SE, love the fight design but tone down the instant deaths a touch?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

No it doesn't. A pure enrage check will become irrelevant as people get more geared. The body check is there to make sure the mechanic always remain relevant regardless of how geared you are

I'm not talking about fights when unsynced. I'm talking about fights during the release patch.



On release, enrage is useless when every mechanic is a body check.

[Raven2014]

I'm not talking about fights when unsynced.
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Neither do I.

I'm talking about fights during the release patch.

And by this ... are you talking about week 1? Or Month 1? Consider the life cycle of a savage tier is probably 3-4 months, I think it's even more relevant to what I said. Since the fights are tuned to be beaten in week 1, that means any simple enrage mechanic would become meaningless within one month MAX.

There are actually plenty example of this in the game: they are called Primal Extreme fight. Without hard body check mechanic, every savage fight will simply become another EX fight within a month.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Neither do I.



And by this ... are you talking about week 1? Or Month 1? Consider the life cycle of a savage tier is probably 3-4 months, I think it's even more relevant to what I said. Since the fights are tuned to be beaten in week 1, that means any simple enrage mechanic would become meaningless within one month MAX.

There are actually plenty example of this in the game: they are called Primal Extreme fight. Without hard body check mechanic, every savage fight will simply become another EX fight within a month.

Do you do savage? My group is still progging p12s because we have a person who cannot grasp classical concepts. It's made progging the fight hell because wiping to that means we can't see any further mechanics. When we get by on luck, we wipe to the next mechanic because it's also a body check.



And enrage should be trivialize with gear. That's kind of the point. You have 1 body check mechanic, and then enrage.

E8S was far easier than p12s, and it had light rampant, but it was at the start. And then it was a while before the next real body check mechanic. But even then, most of those outside light rampant were recoverable.



Not so in p12s. It takes player skill out of the equation. Recovering from a wipe (and not just limping along to a clear) is harder than starting over. You remove any kind of player agency.



Also, not every group has the skill to do that even with gear.

[Raven2014]

Do you do savage?

Yes? On 4 different char in fact.

My group is still progging p12s because we have a person who cannot grasp classical concepts. It's made progging the fight hell because wiping to that means we can't see any further mechanics. When we get by on luck, we wipe to the next mechanic because it's also a body check.

I mean ... in a way I can relate, but I don't agree. I had raid with a lot of group/static at different level, and my clear time depend on it. The previous two tier I ran with some decent players, and we manage to clear the tier within just 4-5 weeks. Unfortunately I had to leave due to schedule. So this tier I ran with a super casual group. We manage to get to P12S in like week 3, and then spend the next 3 months wiping on P12S before our first clear. And guess what, I'm ok with it. We wiped for weeks on Classical concept, just to get to caloric and proceed to wipe on it for weeks again. And this is after spending almost a month itself wiping on the first chain in phase 1 because half the raid struggle with the tower/soak order. And it's also mostly due to one or two person.

I think the difference here is how your group and my group decided to take it. Mine never set a time limit or expectation, we know our level and just take thing on the chin. I think the benefit of running with casual is it's almost impossible for us to care enough to get frustrated about slow progress. At some point it sounded like half of us try to explain to this person how it works. It got to a point where our raid leader take it upon himself of solving both HIS and this person mech during caloric, so he will tell this person where to go. (To his credit, he finally learnt how to do it himself after ... 2 months). The other person who keep messing up Classical? Eventually the whole group just take up ourselves to watch if this person is near our proximity, and tell him where to go.

Hey, it's a group effort.

And enrage should be trivialize with gear. That's kind of the point.

And that point is still relevant. A full 660 team will have lot more room for error comparing to a 640 team. But enrage was never a mechanic, it's a tolerance. Ultimately I support idea that for high-end ecounter, team should only get their clears once they have demonstrated full understanding of the fight. I don't support the idea of players allow to simply overgear and brutefor/bypass mechanic they never understood and still get the clear.

Like I sad, you have EX for that. Want to know how I know? Because that's my mentality in EX, I rarely care enough to try to understand the fight fully like a savage fight because I know I don't need to.

Also, not every group has the skill to do that even with gear.

And have you ever thought just ... maybe then your group isn't meant to clear it? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here and I feel this probably gonna open another rabbit hole. Again, I can relate. I had cleared the prior Ultimate, but when my group tried DSR ... we got to Eyes and stuck there for like 3 months. Eventually we just decided "hey, this fight is beyond our skill level", and we quit and we're ok with it. At least I was Ok with it.

You won't hear me saying "oh this is too hard it should be made easier to I can clear it". And you know why? Because I know if the fight is adjusted to the level that my team can clear, it will also take away the challenge that other people would enjoy.

[Reimmi]

I'm convinced that this is exactly what discourages many people from even attempting certain content. It could be quite stressful in the knowledge that a relatively insignificant error, or a slight amount of lag, or even someone simply having a bad day or a bad time on one mechanic could lead to your party wiping. Even worse if you, or your party - can't use any of your skills to recover from your mistake . Not everyone enjoys that.

I almost think the game would benefit from savage having a hard limit on resses, kinda like how wow has a cap of battle reses (depending on party size)
Don't put the limit in casual content, but giving savage a res limit would mean every mechanic doesn't *have* to oneshot you

[Colt47]

Have you actually done a lot of Savage? Shadowbringers had just as many, if not more, body checks or near guaranteed fail states.

Cloud of Darkness had PvP tiles, Shadow Dog's void circles were a guaranteed wipe if someone was dead, never mind how easy it was for void orbs to kill several people. Fatebreaker is basically a harder Themis. Is someone dead for partners? Better hope he doesn't pick a tank or healer. You weren't recovering third phase cycles if the healers go down. Finally, we get to Eternity/Gaia which have Lion Rampant, time warps and a litany of "do this correctly or die."

None of these fights were any more or less accessible for the general playerbase. Same goes for previous tiers or even expansions. Jumping back to Stormblood, we had the infamous Hello, World and Limit Cut from O12S alone.

The only real shocker this expansion in terms of difficulty is Pandæmonium because we usually don't have such a highly tuned fight as the second encounter. Frankly, I love they didn't hold back for once and only wish Themis had been more interesting.

Now I do think they could scale the back checks back somewhat but like Seebazy mentioned prior, it's damn near the only option they have to actually challenge players. Healers, and to a lesser extent, tanks have far too many tools nowadays.

Nevertheless, Savage hasn't been "easier" in prior expansions.

Yes I did all of shadowbringers (except first tier of shadowbringers) and all of the current tier. It absolutely was easier back then, with groups generally being able to do 6 hours in a week and still clearing near the end of the patch. It is physically impossible in the current savage tier to do only 6 hours and clear it reliably. There's too many points where one person can die and kill everyone compared to the original fights, and we don't have the broken stat system to keep these people alive. The devs went tighter on things and it shows a LOT. Multiple body checks per fight and a lot of hidden hard wipes involving mp management if too many rezzes are given out.

[Colt47]

Do you do savage? My group is still progging p12s because we have a person who cannot grasp classical concepts. It's made progging the fight hell because wiping to that means we can't see any further mechanics. When we get by on luck, we wipe to the next mechanic because it's also a body check.



And enrage should be trivialize with gear. That's kind of the point. You have 1 body check mechanic, and then enrage.

E8S was far easier than p12s, and it had light rampant, but it was at the start. And then it was a while before the next real body check mechanic. But even then, most of those outside light rampant were recoverable.



Not so in p12s. It takes player skill out of the equation. Recovering from a wipe (and not just limping along to a clear) is harder than starting over. You remove any kind of player agency.



Also, not every group has the skill to do that even with gear.

That issue with a single person breaking the entire group is the exact problem savage has and because the devs decided they would do the "well it worked the last two expansions so lets keep doing it" ramp it up in difficulty to make it last longer, without understanding the implications of instant death mechanics being used so heavily apparently, they made savage the final ultimate. So basically now everyone who has never been in ultimate has to DO ultimate for progression in a system that has a lot of road blocks already in place to slow that down, including reclearing every single prior fight. One of those fights already exceeds p8s (p10s) in body checks, so it involves not only reclearing old fights, but also dealing with another ultimate-lite type of fight in the middle of it.

The fights are designed fine if the kind of people who did savage were ALL the same people who do ultimates, but they aren't. Also I'm kind of ticked off because they did the absolute opposite of what people wanted in this entire expansion. Yoshi P. said they listened to hardcore players more but I feel like they ignored half the feedback then on the entire thing with endgame. People wanted the ability to have a step between the savage and normal mode, no one said they wanted savage to have more body checks and be more difficult to complete than all prior content before stat squish. Not only that, but they are slow as molasses to react to any kind of feedback. By the time they are going to react to THIS feedback, if at all, it's going to be patch 7.2 or 7.3 in Dawntrail. They have to be reactive in fixing issues of difficulty like this because we are at 6.5. If people didn't clear already they are going to be grinding all the way to potentially 7.0 launch.

And this is a problem because it cuts into doing anything else, like going for pvp seasonal rewards or grinding for mounts. They are literally harming the other content they have doing this difficulty spike.

[Averax]

TBH we need less instant death mechanics and more healer checks. Enable healers to actually perform their role sometimes and allow for mistakes that do not instantly amount in death. More random damage that needs to be healed please.

[Colt47]

TBH we need less instant death mechanics and more healer checks. Enable healers to actually perform their role sometimes and allow for mistakes that do not instantly amount in death. More random damage that needs to be healed please.

Okay so this is basically observation, but the idea they went with on this expansion was to make the mitigation matter more, so they made this critical instead of optional for savage. The idea is that they'd have some mechanic that does a tank buster and unless the tank uses one or two mitigations, the total damage will be greater than the total HP the tank hypothetically will have. They can also do things like add multipliers to the damage so that not using a mitigation increases damage taken by 10-15% on top of the total damage it is supposed to deal.

To patch something like p12s to make it less of a final destination instant death match, they'd have to change it so that there is specifically one or two body checks. So basically, Limit cut would have to be the body check and everything else before it is just damage that can be healed through. Main reason for that is adjusting Super Chain would mean adjusting all the super chains so that they are in the same line of thinking. So then it puts more pressure on the party avoiding damage downs instead of being hard locked to earlier mechanics. Older savage raids people weren't getting death pinned to earlier mechanics, they were basically damage down pinned which meant people were learning the fights properly even if others were failing mechanics, because they could live longer and see more of the fight.

The above would probably make the fight far easier to complete and given where we are at in patch cycle, it shouldn't even matter to anyone who already cleared it. They'd probably just go back to farm gear some more since they'd have less RNG. Also might make the community a bit less dodgy and angry at one another for failing mechanics and killing everyone. What I'm learning from this expansion is that the development team and team leadership did not understand at all who was doing what content when designing endwalker end game. I've been spending my time watching half of the mid-core raiders quit savage before completing the final fights, and the other half trying to at least finish so they aren't feeling like they wasted their time.

[Renathras]

Regarding the actual topic though, I don't have any problems with the body checks in this expansions fights. Requiring everybody to do the mechanics correctly in a savage fights is kinda the whole point of savage isn't it?

The big problem is they've wormed their way into Extremes. Golbez is the worst offender, but as I noted in my list, hardly the ONLY offender.

Meteors on zeromus is the complete opposite of a body check. You can sac strat this mechanic deliberatly or even just on the fly.

Didn't I say that? "a sorta body check, but it's more a positioning check". That is, not a body check. And I've praised the fight as one of, if not the best, Ex in this expansion. Precisely because it doesn't have a hard body check. The only issue there is if someone messes up, it wipes the entire party.

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Anyway, I think people don't get how encounters are harder now than they used to be. People that do Ultimates find everything else easy, that's a given, but then there's the rest of the playerbase. Things people used to find hard in Savage fights are now trivial since people know how to solve that mechanic and have improved in terms of things like positioning and memorization. Encounters are absolutely harder now. But because those players have gotten better, they see them as equal or easier. The problem is, the people who haven't done that now have to leap a giant chasm of difficulty to get their foot in the door, or they can clear the easier fights (P1S) but get walled (P3S). And because the good players who have gotten better aren't able to realize that's what is happening, they insist everyone else is just bad, when their own younger self 5 years ago would be having difficulty with the current stuff.

And again, the big problem is that these same mechanics are creeping into Extremes, which had been midcore content (and in EW, the only midcore content because there was no Exploration Zone/raids for them), making the gulf bigger.

But the solution proposed by the high end people is to just make casual content harder, with the assumption that will make better players, instead of realizing that mechanics are just far harder now and we need to break up high-end encounters into multiple difficulty tiers to make a more gradual ramp difficulty curve. Savages are now Ultimates. Ultimates are now Ultimates+. Half the Extremes are now Savages. But these things aren't marked that way, leading to confusion, frustration, and an increase in people just not wanting to bother with the content.