Post by Azherae on 2023-06-09 13:42:40
Alright, I finally found an FFXI boss that meets all the parameters requested while also helping explain why most don't. Expand below for the explanation of that, or just skip on to
Karkinos
.
The one part that I will keep out of the tag below that is important to know is that Karkinos is a Crab and by nature has most if not all Crab abilities and traits .
Overall the result is that normally you know what the ability the boss is using, does, because other things, often players themselves, have these abilities. What you have to deal with is 'special traits' and 'why is this combined with this other thing this is so OP we're gonna die'. Basically, they break the balance rules.
I didn't want to use any Bosses that are hard or complex only because they 'break the balance rules by Combination' because I feel it requires too much FFXI knowledge to appreciate or draw any reference from. But after thinking about it for a long time I finally found a boss that I somewhat like, where the only requirement for understanding is the TP Gauge which I can probably gloss over as a different explanation for the unfamiliar.
Karkinos is useful because it's just a big 'normal Crab'. It's enhanced, but it's not 'making a Crab, which is normally a Paladin, into a Red Mage+/Monk that summons adds(like King Arthro ) which is their normal method of this sort of thing. And Crabs are simplistic mobs intended to outlast you, slow down your exp gain, or 'stall you long enough to get aggro or link from something else'.
It's just an empowered Crab, and therefore is actually empowered to do things 'better' than a Normal Crab instead of doing more things , so I can talk about it in a vacuum.
The idea of Karkinos is that he has a lot of physical defense. So you first have to figure out how you're getting around that, but attempting to solve it by just 'bringing more casters' doesn't work easily because he simply has too much HP for even a large group of powerful casters to bring him down quickly, and he hits casters very hard .
Also, since DoT sources are 'one per DoT', you would want to vary your DoT options, but otherwise you're still 'just waiting'.
When Karkinos has high HP, he uses normal Crab attacks, the ones we care about are Big Scissors which is just a relatively stronger single hit attack, and Bubble Shower, which is AoE around him and Strength Down. On normal Crabs these are just there to 'make you need a Tank' and 'slow down kills' more or less. If you fought a Crab multiple levels above you, the STR Down might be enough to help the Crab stall long enough to kill someone, but generally not.
Crabs are generally a less threatening target to a standard exp party due to their defensiveness. Nice 'introduction to group combat' enemies, and you meet them in the area where most people experienced group combat for the first time for a long time. This is mildly important because Karkinos serves a similar purpose in Abyssea which is 'Boss Rush' style content for lategame.
So you basically start hitting him to get your special attacks ready and he shrugs off a lot of it. If you do 0 damage you build no gauge so you can't do those special attacks. If you hit him for very little, you're still chipping at him with every strike and if you chip at him a certain number of times he'll do one of the simple mechanics he has.
But against Karkinos, that Bubble Shower STR Down can bring you from 'doing minor damage' to 'doing no damage'. This is 'fine' in the sense that if you are doing no damage you are not 'chipping' him so he won't do another mechanic soon, but 'bad' because your 'Synergy' relies on two people doing their special attacks in order followed by the Mage doing a big blast that gets empowered by that.
So what you want the most is for the Tank to not lose hate as much over time. FFXI contains no 'Look at me!' taunt, only 'I am bumping my hate value up by X amount without actually doing any damage, temporarily'.
This is interesting here because that means the better Tank is the Paladin who has the most of this type, but the Paladin also actually takes hits unlike Ninjas who evade them. And Karkinos can do his special attacks because he's hitting too.
The fight usually becomes about 'empowering a Mage' while leveraging everyone else's skills and abilities to let that Mage shine, but just 'bringing more Mages' only works if you are quite prepared in specific ways. It works about the same, sometimes slightly 'less good'.
A concept of a 'good' method would be, as example:
White Mage to improve Paladin defenses and backup heal (Paladin is main heal for the above reason)
Thief to both put more Hate/Threat onto Paladin and to steal some of the Mage's hate and redirect to self, also to 'offtank' since they are evasive, and to add Defense Down status from Crossbow (a Dark Knight with Thief Secondary works just as well or better here, losing only the "Steal Hate From Mage" function in exchange for more magic attacks and some unique-to-them debuffs)
Bard to do what Bards do. A little of everything. Increase Stats, slow healing, DoT on Karkinos, Mana sustain for the mage, they're always busy.
Add Any DPS that can add other DoT sources or "Enspells", which do their magic damage regardless of if the actual strike 'hits for 0' because they're doing damage without 'chipping' Karkinos
Optionally Add a Summoner to do... almost as much as the Bard, I won't get into this, they are complicated, but a good choice for this fight if you work with them well.
And of course, the star of the show, the Black Mage themselves. To casts the spells that makes the people (or crab) fall down.
Relatively poor choices:
Warriors (it's a Crab, they don't do much as a Primary and they're bruisers, this is not where you need a Bruiser normally, but they can also use Berserk to make up for this specifically because the enemy is not very damaging, and they can use Weapon Skills to lower its defense and evasion and so on, it's basically that you have to work with them and can't just slap them into any party and use the same plan as easily)
Monks (See above, but 'worse', they can manage the same as Warriors with Warrior Secondary though)
Dragoons (They're ok but don't really contribute much of anything extra here either unless using a very specific build)
Samurai (Surprisingly useless in my experience despite not needing to actually chip Karkinos to gain special attacks, but can at least help with Thief Secondary)
Ninjas (don't bother unless you are determined or you're planning to rely on DoT, particularly if you brought the Dark Knight and not the Thief, but can be effective with Thief Secondary or other more complicated builds).
All relatively poor choices refer only to 'if you just happened to grab one passing by to fill the numbers' because their likely build won't suit the purpose. Entirely unconnected from anyone who built for this fight.
Now finally our two simplistic 'mechanics'.
Occasionally and almost entirely at random (though the chance increases as its HP drops), Karkinos 'upgrades' Bubble Shower to Venom Shower. The poison is strong and only Monks can remove it, and only from themselves. You can stun this and then it will 'reroll' which ability it does, but it will usually do another shortly after and it can be Venom Shower again anyway. In the early phases this is the main plan. Stun this attack and hope it does something else instead when it recovers from the CC. Bonus if your Mage has some defenses up, they should also go for a big attack here, if they take hate momentarily they can lose it by taking the hit sometimes instead of the Tank and then a Paladin tank can heal THEM to 'absorb' all that Hate. If somehow this isn't enough, there's always Cover, directly protecting them.
Then there's Mega Scissors, which is similar in how/when it happens, but 'nicer' to us because it's conal but also hate reset. Here, you're rather hoping it hits the Mage by coordination, but this is risky and unnecessary, so usually you just need to have the Mage blast when you see it if the Thief is ready. The Tank loses Hate (basically their value gets set to either 0 or 'lower than most of the group'), the Mage takes it, and the Thief steals it and becomes the Tank for a bit.
Also works fine if the standard 'two tanks' setup is used (this is actually a multi-group mob when you first meet it).
If Karkinos is low, just these two changes result in a 'different battle flow' because the players' 'responses to the mechanics' are themselves 'emergent mechanics'. If you get hit by Venom Shower, you aren't dying to it, but you are 'in a state where you don't want to chip Karkinos and trigger Mega Scissors'.
But too many Venom Showers back to back and the Bard has to change behaviour since the Healer (and Paladin probably) are starting to run low on Mana. They both have Weapon Skills to regain it, but that involves hitting Karkinos enough.
Similarly too many Mega Scissors in a row after a long string of no Mega Scissors means that now, the rest of the group is probably at higher hate values, meaning that if both Tanks get reset to low, it will take them much longer to regain control of Karkinos and the Mage and Thief basically must coordinate to achieve this, and hope that the situation is favorable in terms of the availability of people's special attacks.
So you get the emergent behaviour of 'holding your Weapon Skills after Mega Scissors#1 because there haven't been any Mega Scissors in a while and if you don't have them ready then Mega Scissors #2 might lead to big damage somewhere'.
Or the Paladin going 'Use them' because they know that they have a bunch of defensive skills and Cover ready to be used to protect the Mage after the chain puts the Mage high on the list and it won't matter if the Paladin actually has hate or not because Cover doesn't care about that.
And at that point they're actually hoping for Mega Scissors #2 because they'll be standing in front of the Mage, who should defensively buff and hope for Mega Scissors to hit them too.
But now everyone is focused on stunning Venom Shower because the last thing you want is a lower HP Mage hit by that when the Tank can only protect them from physical hits, especially since if you stun Venom Shower and get lucky, Mega Scissors will follow and all this time that Mage is just offloading spells into Karkinos to get damage while being Covered hoping that Mega Scissors is about to reset all Karkinos' hate on them without them dying somehow.
But then some days you just run out of Stuns or whatever to stop Venom Shower and everyone has to refactor and adapt again because now your Mage and Tank are both Venom Showered and your best bet is to have your Healer use a huge AoE heal and then the Thief steal their hate instead and tank Karkinos until the Paladin(s) get back up there in the list.
There's more to this fight as you add more people, especially Summoners, but I think this is closer to what Intrepid is looking for without all the extra.
I enjoy this fight, whether as Thief, White Mage, or Ninja (assuming I built for it on that day and the rest of the group is also adapted toward it in whatever way). Despite its relatively simple core 'Boss Abilities' Mechanics types, I enjoy all the adaptation to the shifting situation and view things like 'Double Venom Shower after Mega Scissors' as the equivalent of another game's 'Here is a big mechanic you need to do this thing to avoid'.
All without changing Karkinos from being anything other than 'empowered Crab'.
The one part that I will keep out of the tag below that is important to know is that Karkinos is a Crab and by nature has most if not all Crab abilities and traits .
So the reason I don't want to give FFXI bosses to begin with is because of what the game uses for difficulty or challenge, broken up into a few points.
- All FFXI mobs are technically difficult. Yes, all. That's just the design, only your level matters.
- The Majority of FFXI normal mobs are easier than bosses because they are more predictable or simplistic.
- The remaining Minority are rare, meant to be a threat or challenge in the area they exist in, but even then are often predictable
- Bosses get around this by first shifting around the combinations of traits and increasing the range of theoretically available abilities that the mob actually uses to make them more complex and difficult
- Bosses then additionally get other abilities from other 'jobs' that they sometimes 'shouldn't have' to make this combinatorial complexity even higher.
Overall the result is that normally you know what the ability the boss is using, does, because other things, often players themselves, have these abilities. What you have to deal with is 'special traits' and 'why is this combined with this other thing this is so OP we're gonna die'. Basically, they break the balance rules.
I didn't want to use any Bosses that are hard or complex only because they 'break the balance rules by Combination' because I feel it requires too much FFXI knowledge to appreciate or draw any reference from. But after thinking about it for a long time I finally found a boss that I somewhat like, where the only requirement for understanding is the TP Gauge which I can probably gloss over as a different explanation for the unfamiliar.
Karkinos is useful because it's just a big 'normal Crab'. It's enhanced, but it's not 'making a Crab, which is normally a Paladin, into a Red Mage+/Monk that summons adds(like King Arthro ) which is their normal method of this sort of thing. And Crabs are simplistic mobs intended to outlast you, slow down your exp gain, or 'stall you long enough to get aggro or link from something else'.
It's just an empowered Crab, and therefore is actually empowered to do things 'better' than a Normal Crab instead of doing more things , so I can talk about it in a vacuum.
The idea of Karkinos is that he has a lot of physical defense. So you first have to figure out how you're getting around that, but attempting to solve it by just 'bringing more casters' doesn't work easily because he simply has too much HP for even a large group of powerful casters to bring him down quickly, and he hits casters very hard .
Also, since DoT sources are 'one per DoT', you would want to vary your DoT options, but otherwise you're still 'just waiting'.
When Karkinos has high HP, he uses normal Crab attacks, the ones we care about are Big Scissors which is just a relatively stronger single hit attack, and Bubble Shower, which is AoE around him and Strength Down. On normal Crabs these are just there to 'make you need a Tank' and 'slow down kills' more or less. If you fought a Crab multiple levels above you, the STR Down might be enough to help the Crab stall long enough to kill someone, but generally not.
Crabs are generally a less threatening target to a standard exp party due to their defensiveness. Nice 'introduction to group combat' enemies, and you meet them in the area where most people experienced group combat for the first time for a long time. This is mildly important because Karkinos serves a similar purpose in Abyssea which is 'Boss Rush' style content for lategame.
So you basically start hitting him to get your special attacks ready and he shrugs off a lot of it. If you do 0 damage you build no gauge so you can't do those special attacks. If you hit him for very little, you're still chipping at him with every strike and if you chip at him a certain number of times he'll do one of the simple mechanics he has.
But against Karkinos, that Bubble Shower STR Down can bring you from 'doing minor damage' to 'doing no damage'. This is 'fine' in the sense that if you are doing no damage you are not 'chipping' him so he won't do another mechanic soon, but 'bad' because your 'Synergy' relies on two people doing their special attacks in order followed by the Mage doing a big blast that gets empowered by that.
So what you want the most is for the Tank to not lose hate as much over time. FFXI contains no 'Look at me!' taunt, only 'I am bumping my hate value up by X amount without actually doing any damage, temporarily'.
This is interesting here because that means the better Tank is the Paladin who has the most of this type, but the Paladin also actually takes hits unlike Ninjas who evade them. And Karkinos can do his special attacks because he's hitting too.
The fight usually becomes about 'empowering a Mage' while leveraging everyone else's skills and abilities to let that Mage shine, but just 'bringing more Mages' only works if you are quite prepared in specific ways. It works about the same, sometimes slightly 'less good'.
A concept of a 'good' method would be, as example:
Paladin to take minimal damage and build maximum non-damage based Hate/Threat.
White Mage to improve Paladin defenses and backup heal (Paladin is main heal for the above reason)
Thief to both put more Hate/Threat onto Paladin and to steal some of the Mage's hate and redirect to self, also to 'offtank' since they are evasive, and to add Defense Down status from Crossbow (a Dark Knight with Thief Secondary works just as well or better here, losing only the "Steal Hate From Mage" function in exchange for more magic attacks and some unique-to-them debuffs)
Bard to do what Bards do. A little of everything. Increase Stats, slow healing, DoT on Karkinos, Mana sustain for the mage, they're always busy.
Add Any DPS that can add other DoT sources or "Enspells", which do their magic damage regardless of if the actual strike 'hits for 0' because they're doing damage without 'chipping' Karkinos
Optionally Add a Summoner to do... almost as much as the Bard, I won't get into this, they are complicated, but a good choice for this fight if you work with them well.
And of course, the star of the show, the Black Mage themselves. To casts the spells that makes the people (or crab) fall down.
Relatively poor choices:
Warriors (it's a Crab, they don't do much as a Primary and they're bruisers, this is not where you need a Bruiser normally, but they can also use Berserk to make up for this specifically because the enemy is not very damaging, and they can use Weapon Skills to lower its defense and evasion and so on, it's basically that you have to work with them and can't just slap them into any party and use the same plan as easily)
Monks (See above, but 'worse', they can manage the same as Warriors with Warrior Secondary though)
Dragoons (They're ok but don't really contribute much of anything extra here either unless using a very specific build)
Samurai (Surprisingly useless in my experience despite not needing to actually chip Karkinos to gain special attacks, but can at least help with Thief Secondary)
Ninjas (don't bother unless you are determined or you're planning to rely on DoT, particularly if you brought the Dark Knight and not the Thief, but can be effective with Thief Secondary or other more complicated builds).
All relatively poor choices refer only to 'if you just happened to grab one passing by to fill the numbers' because their likely build won't suit the purpose. Entirely unconnected from anyone who built for this fight.
Now finally our two simplistic 'mechanics'.
Occasionally and almost entirely at random (though the chance increases as its HP drops), Karkinos 'upgrades' Bubble Shower to Venom Shower. The poison is strong and only Monks can remove it, and only from themselves. You can stun this and then it will 'reroll' which ability it does, but it will usually do another shortly after and it can be Venom Shower again anyway. In the early phases this is the main plan. Stun this attack and hope it does something else instead when it recovers from the CC. Bonus if your Mage has some defenses up, they should also go for a big attack here, if they take hate momentarily they can lose it by taking the hit sometimes instead of the Tank and then a Paladin tank can heal THEM to 'absorb' all that Hate. If somehow this isn't enough, there's always Cover, directly protecting them.
Then there's Mega Scissors, which is similar in how/when it happens, but 'nicer' to us because it's conal but also hate reset. Here, you're rather hoping it hits the Mage by coordination, but this is risky and unnecessary, so usually you just need to have the Mage blast when you see it if the Thief is ready. The Tank loses Hate (basically their value gets set to either 0 or 'lower than most of the group'), the Mage takes it, and the Thief steals it and becomes the Tank for a bit.
Also works fine if the standard 'two tanks' setup is used (this is actually a multi-group mob when you first meet it).
If Karkinos is low, just these two changes result in a 'different battle flow' because the players' 'responses to the mechanics' are themselves 'emergent mechanics'. If you get hit by Venom Shower, you aren't dying to it, but you are 'in a state where you don't want to chip Karkinos and trigger Mega Scissors'.
But too many Venom Showers back to back and the Bard has to change behaviour since the Healer (and Paladin probably) are starting to run low on Mana. They both have Weapon Skills to regain it, but that involves hitting Karkinos enough.
Similarly too many Mega Scissors in a row after a long string of no Mega Scissors means that now, the rest of the group is probably at higher hate values, meaning that if both Tanks get reset to low, it will take them much longer to regain control of Karkinos and the Mage and Thief basically must coordinate to achieve this, and hope that the situation is favorable in terms of the availability of people's special attacks.
So you get the emergent behaviour of 'holding your Weapon Skills after Mega Scissors#1 because there haven't been any Mega Scissors in a while and if you don't have them ready then Mega Scissors #2 might lead to big damage somewhere'.
Or the Paladin going 'Use them' because they know that they have a bunch of defensive skills and Cover ready to be used to protect the Mage after the chain puts the Mage high on the list and it won't matter if the Paladin actually has hate or not because Cover doesn't care about that.
And at that point they're actually hoping for Mega Scissors #2 because they'll be standing in front of the Mage, who should defensively buff and hope for Mega Scissors to hit them too.
But now everyone is focused on stunning Venom Shower because the last thing you want is a lower HP Mage hit by that when the Tank can only protect them from physical hits, especially since if you stun Venom Shower and get lucky, Mega Scissors will follow and all this time that Mage is just offloading spells into Karkinos to get damage while being Covered hoping that Mega Scissors is about to reset all Karkinos' hate on them without them dying somehow.
But then some days you just run out of Stuns or whatever to stop Venom Shower and everyone has to refactor and adapt again because now your Mage and Tank are both Venom Showered and your best bet is to have your Healer use a huge AoE heal and then the Thief steal their hate instead and tank Karkinos until the Paladin(s) get back up there in the list.
There's more to this fight as you add more people, especially Summoners, but I think this is closer to what Intrepid is looking for without all the extra.
I enjoy this fight, whether as Thief, White Mage, or Ninja (assuming I built for it on that day and the rest of the group is also adapted toward it in whatever way). Despite its relatively simple core 'Boss Abilities' Mechanics types, I enjoy all the adaptation to the shifting situation and view things like 'Double Venom Shower after Mega Scissors' as the equivalent of another game's 'Here is a big mechanic you need to do this thing to avoid'.
All without changing Karkinos from being anything other than 'empowered Crab'.