A handful of strange things happened in the wider world of Kefka prog this past week.
After an emergency maintenance on Tuesday we woke up in a world where Graven 3 arrows were fixed. Prior to the patch the teleporter arrows exhibited some seemingly strange behavior due to how the server registered when players would count as “in” and how they would be teleported out. What most players eventually settled on was “freaky arrows”, a setup where the teleporter loop around the arena was augmented by the cardinally-placed arrows being indented a bit towards the center of the arena.
After the maintenance the teleporters were set to always send you out through the middle of the teleporter. This killed the freaky arrows placement and in general just made the mechanic less precise to resolve. A mechanic that was once frustrating to see fall apart due to someone barely missing a follow-up teleporter or getting teleported too late due to their ping disappeared overnight!
It’s an interesting fix because at the beginning I’d assumed that the teleporter behavior was intended and that the playerbase was just bruteforcing an unintended solution. That the devs would come out and change a teleporter behavior also shines a spotlight on another solve later on in the fight.
The gist of Phase 3 revolves around resolving a set of elemental debuffs that Chaos applies on the party. The first half of the phase Chaos will apply a cocktail of fire, water, and wind debuffs on everyone and each time one of the debuffs falls off a corrosponding crystal will react with a follow-up. The water and fire debuffs expiring will explode in a donut or point-blank AoE around the player respectively, and the corrosponding crystals will follow up by targetting the two closest players with the inverse. The wind debuff can expire naturally but is meant to be resolved by taking damage from one of the crystal follow-up attacks while facing the correct direction, after which the wind crystal will target the nearest person with a point-blank shared AoE.
The intended solution seems to have been for parts of the group to handle the active debuff expiring near the wind crystal while the other half handles the reactive part and cleanses their wind debuffs. After the water and fire debuffs resolve Exdeath will cast Vacuum Wave which will forcibly trigger any remaining wind debuffs which would need to be handled by role pairs.
The intended solution, anyway. What was discovered was that, initially, all eight wind debuffs could be handled during Vacuum Wave with a
tank LB3. This would target every player with a wind crystal follow-up, but the tank LB would cover the additional damage applied by the magic vuln
applied by the first one. The strat was further refined later by having all eight party members stack together after the Vacuum Wave, still using tank LB3 alongside some additional mitigations to resolve the mechanic safely.
This boils the first half of phase 3 down to fairly static positions with the only variance being which of the fire/water crystals the ranged DPS stand near first, and which way you face during Vacuum Wave. But I also find it a little interesting that alongside the Graven 3 teleporter change the devs didn’t also go back to enforce an intended solution to the wind debuff. DMU is in general a very fun encounter to think about because it feels like there’s a handful of ways to solve a lot of mechanics in the fight instead of one enforced method like in something like TOP or FRU. There’s a few different solves for Graven 3 teleporter placement, two wildly different Forsaken strats early on in world prog (one of those has a minor variation itself) and both major parts of Phase 3 have a handful of different solutions found that both work in different ways, but still work without compromise and will get you further in the fight.
But uh… about the other thing that happened this week.
Given the fluidity of mechanics in this fight you saw a lot of early prog relying on strats that worked by maybe relied a bit too much on precise movement or placement or maybe just complex adjustments that can really only fly in a group of eight people who trust each other. A lot of these early strats and later revisions were compiled into a pastebin being maintained by a group of world proggers and other hardcore players.
It seems like the pastebin was meant to act as a central point for collating vetted strats with the intent of refining them over time. On paper that sounds like a great idea! But things quickly fell apart as major revisions would be pushed out overnight, sometimes walked back after pushback from other players, and eventually came to a head after a change to Phase 3 Black Holes caused such a massive uproar that the creators abandoned the project.
I think the big misstep here was assuming that players would be accepting of any changes that were pushed through without a heads up. A lot of strat discussion actually took place semi-publicly in the NAUR and Ulti Project discords. The problem is you kinda had to… know that they were happening? I sorta stumbled into the Ulti Project channels while poking around some discord servers I had buried in my list and spotted some discussion about changes to Black Holes ahead of the last major update but no one outside of these channels would ever know this was happening. Think about it like an outside observer – you’ve been progging in PF or with your group who uses PF strats, going to bed after a fairly successful night and maybe even getting through a mechanic. Suddenly you wake up the next morning and the pastebin is pushing a different way to handle the mechanic. Even if it’s a light change it’s still presenting a split in what PFs are running what type of strat, and if players don’t read the PF description it can cause confusion when they do actually reach the mechanic that has conflicting strats.
I don’t really want to go into the merits of SDA vs DSA – I understand the idea behind wanting to prevent the tank one-shot in DSA and the thought process change between the two strats is incredibly minor. My group has barely started pushing into black holes as of Friday so I can’t meaningfully comment on the actual effectiveness of the strat (or the alternate double tether strat picking up steam lately). What I can comment on is the bizarre reaction that players had to the change.
Pushback came in pretty early in the pastebin comments and I think most of them are reasonable “hey this kinda fucks with PF to drop so suddenly can you change it back?” Some of them are pretty vile though. Some of it was vented out in PFs that are gone now, but a lot of it is preserved in the comments on the pastebin. It’s actually a bit of a reminder that this is still the internet. Someone’s gonna Let It Rip in a reply if they’re hiding behind an anonymous username.
That said the reply from the maintainers ain’t so hot either. There’s some haughty and passive-aggressive comments in their sign-off post (“Should anything come from it – we no longer care” okay dude) but dipping into those same discords is a bit more, uh, “pointed” venting from some supporters. I hope they don’t think they’re posting in private channels or anything.
I don’t think you can announce and push for your doc to be The One Everyone Uses and then flippantly make changes without public input. Even a poll or something linked in the pastebin when changes were being considered would’ve helped avoid this – you could explain the intent behind the change and gather feedback before adding it to the pastebin proper. In my mind you could have a callout in the phase section with something like “hey, we’re proposing a change to this strat you can see [here], and we’re gathering feedback!”. Hell, even link them back to your discord if you want to moderate the feedback a bit and cull some of the nastier comments.
It sucks that it turned out this way, but at least it happened after the strats are pretty much set in stone for the rest of the fight. Comparatively P4’s mechanics are pretty static in how you position for them based on if they’re flipped or not, and P5 is a bit of a victory lap in terms of movement (maybe not in terms of healing!!!!). If this had happened earlier on it’d be scary thinking about what kind of wild west of clownbin umadbin kefkabin-but-good would be out there.
Edit 6/30: The pastebin was taken down? I didn’t even know that could happen.
The strats have been backed up in a Google doc but it does mean some of this post loses some of its context. Sorry!
Back down on earth, prog in my own group went pretty steady this week. There’s a trend of spending our first night of the week warming up and maybe not seeing our prog point until the next night, but the cleanup happens fast over the week and we’ve been able to consistently push on further by the end of the week.
As with any Ultimate fight prog will inevitably slow down the deeper in you get. It maybe doesn’t feel exciting to say “oh yeah, after getting into phase 3 last week we’re still in phase 3 this week” but as far as mechanics go we very quickly cleaned up the first three element crystals and limit cut. I had to miss our Thursday night run and in that time they saw their first clean limit cut push, and when I came back on Friday we got a couple of black hole pulls in. The DSA/SDA kerfuffle’s come and gone since our last meeting and has settled on DSA, although I’m a little curious if the double tether variant of the strat will catch on. I’ve spend enough time thinking about this in relation to the kefkabin mess that I don’t wanna get to into it this week, but if it does take over I wanna compare the two next time.
Limit Cut (I think it should formally be referred to as Trance based on the cast but what do I care) is pretty wild. By this point in world prog I wasn’t able to keep up nearly as much as the first day so I couldn’t see how it was solved, but I get the concept. As the Umbra Smash/Vacuum Wave combo is set up by the two targetable bosses Kefka will cast Trance and begin flying through the arena in straight lines starting at a random cardinal or intercardinal, going through each point in either a clockwise or counterclockwise pattern. A little over halfway through his eight dashes he’ll mark each player with a one through eight Limit Cut marker. A bit after he finishes his eighth dash, clones will dash back from the lines he made, but also each “step” of the dash will shoot a clone the person in a reverse order from the initial rotation, starting from the first one. I sort of assume that the dash is fatal under a certain distance, although I haven’t watch any world prog vods to verify this.
The solve then is to find the first side that he hits with a dash, then which direction the dashes are rotating and then position yourselves opposite of that rotation in the subintercardinal pockets between two pairs of markers. This last bit I thought would be a lot harder to grasp because, well, look at this:
True to his original O8S arena, Kefka’s platform is devoid of any particular Lines on the Floor to help orient yourself with. This is what made Forsaken such a pain in the ass for people before the standard markers came on the scene. But now stationing yourself between those two markers is a bit awkward and doesn’t quite seem like it’s aligning between the two of them. But you have exactly this much space to work with:
So what’s the secret then? Well even when there are no lines on the floor, there are lines on the floor.
Very conveniently Kefka’s arena has these fan shaped threads spooling out from the center, and it just so happens that the left side of every thread is perfectly aligned with the each subintercadinal. Using these as a guide keeps you perfectly safe from the returning dashes and sets you up perfectly for the limit cut hits.
From the bits of Black Holes I saw it feels like a big stupid mess visually, although the logic to resolve it is sound. I don’t want to get too deep into it until I’ve gotten a proper crack at the enrage at least, though, so hopefully we bust through and into Phase 4 sometime this week. I’m really liking the pace we’re going at. Personally I’d like to have us clear before July 28th, but that’s entirely selfish of me in the sense that I really wanna slam into the new Crescent Isle update as soon as it hits. Hopefully there’s no dangerous heat waves or storms coming that could hinder our progress!!!!
