Is EX/Savage content a battle or a dance number?

[Taika]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

Erm... you're posting this as what you'd want from the content (as opposed to what you think it currently is), but I feel like this actually described the game's endgame content pretty well...

I think the issue might be that you've only tried OS1 and OS2, which are far from what this game's raiding has usually been in every way.

[MeridaQ]

Snip

We are still talking about randomized mechanics right? Because as a general statement most encounters are chocked-full of dealing with mechanics not using the WASD keys. That being said if we are talking about randomized mechanics, the list I provided was in no way exhaustive.

[DGladius]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

Is this not something that we already have lots of in like all of ff14 raid fights?

[Awha]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

But this is how end game as a whole is handled in FFXIV, so now I am confused. What do you want changed then? So you do not want variety, you want more of what we already have? Is that what you are getting at? Hella confused.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but if I recall you did say that your ability as a healer should not be predicated by how well you can handle mechanics while performing your role or something along those lines. Then you sum up how FFXIV handles most end game content with the above quote. Sorry if I cannot help but be confused as to what you want, do you want more of what FFXIV already has or more variety and encounters that are simple number checks so to speak?

[Estelle9lives]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

Vs.

"It's just a jump to the left! And then a step to the riiiight. Put your hands on your hips. You bring your knees in tiiiight!"

I realy don't know what point you're trying to make.

Skill in this game is a direct reflection of how well you can execute this "dance" while pushing your own numbers. What you said in the first quoted line literally happens in every single Savage fight in this game in the form of raid buster AOEs. Simply requiring people to be topped off all the time by making bosses do more/constant damage wouldn't be a good metric of difficult in playing a healer.

While I can agree that O1S and OS2 are not the most engaging fights, there is a huge step up in A3S, and in there mechanics have a bigger random factor. I can give you a few examples:

- Spellblade Holy tethers are completely random and require players to adjust their position accordingly (reactionary mech)
- Briar spots have two possible safe zones that you need to move to
- Mindjack is completely random (1 out of 4 options that you will need to adjust to)
- Spellblade Folio will put you in 1 out of 3 situations that will require you to go to a different spot
- Haste Spellblade picks between two mechanical combos
- Animal Farm pattern is random and will require players to adjust
- On the last phase she uses mechanics from previous phases at random, picking from Waltz/Folio or Briar/Earthly Dance, requiring quick reaction from the party

In my opinion this is one of the best designed fights in th game in terms of how fun it is to execute, despite still not being too high on the difficulty list - I'd definitely give it a shot before just assuming it's "mind numbingly boring". In the end though, if Savage isn't fun to you that is perfectly fine, I just can't seem to understand saying fights aren't difficult because they are a "dance".

[HyoMinPark]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

We already have these in the game.

As for precasting heals/shielding, you should be doing that for every tankbuster in the game unless a tank is going to immunity through them. Again, not a new concept; it’s already present in the game in every Ex and Savage fight. There are already healing checks present that healers have to heal through or otherwise people below a certain threshold are dead (Dimensional Wave spam during Iron Giant/Ninjas; Neverwhere, which is nothing but a giant heals+DPS check to enrage). You should also be pre-casting heals/prepping shields for all raid-wide damage for as much mitigation and damage control as possible. If you aren’t doing this already, then you’re not doing your job as a healer, I’m sorry.

It sounds like you’re asking for more tankbusters and raid-wide damage, and less of any kind of gimmicky mechanics. Which, again, would just make the bosses Glorified Striking Dummies with excessive healing checks that don’t really take any skill to execute other than “Spam Cure III/Medica/Helios/Indom/ET+Succor”, and would grow extremely stale after a run or two. I like having to move around for and adjust for mechanics like the in Grand Crosses in V4S. Keeps me awake, at least, and it makes fights more interesting rather than standing still the entire time.

I am not a fan of bosses like Refurbisher in A9S where I could literally plant myself in a corner and stay there 90% of the fight. And while I would like for content in this game to have a better balance in a healer’s healing uptime and a healer’s DPS uptime (20% healing/80% DPSing is not balanced for me), I would prefer for it to accompany these gimmick mechanics that you dislike rather than be healer checks where I just stand in the same place the entire time. Making fights nothing more than healing checks with little to no movement would not make them “more difficult” or “more engaging”—it would do the opposite.

Again, go do V3S and V4S, and then come back to this discussion. You don’t have an adequate grasp on Savage content to be able to speak on its current state, I’m sorry.
Though the fact that you find V3S “mind-numbingly boring” is mind-boggling to me—Hali may not be Cruise Chaser, but she can at least call herself “Savage”, unlike Alte Rolte and Catastrophe.

[BillyKaplan]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

Vs.

"It's just a jump to the left! And then a step to the riiiight. Put your hands on your hips. You bring your knees in tiiiight!"

I'm far from being a hardcore raider but I've been through an extreme primal or two to know that it's actually both, and likely intensifies moving forward. Sure, it might not necessarily come at you at the same time, but nor is it really one or the other. If you're focusing too much on the mechanics as a healer to not see the tank buster prepping then your tank's about to die a horrible death with the rest of the party following. It's that joggling your attention with increasingly difficult mechanics and checks that together makes it an extreme or a savage mode.
Allow me to bring an example from something that everyone laughs at when brought up in the context of end-game - Susano Ex. Every mechanic has its counter-strategy. It's probably also really scripted, I just hit panic mode too soon to notice that. But between the combination of mechanics (cloud + rocks + purple markers x.x) and the randomness of the clouds the closer you get to enrage, which only makes it all the harder to not hit enrage... I feel like you're either exaggerating things too much or completely missing the point of the game mode.

[Sebazy]

I haven't run O3S, not because it looked too hard, but because it looked mind-numbingly boring.

So let me get this straight:

You're complaining about content being trivial once you understand the movement mechanics, whilst seemingly refusing to do the content that actually throws damage and healer checks at you whilst also having movement mechanics (And an element of RNG to boot)?

Have you attempted/cleared Shinryu Ex yet? If not, why not. If so, what did you think of that?

In all honesty, if you're not even willing to try O3S/O4S then your point is completely null and void in my eyes, it's very well documented that SE completely dropped the ball on O1S' difficulty this tier, and O2S isn't much better.

[Velthice]

I think a lot of the pushback is because OP has only done O1S and O2S and assumes he has a good idea of what savage raiding is. But he doesn't because those fights are really easy as others have said, and no that's not underselling them. I'd argue the opening fights of first coil were more challenging. Alte Roite could have appeared in normal mode and no one would have thought there was something amiss, and catastrophe feels like it could be one of the easier ex primals.

They're terrible, TERRIBLE representations of savage raiding so any opinion of raiding based on them comes off as extremely uninformed. Do a synced Imdugud (T10) or Melusine (T7). Take on Blaster and friends (A6S) to get an idea of what everyone else thinks of in regards to the opening acts of a raid tier are normally like. if you still don't like it that's fine, but at least you'd have a much better foundation on which to hold that opinion.

[Hruodig]

"Okay, tankbuster coming in. I better precast a big heal, get a barrier on them. Alright...roomwide AoE, need to counter with AoE heal before the boss drops that special attack that causes a player to take <x> damage, where <x> is the amount they're currently under max HP. Anyone under half will be dead..."

This almost perfectly describes almaghests and allagan fields in o4s, library phase in o3s, and many, many parts of ultimate coil.