Ultimate prog kind of ebbs and flows. Especially early on fight mechanics are set up to where they’ll come and go fast and especially in more recent fights have enough variety in them that they don’t overstay their welcome (let’s not talk about TOP right now). At some point though you’ll hit a soft wall in prog on a mechanic that requires all eight people to know what they’re doing through its entirety.
This is where I find myself this week with Forsaken. It’s hard to draw a comparison to mechanics from previous fights just because of how it’s paced and how your duty is assigned. It’s probably closest to something like Ultimate Relativity or Hello World in execution? You’re given an assignment that you have to follow, usually with a bit of tight positioning. Once you know what each assignment does you’re going through the motions each pull until every player in the party has a complete understanding of the mechanic. The big difference is that instead of one assignment you’re meant to follow through the entire mechanic, you’re instead given multiple mini-assignments over the entire phase and have to be able to adjust to each one.
This was way more of a problem for week 1 prog as the positioning for how each mechanic was handled was a little more loose and vibes-based. Groups who were consistent with Forsaken had their way of puzzling out the solve together. More recently this has solved itself with a waymark set for the entire fight that specifically for Forsaken allows you to align yourself with a marker for certain steps and, provided that everyone else is where they need to be, will solve itself.
Unfortunately due to weather and some connection issues between different members throughout the week we weren’t able to get to Forsaken nearly as much as I’dve liked to. This even hit me Wednesday night with my connection slowly becoming worse and worse as the night went on, and on Friday we had to call it early because another member’s connection was completely unworkable.
It sucks when connection issues get in the way of otherwise really good prog. The pulls we did have that were clean were scratching closer and closer to the end of Forsaken, and in general we were cleaning up P1 (and especially Graven 3) enough that we just saw more Forsaken pulls in general. The new markers and assignment setups really help with diagnosing what went wrong through vods, and if that wasn’t enough sometime during the week a whole-ass website went up where you could plug in a pulls log and see each step of Forsaken.
Dissatisfaction with the pace of prog is something that’s always been rough for me to deal with, especially when it’s due to completely uncontrollable issues. The DDoS waves that hit the NA datacenter last winter made a lot of our FRU nights a struggle as it would always hit someone and we’d have to spend the entire night working around it. My view on this is that if it does happen, your group really has to try and lock in on the pulls that don’t get gobbled up by lag and when that also doesn’t happen it can cause the night to spiral quickly.
It’s not terrible in a single week, but I worry that if it keeps compounding on itself later it’s going to put a huge drag on morale. PFing to push my personal pace can help with covering some of the gap but relying on a huge pool of strangers to meet my own expectations on consistency is its own struggle. I did eventually push through to enrage after many many many hours and parties but the amount of people who’d run or join a group that can’t even reach its advertised prog point is a massive downer.
When you’re dealing with a group as unstable as PF you really want to take any advantage you can get. So sims that let you practice particular mechanics become really appealing. We got one relatively quickly for Forsaken, and its existence has seemingly sparked a whole mess of posts on socials about whether simming should be normalized or accepted in prog.
My stance on sims has been pretty much the same for years – I don’t like forcing my groups to sim, but I’m not going to prevent anyone from simming. I especially like that more modern sims allow you to practice solo – a lot of early sims relied on having all eight players present and they just become a big mess between setup and controller compatibility. But more recent sims and specialized programs like the FRU and Forsaken sims allow you to run with bots and even come loaded with multiple ways of handling mechanics.
I think my more purist stance is that sims can only do so much for someone who hasn’t grasped the earlier parts of the fight. It’s great if a person has simmed enough of Crystalize Time to know each debuff front and back and could execute it perfectly each time, but that doesn’t matter one bit if they’re still causing wipes to Light Rampant. The effort spent running drills on a late-fight mechanic would be much better spent on hammering out lingering issues with earlier mechanics and that effort gets paid off by just being able to see the later mechanic more in a live environment.
Everyone has a line that they draw for their prog with anything crossing that line being unfit for raiding or whatever. I personally don’t vibe with anything that interacts with live gameplay (XIVAlexander, Pixel Perfect, Auto Markers) and try to form or find groups around that ideal. I can’t win every fight – I think it’s pretty much impossible to find a random group that wants to do TOP without AM in [current year] – but I’ll take what I can get. My current group stipulated that we’d avoid using any automarkers that might come up for DMU during prog which is chill.
Although it is funny that this much stink is being raised over a mechanic four minutes into the fight.
