Savage Raids are poorly designed and Enrage is fake difficulty.

[Packetdancer]

Imo it's too easy currently if you have even just okay gear.
I know it's the first tier but I felt like I learned the fights in like a pull or two.

Playing devil's advocate ("Ascian's advocate"?) for a moment here, while I agree that savage is not inherently hugely difficult, I would say that it's significantly different than a lot of content in this game in two ways.

First, and arguably most importantly, it's less that savage is inherently hugely punishing and more that the rest of the game is extremely forgiving.

You don't need to play your job in anything remotely like an "optimal" manner to get through 95% of the content in this game. You can play through the majority of the game not even really knowing anything about GCD versus oGCD, or aligning buffs as a party, or anything else.

Clearing an MSQ dungeon doesn't require you to know how best to optimize your rotation as a DPS. Getting through a story-mode trial doesn't require you to know how best to heal efficiently when there's large amounts of unavoidable damage going out and people taking avoidable damage you need to spot heal.

The minimum you need to do to get through savage is not actually that bad... but it's definitely above what you need to even perform tolerably well in the vast majority of content in the game.

And honestly, there's nothing wrong with that; not every bit of content in a game needs to be made to be challenging, where you need to be efficient/optimal to get through it.

I have plenty of friends who would be capable of optimizing their gameplay and doing savage, but who aren't interested; they play FFXIV to pop on, do some stuff casually with friends, enjoy the story when there's more story to enjoy, and then vanish off to other games again. If they want a game that challenges their skill, they often have plenty of single-player games they want to focus on.

However, the downside to this is that the bulk of content in this game is singularly ill-suited to preparing people to head into the small bit of high-end content which does require at least some deeper understanding of combat in the game. Moreover, the game is extremely bad about providing resources for folks to learn those skills.

Which means you can clear all the normal stuff in the game, then decide you want to tackle savage, and find that you're absolutely adrift with no clue how to perform at the level savage wants.

(Honestly, I was in that spot myself when I decided to move into endgame content a couple of tiers ago.)

And while getting to that level of performance honestly isn't that hard when you look at it in isolation, the game itself provides no assistance on how to do so. As a result, it's up to the community -- with videos on "how to play <X job> optimally" and places like the Balance or SaltedXIV to compile lists of tips, resources, and guides -- to help hand folks a map on how to get from point A ("I can finish my duty roulettes without problem") to point B ("I can actually play this job the way the combat designers intended it to synergize with itself and with other jobs, and am doing savage content").

And since much of that type of optimization content is targeted at folks already doing that content who want to get better, I do know folks who want to start in savage who find it all very intimidating.

Worse, if they just throw themselves at the brick wall repeatedly and fail, it only starts to feel more intimidating.

The second factor is that, as I've noted before (albeit in that case with regards to Bozja content), this game is extremely good at misdirection in higher-end content.

The mechanics are rarely that complicated, but they'll be obscured behind a lot of "noisy" showmanship... as I've put it before, a stage magician doing something with one hand to hold your attention, while concealing the tankbuster up the other sleeve.

In normal content, there are ground telegraphs that "bad things are about to be here", and people just learn to look for those even though the fights will also telegraph things in other ways. In higher-end content like savage, you lack the ground telegraphs, or if they are present they're going to be done at a time which is not super useful.

It might be way before the mechanic happens, like P4S phase 2 and Hesperos' mischievous choice to telegraph everything all at once, do something else, then telegraph what order the previously-telegraphed things will happen in, then actually resolve all telegraphed mechanics. More often, they'll just happen far too late to react to them, unless you've paid attention to other environmental cues.

And even if the mechanic itself is simple, the timing will often not be forgiving, meaning you need not only to see what's happening from more subtle cues than any potential ground AoE, but you also need to do so quickly and react without huge delay.

No other content has really taught folks to watch for environmental cues in that same sense, much less to respond with the same degree of urgency; trying to learn to do so is part of getting used to higher-end content like savage. But if you're trying to develop that habit (to survive mechanics) and trying to learn how to play your job more optimally, trying to learn both things at the same time... well, yeah, that genuinely could feel intimidating to folks.

Which is why it's actually good advice to focus on content that's lower-tier than savage -- like a current alliance raid, or some of the more approachable extremes -- while still requiring a little more than MSQ dungeons to get through. The mechanics are going to be more forgiving timing-wise, which means you can focus more on fine-tuning performance in your job.

Once you feel like you've got that down to muscle memory and are really solid on performance there, stepping up into savage will likely feel much easier.

tl;dr - Do I think savage is hugely difficult, in the end? No, not really. I think most players are capable of it if they want to be, though I know not all are -- and have sympathy for those who are not, for whatever reason it might be. (Nerve damage to hands that leaves them unable to weave between GCD abilities, etc.)

But the game doesn't give a lot of resources to folks who do want to get to that level, forcing them to rely on out-of-game informational sources. And as it provides no real ramp-up to that content, folks trying to make the jump all at once may definitely feel like it's more intimidating than it actually needs to be.

[Midareyukki]

Playing devil's advocate ("Ascian's advocate"?)

Diabolos advocate

[SeverianLyonesse]

I am struggling to think of a legitimate argument against enrages, and the closest I can come up with is that in a roundabout way they (and general fight scripting) reinforce the rigid rotation-based job design that is dragging down job fantasies and game feel.

Although I still think:

(1) If enrages are reinforcing that design philosophy, they certainly aren't the worst offender compared to literally every other mechanic in raids, as well as the job designs themselves.
(2) Generally whatever negatives enrages have are pretty solidly counterbalanced by an interest in not wasting players' time and encouraging a base level of competency and rewards system. We could argue that they way they are implemented may be too strictly rewarding mind-numbing rotation optimization, but I again think that is a consequence of the job designs themselves and doesn't detract to the overall benefits of having an enrage system on maintaining fun game loops.

I think OP is misguided in their frustrations. Enrage might be a symptom of bad design in some limited respects/instances, but I don't consider it remotely a core "problem" with the game, if it is even a problem at all. I think raids could have more randomized timelines and jobs could have more reaction-based gameplay, and that still would not obviate the utility of having a hard cutoff time for clear attempts. Though I do think it wouldn't hurt for the devs to play with design space outside of enrages from time to time to shake things up.

[Jinx_Darkes]

Expecting 8 people to perform 15 minutes of mechanics without losing DPS, without a single death and all this while poorly communicating is the crux of everything that makes Savage raiding a horrible experience, the icing on that inedible cake is enrage which enforces this mechanic through fake difficulty and removes any flexibility or room for error.

It's no wonder all the toxicity in FFXIV comes from the savage raiding community, which is in turn why we have all these parsers controversies which are taking up the devs focus. This problem could easily be fixed by offering a little wiggle room for mistakes and removing the pointless enrage function but I guess that's not happening any time soon.

Now I'll sit back and wait for all the accusations of "trolling" or me not "gitting gud" to spew forth like the contents of an overflowing toilet.

Your own expectations are correct. You need to get good.

Also the devs do not have a parser controversy. Their controversy were with adds on that gave you information you were not intended to have and gave visuals to aoes that weren't intended to have any.
In 8 years no one has been banned for streaming with a parser on. Ever. Let me reiterate this. The devs do not have a parser controversy. The people that have a controversy with parsers are BAD PLAYERS. It's a controversy the community made up.

[Ivtrix]

Your own expectations are correct. You need to get good.

Also the devs do not have a parser controversy. Their controversy were with adds on that gave you information you were not intended to have and gave visuals to aoes that weren't intended to have any.
In 8 years no one has been banned for streaming with a parser on. Ever. Let me reiterate this. The devs do not have a parser controversy. The people that have a controversy with parsers are BAD PLAYERS. It's a controversy the community made up.

getting good is the hardest pill for a lot of people to swallow unfortunately

[forsakee]

Troll OP got 12 pages of replies congrats!

[Arkfrost]

I've cleared every savage since Alexander Creator and so far I've only seen enrage 5x. Once in God Kefka, once in Final Omega, twice in Eden Shiva, and once in Hesperos. Aside from that I always either wiped long before the enrage or crushed it long before any enrage could've happened.