Ridere wrote:
admitted they screwed the pooch with Alexander
Oh boy, Ket's in a ranting mood. So, main problems with Alexander:
- Tuned way too high. I think SE got into an e-peen match with the 2-3 "world first" groups. Upset that they had finished Final Coil in only about a week; they decided to make it hard as fuck. But unlike the challenging content in previous coil raids, the difficulty doesn't feel "fair". The DPS checks are too high, the battles are too long, and the mechanics having constantly unforgiving instant-wiping features meant you can't have a nice smooth progression through where you get better and better until you win. Nope, any one person makes a mistake and it's a wipe and reset.
Just take a look at the Bahamut videos posted by Dead in this thread. The "almost win" video has a tank death and a couple of dps deaths and recoveries. Even the win video had a DPS die near the end. These are mistakes that are recoverable and don't end your fight. You might end up not having enough DPS to kill the boss in time, but at least you get to keep practicing the fight, and you even feel like you can still win if you just push a bit harder.
But not in Alexander. No. No recovery, no mercy.
There are servers where only a single party has ever beaten this shit, and that's ludicrous. They've admitted that they didn't think it through; they've admitted that not enough people are clearing it; they've admitted that they didn't test the fight enough; and they've even admitted that their testing team all used their "mains" to test it so none of the new Heavensward jobs were balanced properly!
But what tops this bollocks off is that while SE acknowledge that it's "oops too hard", they refuse to adjust it, probably because they wouldn't want to upset their precious world first groups. Boo hoo.
- Aesthetics. In theory being inside a steam-punk robot contraption for your dungeon should make for some pretty cool environments, but it just kinda fell flat. It's really hard to put your finger on exactly what's wrong here other than it just wasn't "cool" enough.
I think everything else in Alexander contributes towards this particular problem though. It's hard to be impressed with the place when you're frustrated with it. Maybe if they start taking us inside "the core" or something they can start being a bit more fantastical with the designs.
- Lack of carrot. The only reward for completing Alexander Savage was exactly the same gear we already had but dyeable. And since the gear wasn't particularly cool looking to begin with, it was just absolutely not worth the effort required for it. The ilvl was 10 levels higher? Barely any increase at all. Previously, coil gear has been about 20+ iLvls higher, and had completely unique models. The gear from all three tiers of coil is still some of the best looking in fact.
- Story is balls. Making goblins the antagonists didn't have to be a bad idea, but it was. Goblins are generally comic relief and not very threatening. The coil story was genuinely interesting, and each zone you beat added more to the intrigue. By the time you get to Final Coil you start getting story production values that beat anything the "main story" had to offer.
We went from creepy allagan cloning experiments, dragons, Bahamut, and the threat of the world being destroyed; to some goblin with a cat on his head, and an out-of-nowhere Au Ra treasure hunter who's just kinda not-there for something nobody has been given a real reason to care about.
To top it off, everybody already knew the damn story. Which leads on to:
- Fucked up release order. I have no qualms about the idea of an "easy/story mode" for the people who generally can't do raiding, but this is something that should have been added 6 months down the line, not 2-3 weeks before the real raid zone was added. Couple that with the fact that people spent those 2-3 weeks grinding the hell out of the story mode to get the gear from it and everybody was already sick of the place before Savage was even added.
Moreso than the gear, a lot of people pushed through Coil because they wanted to see the next part of the story. But the messed up release order meant we already saw it this time; and ignoring the fact that it wasn't great, it removed one of the big reasons to bother with the raid.
- And finally, SE have gone on to state that Alexander being tuned incorrectly is why the rest of the content since it was added has been scaled wrong. Why Diadem's gear gives nothing better but requires a shit-ton of mindless grinding. Why the relic quest was added way too late in the patch cycle, isn't better than existing weapons, and requires more grinding than any previous relic step before it despite being a new weapon. 3.1 was a real let down for a lot of people.
Great, Alexander is so fucked up it messed up everything else too.
Honestly, ignoring Alexander for a bit, the biggest problem they have to face is that they've chased off a lot of their player base with their mishandling of the content since Heavensward. 2.0 had a bit of a content lull between it's launch and Christmas (when they added the Extreme primals and Crystal Tower) but nothing compares to that and the "nothing" between June and February of Heavensward.
For some crazy reason they released all of the content they had for the 3.0 patch series in the first month. We went from having i140ish gear from the end-game dungeons to having i210 gear from Alexander Savage in a month! Ravana EX was completely obsolete within 2 weeks of being added! And poor fucking Bismarck was obsolete BEFORE he was added by making Ravana's weapon better and releasing it at the same time! What the hell Square?! You could have spread this shit out and people wouldn't have been as damn bored.
Can they fix it for 3.2? Of course they can, but it's getting hard to put faith in them recently. It's a darn shame, because Heavensward itself was an amazing expansion, right up until you hit the level cap and finish the main story. They really dropped the ball with the end-game stuff.
And content lull? They really should have done something to make sure the level 50 content wasn't all rendered completely obsolete the moment the level cap was raised. They could have easily just made "level 60 versions" of all their existing primals and made them part of the relic quest. They could have done the same with the three Crystal Tower zones; add a level 60 version and make it necessary for the relic quest or weekly upgrade item farming. Bam, instant content. They don't need to bother redesigning the content at all, a lot of it is already good content, they just make it
relevant again. I can't believe these are difficult ideas.
They're gonna need to really show of something amazing for 3.2 to convince people they need to start playing again. There's a live letter this weekend for showing off 3.2, and they better have something in store.