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Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward |OT| The Midas Touch
- Thread starter Ken
- Start date
It's mechanics heavy. The "flaw" (if you want to call it that) is you are fighting 4 mini bosses as opposed to one big boss so less health which means the new weapons in a few weeks will make them melt all the faster which will lead to a lot of skipped mechanics on the backend of each fight.
It's a lot of mechanics and it seems likely they're planning for it to not be a quick clear for most groups. It's hard to make long-term determinations about how it'll play out because gear will change things a lot, but the difficulty jump from the all forgiving A5S is pretty big.
Mind Blast silencing isn't that bad since it comes up at a few very specific times in the fight. The cast is sort of quick but after a while you get a feel for when it's coming. It hits a specific spot in my opener, after Hot Shot post-adds, a few GCDs after tether mirages. The hardest part is reminding myself I can go back to burning silence for DPS on Brawler.
Mind Blast silencing isn't that bad since it comes up at a few very specific times in the fight. The cast is sort of quick but after a while you get a feel for when it's coming. It hits a specific spot in my opener, after Hot Shot post-adds, a few GCDs after tether mirages. The hardest part is reminding myself I can go back to burning silence for DPS on Brawler.
Also worth noting, it's simply because most of us are at A6S. So it's less "oh my god this is so bad" and more "this is the fight we're currently at."
Altered Juice
Member
Only tried 4vs4.
There is a 10 minute time limit and my average matches ended in 6 minutes. The matches that timed out were ones that featured Astros spamming aspected benefic with Benny hill playing In the background
So it will be like the old Wolves Den matches where first team to properly use LB usually wins. Though there are the rare cases when you can lock down a healer after they used Purify with your stun-locking or silence-spams. The solo requirement for the rewards means no Feast statics though. RIP
Well it's not a team LB anymore which probably helps.
You're on Sleep duty, regardless!
When the developer of the game itself come out and say they overtuned fights, the fights are automatically docked points in the grand scheme of MMO fight design.
Let's also remember that FFXIV gives the player absolutely no choice in how they approach raids in terms of builds or strategy, so it's nowhere near competitive in the arena of MMO fight design.
The singular argument which seems to be furiously repeated is that A3S introduces mechanics that then show up later in the fight - and somehow that's genius. Ok.
We can ignore the mechanics that are a bit too reliant on the game's sluggish netcode, like positioning of hands or people standing on top of each other but debuffs aren't passing, but those shouldn't be ignored, this is the game they're designed for, these fights need to carefully consider that 99% of the time, everyone you see on your screen is actually a few seconds behind where they actually are.
The tornado phase is boring, you kill adds and the boss is invincible yet still present and targetable - taunting you that this doesn't progress the fight in a meaningful way, it's just something that wastes your time. This isn't the only boss where this happens, but at least other encounters take it out of the target list. Sloppy design.
Altogether it's a highly overrated fight, requiring the player to be extra mindful of the game's slow netcode, inconsistent design philosophy in terms of when the boss is invulnerable, and the devs stated it was overtuned (despite claims here otherwise).
When you accept that it's really only praised because of the fact that it WAS the "static breaker" and praising it makes you look like a total pro champ cool guy, things become a lot clearer. And hopefully future content will look less like Gordias and more like Final Coil (and Midas, if Midas is an improvement, I haven't gotten far enough into it yet - though M2 and M4 being so similar has me suspicious of how M2S and M4S will go)
Let's also remember that FFXIV gives the player absolutely no choice in how they approach raids in terms of builds or strategy, so it's nowhere near competitive in the arena of MMO fight design.
The singular argument which seems to be furiously repeated is that A3S introduces mechanics that then show up later in the fight - and somehow that's genius. Ok.
We can ignore the mechanics that are a bit too reliant on the game's sluggish netcode, like positioning of hands or people standing on top of each other but debuffs aren't passing, but those shouldn't be ignored, this is the game they're designed for, these fights need to carefully consider that 99% of the time, everyone you see on your screen is actually a few seconds behind where they actually are.
The tornado phase is boring, you kill adds and the boss is invincible yet still present and targetable - taunting you that this doesn't progress the fight in a meaningful way, it's just something that wastes your time. This isn't the only boss where this happens, but at least other encounters take it out of the target list. Sloppy design.
Altogether it's a highly overrated fight, requiring the player to be extra mindful of the game's slow netcode, inconsistent design philosophy in terms of when the boss is invulnerable, and the devs stated it was overtuned (despite claims here otherwise).
When you accept that it's really only praised because of the fact that it WAS the "static breaker" and praising it makes you look like a total pro champ cool guy, things become a lot clearer. And hopefully future content will look less like Gordias and more like Final Coil (and Midas, if Midas is an improvement, I haven't gotten far enough into it yet - though M2 and M4 being so similar has me suspicious of how M2S and M4S will go)
Cool...should only take me a year to get that airship mount then.
HylianScribe
Member
I did one 8v8 match this morning before work. I like it more than Seize so far but sure once I start going against premades it will suck (especially as a WHM). 4v4 you better get a premade soon otherwise groups will wreck you. Trying to get my 200 wins for mount on baby unranked mode before they decide to make it ranked only or some crap.
Nap time is my favorite.
The bolded is what I think is the shittiest part, it unnecessarily drags out the fight since what they are introducing at the start is each mechanic individually which is super easy on their own. Again, this is a flaw with most of their fights in general. I'm not looking past it just give them a free pass. I'm looking past it because it's there and they seem to have no interest in changing that philosophy (same with boring mid fight add phase). The meat is everything after tornado (which I notice you didn't really bother touching except for mention of debuff passing).
It's not only praised because it was a static breaker. Few people actually give a shit about when, how, or why other people suck or get frustrated. The fight was built well and was actually mechanically challenging.
To two other points you put in, most MMOs don't have different strategies for boss fights. The optimal strat is found and that's what is fun. As for builds, not sure what you mean, any combo of classes can clear the fights so not sure what you mean.
And to, when the dev has to come out and say blah blah blah. Please, yoship is a mouth piece that is built to talk to fans directly. people thought it was hard so he agreed with them, he would have agreed with whatever they said. His whole platform on deving this game (for better or worse) is listening to the vocal fans and doing pretty much exactly what they want.
I thought vacation time was just for playing video games.
No. By this logic I should be all over A4S, because having cleared it was even more super special leet than 3. But 4 was a shit fight. It was poorly thought out. It wasn't fun. 3 was well done. It has nothing to do with ecred which I have never and will never care about. I spent most of the long dark period of statics exploding on 3 being a combination of confused and sad because people were perfectly capable of doing it, but were giving up because everyone had agreed in advance that it was far, far too hard and blaming the fight was easier than going back and looking at what was actually going wrong.
I absolutely resent the attempt to downplay my opinion of a fight as some sort of epeen obsession given that I have never and probably will never care about establishing myself as 'pro' since most people in this thread have seen me play and wouldn't fall for it for a second. I'm middle tier for my job and not shy about admitting it, and being middle tier was fine for A3S. I just want to enjoy and feel challenged by what I'm doing, and want to see more people stretch when challenged and not just wait for gear to bridge the gap for them. And I want the game to continue providing avenues for people to challenge themselves, which the nerf-happy treatment of old content really stamps out.
For some reason, clicking on the post you quoted takes me to a 2005 Tabris post where he's banned.
I'm okay with this.
I fixed it. Overzealous quote editing strikes again.
This is why I think if they want to go this route of long-ass highly scripted boss fights, that thing he threw out a while back of allowing statics to challenge particular sections of boss fights to practice them would be the most beneficial thing the supplement this design philosophy.
I think that design philosophy is ultimately poor, though, so I don't know if doubling down/extending that is a particularly exciting trajectory for future content.
I would much rather see them get creative with boss arena design, let us explore raid zones on foot, make trash encounters interesting, and increase the number of bosses, than to be stuck with 4 bosses every ~6 months with a boss trial or two in between that just get more and more complicated to clear.
I was actually worried about the fight being way too long with 4 mini bosses but it really isn't any different from a big baddie with multiple phases huh. I do think the breaks in between kill the momentum of the fight though.
Oh, the fight being really scripted definitely helps with the timing of silences. Will just have to get more practice in, I guess.
I used to stand still and not activate any GCDs in T2 when I knew High Voltage was coming up, fearing that doing so might not grant me enough time to fire off a silence. Lol, good times.
I really wana push through to A7S quickly. That fight seems much more fun!
This is beyond missing the point of why the fight is praised and really tries to force it as an elitist stance which is largely the opposite of the point I'm, and others who like the fight, are trying to make. The fight is less and less about those things that people hold up as "why" the fight was super difficult. It was a fight that allowed for a lot to be done at the planning stage to deal with the mechanics contrary to what pretty much everyone keeps stating.
The biggest point trying to be made over and over is that it was a heavy mechanics-first fight, a thing that most people claim to want over and over, and a fight that benefited greatly from being planned for and breaking down. It's a fight with an upfront reputation of being absolutely hard and that, I feel, broke more people than the fight itself. It's a hard fight, yes, but it's doable without requiring perfection that people like to put forth.
So:
Not so much that it's "genius" to do so but that it falls in line with the other heavily praised fight in the game: T13. So more of finding the common ground to point at with it in terms of design.
Two of our members have incredibly bad latency (like, WTFast's improvement for our WAR for the fight was nearly double my current ping. And that's just the improvement, not what he's left with). Debuff passing was a non-issue since you can plan to the point that there's minimal RNG in regards to who gets what mattering and minimal moving parts. The amount of two people trying to cross paths can be minimized to zero: No debuff pass requires both people to move which removes all of the sluggish netcode issue. It can be 100% planned for and completely remove the server polling as an actual issue.
Other instances of it don't have the boss still dealing damage, which is the primary reason he's still there. That said, the non-targetable tornados later also do the same so it's a bit weird arguably, though it'd largely depend on how they function in the back-end. It is worth mentioning that targeted AoE's on the center can hit things when they spawn so it does provide a real use to have him targetable, even if it does make for tab targeting being a relevant thing.
The thing glossed over here is that the add phase is not simply "you kill adds." If that was the case, it's a boring burn phase. It was interesting in that it was less about raw damage and finishing things before bad things happen (e.g., T13 Zoo) and more about individual targets needing to die in a limited amount of time. Damage and targeting priority over raw numbers. The stunning them before they reach the edge, and slows being a relevant thing, is a nice touch as well. Calling it "just adds" kind of misses what the phase as a whole is?
In general for me it's hard to take "overtuned" too seriously in conjunction with the static breaker idea when almost every group that broke on the fight broke prior to the tuning mattering. I know of zero groups that made it to enrage, consistently, and then broke apart. Be it here or the OF or Reddit and so-on. They may exist, don't doubt that, but it's largely not the norm for the fight. Groups broke at getting by the mechanics of it, rarely the tuning, which has always been the point I've stood by.
ROBOKITTYZILLA
Member
You will want to take an actual vacation if you raid long enough.
Also clearing the add phase in time or before time is actually beneficial towards you clearing the fight as a whole, so the better your strategy for tornado phase the better off you were when it came down to the end.
My viewpoint on a3s is that it's a Titan fight. Titan fights are some of the most enjoyable ones in the game from what challenge Hard Mode brings to what challenge Extreme mode brings. Sephirot is also a really enjoyable fight I also liken to a Titan fight. Movement + mechanics + dps is one of the more enjoyable ways to fight in this game, I feel. That's something sorely missing from the rest of Gordias and part of why Midas has been so well received. Doing stuff while doing stuff is always going to be where the most enjoyable bits of the game surface in terms of fight design.
Final Phase T13 is a great example of this, I think, since you had Megaflares to handle, Earthshakers to be mindful of, Tank mechanics in Akh Morn switching and splitting and soaking and all while you're trying to take as much health from Bahamut as you can. The cycles of burn phase mechanics phase is really enjoyable to me and I'm sure many others.
Comparing mechanics -> burn phase fight design to things like A1S or A2S and it just doesn't come close. The mechanics are barely present in 1, and not even there in 2. Even looking at A5S you have periods of burn and periods of mechanics and balancing those two instances of when you do x y or z and what phase of the boss' rotation is up is way more enjoyable. That stuff is only really present in A3S, which is a pretty huge shame. A3S isn't perfect but it was the closest, imo, anything in Gordias reached towards what made so many of the coil and ex primal fights so enjoyable.
My viewpoint on a3s is that it's a Titan fight. Titan fights are some of the most enjoyable ones in the game from what challenge Hard Mode brings to what challenge Extreme mode brings. Sephirot is also a really enjoyable fight I also liken to a Titan fight. Movement + mechanics + dps is one of the more enjoyable ways to fight in this game, I feel. That's something sorely missing from the rest of Gordias and part of why Midas has been so well received. Doing stuff while doing stuff is always going to be where the most enjoyable bits of the game surface in terms of fight design.
Final Phase T13 is a great example of this, I think, since you had Megaflares to handle, Earthshakers to be mindful of, Tank mechanics in Akh Morn switching and splitting and soaking and all while you're trying to take as much health from Bahamut as you can. The cycles of burn phase mechanics phase is really enjoyable to me and I'm sure many others.
Comparing mechanics -> burn phase fight design to things like A1S or A2S and it just doesn't come close. The mechanics are barely present in 1, and not even there in 2. Even looking at A5S you have periods of burn and periods of mechanics and balancing those two instances of when you do x y or z and what phase of the boss' rotation is up is way more enjoyable. That stuff is only really present in A3S, which is a pretty huge shame. A3S isn't perfect but it was the closest, imo, anything in Gordias reached towards what made so many of the coil and ex primal fights so enjoyable.
I understand your sentiment 100% and I agree but while I was reading this, I was thinking how the magic of BLM is taking these mechanics heavy fights and figuring out how many mechanics that I don't, personally, have to do.
You have a future in sports colour commentary.
I realized this recently. 50 BLM didn't have to worry about rotation really. I got to work out how much cheap shit I could get away with, what I could stand in, and my personal favorite, what I could get my group to do for me. (Within reason of course. Like having them stack on me in T11 for the stack missile in phase 1)
Maybe that last one makes me a shitty BLM.
And ever since Midas, no one gives a hoot about BLM anymore. rip you.
The key to sports is to score more basket goal home run touchdowns than the other guys.
HylianScribe
Member
The problem with A3S in the early goings wasn't that it was so mechanics heavy, it was that it was so mechanics heavy + overtuned in the checks department as well. I mean, there were numerous factors that many groups struggled with in progression that we don't need to go over again (just go back to OT posts from September-December of last year for some of those). As gear made up for the tuning issues, it simply came down to a mechanics issue. For whatever reason, the old group I was in couldn't handle the mechanics. We would fail HoP every so often, mess up add phase a lot, have somebody almost aways die to sluice/protean, etc, etc. I think we made it to last phase cycle reset once ever. After nearly 4 months of attempts and trying to explain what to do and fix the issues, it wasn't working.
So I'm going to say honestly, A3S required not only good team work, but you had to know your shit mechanics wise. If one person did't, it was enough to hold progression back. A3S/A4S was basically you couldn't cover for people anymore, as harsh as that sounds. Everyone had to pull their weight. Many of the people who were in those groups that broke during A3S eventually got clears, so I mean, calling it a static killer is still appropriate, but at the same time A3S might have just been telling you the group you were in isn't really working. Nothing against any individual per se, but rather, should try changing things up. That's why there was a phase of groups breaking up and people reforming with new statics. And A3S kills finally happened for them. Then they hit A4S and experienced the same thing all over again...
People still get killed by the dive bombs (I do every now and then, usually caught between mines and dive paths and by the time I recognize the spot I need to be in it's too late). Too often two beta orbs + drill/cannon mechanic go out too close in succession due to improper stunning, so no way to survive all that damage going out in that small of a time. Alphas get through sometimes, too. Way too many people getting paralyzed. People getting excited we made it to third robot unscathed for once and screwing up their height mechanic. That's all for now, we haven't been to fourth robot yet. Enrage timer seems very strict at the moment in ~220 gear. I basically don't want to be stuck on this fight for another month until people get weapons and can kill stuff faster to make things easier and be able to clear. If that's going to be the case, I personally would rather not do A6S at all until then and just keep clearing A5S to gear up. Also something something some people in the group were unhappy about something/dramu and some people are quitting the group. I'm always the last to hear about this stuff, so not even totally sure what's going on. If all alse fails, pug it with the Trep LS.
So I'm going to say honestly, A3S required not only good team work, but you had to know your shit mechanics wise. If one person did't, it was enough to hold progression back. A3S/A4S was basically you couldn't cover for people anymore, as harsh as that sounds. Everyone had to pull their weight. Many of the people who were in those groups that broke during A3S eventually got clears, so I mean, calling it a static killer is still appropriate, but at the same time A3S might have just been telling you the group you were in isn't really working. Nothing against any individual per se, but rather, should try changing things up. That's why there was a phase of groups breaking up and people reforming with new statics. And A3S kills finally happened for them. Then they hit A4S and experienced the same thing all over again...
People still get killed by the dive bombs (I do every now and then, usually caught between mines and dive paths and by the time I recognize the spot I need to be in it's too late). Too often two beta orbs + drill/cannon mechanic go out too close in succession due to improper stunning, so no way to survive all that damage going out in that small of a time. Alphas get through sometimes, too. Way too many people getting paralyzed. People getting excited we made it to third robot unscathed for once and screwing up their height mechanic. That's all for now, we haven't been to fourth robot yet. Enrage timer seems very strict at the moment in ~220 gear. I basically don't want to be stuck on this fight for another month until people get weapons and can kill stuff faster to make things easier and be able to clear. If that's going to be the case, I personally would rather not do A6S at all until then and just keep clearing A5S to gear up. Also something something some people in the group were unhappy about something/dramu and some people are quitting the group. I'm always the last to hear about this stuff, so not even totally sure what's going on. If all alse fails, pug it with the Trep LS.
Pls, I put up numbers.
Also, "ever since Midas" I'm pretty sure people have been trying to tell me that BLM was dead since like 2.4.
I think the one thing I can come to appreciate in HW is there's a wealth of mechanics to pull from older content like Coil, etc. and then figuring out how to combine them in new ways for stuff like Thordan or Sephirot is pretty great. Hell, A8S has stuff from Qarn Normal's final boss.
Like sure, Sephirot is technically just conviction towers + a new version of Twister and Earthshakers, it's a neat combination (and towers being tankbusters when the buffs aren't up) and does require everyone to be on point for all of the third phase. (Or die by themselves in the corner)
And I still adore Spear of Might in Thordan.
PhillipCostigan
Member
probably rehashing the same old arguments, but I don't share the same enjoyment of A3S as other people who cleared it. Part of it was probably experiencing it the majority of the time at over 100 ping on the NA servers, but the amount of mechanics that felt unfair at times was pretty frustrating. Drainage tethers not working, Digititis not passing etc.
Granted a lot of it was alleviated when I had the GOAT EU ping, but I still never really felt the mechanics were fun. Maybe it would have been better if add phase didn't exist? It really breaks the flow of the actual ramping mechanics of the fight. yeah it introduces the positive and negative stuff, but I feel they could have introduced that just at the start of the last phase with the clown fiesta of tethers and it would have been fine.
I also just share the opinion that it was just fundamentally overtuned. It might be a more fun fight in its current nerfed iteration.
I agree with this. Experienced first hand the frustration of trying to teach people the mechanic they were failing and ended up being the fall guy for it. It was the time when I really wished there was like a replay/spectator feature so you can pinpoint who is really making a balls of the mechanic so they can't hide from it.
Granted a lot of it was alleviated when I had the GOAT EU ping, but I still never really felt the mechanics were fun. Maybe it would have been better if add phase didn't exist? It really breaks the flow of the actual ramping mechanics of the fight. yeah it introduces the positive and negative stuff, but I feel they could have introduced that just at the start of the last phase with the clown fiesta of tethers and it would have been fine.
I also just share the opinion that it was just fundamentally overtuned. It might be a more fun fight in its current nerfed iteration.
I agree with this. Experienced first hand the frustration of trying to teach people the mechanic they were failing and ended up being the fall guy for it. It was the time when I really wished there was like a replay/spectator feature so you can pinpoint who is really making a balls of the mechanic so they can't hide from it.
The key to raids is the enemies' health bars reaching zero percent before every member of your party has zero percent health.
I think my SS is stacked too high. If I Invigorate at 550TP or thereabouts I end up hitting a bottleneck at around 28 seconds left where I have less than 100TP and Invigorate is still on CD for another 10 seconds.
I've attempted incorporating Tornado Kick into my normal rotation but it doesn't seem worth the loss of GL3. Maybe during PB it's alright, but it breaks attack momentum otherwise.
Dragoons currently have this problem (where we can't currently attain 1150 skill speed for the god rotation) but the interim gearing process puts me at 760 skill speed, which puts us out of the current skill speed sweet spot. It'll be better when I get lore pants next week though since the pants I do have have like 90 skill speed on them.
how_to_draw_an_owl.png
cultureculture
Member
{I'm interested.}
irfaanator
Banned
im pretty sure it's forever
V
Vilix
Unconfirmed Member
I'm currently watching a twitch stream of a group. The Bard is shooting electric arrows from this bow. Is that a new ability you get in HW?
Well that's a relief. Thanks.
/dead
3 players commendations in this dungeon run with a pug
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DF loves Haukke Manor, though, for 3 days straight that's the dungeon it has given me in the leveling bracket.
So for PLD: Big shield, or small round shield? I know one has higger BS and the other higher BR, but I wonder which stat is more beneficial in the long run, I'm guessing BR, since it'll make block proc more often and that's less damage sustained in the long run.
feelsgoodman.jpeg
DF loves Haukke Manor, though, for 3 days straight that's the dungeon it has given me in the leveling bracket.
So for PLD: Big shield, or small round shield? I know one has higger BS and the other higher BR, but I wonder which stat is more beneficial in the long run, I'm guessing BR, since it'll make block proc more often and that's less damage sustained in the long run.