Is EX/Savage content a battle or a dance number?

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Originally Posted by Xerek

They have fewer mechanics then O1S and O2S and feel less like a dance, allowing more time to actually fight the fight? Because if nothing else, the guides I watched and read on O3S suggest there are more arbitrary, non-combat related mechanics to it, not less.

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My point is, you’re basing your perspective on Savage content based off of the two easiest fights in the tier.

I’m not sure what you’re looking for now, to be honest. Your OP complained about the lack of difficulty, then the post I responded to seemed like you were complaining about the lack of job-specific mechanics (since you said something about how there was nothing different from playing a tank than playing a healer in V1S), but now you’re complaining about not wanting mechanics at all? Some clarification would be much appreciated.

“Mechanic dances” are what make a fight more interesting as opposed to a fight with no mechanics at all. If I wanted to fight a Striking Dummy, I would fight a Striking Dummy.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

My point is, you’re basing your perspective on Savage content based off of the two easiest fights in the tier.

I’m not sure what you’re looking for now, to be honest. Your OP complained about the lack of difficulty, then the post I responded to seemed like you were complaining about the lack of job-specific mechanics (since you said something about how there was nothing different from playing a tank than playing a healer in V1S), but now you’re complaining about not wanting mechanics at all? Some clarification would be much appreciated.

“Mechanic dances” are what make a fight more interesting as opposed to a fight with no mechanics at all. If I wanted to fight a Striking Dummy, I would fight a Striking Dummy.

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At no point, in my OP or otherwise, was difficulty mentioned. You misread, obviously.

As I noted prior, my issue was with the sheer volume of mechanic dances involved. Ones that have nothing to do with job roles or class skills. Ones that make me feel like I am memorizing dance steps to some choreographed routine. I have no issue with them in small doses, but in Savage they seem to be the majority of the fight, with one missed step equaling death. You might find that makes things more interesting. I find they suck the fun out of a fight. I'd rather be applying DoTs, barriers and cures, rather then moving to a set position, slide, make sure I'm up/down, etc. And as stated in my prior replies, that is simply a matter of preference/taste. It has absolutely nothing to do with difficulty. I learned O1S and O2S rather quickly, and got my weekly clear for one-two months. I didn't find them overly difficult, rather...I didn't find them overly fun. It felt like a chore. Find a party, queue up...now the dance steps begin. *yawn*

Or, to put it another way, I find an overabundance of arbitrary, non role/class-based mechanics absolutely kills the fun for me, making it feel more like a rehearsed dance routine and less like an actual savage fight. Others, obviously, can and do feel very different about it.

It's problem solving that turns into a dance.

If you go in before guides are released every mechanic is just "what happened?" followed by "what do we need to do to deal with it?"
so your raid leader is basically slowly forming a dance and everyone else is just learning the steps and when you got it put together it's almost just robotic movements more than anything.

The only part that is really a battle is the dps always suffers doing their rotations while learning but it's just a matter of once you get to enrage cleaning up and getting comfortable with the steps

What does it matter how easy it is? Harder mechanics do't change the fact that most of raiding is essentially memorizing an unchanging pattern of phases which are broken down into attack cycles. Harder just means you have less or no ability to recover from, and there are more and longer phases of mechanics. The only real randomness is which player might be targeted with a marker, or mixing up the location of floor tiles you stand on. But every single fight can be broken down into a list of phases that never deviate from their order of attacks in any real way.

This is because they decided to make hard endgame only 8 people. You can't have a boss using random raid wiping attacks when the arena is tiny and you only have two healers, two tanks, and a single target raise. There's no way to hold other players in reserve, so having the boss be random and use less mechanics isn't possible. The fights are against a single boss, for the most part, so you can't make it something like ffxi Dynamis, where it's as much about claiming area in a time limit as the bosses themselves. I don't know why he is getting so much pushback, because he's not saying anything controversial. The game is designed a certain way which makes fights a list of mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Xerek

Or, to put it another way, I find an overabundance of arbitrary, non role/class-based mechanics absolutely kills the fun for me, making it feel more like a rehearsed dance routine and less like an actual savage fight. Others, obviously, can and do feel very different about it.

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You do realize it's optional, yes? What you describe a choreographed dance, I call interesting gameplay. The last thing I want is for Savage to be reduced into a random series of target dummies. Over the course of several minute fights, just applying DoTs and barrier would get exceedingly dull. Given you criticise O2S of all fights for having too many "dance steps," I can't say I welcome what changes you'd consider making. I already find Catastrophe boring. Less mechanics would only make it worse.

I have an idea. Lets combine Ice Floors and Instant Death!
Everyone Loves those two mechanics in all other games right? Right!?

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Originally Posted by Xerek

snip.

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Wait, wait wait....i meant to address something else earlier, but I feel asleep, and voila! three more pages sprung up here lol.

As a healer, you actually don't have small windows to attack. You have plenty of time to execute your roles In fact, it is kind of expected that you apply your DoTs, put up your regens/barriers, and DPS, while healing. The first phase of O3S ends with everybody standing on their job panels - fail that, and your party is likely to die before you can get halfway through phase 2. But as a healer, you will be tested for your healing abilities. I'm of the opinion that you should actually try O3S first, as that is worthy of the title Savage. I would say that if you don't find O3S difficult, you have some merit. As it stands, I can't...well, I can't really say that I agree fully with your post, as its based on your experience with O1S and O2S...not the true savage fights which are the last two.

I’m honestly still confused as to what you really want, OP. You claim that you don’t enjoy mechanic-dancing/that they don’t make the content challenging, and that you would rather “be applying DoTs, barriers or cures” (which removing all mechanic-dances would turn these bosses into nothing more than Glorified Striking Dummies), but then you insinuate that you want more job/role specific mechanics...which would still end up being scripted mechanic dances:

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Originally Posted by Xerek

As I noted prior, my issue was with the sheer volume of mechanic dances involved. Ones that have nothing to do with job roles or class skills.

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After playing WoW for a long time, I'd have say I greatly prefer XIV's largely predictable, but more mechanically complicated encounter design.

There were tons of fights in the former where the difficulty varied horribly based on when/where certain mechanics decided to occur (IE, there were a lot of mechanics that randomly could put one or more of your healers out of the fight for quite some time, which was naturally terrible). There's really nothing here that could ruin you as badly as the randomness in WoW could.

I get you OP. When people hear the word "random" they instantly jump to the conclusion that a fight would have those group dance moves at a random order and random times, leading to unavoidable wipe combos. But there are different kinds of random that involve the roles and force you to adapt. Adds spawning from random places at random times. Random debuffs which can or can't be removed. Damage to random targets. Adds having a random kill order indicated by icons or something else. Tank swaps being based on your cooldowns being used up by randomly occurring tank busters (with an internal cooldown similar to what hunts have).

Many kinds of random and unpredictable are already present in existing content. Here are some which I remember.

- Aurum Vale: randomly targeted party members get extra stacks, making people cleanse themselves at different times and not simultaneously (with uncleansable debuffs this could be a tougher healing check)
- Lakshmi Ex: the adds in add phase get bubbles in a random order so dps have to adapt to that
- Odin trial: damage and cleansable debuffs on random targets
- Pharos Sirius: ground effects, constatly spawing adds and explosions keep every role busy on the first boss without it being a dance, and the last boss requires random party members to be fully healed to remove a deadly debuff

It would be nice to get a content mode where the most of the challenge comes from dealing with mechanics specific to each role without the ability to cheese them with a higher item level. Extreme 4 mans with an item level sync? Maybe I'll make a thread about this later.