State of the Game: Savage+ Dungeons and End Game Leves

[Delmontyb]

So I'm a bit late to the thread. Is someone really complaining about savage content when they themselves don't do savage content?

I'm using the word Savage as it relates to the world of FFXIV. This thread isn't complaining about any content, but about taking the content that exists and putting it together with other content to add in dynamic and ever-changing content that takes the wealth of content in the game and refreshes it (dynamically). Each time you clear the dungeon, it levels up, thus the player can push themselves higher and higher and the system gets harder and harder.

I hope that makes sense. Whether or not one player does the current savage content really wouldn't impact this system or this request.

[Remedi]

I think he's talking about the back and forth between kisai and other ppl

[HyoMinPark]

To the OP: I have been reading this thread as it has... evolved/devolved... and I have just chosen not to really give my feedback on the topic at hand because I have been distracted by IRL, and have not wanted to get into a pointless forum debate like what is currently going on now. But I agree with the general premise that something needs to be done to make dungeons more worthwhile. While I have never played WoW (minus for one whole day back in 2007), I have heard a lot about Mythic+ dungeons, and I think that this is something I would really like to see in this game to make dungeons (and 4-man content in general) more worthwhile. I would actually be tempted to run the content again.

As it stands now, I haven’t done an Expert Roulette in close to 3 months. I have spammed Swallow’s Compass simply for gear to turn in for GC seals on occasion, and I have been thoroughly astounded each time at how very little I have to actually heal. The kicker for me was always the first time I ran it—I was on SCH, i350 crafted with Anemos weapon; no Savage gear, and nothing fancy—and mobs were not even proccing my Excog. It would go off after the 45 seconds and be nothing more than an overheal. I shouldn’t have to treat an “expert level” dungeon like a level 20 dungeon, where a pre-pull Adlo and my fairy are enough to keep a tank alive and I can just spam Broil II all day. It was utterly ridiculous.

So yes, I agree with the idea of Mythic+ dungeons being added to give me a reason to want to enjoy “expert” 4-man content again. The fact that Leveling dungeons have more teeth than the endgame ones still boggles my mind—at-level and synced down.

Doma Castle shouldn’t hit harder than Swallow’s Compass.
The first two packs in Bardam’s Mettle shouldn’t be more scary than a large pull in Skalla.




That being said, I have one more thing I would like to say. It’s not related to the thread topic, so feel free to ignore it. I just couldn’t not say anything to this:

Being kicked by raiders once, is one time too many. You and others wonder why I have such a axe to grind against parser users, the first and only time I was kicked without any communication at all from any party, in 2.5 both DPS players had fflogs in their lodestone profiles,which is what made me aware of that sites existence. This was on The Keeper of the Lake during Expert roulette, which up to that point I had cleared plenty of times, and even with a party with a tank who was wearing DPS gear. I'm willing to roll with what I get on DF, the raiders should not be kicking players for "play style" differences, especially not from dungeon content. The impression I get from the forum raiders is that they check players lodestones and fflogs and kick players just to improve their own parses.

What makes you think I would ever want to play with a parser user after that?

I have deliberately chosen to no longer interact with you because of the absolute biased nonsense you tend to spew on things you don’t even know about and content you don’t even touch with a ten-foot pole, but I cannot help but answer this.

You were kicked by these raiders from Keeper of the Lake. ONCE. And so now you go on a crusade against all raiders. Because we’re all the same, right? Well, you want to know the irony of this? The one time I have ever been kicked from a dungeon was by two NON-RAIDERS. It was the Aery; I was doing it for one of my healer Anima relics back in Heavensward. The tank was in i130 Augmented Ironworks, and the MCH was level 60 but still in Ironworks herself with a Padjali weapon being her only level 60 piece of gear. Meh, whatever. Not really that big of a deal in there. Nothing was really said the entire time; neither answered my standard “o/” that is my dungeon greeting, which is fine. I had gotten used to people not really saying anything during dungeons, anyways.

We get to the second boss—the one with the poison clouds where the Mustard Gas Bomb needs to eat two of them before you kill it. And I noticed that the tank was deliberately running into the poison clouds to get rid of them, giving themselves multiple non-cleansable poison stacks. The Mustard Gas had no clouds to eat, so it actually came over and started attacking me (because healer aggro). No one tried to kill it, so I killed it alone. Afterwards, I said the following: “Hey, let the Mustard Gas add eat two of the poison clouds instead of running into them. They give you poison stacks that I can’t cleanse off with Esuna, and since you’re already taking damage from the boss, it just helps to not have you taking unnecessary damage from poison, too. ^^” I was not rude in any way.

The response?

I was told to “shut it” and to “f*** off”, and that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Now, I lost my temper because I said it was really uncalled for to talk to me that way, and responded with “Wow, really? I was just asking for you to do a mechanic properly”. The MCH speaks up at this time and tells me to “stop being rude to [his] wife, or that he will not give me the MP turret”. I just said that I didn’t need the MP turret; that my MP was fine. After the second boss, I was kicked.

I wasn’t even a raider back then; most I had done was Extreme primals, and not even all of them (I do not think I had even cleared ThorEx, SephEx, or NidEx at the time this happened). And I was kicked by two other NON-RAIDERS by simply telling them to let the mechanic happen as it should happen rather than by taking more, unnecessary damage.

By your logic, I should hate and generalize all non-raiders that mess up mechanics, right? I mean, after all, being kicked by toxic non-raiders once, is one time too many, right?

There are toxic people everywhere. Mayhaps you should stop generalizing people you don’t even know, and stop blindly attacking them just because you’re still holding a grudge from 4 years ago. And stop spewing nonsense about guides and parsers being “cheating tools”. If you don’t want to use guides to learn how to play your job, then fine. If you don’t want to use parsers to see your own contributions, then fine. If you don’t feel like there’s any content that is worth optimizing in this game, then fine. You do you. But it’s a bit much to call anyone who uses a guide or a parse a cheater, or to say that there are things in this game that do not require optimization.

Maybe Savage doesn’t require it outside of Day 1/Week 1 clears (anymore, that is—used to, it most certainly did if you wanted to clear the content basically undergeared; and, with Gordias, it required it regardless of gear most times), but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t allowed to do it. If I didn’t have optimization to do, I certainly wouldn’t do Savage past getting the gear I wanted from it. Part of what makes wiping to Garuda, Ifrit, and Titan repeatedly in UwU fun/tolerable is the fact that each pull, I can try to optimize my rotation more, and push out more and more damage. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to clear; maybe one day, I’ll finally get the orange that I have been chasing. Contrary to what you think, I’m not doing it to hold my “e-peen” over poor unsuspecting casual players; I’m doing it to prove to myself that I can do it. My achievements on your favorite, hated website are for myself because I need a goal beyond “just clearing”.

Is everyone a cheater just because they don’t play this game the way YOU think they should play it? I’m honestly getting tired of you generalizing who I am just because I’m a raider now, and just because you can’t let go of a 4-year-old grudge against someone who wasn’t even me. I think you need to take some time to reflect about your own behavior, instead of the behavior of all these “rude, toxic raiders”.

[Dualgunner]

I'm both surprised and somehow, not surprised, knowing Kisai's entire grudge against parsing is because of a single kick.

Hey Kisai, did you bother checking if they only had those links to fflogs to block their character's logs from public view? It'd be really embarassing if you got kicked by non-raiders who hated the thought of others seeing their performance...only to then turn around and blame raiders and people who feel the meta-game adds to the game a lot.

[SargentToughie]

I'm amazed that this thread has somehow gotten even more finger pointy and venomous than the 86 page parser thread.

Honestly, at this point I'm just hopeful for some moderator intervention. It's clear that we're at an impasse, and that nothing said in any of the last 2 pages is going to change anybodys's mind, or viewpoint.

[HyoMinPark]

Honestly, at this point I'm just hopeful for some moderator intervention. It's clear that we're at an impasse, and that nothing said in any of the last 2 pages is going to change anybodys's mind, or viewpoint.

Well, posts are disappearing, so looks like you got your wish. But things around here don’t tend to change. I’m just going to go back to my usual thing: just refraining from even getting involved. When your words fall on deaf ears, they’re nothing more than a waste anyways.

[Remedi]

Want to be a bit constructive so.

Let's talk about mythic+ since some have said they don't know exactly what they are.

Aside of the obvious scaling of dmg and health of enemies for each new level, Mythic+ starts adding affixes to enemies starting from 1 up to 3 active at the same time each choosen from a pool (4 in BFA since they are introducing the concept of a seasonal affix that is based on current raid tier)
Unlike deep dungeons affixes which are essentially malus, affixes in mythic+ works as an additional challenge to the group.

Examples
Grievous : makes so that if a player goes below 90% health the start getting stacks of a dot that can only be cleansed if they are healed to full
Raging: Enemies that go to low health become enraged dealing double dmg until killed
Quaking: Makes so players casts quake every now and dmg dmg and interrupting spellcast on them and nearby allies.
Explosive: All enemies in combat with you can spawn an explosive orb that will explode dealing high dmg to the whole dungeons, of note the orbs are immune to aoe dmg and must be burned ST

You get the Idea, compared to deep dungeons debuffs this effects actively requires players to be on their toes, and since each week has it's own set of affixes it makes dungeons more varied.
I think that if we have to get a system like this we need to follow this guidelines so far, the deep dungeons debuffs are more an obstacle than a clear challenge as such I think they will become more of a burden than anything in a savage+ enviroment.

Now on top of this, as I said we have a problem in dungeon designs.
In short each dungeon has 3 corridors of which all enemies must be engaged and killed to open the door (or doors) in order to kill the boss in each of the arenas.
I Think that SE needs to be more creative and even explore the possibility of adding extra routes in dungeons or even adding a pick your boss route of winged dungeon designs.
While the palyerbase will find the path of least resistance, the affixes themselves could help shaking ppl idea, maybe one week a route is more time consuming than the other because the effect of one affix.
Also I think that we need more trash mobs in dungeons, but also the possibility of skipping some of them if necessary.

As I already said Mobs design requires an overhaul, atm most enemies autoattacks, cleaves or uses instant mini buster on the tank and maybe has 1 aoe attack. If we simply increase their health and their dmg eventually you'll start pulling 1 pack a time that lasts forever, which is boring.
Trash mobs needs more teeth in dungeons. It can be anything from healing themselves, using skill requiring interrupts or even outright using CC on the players.

Now i'd like to not think about rewards yet because that requires a long consideration that I haven't done yet, I can only say that there's the risk that the power cap can be reached too easily in our game which could be a problem, one of the reasons why Graeter rifts on D3 start becoming boring is because you reach a power gap that slows down your progress to a crawl, which may or may not kill the feature for ppl if rewards are handled poorly.
The other criticism I have is that we run the risk of becoming too similar to Wow as I said which can be problematic unless we spin the system to be more final fantasy like.

Some have thought of a roulette system like Battle square in FF7, that could be working who knows

[Berethos]

1. Savage+ Dungeons

I wholeheartedly support this idea.

[MageBlack]

For me its a rewards issue. I dabbled in the end game stuff in early ARR but once I noticed the trend of outclassing all that hard work by the next patch my reward based motivation disappeared. In my opinion it doesnt matter how fun or challenging the content is, if you want me to do it more than once I need a reason to do it. I know i've said all this, and probably better, in other threads but hey, why not do it again.

Not only are the rewards lacking but the content is only viable while its new, once it gets a patch or two out, its hard to PUG it. Once the next expansion drops, it becomes completely irrelevant due to the iLev structure. Even synced its so much easier than it used to be when the content was fresh. So if I really want that gear for a glamour, just wait till the next expansion, find a few people willing to steamroll it, then you are in and done.

Speaking to the OP's ideas, I love the idea of scaling difficulty or Heroic versions of dungeons. We kinda have that with the hard mode dungeons but the rewards once again dont really entice people to go in. The Pony's, Birds, and Dogs have been great motivators but only if they appeal.

There was a meme (i'll try to find the pic) where a guy had a hello kitty shield and a goofy looking sword and the caption was something like "When the stats are good but the gear looks dumb" The glamour system solves the second part but we really dont have the first part.



Ok, this is a bit of an example and i hope i make sense but what if, when they launched 5.0, they included the entire relic quest line right away. All the way to the end-expac ilev but made it twice as time consuming as the worst existing relic quest line? So, in theory, you could get the best weapon in the expansion at any time. Dont gate it artificially with weekly caps, or daily limits, or any of that. That way the determined can go ham on the content and eventually when they get it they will have a "legendary" piece of gear that they can carry with them through the whole expansion. The iLev sync will bring it down for other content but it will still be a great weapon.

Also, It would be cool to see some kind of unique stat on gear, something that would be for a specific job, like "increased Thunder damage" on a BLM hat. I remember 1.0 had extra skills you could even purchase from the job quest guy, Spirit Dart or something like that.

As much as I would love to see some change to the game, I dont think we can see it to the extent that it will make an impactful difference on how the game is played. If they cant even have an elemental wheel as a part of the core of their game because it might invoke a favoured class, then I feel there is little hope for meaningful changes to come. This game is what it is, a theme-park and unless you are Disneyland you only have a lifespan of so long before the rides lose their appeal and people move on.

[Paladinleeds]

Alright, gonna take the time to answer some of this.

If the DPS have to stop DPS'ing because of something the tank or healer did, then it's a DPS loss absolutely. It might not be large, but it's an avoidable one when a DPS player has to move and interrupt their combo.

Ultimately, the melees and ranged (not casters) have instant GCD casts, so it's just weaved in. Dependent on how the oGCDs line up, it might not be a DPS loss at all, as the heals are used on the oGCD. Now, if it gets in the way of an oGCD damage ability then yeah, DPS loss for sure. No arguments there.

Yeah something like that. The game likes the 2.5 second GCD a lot, perhaps it would drop the tank off or to the bottom of the enmity table after X GCD's of not being in tank stance.

Potentially yes. It could also be a sliding scale sort of deal. Whenever you're in DPS stance, you essentially bleed enmity (so instead of the bleed taking away HP, it takes away enmity). Could also make for an interesting mechanic of balancing stance usage, rather than a straight fall-off after a certain amount of time in DPS stance. I wouldn't be averse to it.

That's why I suggested maybe the belligerent mobs having their own healers. If reducing the healer DPS to less than 20% isn't possible by directly lowering the potency, perhaps new/harder content should be designed where the belligerent's healers can bring the belligerent mobs back to full health by the same measure the players can for their own party. One strategy would involve separating the belligerent healer from the belligerent group to take them out. Another would be stunlocking/sleep/silence the belligerent healer/group and that requires being able to kill the belligerent healer before the debuff time runs out, otherwise the belligerent party will just take a very long time to kill, even by outgearing it.

They probably could do that. Have healer DPS abilities scale off INT and not MND (with some notable exceptions such as Assize, given it's role is meant to be a little bit of everything). The stun of Holy would still be useful as a mitigation tool, so that wouldn't completely wipe out WHM in dungeons either. They'd still have some utility in the form of Holy. For the solo instances where you'd need the DPS... make it so the "Breaking Boundaries" buff (or whatever it's called, with the flavour text of "Breaking limits in a way only a warrior of light can") for healers would basically have their INT stat match their MND stat. This will give their DPS abilities oomph in the solo duties, but make them basically wet noodles elsewhere (outside of low level dungeons like maybe Sastasha, where healers don't yet have their huge discrepancy between INT and MND).

You still seem to think I'm coming to these threads because “ooh raiders bad”, no. Really it is because so many of the suggestions put forth by the raiders, amount to bigger DPS sponge-mobs and skills to inflict bigger DPS to make the raid take less time. Sure a 2 hour raid is maybe a pain, but reducing every raid boss to 90 second burns is not fun either. Realistically, if a raid has a 90 minute time limit, then it should take a minimum of 1/3rd of that time with an average party, 2/3rds with a weak party. But who really wants to spend a 30 minutes on the same boss. Likely nobody, so maybe cut the time limits to be specific to each phase so they're counting down to enrage. If you hit enrage during M+/EX/Savage, the party gets a prompt to “restart?” and the time resets.

As far as I know, most raiders would like to see more mechanics involved. I'm sure there's a few that believe in bigger HP sponges, I won't deny that. But I think for the most part, we just want interesting mechanics use. Given how well received Ultimate seems to be, which to my understanding is basically a glorious clustertruck of mechanics mechanics mechanics, I would say most raiders love the mechanical challenge. Tighter DPS checks sure, since that in itself is also a mechanic (can you focus your DPS in on this part to make sure you down it?).

The common ground exists, just some people just want me to me wrong, even when I agree with them, and thus don't even read the post, and it gets tiring.

Fair. It's just your crusade has tired raiders out, and probably explains the hostility. At least, it has felt like a crusade. Almost like "violence begets violence", it creates a vicious cycle. While I agree being kicked for stupid reasons is bad no matter when it happens, I'm sure most of us have been kicked for stupid reasons. Not sure how we can solve that issue. When you put forward those suggestions though, like I said, I liked them for the most part. When you bring suggestions to the table, I am willing to listen. And so are other raiders for the most part. Even if we disagree, we can have a meaningful discussion about it.

The idea behind 5 was more about about preventing the bots taking advantage of tuning knobs in enmity from the earlier points.

Like if the developers were so inclined, they already have a solution for this in PotD, you have to defeat X many mobs to unlock the portal to the next floor. That can also be the same strategy where killing specific groups of mobs opens different paths, or difficulty scaling, or different reward paths (reminiscent of V1.0.) Right now, you can wall-to-wall pull, right into the boss room of some dungeons. That is just broken. If a tank hits a mob, and runs away, it should lose interest after a few GCD ticks worth of time. It shouldn't be possible to just hit a mob once and keep enmity, but just the same, it shouldn't be possible to just run through the mobs and survive to begin with.

If a dungeon is laid out like so:

(Entrance)-(mob group A)-(mob group B)-(mob group C)-(First Boss room)

Hitting all the mobs from A, B and C, and making it to the boss room shouldn't ever happen, even unsynced. Throwing a door in the middle to require that group B be defeated is sufficient for opening the door, but another strategy could be to lure group A and B into a trap, and thus not have to defeat them at all. The door unlocks, and then you could pull group C into the trap,or just kill them directly. The only place in the game that really has something like this is MSQ's Castrum Meridianum, with the cannons (and was in fact the strategy before it was outgeared.)

But because players don't like obstructions to pulling everything, it makes the content slower. What would be necessary with luring mobs together or to a trap is some requirement that the tank or other party members not run away from them. I picked 15y because that's the WHM Medica distance, and is generally sufficient for mobs to consider a player “too far away” without a door resetting them. It can be farther away, it just can't be “so far away the mob can't hit the tank even once”

Yeah, fair play. Thanks for the clarification on the reasoning behind idea 5. I must say, with the clarification you've provided, I am warming to the idea. Luring certain enemies into traps would make for some interesting gameplay if done right. Like let's say trying to lure the healer into a trap that silences it, making it easier to kill as it can't heal itself. I would be very much on board with that. I think I speak for a lot of us when I say we want dungeons to be more interesting, and this is definitely one way to approach it.

It's too bad FFXIV didn't make one DPS role have bombs (eg the rogue would have been the logical one) , because one really fun strategy in Wizardy was to layout layers of bomb traps. Only AST has a trap (Earthly Star) but it's not tripped, so it doesn't quite work that way.

Aye, I agree on this. If they were ever to revisit the branching job system (aka SMN/SCH) and add it to other jobs, perhaps there could be a secondary ROG job that would focus on traps (perhaps have different traps do different things, like Hunters in WoW). But as it stands, they seem to be vehemently against that system (potentially even splitting off SMN and SCH into separate jobs, I believe that's been hinted at, but don't quote me on that). So I wonder how they could implement it. Make it a part of 5.0 NIN? A new job that focuses on traps? I guess that's up to the developers to decide.

What I'm getting at is that there is literately nothing interesting at all in how trash mobs are killed. It's the same in every dungeon. Having cannons in every dungeon doesn't make logical sense, but a player being able to set one would, or existing bombs (a la PotD), or having a player be able to set bombs. The traps just wouldn't be viable to use in a boss room, but here's a good opportunity to make trash mobs stop hitting like wet noodles by providing .

Agreed. Trash mobs at this point are literally just cannon fodder.