Can we please delay Savage?

[Waliel]

The solution is to delay everything but savage by one week.

As a someone who takes it relatively easy nowadays and raids two nights a week, I'm in favour of this proposition. I was only able to clear 3/4 of NM and had to skip everything related to Shiva to be on time for raid. Granted, we gathered earlier than normal to get any stragglers (me) through normal, but still.

[FF16Necromancer]

While I know this only effects a small portion of the raid community, it is nonetheless extremely frustrating for many who are either attempting to clear Savage week one or even midcore groups who have Tuesday evening raid schedules with members unable to take time off work or school.

Speaking from my own experiences. As a crafter for my team, I essentially stayed up with the patch, spent all day crafting and rushed through Normal mode, skipping every cut scene along the way—something I prefer not to do. Alas, I simply didn't have the time to get everything done before raid. Several members of the team were in similar positions due to work. A good friend of mine never skips anything but this tier she had to.

Now I know some will argue either not to raid on Tuesday, postpone it or what have you. However, that missing the point. For anyone pursuing a week one kill, losing an entire day simply isn't an option. You want all the time possible for prog as it takes time to learn everything.

Even for groups not aspiring for week one. A new patch brings excitement for raid content. Say six members want to jump into Savage while two are more interested in the story. Who do you disappoint assuming no one can take time off work? Either you delay raid, thus upsetting the people eager to jump into it. Or you tell everyone to skip and whoever wants to watch cut scenes better have an alt.

All of this could easily be avoided with a one week delay for Savage, which has been requested multiple times now. I see no reason why both Normal and Savage have to be released together when they aren't at the beginning of the expansion.

Just something I wanted to get off my chest, especially with it once again being talked about apparently in a recent interview.

I really don't want two or three maintenances in a row. There's already usually a second maintenance one or two weeks after patch to hotfix something. :/

[TroySoFab]

Hopefully in 6.0 they delay savage and story. One week should be more than enough, and I don't think they would have to do another maintenance just for it to unlock a week later.

[MothKira]

Hi, I don't world race, but do raid week 1 and craft multiple gear sets day 1 for my group, and I absolutely support delaying savage by a week for the x.2 an,d x.4 raid tiers.

This is already the standard for the x.05 first expansion tier and ultimate releases, I fail to see why is there such a resistance to the same idea being applied to the two other raid releases of the expansion. I'm convinced if you polled all raiders this would be an incredibly popular change.

As evidenced by multiple references in social media posts, live letters and interviews, the developpers aknowledge and condone the world race, and take into account world race competition integrity in their update design. If you don't believe that, just one example in 5.4 patch notes, the notice in the items tab, regarding an apology on normal raid gear materia slots. https://fr.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...8c2f1094131070
TLDR you might not care about the world race, and that's fine, but SE does.

The world race isn't just about the 1% raiders. It's also one of the biggest social media event for the game, not in small part thanks to hard work from people like Mogtalk. It attracts new players to the game, it creates visibility, - look at the impact speedruns can have on game popularity for instance, and how much games that supported speedrun scenes like celeste benefitted from that, it's the same idea.
There's no downsides for people who don't raid for it to exist. You can simply ignore it if you don't like the idea of ingame competitions, that's fine.

Even ignoring the world race, for other players, the experience of raid week 1 blind at true minimum min ilvl, and post week 1 is just not the same. Because of the nature of savage gearing and the impact of knowing mechanics, it's the only time window where raids can be reliably be enjoyed at true minimum item level and blind. When you say "just dont raid week 1" you're telling people "i don't believe you should be able to raid this way".

I won't say it's "the way the raids are meant to be played", i don't like that connotation that ranks how people enjoy raids - but i'll say it's close minded to dismiss people who are very invested in raid content who do care about that experience, because you don't.

Edit - damn didn't notice this is a necro. Deffo still a relevant conversation though.