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I'm getting sick to death of SE making these "final fights" split into two with a check point. E12S for example is two 8 min ish fights (give/take)… At this point they should just make two 10 min+ fights and make it 5 fights instead of 4.
Edit: after finishing the video, I do not want them to be shorter either. WoW is basically a shit load of bosses but fights are over in a heartbeat.
I feel like the biggest issue with this idea is the how much would be skipped by good groups. My group reclears e9s in roughly 6m40s which is something like 3 minutes before the enrage? If you cut out 1m30s out of a 5 minute fight due to high dps you're in serious danger of missing the signature big mechanic if it's a fight paced as slowly as a first floor. Heck speedkill groups in verse skipped downburst in e6s, you don't want that becoming a totally normal thing to do in the first 2 fights.
I'm not sure how you'd balance the rewards (probably not with gear) but having fights that are roughly ultimate phases (on par with say BJ/CC) in a sort of Blue Mage Carnival set up would be more appealing to me if they wanted to add loads of shorter fights.
I didn't do O8S or O4S when they were current, but I don't really recall seeing any of the looping that you talked about in O12S. It seemed to me like the entire fight was more or less unique. You saw Hello World twice, but the second time did add new elements. The playerbase accommodated for that by creating a strat that could be used for both, which I could certainly see making things feel the same though. However, I think by O12S the mechs weren't really looping so much.
God Kefka was better than oracle. I will die on this hill.
Why didn't you upload this on April Fool's man this title is perfect for that
Edit: I actually agree with this topic quite a bit. They did this in Kingdom Hearts 3 on the Lvl 1 setting. By not scaling the minimum damage you do, fights are artificially harder because they are longer with repeated mechanics. It's very dull and annoying to play. The point is that the fights by the time they were repeating mechanics, they already felt complete and could have just ended right there. Kingdom hearts doesn't have any "enrage" mechanic to speak of to close off a fight rather we have Desperation Moves or DM. Cutting like 1/4 of the health and just making it a harder DM (because most bosses have a DM at 50% as well) would have been much better fight design.
Thankfully they did just that in the Re: Mind DLC. Base game still has issues.
I still don't like door bosses, like, as a system. There are so many things wrong with it, and so many things that can make the raiding environment better if they were executed differently.
In a world where loot distribution became so bloated on 4 fights per tier that we would get the coffer system to address it, there's room for five fights. Particularly with M&F and pineapple, those fights are fully functional on their own and is going to ask weeks of the typical savage raider. They can award loot when they appear.
They aren't really a snoozefest to reclear either and even if you 1 shot it, it's always at least 8 minutes of dead air in your raid night, regardless of how fun the fight is to perform, unless you're strictly parsing for the fight.
Also, god help you if you're progging for the second fight and someone in your static has to poop or something and gets AFK kicked.
i wish they would add a 5th fight, have it work like ultimate but still be on the savage difficulty level. It makes no sense to me that you can't get bis until clearing the tier, but by that point you dont even need bis because the boss is dead, it's just for improving your parse, which isnt a priority of the devs 😐 and then still give ultimate after the 5th savage fight
You have a valid point about Stormblood final fights suffering a little in the 2nd part that I hadn't ever really attributed to having a door boss. Maybe it's because Sigmascape was my introduction to raiding, but I had always thought that's just how it was until E12S came out. Personally, I really enjoy the difficulty they're able to put into both phases of a final fight when they use the checkpoint system if done properly. O12S is one of my favorites, but I will admit having Final Omega repeat itself exactly after Hello World 2 is a little disappointing and it probably would have been better to have an E4S type transition and delete everything after Hello World 2.
With Shadowbringers giving us a taste of 3 different types of final fight transitions (Titan cutscene where we retain control, Shiva where we don't, and Promise door boss), I gotta say I vastly prefer the door boss system. Titan transitions were decent because we could retain control of our characters and they were fairly short, and the fight design complemented it by getting tougher as the fight went on. Shiva on the other hand was honestly miserable because the first part of the fight was fairly challenging and the cutscene added an entire minute to every pull where you can't do anything at all. All self buffs dropped and you couldn't prep for the next part of the fight in any way. Every single pull I was wishing they just gave Shiva a checkpoint and let us skip the cutscene. So I would say that while door bosses aren't always the solution, and Titan has proven that having no door boss does work, most of the time it allows them make the fight more difficult and provide a cool transition cutscene that doesn't whittle away at your soul every single pull. E12S definitely had it done right.
Double length =/= double prog time, mind you. Think about progging Eden’s Promise twice vs. progging Shiva.
For a longer fight, learning the later mechanics have a significant increase to time consumption and that’s what makes ultimates harder than savage. For example, Golden Bahamut wasn’t that hard mechanically, but getting to that phase would take a very long time because all 8 people need to perfectly execute mechanics for the previous 13 minutes straight.
Make chest piece drop from 4th fight. Make weapons drop from 5th fight. Make all savage fights 9 minutes or less like oracle and promise. There. solved. I feel like doing a 12-14 minutes encounter every week like in titan and shiva's case is painful. Doing a 2-part encounter 8 mins each is also painful (17 mins in total. Basically an ultimate fight if you take away the checkpoint)
Now there are exceptions. Like fatebreaker. Fight is 11:30 mins long but it feels short asf. Intermissions are decently challenging but still give you room to breath and discuss your next move with your team. I think that fight is the future of raids formulas which i hope they'd implement in pandaemonium
If I’m understanding you right you want more interesting mini phases that don’t repeat, like how a8s is?
I’d certainly be pretty happy as a veteran raider to have more fights with interesting phases like that. But keep the fight to around the 10-12 minute mark still cause any more than that gets tedious both during prog and on reclears when you have that one mistake that causes a wipe/enrage.
100% i've been gaming for 30+ years across all genre, and to be frank my most fav fights tend to be the shorter ones vs the longer ones. Player fight fatigue is a problem in some of these mmo, such as a fight taking… 18 hours. in ff11.
you can have really great fights without artificially making them longer. Legend of zelda 1, Oot, MM and tp, as well as dark souls 1 and 3, and bloodborne specifically the mid way point in the game and hunters nightmare all have great bombastic fights, but if you clock it the WHOLE DUNGEON takes at mount an hour for someone taking their time and seeing everything. Most boss encounters are roughly 10min for someone who is not going ham, 5 min if you bis your character/gameplay.
A lot of fight in ff14 even undersized can take way too long… Looking at you leviathan……….. with your invincibility bs.
there are 2 reasons why i do not do savage content:
1) community drama around the content and how players handle it. I think it could be better.
2) fights being pointlessly long.
i do not want to do experts, 24 man, savage a lot as people do lackluster communication on expectations. Then when fights are too long, they get overwhelmed and lash out and over all the experience is just not fun. As someone on the spectrum, i thrive in a structured environment. I thrive on clear cut expectations, and simply to the point instructions. I just do not see that here so when i try these fights out for the first time, giving my 100% yet not doing so i get upset to tears, then just add a layer of people lashing out due to fight fatigue because we are 2 hours in, and boss has yet to die. Just calls for a bad time.
My thoughts are if a boss song loops 5 times, the fight is too long. tbh one of my fav fight in Omega was phantom train. The fight itself is interesting in its set pieces, theme, context (if u know the lore). yet the fight did not feel that long as it was more or less a boss fight spread out over the course of mini bosses. So each part felt fresh, and not just a mechanics cycle, which my fav part is jumping on the train and taking out the smokestack. dam shame SE didn't add a QTE or special action for suplexing it at the end.
I agree with this, specially since easier entry level fights would help more people attempt savage, thus making the community grow and improve as a whole.
Needlessly long fights is something that’s been a problem for a while, and not just in savage. Lakshimi NM, for example, is something like 50% longer than it needs to be and gets REALLY boring when it comes up in DF.
I think the idea behind this kind of design is to compensate for rising gear lvls, but honestly it’s not a smart way of handling longevity, especially now that people just unsync old content.
I agree with that sentiment. I don't raid Savage (nor Ex since HW) but even Normal modes suffer for their length and repetition.
Like with E9, the mechanics often repeat several times and that quickly becomes dull run after run. If it ends up being a slow run due to low DPS, it feels even worse. I can see why Normals don't have enrages, of course, but it still isn't any fun.
Long fights need to be engaging all the way through. They should be tuned to give breaks for mental recovery to prevent exhaustion. I can't imagine repetition does this any favours.
Difficulty due to inflated/high HP numbers is not good design, either, and this goes hand in hand.
Over all I agree with you, I just find as a new savage raider, that unless people already want to do savage, they hear that word and are immediately like nope, never going to do that. They get scared. I don't want the difficulty and prestige to be diminished, but having a shorter fight won't get more people into savage raiding based on my admittedly limited exposure.
funnily enough this is generally blizzard's approach to encounter design in wow. it's how they can generally get ~10 bosses per tier (quality is kinda hit or miss depending on what they try). i think having a 10+min fight should be saved for the end of the tier. long fights can be good, as long as they're interesting throughout the whole encounter. if it's just the same repeated mechanics that you see from the first 4 minutes or so, it becomes a test of "okay how do i stay awake?"
It's what wow does and it's shit
you know what would be beneficial to the raid scene? making 1st clear bonus a token, with certain amount of this said token to trade a piece of gear, this way ppl is motivated to help other players clear the fight instead of farm only or exp only pf.
Totally disagree with this. You have used a very mathematical approach for the thing: 10 mins fight split in two is still 10 minutes fight, just split in two; Or 4 weeks progression in one fight is just two weeks fight if u split it in two. But that's not how raiding actually works. the actual lengh of the fight has very little impact on how you fight the boss. Mechanics are what defines a bossfight . You can have a 5 min fight, but if it's LR from Refulgence Savage you won't prog it in two weeks just because the fight is now – in general – shorter, you will continue to wipe it for 4 weeks or more. The only way the things you say could work is if they also reduce the complexity of the actual mechanics. But in that case, your content will be dead in less than a week. Raiders won't be happy at all. And applying your own logic, Anamorphosis is a super easy fight: 5-6 mechanics on repeat, but ceck PF, people are still having issues with that because even if the mechanics are really easy to understand, it requires a certain degree of coordination that people must develop with practice.
the length of the kefka fight was a reference to…. the kefka fight.
In some sense I agree – I think longer fights are exhausting, especially now — most of the time, one player’s mistake = wipe — and you have to restart that fight again from the top.
However said, I don’t think splitting fights into shorter versions = helping players to get raid gears or progress. The basic of the mechanics are being shown in the Normal Mode of the fight, which IMO, no one really paid great attention to it and expect to learn them in savage mode. Hence the long and painful grind.
Savage is meant to be hard, and you got to have a good group synergy to down the fight. Furthermore, with streamers now making fight stats…… what’s so difficult about the fight but to concentrate for that 9, 10 minutes..?
Getting gears from savage mode is a vanity – it’s a proof that you have done it. It’s very rewarding and satisfying when you finally get your drop after weeks of grinding and praying to RNG god.
However, savage mode’s completion is not required for future progression. If everyone can get the gear easy way, might as well not having savage mode altogether.
Study, get good – and get your gear
I know I really think about this question a lot when it comes to Deluburum Reginae cause everything in there drags on forever and it sucks so much. I got about 50 normal runs to my name and barf, I cleared savage only once but going back soon. Having to set aside 90 minutes to do a savage run sucks