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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Let's TheoryRaid #9: King Behemoth vs Morokai/'Thunderstrike' Morokai
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
This is technically sort of a Splinter Topic with the intent of me trying to understand how certain player types (with or without certain MMO 'histories') view complexity/variance in enemies.
For this, since Throne and Liberty does not generally expose the average player to high complexity battles except as anti-zerg, I need to discuss the boss that exists in game (Morokai) and a completely theoretical higher complexity version of that boss. I will try to make it as clear as possible (I may also mention another FF11 enemy type/boss to compare more reasonably to 'base' Morokai).
But first, hail to the King.
King Behemoth has a moveset that is relatively easy to understand:
Meteor --- Wide AoE magic damage centered on the target of the spell. Can hit anyone in range like Nidhogg's Hurricane Wing. If the target of the spell runs beyond 30.0' the spell will not finish casting.
Kick Out --- Used when hate is generated from behind King Behemoth. 40' range. Affects everyone in range. Causes Blind.
Howl --- Gives King Behemoth a substantial attack boost.
Wild Horn --- Cone shaped damage originating from the front of King Behemoth.
Thunderbolt --- 30' AoE lightning damage centered around King Behemoth. Affects everyone in range like Nidhogg's Hurricane Wing. Causes Stun. (a personal note here is that I anecdotally believe this move is more likely if the person that has hate is far away)
Shock Wave --- Cone shaped damage originating from the front of King Behemoth.
Flame Armor --- Gives King Behemoth a Blaze Spikes effect. Can be stolen with Aura Steal.
King Behemoth's regular attacks have an additional effect of Stun.
At a specific point in FF11's lifespan this boss required 2 Tanks and might have been better with 3. The 'complexity' is the reason. So, briefly:
Meteor hits very hard and is hard to interrupt because this is a Lightning type enemy and therefore was possibly resistant to Stun. But maybe not, because there are other 'more important things to stun'. So you want the person with hate to outrange it. But Tanks are usually right in his face, so it's a long run out and then back.
Meteor hits hard enough that even if you did facetank it as a solo tank, you probably lose hate to a DPS. In order to not have been hit by Meteor, that DPS was probably quite near King Behemoth's back, risking Kick Out.
Since Meteor is a spell, there is no guarantee of any delay between it finishing (or being outranged) and a different attack happening. It could also immediately do 1 regular attack that Stunned and then go straight into any one of those attacks.
Just in case, for the people who have only played games where bosses have 'rotations', you never know which of those moves King Behemoth will do (unless it is Kick Out and no one behind him has hate). It could theoretically just spam Thunderbolt for the entire fight (every time it was able to use a special attack, that is)
Morokai should mainly be understood as an undead Orc Shaman with Lightning abilities. He normally stands between 4 pillars that help to block specific versions of his various lightning attacks. Assume AoE ground circles (we'll call this Thundaga for now), and a Chain Lightning attack that leaps from one person to another, becoming more powerful the more it bounces (may or may not be boosted by someone in the chain not blocking it correctly). And then of course the one where he attempts to hit everyone and you need to hide behind the pillars (I'll call this Defibrillate if it comes up again because for those who know his lore it's funny).
You don't need two Tanks for Morokai, it helps a little, but this post would be interminable if I went into every aspect of why. Assume that one good/perfect Tank is enough and allow me to go beyond. To 'force' the issue and make it 'require' 2 Tanks in the same 'way' that King Behemoth does.
There would only be two changes required to create a 'Thunderstrike' Morokai requiring more than one Tank or a completely different approach than the standard, for fighting him.
1. Instead of Chain Lightning being the only 'bounces off' style attack, add an attack that looks very similar, 'Coil Discharge' or something, where the next 'bounce' of the attack goes off in a 30 degree cone toward whoever is next on the hate list (bounces at least twice). If this cone meaningfully includes/overlaps Morokai himself, he gets a combination buff and debuff (two separate statuses, both can stack up)
2. Add a slowish moving Lightning Ball skill that stuns and fires off 'randomly' but moves according to either the charge on the pillars or the charge on the last person to get some status from Morokai in whatever way the theoretical devs see fit. Lightning Ball does not disappear until it hits either a pillar or a player. Perhaps it gives Morokai the same buff/debuff as Coil Discharge if it passes through him, perhaps an entirely different one. There can be more than one Lightning Ball (heck, for Anti-Zerg lovers, he can just send out however many is appropriate in random directions).
The thing that brought up this TheoryRaid is a concept related to 'participation'. Not everyone in even a complex fight necessarily has a complex role. A game with lots of different bosses can mix it up so that different bosses have different levels of complexity 'per role', but simpler games don't do this, leading to many players just not needing to understand anything as long as some other person is doing their job.
This can be any role. Some fights the Tank just has to stand there and press the exact same skills as always. Sometimes the healer just needs to hit the anti-damage button whenever damage happens. Sometimes the Bard just has to loop the same buffs and maybe Dispel occasionally, and ofc, sometimes the DPS just has to hit things and can ignore literally everything else beyond 'hey don't stand in that spot, you will die faster'.
For a Tank, King Behemoth "In A Mood Today And Only Using Thunderbolt" and King Behemoth "Don't Want You In My Face So Spamming Wild Horn" are largely the same. For the DPS and healer these are different experiences (note that FF11 is/was not one of those 'Press button to get aggro for X seconds no questions asked' games).
Even with two Tanks to be able to outrun Meteor and having your Tanking partner spike their hate just when you get out of range, those two situations are similar for the Tanks but might change 'which Healer spec acts as main (hope you brought both!)
But for 'Thunderstrike' Morokai, it's moreso the Healers who 'don't have to worry about the complexity'. The DPS have to know exactly where to stand, and where to return to after a mechanic that forces the Tank to move. The Tank(s) need to work out based on their team comp where they should stand. Should one be slightly to the side of Morokai with no one else near/behind them in that Coil Discharge cone? Or should they be on opposite sides so that Morokai gets the buff/debuff from being within the Coil Discharge cone? Where should the DPS stand? Should they change positions if they don't have a Dispeller or if something happens to that Dispeller, or just wait it out? How should they react positionally to 'randomly being the target of the Lightning Ball', or sometimes not being the target of it (and moving to maybe intercept it). What about when they do miss a block, or a mechanic, and one of them dies or gets too low to keep tanking safely?
The main way I learned that we definitely don't need two Tanks for even regular Morokai was that our 'casual' backup Tank basically doesn't pay attention to mechanics that involve moving (just pops Defense Skills whenever she sees her health start dropping basically), so she spent a lot of time dead or ineffective at Morokai due to 'Thundaga'. If Thunderstrike Morokai was a thing, I would not expect to even be able to clear it unless it was an easy stat-check, for this reason (this is an exaggeration, we have another Tank, they just don't play frequently).
I consider a boss to be variant/different if I think that you must give a different explanation about how to beat it to the same group, and that 'only one person can really afford to miss the explanation' (as noted, there's usually SOME person who gets to just do the same thing).
Most of the time adding one new ability or mechanic to a simple enemy doesn't achieve this, it moreso ends up as 'do what you normally do but watch out for this one thing', but even then, it's normally not a full breakdown/wipe if someone fails and just 'plays like normal' as long as the person 'in charge of dealing with that one thing' will pick up the slack somewhat.
But adding two? One meaningfully complex variant of one? Somewhere on that spectrum between those two things, I feel like one has to 're-explain' and therefore the mob is different. King Behemoth can be this just by 'ability order' (particularly if one of your Tanks doesn't have great Stun Resistance or you don't have a consistent Dispeller but have a lot of multi-hit DPS). If either Wild Horn or Shock Wave had significant Knockback, on the other hand, not much of this fight would change in terms of approach. Tanks might just spend more time running toward the target and have slightly less total enmity built up from Melee attacks, more like the Monster Hunter (crossover) version of the King Behemoth fight. Yet adding 'when Flame Armor/Howl is dispelled, the Dispeller receives a large enmity/hate spike' would potentially cause Tanks to change their builds entirely (since the most likely thing would be to have them change 'Secondary Archetype' to give up a different Hate Spike tool to gain Dispel and pray that their Magic Accuracy is enough to actually land it consistently).
That one I bring up because it's closest to the 'borderline' situation. Is 'a Behemoth that gets mad when you Dispel its buffs' a different mob? In most games 'yes', but the reason is because of a different approach. Most games now are formulaic. In most games you'd be guaranteed that such a Behemoth would actually use the buffs so that players would be guaranteed that their changes would matter in a specific way. In FF11 this isn't guaranteed, so it goes beyond even a standard 'inform of new mechanic' into 're-explain'. Because now you have one or two PLD/RDM (probably) who gave up a Taunt to become Dispel-capable facing down a mob that might just Wild Horn them out of its face repeatedly and then turn on someone else without ever using either Howl or Flame Armor.
Complexity is, unsurprisingly, not a 'simple' topic to approach, but in the end, today's rant is mostly to offer context and maybe see if it sparks anyone to think about 'what is or isn't complex to them'.
For this, since Throne and Liberty does not generally expose the average player to high complexity battles except as anti-zerg, I need to discuss the boss that exists in game (Morokai) and a completely theoretical higher complexity version of that boss. I will try to make it as clear as possible (I may also mention another FF11 enemy type/boss to compare more reasonably to 'base' Morokai).
But first, hail to the King.
King Behemoth has a moveset that is relatively easy to understand:
Meteor --- Wide AoE magic damage centered on the target of the spell. Can hit anyone in range like Nidhogg's Hurricane Wing. If the target of the spell runs beyond 30.0' the spell will not finish casting.
Kick Out --- Used when hate is generated from behind King Behemoth. 40' range. Affects everyone in range. Causes Blind.
Howl --- Gives King Behemoth a substantial attack boost.
Wild Horn --- Cone shaped damage originating from the front of King Behemoth.
Thunderbolt --- 30' AoE lightning damage centered around King Behemoth. Affects everyone in range like Nidhogg's Hurricane Wing. Causes Stun. (a personal note here is that I anecdotally believe this move is more likely if the person that has hate is far away)
Shock Wave --- Cone shaped damage originating from the front of King Behemoth.
Flame Armor --- Gives King Behemoth a Blaze Spikes effect. Can be stolen with Aura Steal.
King Behemoth's regular attacks have an additional effect of Stun.
At a specific point in FF11's lifespan this boss required 2 Tanks and might have been better with 3. The 'complexity' is the reason. So, briefly:
Meteor hits very hard and is hard to interrupt because this is a Lightning type enemy and therefore was possibly resistant to Stun. But maybe not, because there are other 'more important things to stun'. So you want the person with hate to outrange it. But Tanks are usually right in his face, so it's a long run out and then back.
Meteor hits hard enough that even if you did facetank it as a solo tank, you probably lose hate to a DPS. In order to not have been hit by Meteor, that DPS was probably quite near King Behemoth's back, risking Kick Out.
Since Meteor is a spell, there is no guarantee of any delay between it finishing (or being outranged) and a different attack happening. It could also immediately do 1 regular attack that Stunned and then go straight into any one of those attacks.
Just in case, for the people who have only played games where bosses have 'rotations', you never know which of those moves King Behemoth will do (unless it is Kick Out and no one behind him has hate). It could theoretically just spam Thunderbolt for the entire fight (every time it was able to use a special attack, that is)
Morokai should mainly be understood as an undead Orc Shaman with Lightning abilities. He normally stands between 4 pillars that help to block specific versions of his various lightning attacks. Assume AoE ground circles (we'll call this Thundaga for now), and a Chain Lightning attack that leaps from one person to another, becoming more powerful the more it bounces (may or may not be boosted by someone in the chain not blocking it correctly). And then of course the one where he attempts to hit everyone and you need to hide behind the pillars (I'll call this Defibrillate if it comes up again because for those who know his lore it's funny).
You don't need two Tanks for Morokai, it helps a little, but this post would be interminable if I went into every aspect of why. Assume that one good/perfect Tank is enough and allow me to go beyond. To 'force' the issue and make it 'require' 2 Tanks in the same 'way' that King Behemoth does.
There would only be two changes required to create a 'Thunderstrike' Morokai requiring more than one Tank or a completely different approach than the standard, for fighting him.
1. Instead of Chain Lightning being the only 'bounces off' style attack, add an attack that looks very similar, 'Coil Discharge' or something, where the next 'bounce' of the attack goes off in a 30 degree cone toward whoever is next on the hate list (bounces at least twice). If this cone meaningfully includes/overlaps Morokai himself, he gets a combination buff and debuff (two separate statuses, both can stack up)
2. Add a slowish moving Lightning Ball skill that stuns and fires off 'randomly' but moves according to either the charge on the pillars or the charge on the last person to get some status from Morokai in whatever way the theoretical devs see fit. Lightning Ball does not disappear until it hits either a pillar or a player. Perhaps it gives Morokai the same buff/debuff as Coil Discharge if it passes through him, perhaps an entirely different one. There can be more than one Lightning Ball (heck, for Anti-Zerg lovers, he can just send out however many is appropriate in random directions).
The thing that brought up this TheoryRaid is a concept related to 'participation'. Not everyone in even a complex fight necessarily has a complex role. A game with lots of different bosses can mix it up so that different bosses have different levels of complexity 'per role', but simpler games don't do this, leading to many players just not needing to understand anything as long as some other person is doing their job.
This can be any role. Some fights the Tank just has to stand there and press the exact same skills as always. Sometimes the healer just needs to hit the anti-damage button whenever damage happens. Sometimes the Bard just has to loop the same buffs and maybe Dispel occasionally, and ofc, sometimes the DPS just has to hit things and can ignore literally everything else beyond 'hey don't stand in that spot, you will die faster'.
For a Tank, King Behemoth "In A Mood Today And Only Using Thunderbolt" and King Behemoth "Don't Want You In My Face So Spamming Wild Horn" are largely the same. For the DPS and healer these are different experiences (note that FF11 is/was not one of those 'Press button to get aggro for X seconds no questions asked' games).
Even with two Tanks to be able to outrun Meteor and having your Tanking partner spike their hate just when you get out of range, those two situations are similar for the Tanks but might change 'which Healer spec acts as main (hope you brought both!)
But for 'Thunderstrike' Morokai, it's moreso the Healers who 'don't have to worry about the complexity'. The DPS have to know exactly where to stand, and where to return to after a mechanic that forces the Tank to move. The Tank(s) need to work out based on their team comp where they should stand. Should one be slightly to the side of Morokai with no one else near/behind them in that Coil Discharge cone? Or should they be on opposite sides so that Morokai gets the buff/debuff from being within the Coil Discharge cone? Where should the DPS stand? Should they change positions if they don't have a Dispeller or if something happens to that Dispeller, or just wait it out? How should they react positionally to 'randomly being the target of the Lightning Ball', or sometimes not being the target of it (and moving to maybe intercept it). What about when they do miss a block, or a mechanic, and one of them dies or gets too low to keep tanking safely?
The main way I learned that we definitely don't need two Tanks for even regular Morokai was that our 'casual' backup Tank basically doesn't pay attention to mechanics that involve moving (just pops Defense Skills whenever she sees her health start dropping basically), so she spent a lot of time dead or ineffective at Morokai due to 'Thundaga'. If Thunderstrike Morokai was a thing, I would not expect to even be able to clear it unless it was an easy stat-check, for this reason (this is an exaggeration, we have another Tank, they just don't play frequently).
I consider a boss to be variant/different if I think that you must give a different explanation about how to beat it to the same group, and that 'only one person can really afford to miss the explanation' (as noted, there's usually SOME person who gets to just do the same thing).
Most of the time adding one new ability or mechanic to a simple enemy doesn't achieve this, it moreso ends up as 'do what you normally do but watch out for this one thing', but even then, it's normally not a full breakdown/wipe if someone fails and just 'plays like normal' as long as the person 'in charge of dealing with that one thing' will pick up the slack somewhat.
But adding two? One meaningfully complex variant of one? Somewhere on that spectrum between those two things, I feel like one has to 're-explain' and therefore the mob is different. King Behemoth can be this just by 'ability order' (particularly if one of your Tanks doesn't have great Stun Resistance or you don't have a consistent Dispeller but have a lot of multi-hit DPS). If either Wild Horn or Shock Wave had significant Knockback, on the other hand, not much of this fight would change in terms of approach. Tanks might just spend more time running toward the target and have slightly less total enmity built up from Melee attacks, more like the Monster Hunter (crossover) version of the King Behemoth fight. Yet adding 'when Flame Armor/Howl is dispelled, the Dispeller receives a large enmity/hate spike' would potentially cause Tanks to change their builds entirely (since the most likely thing would be to have them change 'Secondary Archetype' to give up a different Hate Spike tool to gain Dispel and pray that their Magic Accuracy is enough to actually land it consistently).
That one I bring up because it's closest to the 'borderline' situation. Is 'a Behemoth that gets mad when you Dispel its buffs' a different mob? In most games 'yes', but the reason is because of a different approach. Most games now are formulaic. In most games you'd be guaranteed that such a Behemoth would actually use the buffs so that players would be guaranteed that their changes would matter in a specific way. In FF11 this isn't guaranteed, so it goes beyond even a standard 'inform of new mechanic' into 're-explain'. Because now you have one or two PLD/RDM (probably) who gave up a Taunt to become Dispel-capable facing down a mob that might just Wild Horn them out of its face repeatedly and then turn on someone else without ever using either Howl or Flame Armor.
Complexity is, unsurprisingly, not a 'simple' topic to approach, but in the end, today's rant is mostly to offer context and maybe see if it sparks anyone to think about 'what is or isn't complex to them'.
You can always have my opinions, they are On The House.
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Comments
The closest thing to a reactionary raid fight from L2, for me, would be a boss that has pools of mob spawns appear after half of its hp is gone. Those pools would spawn different mobs randomly (iirc) and, depending on your role, you'd need to react to those mobs properly.
And so, for my personal experience on this boss, on several servers we fought this boss with way fewer people than it properly requires, so each person had several characters to operate. Iirc the most I did were 3 chars: 1 tank, 1 buffer/debuffer and 1 dps.
Start of the fight mostly required passive gameplay from buffer and dps, cause they had trigger abilities on their attacks, so you could just leave them on auto-attacks and they'd be useful, while I spammed my tank abilities to have enough aggro for the second half of the boss. Tank also had a build-up HUGE dps boost buff, where you needed to cast a buff on yourself, receive a certain treshold of dmg 3 times and you'd have ~15s to use a buff that got enabled through that activity (1min duration, so you had a free window after that). You'd mostly use this thing either on cd or stop using it right before the middle of bosses hp, so that you could go into big dmg boost after that.
After half hp, my main task would be to do the tanks dps buff, pop my dps' buffs (I'd do this before too, but now it had to be done asap) and then concentrate on my debuff char, because I'd need to root/silence/slow atk spd different mobs, depending on their type. And of course I'd need to cast at least a few abilties on the tank to stay at high aggro values, though with a good gear build tank with its buff could even keep up pace with some dpses.
Obviously, all of this was done while alt tabbing through all of those windows, which was also done on a single monitor at the time. Not like that's all that difficult, but a missclick of an additional tab could interrupt the flow and it was quite annoying.
Another curious interaction on this boss, which kinda relates to the Ball and Coil buffs from your example is that in L2 healers had a Celestial Shield that you could cast on both players and mobs. It would give you full invincibility for 9 seconds and protect you from buffs and debuffs, but would disappear as soon as you attacked or used any ability. So, the healer's job (outside of the usual healing, cleansing and sleeping) would be to use that CS on the boss at a very precise moment in the boss' mid-health monologue, cause it'd fully restore its hp right after that point and casting CS on it would prevent that heal from landing.
The relation to the Ball and Coil buffs on the boss is that I thought about "what if players could do something about that outside of pure buff removal/seal".
And so, when the patch with this boss was available on the private servers (or if we had friends who hadn't played this version of the game before), we'd need to explain all of those interactions before and often during the fight. And as, usually, the guild leader I'd be the one explaining and monitoring that people did their jobs during the fight.
So, all of that to say, I'd love to try out that Thunderstrike Morokai, even if my skill lvl wouldn't allow me to do all that well on it.
And as for the differences of the 2 of them, in my mind I'd just treat it like stages of a boss, but separated by time. Same dude, but now the mechanics are slightly different, so you just gotta get used to them.
Here's a video explaining the boss I'm referencing (auto-translate CCs are close enough to get the gist of the mechanics) from 10:20
I also understand better why it flows like that if L2 doesn't have skill builds (I don't really have any specific opinion on whether or not they're good or bad in the context of this because most games make you able to change them anyway).
I think you're implying that you are looking forward to Ashes' dynamic bosses but might not consider them 'different' which is fair enough, assuming you would perceive Morokai and Thunderstrike Morokai as 'variants of the same mob basically'. I agree with that primarily because Morokai 'can't necessarily do what King Behemoth does', i.e. randomize behaviour enough from a large set of options to feel like a different mob.
That's a choice made by Devs though, partly because they want to be able to make people feel comfortable. I don't know if it would be good to have the same mob completely change behaviour if you wipe against it, for instance, I can see that being stressful for many groups.
Intrepid has indicated that their bosses might have some Dynamic AI style approaches, and we'll see how that goes if the bosses also change according to seasons/weather, but I don't think it's impossible. I'd probably choose 'randomization + skill/kit/augment changes' over 'Dynamic AI' if I had to choose though, for this game.
If/when Throne and Liberty starts adding certain seasonal/weather variations to open world bosses besides Kowazan, I'll listen out in World Chat for how much complaining we get. One thing that will be fairly helpful to them if they do it for Guild bosses instead of just the Dimensional Trials is the fact that Guilds can't just 'reject people who aren't perfectly optimal for the boss clear', bypassing the problem that occurs in GroupFinder style Dungeon Content, so I expect them to have more success there.
It's one thing to change a mechanic on something like Shakarux where people can just go "Only taking the classes that can most easily ignore the mechanics" (because it's a Dungeon), but a winter version of Grand Aelon or Ahzreil that applies Chill/Movespeed Down on certain attacks is not only 'just a harder fight', it would be less reasonable for a Guild to 'demand that everyone change to a spec that makes the fight trivial by ignoring any such mechanics' for a Guild Boss version of such a fight.
But that would still not take it as far as either "Yeah this boss could just use a different attack repeatedly every time, today' or 'This boss is going to attempt to dynamically adapt to who is fighting it and somehow not also be manipulated by the players'. Both of those things are more risk for uncertain reward, in Ashes (in terms of playerbase positive reactions, from what I've seen).
I'm gonna continue to hope that there's a legion of old FF11 players just waiting for the former thing, but I'm not that sure the majority of them loved it either.
I think what I would consider properly "different mobs" even if the model is the same would be smth like:
If that kind of approach could be applied to all bosses (ideally even mobs) in the game - I'd fucking love it. But I understand that it's an insane amount of dev work.
Thunderstrike Morokai would be almost no animation work, and only very little balancing work.
Changing Ahzreil to 'Chillsoul Ahzreil' would be a little work but it would still mostly be 'collecting ice assets from other parts of the game and applying them to that boss' mechanic visuals 1-for-1 (totems, etc) or maybe reusing them for new mechanics.
Any winter/frosted form of Grand Aelon could theoretically require some work but it'd probably be like, particle effects or recolors of more stuff that already exists. I'd go so far as to say that any game that wants to compete in the PvE 'sphere' must learn to efficiently recycle assets and minimize changes that would require animation changes, if we're not going back to 'Raiding is Reading'. The pace of content output required just seems like it would be too vast otherwise.
But my current evidence is mostly anecdotal. Throne and Liberty ended up getting their new Raid content delayed because it's a 'full deal', new content spectacle type thing. Whereas their normal Dungeon PvE is 'new model, new boss, but usually uses a reskinned or shifted part of the world that already exists'. So they save the energy in a different place. Part of the reason my group can even have faith in their ability to put out enough content is that they still have multiple places in the world they haven't used for this purpose yet (basically linear-ish paths you can put enemies on, where one end is roughly boss-arena sized).
I really don't actually know what the 'acceptance rate' for that is, my understanding is that PvE-focused players don't care much because the idea is that 'we' want variety and cool stuff to do, so it's good enough to just have the animations be clear enough.
Ofc that could just be because of the years of 'conditioning' to accept 'yeah we don't have time to make 4 different models, so these endgame Wyrms are all gonna look the same except for colors, oh and we might need to reuse that model again in another expansion'.
Still, given what this topic is a 'splinter' of, it's a question of how much the open world mobs can be allowed to change, and how efficiently that change can happen (most TL Field bosses, if you remove their 'big' mechanic or their 'environmental/arena' mechanic, are about equivalent to what FF11 normal enemies are like).
But at that point I'd be getting into open world and ecology again, so I'll leave that essay for another thread and just hope for the sake of both games that the PvX audience that enjoys this type of PvE content for its own sake is also not too picky about recycling, or I'm never gonna get things like "Blackscale Chernobog" and more importantly, both Dev Teams have a much harder road ahead.
If the boss farts rainbows or lightning bolts is not important to me, I don't care.
And considering that the masses are fine with "different colors of circles on the floor" as mechanics - I think Ashes might be fine. Or at least, that particular part of the design won't be as big of a hurdle for the game's popularity, compared to ALLLL THE OTHER PARTS.