Normal/Savage Alexander complaint

[Moomba33]

What I still don't understand is why they release content "backwards".
Crystal Tower was supposed to be available at launch, but was delayed, so we got i90 from Coil and few months later, i80 from LotA.

Why didn't they release Void Ark BEFORE Alex Savage ? This way, people would have farmed Alex normal, then Void Ark, and then Alex Savage, which would have probably avoid this sense of doing only the same fights back to back.

I think this would create a new problem of forcing hardcore raiders to wait even longer for the content they're interested in.
I'm sure some were already bothered by having to wait 4 weeks after the Heavensward launch for Savage.

Personally I'm very happy with how Alex Normal and Savage were handled.
I never got passed t9 of coil and I have always wished that SE had implemented a story version of coil which was easily clearable in DF.

I would have been fine if Normal Alex had come next patch and the 24 man had come now instead though.

[Nadirah]

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.

And your argument is to go back and do old content that's already been completed?

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

I feel like a lot of the incentives got sucked out of the raids in heavensward. Getting to final coil was a pretty big incentive to do turn 9. Now we don't have that. When 3.2 hits everyone will get to see the 2nd raid tier regardless if you took the time to do the harder raid or not. Unique set of glamour like the dreadwyrm set, we don't have that either. The non-dutyfinder version of the raid is now kind of a "just for fun" thing. With no real reason to do it other than to get your teeth kicked in. It's sad because coil was one of the things that actually took more than 2 hours to blow through, Unlike everything else in the game.

I'm not sure what Yoshi got up his sleeve, but I feel like for this game to actually maintain a somewhat steady subscriber base. They going to have to start taking notes from ffxi and have at least a little bit of content that's not on duty finder, and doesn't become obsolete in 2 months. Otherwise a lot of ppl are just going to burn through the game and take really long breaks or just flat out quit altogether. We will see what the developers do. Coil used to fill that role, but now the 8man raid is pretty much another crystal tower.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Okay, I'm going to bring this discussion back to the main topic now. So the problem with how Alex Normal and Savage were handled was, at least in the opinions of most I've talked to who understand, the fact that we're fighting four bosses we've already seen. Sure, the mechanics are more punishing, more plentiful and more intricate, but for a lot of people seeing the same bosses you've been farming with no problems just removes the feeling of excitement. Sure this may not be the case for the players who raid purely for the sake of raiding, those who care about being the best and probably wouldn't give two damns if every boss was nothing more than an beige cube in appearance, but I'd say they're a minority. So then let's look at the main cause of this problem. Savage released after normal. This is what caused us to be in the position we're currently in, as we'd all seen the bosses for two weeks prior before even stepping into Savage. Now, the simple solution, before you start putting a ton of thought into it, would be to switch around when Normal is released with when the 24-man is released.

However, there's an obvious problem with that. While in the end the same amount of work needs to be done development wise, doing the releases this way would HEAVILY frontload the amount of development necessary. Let's face it, normal should take very little effort to develop once savage is made. You just downtune some numbers, simplify and remove some mechanics, and boom, normal mode. Because of this, from a development standpoint it just makes sense to release the two things together. The 24-man on the other hand needs its own development done from scratch. New art assets for gear, environments, bosses, boss attacks. Tuning a brand new piece of content, mechanics and all, for a 24-man group of random strangers. New music for the environments. These are all things that go into developing a new raid from scratch, and there's a reason that we've never seen two of them released at the same time. On top of that how insulted would you feel seeing the new "raid content" in 3.1 just be an easier version of one of the two raids you've already been doing? I can say I'd be pretty mad seeing something that seemed so lazy as the "raid content" in a major content patch.

And then you introduce gear to the equation. First, gear designs. If normal mode drops gear, it really does just make sense for that gear to be visually similar to the savage mode for that raid. After all, it's the same raid, why would it drop different pieces entirely? And then you need to think about gear progression. If normal mode were to release in off patches, due to the placement of that patch normal mode's gear would be a mere 10 item levels below its savage counterparts. Now think about getting those pieces as a person who had been doing savage since it came out. "Wtf? this looks just like the gear I've already been farming, but worse and I can't even dye it. Why would I EVER want this?" So savage raiders would be turned off. It's just not exciting to get gear that's designed the same as the gear you've been trying to get and wearing parts of for months. Even the players who can only really manage A1 and A2 would likely be put off. This is chunks of the playerbase who before the content is even out, with a release cycle like this wouldn't want to do the normal mode at all. But they may need it to catch up on alt gearing or filling in spots. I'd say these players in this case may be even more angry than they were back before Alex Normal had its droprates doubled, which no one wants.

"So why not have some other source of i190 gear, then release the 24-man with i200 in 3.1 and the normal mode of Alex alongside it, with gear only coming from the 24-man? Or make the normal mode of the previous Alex come out at the same time as the next Alex?" Well, This definitely seems a bit closer to the solution, but there are still some problems even there. For one, I do think it's nice to have the non-dyeable variants of the raid gear available for glamour for the people who can't do savage. But as I mentioned above, it only really makes sense for such a thing to come from the normal mode of the raid. So if you release it later, how much later can you afford to do so? Do you make it irrelevant stat wise like the Odin trial's gear? You almost have to if you're releasing it that much later. But then if you release the normal mode when the next savage comes out, you're too late, aren't you? Won't the overgearing that can be done make the old savage content far more accessible, to the point where people say "why bother doing the normal for gear that I can't even dye when I can just outgear the real version and get dyeable stuff?" In my opinion this basically throws the idea of holding it back to the next savage's release for a normal mode out the window. It may be more reasonable for 3.1 then, but that runs the risk of spoiling the story for those who have yet to complete savage despite their best efforts to do so, which could be very spirit breaking for those people. And also, where exactly would we throw i190 gear to be available instead? Dungeons aren't worthy and the tomestone sets are fairly set in stone.

And on the topic of progression, there's another benefit to the current system which would be lost if we changed to releasing normal mode later. Due to this fact, it would be very difficult to justify making the new savage content gated by something besides savage. Why is this an issue? Remember back to ARR. "Oh, you're skilled enough to take on FCoB but can't find people to do T5 with? Talk to me when you've actually unlocked the raid." The content segregation due to this type of gating was very real. However, it does appear that SE may have finally found a way around it. If the next tier of savage Alex only has one thing gating it, we can safely say that it will be the normal mode of that tier, as opposed to the tremendously difficult final fight of the previous tier. You no longer have this major team skill wall gating people from being able to participate in the current content, you just have the far easier wall waiting to be pushed over. And this also opens up their opportunities to make the final boss of each savage tier as difficult as they please, without worrying about it needing to be clearable by the vast majority so they can continue enjoying the relevant content. These are two very positive aspects of the current system, and ones which I would certainly hesitate to throw away.

But let's get back to the story, which this leads to the other issue I had with the idea of making normal mode come out a patch later. How do you make it work from a lore standpoint? The whole idea right now is that the Wandering Minstrel is someone who grossly exaggerates the story of what you went through previously, making your feats sound far more epic. If you make savage release before normal, this gives us the issues of savage needing to be the original experience that the tale is based off. So... now we're changing the Minstrel's exaggeration to be an exaggeration of just how easily we went through it? I guess that would work, but it goes against the idea of what and who he is. On top of that, imagine how it would feel to unlock it this way. "I've heard tales of other adventurers performing these epic feats, would you like to have me place your name in the song so you can feel good about yourself?" Yeah, THAT won't be a huge insult to the majority of the playerbase who wants nothing more than to see the story. And on top of that the story cutscenes would need to be thrown in somehow despite there being numerous cutscenes not tied to the raid itself, but events outside of it. Perhaps the devs could think of a better idea than this, but I doubt it would be easy, and definitely not as easy as it would be to just continue with how they've been developing the content thus far.

It's not as simple or black and white of a discussion as some people make it out to be. This is something that if we really want to see changed, we should be openly discussing every aspect of not just amongst ourselves, but also with the devs so they can understand why we have a problem with the current system and how we think it can be improved. I'd like to see some more discussion spawn in this thread as a result of this post, as maybe some people have better ideas than I was able to come up with, not to mention the longer this thread gets and the more noticed it gets the more likely it is to be seen b the devs and have our ideas taken into consideration. Please, SE, listen to us and talk to us. Tell us why you made Alex the way it is and if anything we've suggested has been considered or is being reconsidered now. And keep it civil, players, this isn't the time or place for any "git gud"s or "stop whining"s. If we have a problem with Alex as it is, we need to make it known and make our case in a reasonable manner. Thank you, especially if you actually made it through the entire post.

Edit: tl;dr, Normal is obviously important for people to be able to see the story, but the burnout is obvious and visible, so let's talk about better ways to handle the release of raids in the future.

[Fendred]

Well, the problem for Savage Alexander isn't the existence of normal Alexander. It's that all they did was create something with boosted stat requirements. That is not what we were telling them to copy from WoW's Wrath of the Lich King expansion many months ago. If a player wanted to do hard mode Naxxramas, they could do that in the same gear as regular Naxxramas (referring to Wrath of the Lich King here). The only difference is the complexity of the fights.

Requiring raiders to work on both normal and savage mode Alexander for their gear makes about as much sense as saying someone in a drinking contest needs to beat the "bud light" challenge before moving onto the "Captain Adam's" challenge in the same night. Captain Adam's challengers would be puking their guts out or need their stomach's pumped.

[Kosmos992k]

Well, the problem for Savage Alexander isn't the existence of normal Alexander. It's that all they did was create something with boosted stat requirements.
*Snip*
Requiring raiders to work on both normal and savage mode Alexander for their gear makes about as much sense as saying someone in a drinking contest needs to beat the "bud light" challenge before moving onto the "Captain Adam's" challenge in the same night. Captain Adam's challengers would be puking their guts out or need their stomach's pumped.

Or perhaps they created Savage mode, and then detuned it and nerfed it into normal mode?

Oh and just for the record I don't for one moment believe that the players farming Alex normal, would instead be running Savage, if they'd been able to enter Savage on day one. No,they'd have batted their heads off Savage a few times, realized they aren't geared and then gone off and farm Alex Normal for gear. In this case they have the benefit of being able to train themselves on Alex normal, at the same time as they gear up. Sounds like a good thing. Don't anyone kid yourselves that would be otherwise, and lets face it, instead of whining about Alex normal, those same people would instead be complaining about being bored with nothing to do.

[Miscreant]

That sounds good until we consider that all the bosses are spoiled by the online guides used by everyone prior to jumping into the instance. People are just doing too much of the same boss fights in a given week for the purpose of getting loot at an optimal pace. People don't consider it a legit run unless you run it four times in a row. That's four times the number of boss encounters required by raid groups for any previous raid content. Without any variance on the bosses or some way to keep people from running it so much, people burn themselves out on it.

Speak for your self, there are no guides in the first couple of weeks, even then I haven't used a single guide in Alexander Savage, maybe adopted a couple of individual tricks that were posted on reddit, like going back and changing the way we handled the jumps in A1S, but that was already after I was a good portion into the fight or had my clear. In Coil I purposely ignored all videos, guides and information about the Turns ahead, and we did a good period of time in the fights blind before watching a guide. I love the hard fights, I like figuring them out for my self with my team and I like the wow factor of seeing a boss and room for a first time.

Well, the problem for Savage Alexander isn't the existence of normal Alexander. It's that all they did was create something with boosted stat requirements.

What is it with players who haven't been into Savage saying this? The fights are different, the first floors is meant to be a push over, the last two are far more complex, no ones complaining about the fight mechanics.

[dejavutwo]

...

Just finished reading the whole thing and you do bring up a lot of good points about progression flow, content gating, and frontloading development work. I still feel normal mode gear farming diminishes the enjoyment in savage, and that it is something the developers should be conscious of.

[HeavenlyArmed]

Just finished reading the whole thing and you do bring up a lot of good points about progression flow, content gating, and frontloading development work. I still feel normal mode gear farming diminishes the enjoyment in savage, and that it is something the developers should be conscious of.

They most definitely should be conscious of it. As video game developers they're in charge of crafting experiences, and savage causing so much burnout due to the lack of the epic feeling is in a sense a failure in that regard. I guess as an addendum I should mention that despite the issues I have I still believe the best solution would be to release normal mode at the same time as the 24-man and have it not drop gear. But due to the issues I understand why the devs might hesitate to take that patch. I should also add that I've thought about adding something extra to savage, such as perhaps an extra meaningless boss or extra little lore tidbits about each or maybe even having savage have some sort of preview cutscene for the next raid tier's story, but due to the potential lore problems with the first suggestion and the latter two in a sense defeating the purpose of having normal at all, I consider them less likely than even my main suggestion and as such didn't wish to include them in my main post.

[Nektulos-Tuor]

My only complaint for Alexander is ilvl 170 requirement for normal.