New Tier

[Colt47]

The normal raids are good but given visual effects are getting more and more nuts we're going to need a minimap showing danger zones for mechanics even for savage fights. I think I want to throw myself off a cliff after seeing dark red on brown for the extreme trial.

[BtheLee]

The fight seems fun, but I could do without m5 flashbanging me. My head is throbbing after the fight

[SnowVix]

m2 to m4 are acceptable m1 is not. Of course then you without my knowledge remove the counter to unbral ice and fire which is a bug or on purpose. But some of these attack are poorly presented. Right now i have no idea how the stone quarry attack works. When you look away from the boss it should not affect you that how petrification has worked so far. Someone thought it was the adds and so we placed them in front but then it went back to how it normally works in phase 2. Giga slash off shadow lord is poorly presented too. That knockback during the fire arena stage. I have no idea why the group is going all over the place to avoid the move. Really don't know why you would double down on this new way of doing things rather than modify to how things were before.

I'm not surprised someone who refuses to read patch notes when confronted with something changed in game isn't able to do these fights.

When you look away from the boss it should not affect you that how petrification has worked so far. Someone thought it was the adds and so we placed them in front but then it went back to how it normally works in phase 2.

Except it's not? Petrification has had other ways of dodging, including this one, which is to interject an add (or an add's corpse) between you and the source. Which is how it works on the whole fight.

[CidHeiral]

The tier has been very fun so far. Loving the direction they're going with fight design. Hopefully things continue to get even better from here and job design follows suit, but I'm not holding my breath for the latter.

Can't say I've had any issues with the visuals that other people have mentioned. Seems the same as usual to me but I don't have any vision issues so YMMV.

[wigleht]

mechanics in m7 can be completely concealed by the boss model

so the response to TOP rwf was to make shit unbearable for non hackers?

or is this now a 4k couch game?

[DivineP]

Agreed. Very fun.

Visuals are abit sketchy even I can see thar with full 20/20 vision - however, it's been very fun farming cards etc.

As a healer, I have to watch for things to do
Watch for bleeds that destroy ppl HP.

For once I'm happy I don't have a rotation. Haha.

Deffo a good step in the right direction.

[Valence]

mechanics in m7 can be completely concealed by the boss model

so the response to TOP rwf was to make shit unbearable for non hackers?

or is this now a 4k couch game?

The response to TOP was to give us a NASA mechanic in P12S where the zoom hack wasn't needed, and not give it to us in M7 when it is actually needed.

[Taranok]

Having done M5S and some of M6S, and also my own opinions of just encounter design, this has to be the worst raid tier the devs have made since Gordias, for very similar reasons to why Gordias was a garbage raid tier. Why?

• The fights are tested at 0 ping.
• There is a pretty stiff gear check.
• The fights are so badly designed and balanced within the implementation of job balance, that certain classes cannot do the fights.
• The fight design is further homogenizing the game (distinct from HW.)

To expound on this:

The first point, tested at 0 ping. M5S is a ridiculously inconsistent fight. I know, with certainty, mechanics are designed and intended to go off together and in time with the music. I see massive amounts of variance on mechanics. Sometimes I see things like the donut + funky floor fire off together, other times they're desynced.

I am on a 70-110 ping, very inconsistent, makes it extremely easy to tell when things are going wrong, and this is kind of my expectation on fight design as it gets faster. The mechanics desync more and more, they get harder and harder.

Where this becomes damning is I have a friend in Australia, who has cleared at both sub-10ms ping and closer to 200ms. They say the fight is insanely fun at 10ms or less ping. But at 200, it's a hair pullingly frustrating fight. This lines up with my experience. For those who were around for Gordias, its analogue would be A3S. For 3, the laser into autodeath dot based on server tic where healers lacked the time to react to the fight.

Solution: The devs can't make fast, reactionary mechanics. They need to be slow, and they need to be tested on real ping in real world conditions before releasing. There's a reason stormblood has the best fight design. Part of it is the fights are a lot slower.

The second point, Gear Check. While the fight is most certainly doable with competent players, anyone who steps into PF knows that competency is a bonus, not the expectation. Adds phase is a very, very stiff gear check for people who aren't actually particularly good at the game. Where have I seen a gear check like this before? Oh yes, gordias, where the fight took 3 weeks to clear. Obviously nowhere near as bad, it's still very much a "The devs vastly overestimate the average competency of the playerbase."

Solution: Have people of all skill levels test your fights. A lot of problems in fight design become a lot more obvious when you use people who aren't that great at the game. Including things like the dungeons being a nightmare of very much casual-unfriendly design.

Which leads into my next point: terrible class-job design and balance. Anyone who so much as glances at sites like fflogs can see stark problems in job balance. For example, bringing a summoner makes M6S orders of magnitude harder. But it's more than just this. Machinist is also awful. Honestly, most rphys are awful on this fight, if not period, right now. But if you bring a viper, significantly harder DPS checks become a lot easier, because viper fits the encounter design and dps check a lot better than summoner does. To the point where people are bringing double-viper+BLM at times.

But it's more than just this. A fight like M5S means the best iteration of BLM that has ever been made, Stormblood Black Mage, literally cannot exist. The fight is too fast, there's too much movement. Fight design like M5S kills good caster design. It also kills healer and tank design, but that's a problem that we can trace back to ARR and is more a 'This has been a recurring problem since the game has launched, solidified in stormblood,' instead of modern design where it's stale and boring. And, lo and behold, we have an analogue from Gordias. Anyone remember when Paladins weren't brought because blocks couldn't block magic damage, so every fight was DRK+WAR? How AST wasn't brought because, well, it wasn't so much fight design as class design in AST's case, but the point still stands.

Good fight design doesn't constrain class design. M5S has literally killed off good caster design completely. Though this is a problem we have been moving towards since tier 2 Shadowbringers. It's not exactly a new problem, just boiling frog syndrome for people who don't notice it.

Which leads to the final point: Homogenization. When you design fights like M5S, it's further homogenizing the game. Classes like BLM lose cast bars because of fights like M5S. But it's more than this. All cast bars are at risk. When even SMN becomes the most frustrating class to optimize in a fight like M5S because of having a mere THREE casts of 2.8, 2.8, and 3.0 per minute, it hearkens to a much, much bigger problem.

Fight design like tier 2 dawntrail forces a very strict class design. You can't have too many positionals (though personally I hate positionals anyways,) you can't have long cast bars. All healers need to be the same overpowered boring drivel they have been since SB found the hardest possible healer check (charybdis into AOE.) Tanks end up still tanking the same boring way (Guess I press 2-5 oGCDs and stop caring, I passed my binary check!) but this time with 2m bursts happening during these checks, so good luck DRK and GNB. Shoulda played a different tank! I am expecting classes like MCH/DNC/BRD to be further reworked because of the huge disparity on fights like M6S, and that just means more homogenization.

This raid tier is literally the worst raid tier this game has created since Gordias. It has restrictive class selection, gear checks, and fight design that doesn't understand the game's own infrastructure. It is hair pullingly frustrating for the dumbest possible reasons, and further proves that hard encounter design is worse for the game than easier encounter design.

I wish I was on a ping of 5 so I could experience how M5S was intended to be played, because it sounds a lot better than the hot garbage I get to play with.

[JadeCurtiss]

The second point, Gear Check. While the fight is most certainly doable with competent players, anyone who steps into PF knows that competency is a bonus, not the expectation. Adds phase is a very, very stiff gear check for people who aren't actually particularly good at the game. Where have I seen a gear check like this before? Oh yes, gordias, where the fight took 3 weeks to clear. Obviously nowhere near as bad, it's still very much a "The devs vastly overestimate the average competency of the playerbase."

Ah yes, because people who aren't good at the game should expect to be able to clear the highest end content in the game below Ultimate without being competent.

That is not how difficulty works. If you aren't able to clear something because you are not competent enough to meet the difficulty check, you work on getting better. Full stop. Handing players victory is exactly how we arrived at Endwalker encounter design in normal content. And now that we're getting more bite in hardcore content you are going to cry about it? Sorry, but get over yourself.

Whether or not the job or encounter design is in a good place is a separate issue. This specific statement is what I'm addressing. Players shouldn't be punished for being bad? Utterly ridiculous.

[Taranok]

Ah yes, because people who aren't good at the game should expect to be able to clear the highest end content in the game below Ultimate without being competent.

That is not how difficulty works. If you aren't able to clear something because you are not competent enough to meet the difficulty check, you work on getting better. Full stop. Handing players victory is exactly how we arrived at Endwalker encounter design in normal content. And now that we're getting more bite in hardcore content you are going to cry about it? Sorry, but get over yourself.

Whether or not the job or encounter design is in a good place is a separate issue. This specific statement is what I'm addressing. Players shouldn't be punished for being bad? Utterly ridiculous.

People should be allowed to select a difficulty that fits the content they wish to play. Which can be done with easier content and classes of variable difficulty. Which is how the game was designed in stormblood. And it was a lot better because you didn't see classes getting excluded from the content left and right. You could see lower skill players enjoy it. You could see people, like me, who sucked at multitasking being able to find a class that is challenging for me and still fit in nicely for every single fight that Stormblood had (except ucob, I need callouts to do nael 60% of the time because of how fast it is.)

And also, they managed to do that without making a single stupid mechanic that broke the game's own netcode.

So yes, people who aren't amazing but competent enough at the game should be able to do the hardest content. It need not specifically be fast, or particularly easy for them, but it should be doable. The alternative is the toxic garbage that has been shoveled down the player's throat since mid ShB, or do we need a reminder of how garbage end tier endwalker was?


I never said players shouldn't be punished for being bad. I'm saying encounter design is better when it's easier, and players of lower skill are more readily able to play the content. How does this work? Not having as many body checks, having looser DPS checks. Do they still need to learn mechanics? Absolutely. Should they wipe the entire raid off 1 mistake? Does literally anyone think that's fun? Does it create a fun environment for others?

Remember, on JP, these fights typically have closer to a 40-60% clear rate across all players (someone correct me on actual numbers.) It's intended to be decently accessible, not strictly hardcore.