Opinions on M1-4 Savage (Spoilers)

Spoilers for savage mechanics.

Wanted to come on the forums to share opinions on the tier after my group finally killed M4S yesterday.

First, I'd like to say that this tier was miles ahead in terms of fun compared to any of the Endwalker tiers. Like, across the board. For the most part, the fights all feel very active and involved, and much less of the *stand here and wait for debuff to resolve* type mechanics from Anabaseios/Abyssos/Asphodelos. Probably the most engaging mechanics I can think of from EW were the fire tornados in P3S and Dog 2 in P8S.

M1S - while the knock-up/slam-down mechanics aren't truly random, they still feel like they need a good amount of adjustment on any given pull. There's a bit of memory required when the boss slides around the room doing it's cone/paw swipe mechanics, and sorting out the cleaves during the second knock-up section requires a lot of attention from every player. Probably my least favorite of the bunch, but I'm still putting it ahead of the majority of EW raids.

M2S - This fight was just fun. The "use eyes" factor and the sheer amount of adjustment makes every pull feel very different. Mechanics like the Groupbee's line AOEs and the hearts might be tough to get melee uptime around, but it's so hectic that I can't help but smile almost the whole time hearing people call out where they're going to go and what adjustments need to happen in the next 5 seconds. In fact, I don't think I've laughed this much in probably any EW content. I figured the random mechanics like the hearts and bees were just going to be normal mode exclusive and they would become very streamlined for Savage, but I really do appreciate that they left these mechanics alone (more or less).

M3S - This fight has much less of the randomness, but the mechanics are all pretty fast paced compared to other fights. The time to gauge whether the boss is doing quadro/octo mechanics is pretty tight, and then on top of that determining whether it's going to be an AOE jump or a knockback. His doped up combo is pretty cool (and the enrage is perfect, imo on par with TEA's enrage), and you need to decipher pretty quickly which add to get hit by and which quadrant will be safe 3 seconds later. All in all, I felt that this fight was the fastest pace we've had in a raid in a while. M2S feels fast because of the randomness, but M3S actually is pretty fast.

M4S - THANK GOD THIS IS NOT A DOOR BOSS. Endwalker completely burned me out on door bosses so I had a sigh of relief when I saw that this was just one complete fight. Definitely the most difficult of the tier, this one took about 8.5 hours total for my group to clear. I don't know how PF is going to do this lol. This is the only fight of the tier off the top of my head that has body checks and still maintains the fairly fast pace of M3S (in the first phase anyway). The widening/narrowing witch hunt mechanic will be a pretty crazy bait mechanic for PF to make strats for. I was proud of the normal tier for not having a wall boss, but I'll forgive M4S for, again, not being a door boss lol.

The second phase slows down a bit but still requires some fairly quick movement for the sabbath mechanics. One thing I enjoyed that DT has done so far is that some Tankbusters actually involve the party instead of just that tanks (i.e. Mountain Fire from EX1), and M4S has that with the mustard bomb mechanic. Sword Quiver was a pretty hard hitting buildup to enrage, but it wasn't anything too crazy, just a lot of damage going out in quick succession.


I ran Sage for this tier, and IMO the healing was fairly easy in M1S, not much required outside of stack/spread mechs in M2S (the hearts have a pretty long lasting DOT effect as well), a good amount required throughout the entirety of M3S due to the multi-hit raidwides, and a ton of healing/mit planning required for M4S.
Overall, this tier was pretty good, easily better than Anabaseios. I really do hope they continue in this more active direction with mechanic design. Feel free to share your opinions as well!

TLDR; M1S fine, M2S active and engaging, M3S fast paced, M4S fast paced and difficult.

For M1, people generally do a yolo strat or "same-square" strat. but you can cut down half of the thinking by doing a "west lane" or "east lane" safe strat.

For example we use "letter side bad" or "purple markers bad" strat. Basically "west" is always the lane the party should never be in. This means the party doesn't care if it's knock up, or knock down, and only care if a player is next to our square or not. In those scenarios we simply take one step over the line to another square.

and for the knock downs/knock ups it just means "knock-downs" are always on a free "west" square. and knock-Up's can be anywhere west that pushes them to the east lane. If your knock-ups understand the assignment then the party never has to move. ever. This makes mouser 2 pretty brain-dead too as you can just be in your nails-position the entire time on a single square and just move together for the line aoe.

So your M1S can always look like this for mouser 2:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...783664e76504e&
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...c4c9db100a3d1&

The gamble here is that if both tanks or both melee (if you're running double melee) will only lose uptime if both are selected for knock-down. But the strat is no-thoughts head-empty so for most people it's worth.

So there is one thing worthy of note that I really appreciate with M2S, and I feel that it goes somewhat unnoticed on how important it actually is, namely the Honey Bee Beats (or heart phases): outside of those phases it's just a normal encounter with no huge body checks, but once inside those phases mistakes aren't necessarily punished by instant wipes or body checks but by the boss getting buffed with hearts, which not only dramatically increases its damage but also serves as a reserve heal for the very end.

In effect this introduces a way to punish players for messing up in a more creative way than body checks and this I feel is something we should appreciate fully. You end up with people dying or getting damage down serving their usual role with the DPS check of the encounter, but the hearts acting as a second layer to this where doing a clean run can overcome clean deaths or damage downs from the intermission phases, or where doing a messy run with hearts can still be overcome if your group is doing great on damage.

This to me feels a lot more fair and less frustrating than body checks.

An interesting side effect is also that it lets your group progress further relatively easily instead of presenting big mechanical walls to overcome. Even if you do not have a chance to clear due to the state of your run, you can still prog more.

Overall, melees hate it perhaps, but this fight is one of the best encounter designs I have had in savage for the past years. It's creative and works in subtle, great ways to be engaging. And the chaos can be fun to introduce some variations every pull.

I'm so, so very happy M4S has no door boss. I hate them, they just serve to extend the prog and usually have lots of repeated mechanics to pad fight time.

They did however really mess up the HP of pretty much every fight, there's basically no DPS check the whole tier. Every boss needed an extra 5% HP at least.

Haven't gotten to M4, but I think something I really appreciate is that every enrage has felt kind of unique!