Originally Posted by
isCasted
I, personally, quit doing Dragon EQ long before its rewards became useless, simply because I realized that every fight goes exactly the same way. No strategy, no choice, no depth (pretty much like everything in EP5). Even when you're not busy repositioning, it's either you get hit or you don't, and that's just boring.
I also can't care about boosted PI anymore (boosted Loser, to be more specific. Nobody really gives a shit about Elder, right?). It felt refreshing back when it was first up simply because I was missing that kind of experience. Now, however, I can see that without significant speed boosts and improved attack duration/AOE/whatever it also boils down to just whaling with an occasional need to dodge after a while. Sure, buffed HP pool and ATK can compensate for our greatly increased DPS, but DPS is not the only thing that matters. Our own attack speed and mobility was buffed so much that choosing a correct set of attacks for every opportunity simply becomes meaningless. If, supposedly, you could land 2-3 attacks whenever a damage opportunity happened back in the day, nowadays you can land 7-9 without feeling a threat, and our greatly increased ability to respond to those threats (through longer iframes, cancel frames and especially block frames with things like Deadly Circle T-0 and motherfucking Charge Parry skills) greatly diminishes the value of those threats, regardless of how much more damage they actually deal.
When the EP3 rebalance happened, they knew it was going to break a lot of such valuable experiences, even if the intent of the rebalance was very clearly to improve the experience. While quests that have already been more about mopping up brainless shits like Elder and TD1-3 just had their HP values buffed during a transition to XH, Loser was given a special attention precisely because he wasn't meant to be a brainless shit. All of the new content, regardless of whether it had brand-new enemies or reused EP1-2 ones, had the new philosophy applied to it.
EP4 had a lot of buffs to players too, but it also did absolutely fuck-all to the old enemies. Neither enemies that were meant to be brainless shits nor enemies that weren't were adjusted in any way. The level of engagement hasn't dropped as radically as in EP5 for multiple reasons. EP4 rode the inertia of EP3 enemy HP buffs, because they were that ridiculously huge (except for Loser... because he got 1.25x HP and not 4x). That, and then there was also some sense of challenge from a brand new quest design philosophy that spammed you with cheap shots from all directions and telegraphed attacks obscured by lighting issues and other enemies. At the same time, a lot of the new balance changes also weren't there just for sake of balance and/or comfort - they actually offered brand new ways to approach old enemies. Some felt more satisfying, like IF-0; some felt cheaper and stupider, like DC-0 and Charge Parry.
As for EP5, it's almost all the way about adding more cancel frames, faster speeds, wider AOE, lower cooldowns, but barely anything that's actually game-changing for the older classes to make them actually feel fresh to compensate for lowered enemy danger level. And even when it did add things that felt fresh, old enemies are still incredibly slow and brainless, so it basically makes no difference whatsoever outside of select few encounters. And PI is definitely not one of those.
New enemies in EP5 are also boring. They aren't annoying and cheap like a half of EP4 enemies. There's just not a whole lot of ways in which you can approach them. They're clearly test dummies for Hero, and even then they're just test dummies. There's exactly 1-2 correct ways to avoid every attack, each one only has 1-2 attacks that they spam and there's no element of figuring out a strategy based on their composition. Dragon isn't much better than an average mob, all it takes is slightly better reaction time and patience to trivialize him. I have no hopes for Omega Loser for a simple reason that its gimmick is most likely going to be 1-2 extra surprise attacks that will not only improve literally nothing in terms of strategy, but probably even ruin whatever strategic depth was left there in the original fight after all the years of balance mutilation.
In some way, a relative success of EP4 was basically a miracle, and EP5 director wasn't as lucky. But there's another problem: the current directors' lack of understanding of what "gameplay depth" means is incredibly apparent in everything that's happening in EP5, and that is the driving issue that's really making people less tolerating towards its other faults, even if some those faults were present to a much greater degree in older episodes. Shame, because I have to give EP5 direction credit for fixing quite a few bugs and performance issues that have been plaguing the game for years. And Hero has a great value as a sort of a research experiment highlighting both how much better and how much worse the game could be in different ways.
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