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.