Idea for Savage Loot

I have seen a lot of people who tend to drop out of Savage because the loot system is not really rewarding. You put a ton of hours in and even if you clear every fight in a lockout, there's a chance that you get nothing for all of the time you put into it that week. It's not really engaging and many players tend to lose interest unless if they're in a static. From what I understand, the current system is better than it was in the past. I don't think that's a valid argument against criticisms of how it currently works, because better than before doesn't mean it's good.

My idea is a bad luck protection system that encourages you to get as far in a tier as you can each week:

Each week that you clear your first fight, you receive a currency to spend on one guaranteed piece of loot from a vendor. The catch is that you can only spend it on something that would have dropped from the fights you have actually cleared that week.

For example, if you have cleared M2S this week, you can go to a vendor and choose one drop from M1S or M2S, but not M3S until you've cleared it for that week.

This would not only alleviate issues with players having bad luck and not getting any loot week after week of reclears, but it would also encourage players to actually finish the tier. Also it would be a nice change for people who don't just play one role or job.

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Originally Posted by AgathaAllalong

Each week that you clear your first fight, you receive a currency to spend on one guaranteed piece of loot from a vendor. The catch is that you can only spend it on something that would have dropped from the fights you have actually cleared that week.

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Well... you receive a book. If you keep at it for some weeks then you get the gear that you want.

The loot is not the intended way to actually get your gear. The books are. The loot is just a little bonus, and can help offset a few missed weeks.

Your mindset, on the other hand, is that the loot is the intended way to get the gear and that if people don't get lucky then they've "not been rewarded".

Usually in PF you will get loot pretty often honestly. I do. Most tiers I have looted a coffer for every single role of the fights that I've been doing, even for roles I don't play, because when it's 4 pieces of loot for example, it's a 50/50 chance of getting a drop per fight.

Actually, statics are worse (at least as a tank or healer). Because if you're trying to benefit the static and not just yourself, you'll usually yield the loot to the DPS first so that the boss/DPS checks can be defeated faster. After they are all geared up, the survival of the tanks is a "nice to have" so they can be lazier with mit plus they contribute the second most damage so they start getting the loot. Healers last.

Yet, if you PF the fights you can get the loot right away and are very likely to get some drops because of the 50/50 chance.

Alongside all of that, you are gearing up each week already due to the weekly tomestone gear.

If someone drops out on the basis of that, it makes me wonder if they really want to do the raids anyway? There are a lot of people these days doing older raids for fun because that is the type of content they enjoy just for the sake of enjoying it.

1 book for access
2 book for left side
4 book for weap

900 tomes/week

ggwp

The one constant truth that seems to have existed since WoW, is that end game in MMOs is completely broken. Like in FFXIV why do we even have gear advancement at end game to begin with? The entirety of the outdoor zones plus instanced areas are balanced around the initial end game iLvL, but then we get super shiny new gear at the first raid tier that is heads over heals better then the initial iLvL gear. And then at the .2 patch we get another brand new set of shiny gear that outpaces the old gear!

... but all the overworld zones are still set and balanced to a baseline that exists at the point the expansion releases. The only content that even demands the newer gear is content that is released in its own microcosm alongside the gear, so gradually everything else gets trivialized and people start getting sloppy because why try to do good dps and dodge things, when the character is a literal super tank or is able to kill things so fast they barely take damage? Yet at the same time, they have to add something to go after or everyone just quits and goes off to play other games until the next expansion comes out.

I was thinking about Skyrim like enemy scaling on this but then there is this weird problem. So lets say Little Jimmy just hit end game and has his relic gear, and enemies all scale to the highest iLvL of the person they are grouped with. Bob "I died a lot so you don't have to" high tier raider comes along in his end game super gear and the two group up to do content while little Jimmy is fighting some angry squirrels. After accepting the invite from his friend, the little angry squirrels drink monster power aid and little Jimmy is now fleeing from Squirrel Thor: Slaughterer of all noobs whose stats have been upscaled for Bob the high tier raider.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

Well... you receive a book. If you keep at it for some weeks then you get the gear that you want.

The loot is not the intended way to actually get your gear. The books are. The loot is just a little bonus, and can help offset a few missed weeks.

Your mindset, on the other hand, is that the loot is the intended way to get the gear and that if people don't get lucky then they've "not been rewarded".

Usually in PF you will get loot pretty often honestly. I do. Most tiers I have looted a coffer for every single role of the fights that I've been doing, even for roles I don't play, because when it's 4 pieces of loot for example, it's a 50/50 chance of getting a drop per fight.

Actually, statics are worse (at least as a tank or healer). Because if you're trying to benefit the static and not just yourself, you'll usually yield the loot to the DPS first so that the boss/DPS checks can be defeated faster. After they are all geared up, the survival of the tanks is a "nice to have" so they can be lazier with mit plus they contribute the second most damage so they start getting the loot. Healers last.

Yet, if you PF the fights you can get the loot right away and are very likely to get some drops because of the 50/50 chance.

Alongside all of that, you are gearing up each week already due to the weekly tomestone gear.

If someone drops out on the basis of that, it makes me wonder if they really want to do the raids anyway? There are a lot of people these days doing older raids for fun because that is the type of content they enjoy just for the sake of enjoying it.

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Worst case scenario, I need 17 M2S books to get bis. 17 weeks of no reward. Also what do you mean? The loot is the intended way to actually get gear, the books are the bad luck mechanic. I like the raids, but let's be honest, when you don't get anything it's kind of demotivating to keep on doing it. At least with extremes I can keep on running it until I get a mount.

I mean we reach to the point that we are searching for something to do in the game lol

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Originally Posted by FistoSupreme

Worst case scenario, I need 17 M2S books to get bis. 17 weeks of no reward.

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Why would you wait until you have all 17 to start trading them in?

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Originally Posted by FistoSupreme

Worst case scenario, I need 17 M2S books to get bis. 17 weeks of no reward. Also what do you mean? The loot is the intended way to actually get gear, the books are the bad luck mechanic. I like the raids, but let's be honest, when you don't get anything it's kind of demotivating to keep on doing it. At least with extremes I can keep on running it until I get a mount.

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I agree with you Fisto on the way the loot works. The books are more of a fallback measure and always were that way.

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Originally Posted by Andevom

Why would you wait until you have all 17 to start trading them in?

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I meant "no reward" as in not getting loot from the loot table. Turning in books, however, still requires me to clear M2S for 4 weeks to get a headpiece. A month to get gear.

Loot system is fine. There is no doubt that most savage content is difficult. So, the rewards (20 ilvl above easily obtainable crafted gear, 10 ilvl above tomestone gear) are very reasonable.

The "barriers for entry" to raiding are abysmally low.

Raid whenever you want.
No dungeon crawl to get there.
No farming other enemies to get the raid boss to spawn.
No exp penalty for death.
Negligible gil penalty for death (repair costs are low, food isn't lost)
Raid boss isn't contested.
Drops to the party are guaranteed (no boss is dropping nothing at all)
Every party member gets a token to pick what they want after X weeks.

Once a team gets the mechanics down, it is common to clear all 4 tiers in under an hour. Maybe two if there are some struggles. What more do you want? Welcome to a game where there are daily and weekly limitations: 9 different daily roulettes, 12 daily beast tribe quests, weekly Wondrous Tails, weekly tomestone caps, daily hunt marks, weekly hunt marks, daily maps, etc etc.

I've raided in various games. FFXIV is probably one of the least taxing of all of them. Sure, the content is hard... but quick. You could be an expert at some raid content in other games and still get nothing for two hours of your time.

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Originally Posted by dspguy

Loot system is fine. There is no doubt that most savage content is difficult. So, the rewards (20 ilvl above easily obtainable crafted gear, 10 ilvl above tomestone gear) are very reasonable.

The "barriers for entry" to raiding are abysmally low.

Raid whenever you want.
No dungeon crawl to get there.
No farming other enemies to get the raid boss to spawn.
No exp penalty for death.
Negligible gil penalty for death (repair costs are low, food isn't lost)
Raid boss isn't contested.
Drops to the party are guaranteed (no boss is dropping nothing at all)
Every party member gets a token to pick what they want after X weeks.

Once a team gets the mechanics down, it is common to clear all 4 tiers in under an hour. Maybe two if there are some struggles. What more do you want? Welcome to a game where there are daily and weekly limitations: 9 different daily roulettes, 12 daily beast tribe quests, weekly Wondrous Tails, weekly tomestone caps, daily hunt marks, weekly hunt marks, daily maps, etc etc.

I've raided in various games. FFXIV is probably one of the least taxing of all of them. Sure, the content is hard... but quick. You could be an expert at some raid content in other games and still get nothing for two hours of your time.

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FFXIV's savage fights have historically bounced all over the place in terms of difficulty but generally, the first tier is deliberately the easiest of the bunch since they keep going with an escalation league direction. This kind of backfired last expansion because of turning savage into a wall of 8 man jump rope checks. WoW has had hard fights but their stuff is pure stat grinding, so it's not exactly "hard" as much as "I hope you put the time in to get the gear". PoE was far more tactical due to the nature of the game so it's hard to compare difficulty on that front, and not too sure on GW2 since I never really did endgame in that one.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

FFXIV's savage fights have historically bounced all over the place in terms of difficulty but generally, the first tier is deliberately the easiest of the bunch since they keep going with an escalation league direction. This kind of backfired last expansion because of turning savage into a wall of 8 man jump rope checks. WoW has had hard fights but their stuff is pure stat grinding, so it's not exactly "hard" as much as "I hope you put the time in to get the gear". PoE was far more tactical due to the nature of the game so it's hard to compare difficulty on that front, and not too sure on GW2 since I never really did endgame in that one.

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I was trying to walk a fine line. I don't want to say the savage content is easy. I don't want to say it is the most challenging either.

When I raided in FFXIV, my group got a point where we'd log in on Wednesday evenings (since the servers weren't very stable on reset day) and bang out all 4 fights in 60 minutes, maybe 90 minutes... and then all log off for the week. If people have raided in other games, there is more of a commitment then just 90 minutes. And in all cases, I'm still saying you have to invest time to learn the strategy and execute it.

Simply apply the normal raid loot system to savage as well.

You can only get 1 raid reward per week, per fight, not including any minions/mounts. You will only reduce the chest rewards if you already got savage gear, or tome augment upgrade materials. You will also only get a maximum of 1 book per week (similar to normal raid weapon piece that you will automatically get upon clearing the 4th fight in a normal raid tier)
If you did not get anything however, you can do the fight again and not reduce the total chests for others.


The thing is that in theory, statics can get a fully maxed out kit for everyone in 2-3 weeks, if they organize it well and everyone is willing to cooperate with that. You get 8 raiders, all of them have 8 raiding characters. They can clear each fight 8 times, carefully making sure that everyone's main is playing with 7 alt characters of the others, and funnel all of the gear to the "mains" and likely get everyone's main up to maximum ilvl, and no luck is involved. Granted, this does require a lot of initial time investment, and then more investment and skill in actually doing the clears, needing 8 clears of every fight = 32 clears per week and it involves 64 characters.

But this is absolute degenerate metagaming in order to work around a silly arbitrary limit. And this workaround is more likely to result in burning out than this constant excuse of "omg it takes 3 months and a maximum of 1 clear per fight per week to prevent players from burning out" that you hear as a reason for why the system works the way it does.

To be honest I think they should just remove the option of "If x amount have joined then you don't get loot". I know it was probably put in place to prevent people from selling runs but I've just spent a week progging to clear MS1 and people who had completed it joined our party. I was AFK at the time otherwise I would have left but because of that my whole week of trying to prog got screwed over because 5 members who had completed it joined. It's such a defeating feeling to not even get a chance to roll on look and to just get a book? This honestly killed me wanting to continue savage at all because it doesn't feel rewarding at all for efforts.

Loot system is just bad, I think it was more better designed for statics who just give gear to DPS anyway.

I don't think theirs a loot system that will make everyone happy, but one that's 90% luck dependent isn't fun.

Just do splits /s

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Originally Posted by YomiKrane

To be honest I think they should just remove the option of "If x amount have joined then you don't get loot". I know it was probably put in place to prevent people from selling runs but I've just spent a week progging to clear MS1 and people who had completed it joined our party. I was AFK at the time otherwise I would have left but because of that my whole week of trying to prog got screwed over because 5 members who had completed it joined. It's such a defeating feeling to not even get a chance to roll on look and to just get a book? This honestly killed me wanting to continue savage at all because it doesn't feel rewarding at all for efforts.

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Pretty much what we've all been trying to say for years and they keep it in regardless. The problem is I can't remember the stated reason they added the penalty for people who already cleared it reducing the drops for those that haven't. Originally they had randomized loot and no such lockout, but the issue was people would go for weeks without getting a single drop they needed, so they eventually swapped to the chests that give the piece directly to the person.

Also this is kind of a weird restriction. Right now people can win multiple chests per week, but if they clear and join a group that hasn't cleared, the number of chests gets reduced. To change this around they'd have to restrict people to one chest per week and one book per week. That would probably get more people repeatedly doing old fights every week and keep PF alive longer, but the downside is that near the end of the week there would be people constantly attacking savage trying to get their final chests before next week, and it would definitely show the role discrepancy. The alternative might be to keep the current system but just role lock the lockout, so someone could go with a ranged, melee, tank, healer, and magic dps on the same instance and progress that way.

They probably are trying to pace people out but I'm not sure people like the current pace.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

Pretty much what we've all been trying to say for years and they keep it in regardless. The problem is I can't remember the stated reason they added the penalty for people who already cleared it reducing the drops for those that haven't. Originally they had randomized loot and no such lockout, but the issue was people would go for weeks without getting a single drop they needed, so they eventually swapped to the chests that give the piece directly to the person.

Also this is kind of a weird restriction. Right now people can win multiple chests per week, but if they clear and join a group that hasn't cleared, the number of chests gets reduced. To change this around they'd have to restrict people to one chest per week and one book per week. That would probably get more people repeatedly doing old fights every week and keep PF alive longer, but the downside is that near the end of the week there would be people constantly attacking savage trying to get their final chests before next week, and it would definitely show the role discrepancy. The alternative might be to keep the current system but just role lock the lockout, so someone could go with a ranged, melee, tank, healer, and magic dps on the same instance and progress that way.

They probably are trying to pace people out but I'm not sure people like the current pace.

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I don't remember the exact reason but I do remember when ARR Savages/Extremes were around, people would gear up their characters enough that having one lacking DPS wouldn't mean they'd just wipe and sell runs/sell the items for gil. It was maybe done to prevent that from happening? All I know is I've honestly been turned off from continuing to even try savage. Yeah, having a chance at loot just sucks in general but I'd rather have a chance then get entirely screwed out of it because 5 players who completed the raid joined a Practice/Prog group and my attempts to even have gotten a chance at loot over the last 5 days was just stripped away from because of an awful looting system.

Why would I continue putting effort into something that isn't rewarding? I'm not lucky enough to have a static and all I can do is PF at the moment. I can see why a bunch of people I knew didn't bother with savage and just waited till Alliance Raids came out so they could try upgrading their tome gear that way.

Its always a 1/8 chance of winning any piece of gear in PF. On average you will win something every 2 fights or so.

said it once I'll say it again
change savage loot to be like normal, where you can keep running each fight to get at least one guaranteed drop per fight per week
make the mount like the minion too, where it is loot independent of the weekly lockout
this would encourage people to do the fight more weekly, thereby helping more people potentially get clears

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Originally Posted by Mika_Zahard

Just do splits /s

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even with splits, you have to wait for 5 to 7 weeks in order to get all your tome item

Try the wow gearing system. Your job sucks for 6 months because the trinket you need never drops and there is no pity mechanic.

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Originally Posted by TheRealQuah

Try the wow gearing system. Your job sucks for 6 months because the trinket you need never drops and there is no pity mechanic.

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Just because wow's system is worse doesn't make this system good.

we shouldn't say "oh at least we don't have wow's system" we should acknowledge that gearing is still pretty flawed in this game. I don't know why I see this sentiment a lot with ff14 in particular.

1. join a static and be a DPS; you get gear with first priority to make bosses die faster
2. there are also books as rewards and now that M4S books can be converted to M1, M2 and M3 books, it's even easier to acquire gear.