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Marthe -> RE: =DF= June 6th Design Notes: Arena at the Edge of Time: Inevitable Equilibrium (6/8/2020 7:59:44)
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It's almost 5 AM and I've spent hours bashing my face at the duo with Arch. Huge huge pain, but eventually I managed it. Don't try it for yourself though, please. Just use an Epoch.
I've solidified some of my opinions since my last post now that it's been another day or so. I'm glad my fears that it was necessary to have a calendar class to beat it were unfounded. Technomancer puts up a strong performance, as it tends to do. I think the dragons in their current state are difficult but interesting to fight, and don't deserve direct nerfs. It reminds me a bit of Pandora EX, but harder, due to the fact that you have to react to the RNG rotations, while Pandora has zero RNG. The one thing I think deserves looking at isn't specific to the fight, exactly - it's direct hit.
Direct hit as a mechanic usually doesn't matter, and hasn't mattered in the past. However, these dragons both have a high amount of LUK, as well as attacks that are extremely punishing if even one hit leaks through. For example, Drahr'Dolaas has a Null damage nuke that you need to shield, because even one single hit will oneshot you. It's perfectly possible to do so, as long as you stack your MPM high enough and/or blind it - but even if you're completely protected from natural hits, a direct hit will still kill you, and there's nothing you can do about it. With 8 hits and high LUK, there's around a 1/3 chance that at least one hit will leak through - so every time it uses it, you roll a three-sided die and hope you don't auto lose. Either you get lucky or you toss the run, and that's only the most egregious example of direct hit in this fight. I think that while the mechanic does technically add to the difficulty of the fight, direct hit is like Nintendo Difficulty - artificially inflated and not pleasant to play against. (This was an issue with Reaver, too.) I believe this detracts from a fight that is largely fair and that has a good deal of player interaction ability.
That said, I must praise the fight and its mechanics as a whole. The dragons are still beautiful, of course, which makes staring at them for long periods of time trying to figure out a strategy much more pleasant. Their mechanics and interaction are remarkably complex and involved, but make sense once you know how they work. It's amazing work from Verlyrus, and I appreciate his efforts to give us Inn fights like these.
As a side note about the helm - while the level 90 version of the helm is a very slight upgrade to FDL, it amuses me that anyone who can beat this challenge has no reasonable use for it. It's the hardest challenge out there, so what are you going to use the helm for, other than as a trophy? However, the level 70 helm is a slight downgrade from FDL, and is eminently reasonable to acquire. The solo versions of the dragons are difficult, yes, but I believe that for the average player they're possible to defeat. FDL being DC and far and away the best helm for so long has been problematic, and it's great that there's an Inn alternative now. (The NDA helm makes me scratch my head, though. If a NDA somehow beats the duo then I'll eat TFS's shoe.)
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