Discussion : How to boost Alexander attractiveness ?

[Osteichthyes]

What I find to be most unappealing is just how dull most of the areas are. Coils had some interesting features in relation to colour, but Alex is just all grey and bland. Everything just feels the same, and I know they are limited as to what they can create to maintain the aesthetic, but they could have done a little more. Even thinking about the first coils there was a lot of difference, oranges and blues then into reds, there was a lot of variance.

In relation to savage not being popular, I think it could work if savage was released first then normal mode later. The people who would run normal mode would be less likely to complain (although there would have to be something else for them to do in the meantime), but the hardcore people would be able to jump straight into the action and the fights wouldn't feel stale. This would mean adjusting difficulties to make up for the lack of gear but it's better than no one running the content, because then it is just a waste of resources that could go into making more content.

[Februs]

In relation to savage not being popular, I think it could work if savage was released first then normal mode later. The people who would run normal mode would be less likely to complain (although there would have to be something else for them to do in the meantime), but the hardcore people would be able to jump straight into the action and the fights wouldn't feel stale.

I don't think this would work either. The problem with the difficulty of Alexander (INCLUDING Savage) is that a lot of it falls to Dps checks. It's a trend throughout all of Heavensward, actually, and it's a bad one.

I hate to say it, but SE was blatantly lazy when designing their new content. Dps checks are intimidating when you first come across them, sure, but they are not "hard." What they are is a temporary and artificial difficulty spike. Mechanics make a fight "hard." Twisters, Divebombs, Dreadknights, Alternating Status Debuffs, these are the things that made certain coil fights hard and are still, to this day, cock blocking players who think they can just unsync and power through them. Dps checks are just a temporary stop gap. Consider A1-2 Savage. They are almost identical to their normal counterparts, with only a couple tiny tweaks in mechs (Ie: A1 missiles leave puddles... yup. Very exciting). Once people get better geared for the fights (item level 200+) the Dps checks become attainable even by players who are not that good. Suddenly the "savage" content is nothing. You can't say the same for the Coils. Savage coils are still mercilessly brutal.

The way I see it, Alex Normal is a nice pace for casual players. Alex Savage would have done better to have been called "Alex HARD (with the exceptions being, maybe, A3 and A4)." After that, they should have come out with a proper Alexander Savage in 3.1 or 3.2 that is more the speed of what coil players remember. By then new gear would make it doable and more enjoyable for hardcore raiders.

[Nyghtmarerobu]

I think its to late to fix the "Attractiveness" of Alexander. You can say that its boring and bland. You can make excuses about how the story is unintresting and the goblins aren't threating. In reality, majority of the people not raiding anymore, is simply due to the difficulty, and the way gear is dsitributed.

The difficulty of current Alexander: Savage is what the hardcore raiding groups wanted. Kudo's to all of you guys who got your wish for challenging content. But when it comes down to it, it is well beyond what a normal player can do. The wall that was erected by AS3, is absolutely ridiculous, and is only made worse, by the current gear progression of savage. "Can't beat this turn, come back when you have some more gear buddy" - But the gear I need to beat savage, comes from savage. And with minimal left side upgrades, beating AS3 is quite the challenge.

Now I understand why they made two separate difficulties. Not everyone plays this game to raid. Some people want to play more casually, but still experience the raid story, and the Alexander normal content is perfect for them. They made the savage content for the people that play this game to raid. However only a small minority of the people that play this game to raid will ever complete all of Alexander savage pre-echo.

They have alienated the medium-core raid groups. I'm talking groups that have skilled players that raid two or three days a week, a few hours each day. I've seen so many groups broken by A3S, so many friends quit because of the insurmountable progression wall. We are losing our medium-core raiding community because savage is to difficult. Statics are breaking over this turn, and groups are scrambling to keep their groups together over lost players. It needs to be fixed before the next raiding cycle or were gonna see an exodus from the raiding scene.

[Februs]

The difficulty of current Alexander: Savage is what the hardcore raiding groups wanted. Kudo's to all of you guys who got your wish for challenging content. But when it comes down to it, it is well beyond what a normal player can do.

Not exactly. I don't know about the people you know or have talked to, but the general consensus among most of the truly hard core raiders that I know, as well as the majority of the people in the two Raid LS's I'm a part of, is that Alex savage is not the challenge they wanted and that they the way the Coil was done.

As you said, if you can't beat it, "come back when you have some more gear, buddy." But that's not really "challenging." You just need to get better gear and then you're good to go. Strictly speaking, you don't even have to run Alex Savage to get the better gear. You can pay for upgrades to your Antiquated set and gear up that way. Even if they don't put echo into Alexander Savage it will still be made achievable by future gear levels that exceed the current sets. To be perfectly honest, the main reason more people haven't beaten it now is because slightly less hardcore players just can't commit to regular scheduled raids. The Coil was not like that.

If you couldn't beat a specific section of the coil it had almost nothing to do with gear (Dps checks were still in the coil, but they were not the be all end all of the difficulty). When you lost, the coil said "come back when you git gud." There's a HUGE difference between Alexander Savage and what Raiders who were committed to running the Coil are used to, because the coil didn't just demand better gear. It demanded that the players run the content over and over again until they got good enough to manage the mechanics. As it is right now, there are certain mechanics to the Normal difficulty of the coil that actually exceed Alexander Savage in difficulty.

The fact that there are even misconceptions about it is proof of this. You say that Alexander Savage is "well beyond what a normal player can do." That's true enough, but consider that, before echo and higher gear levels, Bahamut's NORMAL Coils were "well beyond what a normal player could do." The idea of clearing it with a PUG or even a fresh PF group was somewhere on the same level of winning every lottery in North America at the same time. It's great that casual players can experience the Raids now, but I think that a lot of people are taking the fact that they can even complain about it for granted. This is content that they were essentially locked out of back in the Coil days. Now they get to run it on easy mode, but the players who wanted a challenge were left with a sub par raid and a "savage" mode that is basically just one big Dps check... I can understand why Hardcore players find that to be a bit of a let down.