My static cleared P4S last night. Miscellaneous thoughts about the entire tier, with spoiler tags so I can go into mechanics:
P1S is a fantastic first fight. Most of its mechanics are visually overwhelming and spectacular but very simple to solve, with just a few tricky spots to slow down new players and force them to think like Savage raiders. Very happy with this fight.
P2S feels very unforgiving for a second turn, with a ton of mechanics where one death just spirals into a wipe. The fight's gimmicks are interesting enough for prog purposes, but I'm not terribly looking forward to reclearing this fight every week.
P3S is a goddamn nightmare. So visually the entire arena and most of the effects are all reds and oranges, which gives me a headache after a while. The tankbuster being a pair of tethers the tanks have to pick up is the most infuriating mechanic in the entire tier. The big orb/small orb AoEs feel like they snapshot way earlier than they should. I'm really not looking forward to optimizing melee uptime for the back half of the fight, because so many mechanics seem purpose-built to force you off the boss. I really don't like this fight!
P4S oh thank god it has its own music, the Pandemonium fight music was wearing on me after progging the other three. Anyway this fight is fun! Phase 1 uses the tile and role mechanics from normal mode to great effect and adds in its own new wrinkles in the tether/debuff mechanics. I still don't like tethers much but it's made better by the fact that all four of the people who need it can just run laps inside the boss and eventually they'll all get one. The DPS check is extremely tight week 1, which is as it should be - clearing the door boss takes a perfect run. Phase 2 kind of has E12S phase 2 syndrome, where a lot of the challenge is in figuring out solutions to the mechanics and once the puzzle is solved actually resolving the mechanics isn't particularly difficult. I'm still a big fan of the "put down nails, show what they do, tether to nails in order, resolve explosions" gimmick, however - it reminds me of Fate Calibration from TEA, which is my absolute favorite mechanic of all time. Oddly for a 2 phase fight, the second phase has a DPS check just as strict as the first. In fact, I think the numbers needed to clear the two phases are almost exactly identical, somewhere around 48k raid DPS. The two phases are both full uptime with about the same amount of mechanics forcing melee off the boss, so numerically it makes sense but traditionally when a door boss has a strict DPS requirement the actual boss is a little more forgiving. I guess SE wanted to change up that formula.
Overall I'd call this tier about 7/10. The first and last fights are fantastic, the middle two a bit less so.
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