Is Endgame Just a Cycle of "Static Killers?"

[PArcher]

Care to elaborate/give specifics? As they say "you know it when you see it:" if you call it something else, but it smells and acts like a static, it's still a static. And I've read a ton of bad stuff saying mid core is practically dead due to AS. Honestly, Alexander Savage is horrific P.R. for SE on FF14, any potential new player seeing that stuff early on likely will be turned off real quick, so much bad stuff on there and it reflects really really bad on this game.

Except most of Alex Savage isn't even really hard in the current tier if you're competent at your job and can pay attention to mechanics. If you are at least above average, and can deal with some multi-tasking, you can do Savage.

Too many players are lazy, and want things handed to them. And they complain and complain. Amdapor Keep and Pharos Sirius are two prime examples of casual content getting nerfed because people are just *bad* and refuse to get better.

[Auteur]

Except most of Alex Savage isn't even really hard in the current tier if you're competent at your job and can pay attention to mechanics. If you are at least above average, and can deal with some multi-tasking, you can do Savage.

Too many players are lazy, and want things handed to them. And they complain and complain. Amdapor Keep and Pharos Sirius are two prime examples of casual content getting nerfed because people are just *bad* and refuse to get better.

Outside material like begs to differ, ex: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/67805...eborn/73747720. Begs the question why does SE want to keep producing more AS raids that are going to further create horrendous P.R. and scare away new people from joining the game. Seems like a disastrous raid as a whole and should be scrapped entirely sooner rather than later.

[viewtyjoe]

Outside material like begs to differ, ex: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/67805...eborn/73747720. Begs the question why does SE want to keep producing more AS raids that are going to further create horrendous P.R. and scare away new people from joining the game. Seems like a disastrous raid as a whole and should be scrapped entirely sooner rather than later.

The FFXIV team made a commitment to the current split (Normal/Savage) for the 3.X raids because the most common complaint from the most hardcore raiders through 2.X was that Binding Coil was too easy and not a serious challenge. At the same time, the majority of players did not go through Binding Coil and many of them felt left out because of the story they were missing by not doing serious raiding.

When Gordias Savage was released, it was fairly clear early on that it required some serious coordination and skill (in the form of very intense DPS checks, mostly) from all players in a party, and players on a number of lower population servers migrated to Gilgamesh in the early days of Gordias (and throughout) because "that's where the raiders are." This, along with Gilgamesh's large population, leads to a lot of negativity regarding casual and low-skilled players.

The response from the FFXIV team was to make Midas Savage more forgiving on the DPS check front, but the mechanics were more complicated, and A6S was poorly done. The FFXIV team still received complaints about this, and have stated that the next tier of Savage will be more akin to Final Coil (aka the "easy" stuff that was complained about that led to Savage in the first place) with the expectation that it will be fully cleared by the best groups in a week, and most serious groups should be able to clear it reasonably quickly.

The overall story is one of players complaining about two things (raid not hard enough, raid too hard) and the FFXIV development team responding by offering Normal and Savage difficulties. Player reaction has generally indicated that the complaint about raids not being hard enough was generally overblown, considering the clear rates of Gordias and Midas Savage, and the FFXIV team has been adjusting as they learn to make it more viable.

Again, this is one facet of a fairly large amount of content available at max level, and I don't believe that Savage has generated anything resembling "horrendous PR" or otherwise scared players away. Player whining on the official forums and other venues greatly overstates the issues, as it is with most MMOs.

[KarstenS]

The FFXIV team still received complaints about this, and have stated that the next tier of Savage will be more akin to Final Coil.

Thats not fully correct. They are balancing the last tier of Alexander around the following issue:

Regarding Midas, Let's just say the level cap was still 50 and you could use the level 50 rotations. I think the clear rates would have been way way higher. After checking the data and logs, we noticed "Understanding the mechanics,judging,dodging and maintaining the level 60 rotations on top of that" is what created the enormous gap between players. There are a lot of buffs you need to manage and maintain and not only that, but the phase transitions or enemy mechanics disturb that rotation. This led to requiring players to flexibly judging in certain situations. Back in binding coil of Bahamut, there were some harsh mechanics, but the difference in rotations directly slashed the gap in difficulty. It's too late to change the rotations during the 3.x series so we'll lower the difficulty of the final tier of Alexander instead.

In a more recent interwiew Yoshida did state the same and he also clarified, that Savage is meant to be hardcore content and not to be for everyone. So the difficult for final Alexander is more like a workaround, which will get changed back in 4.0 with the next raid.