Are we reading the same ffxiv forums? The vast majority of the forum poster seems to rather loath on raider and any and every person who actually manage to do contents or perform well in this game.
No, I will not just "please leave the thread", and you should be well aware of why. I've posted numerous times in this discussion in other threads making concrete and constructive suggestions such as, but not limited to;
Adding additional bosses & mechanics to Savage to rpovide some variety,
Adding additinal chambers/areas to the Savage version, for the same reason,
Adding a tier of crafted gear that when melded decently, provides an alternate path for gearing reducing the need to grind normal mode,
If you read my posts you'd know this. As for inflating your own self importance, you might want to check in the mirror because Not only your original post but the one I am replying to reek of it. Telling someone to leave a topic because you don't like what they say? Want to talk about inflated self importance again? This is a public forrum, I'm posting on topic and civily. You may not like my opinion, but your liking my opinion is not key to whether I can post it.
I did not demand you leave, I asked you to. I even invited you to stay if you actually want to talk about this without dragging your raider vs. casual rabble into this.
The first reply to this thread added nothing of substance other than to mock and ridicule me.
Your first substantive reply was nothing more than retort to someone else statement rather than expanding on your own thoughts. You are hardly posting constructively, it's only in your retort directly to me do you actually add any ideas.
I sort of reiterate what I said before. I would love to hear what you have to say. I am glad you are thinking of some of the same solutions I would like myself. Just, please, if you would, stop talking about my friends, statics members, and myself like we are all self disillusioned basement dwelling man children that had their toys taken away so we are just whining.
We are paying customers that love this game as much as you do and all customers, causal to the hardcore, should expect to enjoy this service.
I'm not even talking about raid difficulty, I'm talking about the dozens of threads and posts made about content like Titan Ex, Steps of Faith, Amdapor Keep, and Pharos Sirius being "too hard", I promise you the "raid community" aren't the ones making those posts.
Also the real complaints about DPS checks aren't that the fights that use them are too hard but rather:
A) they're tossed into the Duty Finder with no parser to measure performance towards those checks.
B) Constantly using them as a measure of difficulty is boring.
The fact that any thread mentioning tools to help players improve their performance is instantly buried in waves of comments about "letting people play how they want to play" or how players shouldn't have to "worry about their DPS" or the conversations in general degrade into tossing around words like elitist (which is constantly being improperly used btw) is a testament to how skewed the forums currently are.
If you honestly think that "hardcore players and raiders" make up the majority of posts on these forums I'm not sure you've actually been reading any of the posts.
Many of the players that you're seeing speak up now are either from the "wait and see crowd" that were willing to stick it out until Heavensward launch and now see that not much (See: nothing really) is changing, or are the players who have continued to see the dwindling numbers of long time subscribers quitting because they've gotten tired of waiting for things to "get better".
My first post was quoted in it's entirity from a completely separate thread, that's why he knows why I won't just leave this one. Furthermore he just added another of my posts from a separate thread and poured scorn on it. You want to talk about mocking people, consider the actions of the OP cherry picking spefifically my posts from other threads. Never mind talking about issues lets just cross posts people's posts from other topics to incite shall we? Very constructive, very civil and polite. What's next whackylacing?
If making a remark about the person who cross posted something I wrote in another thread counts as ridicule (go back to your original post, and the comment you quoted from another topic, and then work out who you quoted.), then I'm sorry, but you're being more than a little oversensitive.
I see, so you get to moderate topics do you? No, you don't. As for "posting constructively", you have on two or more occasions in this topic cross posted a comment of mine from another topic. You are making this personal, which it is not and never should be. If you think so little of what I am saying, why does it generate such a large and strong response? Did I hit a nerve? Either way, cross posting someone elses comments from other threads is pretty poor form, and pretty hypocritical for someone claiming others are not positive or constructive.
5 years and someone finally understand the issue with hard modes in MMORPG. There is hope.Citation:
It's infrequent for a team to be comprised of 8/8 top server players. its often more like a grab bag of skill levels.
Look, I don't really care to get into this detracting argument with you. It's juvenile and it will accomplish nothing.
Yes, I used your post, without your name, to help show how raider and raiding feedback is received. I felt that particular post exemplified how raiders are often misinterpreted, marginalized, and spoken for. I wanted to illustrate the tone that even simple feedback or a really good idea might receive.
I never replied to you in those other threads, if but briefly, and I have no personal beef with you. I can apologize for offending you. I am sorry for offending you with my cross post.
Now, this will be my last reply to you about this off topic disagreement, if you want to talk about the thread topic, fantastic, I would love to see what you have to say. Otherwise, I am going to go about my business trying to foster a productive dialogue.
I still don't see why people are crying about this, it's insane, like as if this was the first game to offer two different difficulty levels of the same content. Have any of you even played Diablo? Same game all the way through, change the difficulty and you get better gear drops. Even Metal Gear Solid 5 does this with the Substenance, Extreme and Total Stealth difficulties on certain missions, completing them results in a higher payout and higher skilled soldiers for base raiding. Savage has different mechanics then Normal mode as well, so it's basically like doing Savage Coil and Normal Coil and I haven't heard anyone complain about there being two SCoB difficulties, I mean Savage SCoB didn't even drop gear, only a title and people still did it. Raiding has never been exclusive in this game either, but people act like it always was and should be, I seriously don't understand this whole "Savage should have came first because I'm a raider" mentality either. Honestly more people would raid if T5 didn't leave such a bad taste in people's mouths from bad design. Furthermore raiding for gear is a pointless reason as I've stated that it only slightly boost our stats and ilv, it doesn't exactly make you a good player, knowing your skills is what ultimately lead to clears and make you a great player, as is your attitude towards others. It's like members of this community have only played this game in their entire lives, it's painful almost as painful as blaming a raid on your burn out, when the entire game is depleted and a utter mess thanks to bad planning and developer design ideology. So if you think that locking out story from everyone, the reason we all bought this in the first place is a good idea, you're almost as delusional as Donald Trump.
I do feel the raiding community is dying.
I'm a raider and I enjoyed BCOB, SCOB, SCOB Savage and FCOB back in the day. Cleared them without nerfs of any sorts, except for T5 since I didn't have a static back in the day. (This is not my main). Hyperion was full of competitive FCs, committed players, statics that worked as a team. Bunch of LS where you could pick up players that can manage and do the content without major issues. People enjoyed raiding because these 3 factors you mentioned. I feel that everything is gone now. Most raiders migrated to one single server, which is Gilgamesh. So the raider community got cluttered there, whereas other servers its group is slowly dying. Less and less people put PFs up to clear content together with pugs. It's all about statics missing members, trying to fill spots for weeks (Myself included, still looking for an MT).
People lost the motivation for raiding, and that hurts me, because it's a kind of content that I truly enjoy but almost no one is down for it. I wish I could move to Gilgamesh too, but I appreciate the company of my friends, even though they are all non-raiders.
Attitude wise, I try to reinforce the idea that not all raiders are bad. That they're helpful, that they are patient, that they aren't that one quiet player that rushes through the dungeon using all his party members as a mere object. Humilliating you if you did 300 DPS less as a DPS class while he was in a tanking class. After all, that's the first lesson you learn from raiding: Patience, followed by: people have different learning curves. It's not matter of life or dead if you wipe. Mistakes happen, learn from them. Try to give advice if needed and/or asked. Be polite to your fellow party members, after all you're part of the team and you all work as a whole. Help people. You, as a raider, experienced and somewhat skilled, have the power to help these guys. Don't be cocky, because you're leaving anything but a good impression.
In the end, both sides will attack to each other, since there're rotten eggs lying in every community nest. We can't change some people, we'll find them, that's for sure, but they don't represent the group as a whole. You, as an individual, have the power to understand this simple concept and just avoid generalizations like "all raiders are special snowflakes, elitist and toxic players that want their content away from the casual players" or "non-raiders are casuals that suck at the game and they feel entitled to everything the raiders have without any effort". Such is the magic of the internet, where your face is covered but your mouth, so you can be mean all you want and get away with it. When people fall into dehumanization, we know we have failed as a society.
A little bit of prefacing: first, a good post from the OP. Second, a few good posts here, but Malzian's post stands out quite well to me. Third, I used to be a raider, and pretty hardcore at that with WoW raiding Heroic before they changed it to Mythic, but I can't currently commit to any organized runs in this game. The whole vitriol between raider and non-raider on these boards is rather reminiscent, but feels like it's on a different level of friction than what I'm used to. Given how I started, how I progressed, and how I currently am as an MMO gamer, I feel like I can see both sides of this. If I may delve deeper into the current situation from my perspective.
The reasons for me to raid is to experience great encounters, the challenge of beating them, the camaraderie that comes with it, and gear. Even at current, I strive to perform as best as possible and gear as much as I can, because that's how I like to play. Story, despite my love for good narrative, plays zero part in raids. The only thing I can really comment on it is that the story for Alexander, in my eyes, is bland at best, but given this game is story driven, it is a good move to make it more accessible, and I don't think it should be so out of reach here. With that said, I've never taken part in Savage or any raiding here, so this is the view of an outsider with a heavy raiding background that is currently, what others would call, casual.
From my limited perspective and with a bit of projection of how I would feel about the current situation, it sounds like the encounters aren't quite different enough to add some zing to the bosses. If I were presently doing said content, I may find myself wishing there were more substance. While not all heroic bosses in WoW had added terribly new stuff, there was just enough that were different to make it a more interesting raid, be it entirely new mechanics, new phases, or tweaking mechanics to make you think differently about how you do it. If it were Fight A with more sparkles, then I can see myself being bored.
Another thing I can only observe is that having only one raid (if you don't include trials) to do over an over can be a pain. Bolding for emphasis before I start my giant ass comparison, I get that SE's strength isn't raid design and raiding isn't their breadwinner here, but not having a good menu to choose from can stifle growth in it and leave people languishing. My raiding started in BC, but up to me quitting after Cata, I've had a number of raids to do, plus a lot more than two heroic instances to run. Perhaps as far as raid types go currently here VS what I did in WoW, I can best compare a two trial-one raid setting to WotLK (didn't raid Vanilla, so no applicable views there) since on release, it did only have one multiple-boss raid, but here's what was on the table: Naxxramas (10/25 man multiple boss), Eye of Eternity (10/25 single boss), Obsidian Sanctum (10/25 single boss with token trash packs, and with the option of making it harder by leaving mini bosses alive), and Vault of Archavon (10/25 initially single boss, more were added later, though note that it was in a PvP zone, which affected what faction got to do it at any given time). All of that, plus heroic instances, at end game. The only time this has failed me really is WoD, where there was only one raid to do, and that didn't keep me entertained for long.
Would having more than one raid alleviate the problem? Perhaps, but maybe it would only delay or prolong the problem. What about difficulty levels? Without repeating my first thought, hypothetically speaking, if I had a lot more free time, I would do Savage and possibly find the difficulty fine, because I'm strange and love beating my head against a wall. What if I had only a little more time than I do now, or if I wasn't busying myself with other aspects of the game? I wouldn't have the ability to commit to Savage, but I find "Normal" to not be normal at all, I find it easy, but considering the nomenclature in the game, it seems to go Normal, Hard, Extreme, Savage. How about adding a third difficulty in between? Not a cakewalk, but not putting yourself through a meatgrinder. The suggestion has come up before (and I think I saw it here too). I've also seen suggestions for more fluff (items, mounts, glamour, titles) to be added to Savage, but that feels more like a band-aid.
Now tying in my first point, a third difficulty with differences in encounters at the different difficulties could be a good solution. I still think more than one raid on top of those two points could help, but raids to take time and resources. So easily said, maybe not so easily done with the latter, but the first two, I would say is more feasible.
That's my view of the whole situation and what my opinions are on what to do with it. Varied content, possibly only at the price of slightly longer development times.
In Coil Savage most groups were still logging in to complete the normal version long after savage was released with fcob being on the horizon, leaving little time to make meaningful progress in savage after you managed to clear T9 the first time.
In Coil Savage you were on the same lockout as the normal version so if your group beat it early enough that you could make progress on savage before fcob came out and one friend in your group didn't want to do it you had to either be a dbag and kick your friend or wait until you had cleared fcob.
In Alexander savage everyone cleared story version in less than a day with nothing for your static to do other than savage for 8 months because everything else in the game can be done without one.
I cleared a4s last week. I am more of a "combat" player than "gatherer", "crafter", "leveler" kind of player.
I feel that there are also casual gamers who just want to play combat stuffs. Just killing mobs and not doing the rest of the content for example crafting.
I really don't think its a problem between casuals, mid core, hardcore issue. A lot of people just wants to kill stuffs and be rewarded.
When I first played this game, I just simply keep killing stuffs. Cos I really like the combat system. So I killed mobs till level50, I did fates and dungeons.
So I continued by farming tomes to get armor, kill primals, get my relic and proceeded to get people to challenge FCOB. It was fun until I cleared FCOB.
There was nothing else besides FCOB.
Sorry but I have to bring up on FFXI. When I played FFXI, I could go Sky if not dynamis or even BCNM. There are a lot of stuffs to do in parallel. Sky is really hard so it took a while. When I got burned out from doing Sky, I went and do dynamis, BCNM, etc. There were always stuffs for me to kill and challenge.
FFXIV has this problem that players need to clear stuffs in sequence.
Heavensward sequence
1) Level60
2) Grind dungeon for law
3) Bismark EX
4) Ravana EX for weapon
5) Alexander Normal
6) Farm Eso
7) Alexander Savage
Once I finished gearing in 1-5, I stopped doing them. Cos its pointless. So I end up with 6 and 7. And there is NO combat alternatives. Nothing to kill.
If anyone gets stuck at A3S, they got nothing else to do. They get burned out eventually and quit.
Some of my static players are so fond of killing stuffs, they went back to help people clear A3. Or even join them for practice sessions. I even did A3S P2 practice the other day.
Cos right now there is nothing else that is challenging nor fun imo in terms of combat besides savage.
I really hope SE can expand on the combat content of the game. Having a good combat system is useless when there is nothing to kill.
I disagree, it was more, imo, that they shared the same lock out. Even if they had removed the gear drops from Savage coil and put it on a seperate lockout then there would have been more players attempting savage coil when it was released. As an optional side challenge Savage would have worked better.
On topic:
On Odin I've seen quite a few statics break up because of members quiting due to the present raid tier. My static is going through the same also. A tank and a healer have already cancelled this month and in Oct we will be losing 2 more. With coil we all looked forwards to doing Coil, to pushing progression to unlock the next part of the story, to seeing the next turn for the first time. Whereas with Alex, as you have stated, there is no sense of mystery, no wow factor when you finally progress because we have seen it all before with the mandatory gear progression through Alex normal. Normal, imo, should have been optional content for those who want to experience the, albeit lackluster in comparison to coils, story rather than a mandatory section of the gear progression. Or Normal held back until they normally nerf the current raid tier and instead implement normal to allow non-raiders to "catch-up" on the story.
Also raiders v casuals, I see less raiders rage when wipes occur because we are used to wiping over and over. Whereas those who rage the most, usually fail the most and try to misdirect their mistakes onto others.
Third Difficulty could be possible. In fact, it could resolve a lot of things on the ground. More so fulfills time sink, enabling the developers to have slightly more time/breathing space to develop content rather then being stressed out...
Though the cons would be the amount of resources that would be required for future updates to then fulfill that content requirement.
Not dissing the idea, I think its good, yet there's some cons we got to be aware of as what you mentioned.
Honestly, I'm almost at the conclusion that the largest part of the raiding community in this game is just bad. As I've said earlier, if the complaint about Savage is that is actually hard, and that SE should make a slightly less hard Alexander (or equivalent) is disgraceful and one shouldn't even call themselves a raider at that point. Criticism about the mechanics, the loot drops, that is fine. But if the issue is Savage is actually difficult for the majority and they should make something easier? Get out of here. And again, this is coming from a scrub who has in order of raiding history never progressed out of Karazhan due to guild poaching, made it to the Amphitheater of Uldar all of once maybe two times, and never made it past the Crimson Halls before it was nerfed to oblivion.
I can only hope SE has heard the cries of the anguished though, and proceed with the next tier of raiding appropriately;
1) Alex NM2 only dropping tomes. Having gear in it makes Savage Alexander gear is not worth having. So as an intensive to have people actually do it, it will just drop tomes. Slightly more than the expert roulette.
2) Alexander Savage be equivalent in difficulty/mechanics to 2nd/3rd Coil. From what I understand, going exclusively by the complaints lobbied about it, Savage Alexander is harder than Coil or at least more gear dependent than the last bindings of Coil. As such, make them more equivalent to the last two Coil, which again unless I'm mistaken, brings the difficulty down to more..."reasonable levels".
3) Beating the last floor of Savage will give each party member a upgrade item for whatever set is available at the time. No rolling for it, you just get it, for the incentive to run it.
For bonuses, I'd bump up the levels of all the Trials and raids to 60 and remove the lvl 50 versions in general.
I love most of the points OP discussed, that was probably the first long post i've ever read.
As a raider who's in it for the challenge I personally don't believe the current difficulty of Alex Savage is the problem right now. People are getting burnt out because things were poorly planned and laid out.
Lets take a moment and compare normal SCoB to normal Alex:
-Many people considered normal SCoB as major content whereas you will need a static to try it out and beat it. Normal Alex didn't as it was easy enough to do with randoms and people who are new or just came back to the game.
-Normal SCoB had lockouts that made it feel special. Normal Alex don't.
-Normal SCoB offered the best gear at the time. Normal Alex was just a stepping stone for Savage Alex.
What caused the burn out? Savage isn't all that different from normal mode... It's the same boss, same stage, same music with a few new mechanics. To top it all off the story is just very bland... I'm sorry, I just can't take a cutscene full of goblins very seriously. I love this game, but this is just not the best update for me. :) I would personally suggest for them to get rid of the overly easy normal mode and bring back the difficulty normal scob had. They can implement Savage afterwards with special rewards such as dyeable versions of the gear that dropped from the normal 'normal mode' aside from the titles. That would make it very interesting for me as I could get dyeable HA coat of healing or something aside from the good challenge I got from clearing savage.
Ok i read the full post Editing to include more
My two cents on everything, is we need to drop the WoW lables. Before WoW i never heard the tearms of hardcore, casual, raider, and non-raider. (regardless if these terms started in WoW or not thats, when i first heard them). We are all players of different backgrounds, time frames, gaming skill, and we all play this game for different reasons and enjoy different content. Why seperate players into segragated groups? I think thats the first mistake we mmo players make. If anything seperate the "elitist" from everyone else. Elistist being the jerk players who become pig headed because they think their are good, and berate and belittle everyone else who they think/assume are not at their level.
I also think those who do savage shouldn't have expected bonus stuff from it. SE was pretty detailed in what to expect, it simply a harder version that is all it was going to be. Similar to how savage version of coil is just a harder version of coil. And the reason behind the Normal mode is to let more people see the story. Which is a good idea and wish they did a normal version of coil. Having bonus story for savage modes would be a kick in the teeth to the players who are not able to do savage mode for one reason or another. These raids are infact interwoven into the over all story/lore of FF14, infact you see Alex rise out after the story, much like you hear bahamuts roar after 2.0 story.
example of this being: Coil explains what happen during the calamity, and what happen in the 5 years.This would be considered part of the main story for player from 1.0, as the story lead up to the calamity.
As for alex, anyone who paid attention to brayflox saw this coming. She has been fighting the illuminati since the Company of heros disbanded trying to stop them from hording gobbie knowledge and the art of fine cheese making. And she shows up again during heavensward continueing said fight, and you learn alot more of that sect of goblins.
In both cases, coil and alex, we are scions. Our role as a scion is to fight primals which was the reasoning behind both coil and Alex.
Also to note, not everyone is familur with how ff14 is set up, I personally come from ff11. i tried WoW and didn't like it and never raided in WoW so im not familur with the set up. I'm also not to familur with how the ilvl system work, and how post cap gearing really works as its completely different to what I'm personally used to. Things like normal version of raids help with this, and wish SE did this sooner, I'm also glad they did put Alex normal in DF (i'm not a fan of DF btw) as i'm not too familur with the concept of statics, as I'm more used to having an endgame linkshell and doing scedualed events with them, which isn't done here.
Edit: my thoughts on your personal feelings, first off thanks for sharing I hope venting helps you enjoy the game more, as it sucks when people stop enjoying a game they like. What i noticed is you think on the lines of segragating the community, and having a "what about me?" moment in SE sudden change in direction of raiding. What i think is you need to take a step back, take a deep breath and really think hard on what raiding means to you. Like why do you raid? Why do you find raiding fun? Also think why raiding exists in MMO.
I think you may need to re-adjust to the new direction SE is taking on raiding in ff14 and find away to enjoy it. I think overall this change was a good thing, as it gets this type of content out to more players to try. I think all mmo should have done steping stone endgame content, as it gets people unfamilur with it to try the content out, and build up to do the harder version of the content. I think it is a bit of a shame that such a small poplulation of MMO communities do this spectrum
of content. I wish that number was bigger because that will not only give the game room to grow, it will build a larger pool of players making it much more easier to build up LS's and groups for said content.
My final thoughts are kicking members should be a last restort, and only if they have a bad attitude. Kicking a member for "not meeting numbers" is a big reason alot of people think said spectrum of players are rude, as to me it is rude to do so. Take time to prepare your team, take time to help your team improve. Doing so builds team bonding which inturn builds the teams skill level. Rather saying "my static" say "my raiding friends". Alot of the reasons people don't like the raiding enviroment is, its treated like a work place, or at worst the military. You are treated like a underpaid bottum feeder or a yellow bellied grunt by the leaders. There is also alot of favoritism, between leaders and their irl friend to fresh members of said raid group. I have personally experienced alot of this in ff11, WoW, and AION. Which is why I enjoy the added "story mode" alex as those bad experiences made me miss out on coil as I was shy to even find a group when I was max level. Also to add, I'm a ps3 ONLY player, this also made it hard to look for a group cuz alot of raid groups require some form of voice chat which i have 0 access too. Which in the past I was looked down on by people.
My worst experience was playing WoW and trying to find a guild, alot of them require addons and a voip as they also was raiding or was considering it. I had told guilds, that my pc was shared with 6 ppl so downloading addons or a voip wasn't an option for me. I was then heavily insulted by said guilds for being lazy (im far from it)
Inshort, we need to drop the segratation lables, we need to learn to word things better when making suggestions, and lastly we need to consider players other then ourselves and what their gaming experience is when making said suggestions, as well as maybe retihink our attitudes on raiding.
Thanks for reading
Are you kidding me? You're one of the worst posters on these forums. Constant straw-man arguments, excessive use of anecdotes, and the delusions that this game is "fine" and "I don't know what people are complaining about. So yes, unless you're going to add something constructive to the conversation, do us a favor and GTFO!@
the problem that people have is mostly having to grind normal to start gearing up. They put gear in the normal story mode that was meant to be so all could enjoy the story. And when you make such a gap in gear levels of 180 (enhanced doma gear) to about 200(af2eso gear) people are going to burn themselves out farming normal because of the weekly lock on eso tomes. I don't think it helps that the fights in normal are very easy.
Only thing that makes normal slightly harder than an expert dungeon in duty finder is because you need an extra 4 people and we all know duty finder can be an awful place at times.
So many really long posts O_O would be nice if people cut out the fluff and got to the point
People that actually care about being a "raider" or a "casual" are idiots...you're either good or your bad and there are plenty of goods and bads in both groups, I've seen some casuals who kick ass, I've seen some raiders that are down right bad. Play the game how you want, stop comparing your self to other players and stop projecting your personal views onto other players too.
Something important that should never be forgotten. Also, if a game doesn't look good for you, it can be good for someone else.
I understand that some people are unhappy with how things are, but there are also people that like how things are. I for example are happy with the situation right now. could it be better? Of course, nothing is perfect and it can always be better. But whatever SE does, there will always be someone to complain.
In my current static, more than half of us work and we are from different time zones. We raid about 2 hours a day, 3 days a week. And that's enough for us to enjoy and have fun together. We still need to clear A2S but we can see evident progress every time we go in. It might look slow for most of you, but for us it's fine and works well. Are we going to get destroyed once we reach A3S? Most likely. But I totally look forward to it, having fun wiping with my friends in a challenging fight.
I read a lot of complaints about the current Alex Savage. The one that surprise me the most is how it is a gear check and without that minimum gear you cannot clear it and blame it on SE. What nonsense. The community decides this. The ones getting world first clear set up the bar on the maximum skill. Every piece of gear you need is to compensate the difference in skill with those teams. and it varies greatly from person to person. And it's not bad! We are not machines, we are all different and play slightly differently (difference can be very small but can have big impact). To each one is own pace.
Same goes for the fending accessories. Best tanks will not need them and label them as useless. I see them as options to compensate mistakes from my part (since I am the tank) or from my healers. I'm not perfect and I can make mistakes (and I will usually blame myself for doing them), same goes for my healers. If I need a cushion to compensate for that, I don't mind. If the price to pay is delaying our clear for a few weeks, that's also fine. what matters is that in the end we get better, we progress, we will clear it when the time comes.
Back in time when coil was the only raid, people complained it was too hard and they couldn't see the story. So SE gave them what they wanted, an easy version for the story....
That was a well thoughout post OP. I think part of the problem in getting new blood to join in on the raid is in part the DPS checks. I know many regard high DPS and some look down on those who don't "perform" this way. This is one issue that shy me away from doing high end raids because I know full well I can't deal that high damage. To me that's a chore and makes the game unfun for me because I have to worry about my DPS over enjoying the game. I don't think of myself a bad player but at the same time I'm not the bestest. It's also why I tend to avoid parties with 2 strike rules or will replace if DPS is low. It creates this mindset to me that I shouldn't attempt this raid because I don't have very high DPS levels. So I end up tackling a raid after it becomes laughable. While I don't mind challenge, (cleared SoF pre-nerf) but at the same thing I don't want to spend hours and hours just to down one boss and then having to do it over and over to farm the loot. But I do understand where the high end raiders are coming from. Back when the bane T5, the joy of finally bring down Twintania and moving on to SCoB. Indeed story is a great reward in itself but at the same time, it shouldn't be gated as well. When I see posts that want to get rid off Alex NM, it puts me to fly because it's like the hardcore are blaming the casuals for their stale Savage. I do agree SE should've handle Savage better. I haven't even step foot in Savage and I hear the horror stories. Other stigma SE has inadvertently created is this idea of BiS. Because they really simplified stats and attributes, there's only like 2 stats worth having on because anything else "hinders" your performance. Tho this is a personal complaint I have with the game, I think it does have some effect.
Anywho, just my take on how some might feel, as I do understand both sides of the fences.
There is still one thing people don't seem to understand. Normal Coil =/= Normal Alexander
Normal Coil was a bit easier than Savage Alexander, but much much much much much harder than any extreme primal or normal Alexander.
Savage Coil came only as a fun experiment from devs. Savage Alexander doesn't come as a fun addition or as a side content, it is main content for raiders.
You cannot really compare Savage Coil and Savage Alexander only because they have the same name, these 2 pieces of content serve completely different purpose.
Savage Alexander is the same what Normal coil was in 2.X. It even offers the same equipment rewards compared to the rest of 3.0.
Please don't act like adding Savage Alexander was some kind of favor from developers, thanks.
It's not tho. Biggest complaint is that normal Alex was a mandatory part of the progression path and that players burnt out on it before Savage was released. That there is nothing different in Savage, that there is no story to discover, no new mobs to beat. It's rehashed, plus the difficulty is more gearcentric than SCoB for example which was heavily mechanics based in difficulty.
The heavy gear check difficulty of Savage Alex was in response to a very small part of the raiding community being able to circumvent the planned gearing progression through FCoB by the use of penta-melded gear. The majority of the raiding community still progressed at the expected rate. SE took it way to the extreme in Savage.
For me the best Raid tier that was balanced between mechanics and gear progression was SCoB.
Also doesn't help that one of the most popular tanks, PLD, is a detriment in comparison to WAR and DRK in savage so long term PLD raiders where forced to change.
Or... you know.. the simple joy of playing a video game. I've always called BS on story (and to a lesser extent gear) being the major motivating factors for raiding. Don't get me wrong - the gear is nice, but it's the cherry on top the ass kicking sundae of FINALLY downing content that you and your friends have been working on for weeks (or even months).
Ask most groups one raiding session away from a kill if they mind giving up one of the chests if it finally means downing a given turn. I think you'll find the vast majority will opt for the kill.
That's why we need to distribute all the endgame in several raids,not only Alexander. For example, 2 sets of 4 raids each one with 8man and other with 16 ppl to use actual and future jobs more effectly.
Rewards between them should be suitable to beam the ohers raids but we will need more customizable gear, with set bonus and new sockets for materia, not only in pvp.
Well to be fair OP when 2.0 first launched the upgraded relic(i90) and the coil weapons (i90) were the same, til enough raiders complained getting +5ilvl. When the soldiery upgrades/unidentified tome became accessible to everyone, complained about casual s "ilvl welfare program". And when the zeta came out too. A lot of complaints were about ilvl
And that is fine. That is a legit complaint.
But my rant was directed at those who see Savage as too difficult and demand something easier in it's place. They can suck it.
And no, I don't adhere to the idea of "midcore". I've heard enough people not agree to what it even means to come to my own conclusion that if you aren't good enough for what you believe is "hardcore" then you shouldn't be doing it at all.
I'm going to disagree here. No, raiders shouldn't have an entire section of the storyline for themselves. Unless you're also okay with eventual nerfs to that raid content somewhere down the line (and the whole point of savage is to not have to nerf the content as they did with Coil).
Sadly, this is as you have said, standard for raiding as a whole. You saw stuff like this in WoW too. Probably worse due to loot drama (which thankfully has a less chance of happening here between smaller raid sizes and the loot systems in place).Citation:
This has caused many midcore raiders just to up and leave the game. Even high end raiders peppered throughout the raiding statics on any given server are leaving. It's infrequent for a team to be comprised of 8/8 top server players. its often more like a grab bag of skill levels. Statics are imploding right and left as some of these teams are unable to carry their weak link or two anymore. High end to mid core, people don't want to carry on when the raid is THIS challenging and when its EVEN MORE CHALLENGING to fill a roster after losing people week after week.
This part echoes a sentiment I've seen floating around: the need for an intermediate tier or something that's not tuned to the harsh levels of Savage. This said, you haven't really touched on things to actually resolve the issue. Based on what I've been seeing floating around, the issues are the difficulty settings (which a developer may shoot down for one of several reasons) and raid design (why aren't you guys discussing this more?).Citation:
If you made it this far, thank you for taking the to humor my ramblings, We are almost done and I will soon wrap this up. Anyways, this is the situation us raiders are contending with now. Many teams are stuck and imploding on a3s. Teams on a4s are fighting to keep a roster full for content that will have 1/3 it's value, bis gear, taken away in 6 weeks. Another 1/3 of the content, the story, has been so underwhelming and unhyped that no one cares about it, and the last 1/3, the challenge, is not well designed for most raiders. This challenge was tailored for lucrezia and sever 1st groups, Alex savage, the only meaningful raid in the game, alienates, disparages, and disenfranchised a lion's share of ARR raiders. What they had is now gone, the four bosses they looked forward to every six month have been tuned so high, only the best of the best raiders will see full clears. The rest of the raiding population will be stuck with the first two floors until there are nerfs, another raid tier, or both.
What I'd want to see the devs do is implement story mode raids (what we have right now with Alex 1-4), then a hard mode with more difficult mechanics. The savage stuff (AKA the versions of these fights tuned for world 1st FCs) would be triggerable mid-fight. An example would be A1 Hard Mode (maybe A1 mechanics plus only the 4 nukes instead of the 2 and the tank-busters?) having a gobbie in a Dr. Robotnik-style hover machine that sticks around for about 4 minutes into the fight then leaves. If the raid manages to damage both Oppressor and .5 down to a certain HP percentage within those 4 minutes, Savage Mode is triggered, causing the gobbie to repair both to full and then introduce the really difficult mechanics with high DPS requirements. So an average raiding group would still be able to clear it and gear up while also eventually becoming strong enough to trigger Savage Mode.
Better raid pacing and raid sizes (really, we need raids with more than just 4 bosses in one tier) would also help. Someone on reddit brought up the point that bigger raids allow for hard brick wall-type bosses as well as easier bosses that act as a sort of cool-off before going to another hard boss. In fact, the poor raid pacing seen in Alexander most likely has a hand in people getting burned out.
The one thing I will agree with you is BiS not coming from savage. If this is indeed the case then I agree that something is wrong.
Playing devil's advocate here, but why not, exactly? You don't see people who refuse to tank complain that they don't get to experience the WAR, PLD or DRK storyline, or people who don't wish to heal rage at how they're locked out of experiencing the WHM, SCH or AST storyline. And it's not like "That's different, those storylines are class based!" because, well, Binding Coil was raid based. Sure, it's easier to get those storylines than to get Coil's, no argument there, but it's still an example of storylines exclusive to a specific type of gameplay (class based gameplay, in this case) with no easy or all-access mode, just as Coil was (only there the gameplay was aimed at those who wished to challenge themselves).
"But Coil storyline was an important part of the Main Scenario, the job and class storylines are not!" Well, not so much an important part of ARR's Main Scenario as tying up loose ends of 1.x, but fair enough. Even so, one could still not see the Coil story and be perfectly able to follow the MSQ. It's not as if the Binding Coil storyline was mandatory to understanding ARR's overal plot. Same with the job and class storylines. Only those are fine being gated behind something (having to play other classes you may not like), while Coil, for some reason, isn't. That's starting to look like double standards to me.
You could argue that "the job and class storylines are accessible to everyone!" but, well, so was Coil's. There's nothing locking people out of Coil (besides having had to beat the original 3 HM primals), so the only thing keeping them out of it is themselves. I'm not saying they have to do Coil, I'm just saying they did have the option of doing it if they wanted the story. Which, again, I know wasn't always so easy in practice. Getting groups together or finding a static before Coil was added to the DF and echo'd wasn't always easy, I know that from experience. Even so, the option was there nonetheless.
Non-tanks don't get to experience the tank storylines. Non-healers don't get to see the healer storylines. DPSers, same thing. Story exclusivity does exist in this game, even outside of the raids. So why is it bad that raiders get their own piece of story content, again?
Not sure how I was rude and "caustic". Just some advice on how to effectively communicate. Forums are a very poor place for what is essentially a blog post. The key to good communication is to understand your audience and your medium and to speak to them.
In my profession, I've seen lots of extremely smart people that go overboard with text, content, unnecessary graphics, etc. which only serves to make most of the audience tune out. You may be successful at reaching some but overall, the result will not be good. Not relevant for this audience but this is especially true when you are communicating to decision makers.
Maybe because Alex Savage is meant for the players that did regular Coil and Alex normal is meant to be the easier mode for the people that complained they can't see the story of coil?
Comparing normal mode Alexander with regular Coil is like comparing Sastasha (Lvl 15) with Aurum Vale.
Alex Savage is meant to be the raid for raiders that did regular coil.
The story for alex is so far removed from the rest of the game that I don't think anyone would care much if there was only one alex raid similar to binding coil.
Also you could always just watch it on youtube. I totally get that that's not the same and all, but people make it sound like you just had no option to ever understand the story. If you wanted to watch the story but not do the fights, that was always an option.
Also, as a raider, the coil story was amazing for me. Not because of epeen exclusivity, but because they gave the fights some really epic context. I don't really like when people shoehorn a raider's motivation into having to be one thing. Mostly I just enjoyed the fights, the gear was a nice bonus, and the story greatly enhanced the experience. Fighting Bahamut at Alex storymode level difficulty would've been really unfulfilling for me personally. And call it what you will, but farming an ezmode bahamut for 4 weeks before seeing the "real" fight would have taken a lot of the epicness out of it.
I'm not really sure what, if anything, I'm suggesting. Probably nothing. I don't know the solution. I like that people can experience the story first hand. But I feel like the way it was implemented cost the story some of its epic quality.
Honestly, this is also a pretty good point. People cared about missing out on the coil story because they were actually missing out on something. Say what you will about it not technically affecting the msq directly, but "so what's the deal with Bahamut?" was a very important question. Alex isn't really relevant to anything. And on top of that, most people don't seem to like the story. I've seen a lot of people complaining about it (myself included tbf), and the highest praise I've seen is either "give it a chance there are still 2 more installments" or "I didn't dislike it", neither of which are shining endorsements.