I was told to go ham so ham I will go.
First off roles,
Tank-
It seems to be a general rule of thumb that if a boss gives anti-heal stacks on hit it will require two tanks to tank him, unless, given a long enough down phase to clear anti heal stacks, such as boss 3 and 5 in guild city. We get around this now by having one boss tank, who clears their anti-heal stacks by stun locking them off after every 1-2 tankbusters. Heres a video of boss tanking, Boss 4 time stamps start at 9:13, each phase is time stamped https://youtu.be/fuNWs9WllX0
This really sucks to do, boss tank is a very long and tedious job. not to mention once you get over the initial learning curve of stunning and jumping our of circles, it’s just plain boring.
As far as I cant tell from my time add tanking and talking with other add tanks there seems to be no issues on add tanking side other than opening blue, coordinating opening blue portal with the two red circles makes it to where anytime a group wants to open blue phase intendedly it usually results in two dead boss dps, and a dead add tank.
Dps-
Firstly, Boss dps. the way we work around the double red circles killing the party is we only have 2 dps in boss combat at all times. them dps-ing the boss and dodging their red circles. This causes a few problems. Some groups don’t have high dps or only have a few high dps, so either phases take much longer due to lower dps on boss, or add get out of control due to a lack of dps on add side.
Add DPS, The way we kill boss 4 currently is a long and grueling fight for everyone, add dps especially. 16-30+ minutes of doing your maximum dps and trying your hardest, unlike boss tank/dps they dont get a break when the portal opens. they just have to go do max dps in another arena. add dps is easily the hardest job or one of the hardest jobs in boss 4.
Healers-
Boss bard, another way we dealt with the red circle and pink orb issues is in order to have a healer for the boss tank/boss dps, we put an out of combat bard near the boss tank, who’s only job is to provide passives and to decurse the tank every tankbuster. This results the boss tank and boss dps pretty much doing this fight without a healer, we’ve resulted to carrying legendary lvl 30 healing pots on us during the fight to sorta, replace what would be a musky or active healing bard.
Add musky, If add dps isn’t the hardest job in the fight its definitely add musky. Add musky is responsible for making sure all of the add side is healed through the adds damage, which isn’t easy by any means since the pistoler shreds the any class their focusing, and if the elite melee hits anyone other than a tank that elite melee hits like a truck. they are also responsible for opening green phase, they will gravity orb the non elite melee and musky-tank up to 5-6 of them in order to burn to open the green portal. Here’s a video of it https://youtu.be/NcdSzXK0gSo
Okay cool, that’s all the roles addressed, now the gross mechanics. Everything I addressed in terms of mechanics above applies here as well.
Pink boss orbs-
Sephoteps pink forehead orbs are kinda a problem. As right now we are only running with only 2 boss dps each of them get an orb. if one of them goes down and boss tank isn’t quick enoough to react they instantly get domed and the fights over.
There is also a very common bug were when a orb is knocked down, and then someone jumps to where it was, as late to 5 seconds after I’ve seen it happen, the player who jumped into the spot will be treated as if they were hit with the orb, they’ll take the damage, die, get the affliction, despite knocking down the orb.
Red Circles-
Despite the name this is mainly going to focus on red phase opening, opening red phase is going to be the part of the fight most groups struggle on, we’ve found a way around this with what most people know as SHEIKAH method, which can be seen done in the add musky video earlier in this post, there is a time stamp for SHEIKAH jump in the chapters of that video as well. But for groups using Thrive method or anything other than SHEIKAH jump double circles are always a possibility and usually a run ender.
Not to mention the damage, if everyone isn’t at full health before the red circles drop red phase is opened with most if not everyone on the verge of death, and a dead body or two.
Adds-
The adds tend to be very glitchy, their health bars/elite symbol, not showing up. there was a post a while ago about making the elite melee a different color which i think is still an amazing idea, here’s the post Boss 4 elites ads
I dont think that is out of the realm of possibilities since we have Captain Jethin in Lamavora, which is just a light blue raid smasher.
The pistolers are also a problem for some people, getting hit with a poison shouldn’t be a death sentence. there are methods where the add dps stand in the rubble around the arena to avoid being hit. Making it so the poison on the pistoler is toned down a bit might not be a bad idea, but out of everything in this raid the pistoler issue is probably the least offender on this list.
Green Portal-
Green portal is mostly fine compared to the rest of the fight aside for one huge issue, it has two smasher knights in the green portal add group, and more often than not their smash castbar is invisible for most of the party. Most green portal fights have 1 or more deaths because of not seeing the smash castbar or animation.
Loot-
More often than not our 20, 30, 40 minute boss 4 kills always end in tired groans and sigs of disbelief when everyone in our party sees a purple chest. it is a long grueling fight and the more kills and the more weeks a player has killed it and only gotten a purple chest to show for it is awful. Since I typically host a SHEIKAH raids it really does suck to watch all of my guild members become tired and sick of doing this boss fight week after week because they think it isn’t worth the effort.
Lastly, @Jake_E I would be more than happy to have you or any of the other devs come and sit in on a Boss 4 weather it be in game or in our discord call, and watching the stream of us do it. I know i post alot of boss 4 videos and have sent alot of them in this thread alone, but nothing really shows off the bugs better than watching it all unfold, all the videos are highly edited to just show the kill, none of the failed or bugged attempts.