The Case for Upgrading Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower

[HyperiusUltima]

First of all, check here regarding how bad it is for current relic with ARR Alliance Raids that are required for MSQ.

Now, I know this is yet another “Crystal Tower Bad” thread, but it’s getting to the point where it has been rehashed, reused, and overly forgotten about when it comes to content updates. While they should be focusing on new content for the game, two Alliance Raids have been complained about from hell and back, not just by me, but other players who have experienced other Alliance Raids in-game.

The two biggest offenders are Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower.

There are three reasons why these two are hilariously unrepresentative of Alliance Raids, especially when they’re supposed to be introductory to that type of content in the first place.

1) The content has not survived ten years’ worth of buffs to jobs and still functions like it were 2013. A lot of this is attributed to how mobs are very easily mowed down, and how bosses melt in the case of a whole minute. Amon is the exception here, but you know what I’m getting at.

2) Mechanics are either heavily skipped or just not done at all. This is effective for basically all of Labyrinth(except the final boss and King Behemoth due to HP% gating for Ancient Flare and Ecliptic Meteor specifically), and all of Syrcus(except Amon and Xande). Why? Because you can burn everything down as said in 1.

3) Players are synced to the highest iLv for that time(i120). Whenever we talk about syncing down, we always talk about stats. The stronger your equipment, the more damage you do when you sync down because of how much disparity there is. However, in the case of these two Alliance Raids? This causes all enemies to become overpowered by damage alone, and is probably the main culprit behind why both pieces of content feel boring as hell to be in.

So, how can we fix this? They can’t just roll back jobs to 2013, and they can’t nerf either. The solution lies in fixing the iLv problem, because while stat disparity does play a big factor into damage, it’s the fact that being 60 item levels higher than requirement for the raid at its time absolutely causes issues with mechanics not showing at all.

I’ve proposed this before, and I will do so again: Find a way to sync people down to the maximum iLv for that time period. It’s not hard to do - and if you do that for every piece of outdated content, you’ll retain those mechanics since stat disparity only causes so little compared to a raw iLv difference on sync down for these old raids.

Of course, I’m going to draw the “You just want Alliance Raids to be hard again” crowd…so this is for those people:

No, I don’t. I just want it to not be a snoozefest of a raid that amounts to just smacking a training dummy to get through it.

It’s past due by 2 expansions now to get a facelift, and it definitely requires one so it doesn’t affect those who return to Alliance Raid Roulette and dread doing Crystal Tower outside of World of Darkness. That is all.

[Shistar]

I wholeheartedly agree, though I honestly wouldn't mind if they brought up the difficulty to something similar or slightly below Mhach's, so people won't get a whiplash effect when they get there (and then Ivalice).


Honestly, synced ARR ARs can get pretty spicy with the healing and I had a lot of fun joining a PF for it once. We still skipped a ton of mechanics, but the onces we got to see were fun enough! I just want to do mechs, man.

[RenkoBernkastel]

Amon can get melted too as we saw when the "players get frozen" mechanic was bugged for a week or so and you HAD to kill him before curtain call or else you'd wipe. Or you rez cheese, now that I think about it.
Anyway, I'd reckon there are about 1000 players in the world who remember anything about crystal tower mechanics and half of them probably don't even play the game anymore. Ayo SE, syncing us down properly is basically the same as adding 3 brand new alliance raids to the game, imagine how much dev time you could save that way.......
But I'm not holding my breath. Just like every other thing I wish for in the game like a sync down system more like GW2 where they scale your stats and don't just remove 90% of your skills, or dungeon trash that is either interesting or at least worth killing.
Actually I'm expecting the opposite, since CT raids are mandatory for MSQ, they're probably going to remove every. single. mechanic. from those raids so that you can go in with 23 duty support bots.

[Valence]

The item level is the same problem in every raid series. And also endgame trials and normal raids as well, because they all sync to the expansion max item level cap, the only exceptions being the end story trials of EW and DT. Early endgame dungeons also get the special hard sync. This isn't a problem coming from CT alone. It would certainly improve it to have stricter ilvl requirements, but just try today to run those at MIL and you'll see that they're still a steamroll.

It's mainly a problem of powercreep and wide system changes. Run any hardsynced endgame HW or SB dungeon (not even ARR) and you'll see what I mean and how everything still melts in seconds. The only solution would be to review hardcoded boss/encounter values themselves to bring them up to current standards all across the board.

[Desna]

My sister and I play daily. I don't usually have time for forums, was looking into this because of things that have happened over the last few weeks. In Syrcus, last boss fight, the mechs are straight forward, including three group stackers that drop, These three group stacks naturally should be spread around the boss, back in the day it was a neat little three leaf clover look, you never overlap group stackers, that's pretty basic.

Noticed a while ago players starting to just rush in and stand on each other, stacking up those stackers and stared in amazement the first time I saw it, stayed out figuring a wipe was at hand but it resolved...everybody in the mass of bad player reaction was fine. Sister and I talked about how bad that was how it should have been a wipe, it was bad there were a bunch of sprouts in there that just saw a raid wide mechanic done completely wrong and it was fine.

Fast forward. we're in Eden's Verse Refulgence, I'm healing, sister is tanking and Icelit Dragonsong happens, which is a light party two part stack set, 4 players per stack to soak through it. The sprouts run together with the stack markers. We wipe. Ok...simple fix "Don't stack stack markers, stay away from each other and let everybody come to you." We dive in again, markers happen this time the whole party except for me and sis who see it happening runs to one stacker leaving the other one, to save them, sis and I run to them but not before they doubt themself and rush to the group overlapping the stackers and killing everyone but me, my sister, themself and one other dps. We manage to finish off the boss. "Sorry...been running Syrcus a lot and you stack stack markers there" one of the sprouts says.

Weeks now...and we are seeing this consistently in other content while running our roulettes. New players rushing to overlap stack markers wiping groups, inciting other players to get frustrated and quit raids and dungeons because in Syrcus (have seen this repeatedly) If anybody tries to Alliance chat mechanic info...they get blasted with "Doesn't matter in here, get over it" "Shut up nobody cares" "This is old content we're all just watching youtube anyway" and other insults and nasty reactions from other players just trying to get through it seeming to be really resenting the fact they're there.

TLDR: Syrcus is teaching new players BAD habits ignoring how mechanics work and it's carrying into other areas where those same mechanics actually have consequences and cause wipes when they react wrong because Syrcus didn't teach them to respect and pay attention to mechanics.

My suggestion? An update. Make the mechanics PUNISH the raid for them being ignored, just like they used to when the content was current and just like those same types of mechanics do through all later content. If they are meant to teach players? They should teach them right, not cause them to react wrong later.

[Carin-Eri]

The item level is the same problem in every raid series. And also endgame trials and normal raids as well, because they all sync to the expansion max item level cap, the only exceptions being the end story trials of EW and DT. Early endgame dungeons also get the special hard sync. This isn't a problem coming from CT alone. It would certainly improve it to have stricter ilvl requirements, but just try today to run those at MIL and you'll see that they're still a steamroll.

It's mainly a problem of powercreep and wide system changes. Run any hardsynced endgame HW or SB dungeon (not even ARR) and you'll see what I mean and how everything still melts in seconds. The only solution would be to review hardcoded boss/encounter values themselves to bring them up to current standards all across the board.

And they clearly can do that, as the NieR raids are still challenging - probably not 'up to current standards' but I'd certainly argue that the bosses don't "melt in seconds"
(and sadly still cause some players who queued AR roulette to bail as soon as they realise which raid it is....)

[Valence]

And they clearly can do that, as the NieR raids are still challenging - probably not 'up to current standards' but I'd certainly argue that the bosses don't "melt in seconds"
(and sadly still cause some players who queued AR roulette to bail as soon as they realise which raid it is....)

Because Nier bosses were totally overtuned on HP at release, and ShB is also post battle system rework as well so powercreep is less of an issue there (only the lack of hardsync is especially for copied factory and bunker).

Also I'll say though, Ivalice had some bosses that could also take a significant amount of time to kill at release too, notably in Orbonne, or the last ones of the previous tiers, and the reason they die a lot faster compared to Nier is again due to the aforementioned powercreep.

They've downscaled boss HP a little in EW and DT I think.