Normal/Savage Alexander complaint

[Melixy]

When I did Coil, I felt rewarded by three things-- the story, the gear, and the challenge. And I firmly think you can feel rewarded for all three of these. Does it suck that players got locked behind hard fights that required good luck finding pug groups or finding a good static? Yes. It does suck. I felt bad for a lot of my friends when they couldn't get through FCoB. And I later helped some of them clear the content when it wasn't locked so they COULD experience it. There should be story stuff available for people who can't do the hardcore stuff.

But having a rehashed version of the "casual raid" seems a little unfaithful to the hardcore raiders. Could we cope with it? Sure. But I don't think it's the best thing SE could give to us. It's not the best compromise. I'm bothered by the lack of new story in Savage, but I could easily overlook that if the bosses themselves were not, for the most part, just their counterparts with a few mechanic differences and their damage output being significantly higher.

Here's my suggestion-- have Savage be a mini-arc in the story. I'm not really saying have it be its OWN story, but have it be something that's not really through the Wandering Minstrel (Because while that's a good idea, it has the tendency to get overused if one isn't careful, and that darn bard tends to get carried away-- I'm already mad at that guy for singing about Nael dropping rocks on my head during Heavensfall, he needs to tone it down some.).

What I'd personally suggest is since we've cleared out this robot and it's still around, have Savage be an attempt by the WoL to explore Alexander for more secrets. There doesn't have to be many cutscenes and doesn't have to be much dialogue. Maybe some dialogue from Cid going, "Hey, I want you to check out where you previously were in Alexander and see if you can find anything on how to get it to disappear for good." The bosses could then be leftovers from our first jaunt into Savage. For Gordias, I'd imagine the first floor could be a haywire/malfunctioning version of the Oppressor that's rather upset at you for beating him up, maybe second floor could be like some Illuminati gobbie warlord that's mad you made his buddies go "gobbieboom", etc. A mix of old fights and new-- new mechanics, new faces to bash in. It'd certainly make Alexander Savage feel a little more fresh and people wouldn't have to worry about being locked out of a very bare minimal story (that really just serves to introduce the new bosses).

[Nadirah]

Your argument is "we have nothing to do". But your argument sucks as we have got way more different content to do with Heavensward, as we got at ARR release or any patch later. It is not possible to get infinite content within one patch. You have to life with that like everybody else before.

And your argument is to go back and do old content that's already been completed?

[SendohJin]

I paid for that story as much as you did, so why should I not get it? Placing story elements behind top tier raids in a story based, paid subscription MMORPG is a poor way to do business and screws over the majority of players in the game. I think most would recognize that those players will never set foot in the top tier raid content.

Slowing it down? If it's gated behind savage mode Alexander, it's unlikely anyone but raiders will ever see it; just as the only way 80+% (this is a guesstimate) of the players will ever see the Coil story elements is via You Tube.

that's not what i said at all. slowing it down means normal mode comes out in 3.1.

i never said anything that would imply that it would be gated behind Savage. so everyone will get to see it, everyone gets what they paid for.

[SendohJin]

What I'd personally suggest is since we've cleared out this robot and it's still around, have Savage be an attempt by the WoL to explore Alexander for more secrets. There doesn't have to be many cutscenes and doesn't have to be much dialogue.

your idea is worse, creating any dialogue exclusive to Savage is bad.

[Moomba33]

What I still don't understand is why they release content "backwards".
Crystal Tower was supposed to be available at launch, but was delayed, so we got i90 from Coil and few months later, i80 from LotA.

Why didn't they release Void Ark BEFORE Alex Savage ? This way, people would have farmed Alex normal, then Void Ark, and then Alex Savage, which would have probably avoid this sense of doing only the same fights back to back.

I think this would create a new problem of forcing hardcore raiders to wait even longer for the content they're interested in.
I'm sure some were already bothered by having to wait 4 weeks after the Heavensward launch for Savage.

Personally I'm very happy with how Alex Normal and Savage were handled.
I never got passed t9 of coil and I have always wished that SE had implemented a story version of coil which was easily clearable in DF.

I would have been fine if Normal Alex had come next patch and the 24 man had come now instead though.

[Melixy]

your idea is worse, creating any dialogue exclusive to Savage is bad.

Creating dialogue exclusive to Savage is bad? Even if it's just one or two lines at the start of the Savage quest? A quest literally anyone could do by themselves after clearing Alexander NM?

Why? It's not gated by anything the average populace wouldn't already be clearing, aka-- the "story mode". The rest of the questline would just be beating the difficult bosses in an 8-man raid.

[Miscreant]

Creating dialogue exclusive to Savage is bad? Even if it's just one or two lines at the start of the Savage quest? A quest literally anyone could do by themselves after clearing Alexander NM?

Why? It's not gated by anything the average populace wouldn't already be clearing, aka-- the "story mode". The rest of the questline would just be beating the difficult bosses in an 8-man raid.

The story used to be part of the drive for clearing coil, I would rather just experience Alexanders story through Savage without going through the normal version.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

I feel like a lot of the incentives got sucked out of the raids in heavensward. Getting to final coil was a pretty big incentive to do turn 9. Now we don't have that. When 3.2 hits everyone will get to see the 2nd raid tier regardless if you took the time to do the harder raid or not. Unique set of glamour like the dreadwyrm set, we don't have that either. The non-dutyfinder version of the raid is now kind of a "just for fun" thing. With no real reason to do it other than to get your teeth kicked in. It's sad because coil was one of the things that actually took more than 2 hours to blow through, Unlike everything else in the game.

I'm not sure what Yoshi got up his sleeve, but I feel like for this game to actually maintain a somewhat steady subscriber base. They going to have to start taking notes from ffxi and have at least a little bit of content that's not on duty finder, and doesn't become obsolete in 2 months. Otherwise a lot of ppl are just going to burn through the game and take really long breaks or just flat out quit altogether. We will see what the developers do. Coil used to fill that role, but now the 8man raid is pretty much another crystal tower.

[Fendred]

If we must have a normal mode for people who think they can't raid then I'd prefer savage come out first, then the easier mode for catch up. Story isn't as big of an issue it's more the fact that half the fight is pretty much spoiled and you know which bosses are coming up, takes away from the excitement of progression. I think there's still a lot of room for improvement with the raids in general though but that's another thing altogether.

That sounds good until we consider that all the bosses are spoiled by the online guides used by everyone prior to jumping into the instance. People are just doing too much of the same boss fights in a given week for the purpose of getting loot at an optimal pace. People don't consider it a legit run unless you run it four times in a row. That's four times the number of boss encounters required by raid groups for any previous raid content. Without any variance on the bosses or some way to keep people from running it so much, people burn themselves out on it.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Okay, I'm going to bring this discussion back to the main topic now. So the problem with how Alex Normal and Savage were handled was, at least in the opinions of most I've talked to who understand, the fact that we're fighting four bosses we've already seen. Sure, the mechanics are more punishing, more plentiful and more intricate, but for a lot of people seeing the same bosses you've been farming with no problems just removes the feeling of excitement. Sure this may not be the case for the players who raid purely for the sake of raiding, those who care about being the best and probably wouldn't give two damns if every boss was nothing more than an beige cube in appearance, but I'd say they're a minority. So then let's look at the main cause of this problem. Savage released after normal. This is what caused us to be in the position we're currently in, as we'd all seen the bosses for two weeks prior before even stepping into Savage. Now, the simple solution, before you start putting a ton of thought into it, would be to switch around when Normal is released with when the 24-man is released.

However, there's an obvious problem with that. While in the end the same amount of work needs to be done development wise, doing the releases this way would HEAVILY frontload the amount of development necessary. Let's face it, normal should take very little effort to develop once savage is made. You just downtune some numbers, simplify and remove some mechanics, and boom, normal mode. Because of this, from a development standpoint it just makes sense to release the two things together. The 24-man on the other hand needs its own development done from scratch. New art assets for gear, environments, bosses, boss attacks. Tuning a brand new piece of content, mechanics and all, for a 24-man group of random strangers. New music for the environments. These are all things that go into developing a new raid from scratch, and there's a reason that we've never seen two of them released at the same time. On top of that how insulted would you feel seeing the new "raid content" in 3.1 just be an easier version of one of the two raids you've already been doing? I can say I'd be pretty mad seeing something that seemed so lazy as the "raid content" in a major content patch.

And then you introduce gear to the equation. First, gear designs. If normal mode drops gear, it really does just make sense for that gear to be visually similar to the savage mode for that raid. After all, it's the same raid, why would it drop different pieces entirely? And then you need to think about gear progression. If normal mode were to release in off patches, due to the placement of that patch normal mode's gear would be a mere 10 item levels below its savage counterparts. Now think about getting those pieces as a person who had been doing savage since it came out. "Wtf? this looks just like the gear I've already been farming, but worse and I can't even dye it. Why would I EVER want this?" So savage raiders would be turned off. It's just not exciting to get gear that's designed the same as the gear you've been trying to get and wearing parts of for months. Even the players who can only really manage A1 and A2 would likely be put off. This is chunks of the playerbase who before the content is even out, with a release cycle like this wouldn't want to do the normal mode at all. But they may need it to catch up on alt gearing or filling in spots. I'd say these players in this case may be even more angry than they were back before Alex Normal had its droprates doubled, which no one wants.

"So why not have some other source of i190 gear, then release the 24-man with i200 in 3.1 and the normal mode of Alex alongside it, with gear only coming from the 24-man? Or make the normal mode of the previous Alex come out at the same time as the next Alex?" Well, This definitely seems a bit closer to the solution, but there are still some problems even there. For one, I do think it's nice to have the non-dyeable variants of the raid gear available for glamour for the people who can't do savage. But as I mentioned above, it only really makes sense for such a thing to come from the normal mode of the raid. So if you release it later, how much later can you afford to do so? Do you make it irrelevant stat wise like the Odin trial's gear? You almost have to if you're releasing it that much later. But then if you release the normal mode when the next savage comes out, you're too late, aren't you? Won't the overgearing that can be done make the old savage content far more accessible, to the point where people say "why bother doing the normal for gear that I can't even dye when I can just outgear the real version and get dyeable stuff?" In my opinion this basically throws the idea of holding it back to the next savage's release for a normal mode out the window. It may be more reasonable for 3.1 then, but that runs the risk of spoiling the story for those who have yet to complete savage despite their best efforts to do so, which could be very spirit breaking for those people. And also, where exactly would we throw i190 gear to be available instead? Dungeons aren't worthy and the tomestone sets are fairly set in stone.

And on the topic of progression, there's another benefit to the current system which would be lost if we changed to releasing normal mode later. Due to this fact, it would be very difficult to justify making the new savage content gated by something besides savage. Why is this an issue? Remember back to ARR. "Oh, you're skilled enough to take on FCoB but can't find people to do T5 with? Talk to me when you've actually unlocked the raid." The content segregation due to this type of gating was very real. However, it does appear that SE may have finally found a way around it. If the next tier of savage Alex only has one thing gating it, we can safely say that it will be the normal mode of that tier, as opposed to the tremendously difficult final fight of the previous tier. You no longer have this major team skill wall gating people from being able to participate in the current content, you just have the far easier wall waiting to be pushed over. And this also opens up their opportunities to make the final boss of each savage tier as difficult as they please, without worrying about it needing to be clearable by the vast majority so they can continue enjoying the relevant content. These are two very positive aspects of the current system, and ones which I would certainly hesitate to throw away.

But let's get back to the story, which this leads to the other issue I had with the idea of making normal mode come out a patch later. How do you make it work from a lore standpoint? The whole idea right now is that the Wandering Minstrel is someone who grossly exaggerates the story of what you went through previously, making your feats sound far more epic. If you make savage release before normal, this gives us the issues of savage needing to be the original experience that the tale is based off. So... now we're changing the Minstrel's exaggeration to be an exaggeration of just how easily we went through it? I guess that would work, but it goes against the idea of what and who he is. On top of that, imagine how it would feel to unlock it this way. "I've heard tales of other adventurers performing these epic feats, would you like to have me place your name in the song so you can feel good about yourself?" Yeah, THAT won't be a huge insult to the majority of the playerbase who wants nothing more than to see the story. And on top of that the story cutscenes would need to be thrown in somehow despite there being numerous cutscenes not tied to the raid itself, but events outside of it. Perhaps the devs could think of a better idea than this, but I doubt it would be easy, and definitely not as easy as it would be to just continue with how they've been developing the content thus far.

It's not as simple or black and white of a discussion as some people make it out to be. This is something that if we really want to see changed, we should be openly discussing every aspect of not just amongst ourselves, but also with the devs so they can understand why we have a problem with the current system and how we think it can be improved. I'd like to see some more discussion spawn in this thread as a result of this post, as maybe some people have better ideas than I was able to come up with, not to mention the longer this thread gets and the more noticed it gets the more likely it is to be seen b the devs and have our ideas taken into consideration. Please, SE, listen to us and talk to us. Tell us why you made Alex the way it is and if anything we've suggested has been considered or is being reconsidered now. And keep it civil, players, this isn't the time or place for any "git gud"s or "stop whining"s. If we have a problem with Alex as it is, we need to make it known and make our case in a reasonable manner. Thank you, especially if you actually made it through the entire post.

Edit: tl;dr, Normal is obviously important for people to be able to see the story, but the burnout is obvious and visible, so let's talk about better ways to handle the release of raids in the future.