SE: Please enable echo way earlier on savage tier...

[Colt47]

This is quite literally the definition of lacking skill, sweetheart. You (general) aren't yet capable of beating P12S without several deaths and/or damage downs, thus needing the game to give you a free 10-20% boost to overcome that deficiency. Now let me be clear. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. Especially for those inexperienced with the higher difficulty of Savage. But it is a skill issue. Like others have already brought up, you have access to nearly full i660 nowadays, which is significantly higher than people clearing it before did. Therefore, the fights have already been "nerfed".

Even without echo, you aren't going to skip the actual hard mechanics in P12S. All of them are situated in such a way, you'll never kill beforehand. And most of them are body checks. You're not completing Classical Elements until everyone understands how the shapes and 180 degree rotation works nor are you getting by "Limit Cut" with deaths prior to the last pair. Echo may allow for a few extra deaths but it's not going to change much when the vast majority of people still struggling with Savage are making mechanical mistakes not dying to enrage.

It should also be noted, the "running joke" has nothing to do with echo. People asking for Savage to be unlocked earlier simply want the gear restriction removed so they can subsequently gear and play more jobs. In fact, several of those same people would prefer echo didn't happen until 7.0 to preserve the fight's difficulty curve.

The problem with calling this a skill problem is that in reality, this is talking about 8 people having to executing a series of tasks in a proper order. A persons personal skill has nothing to do with completing these fights as I can assure you, even if someone has cleared this and farmed it 50+ times over, if they go join a learning group on Caloric 1 they are not clearing that fight. Also, to be clear people getting stuck on the first phase of the final fight of a tier is pretty normal considering how bad the door bosses usually are. However, even on p8s p1 the break points were not like this. You could still clear the fight if one or two people died during transitions that happen in the second half, but people here have short memories and don't seem to remember it. With p12s the vast majority of the fight is built so that no one can really afford to be dead. The only option is to literally boost damage to the point they can skip a phase and even then, it's still going to be just as difficult to get to phase 2 because so many people mess up on mechanics that can kill on phase 1.

Last night I went into a Caloric 1 prog, and even with executing everything perfectly, I can't get to phase 2 if player 1 derps on paradigma 2 by standing in the wrong place, player 6 dies on paradigma 3 and the tower goes to the wrong spot, player 3 ends up falling over during limit cut and the extra damage knocks out two other people, someone misses a tower on superchain 1 despite the fact we're supposed to be in Caloric 1 prog, and then everyone gets so worn down that the people who know what they are doing start making mistakes. If this was within the first four months of content, fine. We're not in the first four months of content we are on month 7.

And the reason that we got here to begin with, is because Harrowing Hell and the crap that went down in p10s stalled out a lot of midcore players because that was another nightmare point that shouldn't have been even placed there to begin with. No joke that fight felt like it was supposed to be fight number 3 and they just flipped them around last minute for some reason.

[Menriq]

The problem with calling this a skill problem is that in reality, this is talking about 8 people having to executing a series of tasks in a proper order. A persons personal skill has nothing to do with completing these fights

8 people have to execute a series of task, but yet saying a person's personal skill has nothing to do with it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like 8 people's personal skills are needed. I'm failing to understand how that is not a skill issue.

Last night I went into a Caloric 1 prog, and even with executing everything perfectly, I can't get to phase 2 if player 1 derps on paradigma 2 by standing in the wrong place, player 6 dies on paradigma 3 and the tower goes to the wrong spot, player 3 ends up falling over during limit cut and the extra damage knocks out two other people, someone misses a tower on superchain 1 despite the fact we're supposed to be in Caloric 1 prog, and then everyone gets so worn down that the people who know what they are doing start making mistakes. If this was within the first four months of content, fine. We're not in the first four months of content we are on month 7.

That is called a trap party. This is a very common scenario when using PF.

And the reason that we got here to begin with, is because Harrowing Hell and the crap that went down in p10s stalled out a lot of midcore players because that was another nightmare point that shouldn't have been even placed there to begin with. No joke that fight felt like it was supposed to be fight number 3 and they just flipped them around last minute for some reason.

This was not a big issue for a lot of prog groups, especially as gear upgrades made this a lot easier. I've actually seen several takes where P10S is being praised as one of the best, if not the best, 2nd turn SE has ever done.

[Colt47]

8 people have to execute a series of task, but yet saying a person's personal skill has nothing to do with it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like 8 people's personal skills are needed. I'm failing to understand how that is not a skill issue.
That is called a trap party. This is a very common scenario when using PF.

This was not a big issue for a lot of prog groups, especially as gear upgrades made this a lot easier. I've actually seen several takes where P10S is being praised as one of the best, if not the best, 2nd turn SE has ever done.

The first two fights in a tier are the ones that are designed for the crafted gear to be more than enough, while the last two generally are more like hairs breadth, so when people gear to 630+ the first two fights become much easier. That's part of the intent since you have to reclear those two fights to get to the last two, and once again this is where memory fails on people as the point where p10s blocked most groups was ages ago. However, that delay still made the tier take longer and caused people to grow bored and disinterested. It also is resulting in a slog in the second half that wasn't present in the first two tiers. I think the main reason they haven't actually started up echo is due to development issues involving echo. It's likely not something they can just "turn on", and they have to build it into the tier. It still feels like they should have it at this point due to the issues happening in PF this late into it. They tuned up the difficulty on savage after many years of having nerfed it, and they sort of hit the opposite side of the pendulum.

And again, people who are not new to savage are not gaining skill doing savage they already mastered the skills to do savage ages ago. This is a war of semantics the way that it is being presented by people stepping into this thread and there is absolutely no argument at all here. Competency is not the same thing as skill: The pattern for learning how to do these fights is the same across every single tier and competency is the ability to execute the skill that someone has supposedly mastered. Also, it is kind of debatable if the majority of people who clear savage are actually skilled in learning savage since most people are depending on guides coming out from the few that do, but that is another topic and much more open to interpretation than others.

[Jeeqbit]

even if someone has cleared this and farmed it 50+ times over, if they go join a learning group on Caloric 1 they are not clearing that fight.

That is true in many fights. You may have cleared almost any fight in the game, but if you join a fresh learning group, obviously you probably won't clear it unless it's a really easy fight (like Innocence was).

Is this fact frustrating? Yes. Has it always been frustrating since ARR? Yes. Is it frustrating with many other fights as well? Yes.

The point being made is that this is not some new thing. It is fair to think of solutions to this problem, such as a better matching system so you can find people in PF who are genuinely, consistently up to the same mechanic. But a solution is not "make hard fights easier by buffing them with the Echo so they are a joke".

We're not in the first four months of content we are on month 7.

So what is wrong with waiting some more months or until the next expansion when the Echo is there like you're wanting?

[OgruMogru]

nonono guys I'm not unskilled, I'm just incompetent

lmaooooo

[ZiraZ]

You should've made a thread about prog point liars becoming the norm, this doesn't have anything to do with Echo, if you want the boss to die before paradigma 2 then you are gonna also need 10 more levels and Dawntrial gear.

[Colt47]

You should've made a thread about prog point liars becoming the norm, this doesn't have anything to do with Echo, if you want the boss to die before paradigma 2 then you are gonna also need 10 more levels and Dawntrial gear.

The prog point lying is unfortunately a symptom of the content they constructed and generally the struggle of trying to make a singular, massive multiplayer game that can capture enough peoples interest to keep the lights on. The truth is that FFXIV doesn't need any savage or ultimate content because the game is not built to be difficult. The core content is designed around a set difficulty level that is more in line with a casual / normal / narrative mode game, where the interaction and involvement a player has is with the narrative and the systems of the game are built around supporting the narrative. The main reason that savage, ex, and ultimate were added is to satisfy people that want difficulty and challenge in their game and have a large social network for which to support the achievement and make it satisfying.

But in games like this there's an entire spectrum of people who have different desires and lifestyles, and when content gets added to these games every player is exposed to that content in one way or another. People on this forum, even if they do not participate in savage, are exposed to it through the items and the players that engage in it. So eventually, if content dries up or there just isn't much else to do those people try and engage in that hard content.

Breaking down all the comments made this expansion by content creators and players, all of it involving gearing faster and/or engaging echo sooner is about balancing the accessibility so that the savage content and other hard content are accessible to the most people possible, even if it isn't at the same time. The people that are arguing against it are afraid that they are going to lose something they enjoy because of the changes or shortens the time span they have to complete the content and it's understandable. Some people are doing it through attacking credibility (This player is clearly bad at the content and just wants free gear, etc.) others just ask why the current system isn't good enough and say things like "why can't you just wait until echo in in the .6 patch instead of asking for it sooner?"

The simple truth is that savage has a lot of design issues because they are building puzzle solving fights with tight checks that can only be overcome by proficiency, and as seen in heavensward and even now, a miscalculation in how difficult a set of content is based on the current game system can cause a lot of problems. The people that dive head first into the content are going to finish the content pretty fast, and those that take a more casual approach to it through midcore scheduling are going to take longer, and the whole point of the suggestions are to normalize the time it takes so that people who are doing it more slowly are not being penalized in time to completion over those that dive head first. People right now have developed the habit of completely clocking out of the game at this point if the static they have runs into issues in the first few weeks because they know it is going to be a slog otherwise. The people that are good complete the content and leave, and those that take longer, even if they did a prior tier on a more robust schedule and beat the last one in 4-6 weeks, suffer.

And there is no good answer under FFXIV for groups that start late. If a group starts late they have to hope that those they took along are not going to have a life change and that they are on a robust enough schedule that they do not need to use PF under the current system. Under a system where the echo comes on sooner and they make gearing easier, it is true they may not get the same authentic experience, since they may be looking for something where they have more gear than the minimum iLvL requirement, but aren't so powerful that they render key mechanics moot, like doing old content unsync. But in the end, I agree with the content creators that gearing is too slow, echo comes on too late, and there is a lot of disengagement in late tier because of it with or without developers accidently making content more difficult then intended.

[Jeeqbit]

The truth is that FFXIV doesn't need any savage or ultimate content because the game is not built to be difficult.

I mean, if you make this argument, then arguably no MMORPG needs high-end content, it just came about in one of them and then every MMORPG after that copied the concept and felt it was "standard" and a "defining trait" of MMORPGs. The reality is the majority of MMORPG players were always casuals who didn't even really get through the hardest stuff; rather, they were witnesses to the people who did and their shiny weapons and titles.

If an MMORPG ever ends up where the majority of people clear the hardest stuff, then either the hardest stuff is not that hard (even with some slow or sloppy players in the group), or the lack of casual content drove them all away over time leaving just the ones interested in hard content. But almost every MMORPG has other things like emotes, mounts, guilds, pvp, seasonal events, houses, quests and grinds much of which end up done by casual players, so an MMORPG has to do a lot of things wrong to drive away their casual players.

there is no good answer under FFXIV for groups that start late.

That's not any more true than at the start of the tier. I saw people clearing P8S in the final weeks of the last tier after only like a week of prog. I wound up in various discord servers when I was farming it and saw what was happening. You can't just say "all people struggle after X timeframe".

[Menriq]

Last night I went into a Caloric 1 prog, and even with executing everything perfectly, I can't get to phase 2 if player 1 derps on paradigma 2 by standing in the wrong place, player 6 dies on paradigma 3 and the tower goes to the wrong spot, player 3 ends up falling over during limit cut and the extra damage knocks out two other people, someone misses a tower on superchain 1 despite the fact we're supposed to be in Caloric 1 prog, and then everyone gets so worn down that the people who know what they are doing start making mistakes. If this was within the first four months of content, fine. We're not in the first four months of content we are on month 7.

Can you explain how any amount of Echo would have fixed this?

The bottom line is that people are clearing for the first time every day. Casual does not mean bad, it just means they are going at a different pace. I can't say any content creator I'm familiar with is advocating for Echo to start sooner. What I do see is a request for opening up the loot sooner, which in turn kind of helps everyone that is doing the content. At some point, you'll just to understand that Echo is not going to be the savior you think it is, and that performing the mechanics incorrectly (which is what the gist a lot of us are trying to explain) is what is preventing your progression.

[Caro178]

Can you explain how any amount of Echo would have fixed this?

The bottom line is that people are clearing for the first time every day. Casual does not mean bad, it just means they are going at a different pace. I can't say any content creator I'm familiar with is advocating for Echo to start sooner. What I do see is a request for opening up the loot sooner, which in turn kind of helps everyone that is doing the content. At some point, you'll just to understand that Echo is not going to be the savior you think it is, and that performing the mechanics incorrectly (which is what the gist a lot of us are trying to explain) is what is preventing your progression.

You are absolutely right but I guarantee they're just going to repeat once again that they're not the problem - it's everyone else wiping them (doubt), it's the body checks (welcome to savage), the fights are too hard (they really aren't), the dps checks are too high (lmao), etc. You can't use logic here because they're huffing the purest "am I out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong" copium money can buy. 7 months in if you can't progress a fight tons of other people are clearing for the first time every day despite joining lots of parties and playing with tons of different people then there's only one common denominator: you.