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[iammeiam]

Edit: To put something useful top of page: Maintanence tonight (November 24th) at 9PM Pacific. Hotfixes including Verminion tournament stuff.

Alex just feels either rushed. poorly conceived, or a bit of both.

I'm really torn here--on the one hand, A1S and A2S are basically generic Coil fights. 1S throws Faust at you to get you ready for DPS checks to come, 2 throws a bunch of junk at you to get you to strategize and plan since you have to have a plan for every wave after 5 or so. I wouldn't be surprised to find out 3 is where most of the time this tier went. Mechanically involved without being overcomplicated like Thordan, tuned to require across-the-board competent DPS around i200-205 without requiring particularly great performance, and designed with a constant sense of feedback for progress. Basically any time you have to deal with something new, the field of battle or opponent visually changes.

Then you get to 4 and it really does feel like they ran out of time and just sort of threw it out there. 4 legs that you have to kill one by one, but the individual legs don't actually matter, nothing visually changes as you progress through. You more or less spend seven minutes with the game cycling through pairs of four mechanics: Carnage, Discoid, Dolls, Quarantine. Pushing phases at a bad time is a thing again, which was missed by nobody. Deal with that long enough and you finally get to fight the boss! Nisi as implemented is just offensively bad and there's a reason everyone skips it. I can't believe they had a sufficient number of people test this fight and walk away with the impression it was a good idea. It's also tuned to the point of being potentially problematic, given that the doll check on leg 3 means you have to hit certain DPS checkpoints at certain times.

So I kind of think there's an alternate universe where they played around with things, realized that 4 was kind of a mess of a fight, tuned it lower, and swapped it with 3. Fixed the difficulty curve, ended on an enjoyable enough fight, had a huge impact with some relatively minor tweaks. But it still feels like 3/4ths of Alex was pretty well designed.

 

[EndcatOmega]

Hahaha, oh wow.

They want people to communicate and work together so they want to wait a little longer until they make changes, but they are considering changing the drop rate of gear because multiple groups working together are killing mobs way too fast and gaining more loot than they expected.

Talk about burying the lead.

 

[iammeiam]

They always underestimate player thirst. Meanwhile:

Thordan extreme is a battle with the difficulty in between Alexander savage and normal mode, however Thordan extreme was set to a special difficulty so players have goals in 3.1 and they plan to not make the next extreme primal as difficult as Thordan extreme.

But...


;_;

 

[Frumix]

I can imagine how they considered Thordan sufficiently hard. It's very SCOB-esque, and the DPS checks are pretty real. It's as hard as your group makes it which means that if you're playing with a good group you're likely to not notice most of the difficulty. It's really well designed where mistakes accumulate over time and good performance allows to avoid a lot of problems!

 

[dramatis]

I'm fine with Haurchefant the way he is in English.

The insistence on throwing romantic subtext into everything is frankly unappealing and not particularly something to be complained about.

 

[Kintaro]

I'm fine with Haurchefant the way he is in English.

The insistence on throwing romantic subtext into everything is frankly unappealing and not particularly something to be complained about.

He was a completely different character in 2.0 to the point where he was reintroduced people were like "who is this guy?"

Localization team going rogue sounds about right though given some of the changes.

 

[Jayhawk]

Talk about burying the lead.

YoshiP underestimated the power of Hawk Airlines!

 

[Sorian]

YoshiP underestimated the power of Hawk Airlines!

Quick, we have to get in there double time before nerfs.

 

[aceface]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/3u2wp9/quick_summary_translation_of_the_famitsu/

Hahaha, oh wow.

You are in a lot of trouble Koji!!!

 

[scy]

.....Thordan EX is a special case difficulty wise? Do they ever plan on challenging the playerbase or just cakewalk everything?

 

[iammeiam]

I can imagine how they considered Thordan sufficiently hard. It's very SCOB-esque, and the DPS checks are pretty real. It's as hard as your group makes it which means that if you're playing with a good group you're likely to not notice most of the difficulty. It's really well designed where mistakes accumulate over time and good performance allows to avoid a lot of problems!

But there's not really anything in the game worth doing that isn't as hard as your group makes it. Void Ark boss 3 isn't particularly hard, but vote abandons happen if the group makes it hard.

I dunno, we've had ridiculous recoveries (multiple clears with 5+ deaths, and we've never had to deal with AOE phase/second Sacred Cross to clear so DPS didn't seem particularly tight/we could have been way worse at DPS and exactly as bad at mechanics and still cleared.) Thordan is SCoB post-nerf, post poverty sands, without Echo. The mechanics are there, but most of them don't hurt that bad. Real SCoB would have that ice DoT uncleansable, same with tower fail paralysis. Thordan lets you Esuna all of that so you can bounce back.

I'm mostly annoyed because it seemed like perfectly tuned midtier content. Challenging enough to take some time, nowhere near as demanding as the hard bits of Savage. It's something the game has sorely been missing and to hear that it was a one-off thing is super disappointing.

 

[Frumix]

I'm mostly annoyed because it seemed like perfectly tuned midtier content. Challenging enough to take some time, nowhere near as demanding as the hard bits of Savage. It's something the game has sorely been missing and to hear that it was a one-off thing is super disappointing.

You can perhaps find solace in the fact that they seem to never be able to evaluate their difficulty right.

 

[studyguy]

They want people to communicate and work together so they want to wait a little longer until they make changes, but they are considering changing the drop rate of gear because multiple groups working together are killing mobs way too fast and gaining more loot than they expected.

So Dia nerf incoming because the team didn't foresee a bunch of people who turned The Hunt into a coordinated game of follow the leader turning Dia into a giant game of piñata where everyone is invited.

The team has two settings as far as I'm concerned with tuning content.
Lets make this faceroll easy
Or lets make this a brick wall

The ones that come out somewhere in between are simply accidents imo

 

[scy]

You can perhaps find solace in the fact that they seem to never be able to evaluate their difficulty right.

There is nothing on this game that is impossibly hard. The biggest problem is the lack of mid tiercontent to teach players to improve. Flat out removing that tier of content isn't really going to help matters.

 

[Kagari]

Gobdip possibly in Void Ark sooner than expected. Get ready, kids.

 

[Tomat]

.....Thordan EX is a special case difficulty wise? Do they ever plan on challenging the playerbase or just cakewalk everything?

You already know the answer to that :S

The last nail in the Savage 1-4 coffin on its way

Wasn't there talk of 3 and 4 nerfs? I'd say that would be the last nail.


This sucks. I'm disappointed in this raid tier. Disappointed I haven't cleared 3 yet but also disappointed in just about every other aspect of the raid.

 

[studyguy]

Gobdip possibly in Void Ark sooner than expected. Get ready, kids.

The last nail in the Savage 1-4 coffin on its way

 

[Frumix]

Gobdip possibly in Void Ark sooner than expected. Get ready, kids.

But I already have the BiS weapon for my current job! :^)

 

[HylianScribe]

They always underestimate player thirst. Meanwhile

... why ... Thordan is what I asked for...

Where is that Miyamoto/Zelda 4chan image...I want somebody to redo that with YoshiP and raids.

"YOU SAY THAT SECOND COIL IS TOO HARD WITH INSTA WIPE MECHANICS, SO I MAKE FINAL COIL"

"YOU SAY THAT FINAL COIL IS TOO EASY BECAUSE LUCREZIA CLEARS IT IN A WEEK! YOU SAY YOU LOVE SECOND COIL MORE BECAUSE IT WAS HARDER AND I SHOULD MAKE SOMETHING BETWEEN SECOND COIL AND SAVAGE COIL, SO I MAKE ALEXANDER SAVAGE!"

"YOU SAY THAT ALEX SAVAGE IS TOO HARD AND DPS FOCUSED AND YOU LOVE MECHANICS BASED FIGHTS LIKE TITAN EX, SO I MAKE THORDAN EX!"

"YOU SAY THAT THORDAN EX MECHANICS ARE TOO HARD, AND NOW YOU WANT EASIER FIGHTS LIKE SHIVA!"

"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU WANT!?!?!"

"THAT'S WHY I MAKE GOLD SAUCER, DIADEM, AND REAL MONEY ITEM SHOP! AT LEAST THE CASUALS LIKE IT!"

 

[Kagari]

But I already have the BiS weapon for my current job! :^)

But that extra 4 dex or whatever!

 

[EndcatOmega]

... why ... Thordan is what I asked for...

Where is that Miyamoto/Zelda 4chan image...I want somebody to redo that with YoshiP and raids.

Much like the Zelda one, it's because there's like 9 different playerbases to please.

And like the Zelda one people who want another Majora's Mask are correct.

 

[Sorian]

Much like the Zelda one, it's because there's like 9 different playerbases to please.

And like the Zelda one people who want another Majora's Mask are correct.

Oh man, can we be friends?

 

[scy]

You already know the answer to that :S

It seems bizarre to me since I find A3S is at a really good spot design wise. The problem is the gaps in between to get players there. Thordan EX currently is a good fight since it's fairly relaxed. It still has pretty obvious spots to gauge prpgress. Not that most people use it that way (e.g., clean runs should not see 2nd Sacred Cross) but it has room for that.

I dunno, it's all just weird to me. People want hard content but not hard enough to try to beat it, just hard enough that they get by? Not sure.

 

[iammeiam]

There were people not expecting gobdip to hit in 3.15 alongside an i210 relic? They're pretty consistent about opening all non-raid routes to an iLvl simultaneously with their catchups.

... why ... Thordan is what I asked for...

Thordan was like exactly what 3.1 needed. It was the perfect content to bridge the gap and give people something they could go, learn consistently, and succeed at without the kicking-your-teeth-in aspects of Savage. The only thing wrong with Thordan is that he was the only piece of content like that, so I can't facepalm enough over this.

 

[Sorian]

Can we have real talk for a second?

Why don't they make difficult fights that aren't 13 minutes long? A3S is shit because you have to go through this boring ass first half of the fight to get to the real mechanic section. It is completely possible to have this mechanically/dps heavy challenging fight without having such a long ramp up time every single time.

 

[Kagari]

Can we have real talk for a second?

Why don't they make difficult fights that aren't 13 minutes long? A3S is shit because you have to go through this boring ass first half of the fight to get to the real mechanic section. It is completely possible to have this mechanically/dps heavy challenging fight without having such a long ramp up time every single time.

You can say the same about A4S as well.

 

[iammeiam]

Can we have real talk for a second?

Why don't they make difficult fights that aren't 13 minutes long? A3S is shit because you have to go through this boring ass first half of the fight to get to the real mechanic section. It is completely possible to have this mechanically/dps heavy challenging fight without having such a long ramp up time every single time.

Fight length is a thing but I think a lot of it has to do with balancing out how insanely frontloaded DPS can be. A3S's back half feels overlong at times, but the first half is relatively active. Jiggly butt phase -> Single hand phase -> Double hand phase -> Pudding Phase->P4 transition all happens in the first five minutes.

But then again this is basically my exact biggest complaint about 4, so I can see where you're coming from.

 

[Sorian]

You can say the same about A4S as well.

It's been an issue with a ton of their fights. They think that each fight needs to be self-contained for learning instead of building on prior encounters. There is no reason to give me a 5 minute lead in during each fight where we get babby's first debuff pass mechanic because later in the fight they are going to turn the dial on that mechanic up to 8. Give it to us straight from the beginning of the fight, the community is learning mechanics from all of the prior fights, there is no reason to re-learn everything each time.

 

[scy]

Can we have real talk for a second?

Why don't they make difficult fights that aren't 13 minutes long? A3S is shit because you have to go through this boring ass first half of the fight to get to the real mechanic section. It is completely possible to have this mechanically/dps heavy challenging fight without having such a long ramp up time every single time.

Because fast fights that are hard will just get beaten faster. Or something.

A3 and A4 are both this 5-6 minute slog before their interesting things happen, though A3 at least varies nicely. Thordan too for that matter. Seems to be their approach to fights in general. Dunno why the can't settle for 9-10 minute enrages again though. Or just a really long interesting fight the while time. A4S as just the Manipulator could have been a fine super long fight.

It's been an issue with a ton of their fights. They think that each fight needs to be self-contained for learning instead of building on prior encounters. There is no reason to give me a 5 minute lead in during each fight where we get babby's first debuff pass mechanic because later in the fight they are going to turn the dial on that mechanic up to 8. Give it to us straight from the beginning of the fight...

See, here's the thing ... I think the first Digititis is the hardest in the fight. The others can be done with everyone in static spots and handled with no interference. Wash away to Digititis has the most random elements and reactions to it.

 

[iammeiam]

A3 and A4 are both this 5-6 minute slog before their interesting things happen, though A3 at least varies nicely. Thordan too for that matter. Seems to be their approach to fights in general. Dunno why the can't settle for 9-10 minute enrages again though. Or just a really long interesting fight the while time. A4S as just the Manipulator could have been a fine super long fight.

A4S leg 4 dies at a little over 7 minutes in if you want to beat enrage. Enrage is somewhere around 13 minutes. You spend more than half the fight poking at his kneecaps to annoy him out of his hiding spot. And your reward for that is turning Perpetual Ray from a harmless stun mechanic into a tankbuster. I hate this fight so much.

 

[Sorian]

See, here's the thing ... I think the first Digititis is the hardest in the fight. The others can be done with everyone in static spots and handled with no interference. Wash away to Digititis has the most random elements and reactions to it.

As a black mage who can teleport, the difficulty is obviously lost on me. I understand the sentiment though.

Edit: I miss when manawall used to let me cheese some mechanics. Random musing.

 

[EndcatOmega]

Oh man, can we be friends?

As long as this doesn't involve me queuing up to 24 mans every time there's a new card!

 

[Sorian]

As long as this doesn't involve me queuing up to 24 mans every time there's a new card!

No way, I have to queue by myself so I get in progress to replace salty dps that didn't get their drop from the third boss.

 

[scy]

As a black mage who can teleport, the difficulty is obviously lost on me. I understand the sentiment though.

Edit: I miss when manawall used to let me cheese some mechanics. Random musing.

To be fair, I either do the fight on SMN and can sprint and spam an instant or do it on WAR and can ignore the knockback. So there's that I suppose.

Now you can shrug off like 3k damage nbd.

 

[Sorian]

To be fair, I either do the fight on SMN and can sprint and spam an instant or do it on WAR and can ignore the knockback. So there's that I suppose.

Now you can shrug off like 3k damage nbd.

It's ok I guess, it used to be more fun when I had to eat a physical tank buster and laugh though, those days are gone forever.

 

[Squishy3]

It's been an issue with a ton of their fights. They think that each fight needs to be self-contained for learning instead of building on prior encounters. There is no reason to give me a 5 minute lead in during each fight where we get babby's first debuff pass mechanic because later in the fight they are going to turn the dial on that mechanic up to 8. Give it to us straight from the beginning of the fight, the community is learning mechanics from all of the prior fights, there is no reason to re-learn everything each time.

I mean Thordan is a good example of this where it's using a ton of mechanic from previous encounter with a couple of new ones (Spear, Dragoon jumps, etc.) and it is a really good fight. It builds up in complexity perfectly. Savage Alex just isn't as good as it since A2S to A3S jumps up 100 feet in difficulty.

 

[Sorian]

I mean Thordan is a good example of this where it's using a ton of mechanic from previous encounter with a couple of new ones (Spear, Dragoon jumps, etc.) and it is a really good fight. It builds up in complexity perfectly.

I agree and look, they are already back pedaling and saying that Thordan was just a special thing and not to expect that in the future.

They have their priorities so good.

 

[WolvenOne]

I don't think nerfing the drop rate will fix what people perceive to be the big problem with Diadem. The problem is that they made the spawn conditions on Star-ranks dependent on killing lots of lower ranking mobs. As a result, the best way to spawn a bunch of Star-Ranks is always going to be to get a ton of parties together and zerg down mobs crazy fast until S-ranks appear. Removing 210 pieces from Silver or Bronze drops, doesn't change that one iota.

If they really want people to slow down, make it so monsters stop respawning on a specific island if they're being zerged down too quickly. Just have a message that reads, "The monsters sense something amiss," pop up, and keep that status effect in place for at least ten to fifteen minutes. This would make tons of parties zerging on a single island a poor use of time, as people would need to pack up shop and move to a different island every five minutes or so, potentially before even a single Star-rank spawned.

As for Thordan, I have mixed feelings there. On one hand I've really enjoyed that fight, and wish the Alexander fights had been a bit more like that. (Maybe make a few attacks hit harder so recovery from mistakes is more difficult, but overall like that.) Conversely though, while that fight's pretty easy with a static that's reasonably well experienced with raid mechanics, it is apparently pretty nightmarish for players that don't have that sort of support group. I could see that being a problem, since extreme primals have historically been something players could pug and eventually get down on their own with some work. That being said, I hope they wait and see how the community adapts to Thordan before they do their final balancing for their next extreme primal.

All that being said, I will agree with what somebody said earlier. Fights in this game have a tendency to see saw between being too easy, and being brick walls. I really hope they figure this out eventually, because it does feel like it's starting to hurt them a bit.

PS: Best designed series of fights in this game is still FCoB, I think. I'm biased I know, but those fights felt like they hit a sweet spot between difficulty and accessibility.

 

[iammeiam]

As for Thordan, I have mixed feelings there. On one hand I've really enjoyed that fight, and wish the Alexander fights had been a bit more like that. (Maybe make a few attacks hit harder so recovery from mistakes is more difficult, but overall like that.) Conversely though, while that fight's pretty easy with a static that's reasonably well experienced with raid mechanics, it is apparently pretty nightmarish for players that don't have that sort of support group. I could see that being a problem, since extreme primals have historically been something players could pug and eventually get down on their own with some work. That being said, I hope they wait and see how the community adapts to Thordan before they do their final balancing for their next extreme primal.

Here's the real problem though: Designing all non-current-raid-tier content in the game to be beatable with a bad group is going to encourage players to stagnate instead of improving. Thordan basically asks that most of your group be able to do most mechanics while keeping up OK DPS. That's it! And it's all so incredibly scripted that you can PUG it and have most if not all of your learning carry over between sessions. It will take more practice for players without raid experience, but the whole point is to get them those experiences so that makes sense. So the question becomes if that's too much to ask of random players. Is the game about actually engaging with and learning from content, or is it about whacking a loot piñata until someone's iLevel is high enough to satisfy them? And if it's the latter, why not just Diadem until relic?

 

[Kagari]

Second Coil design and difficulty (and upgrade item placement) was probably the best all around. I would like to see more like that.

 

[WolvenOne]

Here's the real problem though: Designing all non-current-raid-tier content in the game to be beatable with a bad group is going to encourage players to stagnate instead of improving. Thordan basically asks that most of your group be able to do most mechanics while keeping up OK DPS. That's it! And it's all so incredibly scripted that you can PUG it and have most if not all of your learning carry over between sessions. It will take more practice for players without raid experience, but the whole point is to get them those experiences so that makes sense. So the question becomes if that's too much to ask of random players. Is the game about actually engaging with and learning from content, or is it about whacking a loot piñata until someone's iLevel is high enough to satisfy them? And if it's the latter, why not just Diadem until relic?

Oh, I agree, which is why I want them to wait to see how well the community adapts before balancing the next extreme primal fight. If the community adapts well enough then I would just assume that they create another fight in that general ballpark of difficulty.

If the community doesn't adapt though, then they might need to dial it back to the difficulty of the earlier extreme fights. That's a huge shame I know, since that fight is a ton of fun for people that actually put the time and effort into learning how to play the game, but it doesn't matter how much content they put into the game or how good it is if people refuse to play it.

I might also advocate that they switch off between normal Extreme difficulty fights, and near Thordan level fights, since the later fights will be coming closer to the ends of raid cycles, and will be dropping near max-ilvl weapons.

 

[Vilix]

Edit: To put something useful top of page: Maintanence tonight (November 24th) at 9PM Pacific. Hotfixes including Verminion tournament stuff.

Well I guess I'll be going to bed at a decent hour. Any idea on how long this maintanence will last?

 

[Jayhawk]

I guess people don't care enough to dump their logs of Thordan extreme on FF Logs because my highest DPS number would be in the top 10 in the world rankings... and I'm pretty bad at this game.

 

[Squishy3]

i'm trying out the blade and soul beta and all people are doing is talking about savage alex


now they're talking about the new relic weapons

 

[iammeiam]

Well I guess I'll be going to bed at a decent hour. Any idea on how long this maintanence will last?

2 AM.

I guess people don't care enough to dump their logs of Thordan extreme on FF Logs because my highest DPS number would be in the top 10 in the world rankings... and I'm pretty bad at this game.

Thordan uploads were broken during the majority of the initial farming rush, so anybody who tried to upload through at least Friday didn't count. It was splitting the fight phases into seperate trash fights instead of treating it like a boss. I think people can maybe go back and upload old stuff now so if they care I'd expect the rankings to shift a lot in the near future.

I want to see speed kill times; groups with i210 weapons have to be melting him.

 

[Ken]

3.15 Patch Notes preview

*Players are now awarded treasure coffers upon entry of Alexander Gordias Savage.

 

[Xux]

I'm fine with Haurchefant the way he is in English.

The insistence on throwing romantic subtext into everything is frankly unappealing and not particularly something to be complained about.

Yeah, I'm glad the localization team fixed him.

 

[Frumix]

We were bored, we DFed Titan.
How, after all this time, is it still some of the most fun content this game has produced?

 

[tiggerkiddo]

Haurchefant is just perfect the way he is in the Western version.

As for the other stuff, eh just goes in line with their other decisions

 

[Kagari]

We were bored, we DFed Titan.
How, after all this time, is it still some of the most fun content this game has produced?

Me and Shamdeo were two-manning T1, T5 and T9 last night for fun. Was hilarious trying to see how long we'd last.

Conflags lasted a lot longer than I remember...