Do the devs know what they really want to do with raids ?

[Kuwagami]

according to this :

The current "Savage" situation

How do you feel about the current clear methods and progress for savage Alexander Gordias?

Yoshida: Since normal Alexander helps you get into Savage, let's talk about both. First, for normal, the number of players clearing is far more than we expected, which is really good. As of late October, at least about 50% of players who are actively playing battle classes have completed all four parts of normal Alexander Gordias. It was also satisfying to watch players make adjustments to compensate for the shortfall in obtained Esoterics tomestones. We also paid a lot of attention to the world's first fights in Alexander savage and we were surprised by how quickly some groups got through it.

So you were able to satisfy those who asked for a more difficult battle.

Yoshida: On the other hand, unlike with the coils of Bahamut, we know there are many people who are stuck without having cleared the third area of Savage. Unlike normal, it's difficult to get a group of people who can clear the savage version of the third area. It really takes eight skilled players to overcome the difficulty.

So you're thinking of a difficulty between the normal and savage versions.

Yoshida: As of now, it's difficult to clear the savage version if the players don't all have good command of their jobs. Previously with the coils of Bahamut if you had six highly skilled players in a full party, even if the other two made mistakes or had item levels that were too low, it was possible to overcome that elsewhere. However, even at the maximum item level right now, a small mistake in battle or mechanics can be difficult to overcome in the third and fourth areas of savage. We know that it can be a really difficult problem to recruit a group of highly skilled players only within one world.

How many people have cleared?

Yoshida: The number of people who have cleared savage is about what we expected. As esoterics gear became more available, we expected more players to break through the third section little by little, but it looks like many run into a bad stretch there. We're looking to see whether groups stop trying there or whether less groups are trying in general.

It will be helpful to understand the current situation so you can take advantage of that knowledge in the next update.

Yoshida: The next update for Alexander will be in patch 3.2. Right now, we're working on the savage version and trying to decide whether to make it satisfying for the top players or whether to adjust it for a wider range of people. Given the cost of development, I'd lean towards a lower difficulty savage, but then some players may come back and say it isn't difficult enough...

By the way, will you be making job adjustments in patch 3.1?

Yoshida: There will be some, but nothing on a large scale. The biggest adjustment will be to rebuild the underlying mechanism behind ninjutsu to reduce the effect of lag and better connect mudra. We've also adjusted TP for Paladin and Ninja. We hear the player feedback about wanting to raise the DPS of Paladin, but we need to consider the offensive and defensive characteristics together, so it would be difficult to just raise the DPS with their current defensive ability.

A lot of those voices are probably from players in savage Alexander where there is a high reliance on tank DPS.

Yoshida: We'll be making effort to eliminate that as much as possible. Within the content, there are strong and weak points to each job. For example, in the second area of savage, a paladin main tank should have higher stability than a dark knight. Depending on the player and their skill level, each party will see different results, but we'd like to reduce the difference. We can't just make adjustments to jobs based on whether they are strong or weak in particular content as that would break the jobs, so we'll work to eliminate disadvantages to certain jobs as much as possible in the content. That doesn't mean we won't be making any adjustments to jobs in the future, but we'd like to also hear feedback after playing through the different content in patch 3.1.

It just seems to me that Yoshida is really confused about what he wants to do with the raids. He knows that AS is just stupidly overtuned but doesn't really want to lower the difficulty for the next tier because he doesn't want to piss of.. who exactly ? The 1% of players who cheesed their way through a fight too hard for them to handle as it was intended, due to an oversight in the game design ?

Really ?

I mean, if you know there is a problem with something, you fix it. You don't care about the minuscule minority who MIGHT not like it (though I know that some of them absolutely hated how AS was designed).


The team really needs to take a firm stance on what they want their end-game and raids to be, and stick with it. If you want only the top 1% to go through it, so be it. But say it so. Do not even leave a glimpse of hope that the mid-core raiding crowd can achieve it, and give them something to do instead (maybe the diadem will do it ?). If you want the mid-core crowd to be your focus instead, then don't care about the barking people who won't be happy until they are the little special snowflake on top of the mountain.

Whichever you choose, please just stay consistent and don't go left and right, trying things and cancelling them right after because one side started to whine harder than the other.




special mention for the "tank dps" being a problem that they want to eliminate, right after a patch which made us full time dps with extra HP and defense. I really appreciated the joke. Not mentioning it's totally ignoring the fact that healers are also forced to dps all they can and even a bit more.

[BreathlessTao]

The team really needs to take a firm stance on what they want their end-game and raids to be, and stick with it.

Meh. They can't / don't want to take a firm stance on what the Duty Finder is, ever since it was added - everything in there is "player disputes" and they just stay out of judging and punishing anything that happens in there. Even though too many (if not all) of those disputes stem exactly from this lack of specific and straightforward definition/guidelines.

special mention for the "tank dps" being a problem that they want to eliminate, right after a patch which made us full time dps with extra HP and defense. I really appreciated the joke. Not mentioning it's totally ignoring the fact that healers are also forced to dps all they can and even a bit more.

This is really "funny", because this, by taking it to the absolute extreme, shows how pretty much everything in this game is simply about DPS. If the group can pass a certain DPS value (strictly unofficially of course, actual values, parsers are a big and total no-no) - they can clear the content. Should be a real big in-your-face sign that it's something that should be changed, imo....

[Marxam]

they could do what they did with scob and implement "timed phases". Yes I know it made turns like t7 hard, if not harder than t9 in some instances but back then dps wasn't an issue. Properly doing mechanics was wayy more important and you even had to stop dps all together in some fights. Imo scob was the best tuned raid so far in terms of difficulty, player and team responsibility and interesting mechanics.

Making the same gear but dyable is not enough incentive for me to follow a raid schedule. Unless they find some way for making statics more flexible to allow more people to get in, Savage will always have lower than expected numbers. I quit raiding after ARR due to this reason. Plus I hate the goblins and the current story arc atm. Really SE!? Illuminati? you couldn't have made a more interesting story like Alexander awakening after finding out Bahamut was slain? In FF9 he fought Bahamut.

[CosmicKirby]

I can certainly agree with the idea that, the very small pool of players who actually cleared A4S, are the ones most likely to be upset if the next wing of AS isn't as difficult.

But, at the same time, the vast majority of those players use or used a clearly unintended tactic/glitch to make the fight much easier. So it would be a really odd position to take in general. Perhaps asking for mechanics that rely less on connection would be more sound, but just asking for harder or as-hard raids when most people take the easy way out when possible, does not follow.

[Brannigan]

DPS helped a ton in SCoB as well. It let you skip phases in the Avatar and do stuff like get only 1 wyvern (or was it 2?) in Nael that made the fights a lotttttttt easier. Plus people were straight up burning Rafflesia and ignoring final phase mechanics week 1.

They should design more fights like SCOB (+savage) though. They were the best fights in FFXIV so far. Alex Savage are some of the worst outside of a few neat things in living liquid (the fight overall sucks though)

[Risvertasashi]

In one of these interviews, IIRC Yoshi said that he would like to do three tiers of difficulty. But he doesn't have the staff/resources for it.

I think, then, the difficulty lies in finding an acceptable compromise.

[Khyan]

Even if I'm a savage raids raider, I agree. The DPS check everywhere is boring. Even if my static don't have any problem with dps, I think it just spoils the pleasure to do raids. It was fine with Coils, but it's ridiculously boring with Alexander.

T9 was great : good balance between dps check and mechanics.


PS: Give accuracy in healer gear, Yoshi. Thanks...

[Kuwagami]

In one of these interviews, IIRC Yoshi said that he would like to do three tiers of difficulty. But he doesn't have the staff/resources for it.

I think, then, the difficulty lies in finding an acceptable compromise.

yeah he did say that somewhere. Though as their team is small, it's highly unlikely unless they hire a bunch of new people (they ARE recruiting right now though apparently). But until they have the staff to provide content to everyone heart's content, they really need to stop winging the development direction.

PS: Give accuracy in healer gear, Yoshi. Thanks...

fun fact : healers aren't supposed to dps. They were given accuracy in 2.3 because it was required to meet SCoB savage dps checks at the taime, and carried on afterwards. Then they looked at healer dps and the fact that FCoB got wrecked because of that, and backpedaled like crazy on the fact that healers should dps.

All the while as they introduced content requiring healers to dps even more. yeah.

[MugenMugetsu]

...pretty much everything in this game is simply about DPS......

I don't see that being the case, but see it more as...the more dps you do the quicker you kill whatever it is that is intended to be killed, and in doing so, you reduce the amount of time that you have to deal with mechanics, thus increasing your survivability and ability to clear the content. However, in order to push out that DPS, tanks must effectively perform their role, healers must perform theirs, and of course the DPS also have to perform theirs as well.

So, I wouldn't say, "Everything in this game is about DPS." as if you have a shitty tank that can't hold aggro, doesn't know how to perform mechanics properly, doesn't grab adds, etc. or an inefficient/incompetent healer, you're not going to be able to push the DPS required, and you're not going to be able to clear the content. So, in my opinion, it's not all about DPS.

Lastly, I don't believe that savage content, or any content for that matter, is only able to be cleared by the top 1%. I understand that their ability to clear the content is a lot greater than that of midcore players, however, if you have a goal that you and 7 friends/static members wish to achieve, and you apply the right amount of effort, I'm positive that whatever your goal is, it can be achieved. Sure there will be A LOT of wipes, and what could be considered to be wasted time, but if a group keeps at it, and applies enough time and effort, unless they are undergeared, simply can not deal with mechanics, do not have enough time to dedicate to banging their head on their keyboard out of frustration due to repeated wipes, or just aren't good enough, they will eventually get the clear. Though I also understand that some content does seem impossible to clear, but to me, if there are groups who can clear it, without using exploits, then I'm confident that clearing that content is not out of reach for anyone who is at least a midcore player that is able to find 7 other good players to attempt to clear the content with.

[Alahra]

I don't think it's a matter of them not knowing what they want to do. Rather, I think they underestimated the playerbase in FCOB, and in trying to tune Savage to last longer than FCOB did, they overshot the mark, essentially overestimating the playerbase this time. As mentioned above, now they have to find the compromise, but they're also being cautious. Yoshi mentioned possible nerfs to Savage in 3.15 if the increased gear availability isn't enough to open it up to a wider audience, but they're not yet convinced they made Savage too difficult, period.

Sure there will be A LOT of wipes, and what could be considered to be wasted time, but if a group keeps at it, and applies enough time and effort, unless they are undergeared, simply can not deal with mechanics, do not have enough time to dedicate to banging their head on their keyboard out of frustration due to repeated wipes, or just aren't good enough, they will eventually get the clear.

Even if it's possible to clear for a larger number of groups than are clearing the content at present, that doesn't mean those groups will have *fun* pushing that hard to do so. That's very important to remember. The content is by no means impossible, but if statics and raiding FCs are falling apart because of the content (especially ones that have been around for a long time), it's probably worth looking at whether or not the content was designed for too small of a crowd.