Savage SCoB difficulty compared to FCoB?

[Kuwagami]

The basic design philosophy for all the savage second coil fights seemed to be to counter "cheese" strats like superslug, mark moves, single tank 8, four renauds, single tank 9, etc. It's pretty neat.

Coming back on that.

You kinda reverse how it truly is, as the Savage mode is just the untouched fight as the devs first programmed it. Rather, the "chees" strats were made possible by the nerf of many if not all mechanics to make them doable by the good players.


@OP

after talking to a few friends about your question, most of them confirmed that Savage is harder than Final Coil. I know one who was in the top 50 groups clearing T13, and yet his group still has to beat T7 savage ^^

(they got T9 & T8 savage 2 weeks after their first T13 kill, having some free time in their raiding week)

[Brannigan]

Coming back on that.

You kinda reverse how it truly is, as the Savage mode is just the untouched fight as the devs first programmed it. Rather, the "chees" strats were made possible by the nerf of many if not all mechanics to make them doable by the good players.

That was what was said in an interview, but I don't really think that's the case. Maybe the original fight concepts were closer to Savage, but they almost certainly added some mechanics due to how players actually engaged with the original second coil fights. There's a lot of reasons I thought this while I was doing savage, but the ones that really stand out to me are the 360 degree devour in savage 6, the adds being buffed by the boss in savage 8, and the vulnerability up debuff in savage 9. The numbers were also tuned for full i110 players with High Allagan weapons, so at the very least they touched those up. If only because of that, I don't think the savage versions of the fight as we know them now ever existed before 2.3 (or whenever they were patched in).

- Swarm works completely differently. It targets a random non-MT and places 4 stacks on that player. Each stack applies a stack on the player that increases damage taken from each consecutive Swarm stack. At no stacks, it does little damage, at 1 stack, it does around 5,000-6,000, at 2, it will kill any non-tank, 3 can't be survived (and no, Holmgang/Hallowed Ground don't work). This works like Allagan Rot/Chain of Purgatory, you must spread the stacks to 3 other players. For the next round, the other 4 player need to take the hit, but due to RNG, it is possible you are forced to take the 1 stack hit. Swarm targets players with least stacks.

Oh yeah, I forgot about this. This is a lot cooler than regular swarm. You can actually use Cover to eat terminal stings in an emergency. Pretty sure I had to do that for our clear to prevent a healer from getting double stacked.