My personal issues with raiding in this game:

-Gear rewards are crap; there's marginal difference between a Savage raider in full BiS and a Tomestone hero who farmed their upgrades through hunts. I don't think letting raiders have a 5-10 item level advantage is going to completely destroy a non-raider's ability to enjoy the game. Yes, I freely admit that to me, being able to show off raid rewards is a big motivator. Its not the only one, but it's there. Sue me.

-The arenas are unforgivably dull. Ever since the issues with Twintania's lulzy z-coordinate range the developers have made every arena a flat boring circle or rectangle with no clever use of the environment. Remember having to jump or drop down to a non-glowing panel in T1? I remember. AS2's use of the vehicle was great IMO but it's the only fight of its kind. Please give us more interaction with the raid environment outside of just dodging predictable crap on the ground! Jeez.

-Insta-gibs are kind of a gimmicky way to curb healer effectiveness, IMO. The vuln stacks for fudged mechanics in O2S and O3S aren't bad except the manner in which they're tuned. We messed up every Fourfold on O2S this week and it didn't make an onze of difference in how nuch I healed and DPS'd the fight. Also, bugger off with the constant pushbacks into oblivion. They're not bad once in a while, but they've been used 3/6 times for major fights this expac and it's tired by now. (Lakshmi EX, O1S, O4S.)

-They're a miserable experience for me to heal. I don't enjoy DPSing 50% of the time as a healer because the mechs are either a bigass raid buster that's healed up from in 2 GCDs or everything tickles. Can we get some constant sustained damage for healers to heal? That'd be great.

-Tank swaps don't exactly feel "organic" to me. They're either forced through debuffs/vuln ups or the second tank just DPSes while waiting for adds to show up. Mechs like Thunder III in O4S (first phase, at least) can be entirely cheesed with tank ults depending on your comp, meaning tanks swap literally only to cycle LD/Gang/HG CDs, not as the "intended" way to do the mechanic (one tank takes first hit, second tank Vokes to take second hit). Much like with healing, I'd prefer damage to not come out in ways that's completely trivialized by cooldowns - constant consistent hits that would have tanks rotating when the damage becomes too much for their particular CDs and they drop to low health. Not just rotations because they get vuln stacks so high they'll get one-shot next - that's kinda cheesy, IMO.

-Raid storylines sans Coil have been pretty mediocre. Why can't we have a raid with actual MSQ relevance? Normal Mode means everyone can see it, so where's the problem? This point admittedly has less to do with Savage and more to do with raids as a whole.

-Not sure how I feel about the idea of "gateway" bosses. Exdeath is an example of a gateway boss gone wrong, IMO - having him reset when you leave the instance is just obnoxious considering his overall difficulty. If they didn't want FCs selling skips they should have just programmed him to appear whenever someone in your raid hasn't cleared him for the week yet - but if everyone has, he's gone and stays gone til Tuesday, letting groups focus on Neo. I know teams that just end their raid 1/2 hour early if they haven't downed him just because there's little point in practicing on Neo for so short a time only to be roadblocked by this fucker again the next raid day. I liked ADS, the various nodes in T2, Faust etc (less so Faust since he had pretty much no mechs lol), but Exdeath just annoys me.

-Scripted encounter design is trash. Some might praise it saying it teaches them how to optimize, but I think it makes players intellectually lazy and incapable of adapting due to concrete lack of understanding the mechanics. You'll clear every fight the same way every week with no variation if your team isn't bad. One guy can handle callouts he gets from a Mizzteq guide and no one needs to pay any attention to anything but following the best flashing button press on their UI - who cares WHY you're stacking here or moving here, your RL just tells you to do it and it works. Damage is either on the tank or everyone; even "stack" mechanics are designed to have everyone take roughly the same amount of damage (circle swaps during Spellblade:Holy on O3S, for instance, or knockback/blowup on O2S), meaning you never need to "pocket" cooldowns in reserve or be ready to spot-heal a flagging health bar. Most of the bosses don't even have RNG crits as a factor anymore, since 90% of raid hits are magical now. (Just delete Feint, please, if you're not going to give melee anything meaningful to use it on.)

-Participation-trophy itemization means I'm stuck running expert roulette for tomes anyway, even though Savage is clearly beyond that skill level. Why am I still stuck doing this when I'm a "hardcore elitist raider"? If full raid gear isn't BiS then I should at least be damned close to capping tomes from clearing it weekly. If only the "top 10%" or whatever are raiding anyway, I doubt the queues are going to suffer all that much from our absence tbh.

-Mounts aren't bad. It'd be cool if they were made a super-rare drop unsynced, though - give a little more push to down the content at relevant ilevel. I'm not as fussed about this on a personal level, though.

-If the gear is going to stay at the same item level as upgraded tome gear, it'd be nice if it had a unique appearance, not just a dyable version of normal mode gear. No, I do not care about "excluding casuals" or whatever, there's tons of gear that's been exclusive before - PVP gear, GC hunt gear, seasonal gear, cash shop gear. You can also run it unsynced an expac later for the appearance, or try it post-Echo. The devs will also likely release it as crafted down the line too, like Coil gear. No clue why we've been stuck with ugly uninspired normal mode gear as a showcase for our Savage progress - saving on art assets, maybe?



This is just off the top of my head, teally, and strictly my personal opinion. I'm also secretly paging Brannigan to this thread because I'm eagerly looking forward to his scathing breakdown wrt the FFXIV raiding scene.