Keeping Content Hard and Helping People Learn

[Carighan]

I'll be honest, recently helping people re-run old content in unsync, if you think "stuff got dumbed down" you really need to re-evaluate your own bias in that.

Ignoring the whole HP/damage issue for a second, it's crazy how slow in particular fights used to be. Even just last expansion. There was sooooo much time to react to everything compared to the raid fights we got now where you are constantly handling the next element of the next mechanic with maybe 2-3 seconds in-between. Compared to stuff like the 20+ seconds of nothing in many fights even just in Endwalker.

The individual mechanics also usually erred much easier, except for some of them the original discovery (so tipping my hat to the blind runners here, definitely). We just re-did P8S, and High Concept - still the best mechanic they ever thought up - is quite simple due to how slow it is, how you got no boss to focus on, and how it is already solved for you. I dread having to be the one to solve it, sure, but with a raidplan or video it's far easier to pull off than current mechanics such as Disco Infernal or even the thunderstorm during M6S, both of which leave you extremely little time for anything.

There are exceptions on both ends, of course. Some older mechanics are difficult, though maybe not for the right reason. Natural Alignment and it's often pixel-decided clear-vs-wipe is one such bad-type-of-difficulty example. All of P3S is another. But there's also cool more difficult mechanics, like P5S' movement or P12S LC and Para 3, again just to name Endwalker. There's also of course easy mechanics in the current fights. But overall? Complex as some old mechanics might have been, the sheer lack of speed compared to Dawntrail is really something.

I mean don't get me wrong, I agree things should not be dumbed down, but I really don't feel they have, quite the opposite in fact, Dawntrail raids are fantastic and show a great direction, same for it's Extremes. M8S excluded of course, which is so aggressively mediocre that it almost feels like mockery.