LogFAQs > #961634093

So the biggest issue with Gordias is that it was mathematically impossible to clear week 1 - the DPS check was tuned such that you needed at least 1 DPS with the tomestone weapon in order to do enough damage to clear A4S. The devs later admitted that they tested Gordias by enabling god mode on the test party and walking around resolving mechanics without DPSing, then set the boss HP numbers at what their models said players should theoretically be doing.

Even past that the tier had some legendarily difficult and janky mechanics. In A3S, Digititus requires the entire party to recognize and pass debuffs with very little time to adjust anything. The Hands require extraordinarily quick and precise positioning by the tanks or else they just wipe you. On top of all that, the boss has a cleaving tankbuster with no castbar or telegraphs, so if your tank slips up and forgets to mitigate at the right time they just die. Now imagine having to do all of this on NA ping, when the fight was designed with JP internet structure in mind. Even today if you go back and try to do A3S at a contemporary item level it's ridiculously hard.

A4S is of course infamous for Nisi, an extraordinarily hard-hitting dot that could be passed between members and was needed to resolve a mechanic several minutes later into the fight. The dot ticked for way too much, and in NA at least players quickly discovered that it was less of an overall raid DPS loss to just let Nisi fall off and then resolve the later mechanic by letting two DPS players and your off tank die rather than overtax the healers by forcing them to heal Nisi for five minutes or whatever it was. To their credit SE learned their lesson from this and since then have been very careful to design mechanics that a) are not such enormous pains in the ass to resolve in the "correct" way and b) can't be cheesed by any combination of letting debuffs fall off and letting players die.

Special shoutout to Faust, the trash mob in A1S. Faust is a pure DPS check, with no mechanics and nothing to stress healers. All you have to do is kill him and the adds he periodically spawns. In spite of this, for weeks after Gordias released there were Faust prog parties on PF, because NA players simply could not comprehend how to press their buttons. Not only were raids designed very differently back then, player skill was much worse.