Normal/Savage Raids should be one big raid

I think there's a lot of good points that've been brought up about things that might come out of going to a more "alliance raid"-like version of normal/savage raids: areas feeling more connected, more interesting design for the boss rooms...

...but none of that really requires putting everything in one instance. As someone doing Savage currently, reclearing the first half of P8S is already annoying at times, when small mistakes lead to wasting time on the fight we already cleared that gives us no real rewards; if there was only one checkpoint after the second boss like suggested, that happening every instance with the first/third boss seems like it'd get real old, real fast.

But even if it was a matter of "no enemies in the instance respawn until weekly reset" to avoid that annoyance, I'm just not really sure that FFXIV raids need trash mobs? It really just seems like a preference for a certain style of content, and as people have already pointed out - while not the main raids, FFXIV does have content like that - just not its raids.

Looking back at Coils and Alexander normal mode (since I wasn't around for Alexander Savage on-content and haven't done it), where trash mobs did exist in raids: most of those trash mobs are very forgettable. There's a few examples where that's not true, but those are mostly the ones where the "trash" is more of a mini-boss before the main boss, rather than actual packs of enemies.

And for a final somewhat different point: making all four bosses of a raid tier in one instance would mean that there's basically no chance for story to happen in between the fights, which limits the type of story they can tell in raids. Even in Coils and Alexander, decent chunks of the narrative happened between fights; if everything's shoved into one instance, suddenly all of the story has to be delivered only before the first fight and after the last. Not trying to say that style of writing can't work - it obviously can, that's how Alliance Raids and the various exploratory zone raids work - but it's a different approach entirely from what we've gotten. I enjoy the fights of raids, but even if I liked the idea of a single instance for the combat's sake, I'd be pretty disappointed if the narrative suffered for that.

Another important factor is balancing the fight.

Trash mobs = resources. Now you have players fighting over whether they should kill everything quickly to be done, or others wanting to slow roll so they can build up their gauges. You have players wanting to spend even more time just so they can get a perfect pre-pull. You have players that just put something important on cooldown and now they want to wait two minutes for it to be up at the start of the boss. And nobody likes respawning trash? Well now you have groups that want to just bail after a wipe because they don't have trash to build resources off of anymore. The boss literally gets harder after a wipe because there's no pre-pull prep.

It's simply a whole lot easier to accept that "raid" in FF14 terminology is not the same as "raid" from some other game. What you want is an entirely different form of content; trying to change a pre-existing format is asking for trouble.

They put any trash in the quests and battles before the raid, so that you only fight them once on your own and parties don't get burdened with them every time they queue in. I don't think they have done much of that either since Stormblood, but it's how they would do it now.

I prefer it to work the way it does, because you can just hop in, fight the boss you actually want to and then hop out. People already find it annoying that there is a door boss in the last raid of each tier, so how would they react to there being lots of door bosses?

The reason it works for alliance raids or bozja raids is because all but one of these was very casual and easy. Even so, there are times I just don't do an alliance raid because they are too long. I avoid the Alliance Raid roulette most of the time unless someone else queues me in. Not needing to spend more than 20 minutes in any content in this game has grown on me. It was so awful being sucked into other games like this for hours, getting hungry or tired and not being able to stop because the content lasted hours.

This development style supports your ability to take breaks between bosses which is healthy.

The way normal/ savage raids are designed never appealed to me one bit. They're glorified trials, they're all about efficiency and having to spend as little time as possible with the content and for me, the atmosphere suffered greatly.
Raids have always been about fighting my through a dangerous, vast environment for me. Getting ported into a cube with a boss right in front of me just feels disconnected and sterile.

If they made trash a bit more interesting in terms of mechanics instead of being 5 target dummies dragged to one spot and maybe gave them some small drops like a few uncapped tomes or something and made sure that if you wipe to boss 3, you can teleport back to boss 3 instead of having to take a long walk through the entire dungeon again, I could see it happening. Increasing the duty timer would help as well so groups that prog savage don't have to worry about not getting enough practice time in.
And I think especially for savage, groups should be able to leave to get new members while keeping their instance with the progress they already made. Perhaps they could solve it so that as long as lead was passed on to someone who was part of the previous prog group, the instance and the prog gets passed on as well.

And there's something between never having to spend more than 20min and suddenly having to spend several hours with content and not being able to eat or go to the toilet. Exaggeration doesn't make a good point, it just sounds narrow-minded.

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

And there's something between never having to spend more than 20min and suddenly having to spend several hours with content and not being able to eat or go to the toilet. Exaggeration doesn't make a good point, it just sounds narrow-minded.

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It's not an exaggeration. That is literally how other games I've played have been because there was not a duty finder. It was a lot like finding a party for BA without discord, or finding a party for savage at 3am by shouting around, with content that spans multiple bosses and trash. Between all of that I couldn't stop to eat hardly for hours. This game has been better than any other in that area.

What really is the difference between leaving at the third boss and then joining a new party and skipping to the third boss, and them being in separate instances, really?

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

So how about this. Why dont we take the existing raid tiers which has 4 bosses but build a whole large dungeon into it where you explore the instance, fight mobs and encounter these bosses for one huge raid instead? Pretty much an 8-Man raid dungeon. Imagine having to actually physically delve far down into the coils of bahamut

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They did something like this with Binding Coil. The first 4 turns (not counting 5) required traversing a "dungeon" to get to the boss, sometimes with mini-bosses along the way. They just broke the raid into 5 parts as checkpoints. Turn 3 didn't even have a boss. It was just trash all the way down.

However, the problem is that scaling trash to be anything more than trivial trash is difficult. Not saying it is impossible, but they already did something like what you are asking.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

It's not an exaggeration. That is literally how other games I've played have been because there was not a duty finder. It was a lot like finding a party for BA without discord, or finding a party for savage at 3am by shouting around, with content that spans multiple bosses and trash. Between all of that I couldn't stop to eat hardly for hours. This game has been better than any other in that area.

What really is the difference between leaving at the third boss and then joining a new party and skipping to the third boss, and them being in separate instances, really?

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Would it make sense for me to say
"We cannot ever have character customization like talent trees because I played a game where you couldn't respect and if you bricked your spec, you had to level a new character from scratch"?
No?
Indeed, that is why it makes no sense immediately swining to the other extreme and saying because you have played some games where you apparently weren't allowed to eat or go to the toilet we cannot have proper dungeon-style raids. Because that IS deliberately picking extreme examples to argue against something that was never meant to be anywhere near the extremes that you saw. "Finding parties by shouting around"? Does it look like we still live in the stone age of MMOs? We already HAVE a Duty Finder and Party Finder so your example of games that didn't have either are completely pointless and yes, exaggerated.

And you're right, the difference isn't much for people who deliberately want to prog a certain boss - which I am honestly okay with. Is that a bad thing now?
A new party will have the entire dungeon-style raid again but someone filling in for a party being stuck at the 3rd boss won't have to. I was trying to find some middleground here because people like to instantly screech about not wanting to have to spend the entire day on fluff and I can see why it would be annoying to have to re-do the entire dungeon for every single wipe. While in an instance, trash and bosses shouldn't respawn.
That takes priority and since it wouldn't make sense to code in a way that a single person being behind resets the progress of the entire party yes, that option exists.
Which is also the way a lot of other games deal with it, by the way. Someone has a lockout to a certain part and whoever joins their "ID" gets to that point. No "spending hours and not being able to eat".

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Originally Posted by Rilifane

it makes no sense immediately swining to the other extreme and saying because you have played some games where you apparently weren't allowed to eat or go to the toilet we cannot have proper dungeon-style raids. Because that IS deliberately picking extreme examples to argue against something that was never meant to be anywhere near the extremes that you saw.

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I don't think it's an extreme. It's pretty reasonable that splitting the floors up means you aren't forced to stay in the raid. Again we should look at the door boss in P8S. Once you are at part 2, the longest you can go afk is 10 minutes because you get kicked out otherwise and then you have to do part 1 all over again. Which is actually a problem if part 1 takes a lot of attempts to get through. This is the problem it creates and it would be worse with lots more bosses and therefore a longer completion timer.

We could have the system to just enter a duty in progress that is at that phase already or start at it, but from a developer point of view that is going to be a waste of their time to achieve almost the same thing that we have just to satisfy the technicality that it's all happening in the same instance.

I agree combine them... and failing at third, does not grant completion priveligies.. you need to start over from the beginning and of course you get to keep the items won but max 1 drop per raid like 24man.

I would like to see that and it would actually encourage me to do it in savage as well... as would feel the real punch.

Or leave it with save spots.. so if you pass one you can go onto the path of the second one at a later stage in the week but if missing out you need to start over at next reset again, the idea of not just can start neverending progressing on the final boss in the raid as soon as completed part 3 as it is now is kind of a weak move.