My thinking about Alex normal/savage. Issue IMHO inside

[Synestra]

ALEX normal is the BEST thing that happened to HW. It kinda overshadows the fact that you don't need an static or beg people to help you. You just join the raid with a bunch of people and get on with it. It kinda as well makes people be at the same level equally. I am pleased with this and hopefully it will carry on all the way thru future patches.

Tryed it once without static group and dear god it was horrible experience, i gotta give some serious respect for those that DF that thing every time, i simply cannot do it ever again.

[Bernelli]

Poorly desgined in what way? It's a tough ass fight as it should be, if a static can't beat it and break up over it then its there problem.

You're a fool if you seriously believe that the large amount of statics falling apart once they hit A3S isn't related to the raid itself.

[Azazua_azura]

@ OP (sry ur name is hard to type for me)

Ok, what PRE WoW mmo have you played that you could bring ideas from, so far you are only mentioning world of warcraft and swtor which was even labled by the devs as a WoW clone (the devs who promoted the game said think WoW but with lightsabers). I am asking because the only game you are mentioning is WoW, and as much as this might be a surprise, not everyone has played it or raided in it so may not understand what your saying or asking for (i sure as heck don't). And please do not take this the wrong way, but you are coming off like a too big of a WoW-fanboy, and seems like you want ff14 raids to be exactly like WoWs.

You are also basing your comments on one raid type which was JUST added to ff14. Coil only had a 2 modes, coil and coil savage. There was never a "story" mode for the adverage player base. I say give it some time for them to adjust it as they are still figuring out a balance.

If you are upset on the size, please take into consideration and look up past live letters, letters from the producer going as far as pre-lauch. I say this due to yoshida said time and time again content is set up in the way it is, so if a player can only play for an hour or two they can do stuff. All content is built on this time frame. You will not find content that last 3 or more hours on adverage.

If that is what you want, this may not be the game for you, as they may not change their stance on this.

[Nadirah]

Man I feel bad for you

There's plenty of games that have done crafting rather well and this is not one of them for me.

I cannot *stand* crafting in FFXIV. It's boring as balls.

If you are upset on the size, please take into consideration and look up past live letters, letters from the producer going as far as pre-lauch. I say this due to yoshida said time and time again content is set up in the way it is, so if a player can only play for an hour or two they can do stuff.

If the instance didn't expire in 90 minutes or whatever, killing one or two bosses in a 14 boss dungeon and then coming back the next day is perfectly feasible.

In both WoW and EverQuest 2, raids persist for the entirety of the lockout. If I walk into a raid instance and get saved to an ID(Mythic raiding in wow, any raiding period in EQ2), that raid instance stays the same exact way when I load into it. If I killed X and Y, but not Z, when anyone that enters with my ID goes in there, all they see is Z is alive, and any trash linked to it is alive.

It wouldnt work here, because regardless if you killed anything or not, the instance is "done" in 80 or 90 minutes, and you have to start completely over.

Which I still think is stupid for raid content.

[Synestra]

I cannot *stand* crafting in FFXIV. It's boring as balls.

Wait wut? this game has most involving crafting system i have ever encountered, instead of "press button to craft" you actually need a rotation and manage you buffs while doing that.

[Dante_V]

Alex normal mode has killed raiding and it painfully boring. It needs more challenge IMO.

[Alym]

Alex normal mode has killed raiding and it painfully boring. It needs more challenge IMO.

I'm not interested in arguing over opinions so I won't post beyond this, but I wanted to add mine to the forums to be heard. I actually believe Savage mode is what's killing raiding.

For some background, I'm raiding Savage mode Alex (currently on the last phase of A3S) and beat each tier of Coil before echo in ARR. I know lots of people in a lot of raid groups (or at least I did). All the raid groups I know didn't break up when Alex Normal was released because now they got to see the story easily. They didn't break up when Savage was released due to Normal mode burnout. However, one broke up when Faust/A1S was too hard of a DPS check for them. Almost all of the others fell apart on A3S. The fight was too much of a challenge. When raid groups are working for weeks or months on the same phase of the same fight, people get frustrated, bored, tired and burnt out. That's the point where people may say, "Well, I saw the story and A4 boss in Normal so... whatever. Bye!" but they never would've gotten to that point if Savage hadn't been tuned so high. To me, this clearly shows that the Normal mode isn't the problem; the lack of progression in the only real progression content is the issue.

I've been in three statics since the start of HW. The one I had going into 3.0 had been together for all of 2.0. They hated Alex Savage and the unchanged (since 2.0) gearing process. All of them but me and one other quit shortly after Savage was released. The next group I was in was rebuilding after half of their group quit because of A1S in the early weeks. They couldn't ever get 8 people on all at once to even enter Savage, so I left. The third group I am now in is with my real life best friend. I joined because their caster quit in A3S. Shortly after I joined, their PLD quit (due to real life scheduling issues) and we had a very tough time finding a replacement because no one wants to do Savage anymore. I'm wondering how long this group will survive, though. Our WAR has flat out told us that he only logs in to raid because we're his friends but he no longer likes the game and does not have fun in A3S. My best friend, our WHM, is pretty much of the exact same opinion as the WAR. Truth be told, I'm getting there myself. I have fun on Tuesdays when we clear A1 and 2S, but dread having to login for our A3S progression days because Savage is just not fun. It's tuned too high to be fun and A4S is supposedly even worse. As a group, we are now talking about cutting back a progression day because so many people are miserable.

Our group isn't the only one like this. Another group in my FC just decided they would no longer do A3S until 3.1. They said they will try it again then and, if it's still the same, they will likely stop raiding. This is on the heels of another group I know breaking up over fighting while progressing through A3S - the leader of my FC was in that group. She and most people in her group also rarely log on now either.

All of these people I listed were people who, like me, cleared all tiers of Coil before echo. They weren't casual raiders.

My point of showing all these examples is that I don't believe the easier Alex Normal is what's making people not want to do Savage. I think it is, in fact, the extremely challenging difficulty of Savage that is making people give up. So to say that the game "needs more challenge" is, I think, harmful feedback to the health of raiding.

We have the challenge in Savage now, but very few seem to actually like it. Add onto that the state of the game outside of raiding and it just makes things worse. Those are topics for other threads, however.

EDIT: To propose a solution, I believe Normal mode should stay the same including drops and ilvl, Hard mode should be added and tuned to the same difficulty of 2.0 Coil and be the main progression content in terms of drops, and Savage (if they insist it should continue to exist) should offer the exact same drops as the new hard mode but should also give an extra chest, titles, and/or small vanity rewards.

[Arashmin]

EDIT: To propose a solution, I believe Normal mode should stay the same including drops and ilvl, Hard mode should be added and tuned to the same difficulty of 2.0 Coil and be the main progression content in terms of drops, and Savage (if they insist it should continue to exist) should offer the exact same drops as the new hard mode but should also give an extra chest, titles, and/or small vanity rewards.

So like how Coil did it's entire thing, but with a Story mode. I think this is what people actually wanted when there was clamor for an easy-to-access mode, not to have the previous model (which catered well to its proponents) obliterated.

[Colorful]

So like how Coil did it's entire thing, but with a Story mode. I think this is what people actually wanted when there was clamor for an easy-to-access mode, not to have the previous model (which catered well to its proponents) obliterated.

I think most of us were hoping for coil + echo as it was advertised honestly, but it looks like we're not going to get that.

[Alahra]

My point of showing all these examples is that I don't believe the easier Alex Normal is what's making people not want to do Savage. I think it is, in fact, the extremely challenging difficulty of Savage that is making people give up. So to say that the game "needs more challenge" is, I think, harmful feedback to the health of raiding.

I can echo your sentiments from what I've seen on my server at least. One of Diabolos' oldest raiding FCs (and I think the oldest that hadn't transferred, but I could be wrong on that) broke up several weeks ago entirely because of AS3. As far as I know, only one FC has cleared AS4 on Diabolos at this point, too. A large number of folks that were raiders in ARR that I know don't have raid groups anymore, either, and I'm seeing many of those folks online less and less.