Normal/Savage Alexander complaint

[Allyrion]

You've missed the point, they want to experience the story through progression, not on these watered down fights that provide no real challenge or reward outside of bits of gear. We're forced to run Normal mode before Savage, it ruins the story, it ruins the wow factor when you first see a new boss and their room. You plough through all of the floors so fast that theirs no time to speculate about whats next in-between.

For me personally I have no problem with normal mode being in the game or it dropping gear, I think its a good thing for the casual fan base. But for the next round of Alexander raids I would like for Savage and Normal to be separate entities, with neither being a requirement for the other.

it's not exclusivity, it's priority and awe. seeing Twintania, Nael, Phoenix, Bahamut for the first time in Coil after completing the difficult fight before them is rewarding.

high skill players should be rewarded for their skill. they should earn that storyline and earn that final fight with the big boss.

everybody else can wait to the next patch for the story mode.

While I'm completely on this side of the fence, it's a tough compromise.
I think difficulty modes diminish the novelty of the encounter.

Facing an easy mode version of Bahamut would've been dumb.
The echo was fine to make content more accessible.
But the new content is designed such that Savage is faced with catch up gear from Esoterics and Normal Alexander.
I don't like facing the same boss I face rolled quite a lot already.

Now a lot of bosses go on farm and that might seem the same.
But the first time you experience fighting the boss is important.
Learning the mechanics, seeing the place and seeing the boss really affects how you perceive it later on.
But Normal previews a lot of Savage and even just having the same boss really diminishes the weight of their presence.

You can gimp yourself and not go to normal, but that's a BS solution when it's clearly designed to be used while you work on Savage.
Your first encounter with the bosses has to be on normal too since it's a requirement.

Even if it wasn't, I just don't like difficulty modes.
They break the story. It's not like you'd write a book where the hero faces a ton of challenges and another where it's a walk in the park.
The bard was a clever way to incorporate it. I've liked it since Ultima Extreme to the old Savage.
But those made more sense because it didn't affect how you felt about the story.

I get why these difficulties exist though, because otherwise you exclude players.
It was nice with CT, because the easier raid was completely different.
But that's an issue because people want to experience the story of Coil and Alexander but the difficulty and time commitment doesn't allow them to even step in.
I was fine with the Echo, but that's not enough for a lot of people.

There's no good solution there. I can't see a compromise that makes everyone happy.
If it's the same boss in two difficulties, I'm just not going to feel the same way about it.
The name, image and room of some of the old Coil encounters evoked a certain feeling because it carried the weight of the encounter's difficulty.
But difficulties are also the only way fit everyone into the raid progression, where it's exclusive content otherwise.

Anyway, I don't hate normal. I'm not burnt out by it.
It's not going to break the game and it's good for a lot of people.
It will just diminish the weight of the bosses, encounters and story, and that can't be helped.
It's easier to stomach because it's a goblin raid so it's more upbeat that Coil was.

[SkizzleofRagnarok]

I'm surprised the white knights have not shown up yet to ruin this thread by thinking everything is awesome and there is no such thing as getting burned out.

[Kona_Nightwind]

I to agree that it sucks doing basically the same fight but harder. But I still think it was the best way to go, for allowing everyone to see all content. The solution is to make the savage mechanics more interesting. WoW hit a gold mine with Uldah, then ignored it. They had gates within the normal fight itself, it you did X than the fight would get harder with different mechanics. This it what I'd like to see.

[Ferth]

Several things are going on with savage/normal Alexander that hopefully SE is learning from.

First and foremost the drop system for normal Alexander, while certainly better than previous loot mechanics, is still pretty terrible in implementation. SE needs to really work on humane design. Unnecessary item bloat paired with unnecessary loot restrictions make normal mode loot just about the least engaging system yet. These days, if you join a group farming Alex Four be prepared for every single person to need/want a shaft. Who wants to do Alexander gordias 8 times a week? Time to phase out the seven superfluous items that normal mode drops and replace them with one item. Trade in one item for a belt/accessory, two for hands, hats or boots, and four items for pants or body. This lets us effectively use normal mode to gear up secondary classes without completely burning out and it still has the same total time required to gear a class in full i190 gear.

The second thing going on here is that square enix is using terrible boss design in an effort to "win." It is very clear with this savage mode that Square Enix is letting it's ego get in the way of developing fun content. Rather than making encounters that are interesting they are straight up making encounters with brutal dps/hps requirements because we keep exceeding their projected metrics. If you develop a game as if your players need to be beaten you can't win. Either we will consistently be better than you expect or you will eventually make something so punishing we just a don't enjoy trying anymore. An ancillary effect of this ego contest is that they also completely neutered crafting to prevent people from gaining a slight edge through melded gear. Butchering side content to prevent a fraction of your playerbase from being marginally better is not good design.

[Nekodar]

Here we go again...
Keep things as is... It's perfectly normal to require a normal mode to be cleared before going for a harder mode of the same thing.

Avoid burning out by simply doing things in a pace that suit you rather than force yourself to do everything as fast as possible.
What do you gain by rushing? Bragging rights?

[Nadirah]

At the Release of Realm Reborn we had:

Instances
- Wanderer Palace
- Amdapor Keep

Primals
- Ifrit HM
- Garuda HM
- Titan HM

Raid
Coil Turn 1-5

No dailys or weekly PvE stuff (except tome cap). No roulettes. No ex primals. No gold saucer (I know alot of ppl that are still farming for TT cards). No FC stuff. No crafter or gatherer stuff (daily or weekly). No hunts. And some stuf I did forget.

Not talking about ARR launch content. Still waiting.

[KarstenS]

Not talking about ARR launch content. Still waiting.

Your argument is "we have nothing to do". But your argument sucks as we have got way more different content to do with Heavensward, as we got at ARR release or any patch later. It is not possible to get infinite content within one patch. You have to life with that like everybody else before.

[Elim]

Eh... I'm one of the people progressing savage (on A3S atm) and gear isn't a big deal to me. I get it to help progress -- that's it.

I raid for the excitement of the clears. Because I had to farm story mode at first, it made savage less exciting to me. I'm not asking for any sort of change in future content, just sharing my opinion.

[Fendred]

My gut feeling on this is it has to do with the loot system. If you compare it to Binding Coil or CT, players aren't running the bosses in succession, but rather doing four of the same boss in a row. It's less interesting because the encounters run in a given hour are less varied. Additionally, I think some people try taking pot shots at getting loot in PUGs for Alexander, which is the worst possible idea for gearing up unless the player is just starting Alex.

I experienced burn out on Alex over a month ago, which resulted in the leveling of my brand new ninja character. I'm not really too motivated to grind much of anything at the moment.

[dejavutwo]

I don't personally care about story or exclusivity. The only thing that I care about related to this suggestion is that I had to farm normal. I don't mind that there is a normal mode, but savage would have been much more fun if when I went in I didn't already have the basics of the fight down. The best analogy for how I feel about the normal/savage as implemented would be if SE released LotA as it was. Then later, instead of releasing ST they released LotA II which had all the same fights except each boss had one or two mechanics tweaked. In that situation, I bet most people would be upset too.

The reason I suggested swapping the order of releases is because it keeps the same amount of content for everyone, while giving more variety to those who are raiding.