"Is EX4 hard?" A light numerical analysis

The important preamble here is that difficulty is, of course, subjective, and no one can tell you how hard a fight is for you. But there are broad strokes that people generally agree with. This is an attempt to capture those broad strokes with some solid numbers that enable comparison with the new EX fight.

I'm keeping this as spoiler-free as possible (no mechanic details), but if you want to avoid all possible details of a fight you should probably avoid this.

A fight is essentially a dance of movements, and to capture the difficulty of a fight, I categorize the required movements as follows:

• A tight move is one with either tight timing or a tight position. Roughly, tight timing is when you have one second or less to respond without sprint.
• An observation is a move that requires you to read something non-obvious, such as a move name, a symbol, etc. Dodging puddles are not observation moves.
• A role-based move is one that requires you to move based on your role. Moves that give you a marker and ask you to move based on the marker are also considered role-based. In short, anything that can't be dorito'd.
• A team-killing move is one that, if failed, would cause you to kill a teammate.
• A wiping move is one that, if failed, would cause you to wipe the party (possibly except tanks).

Here's the data for the four EW EX fights:

And here's some more data for P1S, P2S, and the 4th ShB EX fight:

Some comparisons we can see are:

• There are more movements and far more tight moves in EX4 than previous EX's.
• The number of required observations is similar in each fight. One implication is that a greater percentage of EX4 moves are obvious danger that require no specific observation.
• There are far, far more chances to kill your teammates in EX4 than other fights.
• There are also far more role-based moves, based on clock spots and light parties, especially compared to the infamous EX1 that can be solved entirely via dorito.
• As expected, there are a lot more team-killing/team-wiping moves in Savage, though the total number of moves for the first two floors is less than most extremes - they are slow fights.

Some notes:

• This approach only partially captures clear difficulty of a fight. One aspect that isn't captured is enrage tightness. For example, at min ilevel, a mediocre team could get away with 10+ deaths on EX4, while a fairly decent team should probably reset with two deaths on e12s phase one. It would be more accurate to say that this approach captures execution difficulty instead of clear difficulty.
• Tankbusters and heal checks are not counted, for the same reason I don't separately consider the difficulty of maintaining melee uptime or placing ley lines - they are considered part of the specific job's expected gameplay and not the dance-fight itself.
• There are going to inevitably be subjective difficulty concerns that I can't capture, for example, p3s being too red, or p4s phase two being hard with people who have trouble remembering numbers.

Message me if you'd like me to share the text files of how I classified each move in each fight.