It's ... hard to quite say it, I guess, but I get what their goals are with the changes but I'm not sure why they chose the ways they went about it.
Blaster - There's really only three mechanics here: Mirage Dashes, Mirage Tethers, and Mines. The first two are basically able to be treated as the same and the latter interferes with the first so I can get why they decided to speed up the mines by halving it but it essentially turns it into a non-mechanic. Put another way, shifting fight timers around (move a GCD in between mines and Mirage, trim the amount of mine patterns available) can retain the entirety of the mechanic and still give control to the players for dealing with Mirage. They simply omitted mines as anything beyond "make sure the OT hits it or we die."
Brawler - Honestly, not ... too much they could do to the Betas to make them easier to handle. I'd have figured they'd instead just slow them down even more so you can get away with just a stun to get them into proper timings but tweaking their damage gets the same goal. The issue here is it's literally the entire mechanic of just "stagger the damage so people live" and now it's approaching "or don't, it won't kill you anyway" which feels a little awkward.
Swindler - No real comment, not much in this fight to have changed since his actual mechanics are pretty binary. Truth be told, I figured if they nerfed any damage it was going to be his AoE by making it Magic damage instead of Darkness or just flat out reducing it a bit.
Vortexer - I'm torn here. They shaved out basically one entire debuff pass worth of HP? I guess they had a lot (a lot) of Enrage-based wipes and figured doing that here made the most sense to remove it. I'm not sure I agree with that yet, most of the Vortexer fight with relation to the rest of the robots DPS check-wise felt appropriate at the "around two rotations" mark for how long he'd survive and he's really straightforward once you know your plan. I think if they did the HP cut on the other robots to get people to Vortexer smoother / faster it would have worked out better but I guess they also don't want A6S to be thought of as "Vortexer and friends" but as "these 4 robot dudes" and bringing him down a peg HP wise helps that.
tl;dr: Blaster mechanic essentially removed, Brawler mechanic borderline trivialized, Swindler change removes an edge case, and Vortexer change could have instead been spread to the other robots to make getting to him easier. I wish they changed the fights in a more invisible manner that meant what you did was the same but now smoother rather than tell you to do less.
The main argument against "I wish people would put in time to learn end game raid or get better at their jobs/game in general rather than asking for nerfs" or as Galen put it " If you can't be arsed to learn shit about the most difficult content in the game you probably shouldn't be trying to do the most difficult content in the game" is what the heck else is there to do then if you want boss fight style content.
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They would have to have more mid-tier raid content, the equivalent of a new boss battle a month that average players can at least attempt and enjoy and realistically clear. Not the stuff thrown at them so far in Gordias and Midas.
I mean, that's the entire point of what I've been saying? I don't really get the point of culling the content they do have. Right now the situation stands to me that there's a void of difficulty still in the game when you compare A8S to everything else and bringing A6S down a peg simply widens the gap. It's a void that they have yet to fill and every time they start having content to do it, they nerf it or relegate it to useless. This isn't some cry to get harder and harder things, it's to get more content to fill more gaps and let the playerbase develop.
You've said it a lot on it'd be great if we got more EX Primal-styled content and I do agree on that? I wish we got more fights like that. And I wish we got real harder dungeons that simply asked for players to do more damage, do more mechanics, and react better (aka, just tweak values, not full-blown new assets). Just more things to players to be doing "raid level" content at more times to help fill the gaps in the game so it's not faceroll <-> raid only.
Cuz in case you haven't looked outside the GAF bubble on Ultros, our server's raid scene is sickly. It had been on the decline for a while, but the past two weeks saw several good raiders quit or transfer. Heck I wouldn't be on Ultros if not for being stood up, and I may just yet again leave cuz it's just bleak and I do want to raid.
Here's the thing, the raid scene in general (across many MMOs) is fairly bleak and a large problem, at least with 14, is there's a wide gap of player skill levels and many of them just flat out cannot do the content. For many of them, it's not because they physically cannot, just that there's not a lot of reason for them to do so until then and not much to go off of to base themselves. SSS was supposed to be some kind of stopgap solution to this, I guess, but that really did not pan out in the slightest.
I feel like by and large most of the playerbase got relatively worse with the addition of Heavensward. Not necessarily their own faults but just a lot of new complexities with jobs, burn out, more gimmicks in raids, etc as well as just the ceilings for every job going a lot higher / the skill gaps being larger. So you have fights that ask a bit more, players doing a bit less, and not much to help get them where they need to go. In many ways, I think we're on the same page for what the raid situation is like, I'm just more focused on there not being as large of an able body ready and willing to do the content vs there not being the people to lead said body. I want to see the playerbase slowly being built up rather than things brought down.
In the end it's about fun and whatever their budget is. Either we eventually get more content and more midcore things to do or we end up with no Savage-tier content going forward. Guess we'll have to see how things go.
