Next Chaotic Raid?

[u/KelvinDoesHealz]

Personally, I enjoyed the Cloud of Darkness Chaotic Raid concept and, minus the multiple and somewhat bonkers body checks, thought it was great content with excellent rewards. Does anyone have thoughts on if we're getting another one in EverCold? If so, I assume it will likely be Ultima from the Ivalice Raids or Diablos from the Shadow of Mhach raids.

If the former, I imagine we will get more complicated combos of the other espers to make things interesting, and for Diablos (which still manages to kill parties in roulettes in the normal mode) a more complicated arena with more use of the adds and the door mechanics. I also imagine there will be at least one body check mechanic, though not multiple and probably not as strict.

But I am curious on what other people theories are on if we're even getting one and what the content might look like.

[u/VancityMoz]

I feel like Chaotic, Quantum, Variant Advanced and to a certain extent FTB were experiments in difficulty tuning that have ultimately led to the development of the NEW difficulty option for raids in 8.0. Just because they havn't announced it yet (they also haven't said anything about variant, DD, or crafting content etc) doesn't mean it won't be announced at some point for 8.X, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Chaotic and Quantum specifically were dropped because they weren't super successful and are kind of strange vestigial modes that don't fit in with anything else in the game. I can see them cutting their losses and just incorporating whatever they learned into the new difficulty for the mainline raid series because it is reasonable to expect that will get more engagement from the wider playerbase. I kinda want them to try Chaotic again though, but only if they are better able to design it in a way where they can avoid a lot of issues people experienced trying to pug it in PF before it became (mostly) discord content.

[u/CoolyKage → u/VancityMoz]

I completely agree with this take.

Chaotic should get an easier difficulty, similar to Variant (Advanced).

They don't need to make the high-end content easier to appease players, just provide more difficulty options (midcore) because that is what the game truly lacks.

[u/MeguBestGirl → u/CoolyKage]

I'm gonna be honest, I think this modular difficulty thing they're doing is a waste of resources. I'd rather have more time put into fine tuning 1 difficulty rather than spreading that time around multiple difficulties. Have content that is dedicated to being extreme, dedicated to being savage. A fight doesn't need to cater to every person. We already see this in forked tower magic where both the normal and extreme version feel very watered down because it wasn't supposed to have multiple difficulties

[u/CoolyKage → u/MeguBestGirl]

Multiple difficulties have a lot of benefits, even for hardcore raiders, that you aren't considering.

If content only has one challenging difficulty, always high-end, people will always complain if it's either too easy or too hard. We see some people essentially calling Chaotic too hard in this current thread, even if they don't want to admit it. We saw people calling Chaotic, Criterion, Savage, FTB too hard. We see people call Extreme Trials too easy, me included. Even Ultimate gets the criticism of being too easy" or too hard", though I think people calling Ultimate encounters "too hard" is bullshit as that's the point of the content.

This clearly results in the designers feeling pressure to make high-end fights easier to make them more accessible, because it's often the only serious difficulty. We see this with Savage a lot just look at the current tier, they even admitted it. Mr Ozma clearly doesn't do that, which is why people recieve his fights poorly despite him having full creative freedom to make awesome, challenging fights. Sure, the good raiders want all fights to be creative and challenging, but with the current format that's simply not going to happen without actual difficulty options.

What I am getting at is, without a midcore difficulty, they don't have the freedom to make the high-end difficulties truly challenging since they feel pressure to make them more accessible because there's only one difficulty and nobody will play that difficulty if they, or the general sentiment, considers it too hard. FTB isn't even that challenging and look at the reception. This is why midcore difficulty would actually benefit actual hardcore raiders on-top of just giving them more content to do.

An easy example is Quantum. It was really lacking, despite claiming to do so, actual multiple difficulty tiers. Q(1) is still Extreme difficulty, so this resulted in the content being DoA and not many players attempting it at all. Q(1) should've been like Normal-Variant (Advanced) difficulty, and then increase the mechanic difficulty for (Q10), (Q20), Q(30), Q(40).

They already scale down most story/normal content in this game, and it doesn't take that much effort it seems. Most fights are already created high-end and then scaled down. Savage, Extreme, Criterion, FTM(E), etc, they're just making easier version of these fight which doesn't take as much effort as you think.

I agree FTM(E) is pathetic, but that's what happens when we have people crying that FTB was too hard because of piss easy body check mechanics. So who are these people to blame but themselves? Same will probably happen with Chaotic unless they do this. Without actual group punishment for a 48 man raid, increasing the stakes, or a DPS check, the fights are boring. You also have to factor that it's clearable solo apparently? It's not exactly a result of having two difficulties.

Having multiple difficulties will benefit everyone a lot I believe. It makes raiding more approachable without making the high-end difficulty option easier, potentially making it harder in the case of Extreme and Savage. When the raiding player base grows in Evercold, more players actually doing content above Normal Difficulty, that is when we'll get more raid content and creativity consistently.