Love the Creator Savage Tier Difficulty Tuning

[Griffey]

I think the difficulty is fine. As people have already mentioned a lot of development time goes into making savage content and when a tiny minority of players are the only ones who enjoy it it's a little pointless. At this difficulty mst mid-core players can clear and enjoy the content which is a good thing.

I can however understand the top-end players' frustrations because FFXIV is famous for its extreme difficulty raids. My main gripe with this though is that some of the best gear is locked behind an incredibly difficult trial. You get better gear to help you challenge the hardest content, but if you can already clear said content, why do you need better gear?

I think they should add a third tier that matched the difficulty of savage gordias and Midas every odd patch, but instead of rewarding you with top-tier equipment you get unique glamours, mounts, titles etc. I think this would be the best option since it satisfies the top percentile's need for a challenge, while also giving mid-core players and above something to actually use their hard-earned BiS on.

[Faeon]

I think the good balance was with Weeping City. They found a good balance around that from what was said on the forums by people.

[Kaisinel]

Yeah I really enjoyed this raid, I got my life back after clearing in 4days. Now I can focus on real life again. Thanks SE.

[S-r-ex]

I also like the current tuning, it's finally accessible at my level. Being a midcore player in this game hasn't all that fun in HW, stuck between "stare hard enough at the screen" and wipe-istanian gulag.

[Lambdafish]

Honestly, the more I play, the more I like it, but the more I hate the raid structure itself. I really like the direction they seem to be going in stormblood, where the rewards that you get from regular raiding (BiS weapons) will be used in savage raiding (unique rewards and epeen?). Having the actual raid be easier is a bad thing if the rewards do not lead into harder content (especially with such a low barrier of entry), but having the rewards lead into an actual savage mode makes this easier (but still challenging) raid seem like a better design.

I know we don't know anything yet, but I am optimistically excited about 4.0 raiding

[Neophyte]

Not really. The people who feel the way I do and the communities we have built are a larger population of the max level player base then most people want to admit. If we don't have anything to do, we'll straight up leave. Rather people want to admit it or not that will have a huge impact on the games revenue which will affect how much casual content is released as well. There are plenty ways they could have added content at this difficulty level while leaving savage alone. Their approach this tier was simply wrong and moronic. If they continue this the game will lose a large portion of its max level player base that are subbed year round. I know people who are talking about quitting already, and a lot who are giving it until next raid tier at most.

Well, as far as I see it...

First world Progression Groups are happy (Elysium complained about to less competition @ the end of midas Progression).
Most People who couldn't raid while Gordias/Midas, because their groups got destroyed or they didn't find a group to join in time, are happy, since A9/A10 and even A11 are way better pugable than every single gordias/midas tier.
The raid groups I know are very happy with Creator so far. Two of them cleared Sunday, another one is at A12 prog and another two are on A11 prog. None of those had more fun in Midas just because they needed 3 months or more to clear it.
No one prolonged his sub out of joy, because he felt happy about doing another month of progression on A6S/A7S/A8S after failing 1,5 months.

So you want to talk about people leaving this game? Because that was one reason to leave associated with gordias/midas specifically.
Gordias/Midas led to server migration and/or player loss. Alexander has done the exact opposite so far (i.e. friends who changed server for midas/gordias prog regret now to have left many friends for something which you don't have to do anymore to be able to find a raid group).

Also: So far 2-3(?) groups on Phoenix cleared that content while 10x, 100x or even 1000x of that are currently progressing.
So you want to make that first number a big 0 again and make the pool of currently attempting groups half, a third or even a quarter of which it is right now.
Sounds totally reasonable.

[Viridiana_Sovari]

If you look at what Yoshi P said during fanfest, I don't think a lot of people understand what he meant. He basically said he is axing normal mode as it is today. They aren't going to only do 1 difficulty mode and make it what normal is today. Normal mode will basically be somewhat where Creator savage / coil was and he is considering something for the Hardcore crowd on odd patches. So basically it is going to be more akin to the normal/savage version of 2nd coil was if he goes through with it which is exactly what a lot of people wanted. People will cry about not having story mode, but as long as they don't link it to the main story like they did in coil it won't be an issue. Not having brain dead mode will actually motivate more people to get into challenging content if the story and experience is what they are after. I think that model is much better for the games health overall. They just need to make it worth trying for more people by making it something more than just a title.

[Viridiana_Sovari]

Snip

Ask them how they feel in a couple months. It would be fine if we had more raid content around the corner. We don't. Its not like we get 4 man raid tiers every 2 or 3 months. We get 4 bosses to last 6 or 7. The tier is over for any decent groups and literally on farm mode for the next 7 months minimum given the early 2017 release date of Stormblood. I'm completely fine with having "midcore" content. But the answer isn't to take away content from the hardcore community. I have friends from my old server on Malboro who never beat a8s who are completely depressed by how easy this tier is. There is simply no longevity to it for anyone except people who approach it at an extremely casual level. Creator savage is what alex normal should have been the entire time. We didn't need more brain dead content. Everything else in the game is already there.

[Nezerius]

If you look at what Yoshi P said during fanfest, I don't think a lot of people understand what he meant.

You must've been watching a different fan fest stream, or perhaps it's you who didn't understand what Yoshi-P said. It was never said that they're planning to scrap the current normal/story mode for the raid.

An idea they're playing around with is having the difficult content (as in, the 8-man raid) still in the even numbered patches, with the possibility of an even higher difficulty thing in the odd numbered patches.

[Viridiana_Sovari]

You must've been watching a different fan fest stream, or perhaps it's you who didn't understand what Yoshi-P said..

He literally said that he is going back to having one difficulty on release during the keynote. Go back and watch it. He said during please look forward to it and the live letter that they are looking at doing something for HC raiders in odd patches. Guarantee you they are not going to launch 4.0 and then only give you what the current normal/story mode is until 4.1. They would lose anyone who cares about raiding at all.

Normal mode is going to go back to the coil days. Just wait and see.