Savage Raids & Hard Enrages - Should there be more Variety?

[Vaer]

Hard wipes/enrages are pretty much necessary when combat resurrections are as abundant as they are. It's their way of enforcing mechanics. If you die but it isn't a hard wipe and you raise, you get penalized with weakness which makes beating the hard enrage more difficult each time you mess a mechanic up/someone dies. LB3 doesn't give weakness, but you are giving up actual LB damage in exchange.

These types of mechanics are one of the few things that keep a semblance of difficulty if the goal is to keep it from being completely faceroll. Look at LotA, you just kinda steamroll the entire place, except you will still die if you don't stand on the panels. Soft enrages are easily overgeared as gear levels increase (a lot of them are at the end of fights, but you start skipping them completely when you have enough DPS), but the hard wipes pretty much keep you honest as even easier fights have trip spots that will wipe you if you don't know how to do them properly. That is until you overgear them so completely that you can solo them years down the line.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Hard wipes/enrages are pretty much necessary when combat resurrections are as abundant as they are. It's their way of enforcing mechanics. If you die but it isn't a hard wipe and you raise, you get penalized with weakness which makes beating the hard enrage harder each time you mess a mechanic up/someone dies. LB3 doesn't give weakness, but you are giving up actual LB damage in exchange.

Not really. Hard Enrages exist purely to give a fixed duration to a phase or fight. Having a Hard Enrage does not necessarily make a fight harder. You could have a mechanically difficult fight with a fairly loose Enrage timer. It is the tightness of the DpS check that partially determines difficulty.

These types of mechanics are one of the few things that keep a semblance of difficulty if the goal is to keep it from being completely faceroll. Look at LotA, you just kinda steamroll the entire place, except you will still die if you don't stand on the panels. Soft enrages are easily overgeared as gear levels increase (a lot of them are at the end of fights, but you start skipping them completely when you have enough DPS), but the hard wipes pretty much keep you honest as even easier fights have trip spots that will wipe you if you don't know how to do them properly. That is until you overgear them so completely that you can solo them years down the line.

Ancient Flare is not a Hard Enrage. It is a mechanic check with a wipe condition.

[Vaer]

Not really. Hard Enrages exist purely to give a fixed duration to a phase or fight. Having a Hard Enrage does not necessarily make a fight harder. You could have a mechanically difficult fight with a fairly loose Enrage timer. It is the tightness of the DpS check that partially determines difficulty.



Ancient Flare is not a Hard Enrage. It is a mechanic check with a wipe condition.

I only lump them together because they have the same end result. Would you consider an add phase with a dps check a hard enrage if you fail to kill the adds in time? I guess not? Honestly, they seem the same thing to me. The dps check is just in the middle of the fight. The one at the end in which you would typically call the literal "hard enrage" is just a gear check, overall fight benchmark and to make sure you just aren't using a ton of tanks/healers.

Sure, standing on platforms isn't the same thing, (it's really team jump rope) but to me it is similar in that the fight immediately ends.

As I said, when you can just chain raise players like other games don't allow you need these jump rope mechanics to prevent turtling and ignoring of mechanics.

In exchange, they use weakness/damage downs as something similar to make the fight harder if mistakes continue to occur.

They've also tried the other two extremes with Gordias and Midas, and settled with an in between with Creator which is what they're doing now.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I only lump them together because they have the same end result. Would you consider an add phase with a dps check a hard enrage if you fail to kill the adds in time? I guess not? Honestly, they seem the same thing to me.

Many Add phases do have phase Hard Enrages, but that does not make an add phase or dps check inherently a Hard Enrage. A Hard Enrage is completely "Fight/Phase is taking to long. Time to reset/end the fight."

Sure, standing on platforms isn't the same thing, but seems similar in that the fight immediately ends. The dps check is just in the middle of the fight. The one at the end in which you would typically call the literal "hard enrage" is just a gear check and overall fight benchmark.

A Mechanic wiping and reseting a fight does not make it a Hard Enrage, it is just an instant kill mechanic. Hard Enrages and Soft Enrages are mechanics that are there literally to put a clock on a fight/phase and prevent things like FFXI's 12+ hour Absolute Virtue/Pandemonium Warden battles.

One of the main reasons for the confusion is that SE has liked to turn the last 10% of a boss' health into a dps check by initiating the Enrage rotation early because clearing just before a wipe is a very addictive Endorphin rush.

As I said, when you can just chain raise players like other games don't allow you need these jump rope mechanics to prevent turtling and ignoring of mechanics. In exchange, they use weakness/damage downs as something similar to make the fight harder if mistakes continue to occur.

Enrage is a term that originated in WoW. World Bosses were given the ability to Enrage where the would be given a speed and damage buff if they were in combat for a certain period of time in order to prevent characters from running around kiting/terrain locking the bosses until they died/despawned.

The "jump rope" mechanics are there to make each fight interesting and not just a bunch of tank and spanks (which LotA and ST have pretty much turned into).

They've also tried the other two extremes with Gordias and Midas, and settled with an in between with Creator which is what they're doing now.

No... Gordias, Midas and Creator all relied on pretty tight Hard Enrages and soft phase transitions. Starting with 4.0, pretty much every Raid fight and Extreme trial has been on very fixed timelines with very tight Hard Enrages and unskippable phases.

[Vaer]

Many Add phases do have phase Hard Enrages, but that does not make an add phase or dps check inherently a Hard Enrage. A Hard Enrage is completely "Fight/Phase is taking to long. Time to reset/end the fight."



A Mechanic wiping and reseting a fight does not make it a Hard Enrage, it is just an instant kill mechanic. Hard Enrages and Soft Enrages are mechanics that are there literally to put a clock on a fight/phase and prevent things like FFXI's 12+ hour Absolute Virtue/Pandemonium Warden battles.

One of the main reasons for the confusion is that SE has liked to turn the last 10% of a boss' health into a dps check by initiating the Enrage rotation early because clearing just before a wipe is a very addictive Endorphin rush.



Enrage is a term that originated in WoW. World Bosses were given the ability to Enrage where the would be given a speed and damage buff if they were in combat for a certain period of time in order to prevent characters from running around kiting/terrain locking the bosses until they died/despawned.

The "jump rope" mechanics are there to make each fight interesting and not just a bunch of tank and spanks (which LotA and ST have pretty much turned into).



No... Gordias, Midas and Creator all relied on pretty tight Hard Enrages and soft phase transitions. Starting with 4.0, pretty much every Raid fight and Extreme trial has been on very fixed timelines with very tight Hard Enrages and unskippable phases.

Yes, my original point was that the jump rope mechanics/enrages and similar mechanics are in the game to mitigate chain raising and other forms of turtling in FFXIV. You get limited resurrections in other games. I'd rather not argue what is considered a hard enrage or a soft enrage here. I'm saying they all serve a purpose to punish players for playing incorrectly and they are needed because of that if the goal is for difficulty.

[Barraind]

A Mechanic wiping and reseting a fight does not make it a Hard Enrage, it is just an instant kill mechanic.

Mechanics that absolutely 100% kill you if you dont handle them within a certain time period are literally hard enrages.


14 has problems with soft enrages due to healing througput and availability of tank cooldowns. If you're going to make a soft enrage that will tax healers, you're going to be toeing the line of a hard enrage unless its designed to be in burst phases.

Enrage is a term that originated in WoW

It was a thing long before WoW was a game (and before that, Enrage was a boss ability that melee bosses [and some casters] would use at ~10% HP and is why enrage is called enrage). Soft enrages were built into almost every EQ raid in one of three different forms.

Hell, some fights in era were designed as soft enrages from 100%. See: bosses that did more melee damage than you had HP every 1.3 seconds, hope your tanks are good at tank swapping and your healing rotation is ready to land as much healing as you have hp every 1.2 seconds.

[Hyperia]

I'm ok with them changing enrages, its easily done by randomizing what happens next instead of a totally scripted fight. If a group can clear a boss fight and deal with randomized mechanics over 22 minutes, let them have the kill. Think of it this way, imagine if the JSDF is unable to force Godzilla to retreat in 11 minutes, he explodes in a nuclear cloud wiping out all of Japan.

I'd enjoy an endurance option rather than a hard enrage as I am getting bored with the glorified DPS race every fight we have.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Yes, my original point was that the jump rope mechanics/enrages and similar mechanics are in the game to mitigate chain raising and other forms of turtling in FFXIV. You get limited resurrections in other games. I'm not trying to argue what is considered a hard enrage/soft enrage/semantics here. I'm saying they all serve a purpose to punish players for playing incorrectly and they are needed because of that if the goal is for difficulty.

Not trying to argue that the mechanics are meaningless or don't make things difficult, but your belief that the Hard Enrages/Forced Wipe mechanics are necessary because the easy of resurrections is pretty off base. Right now the only real way to tax healer mp is to force them to chain raise and DpS requirements to clear are tight enough that needing to do so means that the attempt was a failure even before then.

In my mind, a well designed difficult fight would be tuned to be cleared without mistakes by above average dps in, say, 11 minutes with an Enrage at 12 minutes that above average dps might see if they make to many mistakes and below average dps might see with perfect play. The current round of Savage fights are designed to be cleared at 11 minutes with perfect play and have a hard enrage at that point.

[Vaer]

Not trying to argue that the mechanics are meaningless or don't make things difficult, but your belief that the Hard Enrages/Forced Wipe mechanics are necessary because the easy of resurrections is pretty off base. Right now the only real way to tax healer mp is to force them to chain raise and DpS requirements to clear are tight enough that needing to do so means that the attempt was a failure even before then.

In my mind, a well designed difficult fight would be tuned to be cleared without mistakes by above average dps in, say, 11 minutes with an Enrage at 12 minutes that above average dps might see if they make to many mistakes and below average dps might see with perfect play. The current round of Savage fights are designed to be cleared at 11 minutes with perfect play and have a hard enrage at that point.

Totally disagree, it would make the fights easier without team jump rope mechanics and the hard enrage. Can you have really hard fights without them? Sure. But in my experience removing them when healing kits are so strong that you are DPSing most of the time would be going in the wrong direction if difficulty is the goal.

I've wiped many times sub <1% or around 2% when content is current. Usually because of mistakes or accidental deaths. It obviously doesn't feel great to be in that situation but if I played slightly better, or the group played slightly better we would have cleared it. So we tried again, did it with 0 deaths and we cleared. If the enrage wasn't in place or even slightly more lenient we would have cleared it easily.

Even some recent mechanics can be cheesed with healer LB3. The 2nd portal set in E7S, can be completely cheesed with LB3 if you have at least one healer that survives it. That means 7 people can fail this mechanic and you will still clear. The E7S hard enrage is actually really lenient if no one dies and everyone does all the mechanics properly. They gave some consideration due to the annoying mind jack and portals. I even did this with Grand Cross Omega last expansion.

Also certain mechanic logic breaks if there is one dead person when it selects targets. We somehow got through LR in E8S with only 7 people up by accident. If we went all the way, the hard enrage would stop us from clearing due to the lost dps from weakness.

That's just my experience though. I'm gonna have to agree to disagree. With the way the game is designed removing them or giving more time without compensating for it would make fights easier. Overtime, savage hard enrages get nerfed anyway as people get gear. Honestly, I think the value of gear would drop if you lower the DPS requirement even more. I'm not even that great of a player, so those that are at the top would clear the entire thing even faster if it got dropped more as they would be alotted more mistakes and deaths since their DPS is already so high above average players.

[ForteNightshade]

The issue is healers can typically brute force heal through soft enrages for a long time unless the boss' deal obscene levels of damage all at once. And at that point, why even bother when the heal check is so high, it may as well just be a hard enrage? On that note, it's become quite clear SE does not want too much responsibility placed on only one or two players. Range mechanics are practically non-existent. Even Savage this tier now targets two DPS at random. I suspect it's so Range players don't feel like they have to do every mechanic while Melee ignore them. A soft enrage usually boils down to "get the healers heal through this? No? You die."