Normal/Savage Raids should be one big raid

I know Im not the only one who isnt fond of the raid design in this game for how extremely simplified it is, with its one boss encounter per raid. When I first started FFXIV, Ive imagined that the raid bosses that Ive been seeing at the time such as Kefka and Exdeath were all these cool bosses that you found traversing through the Cleft of the Dimensions dungeon from FFV and my mind was eagerly hyping up the whole instance.

Of course, I quickly found out thats not how raids worked as soon as I started Coils of Bahamut and as I played along through the expansions, I slowly started to see how the game reduces these raids to just be a boss room and thats it. This while Ive accepted it, I cant lie to myself knowing how much of a letdown the raids are in this game.

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, or scale up large parts of Alexander, or having to explore and brave the forbidden corridors of Pandaemonium? Seriously, lets make these into actual huge dungeons!

I can imagine this will make the raids more satisfying and fulfilling to complete, provide a challenge since you have to defeat these bosses in one run (although also allow a save/check point after the 2nd boss), it still correlates with the current design of having to redo all the savage raids weekly for gaining loot, AND actually place treasure coffers in the dungeon instance to allow extra chances for getting savage gear (maybe just have the accessories come from these treasure chests).

To me personally, this sounds like a such a good idea to make raiding more fun and rewarding. What do you guys think?

Yes, it should just be 1 big raid with all 4 turns as part of 1 actual raid - Like they do in BA, CLL, DR, and Dalriada.

Raids don't feel like raids, they feel like glorified trials

It's funny, considering there's a non-trivial group of people who think being able to spend all your time on the actual meat of a raid (the bosses), rather than getting bogged down by constantly respawning trash mobs you don't care about and re-running after every wipe is one of FFXIV's strengths.

For those purposes, I'd argue that the best option would be an in between. One big raid, but it retains the ability to return to the point you've progressed to so you don't return to the entrance every time you wipe on boss 3 of 4 or something.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

I know Im not the only one who isnt fond of the raid design in this game for how extremely simplified it is, with its one boss encounter per raid. When I first started FFXIV, Ive imagined that the raid bosses that Ive been seeing at the time such as Kefka and Exdeath were all these cool bosses that you found traversing through the Cleft of the Dimensions dungeon from FFV and my mind was eagerly hyping up the whole instance.

Of course, I quickly found out thats not how raids worked as soon as I started Coils of Bahamut and as I played along through the expansions, I slowly started to see how the game reduces these raids to just be a boss room and thats it. This while Ive accepted it, I cant lie to myself knowing how much of a letdown the raids are in this game.

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, or scale up large parts of Alexander, or having to explore and brave the forbidden corridors of Pandaemonium? Seriously, lets make these into actual huge dungeons!

I can imagine this will make the raids more satisfying and fulfilling to complete, provide a challenge since you have to defeat these bosses in one run (although also allow a save/check point after the 2nd boss), it still correlates with the current design of having to redo all the savage raids weekly for gaining loot, AND actually place treasure coffers in the dungeon instance to allow extra chances for getting savage gear (maybe just have the accessories come from these treasure chests).

To me personally, this sounds like a such a good idea to make raiding more fun and rewarding. What do you guys think?

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You just described DRS. And yes I would be willing to give this a go. Have you done it by the way? You should because you'll experience just what you suggested and It'd be interesting to see if you still like it after having been through it. It was a lot of fun IMO.

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Originally Posted by EliaStormblade

It's funny, considering there's a non-trivial group of people who think being able to spend all your time on the actual meat of a raid (the bosses), rather than getting bogged up in constantly respawning trash mobs you don't care about and re-running after every wipe is one of FFXIV's strengths.

For those purposes, I'd argue that the best option would be an in between. One big raid, but it retains the ability to return to the point you've progressed to so you don't return to the entrance every time you wipe on boss 3 of 4 or something.

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Actually I was thinking about it like this too. Of course we need to have some convenience for it. I was just thinking the mobs dont respawn but yeah obviously you would want it to where if you wipe you dont have to redo the whole instance. Which is also why I proposed the mid check point where you can call it a day after the 2 bosses if you want and come back to finish the last 2 later. But basically the idea that I want is to see these normal raids be *actual raid instances like CLL, Delibrum and Dalriada*. Just with more exploration involved for placing extra loot.

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Originally Posted by Ath192

You just described DRS. And yes I would be willing to give this a go. Have you done it by the way? You should because you'll experience just what you suggested and It'd be interesting to see if you still like it after having been through it. It was a lot of fun IMO.

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Ive have not actually, although I have done DR and the rest of the Bozjan raids and is just hit me how they could've just...applied those designs into the regular raiding and improve on them. Maybe one day I'll get into DRS.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Actually I was thinking about it like this too. Of course we need to have some convenience for it. I was just thinking the mobs dont respawn but yeah obviously you would want it to where if you wipe you dont have to redo the whole instance. Which is also why I proposed the mid check point where you can call it a day after the 2 bosses if you want and come back to finish the last 2 later. But basically the idea that I want is to see these normal raids be *actual raids explorable instances like CLL, Delibrum and Dalriada*. Just with more exploration involved for placing extra loot.

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Yeah, so basically what one generally expects from a raid. Raids traditionally are meant to be larger-scale dungeons, whereas contemporary XIV raids are more like alternative trials. I mean, I'm for that myself. I sure don't mind some sort of continuity between areas and bosses, rather than just being ported into one box, fighting the boss and then moving on. I feel like one issue XIV has is that it feels too sequestered anyway. In the overworld, but also raids.

Keep the convenience of not having to reclear trash and being able to port to the bosses after wiping, and put all four bosses into the same instance where you have to traverse the raid like it's an actual compound, or crypt, or whatever it is that the raid is themed after. It sounds more immersive. Hell, I'd argue Alliance Raids do this better than Normal/Savage raids.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Ive have not actually, although I have done DR and the rest of the Bozjan raids and is just hit me how they could've just...applied those designs into the regular raiding and improve on them. Maybe one day I'll get into DRS.

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It's a lot beefier that normal DR content wise. So you start with different rooms and the raid has to split up and meet back together later. There's a lot of people with different responsibilities to make everything work, and then there's of course the fights, although they are more EX level due to the sheer number of people. Still think it could've used a bit more exploration zones you could just go check out and stuff but there's more to see than in the normal edition.

Fun Fact: The Alliance raids were originally supposed to be hard content just as you described.

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Our original goal and plan for alliance raids when we were launching A Realm Reborn was for the content to not only be large in scale, but also a higher difficulty than what we see in game. I think it would have netted out somewhere below The Binding Coil of Bahamut in terms of difficulty, but far harder than what we currently have.

Unfortunately, when we determined that the release of the alliance raid would not make it in time for ARR’s launch, we had no choice but to change up the plan of our difficulty hierarchy for our content. We thought players would feel suffocated if we just had high-difficulty content, so alliance raids were positioned as a more casual type of content, even if there were some wipes along the way. This turned out to be well received, and we are also very satisfied with the current difficulty level. We plan to continue including this as one of our main forms of content.

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SOURCE: https://www.destructoid.com/stories/...--605273.phtml

I agree there is certainly something about the grand scale of alliance raid dungeons that would be cool to see in the regular raids. However, I have never in all of my many years of raiding found myself fighting trash mobs and thought "wow I'm having so much fun fighting this trash right now." Even in the older 8-man raids in this game that have trash before the boss I feel more annoyed than anything. While I don't totally disagree with you I personally don't have much desire to see that design brought back.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Fun Fact: The Alliance raids were originally supposed to be hard content just as you described.



SOURCE: https://www.destructoid.com/stories/...--605273.phtml

I agree there is certainly something about the grand scale of alliance raid dungeons that would be cool to see in the regular raids. However, I have never in all of my many years of raiding found myself fighting trash mobs and thought "wow I'm having so much fun fighting this trash right now." Even in the older 8-man raids in this game that have trash before the boss I feel more annoyed than anything. While I don't totally disagree with you I personally don't have much desire to see that design brought back.

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which is fair, since this the whole reason why Normal raids and even Alliance raids to an extent dont follow this design, since a lot of people didnt like it in WoW. People nowadays value their time much more than decades earlier with gaming but ever since I started looking back at other MMOs, I feel like we've also sort of lost a bit of that "spectacle" with doing content with other players that felt very big in a sense.

The reason why we went from the way coil was (large areas with trash and bosses and save states) to the arenas we have today is quite simple.



Players did what they could to avoid the dungeon aspect and just get to the bosses quickly. There were sack strats for t1, ninja or DRG sneak strats for t10, etc, etc.



They just responded to how the playerbase was playing the content.

For the record, if you are able to integrate teleports and non-respawning trash, the only con I can honestly think of is that people who want to just farm one boss (think p8 x4 now for the Abyssos Blades) might be a little annoyed.

Otherwise it seems like a perfectly fine idea.

I personally enjoy the general concept of how savage raids are presented. No filler, no nonsense. You teleport in and you fight the boss. I'm all for content like this, but not to change savage/normal raids. We already have alliance raids / BA / DR that can be expanded upon IMO

I very much appreciate raids being just the juice bits: the boss fights. Criterion has confirmed this for me aswell. The trash mobs there are by far the least interesting part of criterion. The bosses being seperated also allows for each of them to be longer and more designed (in theory).

There's also the matter of time investment. Smaller chunks = more accessible. Players with limited time an tackle them piece by piece, players with more freedom can just blaze through them all. Making raids bigger/longer means freezing out some of that population.

But what if I like the way it is now and don't like the sound of that idea? Honestly there's been times when I've questioned why trash mobs still exist as a normal staple in alliance raids, although the Myths series has found a way to incorporate them relatively well. When I think of "Raid" though I don't think of killing mobs, I think of big crazy fight and that's exactly what we get. People say they are glorified trials and I'm fine with that. Trials that pack a bigger punch but aren't EX, sounds perfect to me.

Many of you have provided valid points here, such as the time investment, the convenience of having bite-sized fights and these things I also agree with why the current design works.


But honestly, I feel like a lot more positives would come out from the raiding scene than the bad with going back to the old school dungeon design, at least with the loot aspect and gameplay wise. You could also argue that them having to work on the dungeon aspect of these could lead to better boss arenas if they could finally quit with the boring all these squares make a circle rooms where everything feels so formulaic to a fault. To me when I think of a "raid" I think of an actual raid into the boss's stronghold, not just knocking at each of their apartment doors like the grim reaper.

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Originally Posted by Xirean

But what if I like the way it is now and don't like the sound of that idea? Honestly there's been times when I've questioned why trash mobs still exist as a normal staple in alliance raids, although the Myths series has found a way to incorporate them relatively well. When I think of "Raid" though I don't think of killing mobs, I think of big crazy fight and that's exactly what we get. People say they are glorified trials and I'm fine with that. Trials that pack a bigger punch but aren't EX, sounds perfect to me.

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because fighting numerous enemies at once feels very satisfying? Has anyone ever played Dynasty Warriors? I like mob fights because it gives us a chance to go to town on some schmucks with our aoes, granted FFXIV's combat design isnt that well good for it anyway but if the idea is there it could also be where the devs have to better think of how to make combat more satisfying for single and multi- encounters.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

because fighting numerous enemies at once feels very satisfying? Has anyone ever played Dynasty Warriors? I like mob fights because it gives us a chance to go to town on some schmucks with our aoes, granted FFXIV's combat design isnt that well good for it anyway but if the idea is there it could also be where the devs have to better think of how to make combat more satisfying for single and multi- encounters.

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But we already have that for normal dungeons. Why include it for raids as well?

Your ideal scenario would be a scaled-down version of a 24-player raid for 8 players. However, this format was abandoned in the middle of HW due to its low appeal. Many players dislike dealing with trash mobs, as they are tedious and time-consuming. Not everyone can afford to spend hours on raids that are artificially lengthened by filler enemies.

Trash mobs in a raid is a big no, especially if they respawn

I think we have a good setup now. 8 man is closer to a trial, 24 man has some in-between mobs and then bosses so it's a good balance.

I cut my raiding teeth breaking into Plane of Fear or Plane of Hate and it was fun for a time but that sort of thing can drag on eventually. It's possible to engage with that side more informally in this game and I find that rather appealing.

But they did have things like DRS that seemed well received so maybe don't modify the current setup for 8 and 24 man and instead focus on adding more options like that. I think that would be a fair compromise.

I just want modern normal raids to be more similar to the Alex normal raids. I'm not really a fan of the linear dungeons in this game, but even a hallway leading between areas/boss arenas would be better than just spawning into a completely disconnected boss room then teleporting out at the end. I'd like to see more Fausts tbh. Doesn't have to be Coils difficulty, and let's be real, it's normal mode content so it will probably be over in less than 15 minutes anyway, so players with time constraints won't really be impacted.

Savage can just stay as spawning into the boss room. It's at least a bit easier to believe seeing as the WOL has already been there.

People would have no problem with trash if killing the trash rewarded you and didn't respawn.

Problem is, SE doesn't wanna do that. Not even for accessories.

Honestly, they could probably add a fifth fight that gives the illusion of travel. Like imagine a fight where you're on a platform moving or you just have to move along, and fight through tons of trash packs with problem monsters here or there. Maybe it goes on for 10 minutes. At the end, you get accessories, and access to the 4 floors of fights. Which are still separate instances, but they are inside of something the same like how Alexander and Coil were.

The thing I've liked least about raiding is that the platforms have been free floating and in wildly different places or empty space for ages now. I'd rather raids took place in at least the same structure. Pandaemonium has been somewhat like that, but we still teleport into every room, and it still feels disjointed.

I think the call to have trash is more a call to have a connected raid dungeon that all feels like the same place, at the very least, even if it would be impractical for it all to be seamless same instance.

Basically an 8 man Savage Alliance Raid?

Um. Yes, pls.

I think the current idea with savage/normal raids being just a boss fight is fine, as it allows you to focus on the important thing which is the boss and skips the boring parts which would be the trash kills in between. If SE could come up with new ideas to make trash interesting, I'd rather see that implemented in dungeons or alliance raids rather than decide to add more time to completing the 8 person raids.

I'd also rather see SE put that effort into making the alliance raids more engaging and make them feel connected with one another through more than there being a storyline. I think there could be a lot more thought involved in the raids other than do a couple trash pulls between bosses because reasons with little thought beyond aoe down the mobs and stay out of bad, which I suppose could apply to dungeons as well. I would also like if the bosses were more dense with the mechanics and were shorter individual fights with just more bosses per alliance raid tier.

I would rather keep savage raids the way they are on a structural level but I wouldnt say no to SE trying stuff like delubrum again (although i would prefer it without the lost action economy).

I just dont necessarily agree with just annexing mobs in these raids. To me this almost sounds like "lets just get rid of mobs in dungeons, and be just straight bosses". That would be extremely boring. Im all for making the trash mobs at least more engaging and interesting but they would also need to overhaul the combat to be more fun for it to work imo

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

I just dont necessarily agree with just annexing mobs in these raids. To me this almost sounds like "lets just get rid of mobs in dungeons, and be just straight bosses". That would be extremely boring. Im all for making the trash mobs at least more engaging and interesting but they would also need to overhaul the combat to be more fun for it to work imo

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Mobs currently are often more dangerous than bosses so I actually wouldn't want to see them go in dungeons. Although that would remove the current struggle between multi pull vs single pull expectations. As far as wanting mobs out of raids though it's more about they don't really serve a purpose. The bosses give rewards and the mobs don't. In a dungeon/alliance the mobs serve as a sort of break from the mechanically heavier bosses which is somewhat nice. The structure of dungeons isn't really something I think needs to be added to raids.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

I very much appreciate raids being just the juice bits: the boss fights. Criterion has confirmed this for me aswell. The trash mobs there are by far the least interesting part of criterion. The bosses being seperated also allows for each of them to be longer and more designed (in theory).

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I agree with the trash in general but I disagree with Criterion mobs being trash. They hit harder than all bosses in ARR combined and are not garbage. If anything those monsters should be in every dungeon (albeit less vicious).

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.