State of the Game: Savage+ Dungeons and End Game Leves

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Exaggeration seems to get the point across, but some of you are still nitpicking the point not being made. Any "retooling" of old content, means everything that goes into it gets rebalanced. There's no point making a "challenge" mode that is just 10x the HP, and utterly devoid of anything new.

It may surprise you to know that I would rather have an entirely different kind of combat content designed, rather than, as you put "reskin stormblood". Because the storyline is fine as it is, what is a problem is that the content is not engaging once it's been cleared. The MSQ content should offer a reasonable challenge, not just a low bar to jump and then oops, a boss with 1000x the hp.

The game already contains mechanics that we've seen in PotD/HoH, that suggests they can do things to the content already (eg the miasma on some floors, no auto-healing, ambush spawns traps, etc), but I'd suggest that applying PotD mechanics to the other game content is probably the opposite of what should be happening.

Let's say, for example, each ARR dungeon gets two challenges, a level 60 and a level 70 mode. Both modes level and ilevel sync you to minimum ilevel for the content as the basis for the challenge, and the existing monsters are levelsynced to 60 or 70 as well. This means that you get to use your level 60 or 70 skills, but the monsters also get to use theirs. So that means that all the ARR monsters will suddenly have mechanics that were only see in "reskins" of their monster type. From that, each dungeon contains extra chests that contain one-time use pomanders to buff the party. So you only get a reward for NOT using the pomanders. If you only want the clear, grab the pomanders and reduce the difficulty, but if you wipe you have to start over.

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The point is that you don't think it's a good idea, simply because you don't want to do it. Which is fine - but I have not once seen you contribute anything to discussions that offer up content like this. Rather, it seems that all you've done is complain about every little suggestion that has been put out there, especially by those of the raiding side of things. Here, we have somebody who actually does do things for the community. What we have here is a pretty nice layout of what could be a really great idea. You...what have you done aside from bringing in an overall negative attitude to almost everything? You say there's no point - but really, there's no point for you because you don't want to engage in an actual discussion. You want to debate and shoot down ideas for no reason other than your own pessimism over anything and everything that has to do with skill level and higher difficulty.

The way the OP presented, these ideas were meant for players who are apt to try something with a challenge in them. It wasn't meant for pessimistic players who shoot down anything with a challenge. Let the good folks here discuss this idea and quit trying to shoot everything challenging down at every turn. It is this kind of mentality that contributed to cries for nerfs on content that can be done if you know how to play decently, ala Aurum Vale, The Royal Menagerie, and fighting Hashmal.

Don't mean to take away from this thread, because the ideas therein are amazing and I would love to see it to fruition - but the pessimism is honestly quite annoying.

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Originally Posted by KaivaC

The point is that you don't think it's a good idea, simply because you don't want to do it.

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Please point where I said this. You are putting words in my mouth. I said, repeatedly, that the issue is that this would come at the cost of new content, which means anything from losing one or two primal/raid tiers to an entire patch cycle. And again, arguing against the point not being made. This is about what the dev team should be putting resources into, and the raiders only play 1% of the content. It's not in the dev teams best interest to design new content that only raiders play, since they don't respect the developers enough to not spoil it. If the developers are going to spend any development time on anything new, I'd rather they come out with new content, and not give us 20 versions of Ifirit, Titan and Garuda again. They should be designing content to have more than 2 days of longevity, and that is perhaps why they are releasing content in smaller and smaller amounts more frequently.

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Originally Posted by KaivaC

Don't mean to take away from this thread, because the ideas therein are amazing and I would love to see it to fruition - but the pessimism is honestly quite annoying.

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If you have nothing to add to a thread, don't add to it.

I add to the threads like this, because people don't consider the engineering requirements of, pretty much anything. I don't work for SE, I'm free to speculate on why something can or can't be added. The biggest reason why you won't see "something like Mythic+" is again, that was a solution to make WoW's stale content have more longevity. For FFXIV to have the same kind of thing, would require changing all the content to scale in ways that the content is just not designed to do, and the game has a hard enough time dealing with 24-player alliances, to say nothing of how poorly Eureka wound up being, both skill and engineering-wise.

http://i68.tinypic.com/2uza2q8.png

The most basic thing Mythic+ does is ramp up the hp/mp and damage. So in FFXIV context, this is like giving the monsters an extra X levels over your current level. If you've not ever looked at how the HP scales in FFXIV, every single monster in a dungeon is the same level, and has the same HP except the bosses. So the trash monsters with 6000 at level 50 end up being level 60 with 12000 hp, and four times harder to kill, to say nothing of how the boss monsters attacks all become instant-ko's that were originally balanced to take 50% of the hp off an appropriately geared player.

That's why adapting this, "Like WoW" doesn't work. The part that does work, is how progression works, as that's exactly the same idea that unlocks "Savage" modes in FFXIV and we've previously seen this in coil where you had to clear all the turns in order every week. Just now instead apply this to the dungeon + level, or take the exact same cue as PotD and have separate party "save game"'s for that content. The other key thing about Mythic+ that I see is that there is a very strict time limit, and making mistakes/dying reduces the remaining time.

Cue the call for nerfs on the first day, when players can't get past the first level because, oh gosh, it's hard. Look no further than the nerfs asked for PotD and HoH.

Which is why I'm telling you, don't expect this kind of thing. WoW's version just makes content "harder" by changing the tuning knobs, which it can do because it plays differently. In FFXIV, changing the same knobs makes would just turn things into an endurance test, not a challenge. Level 50 monsters with the hp of level 60 monsters but no new skills, is still boring.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

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The key thing that I am taking out of the original idea by OP, particularly with the dungeon idea, is that the content would not be meant for casual players who do not enjoy dealing with challenges. I.e those same people who thought that the Royal Menagerie should've been nerfed, and others because it was 'too hard for a story dungeon'. If they can't get past the first level, either find a competent group, get good, or both. I haven't tried HoH, but if it's just like PotD, then I feel that it's sad that people are asking for nerfs. You are saying it would be like an endurance test - perhaps, but from what I have been able to tell, the idea is warmly received by those who are more than willing to try something new.

It would be great to revisit older dungeons scaled up to current levels. There is obviously demand for it. Not overwhelming, but the demand is definitely there.

On the topic of it taking away from content - what is funny is that a lot of people said that about Ultimate. They also said that it's not in their best interest to make Ultimate solely for the raiders, that that brought more excitement to FFXIV than anything since the launch of Stormblood as far as overall interest is concerned. Honestly, from the way you are putting it, retooling does not sound like nearly difficult task that you are making it out to be since it's mostly just reusing assets, and one can pull the team that did Ultimate onto the idea of Savage Dungeons. I am sure it would get plenty of traction from those who actually want more than just the same boring stuff, especially if a leaderboard were to be implemented.

What you may find boring, others may find quite refreshing.

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Originally Posted by Tsumdere

Interesting. I do wish we had harder dungeons in line with what WoW has as I do believe FF to be way more pleasing to the eye and have a better story so I will never switch, but I (along with many others) crave something a little more challenging than the dungeons we have now. I think the problem is not that they can't do the things WoW does with dungeons, is that they won't because they cater to the lowest common denominator of ice mages and such.

I guess this wraps back around to people just wanting harder dungeons and harder 4-man content.

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You may be surprised to learn Blizzard is screamed at constantly for "catering to casuals" and the general development trend has constantly been towards things taking less time, effort, and skill. Outside of m+, dungeons are a complete joke and are easy enough that people can just outright solo them with little difficulty by the halfway point of the expansion or earlier, depending on class and spec. WoW is simply a more world focused game in many respects and dungeons are designed according to a different paradigm, even if that has been watered down over the years. Blizzard also has the resources to simply decide to make 160 different versions of the same content so that there's a difficulty level for all, which alleviates the need for nerfing the real difficulties to make sure everyone can get through it. There is no Steps of Faith or Royal Menagerie nonsense because even if players were "forced" into doing something similar (there's no MSQ with 90% of the content locked behind it), there would be an LFR version that promises to fall over dead if you can just get 24 other people to stay half awake and push a button once or twice a minute for six or seven minutes. You'd also get some nice gear that's about as good as the best raid gear from last tier for doing it.

We could argue that the current mythic+ are also a catering to casuals since they offer a good amount of loot, while before challenge modes were catering to ppl liking a challenge too

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Originally Posted by KaivaC

It would be great to revisit older dungeons scaled up to current levels. There is obviously demand for it. Not overwhelming, but the demand is definitely there.
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If I may insist however, ppl ask that while also looking toward mythic+ from wow, but if you consider that 90% of the mobs in dungeons simply autoattacks the tank, increasing their health and dmg would simply making them HP sponge and adding Potd debuffs on the dungeon won't really change your approach that much.

Some affixes on M+ change your whole approach to the content but that is also because mobs variance is much higher in wow than here.
I mean Necrotic is stacked much faster on a dual wielder mobs than a 2h or 1h one, but we don't really have something like that here.
I really think that the problem is in the base material and the overall design of dungeons, they really need to improve, I dunno put a healer mob in a pack that if left alone will cast cure 3 and full heal the pack, a mob thta knockes ppl away into other groups, caster mobs nuking ppl from orbit.
Only when we have fixed the core we can really talk about a scaling type of content or rework of old ones, otherwise we'll only get boring HP sponge.

Or we can simply ask them to add an arena type content that is a boss rush with a roulette of debuff like battle station. I mean there are idd alternatives, the sky is the limit afterall

As much as I love challenges, but I always will feel a certain way how Savage Content is handled. A challenge to me is something that you can survive, but it will be hell to do so(think Dark Souls or the Devil May Cry Series much harder modes of gameplay)...however Savage Content just craps all over that and you go through numerous deaths and waste another 10-15 minutes. To me that is not a challenge, the challenge should be staying alive and figuring out your opponent within a reasonable time but not make the content where it is so overwhelming that just it completely demoralizes the player. In fact their other franchise Dragon Quest does this so perfectly to a tee, their much harder content usually towards endgame or post-endgame puts you through hell but it's enemies doesn't try to outright smack you down and force you to start over a bunch of times (There is a reason why Dragon Quest VII is one of the most popular ones).

Ultimately Savage Content has issues in gameplay design that I really wish more people start questioning more rather than defend it for what it is, and compare to other games that do hard challenges (there is many examples to look at out there in the RPG genre). For one having to deal with 7 other players, and instant death mechanics being everywhere are not usually a good mix for a great experience (I believe almost everyone here has a salty experience regarding this).

If they would just knock it off with the Enrage Timer (which to me is the most blatant piece of crap ever made just to prolong content health, I seriously doubt they just added it for a sake of a challenge) then I guarantee more players would start giving more of a damn what Savage Content has to offer because you don't have to worry about some crazy timer you have to beat.

Having Savage Dungeons is just going to be the same problem because Yoshi P. or whoever does this crap is just going to add Enrage Timers everywhere, I really don't trust their idea of fun anymore.

I'm going to outright say it, the only reason Deltascape Savage, Sigmascape Savage are difficult is not because of the mechanics involved but because of that stupid Enrage Timer that should be removed from the game. You just don't punish players like that when they're so close to their reward for having to slog through these fights, that is a big slap in the face for parties when got put through hell to make it to the end only to fail because of a timer.

Whoever implemented this crap must have loved Emerald Weapon from FF7.

Honestly it's a shame how they handled their Savage Series, they were on the right track but this Enrage Timer crap really needs to go (also by removing the stupid timer I doubt we would be having some many fights over parsing as of late).

Give me a reason to trust Yoshi P. and Team to do a Savage Content Dungeon then I'm onboard with the idea, but I doubt it will ever happen since he'll just slap a Enrage Timer to every Boss in the dungeon and call it a day.

What I want, if they can replace Ultimate from 4.5X (because we will not have it) by 3 savage dungeons, it would be great.
Just for sum up it could be :
- Aurum Vale (Realm Reborn)
- The Vault (Heavensward)
- Sirensong Sea (Stormblood)

The length of the dungeons is longer than before, so we would have 4 boss (with at least 1-2 that are quite identique from normal version).
They could add a little story like "Dark phantomatic energy have been notified in these dungeons and we need to check out why, and destroy/seal it"

In Aurum Vale, a special poison from there disturb our senses and creates hallucinations/illusions of past adventurers we need to fight.
4 boss : Otyugh & Microtyugh, Giant Mushroom, Miser's Mistress, Edda and her companions (I'am not sure if they reached Aurum Vale...otherwise it could be another team).

In the Vault, the holy energy was liberated from an magic urn and awoke the spiritual energy of the Knight of the Round. Thordan is waiting for us at the end.
4 boss : Ser Adelphel & Ser Janlenoux, Ser Grinnaux & Ser Ignasse, Ser Charibert & Ser Noudenet, Thordan and the Knights of the Round.

In Sirensong Sea, powerful boss have emerged from the sea like attract by something. It's like they are now undead.
4 boss : The Governor, Undead Lorelei, Undead Kraken, Undead Leviathan.

The rewards are multiple : title, gears (ilvl 400-405), minion(s), mount(s), furniture, triple triad cards.

Savage dungeons would not work. And ultimately it would fall to where once the healer dies its game over because the damage intake would be too high.

Mechanics that promote difficulty such as tankbusters, tankbusters that require tank swaps, heavy unavoidable damage.

Even if you were to make it 5 man content it would still just be a damage modifier on a dungeon rather than actual mechanics, and the fact that you can only do so much with 4 people.

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Originally Posted by Remedi

It really isn't fair to make a comparison 1 on 1 also because of how mmmh forgiving blizzard fanbase really is, blizzard has 15 years of gaming and fanbase that can allow them to survive an expansion like wod, can it happen here? No it really won't

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FF14 had 1.0. You want to talk about a forgiving playerbase? WoD had a ton of bad things about it. People forgive, but they do not forget. This applies to both games IMO and is why a 1 to 1 isn't as unfair as you are saying it is.

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It took them 3 tries to find a way for challenge mode to took off and honestly they needed the help of a carrot on a stick + D3 team and that is with a background that made it easy for it to work.

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What were the 3 tries (MoP/WoD CMs 1 & 2?)? CMs were a huge success. People loved them. Blizz took it one step further by improving them and making them more mainstream via Mythic+.

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FF14 feels to much stiff at the moment for mythic+ to work well, they need to sort that out before they can reliably do something like that here OR they could try and find something else, eitherway it's not something that will come out in a way it'll require time and trial and error.

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Now this we can agree on 100%.

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Because honestly I want you to picture all the trashes in each dungeon having like 20x the health and doing moderatively more dmg, that would be like having HP sponge enemies and I don't know how much fun it'll be

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Bingo bango bongo.

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Originally Posted by Tsumdere

Oh, yeah. F' that. I do want more than an HP buff. I have no idea how Mythic+ works, but from the sounds of it is really is just an HP/DMG up buff which really doesn't change the way you have to approach the dungeon or anything. That does sound boring.

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Mythic+ does far more than just HP/DMG up buff. Mythic+ is some of the most fun gaming I've ever had in over a decade of MMO's. It absolutely changes the way you approach a dungeon.

At its core it's a scaling dungeon system. You get a key for a random dungeon that you then try to beat the timer on. At the first few levels, there are no affixes, just raw hp/dmg modifers. Depending on how fast you beat the dungeon the more your key "levels up". Once you hit level 4, an affix gets added. It might be something like:

• volcanic eruptions spawning underneath you frequently forcing movement
• enemies drop threat more frequently
• killing an enemy boosts other enemies HP/Dmg forcing you to kill around same time
• enemies enrage when low on HP, dealing significantly more damage
• slain enemies burst when killed draining your HP

Here's a full list of them if you're interested.

At level 7, you get a second affix so now you have to deal with both issues, and increasingly more damage/HP of enemies.

Then at level 10, you get one of two affixes (fixed for the week for all keys):

• Tyrannical - increases boss damage by up to 15% and HP by 40%
• Fortified - Trash has 20% more HP and deals 30% more damage

These are in conjunction with key scaling modifiers. What these affixes do is drastically change which dungeons become harder and which parts and how you approach them.

I'll give an example. In the Eye of Azshara dungeon when we were pushing early +15 keys, the final boss gave us a really hard time. His mechanics are fairly straightforward:

Dodge lightning bolts and tidal waves, stack up for Meteor effect, and spread out for Arcane Bomb. When the boss gets low on HP, he gains a buff where he attacks faster and hits harder and his auto attacks splash the entire area.

The issue we had here was that the passive unavoidable AOE damage of that phase made it very hard to be healthy enough for the meteors. It meant we had to get creative to find ways to have our healer DPS as much as they could while also giving him time to stabilize, while we could avoid stacking for meteors. What ended up happening is I would help heal right after meteor to help stabilize the party so we had enough HP for the next one.

I have dozens more examples of times we had to get creative to solve the puzzles Mythic+ presented us, and it's why I defend it so heavily.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

There's no point making a "challenge" mode that is just 10x the HP, and utterly devoid of anything new.

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There are exactly 0 people in this thread who have requested that, so either please put an iota of effort into actually reading/understanding what people want. No one wants an HP sponge update.

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This is about what the dev team should be putting resources into, and the raiders only play 1% of the content. It's not in the dev teams best interest to design new content that only raiders play, since they don't respect the developers enough to not spoil it.

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Source? Also why do you think that only raiders would be interested in harder dungeon content? Your immense hatred for raiders literally oozes out of your word selection. Your bias is honestly depressing and not healthy at all.

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If the developers are going to spend any development time on anything new, I'd rather they come out with new content, and not give us 20 versions of Ifirit, Titan and Garuda again. They should be designing content to have more than 2 days of longevity, and that is perhaps why they are releasing content in smaller and smaller amounts more frequently.

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Like? Give examples of new content they should come up with. Mind you I agree that that the content durability design is awful.

I the past I've given examples of how I would design content:

Here are a few links:

• http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ish-Eureka-was
• http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ork-%28LONG%29
• http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Eureka-Concept

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If you've not ever looked at how the HP scales in FFXIV, every single monster in a dungeon is the same level, and has the same HP except the bosses.

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I'd have to turn on HP values again to verify this, mind sharing your source and how you determined this? Not saying you're wrong, but I'm curious how you quantified it.

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

If they would just knock it off with the Enrage Timer (which to me is the most blatant piece of crap ever made just to prolong content health, I seriously doubt they just added it for a sake of a challenge) then I guarantee more players would start giving more of a damn what Savage Content has to offer because you don't have to worry about some crazy timer you have to beat.

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Enrage timers are incredibly valuable. They show us who is contributing and who is getting carried.

Kind of like the DRG who does nearly half the DPS of a tank.

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I'm going to outright say it, the only reason Deltascape Savage, Sigmascape Savage are difficult is not because of the mechanics involved but because of that stupid Enrage Timer that should be removed from the game. You just don't punish players like that when they're so close to their reward for having to slog through these fights, that is a big slap in the face for parties when got put through hell to make it to the end only to fail because of a timer.

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Enrage timers are a mechanic whether you like it or not. And failing that mechanic has consequences. I would VERY STRONGLY recommend you getting some help with your performance if you continually struggle with enrage timers.

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Originally Posted by KaldeaSahaline

Mythic+ does far more than just HP/DMG up buff. Mythic+ is some of the most fun gaming I've ever had in over a decade of MMO's. It absolutely changes the way you approach a dungeon.

At its core it's a scaling dungeon system. You get a key for a random dungeon that you then try to beat the timer on. At the first few levels, there are no affixes, just raw hp/dmg modifers. Depending on how fast you beat the dungeon the more your key "levels up". Once you hit level 4, an affix gets added. It might be something like:

• volcanic eruptions spawning underneath you frequently forcing movement
• enemies drop threat more frequently
• killing an enemy boosts other enemies HP/Dmg forcing you to kill around same time
• enemies enrage when low on HP, dealing significantly more damage
• slain enemies burst when killed draining your HP

Here's a full list of them if you're interested.

At level 7, you get a second affix so now you have to deal with both issues, and increasingly more damage/HP of enemies.

Then at level 10, you get one of two affixes (fixed for the week for all keys):

• Tyrannical - increases boss damage by up to 15% and HP by 40%
• Fortified - Trash has 20% more HP and deals 30% more damage

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The irony here is Kisai mentioned earlier any changes, in her bias assumptions, would mean less new content yet if they actually implemented something like described above, they could all but scrap new dungeons for 5.0. The new revamp would simply make the old dungeons feel entirely different, and far more engaging.