How about we change the "dps check" a little?

[Jandor]

This man/woman gets it.

DPS check is pretty boring, with it being a mitigable damage would be cooler.

DPS check is a requirement, without it you may as well not bring any DPS, especially to progression.

Just stack up on tanks and healers and slowly but surely brute force your way through the mechanics.

[Hezzlocks]

DPS check is a requirement, without it you may as well not bring any DPS, especially to progression.

Just stack up on tanks and healers and slowly but surely brute force your way through the mechanics.

You are correct that there absolutely should be a DPS requirement to prevent that kind of situation, but that doesn't mean the fight should be built entirely around a DPS check. Hard enrages are the DPS requirement, the point where if you don't have the dps to kill it before this time, it's an instant wipe. This doesn't need to be strict however, merely just something that is in place to prevent people stacking tanks and healers.

Soft enrages, meanwhile, are the intended end point of the fight, where a mechanic becomes gradually stronger over the course of the fight, and eventually becomes an overwhelming resource drain. Could that mechanic be cheesed through with excessive healing and mitigation? Yes, but then you'd be hard pressed to beat the hard enrage. Soft enrages are intended to be a skill check for healers and tanks. The better they are, the further they can push the soft enrage.

We don't have that. We have DPS checks galore, but not so much healing and tanking checks. Or even mechanical skill checks, really, at least not beyond "Don't stand in the things we don't want you to stand in" and "Stand in the things we want you to stand in"

[CorbinDallas]

We don't have that. We have DPS checks galore, but not so much healing and tanking checks. Or even mechanical skill checks, really, at least not beyond "Don't stand in the things we don't want you to stand in" and "Stand in the things we want you to stand in"

E2S, E3S, and E4S all have soft enrages. As did Neo Exdeath, God Kefka, Final Omega, Chaos to a degree (you could survive the 4 sets of debuff before the hard enrage), Tsukuyomi's enrage was an increasing stack damage mechanic, back in the day Shiva and Phoenix had increasing damage stacks throughout the fight, resulting in a soft enrage. There are loads more and are more common than you believe.

[Rilifane]

You are correct that there absolutely should be a DPS requirement to prevent that kind of situation, but that doesn't mean the fight should be built entirely around a DPS check. Hard enrages are the DPS requirement, the point where if you don't have the dps to kill it before this time, it's an instant wipe. This doesn't need to be strict however, merely just something that is in place to prevent people stacking tanks and healers.

Soft enrages, meanwhile, are the intended end point of the fight, where a mechanic becomes gradually stronger over the course of the fight, and eventually becomes an overwhelming resource drain. Could that mechanic be cheesed through with excessive healing and mitigation? Yes, but then you'd be hard pressed to beat the hard enrage. Soft enrages are intended to be a skill check for healers and tanks. The better they are, the further they can push the soft enrage.

We don't have that. We have DPS checks galore, but not so much healing and tanking checks. Or even mechanical skill checks, really, at least not beyond "Don't stand in the things we don't want you to stand in" and "Stand in the things we want you to stand in"

Soft enrages are also a way for tanks and healers to contribute towards passing the check without having to be a pseudo-dps. At least in WoW soft enrages were also designed in a way where stacking healers wasn't an option at all. It was a choice between 2 or 3 healers for 10man and 4 or 5 healers in 20/25man. I can't remember ever seeing a raid running 6 healers in 25man even if the raidwide damage was heavy and the soft enrage added to that.
If the dps is the weakest link (lack of gear, suboptimal raid comp, learning the fight etc), a good healer team can make up for quite a bit. On the other hand if the healers are the weakest link, good dps can make up for that by not letting it come to the point where the healers get overwhelmed. Tanks always contribute either way. They help with correct positioning and minimizing running and mitigation to take of pressure.
A decently designed soft enrage is enough of a dps check.
I'm good with some hard enrages, that's okay. But it's definitely not the only way to desihn encounters.

[IttyBitty]

not so much healing and tanking checks.

Siri, what are tankbusters in general?
How about Aggro resets?
Almagest?
White Hole?
Charybdis?
Photon especially when combined with Eternal Darkness?
Missile?
Allagan Field?
Shinryu's dragon heads?
Akh Morn?
Death Sentence + Plummet?
Heartless Angel/Heartless Archangel?
Practically every single Prey mechanic?

How many more examples do you want?

[Hezzlocks]

Siri, what are tankbusters in general?
How about Aggro resets?
Almagest?
White Hole?
Charybdis?
Photon especially when combined with Eternal Darkness?
Missile?
Allagan Field?
Shinryu's dragon heads?
Akh Morn?
Death Sentence + Plummet?
Heartless Angel/Heartless Archangel?
Practically every single Prey mechanic?

How many more examples do you want?

None of those are soft enrages. They're basic mechanics you deal with in the fight, and for the most part someone dieing to them is not a raid wipe, at least not an assured wipe. You seem to be confusing this with mechanical understanding. A soft enrage is something that builds up in intensity to the point where it becomes overwhelming, requiring the tanks and healers, and even the DPS if they had defensive cooldowns in FF14, to give it their everything to last as long as possible until either the phase ends, the boss dies, or the raid wipes. Susano's sword is one of the closest things to this for a tank, yet even that is still, in the end, just another DPS check.

Really, there are generally only two things that wipes groups. Either people not dodging things and being killed off, or the DPS check failing. Because of this, healers only ever heal as much as they need to, and tanks always gear for maximum DPS. If there were more fights that had more unpredictable unavoidable damage, or much higher constant damage, while also having an ever so slightly looser hard enrage time, then this wouldn't be the case.

You can often separate fights into a few different categories. DPS check, where the enrage timer is extremely tight and/or there are things that must die *immediately*, endurance fights, where incoming damage is usually wild and random and trying to survive is more important than dealing damage, and mechanical understanding, where the fight is more about performing mechanics correctly than anything else, but may be combined with a moderate version of dps or endurance fights. FF14 has plenty of the DPS checks, nearly every fight is tight enough that DPS needs to be on point to clear. There are some mechanical understanding fights. There's not many endurance fights.

[Nedkel]

DPS check is a requirement, without it you may as well not bring any DPS, especially to progression.

Just stack up on tanks and healers and slowly but surely brute force your way through the mechanics.

You will still have to do certain amount of dps, there will be two kinds of dps check.

You do little less dps, you get one reward but you have to survive the soft enrage, it wont be easy to clear because you will get hit with massive amount of damage to punish you for it and few minutes after you will get hit with hard enrage.
You do it again and your dps is good enough so you kill it before soft enrage, you will be able to claim it again in second run.

It still will be 1 reward per run, but if you are good enough you could do it twice and get double the rewards.

I am not advocating here for a "participation reward", just a reward for being good enough in other areas than straight out DPS. I think there was quite a misunderstanding on my thread post, and i was being attacked for it, gcbtw. xD

[Vidu]

You will still have to do certain amount of dps, there will be two kinds of dps check.

You do little less dps, you get one reward but you have to survive the soft enrage, it wont be easy to clear because you will get hit with massive amount of damage to punish you for it and few minutes after you will get hit with hard enrage.
You do it again and your dps is good enough so you kill it before soft enrage, you will be able to claim it again in second run.

It still will be 1 reward per run, but if you are good enough you could do it twice and get double the rewards.

I am not advocating here for a "participation reward", just a reward for being good enough in other areas than straight out DPS. I think there was quite a misunderstanding on my thread post, and i was being attacked for it, gcbtw. xD

With this bolded part you somehow managed to make your suggestion worse... seriously? Now you're putting the burden for making up for subpar DPS on the healers who are suddenly faced with "You better heal this up quickly or its a wipe after all because the dps in your group was to bad, better make up for it!"
No... just no.

You get the reward for being good enough at the overall fight, that means following the mechanics while dishing out enough damage. What you are asking for is a participation reward, because the difficulty of Savage fights is a combination of more complexe mechanics and higher dps-requirement. If you cant bring that to the table, stay away from it.

[Nedkel]

With this bolded part you somehow managed to make your suggestion worse... seriously? Now you're putting the burden for making up for subpar DPS on the healers who are suddenly faced with "You better heal this up quickly or its a wipe after all because the dps in your group was to bad, better make up for it!"
No... just no.

You get the reward for being good enough at the overall fight, that means following the mechanics while dishing out enough damage. What you are asking for is a participation reward, because the difficulty of Savage fights is a combination of more complexe mechanics and higher dps-requirement. If you cant bring that to the table, stay away from it.

I also suggest that this damage to be mitigatable with other things as well.
Tanks LB or various tank abilities may come in place as essential along with healers ability to heal it all.

What i am asking for is not a participation reward, you wont get through it if you are not good enough anyway.
Its increasing the amount of rewards per week for good players, and let the lesser ones get something too instead of failing it and never coming back, because he/she is stuck at savage raiding and cant progress with gear anymore, making savage raiding more accessible for PuGs or groups of random mediocore people who want to do it. Those rewards are just a gear used on pve, why is everyone losing their mind if someone worse than them get a chance to get it too? It is fair enough that someone good will be able to get it twice a week, and someone worse get a chance to get it one, both parties progress, people who have no clue to play the game will not progress anyway.

This is the point of my suggestion, to make it more rewarding for good ones, and possible to make anything out of it for average ones.

[Vidu]

I also suggest that this damage to be mitigatable with other things as well.
Tanks LB or various tank abilities may come in place as essential along with healers ability to heal it all.

What i am asking for is not a participation reward, you wont get through it if you are not good enough anyway.
Its increasing the amount of rewards per week for good players, and let the lesser ones get something too instead of failing it and never coming back, because he/she is stuck at savage raiding and cant progress with gear anymore, making savage raiding more accessible for PuGs or groups of random mediocore people who want to do it. Those rewards are just a gear used on pve, why is everyone losing their mind if someone worse than them get a chance to get it too? It is fair enough that someone good will be able to get it twice a week, and someone worse get a chance to get it one, both parties progress, people who have no clue to play the game will not progress anyway.

This is the point of my suggestion, to make it more rewarding for good ones, and possible to make anything out of it for average ones.

My bad. You're putting the burden on the healers and tanks because the dps failed to deliver.

And the reason(s) that at least I'm against this are:
- You're basically asking for a nerf in disguise. A nerf on the most challenging content in the game, we dont need that.
- You're saying yourself that people who arent "good enough" wont get through it - so you're putting a certain "bar" for everyone to pass in place already, so what would change? That the bar is lower now? Why shouldnt people amount to the current challenge though?
- Your suggestion is not to reward good players, its to carry the bad ones. If you want to reward good players, then lets put something in that rewards you for a crazy-speedkill that you'll get when you beat the thing 2 minutes before enrage hits! That would be rewarding good players.
- DPS-checks are the main mechanic to hold DPS accountable. During the whole fight the main burden falls on tanks and healers to ensure that there is no wipe by keeping everyone and/or themself alive. The DPS-check(s) are what places the burden on dps aswell. Your own suggestion highlights that by saying how tanks and healers would have to make up for hitting the soft enrage. A dps needs to learn their rotation just as much as a tank needs to learn proper cooldown-use, so...
- The reward is not only gear, its also the victory itself and that victory should be earned by mastering both your job and the fight.
- The gear is only relevant for those who are raiding, you can do everything else in the game without it (if you're good enough you can do Savage without it!). You dont need this gear, but if you want it - earn it. We have so, so many alternative ways of gearing up for 90% of the content, make use of those. Tomestone-gear is the progression way for everyone who cant or doesnt want to raid.

Not everything in this game needs to be accessible by everyone. Some things should require more dedication and better rewards for that dedication, Savage is one of them. You shouldnt clear the most difficult content in the game if you cant deal with mechanics and your rotation at the same time - or if you dont know your rotation to begin with. And other jobs shouldnt have to make up for your shortcoming or suffer a penalty, because you couldnt bother to learn how to play your job. At a certain point the game should just tell you "You shall not pass until you learn how to play properly!" - Savage is a pretty damn late point for that already.