this game relies too much on instant death attacks to make endgame harder

[Alhanelem]

Have you? Einherjar was about crowd control and Salvage was mechanic based and normal monsters were scaled to the fact you were naked for a chunk of the dungeon run. None of the bosses instant killed you unless you flat out sucked or were a taru with almost no HP lol. Now Charm...that's a different story.

I think he's referring to Zentetsuken, but that's the only truly instant death move I can think of. Maybe one of the other bosses has a doom ability. It's there, it's just not used (in my opinion) excessively.

Remember: the question here is: "Do you think instant death is overused in this game, and/or do you think it is a necessary/effective difficulty mechanic?

and I"m not talking about high damage AoE, I'm talking about stuff that's basically guaranteed to oneshot everyone (or everyone except the tank with 3x the HP of everyone else, which may as well be everyone since the tank will subsequently die)

[neverendingxsin]

So you'd rather just stand still and tank and spank everything? I for one prefer having to move around and dodge things. It separates the great players from the bad players. Makes it take more skill to beat dungeon.

[Alhanelem]

So you'd rather just stand still and tank and spank everything? I for one prefer having to move around and dodge things. It separates the great players from the bad players. Makes it take more skill to beat dungeon.

No, I wouldn't rather just stand still and tank and spank everything. You're missing the point of the question. At any rate. Most dodgeable attacks are not instant death attacks. Weight of the Land, eruption, tornados, etc. are not instant death. I don't feel instant death is a REQUIREMENT to make a challenging fight that requires skill.

Let's just say for a moment you removed Titan's burn phase. This isn't about skill of any sort- It's simply a damage gate, requiring people to do X damage in Y time or everybody dies. Even if you removed Earthen Fury from the fight entirely, and left everything else, titan would not be any more or less difficult than it is now. The burn phase isn't why Titan is hard. It fails at adding difficulty, it really is just a device to say "your gear must be level X to win." Remove this instant death phase, and most people would still lose because the final phase is so intense.

Ifrit and Garuda handle this a little better, where the damage taken varies with performance, rather than it being a binary "do or die."

(I'm not making this thread because I"m bad, die to the AoEs all the time, or anything like that. I just want to know if people think it's a cheap way to add difficulty or if you think it has it's place.)

[Balaur]

now, I understand the primal fights are totally scripted and memorizing the attack patterns and stuff is key, but I feel like too many of the bosses in this game (at all levels) rely too much on the threat of instant guaranteed death to make things hard.

Yes, that is the point. How else are they supposed to make the fights hard? You do not offer an alternative method that allows the fight to be hard but doesn't offer up a "get out of this now or you're dead" gimmick, or a "wave of unending adds that slaughter your group" instant death mechanic, forcing the group to ever higher levels of reaction-timing and coordination to survive.

But, pray tell, what other mechanism for making stuff hard do you think there should be?

Even in WoW, there were a large host of mechanics that made things "instant death," from rage timers, to BadStuff, to adds that had to go down NOW, and so forth. This is also true in TERA, where the hardest fight, Shandra Manaya HM, is nothing but this stuff PLUS you have to juggle a buff series that requires each party member to each receive a series of three different buffs in a certain order, while she spams a variety of almost undodgeable aoe instant death moves. I don't think this game has much else it can go on, as this is a tradition going back to UO and EQ1, whereby the boss just KILLS people, often lots at once.

[Alhanelem]

Yes, that is the point. How else are they supposed to make the fights hard?

Not very many bosses in FFXI relied on instant death attacks. Most relied on crippling status effects, or dealing damage really fast to where healers would have a hard time keeping up with it. I think there are plenty of other ways to keep fights challenging without over-using this mechanic. Most any boss in FFXI was hard if you put out-of-control DPS on it- it would make the monster use many more attacks than it would if you acted more carefully. The point is, there can be more variation than this.

I guess the probelm isn't as bad as some Korean MMOs where a mechanic I see a lot is damage reflection- the monster puts a buff on itself with almost no warning and if anyone hits it during this time, they die.

[Malix]

From this thread i gather that the OP wants to makes more mistakes in endgame.

[Rydin]

Yes, that is the point. How else are they supposed to make the fights hard? You do not offer an alternative method that allows the fight to be hard but doesn't offer up a "get out of this now or you're dead" gimmick, or a "wave of unending adds that slaughter your group" instant death mechanic, forcing the group to ever higher levels of reaction-timing and coordination to survive.

But, pray tell, what other mechanism for making stuff hard do you think there should be?

Yes... that's it. As a customer, you are OBLIGATED to come up with an alternative for anything you are unhappy with. Despite not being developers, we are tasked with improving the game from a design perspective. get out of here with that. I absolutely hate those "Can you come up with something better" comments. Last I checked, the OP is not getting paid to do so.

Have you ever played any Final Fantasy before?

This is sad but true. It's a tired old overused NES mechanic.

There's really only so much you can do in a mmo.

Kill add
Kill color add
Hide behind X
Take debuff 1,2,3
Avoid aoe
Interact with object

So, guess they're just going with what they can use

No... this is what's wrong with the entire genre. Developers believe you when you make comments like this. I'm not even a developer and I could go into a list of things to improve fights. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE stop making developers think that they can put little to no effort into their game design and still be successful.
And remember:

"Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress." -Mahatma Gandhi-

I seriously Can't believe you either. I mean seriously? Nothing in this game reacts to the player at all. ALL bosses are scripted. The only reactive thing they do is trigger phases based on their HP. This game has a lot going for it, but enemy AI is at the very bottom of the list. "What else can they do in an MMO"
I'm a fair person, so I'll give you a chance to rescind that statement.

If you lowered plume/bomb damage he would be trivial to the point of being boring =(

Because his scripted behavior isn't trivial and boring now?

[Churchill]

If this topic was about cheap mechanics like Hate Resets, then yeah.

Instead it's about things that you can easily avoid, so it's a standard Analhelm topic.

[Rydin]

If this topic was about cheap mechanics like Hate Resets, then yeah.

Instead it's about things that you can easily avoid, so it's a standard Analhelm topic.

That's kind of true... Nevermind the insta-death, I think the mechanics are cheap and unimaginative overall

[Roaman]

I prefer pvp over pve so i don't really care how they make their bosses.... i only hope they made major changes to the pvp because what i saw in some vids of phase 4 pvp was awful