On Ultimate Off Ultimate

[Cetonis]

raid difficulty should not be pushed up

Do people feel that O4S is substantively harder than O3S, or O8S than O7S? I'm not certain I agree, at least for non-healers (the healing difficulty definitely goes up).

Both are light on mechanics relative to past final fights (from Nael to Alexander), and they both lean hard on wombo combo dances that, once solved or guided, are fairly easy to get down and repeat. Emptiness and small Trine are the only mechanics that ask for a reaction beyond "do thing A or B", and mechanics like those exist in the third fights anyway.

I think they could get away with making the lasts fight as-much harder on tanks and dps as it is on healers, and in doing so may better bridge people into Ultimate. Clear rates would go down, but I doubt that participation would - people are more inclined to keep at it when they're three fights deep and at the last boss, than when it's just a middle fight and there's still more after.

[HyoMinPark]

If you want an example of why raid difficulty should not be pushed up, look at gordias.

The issue with Gordias that people seem to always forget about is that the developers admitted that they screwed up and overtuned the fights (particularly A3S and A4S) for what was the current max stats, gear, and item level at the time. Mechanically, I don’t think that Gordias was “too difficult”; but the damage output was way overtuned for its time—healer and tank DPS were absolutely mandatory to clear, even with the best gear the game offered at the time.

The developers learned from their mistakes and made Midas, which I hear from a lot of veteran raiders was perfect in terms of difficulty and overall fight quality (annoying A6S gauntlet robots aside). However, the raid scene was still feeling the fallout from Gordias, so they brought it down to Creator level. Deltascape and Sigmascape are not Creator level, they’re actually slightly easier. Personally, I’d rather see difficulty return to Midas levels, or at least something between Midas and Creator, but since Savage clear rates are the highest they’ve been for all regions with Delta/Sigma, I can see why the developers want to keep Savage at the level it is now.

[Alleo]

Personally, I feel Ultimate resources could go into bettering the savage raids to make them more savage. The only fight from current savage that really gives me trouble is O8S, but that's just my opinion.

I originally felt that one Ultimate was enough per expansion.

I agree with this. Instead of putting all the work into this fights maybe make the last turn of a savage run be as hard as ultimate, with the other turns getting more difficult too. The top raiders wont have much to do anyway because they beat savage or ultimate in max. 2 weeks. I dare to say that the important part is to get the other raiders and maybe midcore players to enjoy savage more.

And hey he did say that the last Omega raid will be surprising and great, so maybe instead of getting another Ultimate fight, savage raids will include a special Omega fight or something like that.

In the end they never promised to do x amount of Ultimates per expansion and they also have only so much that they can use for such fights. So for me I am fine if raiders get their content but I also see no huge problem that they are only having two of them per expansion. I just find the reasons for that a bit strange. (Like how the players are tired and things like that)

[Ekimmak]

I do not particularly care for Midas, despite loving the look of the gear. A6S was a brutal floor, you had to perfect four different fights before you got to see any loot. And then A7S had the trauma of giving him a massive damage boost for a single misstep.

I just hope they drop the idea of a "brand new 2nd phase" for O12s, because that's a painful roadblock for a PUG raider like myself to overcome.

[KisaiTenshi]

They're talking about Cactbot, which is a different tool than ACT. They aren't going to touch parsers because they know the backlash it would have.

That is still ACT, and still using the ACT FFXIV Network module. I told you why this is a cheat tool, before, so I won't bring it up again.

The game sends the packets unencrypted is the only reason any of these tools work at all. Any counter-measures employed would break all the parsers. Now they could compress+encrypt the packets that spawn a monster, but that packet is still being sent, and if you know the mechanics of the fight, you wouldn't need to decrypt it, just know that "something is about to happen".

I don't seriously expect the dev team to change this because it would result in lag for everyone. The proper counter-measures would require randomizing the packet id's for every instance change, and that just adds a hurdle for the parser developer, not a wall. Applying and cycling an encryption key for every instance would be a higher hurdle, but not a wall, since the same network parsers can read the game client memory so digging a key out of the memory would not be an obstacle. That comes back to "you can't trust the client"

Obviously that means they need to consider that players are cheating by using parsers and thus they should not design a boss fight by pre-spawning anything.

Or you know, they could just ban players who use these tools in the first place.

[Rogatum]

I do feel two ultimate encounters and expansion is a tad low since if we are being honest they have no real reason up the difficultly on savage fight to match earlier encounters such a Midas, even though I do think current skill level of the community has progressed greatly since then. To a degree I also like how savage more or less has a nice mid to hard core feel to it. In the end no matter what they do to players that were able to even make progress through phases in ultimate savage more or less will remain a joke in comparison and since the clear rates for current savage tier have been so high I do think SE has found a happy medium. Do think maybe three to four ultimate encounters an expansion would be the best of both worlds. Hope that makes sense.

Also please let us not turn this thread into an pro or anti parser thread.

[Remedi]

I agree with this. Instead of putting all the work into this fights maybe make the last turn of a savage run be as hard as ultimate, with the other turns getting more difficult too. The top raiders wont have much to do anyway because they beat savage or ultimate in max. 2 weeks. I dare to say that the important part is to get the other raiders and maybe midcore players to enjoy savage more.

And hey he did say that the last Omega raid will be surprising and great, so maybe instead of getting another Ultimate fight, savage raids will include a special Omega fight or something like that.

In the end they never promised to do x amount of Ultimates per expansion and they also have only so much that they can use for such fights. So for me I am fine if raiders get their content but I also see no huge problem that they are only having two of them per expansion. I just find the reasons for that a bit strange. (Like how the players are tired and things like that)

The problem is they wanted an higher raid clear rate overall, ultimate was a way for them to meet the best of both worlds it also gave an end goal to pve in this game and something that it's not done often essentially gave a purpose to raid gear and motive for raiders to stay subbed.
In short you beat savage in one day then you gear up for the ultimate that comes, now they'll beat savage in one day and it's cya till 5.0 and maybe that month once 4.5 drops and believe it or not ultimate is run by raiders also for fun because those fights are good, some even got eureka 345 gear and swallow compass gear to maximise their strenght for ucob.
And frankly they've said they want to surprise us with Omgea, but I'm fairly sure the context was not about difficulty but overall feelings of the fights and the story .

[Dezwaan]

I'll agree that the decision to not do another ultimate is upsetting. I haven't cleared either but progged both and from a player side don't see the release timeline as to difficult. Especially since they made the fight shorter but the same difficulty it makes the time needed to clear a lot shorter.

Ultimate over a second level 70 dungeon was great. If that's all that changes with 4.5 I'll be upset. Hopefully they just make a 5th floor difficult omega raid and that helps.

Time before an expansion usually has very little to do and if there is nothing special I'll probably unsub for a few months and enjoy some other games. I love some side content like eureka, PotD, and even diadem (it wasn't as bad as the community makes it out to be). However being able to finish a lot of the content within the first week after patch drops makes the other weeks/months just redoing content. That's why the higher difficulty stuff (Savage, Ultimate, Heaven in High) is great to fill those gaps.

The issue is just going to be what about 4.5 and beyond... Roughly July 2019 for the next expansion ugh

[Dezwaan]

Combined this with my previous post not sure how to delete it.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Or you know, they could just ban players who use these tools in the first place.

And in doing so destroy their entire raid scene.

Regardless, ACT and Cactbot are not the same program nor do they utilize the same data. Hence why most overlay add ons aren't comparable with Cactbot. The game sending packets doesn't mean both programs follow a similar module. All that aside, the devs themselves have not only acknowledged the futility in blocking ACT, they have outright admitted it's valuable for raiders all while watching the World First racers who have it prominently displayed on their twitch and/or youtube clips. 5150 was mentioned by name from the dev team. They had ACT running.

No matter how much you argue, parsers are not cheating. Cactbot, on the other hand, does step on a very fine line. Which is what actually prompted Yoshida to comment. They may attempt to break the latter, but they aren't going to touch ACT. Why? Because it and FFlogs are they only reason Savage stays alive months after its relevancy has long faded. Without numbers, you have no speed kills or players having means of calculating their improvement. Therefore, they have little reason to bother with the tier save to obtain gear for Ultimate. And that assumes they don't simply play another game.