Posting screenshots of your gear and skill tree would be a good start

@RainGnyu said in Our power is never going to be enough!:

How do you gitgud?

You're not going to get a satisfying answer to this question just by asking it like this, because in order to get good you first need to understand what exactly you're bad at. Different people will understand different aspects of the game differently, they have different gaming backgrounds, differently developed reflexes, they pay different amounts of attention to different things.

If at this point you can't take some specific parts of the game (whether it's some boss fight, a class weapon, or even a particular repeated occurence that leads to your failure) and ask yourself "What am I doing wrong there", a good start would be to record yourself playing different kinds of content. You might be able to figure something out on your own, but it's better if you have other people look at it.

I've seen people do some really bizarre mistakes, like holding technique charges for 4-5 seconds, saying that they couldn't memorize the timing, even though at that point they could just react to very clear visual and sound cues. I myself for the longest time preferred staring at my character to hit JAs instead of memorizing the timings so that I can pay attention to mobs that are trying to kill me. Managing attention overall is a very important skill (in life in general, even); in modern world people have their attention directed on autopilot to whatever may provide an immediate dopamine fix. Modern games in their rush to provide satisfaction as quickly as possible end up encouraging tunnel vision, and quite a few complaints about combat I've seen on this forum (like animation locks or enemies not having health bars) are often a result of people not being used to thinking ahead of what's right before them in any given moment

@Mattwo7 First of all, you've never actually stated that you even agree with an idea of automatic group forming (as opposed to "matchmaking"), so telling me that I'm behind the conversation on this is disingenuous. The OP does not in any way mention anything more complex than just grouping people together, and you went on to disagree with it on that premise right from the start and have never given any ground on it - because of this my concern is still valid.

Second of all, fundamentally, "matchmaking" is just that - automatically grouping people together with a queue-like system. Skill-based matchmaking you see in PvP games or role-based matchmaking you see in your average MMO are simply modifications of that basic principle. PSO2 doesn't need those particular modifications, but a simple queue system would still be beneficial even for regular quests (let alone Trigger Quests), as with current system there are too many cases where multiple non-filled instances would exist across different blocks (or, sometimes, even in the same block), and people would either wait excessive amounts of time or give up on the quest entirely, because the alternative would be to check the quest counter constantly and rally multiple parties to move blocks, taking even more risks to end up without a group in the chaos of people constantly leaving and joining across all the blocks

@Mattwo7 These are some serious mental gymnastics you're resorting to to justify not including such an obvious QoL feature.

First of all, Trigger Quests as a category will always be relevant, because new ones get added almost every new Urgent, and, as such, will always have relevant rewards, even if individual quests get outdated.

Second of all, the fact that you can't even browse Trigger Quest parties in other blocks than the one you're in is a massive hindrance to forming groups. You've acknowledged yourself that Trigger Quests can be activated at any given time, so why wouldn't you want more people to see them when they are active to increase the chances of the group filling up?

And the third point, the one that OP highlighted very clearly, a Trigger Quest that wasn't started is a trigger wasted. Triggers are scarce, so it's only natural that you'd want to keep the trigger if you don't actually end up using it for its one and only, very intended purpose - actually running the quest. If, as you've said, "there'd be no guarantee other people would be doing them or if there'd be enough people in general", why not have this extra security?

This suggestion is nothing but positive, and implementing it wouldn't be that hard: consume trigger only when the quest has actually started, and add a "Browse all Trigger Quest parties" menu at a quest counter

It's not an answer anyone but yourself can give you, it's all about skill. Some people have S-ranked it with 1* weapons and no armor whatsoever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umtRbIN0PUg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z45mzgXRubo), while others (like OP of this very thread) struggle even with top-of-the-line gear. All I can say is, if you'd wanted to experience the fight's original, intended difficulty, you'd at least have to downgrade your weapon to Deo or even Red

Phaleg's HP buff barely compesates for skill tree and PA buffs compared to EP4 balance, and that is not mentioning all the extra mobility, cancel frames, extended timings, way stronger basic attacks (roughly 5 times the damage and 3 times the PP recovery across the board) and skill tree QoL, from double jumps and first arts to "pity" multipliers on conditional skills (for example, Fighter's stances actually reduced your damage compared to baseline if the enemy was facing you the wrong way instead of just giving a smaller increase; your DPS in that case was almost halved, which on bosses like solo PD was an extremely huge deal). People complaining about her having her EP6 stats have no perspective on how the fight actually used to be originally.

In fact, across all EP1-4 content Phaleg is the only thing that's actually balanced around the players' current power level. Even Challenge Mode, as distinct as it is from the main game, is trivial compared to its original iteration.

But, to stay on topic, the game really never gets nearly as difficult as it used to be, and all the somewhat challenging content like Masquerade is still largely optional. The game is certainly not going to relive the sheer madness that on-release Ultimate Naverius was with not only EP3 skill tree and PA balance and OT 11* weapons, but also significantly faster and more aggressive enemy AI

Yes, but that's spoiler territory

One note on #4: I'd like a dedicated button for toggling music and video sounds if I want to have something else in the background.

#5 also reminded me of one, not necessarily related thing: SEA server used to have a way to lock items that prevents them from being sent into storage when they're selected as a part of a batch, so that you could send things to storage quickly without accidentally sending something you actually needed in your inventory. It's weird that it wasn't added to other versions

Here's a good run from NA and a perfect run from JP (UH version has 4 times the HP). "Phase 2" is when the sky changes and you'd normally have to deal with 3 parts at once instead of 2. In NA vid the player doesn't manage to break the bits in time to reveal the core, but you can still see that PD only spends a few seconds in the 3-part mode before revealing main body