they see the same dungeon in Expert Roulette.) Since your gameplay loop puts all those players in regular duties, that different experience is either going to be occupying themselves with skill expression or it is going to be boredom. Simply completing the duty faster is not enough - strong players can do that while falling asleep by already-acquired skills alone. This is why I made a point of bringing up the connection to job design and satisfying mechanics.

This same approach is why the casual player does not learn complex concepts unless the game (or a fellow player) takes the time to break down the concept into small pieces and teach them that way. Their tracking of effort and reward is long-term, but they are only willing to put in effort in the moment. Guide the casual player to one step at a time, and they will climb a mountain. Set a hill in front of them with no explanation, and they will perceive it as a wall.

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In contrast, high-end duties must be designed for the different expectations of players tackling them. The player still likely does not have any grand plan of personal evolution, but they do have a plan to improve at the duty in front of them. While Duty Finder lives in the moment, Party Finder, Raid Finder, and statics live in the future: job performance standards, party coordination, advance planning based on the duty timeline, practicing their execution of those plans in progression... and for putting more effort in, they expect more rewards out in how the duty treats them. Not just rewards in the gear, but in the gameplay experience of the duty itself.

(Of course, there are degrees to this. A player in Extreme probably remembers their plan for a mechanic upon seeing the castbar and executes it with some hesitation, which is the right general idea of planning, but not nearly enough for Ultimate plans. For example, consider shielding TOP's final iteration of Wave Cannon correctly on SCH: in both cases the party must move around extensively during the Wave Cannon castbar due to Alpha Omega's preceding mechanic, so the correct time to cast the first shield without expending Swiftcast is during the preceding castbar while looking at the preceding mechanic's cues, planned carefully not to be so early that the shield expires before absorbing damage. (Raising is almost useless there due to the structure of the Dynamis buffs, so one can expend Swiftcast to shield without much of a tradeoff, but it is more fun not to.) And then the second shield must be in place 6 seconds after the first shield is fully used, in which time the SCH must also move and help heal the party back to full HP, so the slightest hesitation will lead to a party KO. Oh, and they must also remember the other mitigation that the SCH and the party as a whole must apply to every hit, regardless of what cooldowns they have planned to use where. The whole plan is based on knowing when each of Alpha Omega's attacks will land before they even begin, and it is a delight, but a player new to high-end duties will not be doing it.)

• In high-end duties, the player expects and wants to prepare outside attempting the duty, including for specific mechanics. Remember the community reaction declaring Deltascape V1.0 (Savage) (O1S) too easy because the world first completion took only a single attempt? It is too easy for Savage, but let us be precise: the world first team was able to complete it in a single attempt because they could use their brief exposure to the Normal version and their general preparation to do the Savage mechanics by reaction. They had good reaction times on their side - that is a physical attribute world progression teams select for - but that would not have averted a party KO if the duty had forced them to make a mechanic-specific plan. (The very first time I entered O1S, without a timeline, I could not do its mechanics on reaction, but I could see exactly why the world first team could.) Nothing in O1S demands a mechanic-specific plan, and that makes it too easy for even Extreme.
• In high-end duties, the player's practical response time for a mechanic improves significantly over the course of learning that mechanic, and more so the more extensive their planning. Here the player can plan to always be looking in the right place when the duty first gives them the information they need, to move their eyes efficiently between information sources, to preposition their character for the possible random variations of the upcoming mechanic. They can work out how different sources of randomness combine in advance. They can practice executing their plan efficiently and without hesitation, even if they never actively think about prepositioning their hands or distilling animations down to the first visual cues.
  TOP provides an excellent example of this in the opening to Run: ****mi* (Omega Version), popularly known as "the Predation Dodge" due to its resemblance to Ultimate Predation in The Weapon's Refrain (Ultimate) (UWU). Those readers who are unfamilar with TOP can see many examples of the Predation Dodge in real time, courtesy of Sausage Roll's study playlist. Without knowing that the footage is from TOP, the casual player observer can tell that the mechanic is not suited for them; they may not identify it as an Ultimate mechanic, but they understand that putting it in Alphascape V4.0 (O12N) would be a miserable failure. And they are correct - even though every single one of those AOE shapes is known to and manageable for the casual player in Alphascape Normal, as is the notion of AOE combinations! (Omega-F casts her cross AOE, Optimized Blizzard III, and her "Hot Wing" front-to-back-line-safe AOE, Superliminal Steel, in O12N. Omega-M likewise casts his point-blank AOE, Efficient Bladework, and his donut AOE, Beyond Strength, in O12N; in fact, the safespot for Beyond Strength is bigger in TOP to accommodate the combination with Optimized Blizzard III. Both have the same weapon tells in O12N that they do in TOP. (They do cast their AOEs simultaneously in O12N too, though there their positions and facing are dependent on the tanks' choices and the combinations are more limited.) And while the casual player does not get to fight Final Omega, they have seen the hourglass AOE sequence with the same safespots in Alphascape V1.0 (O9N) as Latitudinal Implosion / Longitudinal Implosion.) The casual player even has the notion of remembering an AOE pattern without orange telegraphs on the floor. So why is the Predation Dodge out of reach of the casual player?
  The mechanic is purely individual dodging, so there is no coordination requirement. There is no unavoidable damage in it, so there is no healing or mitigation requirement either. And while there is a hard enrage to the phase as a whole, the damage output requirement is not what the casual player is looking at. What they correctly perceive is that they do not know where to go fast enough, even though all the information has been given to them.
  The casual player does not know that the Omega-M and Omega-F pairs always spawn on opposing intercardinals, and so does not know to begin the mechanic looking at an intercardinal with their character prepositioned on a cardinal such that all intercardinals are visible on their screen, nor to look immediately at the opposite intercardinal after locating one clone and processing its weapon. The Ultimate raider at this point in TOP progression does know all that, and even in blind progression has been primed to expect opposing spawn locations by the earlier appearance of a single pair in TOP Party Synergy. (In fact, I check the pairs for the Predation Dodge entirely by looking at the arms of each clone, since three of the weapons are visible there and "no held weapon" is always the skates for Superliminal Steel. Only Party Synergy has a decoy clone.)
  The casual player has to work out what the overlap of safespots is for each combination while the cues are being shown to them. The Ultimate raider at this point in TOP progression memorized each clone pair combination back when learning Party Synergy, and now can memorize how each clone pair overlaps with the hourglass cleaves from Final Omega. (And from there, how each combination flows into each possible other combination, all outside the duty. That is a large part of why the study playlist exists.)
  The casual player has no practice in picking the light gray weapons on the dark gray clones out of the mid-gray floor, gold overlay or not. The Ultimate raider at this point in TOP progression has practiced that abundantly for Party Synergy and still fully expects to take several individual KOs - potentially cascading into party KOs - here. Indeed, by this point the Ultimate raider has gone through hundreds of party KOs in TOP, and the casual player is not willing to persist anywhere near that long for a duty completion.
  If you immensely slowed down the presentation of cues in the Predation Dodge to allow the casual player time to work out the overlaps while in the duty, and guided the player's eyes around the arena by presenting one clone at a time with the matching weapon transition / creation animation followed by a "freeze" to have them go off in pairs, that version of the mechanic could have gone in O12N and posed little difficulty to the casual player, even with the resolution of the AOEs at full speed. (The only remaining pain point would be working out the correct distance from Omega-M without waymarks for the Optimized Blizzard III + Beyond Strength combination.) The difference between this hypothetical Normal Raid version and the extant Ultimate mechanic is purely the processing speed demanded of the player, which the Ultimate raider attains through planning for and practicing upon the specific mechanic. Their underlying reaction time need not change at all - for me the Predation Dodge went from scary to comfortable within a few hours of study and practice, long after I had already plateaued in reaction time. Even before knowing the snapshots, I have extra time for the movement in all but the "outer" combinations (Optimized Blizzard III + Efficient Bladework) that have the longest distances to move between the two safespots.
• In exchange for their effort in planning and holding themselves to a standard of job skill, the player expects that a reasonable amount of effort put into a high-end duty will yield a plan that (when executed correctly with practice) leaves them ample leeway on their reaction time and results in a "clean" duty completion every single time. ("Clean" as in "no KOs, Damage Downs, or other penalties for failing mechanics". Recovering from failed mechanics necessarily involves reaction to the failure.) High-end duties can, should, and generally do move faster than regular duties, but only ever to force the player to have a plan and execute it with appropriate fluency. Give them all the information they need well in advance and then demand that they act at a specific time, or even perform a sequence of actions without pausing, yes. Have some of that information include debuffs and/or markers given to other players' characters, yes. Demand that they act while receiving and processing information about the next mechanic or portion of a mechanic, yes. Display some necessary information for a limited time, yes, though the tightest limits are only viable in Ultimate to force the player to work out an order of processing and remembering cues. And all that will result in mechanics that can feel reactive while the player is still learning them, because the player does not have the practice with their plan to process the specific mechanic efficiently at that point. But that feeling must disappear with a reasonable amount of practice, as the player's practical response time for that mechanic improves; once the player learns the mechanic, they should have enough time left over that reaction time is not practically a factor. Mastery should feel turn-based, recovering the feeling of the older Final Fantasy games in the real-time format of this one - half the battle was already won in the planning stage.
• Accordingly, any mechanic that requires the player to react to another player's choice, or where all plans that eliminate such reaction are unsuitably elaborate for the duty, is unacceptable in high-end duties. (Responding to information that another player must pass on, such as in Eden's Promise: Anamorphosis (Savage) (E11S) Prismatic Deception, requires a long lead time - for two players' reaction times and an extra client-server round trip - and a way for players to pass on that information without relying on typing, macro space, or out-of-game communication. E11S did it right, but such mechanics can never be fast.) Yes, this means that some mechanics are permitted in regular duties but not in high-end duties. Players put more effort and resources into individual attempts at high-end duties, and taking a party KO or even a personal penalty there because of forced reaction is annoying.
  (TOP is perfectly fine in this regard, as players can devise a priority system for the "open choices" presented by Run: ****mi* (Sigma Version) and Run: ****mi* (Omega Version) without undue effort in planning or execution - that players in Party Finder turned to third-party tools instead is not the duty designer's fault. (Technically, there is also an "open choice" in Run: ****mi* (Delta Version), but that is assigned even more easily using the Remote Regression and Local Regression tethers from Patch.) I even know how to take the priority system management load off my party with manual sign placement, I just do not have the APM to personally place the signs!)
• In high-end duties, the player expects the duty to present a deadly dance with harsh penalties for failure. That is not just part of the difficulty, but also part of the thrill of attempting these duties. If you feel inclined to build in lenience for failing a specific mechanic in a high-end duty, rather than overall tuning allowing for a small number of mistakes, the mechanic is almost certainly not suitable for high-end duties in the first place. That desire for lenience is a sign that the mechanic does not yield to appropriate planning.
• While high-end duties require a degree of skill from the player to have the baseline experience, the player actively expects satisfying mechanics for their trouble, along with ample opportunities to express their skill beyond the baseline. Not every mechanic must be satisfying in itself to execute correctly, but it is a disappointment that there is not a single such mechanic in all of AAC Light-heavyweight Savage.

In high-end duties, the player will solve puzzles and learn complex concepts from fellow players entirely to the extent that they grasp the bigger picture. (Arena floors may be almost entirely flat after players learned to tilt Twintania's divebombs in The Binding Coil of Bahamut - Turn 5, but their real third dimension has always been time.) The best players work with the whole duty timeline and the whole party as one, creating a single branching plan that is executed by eight players - and in return, they expect both the planning and execution layers to provide them the joy of smoothly countering the duty's every move. The party of players as a whole takes on the role of the single "planner" player controlling a party of characters in the older Final Fantasy games, as well as their individual surface roles in executing their plan.

So in high-end duties, give us planning problems that are worth the effort. Reward the spreadsheets, the hours at a striking dummy, the hours in a single duty. Reactive, otherwise easy mechanics can never do that.

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For all their faults, Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers were close enough to these principles to inspire me to fight. To work my way up from being a terrified new sprout to being Ultimate-ready. (It definitely helped that Shadowbringers had very nearly the perfect job for me.) But also to do roulettes long after I had hit my weekly cap of Allagan Tomestones, with no jobs to level, just for fun. I did not mind even Sastasha, because I could still enjoy myself there by working with my job.

Endwalker broke my job, and that was a massive blow to me; this letter is about duty design, but I have always been a systems-oriented player and the jobs are the core systems of combat. I role swapped to keep raiding, because the personal improvement in working with my physical limitations was and is important to me. I did roulettes comfortably to reach my weekly cap of my Allagan Tomestones and level jobs, but not beyond that.

Dawntrail essentially did not change my job. Yet it is the first time I have had to actively remind myself to reach that weekly cap, despite having jobs that could use the Allagan Tomestone gear. A habit sustained for years was broken in less than two weeks, because the Dawntrail duties are so physically demanding that my brain notes the excessive injury risk and pushes me away from them. (Of course, the fact that I am forced to sit out of FRU by Patch 7.0's duty design direction does not help. Ultimate-level skills do not do much for me if I cannot safely commit to the Ultimate.) And injury risk aside, the Patch 7.0 duties are boring!

What Dawntrail has moved me to do is play more RuneScape. In some ways that game is less accessible than this one - its combat system has a far higher APM ceiling than even the old manual Embrace SCH - so I cannot play it perfectly, but at least I can play its combat system solo in my own way and the game will reward me for that. They have something for me, and that is better than having no duties that suit me.

Their latest boss rush dungeon is not only great fun, it copied your attack telegraphs and your system of limited KOs in Duty Support trials to teach the player mechanics... to wild popularity of the Hard Mode that turns the KO forgiveness off! Their "tutorial boss" for recurring mechanical concepts has not only instructional NPCs but individual mechanic selection with a randomized order, allowing the player to choose what they want to focus on practicing... and its own Hard Mode that activates and amplifies all the mechanics. With the mechanics still randomized and repeating once the boss has finished the set, so the player must have at least two plans to avoid KO from each mechanic, in case the boss picks it twice in a row and their cooldowns from their first plan are unavailable. And the Hard Mode smoothly scales from low Extreme to mid-Savage difficulty for an individual completion, while offering a "killstreak" system that gives better loot for chaining up to 200 kills in a row with increased scaling each time - successfully rewarding Ultimate-level consistency! Even their latest gathering boss deliberately allows for strategies ranging from slow but low-effort to fast but high-effort, to encourage and reward skill expression.

(RuneScape is not just copying the best aspects of your duty design history, by the way. They have also been seriously improving their tooltips, combat feedback, and overall new player experience, including by launching their own version of a pet class last year with a full teaching questline. Which inadvertently resulted in their player community learning your term "job gauge", because a player made one for them and it took off enough to start supporting their other forms of combat. Their players can literally bring them the best parts of your interface.)

There is nothing quite like raiding in your game when you design it right. RuneScape would not be in serious consideration for combat challenge if you did. But Patch 7.0's duty design direction has lost sight of both long-term fun and appropriate challenge.

Give us challenges we can all rise to meet and aspire to master, not barriers we cannot do anything about.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

Now to go over the existing Dawntrail duties and their mechanics from a duty design perspective, both the good and the bad. As a reminder, this section is necessarily tedious, and any player readers who are not interested should skip over to my redesign of the Honey B. Lovely duties. (Navigation links are at the top of this thread.)

Certain duties are very time-consuming to repeat with exact mechanics and tuning for review, namely MSQ solo instanced duties, hunts, treasure dungeons, regular FATEs, and World FATEs. Due to the inordinate time that would be involved in reviewing them thoroughly without access to test servers, I have omitted these to focus on the 21 readily repeatable group duties available. Most of the omitted duties follow much the same design style as the ones included, so this along with the discussion of principles should apply well to their issues.

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Due to length, I have split this section into four subsections, in increasing order of acceptable and expected difficulty.

I will begin with the duties appearing in the Patch 7.00 MSQ, in the order of their appearance there. As completion of these duties is functionally mandatory for a player to continue with the game, these duties must be held to the highest standards for providing an encouraging experience to even the returning and very weak player. They know that their access to all further content - combat or otherwise - relies on their completion of these duties, and that knowledge becomes a heavy weight if they worry about their ability to do so. Enjoyment for the stronger player and in subsequent completions of these duties must be created without compromising those standards.

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Ihuykatumu (Level 91 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Three Packs (On River Boat)

These are forced single pulls (one pack at a time), and they do nothing more than a small amount of basic ground AOEs. If you are going to make the player do single pulls, make them individually interesting so that stronger players do not get bored. Throw in some more fish that come to feed on the remains of the previous pack as each mob dies, or some pattern AOEs from Bakool Ja Ja's "gift", or something. It does not have to be as resource-draining as the Holminster Switch forced single pull section, which has no downtime.

Being the opening of the first dungeon of an expansion, it is entirely possible that this is the first group duty the player has done in a while, so a gentle opening is reasonable - but that can still be interesting! This is not, and that makes the story sequences all the more grating when running the dungeon to level rather than for MSQ.

First Boss - Prime Punutiy



Hydrowave

Narrow cone AOE, easily dodged, nothing special. It is fine.

Resurface

The AOE spam after the castbar is visually overwhelming with its speed, since the Flytrap add casting the donut AOE appears during that AOE spam and forces the player to look at more than just their character's feet. If the player could just look at their character's feet, it would be visually on the high side but acceptable, because the player could and would remove distractions and speed up their time to see the relevant cues by focusing under their character's feet.

I can do this, but it is not fun - all it encourages me to do is try to constantly look everywhere as best I can, especially the first time when not knowing about the Flytrap. Even when I do know about it, the Flytrap is usually pretty far from my character's feet, forcing me to visually bounce back and forth between looking up at the arena as a whole and down at my character's feet until the AOE spam ends.

Suppose instead that the boss pulled up the Flytrap during the castbar, putting it in the arena and on the player's enmity list. The AOE sequence could then play out the exact same way, but the first-time player would have a reasonable chance to see the Flytrap and think "this probably does something" before the donut telegraph appears and probably covers the whole area around their character. On future attempts, stronger players would have the option to path to the known location of the Flytrap during the AOE spam, making it more interesting in how that interacts with their job.

Song of the Punutiy (Adds)

This is a good mechanic, with light damage from the spreads going into increased tank healing from the adds. Allowing the party to bait most of the adds' positions for when they first become targetable could provide an opportunity for skill expression, although here it does little because two of the spreads are so large.

Shore Shaker

Easy but fun - just step in when the telegraph in front of one's character disappears, and since the player knows to look there based on seeing the sequence of telegraphs appear, the timing is fine.

Overall Impression (Boss)

This boss is pretty easy other than Resurface being an issue. As the first group boss of the expansion, starting off with a visual design issue raises concerns to the player immediately.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

First Pack - Bats and Widowmaker

Nothing interesting here. This does allow for a double pull, though, so it is fine.

Second Pack - Doblyns and Treant

Ditto.

I appreciate not having to target and interact with the ladder once this pack dies, and the same goes for the later ladders in this dungeon.

Third Pack - Mimiclots

The idea of "they've copied our forms" is cool, but nothing seems to be done with it other than apparently making these enemies stun immune - and the player is not going to see that without a WHM in their party. Even something simple like giving them each a basic AOE that draws on a "classic" job in the role (though some of that recognition has been eroded by job changes) would sell the concept mechanically: front-facing cone for the tank (MRD/WAR), point-blank AOE for the healer (any healer but AST), line AOEs for the DPS (LNC/DRG).

(The healer does have such an AOE, but none of the others do and the cast does not look like Holy. Plus I had to find that out from videos, not from my own completions, despite using Duty Support first for immersion and then to avoid hampering other players' experiences when reviewing the duty.)

This pack does allow for a double pull, so it is not boring, just a missed opportunity.

Fourth Pack - Doblyn and Widowmakers

Still nothing interesting here.

Second Boss - Drowsie



Sow

If you are expecting the player to see where the seeds dropped from this cast, that expectation is unreasonable - they are too small and show for too short a time for the player to track four objects. Since players have sufficient time to see them from the later Drowsy Dance, telegraphs, and Wallop, this winds up mostly being a "warning, something happened" cast.

Drowsy Dance

Grows the seeds with telegraphs, fair enough.

Wallop (cast by adds)

I appreciate the facing markers here, which make this reasonable to dodge since the player can just look at the base of each root. Having to follow each root upwards to find its facing direction would be too much.

Mimiclots

Since the Mimiclots return from the earlier trash, this is a great opportunity for them to do a mechanic (with the player having a good guess based on the trash) every time, rather than simply being AOE fodder when I completed this with Duty Support. Sometimes having AOE fodder in a boss fight is fine - it provides a change to the healing requirements and an opportunity for everyone to switch between single-target and AOE rotations - but this is a missed opportunity to do something more than that...

From seeing videos of other players' completions, the Mimiclots do have a mechanic here! Why can Duty Support completely eliminate a mechanic?

Sneeze

Big cone, long cast to dodge it, no problem.

Overall Impression (Boss)

The name of this boss and the fact that it starts sleeping do suggest sneaking past, which inevitably creates tension between players who want to leave it be based on their character and players who want the XP for defeating it. To remove that tension, perhaps this should have been a point where one of the other claimants' teams forced the fight?

Mechanically, this is okay.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Four Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Thematically, the dead animals are a cool hint at the boss, but that is not mechanics.

Third Boss - Apollyon



Razor Zephyr

Basic line AOE, reasonable cast time.

Appearing Beasts

A thematically cool "warning, something happened", and I like the red text that hints at how the boss has powered up.

Swarming Locust

I do not love the boss jumping around without prior telegraphs for the sequence, just from a visual tracking perspective, but it is acceptable in moderation in contexts like this. The jumps are not that fast, and the next attack does not require knowing the precise position of the boss.

Blades of Famine

The empowered line AOE, and since there are four of them, being away from the boss after the jumps is helpful to the player rather than annoying.

Repeats twice, including the jumping around.

Levinsickle

I quite like this mechanic. Each of the sets of radial cones covers the arena across its sequence, and there are two of them so the player wants to step from the empty space into the overlapping space. It encourages the player to think, with all the information clearly given and a reasonable amount of time.

(no castbar) Appearing Beasts

A different mini-phase, this time adding a donut after the tankbuster.

Windwhistle

I do not love having to keep an eye on the resulting Whirlwind for so long as it pulses the snowflake of line AOEs. I find it doable, but it is definitely a visual stress since its movements are not cleanly predictable.

Overall Impression (Boss)

This is actually a pretty solid boss, despite Windwhistle. The concept of a boss that eats other predators and takes on their attacks is a good one, and could allow for a degree of "mechanics the player has already seen, but empowered / in succession" without the overwhelming nature of Tower of Zot's final boss.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

The boring opening is not great... and Resurface looms over the entire dungeon. It put me in "try to constantly look everywhere" mode from the beginning, and that is not fun.

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Worqor Zormor (Level 93 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Four Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

First Boss - Ryoqor Terteh



Fluffle Up

An AOE sequence from adds, that the boss modifies by freezing some of the adds. The first two show the patterns from the different types of adds; the small Rorrloh Teh on the cardinals hit a quadrant of the arena in front of them (safespots for each hit opposite each other), and the large Quorrloh Teh on the intercardinals hit a point-blank around them (safespots for each hit beside each other). These first two are fine.

Good visual clarity with the ice tethers, guiding the player to look from the boss to the adds.

Snowscoop

Nice sidestep between the two sets of line AOEs through the center of the arena.

Sparkling Sprinkling

These spreads appear during the preceding mechanic, allowing the player to notice others near them and try to dodge away. You still are going to get players overlapping spreads, because Duty Finder does not plan spread locations, but this is a mechanical overlap that is easy enough for MSQ.

Fluffle Up (repeated)

Now the two patterns are combined, and the boss puts out four ice tethers. While the boss is reversing both patterns, with each reversal previously shown individually, the first-time player does not know that and may not even know that the individual patterns are always reversed. For all they know, the boss could be manipulating each add individually to create a sequence of three hits instead of two, or only reversing one of the patterns.

So when the tethers come out, the previously working method of "stand in / note the first safespot, then if tethers appear, move over to the area that would be hit by the tethered adds" no longer works. The first-time player must try to remember which of the adds were going to go off first, which is itself not easy as a spatial memory mechanic with four things presented at once, and match those up with the tethers. That is not really reasonable to pick apart in the time given.

Once the player has time to think about this mechanic after the battle, it becomes fine or even too easy. "The boss is going to reverse both patterns, so stand where all the orange is" is the obvious guess and the correct one. But this is an MSQ dungeon, where the player's first attempt is a critical story experience, and many casual players do not have the notion of hidden patterns in mechanics at all.

This is a difficult mechanic to fix, because you also do not want to slow down the battle so much as to bore players on repeat runs. It may well be more suited to a Trial or a Normal Raid than a dungeon, as those allow for longer bosses that can do things like refresh the player on Spell-in-Waiting markers and still have time for another concept.

Overall Impression (Boss)

This is a good boss concept, focused on manipulating the timing of AOE sequences by freezing adds. It only gets to be too much for the first-time player during the later Fluffle Up casts.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Four Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Second Boss - Kahderyor



Crystalline Crush

The stack tower here sets the party up for success with the immediately following Wind Shot, which is especially nice since this boss has a substantial amount of unavoidable damage.

Wind Shot (Player Donuts + Crystals Safe)

If the party stays where the tower was and the crystals appeared, they will be fine! Good introduction to what this wind mechanic does. The color for the wind AOE could use a sharper green, though.

Earthen Shot (Spreads + Away From Crystals)

Again a good introduction, since the player should reasonably guess that a different element requires a different response, and the last one was "stay where the tower was". Though the color for the earth AOE could use a sharper yellow even more than the previous mechanic, or potentially even replacement with another element given the later mechanics.

Crystalline Storm (Line Crystals)

Three small line AOEs that leave behind crystals.

This is why the elemental AOEs could use sharper colors. When the player has to check the AOEs from all three lines at once and react to their party's movements for both donuts and spreads, high contrast really helps them process the visuals quickly. (Having only seen each element once before, the first-time player may not have picked up on what the tie is between the crystal locations and the elemental safespots. Casual players have a lot to think about going in!)

Wind Shot (Player Donuts + Crystals Safe)

Stepping into any line will avoid the ground AOEs, so the player need not remember or remind themselves of all the line positions. There is a decent amount of room for stacking or spreading the donuts.

Earthen Shot (Spreads + Away From Crystals)

Now there is little room, the party is reacting to each other for spreads, and the earth AOEs are yellow on light brown. I imagine this is miserable for anyone with reduced color vision in the red-green range, even if not full-blown colorblindness.

Seriously, perhaps the earth mechanic should have been replaced with fire or lightning instead? Fire is already associated with ground AOEs, lightning is already associated with spreads, and the embedded crystals are purple.

Seed Crystals

Break out of the crystal adds. Easy enough.

Sharpened Sights

Enters a gaze + AOE mini-phase, casting first Stalagmite Circle (point-blank + look away from boss) and then Cyclonic Ring (donut + look away from boss).

The gaze combined with AOE is very well done, showing the player the combination where they will naturally succeed before asking them to respect the gaze while dodging the ground AOE. Using the contracting gaze ring rather than the icon on the enemy is an excellent way to get the player to see the gaze in this context, especially since the head of the boss may be off their screen.

Overall Impression (Boss)

The elemental effects really could use some more pop on the ground, to maintain visual clarity when they are coming from the crystal lines. Otherwise, solid boss.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Four Packs

Not much mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled. A good tank can and should bring the Cloudtrap into the group or vice versa.

Third Boss - Gurfurlur



Stonework (Fire, Expanding Square AOEs + Spreads)

A combination mechanic right from the start, but giving the first-time player plenty of time to expect something big and understand that the mechanic comes from the stone plate.

Stonework (Water, Knockback)

This one is not a combination, but it shows the player that the water knockback comes from the side with the plate, not the plate itself, which is important later.

Sledgehammer (Multi-hit Line Stack)

From a raid healing perspective this does not hit that hard, but anything that did would be too much for casual players. As it stands with the big marker and threatening name, this slow cast is enough to invite a casual healer to prepare to heal the party rather than reacting, and to invite the rest of the party to mitigate, both of which are good skills.

Arcane Stomp (Damage Up Orbs)

The large number of orbs to intercept here creates a faster section, encouraging players to use their movement tools efficiently and split up the arena between themselves. Good for making the boss "less of a striking dummy" without compromising on the slow, powerful attacks of a giant. (On repeat runs, the player may well notice that the boss only intercepts the orbs when they reach the middle of the arena, not his hitbox, and use that fact to make smaller movements.)

Notably, the buff from the orbs only lasts a minute on player characters, but lasts indefinitely on the boss, which looks scary from the casual player's perspective. And this being a leveling dungeon, it has a tight implicit Item Level sync.

Enduring Glory (Raidwide)

Again, this does not hit that hard from a raid healing perspective, but a raidwide after a damage up is scary in concept.

It does cleanse all the Damage Up stacks from the boss, which is really probably not necessary - Sledgehammer as it stands can be completely countered by Liturgy of the Bell / Seraph / Macrocosmos / Panhaima if the healer brought in Anabaseios tome gear. With this much lead time and seeing a whole mechanic dedicated to the Damage Up stacks, a casual healer can be asked to find more than one AOE healing tool; this could cleanse half or two-thirds of the stacks instead. Even if they do not find more than one AOE healing tool, the party will probably just be left at low HP instead of KOed.

(And if the party does take a party KO to some of the Damage Up stacks remaining, they can just try again with knowledge of the Damage Up. The blatant obviousness of Arcane Stomp makes sure that the (reasonable) player notices the orbs and infers that the orbs power up the boss even if they do not look at enemy buffs, so they are unlikely to blame the healer.)

Stonework (Wind, Tornadoes + Double Knockback)

A combination that invites the player to think about using their knockback immunity! The first knockback from the center plate will likely be taken to a corner since the player does not know the distance, which leaves the player well set up to position for the tornadoes before they start. The second is much less immediately pleasant, having the potential to knock the player character right into the tornadoes just before they leave the arena - but from a duty design perspective this is great, as it presents a problem to the player while making sure the tools to solve it are at their fingertips.

Stonework (Fire + Water)

This looks scary, and what that does is encourage the player to think about the combination and how the mechanics interact. The water knockback is timed to match the first hit of the square fire AOEs, so the player can have it wash their character right into the safespot and then just move for the spreads. Having seen the pieces of the combination earlier, the player is empowered to make a guess at the timing and prepared to move their character shortly after the knockback.

Sledgehammer (Multi-hit Line Stack)

As before, but coming right after a raidwide this time. The long cast makes it still very reasonable to heal.

Overall Impression (Boss)

Great! More like this for dungeon bosses. Visually clear, the voice sells the "weight of history" idea, and the mechanics are gentle enough for a casual first-time player to understand their mistakes while having frequent combinations and optimization opportunities for strong players. The spectacle both tells the story and helps cue the player, which is not possible for every concept but awesome when you make it work.

Not every dungeon boss should be this slow, but for a giant it works to have slower and more powerful attacks.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

So close to being fun all around without issues, and at least the issues do improve on repeat completions. The mechanics carry out the themes very well.

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Worqor Lar Dor (Valigarmanda, Level 93 Normal Trial)



(no castbar) Animation Tells

This boss has three recurring animation tells for basic attacks using three elements: the wind swirling donut (center of the platform safe), the fire stomp (leave melee range), and the lightning beak cone (front corners of the arena safe). These animation tells are supposed to be taught by the red text the first time, and then the player is supposed to recognize them with no other cue thereafter.

So let us consider these three animation tells and the text that is meant to teach them.

• Wind: "A tempestuous wind gathers around Valigarmanda." This directs the player to look at the boss model for a swirling wind, suggesting a donut around the front of the arena... which is not where the wind is, the wind is around the platform instead and Valigarmanda later enters the swirl. The most accurate lesson the player can learn from this is that your pop-up text can be wrong.
• Fire: "Valigarmanda gathers its strength." This says absolutely nothing about where to look. (Where to look is at the boss's legs, since its body starts glowing red and its legs are close to the platform.)
• Lightning: "Blinding energies build within Valigarmanda's wide-open beak." This gives a correct description of where to look - but Valigarmanda raises its beak off the screen during this animation at the default camera tilt or even slightly higher, and most players are never going to adjust their camera tilt. Indeed, there is no way to get Valigarmanda's beak comfortably on the screen without sacrificing ground visibility either camera-ward of one's character or by looking very side-on, which results in the player fighting their interface to both see this tell and dodge other ground AOEs smoothly. To make matters worse, the boss also glows red during this animation!

Every one of these teaching texts is either useless or wrong. One of the tells is not even reliably on the screen. And this is for a mechanic set the player is meant to recognize by animation alone while other things are going on in the duty?!

What I did in response to this is launch straight into the "try to constantly look everywhere" mindset and stay there even for subsequent MSQ duties, combined with following the Duty Support NPCs for the animation mechanics in this duty once I realized I was better at tracking them than finding the then-mysterious-unto-me animation tells. This is not fun, but it was the best option open to me short of finding a guide and finding and memorizing a timeline for a Normal Mode trial.

You can have animation tells without other cues; the old version of Aurum Vale did it and was fine. You can have animation tells on a large boss model if you are careful; Alphascape V2.0 (O10N, Midgardsormr) did it and was fine. But you have to make sure the player actually gets to learn the tells, and can see them consistently without having to try to constantly look everywhere. "Welp I got hit by this animation tell mechanic shortly after this castbar attack, somehow I am supposed to look at both at once" is not actionable!

(There is something of a rhythm to when this boss uses its animation tell attacks; I was much more comfortable returning to this trial after doing the Extreme version. But that does not help any player who does not complete the Extreme version. Plus between this being a high-level trial and having Duty Support, even players who queue Trial Roulette will see it very infrequently beyond their own first time - the first-time experience is not just critical but the default, and then the player does not have any knowledge of that rhythm.)

One way to significantly improve this without making major changes to the boss concept:

• Wind: Change the teaching text to "Valigarmanda creates a tempestuous wind around you.", "Valigarmanda creates a tempestuous wind around the platform.", or something along those lines. The player must be directed to look at the tell that appears with a reasonable lead time, which is the wind gathering at the corners of the arena. The wind effect could also use a little more green for contrast.
• Fire: Change the teaching text to "Valigarmanda channels fire into its legs."
• Lightning: The teaching text is accurate, if incomplete. Change the animation tell to start with the boss lowering its beak right onto the platform, so the player can reliably see it at the default camera tilt. Change the glow on the animation to be a purple lightning glow from Valigarmanda's head only. These changes would make the color and motion also dramatically distinct from the fire attack.
• All: These changes allow the player to "rest their eyes" on a spot roughly around the resting position of either one of Valigarmanda's legs, because all the animation tells are in close proximity to those spots and the teaching texts show them that. This notion of a "resting point" is essential to having the player see animation tells without giving them another cue for when to look at the animation. (Aurum Vale's "resting point" was the bosses themselves, those being significantly smaller and having few castbars to look at. O10N cues the player every time, on top of having very dramatic animation tells that are visible across a large portion of the screen.) "In this duty, look at this spot when not looking at the enemy's castbar / my character's feet / the party list / ..." is actionable, and allows you to have an animation tell mechanic whenever the player has some time to return their eyes to the "resting point" after the preceding mechanic.

A second issue with these animation tells is that this boss is not actually programmed to show the player all the different elements before the repeats begin. It can roll wind, fire, wind, (other attacks)... and then finally wind up teaching the lightning attack in the middle of the duty. This is not appropriate when the duty is already ramped up, and contributes to the "oh gods look everywhere" mindset.

You do not have to show the player each animation tell multiple times the way O10N did, or even show them in a fixed order, but you do have to make sure the introduction period for a mechanic consistently introduces the mechanic. If you want high randomness, have the first one be completely random, the second be completely random out of the two elements not already used, and the third one be the remaining element.

Opening Phase

Aside from the animation tells, this is simple enough. Really, it is almost entirely the animation tells, which does little good when the player has been directed poorly on how to learn them.

Skyruin

Nice clear phase transition warning raidwide, with the random element clearly visible at the front of the arena.

Ice Phase

(no castbar) Avalanche

Here the red text usefully tells the player to turn their camera around and check the avalanche, and it does in fact appear every time so the player does not have to worry about constant camera turning. This is fine as is, though I prefer the Extreme version where the player can learn to dodge by the text alone.

Freezing Dust

An excellently marked Deep Freeze, with both the warning marker counting down to the start of the movement period and the Freezing Up debuff counting down to the end of that period.

(no castbar, snowflake AOEs) Arcane Spheres

The shrinking yellow underline to the red text lightly indicates when the AOEs are about to go off. I can work with that, though red-green colorblind players may well have a bad time.

However, the safespots for these are relatively small, and there is no geometry on this floor for the player to work out where the edges of the safespots are. Trying to reactively correct one's positioning based on the brief telegraphs is not fun. To support mechanics like this, give the player some floor geometry to visually trace out the snowflakes. This is perfectly possible on a snow / ice floor, as demonstrated by Eden's Verse: Refulgence (E8N) and its Savage version (E8S).

This becomes even worse after the fire phase, when these can be combined with avalanches or Freezing Dust.

Thunder Phase

Thunderous Breath

I like this. It is a logical empowerment of the lightning beak, and the telegraph clues the player in right away that there must be some tool other than getting out of the orange available to them. This gets them to try the levitating sections of the floor, making sure they know the usage for later mechanics.

Hail of Feathers

Here - unlike the Extreme - the player does not know the pattern that the feathers will come in, so the cast itself winds up as a multi-hit raidwide that places the feathers to avoid later. The feathers could stand to have more contrast against the floor, though their large size does help.

Blighted Bolt

I like the concept of this. It shows the player that levitating is not always desirable, complete with telegraphs that disappear when leaving the levitating sections. The red text also nudges players to think about how they might counter lightning bolts, and "be grounded" makes logical sense.

However, there are two problems with the execution. First, the player can get hit even if they do it correctly, by another player not quite making it and having their bolt hit the nearby otherwise-safe area. Second, the feathers from earlier have point-blank AOEs at the same time as this cast finishes, and the lightning strikes that are meant to clue the player in to that happen while the player is likely looking under their character's feet for "do not levitate". This again discourages the player from seeing what they are intended to see, particularly since none of the feathers levitate so the logic for feathers is different than for player characters.

(no castbar, line AOEs) Arcane Circles

These are the same circles as the snowflakes in the ice phase, and these ones work well. The red text tells the player to look out, the tethers from the boss tell the player where, and the levitating / not levitating floor sections provide sufficient geometry to at least locate one edge of the safespot. It might not be the edge the player wants for optimization, but the player will never have to react to the brief telegraphs.

These continue to work well after the fire phase, when they are combined with Thunderous Breath.

Add Phase

Ruinfall

The stack tankbuster tower is very clear despite combining three markers, and is a cool concept that encourages the tanks to use Arm's Length on the knockback immediately afterwards

(no castbar) Repeating Line Stack + Cone AOEs

Duty Finder does not make mechanic-specific plans. Even Duty Support will not give the player a clear plan of where the NPCs are going to dodge the ground AOEs. Dodging the cone AOEs is not interesting, and trying to get the full party to stay together to take the stack is a fiasco.

If the player character has the stack with Duty Support, they have a coin flip of blowing their one allowed KO right here by not dodging the same way as the NPCs. And if they already used it on learning mechanics, they are sent back to the beginning for something that is not really a mistake.

Fire Phase

Tulidisaster

An appropriately big, long, scary cast, with multiple hits that go through the different elements of previous phases before starting the fire phase with the permanent DOT.

Permanent / long-lasting DOTs as a different style of heal check are interesting, and this is an appropriate introduction that is gentle enough for casual players.

Eruption

These puddles should be significantly more opaque and red. A stack full of them is visible enough, but the party may not be stacked - especially after the first dodge - and just one is not cleanly visible against the reddened floor.

Overall Impression

Please for the love of Hydaelyn, if you are going to do animation tells, then make sure the player can actually learn the tells and know when to look for them! The fun ideas like branching phase order and permanent DOTs are ruined by the constant stress of trying to look everywhere.

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The Skydeep Cenote (Level 95 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Four Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

First Boss - Feather Ray



Troublesome Tail

The cast, Nuisance debuff effect around each player character, and "You are cursed to be a nuisance to your party..." text provide an appropriate warning that the player should look out for what mechanic the boss is putting on their character.

Worrisome Wave

A narrow front cone AOE, followed after several seconds by each player character repeating it. The overhead marker provides an excellent cue that something is about to happen, having seen Troublesome Tail the player has a good guess as to what, and from there they have enough time to do okay even though they are inherently reacting to their party members' movements.

Hydro Ring

A donut that leaves its area covered in water, but really is the setup for the next mechanic.

Blowing Bubbles

Starts a bullet hell sequence signified by "Feather Ray produces copious bubbles...". There are four sets of bubbles, one pointed at each player character, so the player is expected to move their character at least once.

This is not my type of mechanic, but in this form it is tolerable, since the player has lead time to see where their party members were and therefore where the bubbles are aimed.

Rolling Current

Creates an array of large bubbles that stay still on the arena before being pushed by a knockback, with enough time to see the array. The first time, the player does not know if the knockback will hit their character or the bubbles, but they can understand it once they see the knockback resolve. When this repeats, the player has the knowledge to succeed.

Hydro Ring

Effectively shrinks the arena again, setting up for more bullet hell.

Troublesome Tail

Here is where the real problem begins.

Trouble Bubbles

While the boss does not directly emit bubbles at the party here, each party member emits bubbles at every other party member, starting as soon as the "Feather Ray produces copious bubbles..." text appears. This means that the player must process bubbles coming at their character from three different directions, filter out the bubbles their own character is emitting, try to find a nearby open space, and repeat because the next bubbles will be aimed at their new location - all reactively! The result is a reaction sequence from visually overwhelming input of fast-moving bubbles.

Oh, and individual KOs from failing this come very quickly - even if the player did the first Rolling Current successfully, two bubbles are enough to KO a non-tank from full HP. A player can easily have their character KOed before the "Feather Ray produces copious bubbles..." text disappears, regardless of their physical reaction time! (Remember that this is the first time the player has seen the Trouble Bubbles castbar. They have reason to expect bullet hell and a mechanic repeated by the player characters, but they also have reason to expect a different pattern for a different castbar and an overhead warning before the repeated mechanic begins.)

To make matters worse, the fact that these bubbles move so fast also means that if the player has even moderate client-server ping, each bubble travels a significant distance in the round trip between the server sending a packet with that bubble's position to the player's client and the player's client sending back the player character's position to the server. (Remember, some regions span very large geographical areas and older Internet infrastructures, even before getting into high ping players connecting to a Data Center whose region does not match their current residence.) As a result, the positions the player sees on their screen are substantially different from the true state of the battle on the server. Not only does this give them less time to dodge than is visually apparent, the form of the discrepancy often results in the player seeing that the server says their character was hit (based on the damage and Vulnerability Up) while the positions they see show their character sidestepping that same bubble. A perfect recipe for the player shouting "I was out of that!"

Of course, the same client-server delays apply in principle to every mechanic. This is something that raiders learn to work around when studying moving object mechanics in high-end duties, and even casual players learn with practice to intuitively account for their ping when judging the end of a castbar. But the speed and targeting of these bubbles creates a visual state that looks unfair in an already reactive mechanic, readily apparent to the casual player, leading to annoyance at both the mechanic and the broken immersion.

If the bubbles were in a very simple pattern fixed relative to the player character emitting them, like "always behind the character", that would be acceptable in this context. More complex fixed patterns like "every intercardinal of the character" would be acceptable in Criterion, where the party can plan around the pattern. As it stands, this is a pile of unfun stress, since failures will likely come from visual overload and/or reaction time.

Overall Impression (Boss)

If the player wanted a bullet hell game, they would be playing a bullet hell game instead of this one. Reacting to where fellow players emit their bubbles from is annoying, not fun!

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Skydeep Quarriers into Skydeep Vessels

Now this is a reason to force a single pull on occasion - the Speaking Stone makes it into a forced chain pull (next pack added before the mobs already pulled die) and therefore a cooldown and rotation management test.

Second Boss - Firearms



Mirror Maneuver

A short cast, but a good opportunity for the player to see - or at least be prompted to look for - the mirrors that complicate the next mechanic.

Thunderlight Burst

This is a fun mechanic. The dangerous AOE is massive, with the same radius as a side of the arena, and the player has to figure out where the AOE will explode from by following the boss's aim through the mirrors to an orb. But the long, clear cast makes this very reasonable for the player to do, or understand what happened if they mess up the first time. Later repeats add more mirror bounces, but remain reasonable.

Ancient Artillery

Sets up where the AOEs expand from for the next mechanic.

Emergent Artillery

Another fun mechanic. Combines cross AOEs from the beginning, introducing it with two AOEs (four safespots) the first time and using three AOEs (one safespot) thereafter. The iterations with three AOEs also have spreads afterwards, and the timing is very nice for a gentle combination - the spreads appear near the end of the cross AOE expansion and resolve after the cross AOEs, so the player can naturally move their character to an edge of the preceding safespot and then out.

While on the simple side at first, it fits with the large arena making the player leave more time for their character's movement, and it is still fun.

Overall Impression (Boss)

Good! More like this for dungeon bosses. The player might fail a mechanic, or even multiple, but they have all the information to understand why they got hit. And while it is simple, the large arena means that players who want to tackle movement optimization will.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Skydeep Packers

I understand the reasoning for the barrier, and even the sharp turn to reveal the Alexandrian section of the dungeon, but why is this a single pull? Toss in a barrier guardian or something.

Two Packs

Not much mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled. The Stonemasons having higher HP is a nice opportunity for skill expression without affecting the experience of weaker players, as it allows stronger players to deliberately target the Stonemasons with single-target cooldowns and falloff AOEs.

Third Boss - Maulskull



Stonecarver

A "punch" AOE sequence with very good teaching, between the castbar, "Maulskull draws power into its fists!" red text, and audio cue with glow pulse for each AOE locking in. Since the telegraphs are not shown on the floor, this is technically an old form of memory mechanic, but it is completely fine since even the first-time player only has to remember one {step through / stay} for the second hit.

The teaching is important to set the foundation for when this comes back in combinations.

Skullcrush

The player should be well familiar with knockback circles, but this may be their first time seeing the front-center placement in a relatively small arena. This gives the player the chance to think about aiming to ride the knockback towards a back corner of the arena.

The follow-up spreads are fine, giving the player limited directions to spread out in and a chance to practice that before later mechanics.

Maulwork

A faster, dramatic sequence of AOEs, which is fine even though it feels fast.

Deep Thunder

Big, scary multi-hit stack tower. More of a spectacle than a heal check, but regular duties cannot have difficult heal checks anyway.

Ringing Blows

Combines Stonecarver and Skullcrush, requiring the player to move fast coming out of a knockback. This is a great way to create excitement in a casual-friendly way, since it is a fast and flashy movement sequence but the player has already seen all the pieces.

Colossal Impact

A knockback from a back corner of the arena, followed by either a stack or a spread. Occurs several times.

My one problem with this is that in the spread variant, the player's view of their character can wind up blocked by the boss. (Pointing the camera at a knockback circle can help the player aim the knockback at their desired angle, which after the knockback leaves the camera off to the front and side of the arena. A top-down view has the same problem, since the boss is so large and looms over the arena.) The player should be fighting the boss, not their interface.

If the knockback was from a front corner of the arena instead, the player's view would be much less likely to be blocked by the boss. As a bonus, this would provide a more natural opportunity for the player to think about job optimization, moving into melee range (or staying out when playing a ranged job during the spreads) after the knockback. (As it stands, the player can try to optimize on a melee DPS or tank by moving out later when not using Arm's Length, but that is unintuitive since it leaves them less time to aim.)

Overall Impression (Boss)

Almost good throughout, except for the moments of fighting the interface. Veteran raiders get the bonus of recognizing many of the mechanics from Eden's Gate: Sepulture (Savage) (E4S), though of course the iconic E4S mechanics are not suitable for Duty Finder and the short format of a dungeon boss.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

The only major issue here is the first boss, but Trouble Bubbles really sours the whole dungeon. The rest could use some polish, but is still decently fun.

----------------

Due to the 20 image limit for a single post, I must split this subsection into two posts. It continues below.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

Due to the 20 image limit for a single post, this is a continuation of the same subsection as above, on duties within the Patch 7.0 MSQ.

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Vanguard (Level 97 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Vanguard Sentries

Not only can these be double pulled, but their opening AOEs add some mechanical interest and change up how the tank approaches the first pack. (The mobs notice the tank from a long distance, but will generally wind up behind the party from their telegraphed dash.) Nice to see things like this.

First Boss - Vanguard Commander R8



Enhanced Mobility

A spatial reasoning mechanic right away, with the "Beware the wingblade!" text to warn the player that there is an aspect beyond the telegraphed AOE. Great work.

Each execution of the bike dash creates a brief forced downtime. Having some forced downtime is totally fine, and the timings are very clear so strong players can plan around the downtimes.

Dispatch

Summons bike adds that do their own basic mechanics, the first set doing the dashes the player saw in the trash and the second doing large circle AOEs that expand from the initial telegraph. While both types have the same castbar, the former adds stay on the ground and the latter fly up into the air, making them visually distinct early on.

Later iterations have two sets of adds, with either simultaneous dashes (perpendicular to each other) or sequenced circle AOEs. Big danger zones, fair timings, especially since the circle sequence is corner to center rather than corner to corner.

Electrosurge

Spreads that go off at the same time as the simultaneous dashes, telling each player to find a different safespot for the dashes. There is not a lot of time with the spread markers visible, but that is fine since the player should be well into working out the dash safespots before the spread markers appear.

Overall Impression (Boss)

A very fair, spatially oriented boss. (It is on the slow side for me, but that is probably a boon to those who struggle with spatial reasoning, and this is a MSQ dungeon.) Not every boss should be this focused on spatial reasoning, but this is a solid one with that focus. It definitely has a place in the design style I want.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Two Packs

Gives the option to double pull, with the second pack having a ranged sentry that good tanks will bring into the group. Its moderately large Spread Shot AOE draws attention to its presence.

Two More Packs

Again can be double pulled. The pair of Vanguard Aerostats is very reminiscent of The Twinning, sharing the same trash model and donut AOEs as a pair there, which helps sell the high-tech theme for players who remember that. Like in The Twinning, this is a fun AOE type to use sometimes in trash, since the melee and casting uptime strategies are completely different.

The turret Electrobeams are less good, because unlike the earlier dashes there is no path to walk through. The player must either be at the front of the party, wait, or take the AOE, and the latter two options are not fun or interesting. If they fired in sequence or had spaces between them, they would be fun.

Second Boss - Protector



Search and Destroy

Circle and line AOEs under every player character in every round, creating a visually dense bullet hell effect reminiscent of Another Mount Rokkon. This is the annoying kind of stressful, since it forces the player to rapidly react to the AOE placements and constantly move rather than doing anything interesting. (The later combination with Fulminous Fence does not help, despite Fulminous Fence being a good mechanic, since the underlying requirement is still repeated reaction.)

This boss could have player-baited AOEs on theme in a much more interesting way, fitting both the name of the cast and the idea of the boss using turrets. Since this boss already uses Acceleration Bomb, it could start by placing Acceleration Bomb on every player character (with the warning it gives now) and then drop a single slower circle AOE under every player character as the Acceleration Bomb is about to expire - creating a test of sticking to the plan of not moving and only then acting on the AOE, rather than running away in reaction. Then it could progress to planning various simple baits around repeated Acceleration Bombs.

Fulminous Fence

Creates lightning fences that inflict Paralysis when moved through. This is a neat way to change up the movement for later AOEs from the player's normal patterns, though it cannot be used too often by necessity.

Battery Circuit

The spinning cones and periodic circle AOEs are made interesting by the presence of the lightning fences. If this was the only movement-heavy mechanic on this boss, it would feel good to plan as a place to use movement tools efficiently. But as it stands, movement tools for jobs with frequent cast times have probably just been used on Search and Destroy, which furthers the annoyance with Search and Destroy.

Motion Sensor

This is a great warning for Acceleration Bomb, between the cast name and the red text "A motion-sensitive bomb has been affixed to you." The player has a fair shot at understanding the debuff without reading its text, even if they have never done non-MSQ duties to see the concept regularly before.

Blast Cannon (cast by turret adds)

A simple sequence of line AOEs covering the arena, that is complicated by the Acceleration Bombs. Very fair, great mechanic.

Heavy Blast Cannon

This standard line stack functions as a spacer mechanic, leading directly into a raidwide so the healer has to work a little. Nothing too hard, but good.

Overall Impression (Boss)

Why the spam of AOEs under the entire party? This could have been a great, really fun boss if it focused on using different movements than normal around the Fulminous Fences and Acceleration Bombs instead.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Two More Packs

Again can be double pulled, and the first pack of this pair adds some mechanical interest by opening with a mix of line and donut AOEs.

Third Boss - Zander the Snakeskinner



Soulbane Saber

A line AOE directly in front of the boss that then explodes into a half-room cleave hitting the whole area that was in front of the boss during the cast.

After showing this once and having a tankbuster where the player can think about what they saw, the boss launches into repeating it while rotating in the middle of the arena - a smooth combination with itself, as the first AOE of the current cast goes off at about the same time as the second AOE of the preceding cast. This is also a fair combination, even once it ramps up to add spreads, since the player has had the chance to see all the pieces first.

This mechanic is a great choice to work with the story constraint of a dungeon boss needing to die and then revive stronger without lengthening the dungeon enough that players try to avoid it. Since it combines well with itself, it allows the boss to show a combination within a very short phase, rather than needing to do only simple attacks or else go too fast to give the player a fair shot at learning. With some concepts it is better to have such a short phase be all introduction in order to use more mechanics later, and with other concepts this way is better.

(no castbar) Revive Sequence

This is short enough that I do not mind it, though I am sure some players got annoyed with it while grinding the dungeon for glamour.

Mechanically, this serves as an opportunity for the healer to heal up from the repeated stacks, a forced downtime that the player can work with rotationally regardless of their job, and an opportunity for the first-time player to think about what mechanics might come from the snake transformation. (Even though they do not know what a feral soul is yet if they are going through MSQ unspoiled, they can still see the changed boss model and the dialogue "I call on the soul of the serpent, the great devourer.")

Syntheslean

A simple 90 degree cone in front of the boss after it turns, but it helps the player pick up on Syntheslither at full speed.

Syntheslither

The indicator showing the boss's attack path and four swords for four attacks is a good one, but alone it would not be enough for the speed of this sequence. (If the player is not looking directly at one of the AOEs, they will probably miss the shape since it appears so briefly.) Showing the player the Syntheslean cone first makes it much more likely that the player will pick up on what attack is being repeated in a reasonable time, allowing this attack to be fast and snake-like while remaining fair.

Slitherbane Foreguard / Rearguard

An upgrade to Soulbane Saber, having the half-room cleave go off immediately and be either at the front or the back of the boss depending on the cast name. The fact that this upgrade also combines smoothly with itself is great, mechanically selling the boss's power-up.

Overall Impression (Boss)

This is a fun boss, and an excellent way to work with a very difficult story concept. Dungeon bosses are time-crunched even before splitting the boss into before and after its first death!

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

This would be an amazing dungeon if not for Search and Destroy. Everything else in here is very well done.

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Origenics (Level 99 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

One Pack

A dull forced single pull, followed by an open section for story reasons. The story reasons are all well and good, but you could have found some way for mobs to be there and be cleared out.

First Boss - Herpekaris



Vasoconstrictor

Sets up venom puddles that the boss then punches.

Venomspill (repeated many times)

The fact that the boss lifts its arm and punches a side is fair enough. The player has seen lots of enemies with the same arm animation before, and it is intuitively "hits the side with the raised arm" regardless, so the only real question they should have is how far the arm punch extends.

But the way this mechanic actually works is not only reactive, it is actively working against the player's desire to learn and improve.

The first problem here is that where the attack actually hits is a random selection of puddles that can cover almost any area except the edge of the arena furthest from the lifted arm, but generally does not cover that whole area. So at the most basic level, the player will look at the first set of telegraphs to learn where this cast hits, and will reliably learn the wrong thing from that first set. At higher skill levels, they are denied the ability to dodge just outside the AOEs (and thereby enjoy themselves) because the AOEs are not in a consistent place every time for them to learn. The player is left with no recourse but to run from one end of the arena to the other or risk getting their character hit.

The second problem is that the player cannot even start moving their character preemptively, because the repeated Venomspills are random rather than alternating. Even for a player who understands prepositioning and begins moving their character back to the center every time, it is still quite reactive, and the casual player cannot be relied on to have that knowledge!

(Plus sustaining a movement input to preposition partly pins down the player's hand (or other body part used for input), which makes pivoting to run the other way take slightly more time unless the player splits their movement inputs between both hands. Whether such a hand split is even possible using a controller is irrelevant, since a controller cannot split the character movement joystick. With a mouse and keyboard it is possible, but counterintuitive: on Legacy movement the player must face their camera sideways to the boss to make the mouse forward movement useful in the split, and on Standard movement there is the added complication of turning the player character around to face the camera for the "keyboard direction". I am not convinced that the Standard movement split method is actually an improvement, since turning the player character is added inputs, and even the Legacy movement split method is absurd to expect here. Not only does it make assumptions about the player's input scheme, but this is a leveling MSQ dungeon boss and the struggling player will generally not think of that.)

(I do in fact use the Legacy movement split method in some duties, because it is slightly faster and I naturally prefer Legacy movement. However, I need to know the duty to know to do it in the first place - which is completely not the context here even before the anti-learning nature of this mechanic.)

This is the core mechanic of the boss, and it is awful. (Even before being combined with spreads.) It could have instead been something interesting like "hit one side with the edge of the AOE right down the middle, which flings the venom to consistently cover the other side and little more in a fixed pattern". That would have been a reasonable two-step dodge.

Writhing Riot

An acceptable memory mechanic, but nothing special. The player can stand in the first safespot and then either remember both subsequent hits or remember the second hit and use it to work out the shared safespot with the third hit. This puts it under the three item rule, and allows strong players to plan to dodge in a single movement.

Overall Impression (Boss)

The core mechanic of this boss is so intensely anti-learning, and little else is in here.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Two More Packs

These are mechanically interesting as a double pull, combining the Aerostats (with donut AOEs) and a ranged enemy for the tank to bring into the group.

Second Boss - Deceiver



Bionic Thrash

Hits two quadrants of the arena opposite from each other, shown by the arms. Nothing special in itself, but returns later in combination with the boss's core concept.

Initialize Androids

A functional warning cast, telling the player to look for the adds at the front of the arena.

(no castbar) Line AOEs From Androids

The concept, that some of the adds are not fully spawned in and therefore do not attack, is a good one. The telegraphs covering the whole floor prompt the player that something must be going on to create at least one safespot.

However, the boss dialogue "Active camouflage operational." makes it seem like the adds that do not fully appear are the ones that will attack, since the other adds appear normally and cannot really be considered "camouflaged" in any way. The player will learn after the first hit, but it is annoying to be misled by the text when instead the text could have said something that is better than guessing without it.

The visual effect for "this is not fully spawned in" is also not really adequate for the player to rapidly scan rows of adds. If they happen to be looking when the "flicker" effect is not active, all that distinguishes the adds is the incompletely spawned ones having a vague green aura, which does not stand out in the bloom-heavy environment.

The adds then come in to be killed, which is good to have sometimes for the same reasons as previous bosses.

Initialize Turrets

Another functional warning cast, this time for large blocks on both sides of the arena that will fire larger line AOEs. I do not like calling these "turrets", since that has been long associated with smaller enemies and line AOEs, but there is nothing strongly obvious to call them. If I had to pick something for the castbar without help, I would call them "cannons" or something similar that at least does not point the player away from that AOE size.

(no castbar) Line AOEs From Blocks

The blocks fire one side after the other, creating a sequence of AOEs to dodge where the whole arena is covered over the course of the sequence. The player can see which side will fire first, as the telegraphs roll out from that side to cover the other side.

However, the visual clarity of which blocks will fire is worse than for the androids, as all of them have particle effects and substantial glow in their charging animation, which mimics the "not fully spawned in" visual effect.

Surge

These spreads with line knockback are good for the player to utilize the AOEs they just saw (or look back at the blocks), since this time the fully spawned blocks prevent their character from being knocked into the wall. Fun follow-up to the sequence.

Bionic Thrash + (no castbar) Line AOEs From Androids

A solid overlap. This time there are fewer "not fully spawned" androids, which is fine in concept since the player should know which type to look for.

Overall Impression (Boss)

Good concept, and well executed except for the introductions and visual clarity not being the best. This would be a good boss given a better presentation.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

One Pack

A dull forced single pull.

Two Sentries

Another dull forced single pull, except that the Sentries burst out of the door as soon as it opens rather than letting the tank pull. This does not change much, as they are not strong enough to create the resource-draining effect of the Holminster Switch forced pull series and the party has downtime while they run to the next pack.

Two Eyeborgs

These have multiple telegraphed mechanics, reminiscent of Coincounter in Aurum Vale, and can be double pulled with the next mob / miniboss. Pulling them together is fun, having fewer enemies but more complex AOEs than a normal pull.

Automatoise

I do not mind the large AOE Hard Stomp from this single mob at all. The player has ample time to dodge, they can strategize regarding range, and once they see it repeat they can strategize about it. In particular, the party benefits from dodging together, for both healing range on the tank and melee range on the Eyeborgs if double pulling.

Third Boss - Ambrose the Undeparted



Overwhelming Charge

The way the boss holds its spear is not initially clear about hitting the front or the side, which is not amazing, but the player will learn that it hits the front from the first hit so it is acceptable.

Psychokinesis (Cages)

Comes with red text "The nearby cages are under strain from psychokinesis!", which is good at prompting the player to look at the sides of the arena with the cages, even if they have forgotten the dungeon after a long break and did not get the cutscene replayed. The castbar is also suitably long.

However, the breaking cage doors could use some more visual pop. They shake, their bars are warped, and they glow slightly, but this is a high-bloom environment and the player has to split their time between checking two opposite sides of the arena. (Having the doors shake is a nice touch to not rely exclusively on contrast for clarity, since peripheral vision is relatively motion-sensitive.) The floor lines for where the cage doors can hit are clear, but the doors themselves are not until the very end when they shake heavily.

(no castbar) Uncaged Adds

A very logical place to have some adds to kill.

Extrasensory Field

The player need only move to one quadrant that does not point off the arena (or use their knockback immunity), for which the tell is clear enough even though the arrows fade out quite strongly during their pulses. Since the player has long enough to look to see an arrow pulse bright several times, they can make multiple eye movements to locate a suitable spot and still have time to move their character.

If they did not notice already, seeing this go off gives them another chance to pick up on the pattern that two opposite quadrants point off the arena to the sides, and the other two point in to the arena to the front and back. (Which is good, as it further distinguishes the quadrants rather than making it a natural guess that the player character would be swept through the midline of the arena and then off it.)

Psychokinetic Charge

Combines Overwhelming Charge and Extrasensory Field, asking the player to use the knockback to dodge the front AOE. A nice fair combination.

Electrolance

A simple circle AOE from the thrown spear, nudging the player towards the boss.

Psychokinesis (Spear Dash)

This is not very clear about how wide the spear will hit, nor does it have easy floor references, but the dash sequence starts away from the boss so the player character is naturally positioned to avoid the first couple of dashes and see the rough size. This is not good for enabling precise dodging, so it gets dull after the first time.

(From here on, the two forms of Psychokinesis and the Psychokinetic Charge repeat with added spreads. None of these mechanics play poorly with spreads, and this is a decent mechanical expression of "the boss is desperate to win" for an MSQ dungeon that a very casual healer must be able to clear unaided.)

Overall Impression (Boss)

An okay boss, nothing special even if the visual clarity was up to par.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

Many boring sections including a horrible first boss, and nothing particularly special or exciting.

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Everkeep (Zoraal Ja, Level 99 Normal Trial)



Double-edged Swords

This is a great cast name, cueing the player to expect the second hit even before its telegraph appears. And since the two hits cover all of the arena exactly once, the player must move their character to succeed but is likely to get it the first time based on the castbar.

Calamity's Edge (Activates point-blank AOEs from the Visions)

Nothing special, but fair enough. After all, anything on the battlefield is not likely to be completely harmless.

Vorpal Trail (Dashing Swords)

My first reaction to this was an excited "newbie's first Exasquares!" ("Exasquares" being the colloquial name for the upgraded Cosmo Arrow in the final phase of TOP.) I saw the swords dash at the edges of the arena and come in, and it was cool. Having them start at the edges is a good choice combined with this small boss hitbox, since the player character is likely not near an edge of the arena when it starts, and so the player has a chance to see the pattern before interacting with it.

My second reaction to this was "oh no the floor is not helping". TOP gets away with that, putting a mechanic that operates on a square grid into a circular arena, by both having a very crisp visual effect for each hit and being an Ultimate. This duty has neither of those to make the mechanic work.

Getting hit by this once would be fine. What makes the lack of floor references actively annoying is that this repeatedly combines with Double-edged Swords, and the player has neither a timing reference nor a position reference for this mechanic to plan their movement for the combination. (Especially since the first section of this trial has very few mechanics in total.)

Since this is meant to be a precursor to the swords from the distorted worlds in the rest of the trial and the Extreme - where the floor does have appropriate lines - I would suggest having the floor shimmer and bring in that reference grid beforehand, both providing the mechanical reference and representing Zoraal Ja's twisted thinking. That would make the mechanic less frustrating and so allow the excitement of the combination to shine through.

(There are no further notable mechanics until the cutscene and phase transition.)

Smiting Circuit

The red text "Zoraal Ja readies his blades!" is a good cue to look into the arena for the environment tell. My only frustration here is that the chosen glow effect for the large swords is very similar to that of the "death wall" at the edges of the arena, making it needlessly difficult to pick them out of the environment. (The player does not have the boss's stance to help them, as Zoraal Ja is not holding the swords for the point-blank / donut, and the glow effect distorts the shape of the swords.) In the Extreme, the player learns to overcome that through duty knowledge and practice, but that is not useful here in the Normal.

Since the glow effect is thematically showing that Zoraal Ja is burning through souls, I would instead change the effect on the death wall. It could have been in glowing electrope purple like that in the background of the instance, with a brighter section that rises up to create the sharp wall contrast, and that would maintain the sharpness of the death wall while making the swords visually clear.

Dawn of an Age

This is a really nice way to shrink and transform the arena, allowing for the "distorted worlds" mini-phases. The AOE is itself simple enough and shown for a long enough time that the player will almost always dodge it successfully, allowing for the covered parts of the arena to disappear. Great work.

Vollok

Putting the swords down directly on the available platform the first time is good, priming the player to look further afield for the swords when this cast repeats. The first cast also shows the player that the swords hit on the grid.

Sync

A nice long cast paired with the red text "The distorted world comes into synchrony." This very fairly asks the player to look for which additional platform(s) have been activated and will perform their AOEs shortly after the end of the cast.

If this did not need a delayed activation to allow for an overlapping cast in the Extreme, for consistency and clarity I would keep the timing and lengthen the castbar so that the AOEs hit at the end of the cast.

Bitter Reaping

Double tankbusters cannot hit that hard in Normal, but it is nice to have one so that casual players remain familiar with the concept.

Gateway

Sets up the tethers that move dashing swords between the platforms. Giving each piece of this setup a separate cast is good for encouraging the player to see all the pieces in the order they appear.

Blade Warp

Another setup cast, placing the dashing swords. Again, this is good, and allows a relatively complex mechanic to work fairly in Normal.

Forged Track

The combination of the cast, the tethers to the swords being activated, and the red text "Blades go soaring through dimensions." really makes this work. The dashing swords need the tethers since they are so far away from the player character, while the earlier planted swords do not. (Indeed, the planted swords are too numerous to tether without clutter.)

Actualize

Transforms the arena back, allowing the fight to switch back and forth between mini-phases.

Half Full

This cleave is significantly easier for the first-time player to find than Smiting Circuit, because they can follow the boss's raised arm to the sword. This allows the cleave to work with the blue background tint of the "distorted worlds" arena later on.

Half Circuit

Logically combines Half Full and Smiting Circuit, which would be very reasonable with the changed death wall and background.

Duty's Edge

The big multi-hit line stack is scary, but it hits slowly enough to be reasonable in Normal.

Overall Impression

The first section (before the cutscene) weighs this trial down, between the repetitiveness overall and the positioning frustration of Vorpal Trail. Everything after the cutscene would be a sound, fair Normal given a touch of visual polish. Working with a diagonally oriented boss is a nice change of pace without being unapproachable.

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Alexandria (Level 100 Dungeon)



It is unfortunately necessary context that many players are not going to want to be here, due to moral disagreements with the MSQ's requirements of their character. If they stick around for endgame, they will likely see this again in Expert Roulette, but the first-time experience is still important.

Mobs Before First Boss

One Pack

A dull forced single pull. This was annoying enough in leveling dungeons, and is outright egregious in endgame dungeons that will appear in Expert Roulette.

You want the player to move through the Alexandrian environments in a very staggered way, fine. Make the single pulls mechanically interesting. Give us multiple AOEs, or minibosses that interact with the environments, or something.

Two More Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Immunization Protocol B9

This is literally one mob, a robot elephant that does nothing interesting, and the party has no option to fight it alongside other enemies. (It does spawn directly after finishing the last pack, but that is hardly resource depletion when it does little damage.) Boring!

First Boss - Antivirus X



Immune Response

Cleaves either the front or the sides of the boss, with telegraph and glowing front beam / side tentacles. Simple on its own, interesting when later combined with the sequence of donut and cross AOEs.

(no castbar) Five AOE Sequence

This mechanic has good cues to what is happening, between the red text "Foreign entity removal initiated.", the circles and pluses appearing in green one at a time over the five purple dots that start the mechanic as the lightning flows through them, and the telegraphs and audio cue as they go off. The pace is also good, giving the player time to plan out their movements.

What would make this mechanic really great is adding a visual indicator for how long each AOE has until it goes off. (A falling object over the circles would look too much like a tower, but a second color could fill in the circles and pluses one piece at a time, or something like that.) That would help the player time their movement around the cues and their Global Cooldown, rather than partly reacting to when each AOE goes off (until and unless they learn the snapshots from sheer practice). Especially with the overlapping Immune Response casts, this mechanic could have lots of room for skill expression and satisfying resolution - it just does not have the indicator to enable that.

This is the core concept of the boss, repeated often, and it would go from decent to great with that visual change.

Quarantine

An AOE tankbuster and a stack for everyone else. Not hard, but it is different, pushing the tank to stay out of the stack.

Overall Impression (Boss)

A good boss that could be a great boss, just needs that visual representation of the sequence timing to enable and encourage mastery. When I was checking a video of this, the party in the video took about three party KOs on this boss, and they kept going because they understood their mistakes and saw improvement each time. That is what encouraging failure looks like.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

One More Pack

A dull forced single pull with a short downtime before the next pack spawns.

One More Pack

Still not interesting, and a series of only two packs is not long enough to create resource depletion the way Holminster Switch does - especially in Expert Roulette, where despite the tighter Item Level sync, once the player gets their gear going they will come in with 30 Item Levels above the minimum.

To make matters worse, after this pull, the party spends a long time waiting at the pile of wood and stone rubble before being able to reach the second boss. While the dialogue there is story-relevant, in repeat completions the placement is boring, and it negates any resource depletion by giving time for cooldowns to come back. This being Expert Roulette, that is a lot of boredom and frustration.

Instead, I would present the opportunity for a standard double pull and have the storytelling sequence start as the last pack is engaged, playing out during the party's fight against that pack. The rubble would then be shot down just after the last mob dies, allowing the party to move on without waiting. Even if the player has returned to the game for the Dawntrail MSQ, the five preceding leveling dungeons will have refreshed their familiarity with a standard dungeon pull, and the extant voiced dialogue of the sequence would allow them to take it in without diverting their eyes from the pull at all.

Second Boss - Amalgam



Disassembly

The boss splits itself into many pieces, matching the name, and slowly creates a triangle enclosing half the arena before hitting that triangle with an AOE. This whole battle is purple on purple, and only the edges of the danger zone are marked until the "there was another indicator for this" telegraph at the very end, but this still works: it has a long lead time, the red text "Amalgam divides into parts.", and the boss model changes dramatically.

Centralized Current / Split Current

Casts with growing purple glows, hitting the front-to-back line of the boss and the sides of the boss respectively. The veteran player may recognize this pairing as Hot Tail / Hot Wing.

While this mechanic is fine, the credit for that mostly goes to the castbar. The glowing areas initially do not give any clue that the AOEs will hit beyond the bright section, and the eventual front-back line on each is too thin to be reliably seen even aside from its lateness. If you want the player to have a good chance to guess this pattern from the visual, rather than relying on the castbar and perhaps getting hit once, the visual needs to be better tied to the area being hit.

(no castbar) Electrope Beams

There are five spaces for circular cannons to drop down at the front of the arena, three of which are filled in the first iteration and four in subsequent iterations. These perform simple line AOEs that combine with Disassembly.

The combination is fine, but very much relies on the cannons being at the front of the arena (thus likely to be on screen already), the lead time of Disassembly, and the red text "Energy accumulates in the electrope!" to be viable. The thin lines extending from the cannons are not suitable to draw the player's eye on their own.

These are followed up by spreads that appear just before the combination goes off, prompting the player to spread out of the combination safespot. The timing is acceptable, but significantly more likely to get the player caught in an adjustment loop than the similar setup from Firearms in The Skydeep Cenote.

Ternary Charge

Easy but fun, just like Shore Shaker from the Prime Punutiy in Ihuykatumu. This is the same sequence of concentric circle AOEs.

Overall Impression (Boss)

An okay boss, nothing special despite the potential in the theme of a boss that splits and recombines. Scraping by visually; this is about the worst viable visual design before it gets annoying.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Four Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Third Boss - Eliminator



Partition

A simple side cleave that sets up for Reconfigured Partition.

Reconfigured Partition

The cast name is an important clue that the sword will move to and hit the other side, making this a fair mechanic instead of a reaction to the animation.

Subroutine

The boss splits one or two parts off, so that those parts can later perform distinct AOEs. (The claw does a line AOE and the orb does a donut AOE.) In theory, this is a fun way to build on and connect to the preceding boss, Amalgam.

However, the initial positions of the parts on the boss's back are so high up that they are not properly visible when the player character is close to the boss at the default camera tilt or even slightly higher, which makes this functionally only a warning that the boss set something up. Since in the story this duty is taking place in a computer, the cast name "Subroutine" could set up just about anything, and that is all the player gets if they do not see the parts separate.

(I literally did not know that this boss splits itself until I went into this dungeon with Duty Support for this review - the comments from Krile and G'raha Tia clued me in. On my first attempt with a friend and Duty Finder matchmaking, I did not see the parts separate due to the combination of camera tilt, camera position, and rapidly moving my eyes trying to learn the duty. On subsequent completions, I had learned to anticipate the potential positions for the part mechanics and look there at their scripted times, which meant I was not looking at the boss to see the parts separate.)

Since it is not practical to expect the player to adjust their camera tilt in combat - APM aside, they may not have the keybind flexibility to do so - and camera tilt is important to the player's HUD Layout and seeing around their character, I would fix this by moving the detachable parts of this boss model down and having their removal significantly change the boss's silhouette. That would make the first-time player much more likely to see the separation without Duty Support commentary, while also not changing the boss's unified color scheme.

(cast by Elimination Claw) Terminate

A wide line AOE cast at the same time as another mechanic from the boss, with the only indicators being the cast on the enmity list and the purple lines extending part-way from the claw at the side of the arena.

If the player reliably saw the claw leave the boss and move to the side of the arena from the preceding Subroutine, this mechanic would be okay but on the fast side for processing the combination. Since that is not reliable, the purple glow is not sufficient to reliably draw the player's eye when combined with the other nearby purple from the Reconfigured Partition when this first appears. And since this does not have a long cast, the result is annoying "gotcha" potential where the player does not see what hit them. (Remember, the player has a lot to see their first time in a duty, especially for casual players.)

(cast by Elimbit) Halo of Destruction

A donut cast at the same time as another mechanic from the boss, with the indicators being the cast on the enmity list, the darkening of the unsafe areas of the arena, and purple vertical lines clamping down on the "spotlight" of the safe zone. The donut is followed up by spreads, or later by a Terminate also asking the player to move their character out of the donut safe zone.

Again, if the player reliably saw the orb detach, this would be okay. Since that is not reliable, the indicators are somewhat lacking, though less badly than Terminate; at least something is shown over essentially the whole arena.

(started by Subroutine detaching both parts) Add Phase

The six spread Lightning Generators have the potential to be interesting, as different jobs can rotationally benefit from multiple targets in different ways. However, in the context of a dungeon boss where an add phase must be very short, the lack of party coordination on who will target which adds first limits the skill expression from these adds in Duty Finder matchmaking.

(cast by Elimbit) Light of Salvation (Line Proteans)

These come with telegraphs, as is necessary to get the player to spread by reacting.

Here, the initial presentation of proteans is fine but not good; the Elimbit has moved after its donut and before the first appearance of this, so between the movement and the adds the player may well not even see the Elimbit and purely react to the telegraphs. (Compare to Ktisis Hyperborea having Hermes cast True Aero, which is also a line protean - and even has a baited follow-up - but comes directly from the boss, which the player is reliably tracking.)

After the add phase, this is sequenced after a knockback circle (no castbar), with the protean telegraphs appearing just before the knockback resolves and leaving several seconds to spread between the knockback and protean resolutions. While that sequence is in itself reasonable, the need to react to fellow players' choices necessarily draws the player's eye away from the Partition / Reconfigured Partition that the boss starts casting during the spreading.

That last part can easily hand the first-time player an individual KO - remember, their character just took damage from the knockback and the protean even if they avoided being knocked into the wall - without giving them the opportunity to see that any avoidable damage was coming at all, let alone what it was. And even on repeat completions, the visual demands are too much for a mechanic that Duty Finder can only do reactively: Partition / Reconfigured Partition require looking at the castbar and the sword, while reacting to fellow players' choices effectively for the proteans requires looking at one's character's feet the whole time. As a result, the most practical method is for the player to try to take their protean close to the front-to-back line of the boss as prepositioning to react to the Partition / Reconfigured Partition, and resolve that on reaction once the proteans resolve. This further pushes reaction within the sequence, making it unfun.

Any mechanic that is going to push the player into reacting to fellow players' choices using vision must be designed around the assumption that it completely occupies the player's eyes for the duration, due to the inherent pressure on reaction time pushing them to keep looking at the relevant locations. Surrounding mechanics must also be chosen and designed on that basis.

Elimination

The boss slashes the arena several times, dealing light damage each time and leaving a set of lines slashing the ground. These lines then expand and explode in the same sequence, requiring multiple movements to avoid further damage as the pattern is quite dense.

If the visuals were clearer about where each set of AOEs will hit, I could enjoy looking for areas that will not be hit often and plan to dodge accordingly. But the visuals given focus more on glow and flash than clarity, and there are no floor references to work with, so this is unpleasant to look at and annoying to analyze.

Overall Impression (Boss)

Would have a much better first-time experience if the player could reliably see the pieces of the boss separating and reattaching. Manageable on repeat completions, but still noticeably annoying.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

Slow and boring, not allowing the concept of the first boss to shine. When it comes to slowness, the tighter Item Level sync compared to the rest of Expert Roulette at least has a reason to be there - the single pulls and forced wait do not.

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The Interphos (Sphene, Level 100 Normal Trial)



As with Alexandria, it is unfortunately necessary context that many players are not going to want to be here due to moral disagreements with the MSQ's requirements of their character. As this is a story trial, despite the lack of Duty Support the player has little reason to return after their own MSQ completion, so they are statistically quite likely to be here for their MSQ.

As a general visual note, the NPC illustration on the Queen Eternal's battle dialogue popups extends a little too high, obscuring target buffs and debuffs in the default HUD Layout position of the target bar. Rather than expecting even the most casual player to move their target bar in order to track their own applied debuffs, I would move the NPC illustration down - or better yet, allow the position of these popups to be adjusted in HUD Layout.

Legitimate Force

A fine one-two punch sequence, with visuals on the boss's four arms that allow the same side to be hit twice while displaying both parts of the sequence. Clear enough, and the first glow naturally draws the player's attention.

Aethertithe

The initial many-hit raidwide is fine.

The subsequent puddle AOEs and final hit on each section are completely sunk by their visuals. The red text "The absorption of aether accelerates!" is a fine warning and not the issue. The issue is the distorted grid visual for the danger zones. For me, I manage, but it looks like it should be a draw-in mechanic even if not caught by the final hit on each section. However, some players got so motion sick from it that they vomited, and I can understand why; the appearance that the floor is moving in a distorted pattern can throw off visual balance feedback quite strongly.

In theory, using the motion of high-contrast objects is a way to provide a visual cue that will reliably be seen without resorting to glowing or standard orange telegraphs, working with the motion sensitivity and contrast requirements of peripheral vision. In practice, the results of this have made it clear that such technique should not be used to distort a floor - and if you want to experiment with it in other ways, run tests with players who suffer from various forms of motion sickness before putting those visuals in the live game.

Coronation (Circle AOEs)

The way these targeted AOEs leap towards the selected player character is spooky and not helpful, since it reduces the player's lead on the AOE and often does not help the player figure out who is being targeted. (The party is likely stacked from a previous mechanic.)

If this instead came with a Prey targeting marker, like its other version, it would be a reasonable mechanic with an appropriate lead time.

Virtual Shift

Transforms the arena into a different environment.

Hourglass Arena Mini-Phase

A very restricted arena that makes for some fun and approachable challenges.

Coronation (Double-Targeted Line AOE)

This is a really cool mechanic. The two targets can work together and pull the cannon around with their tethers so that no one gets hit by the beam, and they have a long time to see the telegraph and how the cannon responds to them. The crisp visuals are also excellent, helping the player see the pieces of the mechanic regardless of whether their character is tethered.

While Duty Finder does not coordinate, and this mechanic seems to be here because of the Extreme version coming in Patch 7.1, this still functions in Duty Finder due to the long lead time and only taking a single Vulnerability Up for getting hit. The player has long enough that they have a good shot at sorting it out without ever feeling pressured on their reaction time, and if they fail they are still able to continue fighting without even waiting for a raise.

If you want to have some complex mechanics where the player must react to another player's choice, this is how you do it. Such mechanics are still inherently limited to regular duties, but this is how you do it.

(This mechanic also appears in later rounds of the "main arena" mini-phase, combined with Aethertithe.)

Downburst

A simple, familiar knockback from a corner or the center of the arena, complicated by the restrictive arena shape. It is not hard, but it is fun, with enough time for the player to fairly reason about the complication their first time.

(no castbar) Donut AOE from Drone Circle

Nothing special, but a fine mechanic. The visual cues of the drones swirling in to form the circle and then lighting up the edge of the danger zone is what makes this work.

Powerful Gust

Another simple, familiar knockback, this time from a side of the arena. Has exactly the same design results as Downburst.

Levitation Mini-Phase

The way this phase opens by moving the player character to make sure there is no floor under them is an important trick, pushing the player to notice the levitation without having to read their debuff bar. After all, this is Normal Mode. The forcible move is not ideal, especially out of melee range, but doing it during an arena change makes it less jarring.

Castellation

Giving the player ample warning of every height change is what makes this work. The opening showing the levitation and the red text showing the changes with "Gravity increases, making you fall." and "Gravity decreases, making you float." are crucial.

I must also compliment the attention to visual clarity while having the wall still look like part of a castle. Not only do the edges of the holes glow, but some light shines through the holes into the safe zones to help the player line up with them.

Since failing this mechanic is a one-hit KO (the wall sweeps the player character out of the arena), I would lean even further into the visual clarity by making the irrelevant top of the wall less jagged and less glowy. I would also consider making the safe zones a little wider, since this is mandatory for MSQ and very casual players may not have the required movement precision. (Especially for the quicker sequence of two Castellations in a row - the down to up transition ensures that the player character is already close to a safespot, but that does not help a player who lacks the movement precision to land in it with their first movement attempt.)

Legitimate Force (with levitation follow-up)

The same mechanic, but this time the player will fail the impending fall if they keep their character close to the center of the arena.

Now that the player has already worked with the levitation mechanic, this is reasonable, and the timing of showing the red text shortly after the second arm glow is perfect. Since they have already seen Legitimate Force several times and the basic format is already familiar, the red text will appear pretty much exactly when they have likely finished processing the second glow cue, encouraging them to smoothly add "and then move to a platform" to their movement plan if the hits alternate.

The timing of the fall allows for a moment of hesitation, which is necessary since the casual player has no practice in executing movement sequences without hesitating.

Overall, this is a good example of how to set the player up for success with a movement sequence mechanic.

Main Arena Revisited

Absolute Authority

The sheer length of this castbar, the dramatic dialogue, and the 5-second countdown are normally associated with very high damage mechanics, making the player likely to shield and/or tank Limit Break this... which is largely useless, since the cast does only moderate damage right away and instead applies debuffs for a mechanically intense sequence.

Duty Finder does need a breather before and after dealing with all of this - there are flares, "stand with someone" triangles, Acceleration Bombs, and petrifying gazes attached to player characters in quick succession, combined with rounds of circle AOEs on the ground and repeated pulses of damage throughout the sequence. However, this presentation is frustratingly misleading, as the party does need their healing and mitigation tools but not for the opening of the mechanic.

To improve this mechanic, I would split the presentation into two castbars. The first would apply an "inactive form" of all the debuffs and faded "frozen" markers for the flares, showing even the casual player that they should prepare for something to happen later. The second castbar would still be long to give the player time to think, and at the end would "activate" all the debuffs and start the sequence. In this way, even if the player does not read debuff bars, they would spend the long cast preparing for a sequence involving later healing rather than expecting a massive raidwide.

(Yes, my proposal would be gently introducing Duty Finder to the same "this debuff is not active yet" concept that underlies the Code Smells in TOP, but with a later activating cast rather than an expiring timer. It is a good concept for all skill levels, and really does not need to be limited to Ultimate.)

Once the player actually knows what this mechanic is, it is reasonable, as the debuffs are suitably timed with overhead markers and the player need only look under their character's feet to dodge the circle AOEs. The pace feels scary because there is no breathing time during the sequence, but there is enough time to do it.

Divide and Conquer

What a sweet way to get Duty Finder to do line proteans. Awesome mechanic, excellent work.

Unlike in Alexandria, here the player is generally looking at the source of the proteans. Then the hits one at a time nudge the party into spreading out, especially since each hit has crisp telegraphs and the "selected for something" overhead marker - meaning they will probably be fairly spread out for the final hit on every party member at once, so they have a good chance of managing the final protean positions. (They still might get caught in adjusting loops and fail, but there is only so much to be done about that when the player is approaching the duty based on reaction rather than planning.) The cast name is also fitting, but it would not be nearly enough on its own.

More like this, please. Short of retraining the Duty Finder population to do general preparation including protean positions, you would never be able to drop the "guide rails" off of mechanics like this, but you could still gently introduce so many concepts. That would make the regular duties better stepping stones to the high-end duties, without making the high-end duties any less of an accomplishment.

Final Phase

Wuk Lamat's intervention here is demotivating because she steals the spotlight from the player, both in storytelling and by doing so much damage that the party's efforts are largely irrelevant. How can you expect the player to put in effort if you tell them that their effort does not matter? To make matters worse, the cutscene sharply interrupts the second Absolute Authority resolution (unless the party has not yet met the generous boss HP threshold to allow that), viscerally stopping the player from carrying out the duty's scariest mechanical sequence! They are all wound up and going, and then control is suddenly taken from them by Wuk Lamat forcing them to cede the stage.

NPC intervention in a duty can be done well, but it must not take away from the importance of the player's actions. For example, The Final Day (Endsinger Normal) also has an NPC intervention cutscene, but the Scions praying for the Warrior of Light's success makes the player's actions more important rather than less important. That is very fitting for the climax of an expansion's MSQ, while this is not. Likewise, The Final Day's NPC intervention comes when the player is expecting not to have control of their character, because they see the raidwide coming that previously needed a tank Limit Break 3 and they see that they do not have the Limit Break available to them. (As a result, the motivating effect of the Scions' prayers in The Final Day is similar to that of Phoenix's intervention in The Unending Coil of Bahamut (Ultimate) (UCoB).)

Having an NPC intervention related to the power of friendship is all well and good. It can even be based on trying to restore Sphene's memories. Suppose instead that after the second Absolute Authority completed, the Queen Eternal continued to overload and then a cutscene started. In this version, Wuk Lamat would be accompanied by G'raha Tia and Krile in trying to restore Sphene's memories, and for their success Sphene would summon one or more of the bosses from Alexandria. The NPCs would engage those boss(es), allowing the player party to continue fighting Sphene. Since the three NPCs are not enough to form a light party, the player would see the NPCs' resources slowly deplete from their own fight over the course of the final phase, creating a thematic sense of urgency and possibly even a (generous) hard enrage.

Dynastic Diadem

A basic donut with a small safespot, encouraging the player to move their character to the front center of the arena. This would be helpful prepositioning for Royal Banishment, but the shared point of the cones there does not match the center of the circle here, so it is not great.

Royal Banishment

Raidwide spam and an appropriately slow alternating cone sequence. A fine mechanic to convey Sphene's overloaded state, having simple movements and many small hits of unavoidable damage.

Overall Impression

This trial is really brought down by its final phase and its story context. The actual mechanics of the other phases would be very good to great with some polish to a few mechanics.

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Despite many strong concepts and some truly excellent mechanics, every single group MSQ duty has at least one major design flaw, several of which are in visual design. This is not good, both for immediate enjoyment and for getting the player to the endgame with the confidence that they can enjoy it.

I may be an Ultimate raider, but I always worry when doing a new MSQ duty for the first time. I always have to. I nearly got hard blocked from continuing the MSQ once, and any new duty could be the one that stops me... or the one that tells me that the game is moving towards demanding something I cannot improve at. Patch 7.0's MSQ left me with a lot of concerns in that regard, since not a single one of the group duties felt good to play.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

I will now continue my review of the design of the Patch 7.0 duties, in this subsection covering the two optional dungeons that are not required by the MSQ. Conceptually I would include Arcadion Light-heavyweight Normal in this subsection as well, but I have split them up for length, since both dungeons have mechanics that deserve extended analysis.

Being Expert Roulette dungeons, these duties can benefit from the player being encouraged to return to them many times after completing their stories, but they must still provide an encouraging first-time experience to the casual player while holding up to the repetition. After all, the rewards for the repetition-based gameplay loop become frustrating if the player is too discouraged to go back to the duty.

Since these are endgame duties, and returning players will often warm up first in the MSQ even if they return in later patches (when the latest MSQ is the patch MSQ not required for these duties), these duties have less need to concern themselves with the very weakest players. However, most active endgame players are still casual players.

(Since Duty Support does not include these dungeons, I had to take the arena pictures in Explorer Mode, so as not to inconvenience other players. Please forgive the lack of bosses in the arenas.)

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Tender Valley (Level 100 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Four Packs

Not only can these be double pulled, but each double pull has one to two individually more dangerous mobs with higher HP. This is the same sort of opportunity for skill expression as it is in the leveling dungeons, and it is even more welcome here with the heavy repetition and full job toolkits of Expert Roulette.

First Boss - Barreltender



Heavyweight Needles

This would be a normal set of cone AOEs originating from the boss, except that the early telegraphs are narrower than the actual AOEs; the telegraphs only expand to show the actual areas to be hit at the last moment. Only the larger open areas actually contain a safespot, while the more numerous small open areas get expanded over and hit twice.

As a result, the first-time player most likely follows the telegraphs and moves their character to either a small open area or the edge of a large open area, thus failing the mechanic. But even though they know what to do next time, they feel baited rather than encouraged.

Why? Because there was no other tell that the early telegraphs do not match the actual AOEs, nor are the expanding telegraphs used in the player's favor. (Fighting Kefka is fun in Sigmascape V4.0 (O8N) and its Savage version (O8S) because there is a tell for when he is being a trickster and the telegraphs do not match the actual AOEs, not just because the player is told by the story that he is a trickster boss. The expanding telegraphs in the circle version of Dispatch (Vanguard Commander R8) are acceptable because they start expanding early and are positioned carefully to guide the player into a true safespot.) There is no skill to be learned here, nor is the player expecting (or willing) to undertake the process of progression for a regular dungeon boss. This is a "gotcha", where the player just has to know / remember that the telegraph system lies here even though 100 levels of gameplay has taught them to trust it. (All the worse if the player remembers that telegraphs are granted by the Echo!)

This is the boss, and by extension the game, punishing the player for doing exactly what the game has taught them to do. That is not an enjoyable experience in any way; if anything, it is treating the player as lesser.

As such, this would be a better mechanic if it used something like the glowing lines from Black Cat Crossing (in AAC Light-heavyweight M1 (M1N)) as needles, even though those are further from the actual AOE shapes - at least it is intuitively obvious that the actual AOEs are not pixel lines, so the player would expect to discover how far they expand and in what shape.

What about the player who already knows how the mechanic works?

Well, "find a large open area" on its own is not interesting, even if the player does not know the hidden pattern. (There are only two possibilities: either the safespots are north and south-east, or north-west and south.) Even for the casual player, this is boring the 90th time, and this is cast twice at the start of this battle before combining it with any other mechanic.

To avoid that boredom, the player must be presented with opportunities for skill expression. This mechanic could permit skill expression by dodging only as far as necessary if the floor geometry had references for the player to work out where the AOEs will expand to. But the floor has no such reference lines, so that opportunity is denied to the player and the mechanic is just boring.

Just because the lore concept is an open desert field rather than a "settled" area, that does not mean you cannot have good floor geometry to facilitate skill expression. This boss jumps to / hits the center of the arena as part of several of its attacks, including this one, and the floor already has cracks to convey the arid desert environment. It would have been perfectly reasonable to have the bigger cracks radiate from the center of the arena due to the repeated impacts of the boss hitting that spot - after all, the battle takes place in the boss's home - and use those to mark the potential edges of the safespots.

As it stands, at no point is this mechanic fun. First it is unfair, and then it is boring.

Tender Drop

Drops many cacti, that will explode shortly after the resolution of the next cast (either Heavyweight Needles or Barrel Breaker). There are two types of cacti: those with small explosions are bare, while those with medium explosions have light brown spines and a pink flower.

I could just correctly say that the tell distinguishing the two types of cacti is inadequate and low-contrast, since the spines are tiny and the pink flower blends easily into the orange floor. But I want to show you what the player can easily wind up seeing while looking around at all these cacti.

Here are some freeze-frame screenshots from a gameplay video without third-party tools:







While the video does not load in perfectly, you can see that the player's interface is much clearer than the cacti, because various visual effects are blurring the cacti. In the first screenshot, the blur is exclusively coming from the boss itself, as part of the animation for a subsequent cast that will resolve just before the cacti explode. In the second screenshot, the blur is coming from the point-of-view player's own job actions, which are often left on as an important source of job fantasy and/or gameplay feedback. (Even if the player knows about the option to set those to Limited or Off!) In the third screenshot, both sources of blur are present simultaneously, albeit with a different subsequent cast.

This is already bad for visual clarity. But what the player sees is even worse than this, especially when they do not already know about the flowers and spines indicating different explosion sizes.

Consider the player's time window to look over the cacti. They cannot do so immediately at the end of the Tender Drop cast, since the boss has just thrown the cacti into the air from itself. The cacti land in clouds of dust that obscure any spines and reach up to the flowers, so the player cannot practically use that time to rapidly look between the cacti either. They can only begin checking for spines and flowers once the dust settles, leaving them precious few seconds to look over all the cacti and the subsequent cast before deciding where to move for that cast.

As a result, the first-time player is forced to move their eyes rapidly either trying to locate all the cacti accurately enough to match them up with the subsequent cast, or waiting on the subsequent cast before checking the cacti near its potential safespots. (I say "trying" because there are far too many cacti for the player to succeed with precise locations for every one in the available time. The human eye has limits.) This rapid eye movement effectively creates further blurring, whether the player is using visual information from while their eyes are in motion, is locating some of the cacti purely via peripheral vision in order to have fewer eye movements, or both. (With some disabilities, it is also possible for the player's eye muscles to move their eyes slower than those of an able-bodied person.)

If you blur those screenshots further and look at each part for only a split second... well, the flowers and spines are no longer really discernable on the cacti. What the player actually sees of your beautifully rendered cacti may be politely described as "a blurry heap".

So the player may well not discover that the flowers and spines exist and are relevant from looking at the cacti before the mechanic resolves - to discover that on their own, they have to happen to catch a cactus with them and a cactus without them in their central vision for long enough to notice those elements, in close enough succession to remember what the other type looks like, in the midst of battle with a boss whose core "feature" is that the early telegraphs lie.

What about from looking at the explosions as the mechanic resolves for the first time? Then the player is encouraged to look at their character's feet, both to see how far the early telegraphs expand and to see if they got their character far enough from all the cacti. Unless they stood their character on top of a cactus, that is a terrible place to look to see either cactus type, let alone both. (And the size difference in the explosions is not large enough to be easily visible by looking at the curvature of the circle telegraphs, whether a small part in central vision or the whole circle in the sea of orange in peripheral vision.) So the player is even less likely to discover that the flowers and spines exist and are relevant at that point.

As a result, the player can easily go through the entire mechanic without discovering that two types of cacti exist at all, and be left with the impression that they failed because they did not locate the cacti quickly and precisely enough to locate a safespot. (Or that they succeeded by chance for the same reason.) In turn, this impression drives them to focus even more on locating the cacti next time, which is not just uncomfortable, it drives them further into exactly the rapid eye movement strategies that make it so unlikely for them to notice the different types of cacti!

For a significant subset of players, the visual design of this mechanic takes the effort they put into learning and steers it into a dead end. Once the player is in such a dead end, the only ways out are for a fellow player to tell them or for them to check video footage slowly with the intention to improve at the mechanic. Neither is likely, especially for the casual player! They will generally just conclude that the mechanic is unfair or that they cannot do it, especially in the context of a "gotcha boss" that has already shown them a willingness to be unfair.

And to make matters worse, disabled players are disproportionately likely to wind up in this subset no matter what their disability is. Visually impaired players suffer for the obvious reason. But a player with a non-visual disability will pressure their vision more to compensate for their disability, and has had ample practice doing so from the MSQ necessary to unlock this dungeon - which also drives them to rapid eye movement strategies, especially given the long history of past mechanics in their mechanical vocabulary where precisely and rapidly locating many explosion sources is the necessary method!

(I wound up in exactly this dead end, until a friend told me that the flowers and spines existed. Cue another friend shouting "what flowers and spines?!" There were only three people in that conversation, no bystanders, all raiders that can handle at least final floor Savage... and the two people other than me had not been delayed by the graphical update, so they had the flowers and spines on their screens many times.)

This is completely unacceptable. It is your job to prevent the player from getting stuck in dead ends, not encourage that!

What about the experience of the player who does know about the two different types of cacti, and that the safespots are always near flower-less, spine-less cacti?

Consider the sequence with Barrel Breaker. The player with this knowledge can plan to have their character ride the knockback into a corner, and accordingly look for a corner with a safespot. So for each corner, they naturally look at only the cactus closest to that corner, and the hidden pattern (that there are two safespots in opposite corners) ensures that they will find one after looking at at most two cacti in their central vision. This is a reasonable task for the time given, and thus a reasonable sequence.

(Notice that the hidden pattern does count as helping the player here, because the player does not have to know it exists to benefit from it. The player who does know about the hidden pattern only needs to look at one cactus to find a safespot for this sequence, and that does not count.)

But consider the sequence with Heavyweight Needles. There is not even always a shared safespot between the two mechanics, so the player may have to check the cacti over most of the arena to locate one that will have a small explosion and plan to dodge accordingly. And even if there were always a shared safespot, the player would still have to either check all the cacti near the Heavyweight Needles safespots once the early telegraphs show, or start checking all of the cacti before the early telegraphs show and waste some of their effort. (In either case, most of the cacti they check have flowers and spines, and so will not stop their search.) This is not at all reasonable when each cactus has to be checked in central vision to discern its explosion size.

I understand that your duty design team is neither your 3D art team nor your story writing team, but you must ensure that each visual indicator's necessary standard of clarity is communicated between teams and tested extensively before release. It is the visual design equivalent of marking "this cast name is a mechanic cue, fancy translations cannot be at the expense of clarity at speed" that you learned from Starboard / Larboard Wave Cannon in O11N and O11S. Otherwise the work you put into making each battle express the surrounding story is liable to cause gameplay problems, as it does here.

To salvage this mechanic, obviously the two types of cacti would have to be made visually distinct despite the game-induced blur on the screen and the effective blur from the player's eye movements. Rather than rely purely on high contrast and glowing at the potential expense of the battle's lore concept, I would both heavily differentiate the cacti and present the mechanic in a way that gives the player more time to check them.

Remember how I mentioned changing the floor geometry for Heavyweight Needles? Working from there, tiny green buds of cacti for all possible positions could be present at all times, and then this cast (suitably renamed) would grow the selected cacti from the bud form before they release their spines explosively and shrink back to bud form. This would naturally eliminate the time period before the cacti land and the dust settles, when the player currently cannot check the cacti effectively. More subtly, this would show the player that the set of possible positions is limited but large, and allow them to review the set in "free time" between mechanics or even outside of battle entirely.

While that would also eliminate the spines as a tell between the different types of cacti, the spines are nearly invisible in the midst of battle anyway so that is not much loss. Instead, I would have the cacti with small explosions grow thin and tall with no flowers or branches, while the cacti with medium explosions grow spherical with a glowing blue flower from all the water aether they are taking in to grow. Not only would the completely different shapes and moderate glow actually manage some visibility through the blur for the first-time player, but once the player realizes that the tall cacti have smaller explosions, they can handle future repetitions by looking for the tall cacti in their peripheral vision and then getting the precise position of one tall cactus and its surroundings in their central vision. (Which would stop their visual search much faster than is currently possible, especially for the Heavyweight Needles sequence. This is why I did not suggest simply making the cacti with medium explosions bigger - those are not the ones the player needs to find first.) So their effort put into learning would steer them away from the dead end and towards a reasonable method for finding the necessary visual information.

Barrel Breaker

The boss winds up a punch to the center of the arena, knocking back all player characters unless they use their knockback immunity. Simple on its own - aim for a corner - but is always directly after a Tender Drop cast.

Prickly Left / Prickly Right

While the early telegraphs and the glowing side of the boss show this as a 180 degree hit to that side, they again lie about the actual size of the AOE. But even for the first-time player who applies the "gotcha" from Heavyweight Needles here and tries to dodge just far enough for that, this mechanic still baits them into getting their character hit since the AOE expands much further. (The only safespot is entirely opposite of the indicated side.)

Once the player knows how this mechanic works, they can use the facing arrows on the side of the boss's targeting ring to locate the safespot precisely for optimization, so this is less bad than Heavyweight Needles. But it is still annoying that the early telegraphs lie with no other tell, and the mechanic is just not that interesting once known.

Overall Impression (Boss)

The core concept of this boss is unfair the first time, and poor visual design prevents it from redeeming itself on repeat completions. Even if its visuals were cleaned up, it is not interesting.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Four Packs

These can be double pulled, again with a single larger mob in each double pull. Each double pull is also preceded by a water pipe slide, both separating the encounters and showing the story of reaching a once-settled area.

Second Boss - Anthracite



Anthrabomb (Basic Form)

Tosses three bombs onto the arena floor, with black arrow arcs leading to images of the bombs where they will land. (The bombs then explode with a single point-blank AOE each.) The arcs are a good and important part of the visual indicator, as they allow the player to locate all the bombs by following the arcs out from the boss. The cast length is also appropriate.

Anthrabomb (Line AOE Tutorial)

Tosses a single bomb into a pipe opening in the arena floor, with a yellow arrow arc leading to a yellow arrowhead (and no bomb image) over the pipe opening. (The matching pipes on one side of the arena then do line AOEs that knock back any player characters hit, with the two types of pipe being distinguished by color, shape, and patterns used as decorations by the previous civilization that built the arena.) The cast length is again appropriate, and showing this cast alone is important to have the player notice that this AOE does not hit directly where the bomb landed.

The edges of the line AOEs are supposed to be something the player can work out via floor geometry, specifically the slightly reddened lines of smaller stones across the arena that meet the edges of each side pipe. However, the color difference and the gaps between stones are so small that these lines become invisible as soon as any effective blurring is introduced, whether from job actions, boss animations, the player's eye movements, working in peripheral vision, or the player's camera movements. And even when they are not blurred, they are still interrupted by the ground pipes, which take up much of the space that is near the entrance to the arena and therefore is most likely to be near the first-time player's camera at this point.

I understand that this battle takes place in the ruins of a previous civilization, but you can and must still find a way to have either suitably crisp floors or mechanics that do not require them for visual clarity. (And I know you can do that; despite the restricted color scheme for the floors of Alexander - The Cuff of the Son (A6N), Alexander - The Burden of the Son (A8N), and their Savage versions (A6S and A8S), the raised and lowered panels for Swindler's Height debuffs are very clear.)

For example, you could have had the previous civilization color their floors and pipes using the natural and enduring colors of various stones, rather than fading paint. (Presumably the boss would blow away any dust.) That would give you a much less constrained palette, even within the hard building stones readily available in the western United States of America that Shaaloani is based on. (While it would limit the logical decorative pattern choices of the building civilization to relatively large, blocky options that make sense as being constructed directly out of stones, the current decorative patterns are not reliably getting seen anyway. Finer detail for lore purposes could be provided by carving the stone if you want.) If you are willing to grant the building civilization the ability to preserve softer stones in transparent and durable material, you could even have the edges of these line AOEs marked in ornamental obsidian, which would be very high contrast and available in the geographical area.

Regardless of your choice of justification for contrasting colors, the floor geometry showing the edges of the line AOEs should extend over the floor pipes. As it stands, the red circle pipes leave little to go on even once the player realizes that the floor pipes are each bisected by one edge of the line AOEs.

Anthrabomb (Final Form)

Tosses three bombs combining the initial two forms; two land on the arena floor and one goes into a pipe. Would be entirely reasonable with good visual design for the floor and pipes.

Carniflagration

Three final form Anthrabombs in quick succession, followed up by a basic spread, with no intervening castbars. The time given for each Anthrabomb is not terribly short, but the second and third appear during the placement and detonation of the previous bombs. The spread markers appear as the final set of bombs is thrown.

Here, it becomes even more important to mark the floor pipes and the edges of the line AOEs in high contrast, because the player's view of the indicators for the second and third sets of bombs will be blurred at some points by the movement of their camera as they move their character to dodge the preceding set.

But there is another problem with this mechanic.

With this sort of mechanic, the player knows from long experience that they only need to find one safespot, and that doing so is faster than mapping out all the safe areas in the arena. So especially if the player is used to playing jobs that can do their full damage at range, a natural response to the faster pace is to start by moving their character away from all the bombs - for which they only need rough locations from peripheral vision - and then further move their character to the nearest spot that will not be hit by a pipe. (This second movement is guaranteed to be small by the alternating layout of the pipes, which the player learned from the line AOE tutorial Anthrabomb, and the player can begin locating the yellow arc during the first movement.) For other mechanics of this sort, this is an excellent method to handle lack of practice with the specific mechanic's visual indicators, or simply high speed demands.

However, this method applied here generally drives the player to move their character up against one of the side walls, beside the pipes. (More so due to the lack of contrast in marking the edges of the line AOEs, encouraging the player to use the side pipes themselves as references.) At that point, consider the behavior of the player's camera. If they try to place their camera over the side pipes, it will instead hit the invisible wall over the side pipes and press up against their character, giving them a view of very little. If they instead place their camera away from the side pipes, even at the maximum distance from their character it cannot show them the whole arena for the subsequent sets of bombs. (If the player primarily moves with a mouse, that will incline them to do the latter.)

As a result, the player must fight their camera rather than the boss itself. This is annoying, both from the immersion break of fighting the interface and from the player's prior learning failing them because of the interface. The player winds up having to avoid this method of dodging at this boss, not because it would not be effective for their character but because it does not allow them to see the later bombs.

If the side pipes did not have invisible walls over them, the player would be able to point their camera into the arena from there and have it be useful just like they do with most arenas, which would eliminate the issue. If the attacks after the first were of some other form that did not need a clear view of the whole arena, perhaps something dodgeable by the castbar, the views available to the player after any first dodge would be adequate. If this mechanic was presented in a context that effectively granted the player an extra-zoomed-out camera to see the whole arena with, as Anabaseios: The Twelfth Circle (Savage) (P12S) does in its Gaiaochos mini-phases, that would also eliminate the issue. (Raiders colloquially and lovingly refer to those mini-phases as "UAV", short for "unmanned aerial vehicle", for the distinctive feel that is fully designer-intended but acts like the camera zoomhacks used in the TOP world race.) But none of these options are true here as the boss stands.

Should the player persevere and be strong enough to seek out hidden patterns even in a mechanic they find hectic, the situation does eventually improve for them. Many seemingly possible sets of bombs are actually blocked, creating several locations away from the side walls that always have a safespot nearby. Once the player learns to keep their character away from the side walls, they have the view of the arena needed to notice one or more of these locations via extended repetition. In turn, should they gravitate to one of these locations, the smaller required movements from staying within that area make the mechanic less hectic, finally allowing them the time to reliably reference the low-contrast markings on the current floor during the mechanic. They may even be able to optimize their movements for job uptime. But the path to that point is needlessly discouraging, and struggling players may not be able to follow it at all.

Overall Impression (Boss)

This boss is an unfortunate victim of its visual design and the game's standard camera. There is optimization potential under the surface, but it requires finding hidden patterns to avoid fighting the interface and the visual design.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Two Packs

These can be double pulled, and the second pack includes two Yok Huy Vessels whose auto-attacks cleave an unmarked circle around their target. This is mechanically interesting. Further, it is not unduly burdensome to the casual healer even if their party chooses to take the auto-attacks for better damage output, since every healer job at level 100 has a variety of AOE healing tools that can easily handle this amount of incoming damage.

Indeed, I consider this a good thing, as it encourages less skilled healer players to try using some party healing cooldowns on trash pulls and then notice being able to use those cooldowns again on the next boss. This gently hints to them that AOE healing cooldowns can be effectively used on trash pulls, even if only the tank is taking damage.

After these two packs, there is an arrow slide:



This arrow slide is clearly meant to introduce the player to the arrows that the next boss places for Greatest Labyrinth. However, since it is completely straight, the player engages with it in exactly the same way as the water pipe slides in the previous section. This makes it easy for the first-time player to miss the behavior of the arrows, especially if their party members are already familiar with the dungeon and charge ahead. (Even if the whole party is there for the first time, they may well be looking at the treasure coffer or still thinking about the previous trash pull.)

To make this a less missable introduction, I would have the arrow slide take the same amount of time, or at most the amount of time that the physical pipes take, but include some turns without turning the whole hallway. (The exact setup may have to be tuned to avoid motion sickness.) This change would make it clear that the behavior is different from the earlier physical pipes, without requiring the player to already understand the arrows or adding frustrating delays to repeat completions.

One Pack + Miniboss

The second pack after the slide is a single Yok Huy Attestant, standing in this arena:



The veteran player who has leveled many jobs through the Shadowbringers range may well recognize this arena from The Qitana Ravel, and expect similar mechanics, depending on how they leveled. And they would be correct; the mechanics of the Yok Huy Attestant are almost identical to those of the Ronkan Dreamer minibosses there, with the only difference being that here the Sun Toss ground AOE dropped on a random player character is targeted immediately as the statues fire their line AOEs from Ancient Wrath. Such a player already knows how the statues work, and can manage this timing by verifying the statue dodge before that animation begins.

However, the player who only subscribes intermittently, or who is newer and so has not had an extended period of being caught up on the MSQ (or nearly so) to level many jobs while being able to access The Qitana Ravel, may only have seen the Ronkan Dreamers in one dungeon completion - and that two expansions of MSQ ago. They are unlikely to remember the miniboss or the statues, and so must learn how the Yok Huy Attestant works without that reference. Therefore, they must watch the animations of the statue AOEs to check their guess at Ancient Wrath, which pulls their eyes away from the Sun Toss telegraph. While they will probably notice the orange telegraph, the delay in looking at it makes it reactive for them until they stop looking at the statue AOE animations.

As a result, even though neither mechanic is reactive once learned, the player's learning processes for the two mechanics interfere with each other. Even veteran players can be in this situation if they do not often repeat leveling dungeons, or if they level each job to the cap each expansion by directly queueing the highest dungeon that job can access, and so have not seen The Qitana Ravel in two expansions. Or if they simply want to re-check their understanding, since this is a different dungeon and this miniboss is the first strong hint of similarities to Ronkan design.

In high-end duty design, such interference is often an acceptable side effect of forcing the player to manage their attention through rapid mechanical sequences. It is acceptable there because the player is expecting and willing to undertake the process of progression, and so allows for getting their character hit by the next attack in the sequence in order to learn the current one. But this is a regular dungeon, where you have none of that patience from the casual player. They may easily require more than the two casts of Ancient Wrath before Sun Toss is added to learn the former mechanic well enough to be comfortable not looking at its resolution, and then judge this section of the dungeon on the resulting poor first impression. (Especially if they had bad experiences with mechanics in the Patch 7.0 MSQ to get here, and/or are being extra careful after the "gotcha" mechanics of the Barreltender.)

Even if the player does know Ancient Wrath well already, it is still a little satisfying to actually get to see the uptime dodges that stay in melee range / Line of Sight without worrying about Sun Toss. Let the player have those moments.

To make this section still strongly reminiscent of The Qitana Ravel without being exactly the same, I would swap out Sun Toss entirely for a different mechanic on the smooth timing of the older miniboss. The replacement mechanic could be a little harder than in The Qitana Ravel, since the player here is more experienced, this dungeon is not strictly mandatory for MSQ, and Expert Roulette dungeons are repeated more than Leveling Roulette dungeons. For example, the Yok Huy Attestant has the same 3D model structure as Lozatl (the first boss of The Qitana Ravel) complete with the crystals on each shoulder that glow to indicate hitting that side of the arena. Those side cleaves would have fit well here, being simple on their own but combining with the ruined wall segments to present new considerations to the player, and would also be a recognizably Ronkan mechanic in the context of the model and the statues.

Other than the one disappointing timing choice, I do like this section. It is a good way to hint at story through mechanics before spelling it out in the post-dungeon cutscene, and being able to pull the preceding pack into the arena is welcome in Expert Roulette. (Even if the second Ronkan Dreamer in The Qitana Ravel offers a harder pull, with an additional pack and a tighter Item Level sync.)

Third Boss - The Greatest Serpent of Tural



Bouncy Council

The most repeated mechanic of this boss, spawning a set of smaller serpents that each do one ground AOE (simultaneously) and then leave.

(The first cast is exclusively thin front-to-back lines, the second cast is exclusively point-blank circles with one corner open, and all subsequent casts mix the two types. These subsequent sets always have exactly two circle serpents that occupy adjacent corners, and three line serpents occupying the remaining corners and the middle of the arena. Line serpents may only be pointed north-south, east-west, or directly diagonal.)

I appreciate that these serpents have bright white-blue arrows marking the direction they are bouncing in. This is a crisp, high-contrast cue that does not obscure the lore idea of the serpents creating their AOEs by bigger bounces once they have wound up, nor does it rely on glow effects. It provides exactly what the player needs to work out for themselves what form and direction each AOE will take. Excellent work. I would personally prefer that the arrows appear immediately, but they are structured very well.

Unfortunately, the placement of these AOEs relative to the floor tiles is not good. This floor is composed of square tiles carved with geometric patterns courtesy of the Yok Huy, and each corner serpent is precisely centered on a tile - but the width of the line AOEs is slightly larger than the side length of a tile, denying the player precise reference points even for the AOEs that are oriented along the tile grid. (And since the telegraphs showing this appear for less than a second, the player can easily mistake them for exactly the same width as the tiles. If they then use the tile edges mistakenly as reference points and get their character hit, they will likely blame the hit on snapshotting or lag rather than having any inkling of the true cause.) The diagonal and circle AOEs have nothing resembling reference points on the floor, which avoids being misleading but still denies the player the opportunity to precisely dodge. Such reference points could have been made by incorporating their possible edges into the carving patterns.

If these AOEs and the floor were tweaked to provide the appropriate reference points, this could be a really fun mechanic, especially as the final form creates small safespots. There is enough time for the player to see all the serpents and work out roughly where they will hit, which would move up to precise locations with the floor references. So for their effort, the player would be rewarded with the thrill of seeing all the AOEs miss their character despite the small safespots, plus of course the job optimization opportunities as previously discussed. But as it stands, those opportunities are not really available to the player, and having only a rough location for the safespots results in worries about reacting to the telegraphs to adjust their character's position.

Greatest Labyrinth

This mechanic opens by drawing all party members into the exact center of the arena, which is useful in some circumstances. However, since here the player must immediately undertake a visually demanding task, the draw-in is disruptive to their view of the arena and their personal tracking of their character's location.

If the player moves their own character, they will naturally include that movement in tracking their character and their camera movement relative to the arena. This allows them to partly compensate for the camera movement automatically, using many of the same brain systems that have evolved for movement on Earth. Forced movement mechanics do not permit this, and instead force the player to re-establish that tracking once their character is in the new location. (Especially forced movements that give no prior indication to the player, such as this one. Mechanics that ask the player to plan around a forced movement at least prepare them for the disruption, especially if they show the player character's new location such as in Eden's Verse: Iconoclasm (E7N) and its Savage version (E7S).)

This does not make forced movement mechanics inherently bad. Far from it. Forced movement has even been used to spectacular effect in some mechanics, such as opening the levitation mini-phases of The Interphos, or the ending of each Relativity in E12S.

But the effects of forced movement on the player's visual tracking must be considered when placing forced movement mechanics and visually demanding tasks. In this context, where the visually demanding task of working with the arrow placements is the core of the mechanic, having a forced movement immediately beforehand disrupts the task without being interesting or necessary.

To avoid this disruption without compromising the arena transformation, I would use the same technique that Everkeep does in Dawn of an Age: place a clear ground AOE with ample time over the parts of the arena you are going to change, and have that AOE KO (and/or move) any player characters that remain in it at the end of the cast. There is no problem with extending that AOE somewhat further to prevent player characters from stepping over onto a just-formed arrow, nor with the bind while the arena transforms.

After the arena transforms, the player is presented with the red text "You feel a longing to vacate your mortal coil...". I understand that this is meant to alert the first-time and/or casual player to the Greatest Curse debuff, which KOs their character if not cleansed by the correct corner tile. But this is not a good use of the red text.

First, this text is exclusively focused on the consequence for failure, not what the player must do to succeed. Such a focus would be appropriate for some puzzle mechanics, where saying too much about a route to success would spoil the puzzle. But this is not a puzzle mechanic; it is a rapid visual processing mechanic. Second, this text is vague and flowery about the consequence. Even if the player is well familiar with reading their debuff bar and with various consequences for failing mechanics, they still have to mentally translate this before they arrive at "failure results in KO". Again, time is of the essence here. Flowery text can sometimes be useful for lore puzzles, which this is not.

I would change the text to "Navigate the labyrinth to break the curse!" That is straightforward and focused on the route to success, mentioning the debuff only as needed to alert the player to its presence.

So what must the player do to succeed at this mechanic? (In more detail than "navigate the labyrinth".)

To cleanse the debuff and thus avoid the KO, the player must get their character to the single corner tile of the arena marked by a blue circle. The arrow tiles prevent the player from simply moving their character there normally. So the player must look over the arrows - the labyrinth - to find out which directly reachable tile will move their character to the desired corner. (There is only ever one such tile out of the eight tiles adjacent to the unchanged central area.)

Let us break down the steps of this task. In particular, let us break down the most efficient general method that guarantees a solution for the player who understands what the mechanic is but has no knowledge of any hidden patterns.

First, the player must check the corners of the arena until they find the one tile marked by a blue circle, the conceptual endpoint to the labyrinth. (The corner markings are not prominently visible until Greatest Curse has ticked down to 16 seconds remaining, even though it starts at 18 seconds.) This may require them to check all four corners, depending on where they start looking. The first-time player wil likely need to see the circle to know that that tile is the correct one, requiring them to check the corners individually in central vision. (The same is true for the player who has completed the dungeon before but has any form of colorblindness that makes the blue and the purple difficult to distinguish.) The player who has done this before, barring colorblindness as mentioned, can use their peripheral vision to check multiple corners at a time. In either case, they may require a camera turn, as viewing all four corners of the arena with their character in the exact center is only possible with precise camera tilts and angles, and even then uses the very edges of the screen that are often covered in HUD elements. (Ironically, the camera tilt settings that make this possible are the same ones that put Valigarmanda's beak off the screen during its lightning beak animation tell. Further, the range of viable settings and angles that eliminate the camera turn would be larger if the player moved their character on their own to the edge of the unchanged central area.)

Second, the player must work backwards from the endpoint to the central area. They work tile by tile to discover the path, asking and answering the question "how can I get to this tile?" over and over again on the smallest scale. (Those readers familiar with computer science may recognize this method as a breadth-first search.) So they look at the two tiles adjacent to the endpoint, and check each of those for whether its arrow points into the endpoint. Due to a hidden pattern allowing the player to return their character to the center of the arena for melee uptime, exactly one of those tiles will point into the endpoint. (The player does not necessarily know that, but they still benefit from it after checking both adjacent tiles by not having to look for paths to both.) They set the one tile pointing into the endpoint as their intermediate goal, since any path there will lead them to the endpoint.

Then they look from their intermediate goal to the two tiles adjacent to that (not counting the endpoint itself, since they already checked it) and check each of those for whether its arrow points into their intermediate goal. One or both of those will, and they set their intermediate goal to those new tiles. (Yes, eventually there can be multiple tiles pointing into an intermediate goal tile.) Then they look at all the tiles they have not yet checked that are adjacent to their new intermediate goal(s), again looking for arrows pointing in. (Some intermediate goal tiles will eventually have three unchecked adjacent tiles, being not on any edge of the arena.) They repeat this process until they find an intermediate goal tile that is adjacent to the unchanged central area, since they know they can reach that tile by normal character movement.

Finally, they move their character to the intermediate goal tile they can directly reach, and wait for the arrows to transport their character to the endpoint. While travelling the path requires no further input from the player, they must leave time for it to occur before the debuff expires.

(What about working forwards from the directly reachable tiles? Tempting as that is, the player has no guarantee that doing so will not lead them all around the arena checking long and fruitless paths. (Even if there is a further hidden pattern guaranteeing that, the player has no way to find that out without either risking many failures or consulting many videos. Regular dungeon guides are generally made shortly after the duty's release without such in-depth knowledge, and working backwards keeps the player's eyes away from most of the directly reachable tiles. Plus the Patch 7.0 duties leading up to this point have inspired no confidence in the player that your mechanics will be consistently visually reasonable.) And if they put their character on a wrong path, the forced camera motion effectively blurs their screen for the duration, leaving them less time to try again.)

(What about working backwards but considering each new intermediate goal tile as soon as it is identified, rather than continuing to check each adjacent tile to the current intermediate goal tiles? That would guarantee success, and indeed in computer science that would be known as a depth-first search. But that would place greater demands on the player's working memory - to hang on to each not-yet-checked tile for longer and accumulate a larger list - without improving the worst-case scenario.)

This requires a large number of visual checks overall, most of which are checking arrow directions. And the arrows are green on brown, with the green color ranging from dark to lightly glowing in a way totally unrelated to the direction of the arrow. The glow is visual clutter, not an aid to the player. So in order to discern an arrow's direction reliably, the player must not only put that arrow in central vision, but they must also stop their eye movement on that arrow briefly to pick it out from the surrounding brown tile. (Especially if they use postprocessing to cope with the forced bloom from the graphical update!)

(You may find that you can discern an arrow's direction reliably when looking at an adjacent tile, not the arrow itself. But I cannot, and I have a recent clean eye exam including peripheral vision and colorblindness testing, so clearly that capability is not available to all your players. I can only imagine this is worse for players with visual impairments. As such, I will proceed based on checking an arrow's direction in the manner I described in the previous paragraph, since that is a much more realistic assumption of the player.)

And the tiles the player is checking at each step are not adjacent to each other, resulting in short eye movements in many different directions. As a result, the player is forced into a flick-stop-flick-stop repeating eye movement pattern, which can be physically uncomfortable to sustain even without a disability raising the time pressure.

Let us take an example to see how much eye movement this is in a bad case.

Suppose that the player goes through nine goal tiles in the course of their search, including the endpoint but not the directly reachable tile, and that each of them has two adjacent tiles not yet checked. (This is very possible when dealing with a long path and/or multiple intermediate goal tiles in the same step. I am not convinced that it is even the worst case.) Suppose also that the player checks the tiles in the worst reasonable order, so they must perform a camera turn to find the endpoint and must check both adjacent tiles for each goal tile until the last one (where they can reason out to prioritize the directly reachable tile).

The camera turn acts similarly to one eye movement. Then the player - even if they can identify the endpoint in peripheral vision - must move their eyes to one tile adjacent to the endpoint, then the other. The same goes for each of the remaining goal tiles until the last one. So that is one eye movement from the camera turn, plus two each from the first eight goal tiles, plus a final eye movement to check the directly reachable tile. 18 eye movements, each of which requires a brief stop.

Suddenly 16 seconds is not all that long, even setting aside time for the player to reorient, the player to move their character, their character to travel along the arrow path, and client-server latency. In fact, when including those, this mechanic demands almost two eye movements per second to ensure success.

This is an even higher eye movement frequency than Ultimate mechanics such as TOP's Party Synergy (initial clone AOEs) and Predation Dodge, where the player can reduce character movement time with planned Sprint and expects ample practice to improve their visual processing speed. (Notice that Sprint does especially little here, since part of the character's movement time is along the arrow path where movement speed buffs do not help.) Sure, those include some larger eye movements and that does matter, but both repetitive motion and rapid stopping and starting are their own physical burdens.

(Party Synergy method: Check Playstation markers before the clones appear, so you must preposition your eyes for the markers rather than the clones. Ignore the middle clone, locate the side clones (and the eye) roughly by spawn sound and peripheral vision. Look at the arms of the side clone visually nearest after checking Playstation markers; if they are empty, look down to their feet to check whether they have skates or regular feet. (Skates means Superliminal Steel, regular feet + empty hands is the decoy. There is only one decoy.) If you found the decoy first, look at the arms of the next clone nearby. Upon identifying a weapon, regardless of finding the decoy or not, start moving your character to the general area of the two potential safespots while looking towards the opposite side of the arena for the other clone. Again look at the clone's arms; if they are empty and you have not yet found the decoy, check their feet. Identifying the second weapon stops your search.)

(Worst case to start of character movement: 3 eye movements (arms, feet, arms). Worst case to complete solution: 5 eye movements (arms, feet, arms, feet, arms). Your eyes will only have to cross the screen once. Time between clone spawn and AOE snapshot: 5 seconds. This is slightly over one eye movement per second, with some visual clutter from the decoy but less than in Greatest Labyrinth.)

(Predation Dodge method: Look at the arms of one of the first clones to spawn. (There is no decoy here; empty arms always come with skates.) Then look at the arms of the clone opposite it. Preposition character roughly between the two potential safespots and preposition eyes on one of the remaining intercardinals, where the next clone's arms will be. Once that clone spawns and you identify its weapon, look opposite it at the arms of the last clone. Then look at Final Omega until the glow shows for the hourglass cleaves. Move your character to the first safespot, while looking at the first safespot for precise positioning. Preemptively look at the second safespot, again to aid positioning.)

(7 eye movements every time, in 11 seconds between the first clone spawn and the first AOE snapshot, with no visual clutter. Your eyes will only have to cross the screen twice. If you can do Party Synergy, you can almost certainly do this, with some extra time to handle the Final Omega overlap.)

Some players do choose to use more visually demanding methods for TOP than those I have just described, because they prefer to always start with the same gender of clone in identifying each pair of AOEs. But that is an option. When they do that, they are choosing to do a harder eye movement task in exchange for an easier pattern matching task. If they find themselves struggling with the harder eye movement, they can take the easier eye movement task and learn the pattern matching starting from either clone by practice and memorization, which gives them an actionable route to success.

Greatest Labyrinth has no alternate option. (Other than trial-and-error and following fellow party members, both of which are unreliable and not really solving the mechanic.) The player who finds the repetitive flick-stop-flick-stop eye movement physically uncomfortable, injurious, or outright impossible is just stuck with it.

Why is a regular dungeon mechanic more demanding than an Ultimate in raw eye movement frequency and sustaining that frequency, both of which the player cannot change if they find themselves limited?

This is absurd.

To examine the intensity of this visual task in another way: the time that the human body (including brain) takes to initiate a "flick" eye movement varies quite a bit even testing the same person at different times, but a typical time is around 200 milliseconds, or one-fifth of a second. That is not counting any time the player spends deciding where to look depending on what they see. So by asking the player to make almost two eye movements a second, you are asking them to spend on average almost 40% of the search time literally waiting for their eyes to get moving. Again, this is absurd.

(Some readers may be aware that in some circumstances, such as examining a face, humans regularly make multiple eye movements per second. Presumably that is not mired in delays because the task of looking at a face allows the human brain to plan several movements ahead to look at different facial features - a sort of planning Greatest Labyrinth permits very little of, Party Synergy permits somewhat, and the Predation Dodge completely supports once the first clones appear. And the tasks where such frequent eye movements are common also do not have such hard stops, hence why we regularly miss details such as accidentally repeated words when reading. I can tell you that I find reading much more comfortable than Greatest Labyrinth, despite working far faster to read at my natural speed.)

The only reasons this demand did not create an obvious disaster are that the player can notice their party members' attempts in peripheral vision, and that party KOs do not lose particularly much time on regular dungeon bosses.

Extending the time limit could improve the situation, especially given the hidden pattern. (The hidden pattern is well-designed, allowing faster players to optimize for job uptime without having to worry about estimating the time taken to travel the correct arrow path.) That is why Deltascape V3.0 (O3N, Halicarnassus) does not suffer the same way from its own visual labyrinth, despite relatively low contrast; even if the player cannot use the motion of the tiles to find the tile directions in peripheral vision, they have far longer to search and several still tiles to work towards along the way. It asks the player to do several small searches, which limit the length of the worst-case scenario, with a generous timer.

But I think there is a more elegant solution here: make the glow help the player visually, as would be expected from such a mechanic.

Each arrow is already composed of one large triangle as its head, two chevrons pointing towards the head, and a tiny triangle filling in the middle. I would make the head triangle glow clearly regardless of bloom, and have the rest of each arrow in a single non-glowing medium green. (Including on the arrow slide earlier in the dungeon.) The idea is that when the player is looking at the endpoint or an intermediate goal tile in their central vision, they would reliably be able to see the glow of any adjacent arrows pointing towards it in their not-quite-central vision, clearly differentiated from those pointing in other directions. Making this reliable eliminates the need to look directly at adjacent tiles that do not become intermediate goal tiles. This would cut the required eye movements almost in half and make the directions of motion much smoother, thus making the visual demand far more manageable without changing the idea or the complexity of the visual labyrinth.

The faster the player needs to see and process a visual indicator, the clearer it has to be. The necessary standard here is much higher than it is in O3N because the player must work faster.

Moist Summoning

This would be a simple multi-hit stack, except that each hit leaves a puddle from the serpent add that hits the stack area. As a result, not only does the first-time player have to react to the presence of the puddle, but every time the player must react to their party members' choices of where to move out of the puddle.

While this need to react to fellow players is not a disaster, it introduces just enough of a delay that each puddle's time to activation is annoyingly short. This would be a less reactive mechanic if it overlapped with something that suggested a movement direction to the party, such as a rotating cone AOE, despite the overlap technically making the mechanic harder.

Greatest Flood

A simple knockback from a corner tile, specifically (relative to the center of the arena) slightly further out than the closest corner. This is only complicated by the puddles from Moist Summoning persisting.

A fine mechanic; the puddles present a consideration to the player without being too difficult, and the player can use their knockback immunity for uptime or dealing with bad puddle placement.

Great Torrent

Hey, an actually fun mechanic! The player has the time with the telegraphs to precisely position outside the first AOE in the sequence, and enough time to spread after the sequence completes.

Overall Impression (Boss)

This boss has a perfect reason built in for excellent floor geometry and the mechanics to match, but it does not actually give us the floor geometry that would enable precise dodging. Greatest Labyrinth is also a low point, since it leaves some players with no actionable route to success.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

The trash mobs are interesting but not too difficult almost across the board, but every single boss has serious visual design issues.

The fact that visual design plagues every single boss in this dungeon, not just one mechanic or even one boss, makes it feel like this is a test of whether lowering visual clarity makes for fun difficulty. Whether or not you intended it as such a test, I will give the answer: no, and that is not something the vast majority of players would give you useful feedback on regardless.

The average Ultimate raider does not consciously think about what sorts of capabilities a mechanic requires, nor how they move their eyes to do a mechanic. Any given casual player is even less likely to think about such things. If they struggle with a mechanic because you obscured the needed visual indicators and references, outside of obvious cases like "this duty is orange on orange" they will generally not perceive that their issue is with a lack of visual clarity.

They may instead notice only that they keep failing the mechanic without any improvement past a certain point, and simply say "this is too hard" on that basis. They may completely miss a core part of the visual indicator, as with the cacti created by Barreltender, and base their assessment on a mistaken idea of what the designer intended. They may notice that they are unable to get all the information they need in time and deem the mechanic or duty "unfair", especially since Barreltender shows a willingness to be unfair from the beginning of the dungeon. They may find themselves delayed in discerning the needed information, correctly perceive that their time to make a decision with that information was very short, but declare the mechanic "reactive" since they do not consciously perceive that the delay came from obscured visuals rather than no visuals. Or they may simply not like it but be unable to pin down why.

All this gets drowned out not only by the angry back-and-forth over "is Dawntrail too hard?", but also by things that are easier to complain about. It is within the reach of the average casual player to identify the Strayborough dolls as annoying, so you get lots of complaints about them. It is not anywhere near the reach of the average casual player - in effort or knowledge - to explain how your visual design choices affect their visual processing of mechanics, the way that I have done here.

Meanwhile, the player who can handle the obscured visuals is totally unaffected. The mechanic is not any more exciting for them, because the mechanic underneath is the same. The arena and animations do not fit the lore and story any better, because an immense variety of lore concepts can be presented with clear visuals for needed mechanical indicators. I described how I would change the visual design of this dungeon to demonstrate that lore fit and visual clarity are not mutually exclusive. And of course, visual elements that are not relevant to mechanics can be as subtle as the artist and/or lore writer desires.

It is exactly as I wrote in the design principles section of this review: making needed visual indicators difficult to see is anti-fun.

I have taken the time to give this detailed breakdown because I want you to adopt - and follow - visual clarity and accessibility standards that suit the real-time nature of this game. No more orange on orange, as players told you about Eden's Verse: Furor (E6N, Ifrit and Garuda), Asphodelos: The Third Circle (P3N, Phoinix), and their Savage versions (E6S and P3S). Those were two raid tiers apart, you had the time to act on the feedback from Eden's Verse in your production pipeline for Asphodelos. No more indicators that require color vision or are heavily obscured without it. And nothing the player needs to see should ever wind up as a blurry heap!

Build visual clarity and accessibility standards into your design process. Make them reflect the requirements of the mechanics that use each visual element. Seriously.

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The Strayborough Deadwalk (Level 100 Dungeon)



Mobs Before First Boss

Four Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

First Boss - His Royal Headness Leonogg I



Falling Nightmare

Introduces part of the dolls' punishment for failure by putting the falling heads over each player character, but with the opportunity to dodge since the player character has not been bound by a doll. This would be a good introduction, except that the heads have barely any contrast with the floor and the dolls are awful to deal with.

(The heads inflict 10 seconds of the Benoggined debuff, which has a "ha ha you messed up" visual as well as being equivalent to Out of the Action combined with Heavy.)

The heads do have green sections with more contrast, but the player cannot readily learn to use those sections, since their 2D shapes on the screen vary greatly depending on the boss's choice of the head's facing relative to the player's camera.

Team Spirit

A brief warning cast for the dolls lining up around the edge of the arena, preparing to march. In itself, this is a good thing.

Spirited Charge

Has the dolls begin marching across the arena.

Since these particular dolls are one of the most complained-about mechanics of Patch 7.0, let us go over them in detail. Why are these so annoying, when players have previously enjoyed moving object mechanics such as the brooms in The Grand Cosmos?

First, note that the dolls march quite fast, even faster than Honey B. Lovely's moving hearts. Their speed feels comparable to the bullet hell bubbles created by Feather Ray in The Skydeep Cenote. So just like those bubbles, the player's screen tells them that they got hit by a doll while also showing positions that would have resulted in a successful dodge if those positions were accurate. The resulting "I was out of that!" is all the more unpleasant when encountering the dolls over and over again in Expert Roulette.

Second, the time available after the dolls line up is not enough to check all of the dolls' starting positions. There are only four seconds between when the dolls first stand still in their starting positions on the player's screen and when the dolls begin moving visually, which means even less time between when the player first has the opportunity to see the dolls' starting positions and when the dolls have actually started moving on the server. This is not remotely enough to check what seems to be 16 dolls, arranged in roughly a square with four to each side. (And the player needs to see all the dolls, not just those aimed to march near their character or a single potential safe spot, due to the overlapping mechanics.) To make matters worse, the arena is a circle whose markings do not correspond to any "lanes" for the dolls, making it more difficult to visually trace their future paths. And since the dolls are relatively densely packed, the player needs precise positions to locate safe areas, which they must obtain from central vision.

Third, the starting positions are not sufficient on their own to know the dolls' entire paths, nor the timing of the dolls traversing those paths. Different groups within the square of dolls start moving at different times, which are completely unmarked other than by watching the dolls move. (Even if the order is static, the player would have to spend a long time watching the dolls - without worrying about their job or dodging - to find that out. I think it is a static order, with the east group always moving first.) And when a doll reaches roughly the edge of the arena (perhaps an edge of the hidden square) after marching from the line-up in Team Spirit, it aims at a party member's position (seemingly at random) and marches a second time in that direction. (In one section of the battle, the dolls even repeat this process of picking targets and marching multiple times, as the boss is too busy casting other mechanics to present another Team Spirit or Spirited Charge.) As a result, even in theory, the player does not have enough information to know the dolls' paths and timings until after each doll has not only turned around, but moved far enough to show which player character it targeted / direction it chose for its final march. They could try to determine the dolls' aim from facing, but seeing each doll's precise facing requires central vision and they cannot put every doll in a group in their central vision at once. (Again, the doll heads have barely any contrast with the floor, and the doll dresses are not much better.)

Fourth, the player does not have just the dolls to deal with. Even the first Spirited Charge has another mechanic begin resolving before the dolls finish their march. Naturally, this places greater demands on the player in every aspect of mechanic handling, as they are contending with more than one mechanic simultaneously. On top of that, the nature of the overlapping mechanics blocks the most comfortable way of dealing with the dolls.

The preferred strategy for the dolls alone would be to stand still in the center of the arena while as many dolls as possible pick their targets for their second march, then move out of the center between two dolls' paths. (The center of the arena maximizes the minimum distance between the player character and any point from which a doll might target them, thus providing the longest guaranteed lead time for the player between a doll's choice of target and needing to move their character or fail the mechanic.) But this strategy will fail every single one of the overlapping mechanics. Technically, the Looming Nightmare chasing AOEs allow the half of the party whose characters are not targeted by those AOEs to adopt this strategy, but that is not sufficient to reliably cover every player who would want to use it. Pushing some but not all players into a task they find unpleasant is still bad game design.

Fifth, this is a reactive mechanic. The player does not strictly need to react to their fellow players' choices, only to the dolls' paths, but they have very little time to react to the dolls' paths considering what information they practically have and when they receive it.

Even to check the safety of a single spot for the dolls' first march, the player must check all four sides of the hidden square for the precise positions of dolls that would pass by, involving at least eight dolls due to the tight spacing. Setting aside the question of the player's visual path tracing capability, that is eight eye movements just to get those dolls' locations in central vision, so doing that before the dolls begin moving requires at least two eye movements a second with stops on each doll. That speed is even higher and more burdensome than Greatest Labyrinth in Tender Valley, which was already a serious problem, making the only realistic assumption that the player cannot do it.

Instead, the player checks only some of the sides of the hidden square before the dolls begin moving. (For example, the most comfortable way to do this is to pick a corner of the hidden square and move one's character towards it while looking at it, refining the precise choice of position so that the nearby dolls pass by one's character. All the dolls that pose immediate threats are visually close to each other, their closeness to the potential safespots allows the player to look at spaces between dolls, the player need not look elsewhere to place their character in their chosen safespot, and a corner grants the longest time before the dolls on non-adjacent sides reach the vicinity.) But this means that the player must check the other sides of the square while the dolls are already moving on their screen.

A doll visually crosses the arena in about seven seconds, which sounds like a lot of time. But the player has less time than that to complete their character's movement, both because the true server position of the dolls is ahead of their client display and because putting their character in the edge of the arena is a mechanic failure of its own. (A less punishing mechanic failure than being caught by a doll, as the wall inflicts a DOT rather than the usual instant KO, but still a failure.) Moving their character takes time of its own, as does the decision-making aspect of reacting to the remaining dolls' paths. Their character's movement takes time to reach and be processed by the server. If they are playing a melee DPS (or a tank with a melee DPS in the party), they will be disinclined to move their character to a corner. Even if they picked a corner, they may well have picked the corner beside the dolls that start last, not first - remember, even if there are hidden patterns, the first-time player does not know that. (And the last dolls start about 2.5 seconds after the first dolls, so that in itself would buy testers who knew a hidden pattern quite a bit of extra time.) The player can look at the first dolls far away from their character while waiting for the last dolls near their character to move... but during their first time, they do not know when the dolls near their character will start moving, and they need that information to know when they can safely move their character for later dolls and overlapping mechanics. (Likewise, they need to know if the doll hitboxes are bigger than the visual models.) So they will likely look at their character or the nearby dolls instead, making the time pressure even worse until they know the timing well enough to stop doing that.

Let us generously not assume the worst case, the first-time player who has been trained by their job to stay in melee range. Instead let us consider the player who is confident that their chosen initial character position in a corner will evade the dolls that start nearby, and so moves smoothly to looking for the dolls from the far sides that will eventually be near that initial position.

Let us say that those dolls will reach their chosen initial character position in six seconds from the start of the dolls' motion, since it is close to the edge of the arena but not quite there. Take out half a second for the client-server round trip and all of the latency internal to the player's client and the server. Say they have to hold down their movement key / joystick / mouse buttons for a quarter of a second to get the movement distance they eventually decide on, and leave another quarter of a second for their raw, physiological, non-decision-making reaction time. So they have five seconds to get all the visual information they need and make their decision on where to move.

They have four dolls left to check from the two sides they were forced to skip earlier, in two groups that are almost across the arena from each other. They must locate each of those dolls precisely to determine its path precisely, or else risk having to look again later on to update their path prediction. Since the dolls are already in motion, they do not naturally know exactly where to look, and have to get that from their peripheral vision. Oh, and there is another overlapping mechanic starting during this time, the details of which will inform their decision even if they know the battle timeline completely. Since the vast majority of players never attain perfect timeline knowledge of Expert Roulette dungeons, and even for those who do their earlier experiences are important, we must take it that they do not have that timeline knowledge. So allot at least two eye movements for the overlapping mechanic: one to the castbar for a general idea of when the mechanic will begin, and one for either the cast name or an arena tell that draws their eye. That makes for six eye movements before the player can make their decision.

Suppose that the player can make 1.5 eye movements a second, including the two larger movements to the other group of dolls and then to the castbar, while stopping on each object for long enough to draw the needed information from it. (Recall from my analysis of Greatest Labyrinth that this speed is comfortably above the requirements of Ultimate.) This would allow them to complete the six eye movements in four seconds, leaving them one second to make their decision on where to move their character. That is tight for a mechanical overlap, and will draw heavily on the player's previously learned tactics for general dodging, but it is manageable. Indeed, this case is how I handle the first part of this mechanic.

But that is not the worst case.

If the player is here for their first-time completion and looking around their character for when the nearby dolls pass by, that can easily consume the entire second of decision-making time. They are then forced to either try less reliable methods (such as looking for spaces between the moving dolls or tracking them in peripheral vision) for the sake of speed, knowingly work off of insufficient information, or not even notice some component of the ongoing mechanics and get caught out by it. If the player does not choose to start with their character near a corner, and instead tries to work in the middle of the arena for melee uptime, that more than consumes the entire second of decision-making time, leaving them the same set of options as the first-time player. If the player reflexively looks at the overlapping mechanic when it is presented, that may throw off their entire plan for checking the dolls.

And that is just for the first march. The later marches are worse.

Since the overlapping mechanic will be failed by the player keeping their character in the center of the arena for the doll baits, to succeed at the combination the player must have their character at least moderately close to the edge of the arena during that period. Because the dolls' turning points are fairly evenly spaced along the edge of the arena, this guarantees that some of the dolls will be near the player's character when they choose player characters to target. And the closer the player's character is to the center, buying them time to check the closest dolls, the less time they have for the furthest dolls.

But for the later marches, we do not need to consider many cases on how far the player character is from the center of the arena and how the player distributes their eye movements accordingly. To succeed they must check all 16 dolls, and to look at each doll individually with the necessary stops at 1.5 eye movements a second would take 10 and two-thirds seconds - long enough for all of the dolls to more than cross the arena. Regardless of the player's chosen order, it is not a realistic expectation for them to get detailed path information on all the dolls.

So the player is forced into tracking the broad movements of the dolls using the motion sensitivity of their peripheral vision, only looking directly at dolls that they think will come close to a specific spot they care about, usually their character's feet. (This is a natural strategy for bullet hell games / levels that do not provide strong patterns for the player to plan around.) In turn, this means that they select a doll to look at only after either it has moved far enough from its turning point for them to pick up its motion towards their chosen spot in their peripheral vision, or it has moved close enough to where they are looking that they see it specifically in their not-quite-central vision. The former case is reactive enough, since that means the doll has already covered a substantial part of the distance towards the player's chosen spot, but the density of the dolls in the arena prevents the player from reliably selecting a safespot based purely on their peripheral vision. They must either wait for the latter case or move their eyes away from their chosen spot to look directly at the doll.

If the player continues looking at their character's feet and waits for the doll to enter their not-quite-central vision, they do not have enough time to decide where to move their character on that basis - remember, each doll is visually behind its true server position. All of the components of a successful dodge that I described for the first march still apply, with much less time and the other dolls demoted to peripheral tracking. If the player looks at the doll before that, they give themselves enough time to make a decision regarding that doll, at the expense of looking away from their character's feet and potentially missing another doll entirely in that time.

Oh, and some part of the arena will be visually blocked by the boss itself. And the player has to handle the overlapping mechanic at the same time, which is a further visual and decision-making task.

The dolls really are reactive. There is not enough time for the player to get the visual information they need and make their decision without pressuring their reaction time, if they get that information at all. Break down the time taken for each part of a mechanic before you lock in the design, let alone release it, so that you discover these things in the design stage when you can fix them easily. Err on the side of breaking down even things that seem very similar to but not exactly the same as existing mechanics. Have a testing art library with varying levels of contrast and visual clarity, so you can have early internal playtests that flag where major changes are needed.

Sixth, the falling head dropped one player character being hit by a doll can also hit other nearby player characters. So not only does the player have to keep track of the dolls and the overlapping mechanic to reliably succeed, but they also have to keep track of any nearby player characters or the falling heads generated by other players' mechanic failures. Not only is this a further visual burden, but the falling heads blur into invisibility against the arena floor under the visual burden of tracking the dolls. So the player gets unfairly penalized by a falling head they did not see coming from a doll their character did not get hit by.

In The Copied Factory, the pink orbs also explode onto all nearby player characters when touched, but at least the player has the chance to see them coming and stay far away from all the orbs. (Which is visually easier than tracking all player characters near each nearby orb.) And even there, it is still annoying to successfully make a close dodge for uptime reasons and be penalized by someone else exploding the orb.

Seventh, the penalty for the player's character getting hit by a doll is particularly attention-getting and unpleasant, disrupting the player's participation in the battle. The initial bind forces the player to watch as their character receives further damage and Benoggined, then the Out of the Action and Heavy restrictions prevent them from doing anything but slowed character movement for 10 seconds, and on top of that they are shamed with a doll head and potentially battle dialogue. (And remember, the player can wind up with the latter two penalties even if their character avoided all the dolls!) The Vulnerability Up may last longer, but it is not the annoying part of the penalty even for the healer.

If this mechanic were reliably doable, the sharp penalty would be fine. One-hit KOs are similarly disruptive, and have been used without issue in regular duties for relatively easy mechanics. (Along with their use in high-end duties, gradually rising from the moderately easy mechanics to just about any mechanic as the duty difficulty increases.) But because the mechanic is not reliably doable, such a harsh penalty adds to the annoyance of it. You would have gotten a fair amount of complaint even about The Copied Factory's orbs if their penalty was this harsh.

Eighth, the nature of this penalty easily cascades into further mechanical failures and difficulties for the party. The bind often results in the player's character getting hit by the overlapping mechanic, taking further damage and Vulnerability Up stacks even if they are not KOed. The Heavy from Benoggined makes it more difficult to dodge further hits. And the player cannot help their party members with mitigation, healing, and/or raises while their character is Benoggined, denying them the opportunity to help a struggling fellow player.

(Yes, Benoggined does not stack, but that does not really mitigate the cascading nature of the penalty - one-hit KOs would result in later dolls running right over the player character too.)

Ninth, the nature of the penalty makes the battle drag on, since Benoggined directly prevents the player character from damaging the boss and cascading failures can indirectly reduce the party's damage output. As a result, the more the player struggles with this mechanic, the longer the battle will take for them on average, and the longer they will have to deal with the annoyance. Further, this encourages their party members to become annoyed with them for extending the battle, which causes social friction over the player's physical limits they can do nothing about.

Salvaging this mechanic would require solving all these problems, which in turn would require a complete redesign of the dolls and the whole boss, as the doll marches are the core mechanic of this boss as the doll king. As I have little to go on for what the design intention of this mechanic is, I will instead compare to existing moving object mechanics that function well, and remark upon why they do so.

In The Grand Cosmos, the five brooms move slowly, making the player's screen relatively accurate to their actual positions. They are large with moderate contrast, combined with tiles providing light lane markings on the arena floor, allowing the player to use peripheral vision to locate each one and match it to its lane. (The arena is exactly 20 tiles deep, divided into five lanes. And since the brooms also alternate, the player can count the number of brooms to a side once they notice that. Indeed, the brooms remain on the enmity list for the entire battle, reinforcing their permanence.) The player is given ample time to see both the brooms and the dirt puddles (which cause brooms passing over them to pause and sweep up) before the broom movement begins, which is all the information the player needs to know the brooms' paths and timing. The player can react if they so choose, but they have the opportunity to plan - if they get caught by surprise, it is a fair surprise arising from their lack of planning, and they can change that next time. (Indeed, working out uptime strategies around the brooms' movement serves as an enjoyable opportunity for skill expression. The whole arena is covered each time the brooms move, so the player must move their character to succeed, but can plan around when to do so.) Overlapping mechanics do not create unreasonable combined visual demands. And while the penalty for failing a broom is an attention-getting sweep, it is brief and allows the player to continue fully participating in the battle. That is a fun mechanic that held up to the repetition of Expert Roulette while being gentle enough for a dungeon required by MSQ.

In all iterations of The Jade Stoa - Normal, Extreme, and now Unreal - Byakko uses Unrelenting Anguish, where he stands in the middle of the arena and emits moving orbs from himself. There are no lanes on the floor or permanent brooms to aid the player, and the orbs move at a moderate speed. But his orbs are in a fixed spiral pattern with widely spaced arms, even using two arms rather than three in the first phase of the Normal to gently introduce the mechanic. Combined with the high contrast of the orbs against the floor, this allows the player to dodge entirely by peripheral vision in the wide-open spaces if they please, which is the melee uptime strategy. For casting uptime, the player may instead keep their character near the edge of the arena, buying them time to look directly at only the oncoming spiral arm and identify a gap to slidecast their character into. Both strategies are fun and remain visually reasonable when combined with overlapping mechanics. And again, the penalty for failure is just damage and a Vulnerability Up stack.

I notice that both these successful examples only require the player to find a moving object's position to know its path, without use of the moving object's facing. Having to look carefully at an object for facing or path information adds a lot to the visual demand. I expect this is why bullet hell games favor high-contrast bullets whose facing is clear from their shape alone, which the dolls are distinctly not, to allow the player to rapidly combine the rough shape with the rough motion in their peripheral vision.

Evil Scheme

A standard "flower" of exaflares from the center of the arena, having all cardinals start before all intercardinals or vice versa. Has been a fine mechanic in other places, but here it is combined with dolls, and that makes it just another annoyance to the player.

Looming Nightmare

Another standard mechanic, chasing AOEs.

These are particularly annoying in combination with the dolls, for three reasons. First, the requirement to keep moving makes it more difficult to visually check for dolls, as the player must check around a path rather than a single spot. Second, the natural way to do this without the AOEs getting in the party's way is to work at the edge of the arena, putting the player's character very close to doll turning points. Third, if the player's character does get hit by a doll, the chasing AOE will catch up during the bind and hit them repeatedly.

Scream

Another standard mechanic, a cone AOE sequence that covers the whole floor in three groups of two cones each. This is the simplest of the mechanics overlapping with the dolls, and is once again ruined by the presence of the dolls. This also starts the sequence of many doll marches from a single Spirited Charge.

Falling Nightmare (Repeat)

This is almost the same mechanic as before, with two rounds and some extra heads randomly placed each round. If the heads had good contrast, the mechanic would be okay but not good for casting planning.

But it comes with the battle dialogue "Apologies for breaking character, but... perhaps it's time you stopped resisting? There are limits to my patience." If the mechanics were enjoyable, this dialogue would be funny. Since at this point the player's patience has been tested repeatedly by the dolls, it is grating.

Overall Impression (Boss)

The use of the dolls is a reactive disaster, and all the other mechanics do not express the lore concept of the doll king. Having a boss express its concept via a complication to otherwise standard mechanics is fine, but the whole combination needs to be reasonable; here, the dolls are not reasonable alone.

Mobs Between First and Second Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Two More Packs

Between these packs, there is a Ferris wheel that falls as the party passes by:



Specifically, it falls shortly after the first time a player character gets close enough to it, with just slightly more than enough time for that player character to run by if they have Sprint active.

To the first-time player, this is a minor "gotcha", as they have no real reason to look to the side of the path while focused on the upcoming mobs, and so most likely will not notice the Ferris wheel's presence until the briefly flashed telegraph at the end.

And then once the player knows about this AOE, they are faced with a choice: try to keep their character at the front of the party's charge to get ahead of the Ferris wheel, deliberately wait until it falls, or take the hit on purpose. None of these options are good. Trying to get ahead of the Ferris wheel involves judging the party's relative positions, for which the client-server round trip making the player's screen inaccurate is highly relevant. Waiting draws the player out of the battle, both from the waiting time itself and the delay in their character reaching whichever party members charged ahead. And taking the hit on purpose just feels bad.

Environment features affecting trash pulls can be fun and interesting, but this implementation is not.

Suppose instead that the spinning Ferris wheel was behind the last pack of this section, and slowly destabilized with a sound effect during the party fighting the mobs. Both of these would encourage the player to see the Ferris wheel well before its AOE. And then rather than the AOE covering the whole area, it would leave safespots between the spokes, shown by a rotating telegraph that slowed down as the Ferris wheel slowed and fell over. (This is physically accurate as well; gyroscopes are more stable when they spin faster.) That way, the player would be presented with a combination between the mobs' basic AOEs and the environment feature AOE, which is not too difficult but would help make the pull interesting.

Second Boss - Jack-in-the-Pot



Troubling Teacups

Sets up teacups around the arena and ghosts entering them to create large point-blank AOEs. The ghosts' targets are nice and clear, since they each tether to their chosen teacup and add white smoke to the teacup's purple smoke while tethered.

(The first cast has only the outer ring of teacups and one ghost. Subsequent casts have two rings of teapots and two ghosts. All rings have four evenly spaced teacups.)

This is an example of a good setup cast that does not have to resort to active glowing. The tethers are effective despite the multicolored arena floor, and the white smoke contrasts the purple smoke.

Tea Awhirl

Starts the teacups spinning around the arena, with the AOEs coming shortly after the teacups stop. (If two rings of teacups are present, this includes the rings swapping with each other.) Since the ghosts are now concealed in the purple smoke filling the teacups, this is a visual tracking mechanic where the player must track the teacups' movement. When dealing with multiple ghosts, there is also a memory component, remembering the shape of the combined AOE relative to the teacup / point the player chooses to visually track.

In purely angular motion, all the teacups rotate at the same speed, and they all swap in/out the same number of times. These facts are apparent from watching the teacups in peripheral vision a few times while keeping one teacup or one fixed location in central vision, which are the natural tactics for the first-time player. In turn, knowing these facts confirms for the player that either of those visual methods yields an effective solution. They can follow one teacup around the arena and remember the combined AOE shape relative to that, or they can watch one point in the arena to count the teacups that pass through it and the ring swaps. I appreciate this flexibility.

I can do this mechanic just fine, but I do not like the pulses of smoke over the arena as the teacups start spinning. They are not fun or interesting - in fact, I did not really notice them until I looked at videos for this review - and instead feel like part of a neurological test, purely a means to add stress to the player's visual processing. (There is a reason that you use similar techniques to make arena transformations less jarring to the player.) Neurological tests do not generally make good gameplay.

I also wonder if the relatively even spin of the teacups could induce motion sickness in some players. I do not get motion sick from these, but I would not be surprised if other players did. In contrast, the jumping dogs in Eden's Promise: Litany (E10N) and its Savage version (E10S) make it very clear from the animations and the individual jumps that they are moving, not the arena floor.

Other than those two things, this mechanic is fine. Which is good, since it is repeated very often by this boss.

Toiling Teapots

A sequence of expanding circular AOE puddles, themed as teapots filling static cups to overflowing and leaving tea behind. The relative slowness makes the puddles work, since dodging back into the first AOEs results in taking the puddle DOT.

This is also a good choice of mechanic to express the lore concept of the boss.

Overall Impression (Boss)

Nothing special, but it is okay. Just take out the masking smoke pulses.

Mobs Between Second and Third Boss

Two Packs

Nothing mechanically interesting here, but can be double pulled.

Two More Packs, with Large Dolls

This is an interesting double pull, as the two large dolls that form the last pack perform light staggered raidwides on top of the usual amount of basic AOEs. This gently encourages the player to consider their mitigation tools, AOE healing tools, and potentially even strategies such as "kill one doll first to halve the raidwides".

I would not go harsher than this in regular dungeons, since fairly weak healers do have to be able to complete the duty at minimum Item Level without drawing ire from their party members.

Third Boss - Traumerei



Bitter Regret

Hits either the middle or the sides of the arena, with a crisp glowing animation tell in Hades's style. Simple on its own, but comes back in sequences later. The edges match lines on the floor nicely for casting optimization.

Poltergeist

A short pure warning cast for the poltergeist tether setup, good to cue the player to prepare for something. Only appears before the first Memorial March.

Memorial March (Walls + Poltergeists)

Places walls in the arena that can be passed through in ghost form. The poltergeists choose their positions, one to each player character and close to an edge of the arena, and appear as the second wall begins to visually drop. The narrow AOEs with clear telegraphs function effectively to nudge the player character definitively into a quadrant of the arena, to make use of the ghost form necessary.

After the poltergeists appear, they begin casting their proximity tether blasts. Even if the player has not picked up on the battle dialogue, they will quickly realize that the walls do not allow them to move their character far enough to stretch the tether by normal means. This is perfect timing for the activation of the ghost/flesh platforms and the (correct) blue text "A section of the floor begins to glow!" The player may not get it right the first time, as going to one of the platforms after this realization leaves them not much time to double back through and well past a wall, but they are pushed towards the information to figure out how to succeed.

(Nice touch that this text is blue rather than red, since it talks about an aid to the player character rather than a warning of danger. Of course you cannot rely on the player seeing the color difference, but they do not need to here so it is just nice.)

This is also the sort of mechanic where one player doing it correctly automatically demonstrates the solution to their party members, which helps the first-time player catch on even though the necessary information is not where they would look when running their character away normally. Such situations allow you to have slightly counterintuitive mechanics in regular duties, though not full puzzles.

It is good that the tethers do not do terribly much damage if not sufficiently stretched, using only moderately increased damage and a Vulnerability Up stack to indicate failure. This ensures that the first-time player does not feel discouraged by the likely failure or two when first learning the mechanic, and allows the later overlaps and combinations to not be too punishing as a whole.

Ghostduster / Fleshbuster

Visually these are spread AOEs, but the cast names and the red texts show that spreading has nothing to do with it. (The texts are "Traumerei prepares a ward against spirits!" and "Traumerei prepares a ward against the living!" respectively. They appear every time.)

If the player character is in the opposite form at the end of the cast, they take no damage at all, complete with the "DODGE" flying text, green checkmark over their head, and "ding" sound effect for the player. If the player character is in the same form at the end of the cast, they are immediately KOed, complete with the "9999999" (true damage) flying text, red X over their head, and another "ding" sound effect for the player. This is a good use of your feedback tools to help the player learn the mechanic, as both possible outcomes are relatively extreme compared to most other mechanics.

(The first of these is always Ghostduster, to teach the player that ghost form is not always preferred. Eventually they randomize.)

The length of the casts is suitably long, allowing the player to move their character to a transformation platform even if their initial position is bad. This is important given the harsh penalty for failure, and done correctly.

The one thing I would change about this mechanic is to use the generic "targeted for something" marker instead of a spread marker. Spreading is not at all relevant to the mechanic - the whole party can stack up and take no damage - and the generic targeting marker is plenty obvious considering its recurring form and its own sound effect.

Memorial March (AOE Sequence)

The boss spawns two sets of ghosts at the front of the arena, both tethered, with the rows alternating between sets. These create line AOEs that resolve in the same order while the boss is casting Bitter Regret. Showing the tethers and giving the player time to see the ghosts during this cast is what makes the sequence work, since it allows them to be looking at the Bitter Regret animation tell instead of the ghost AOEs as they resolve.

Memorial March (Combination)

Combines the walls and poltergeists with something else. Can be a set of ghosts at the front that will hit two of the quadrants at the same time as the proximity tethers, can be Bitter Regret, can be Ghostduster / Fleshbuster. Once the player understands using the ghost form, all of these are manageable and offer different optimization opportunities. (For example, with the ghosts hitting two quadrants, the player can keep their character in melee range and succeed at the combination by starting their character in front of the ghosts, so that their poltergeist spawns near the ghosts and they can run their character away from both.) This is very welcome.

The pace would be fast if not for introducing each element individually first, but it works since they are introduced that way.

Ghostcrusher

A line stack while the walls are up, which encourages the party to run into the walls to stack. This works, which is good. Oddly given the name, it does not penalize characters in ghost form, but the length of the cast is not long enough to do that without being annoying.

Overall Impression (Boss)

A fun boss that could easily have been in a Stormblood or Shadowbringers dungeon. The opportunity to strategize around the ghost/flesh transformation is very welcome in Expert Roulette.

Overall Impression (Dungeon)

The dolls ruin this dungeon. This is the prime example of "it only takes one bad mechanic to ruin a duty", as there really is only one bad mechanic in here - but the one mechanic is so bad that even young and able-bodied players get annoyed by it easily.

----------------

Both of your "experimental" dungeons are plagued by unworkable visual demands. Please for the sweet love of Hydaelyn, adopt and follow visual clarity and accessibility standards that account for the time pressure of mechanics.

[Arohk]

You cleared ultimates which are a hundred times harder than normal content and complain here about MSQ duties?

You know to unlock the new Ultimate Raid, you must clear the current Tier of Savage Arcadion (M4s).

If anything i find the current Savage Raids easier than the Pandemonium before, if your hands hurt from playing the game here are some advice:

Play a different Job that is less taxing, try playing with a controller or use a plug-in to reduce the amount of hotkeys.

All in all the game has not changed in difficulty for savage, you just need to memorize the fight as always, reaction time is almost never a requirement.

[LibitIncarne]

use a plug-in to reduce the amount of hotkeys.

did you even read the posts

[Arohk]

did you even read the posts

not entirely.

You can criticize me for that, but when it comes to accessibility, the combat doesn't have good options to make it easier to play.

[Aurelle_Deresnels]

not entirely.

You can criticize me for that, but when it comes to accessibility, the combat doesn't have good options to make it easier to play.

There are plenty of things Square Enix could do to make their fight designs more accessible without dumbing the fights down: visual clarity standards, working memory limit standards, QTE replacements, learning to count and time all the steps to do a mechanic so they know how much time they're really leaving for the player to react, setting and sticking to a reaction time standard rather than pushing the player to react faster and faster, cutting overly repetitive mechanics and replacing them with actually interesting ones, expanding the player's mechanical vocabulary to provide more varied tools, ...

So, you know, I wrote a letter to SE about their fight design. A letter on things that could be changed, and were previously going fine, to the people who can change them. Complete with detailed design principles and two fight redesigns that are more fun, harder, and more accessible than their originals.

I did not ask for suggestions on my personal interface or job choice, so you have no excuse for stopping reading to jump in with them. And even if I had asked for that, you would still be expected to read first to give useful suggestions, rather than everything you suggested being useless or actively counterproductive to me. If you're going to give unsolicited advice, it behooves you even more to read about the person's situation first. This is a forum, but that doesn't mean you have to post - if you don't want to read something, you can just pass it by!