Yoshida, The Creator: Savage is the worst tuning ever in an MMO

[Lambdafish]

I also agree with everything you just said. Like 100%. I don't believe it is not feasible with their team to add 2 more bosses and just strip away phases from the other ones if they need more manpower.

The problem is that new fights and taking away phases do not equate. Every new fight needs to be concepted, assets need to be made, and the fight needs to be programmed (hell, they even need to add more quest chains to get into the fights), then increase the workload by taking into account both normal and savage. While more bosses would be nice, it is not as easy as you imply (although Yoshi has said that they only need 2 more members on the battle team in order to "vastly" improve raids, whatever that means).

[Zhemos]

I see a lot of people talk about 3 tiers and how its needed and yoshi basically saying they don't have the man power etc.
Eh why not just make a hardcore version of the the final boss for raid tiers. You unlock it after clearing savage. It's 1 fight, they can manage it, maybe? Call it extreme, hardcore, ultra whatever. Have no loot drops for it, only a title and like a mount or something. The hardcore can throw themselves at it for weeks and have stuff to brag about when they clear it. Everyone happy? The end.

[Sparktacus]

The problem is that new fights and taking away phases do not equate. Every new fight needs to be concepted, assets need to be made, and the fight needs to be programmed (hell, they even need to add more quest chains to get into the fights), then increase the workload by taking into account both normal and savage. While more bosses would be nice, it is not as easy as you imply (although Yoshi has said that they only need 2 more members on the battle team in order to "vastly" improve raids, whatever that means).

I know there is more to it as I don't work in the industry but thinking outside the box I feel it would be easy to conceptualize a battle without having any video game knowhow. Hire artists and critical puzzle thinkers to create a concept and then have the design team go from there. I feel the company has a standard they want to live up too and sometimes it might hold them back.

[Aquaslash]

That... actually sounds like a terrible difficulty system. The flaw is that the challenge is completely temporary. It's wholly possible to clear content and get the best gear without learning a damn thing, and your high-level gear will make up for everything by the time a player has access to it.

Just my 2cents.

How is that any different from now? Did anyone learn anything because Brute Justice made them slot VIT materia? Or the Nisi sac strat?

Or were these cheesy methods to cover artificial gates, and pass things that they mathematically should have lost to.

[Lambdafish]

I feel it would be easy to conceptualize a battle without having any video game knowhow. Hire artists and critical puzzle thinkers to create a concept and then have the design team go from there. I feel the company has a standard they want to live up too and sometimes it might hold them back.

Oh yeah, conceptualizing a battle is easy, yoshi P has shared many times his wacky ideas (as have many forum goers including myself). The problem is when you say "just have the design team go from there". A) We don't actually know what makes up the "design team" and what roles and responsibilites these teams have to a full extent B) If we did know the full extent of what they did, design team has other responsibilities, and we don't how busy they are. C) "Just going from there" means nothing. The amount of work it takes to take an idea from conception to even a working prototype takes a tonne of thought and consideration (originality, difficulty, pacing, job viability etc.) and that isn't even taking into account technical feasibility, art assets and even lore. Game development is an intensive task that goes through many iterations before we get a final outcome (as an example of timescale, yoshi P said that a single piece of glamour takes 6 months to create from concept to implementation, and as for battle content - we saw concept art (and even a concept render) of shiva and world of darkness before the release of 2.0)

Edit: *and bug fixing

[Aquaslash]

In addition to what Lambdafish said, there's this thing called "bug testing" that has to be done for every change that's made. Just having a boss deal more damage could cause a ripple effect in the code that leads right up to a game crash. Judging by how many hotfixes have to happen when a patch rolls out, this team needs all the debugging time they can get.

[Remedi]

How is that any different from now? Did anyone learn anything because Brute Justice made them slot VIT materia? Or the Nisi sac strat?

Or were these cheesy methods to cover artificial gates, and pass things that they mathematically should have lost to.

The water debuff in A8s was cheesed too by most if I'm not wrong

[KDSilver]

I keep reading topics about the creator and "how it is easy" since the release of 3.4, but I'm wondering something.

How many people who are giving their opinion have already made every savage of this content?
I doubt everyone already did it.

I'll only begin Savage Thursday,so I won't say a thing about it until I beat every floor, even if i'm surprised of how fast some group already made them all.
But i'm curious knowing what these people think and from them, what made them beat the content so fast.

We won't be able to 'objectively' debate about it 'til 90% of the people who are talking about the raid made it.

I won't be suprised to see some who are yelling about how easy it is based on the progression of hardcore raider being stuck themselves.
Wait and see.

[Verius_Nox]

Hardcore raiding is too small of a population to cater to. If they're allotting resources to something, they want more than 1% of the population to experience it.

[CookieMonsta]

That... actually sounds like a terrible difficulty system. The flaw is that the challenge is completely temporary. It's wholly possible to clear content and get the best gear without learning a damn thing, and your high-level gear will make up for everything by the time a player has access to it.

Just my 2cents.

Umm no, thats not quite how it works. A lot of the people commenting here haven't got a damn clue what they are talking about and they mostly haven't even gotten that far in Savage. Unless you come back when the raid is obsolete with a crazy ilevel advantage (e.g. 40+) then maybe ur statement is valid. A3S, A4S and A8S were still extremely challenging (to the point of borderline impossible for midcore/casual groups) even with BiS gear of the time.

Hardcore raiding is too small of a population to cater to. If they're allotting resources to something, they want more than 1% of the population to experience it.

While I'm all for a larger raiding community and more accessible endgame content. It actually isn't that difficult to cater to the hardcore crowd. IIRC someone several posts earlier mentioned that the WoW devs basically designed their raids for LFR and did simple mods and scaling to make it more hardcore. All up it was something like 5% more resources for 5% of the audience. Not a bad deal compared to designing a full fresh tier of casual 24 mans for the masses.

The problem is that new fights and taking away phases do not equate. Every new fight needs to be concepted, assets need to be made, and the fight needs to be programmed (hell, they even need to add more quest chains to get into the fights), then increase the workload by taking into account both normal and savage. While more bosses would be nice, it is not as easy as you imply (although Yoshi has said that they only need 2 more members on the battle team in order to "vastly" improve raids, whatever that means).

Unfortunately, I think this is the ultimate issue of mechanics heavy Savage raids. Gordias never had this issue because the mechanics were simple but derived its difficulty from tough numbers. The community responded badly and thus we have the new format, programming has limits so sometimes it is better to have a phase as skippable to prevent bugs and other unintended effects (e.g. T7S).