Issue With End Game Raiding

[Almalexia]

The fact that endgame is built on having eight-person statics -- AND ONLY EIGHT PEOPLE, no more or less -- is really what's suffocating endgame.

The 4/8/24 lockdown is but a symptom.

No flexibility in itemization plus a pathological fear of imbalance means a every piece of content requires a strict DPS assembly line quota. Different BGM will play, different colored lights and floating markers will flash, but you are ultimately doing a familiar dance. We will never see Salvage, Dynamis, Limbus or any content with logistical complexity until the itemization moves away from bigger numbers on the same stats.

Once the itemization becomes more diverse, the content will follow suit.

[Saccharin]

No flexibility in itemization plus a pathological fear of imbalance means a every piece of content requires a strict DPS assembly line quota. Different BGM will play, different colored lights and floating markers will flash, but you are ultimately doing a familiar dance. We will never see Salvage, Dynamis, Limbus or any content with logistical complexity until the itemization moves away from bigger numbers on the same stats.

Once the itemization becomes more diverse, the content will follow suit.

I dont see how you think that more interesting itemisation will lead to harder fights. The reason FF14 has those fights is the fundamental design of the game and server code. The 2.5 second global, the negative effects of even a little high latency are the reason why we have rather mundane fights compared to other raiding MMOs.

I'm in favor of making story/normal mode be tuned to a similiar range of difficulty as the EX primals. The latter is already tuned in a way that it becomes accessible through the process of gearing (and eventual echo), and prevents it from being delegated to a weekly routine from release like void ark or dungeons. In a wider perspective, there's a lot of content for players who have no interest in raiding, there's content for players who want to invest a lot of time for raiding, but only EX trials are there for players who want to raid but can only invest a small amount of time due to outside of obligations and finding other players to do so (which isn't necessarily easy, especially with smaller servers transferring off for gordias progression)

Story mode works for what it is so dont even think about trying to make it 'harder'. If you can't put in the effort for savage then you just dont raid. Simple. As I said in the bit you quoted this isn't WoW.

[RiceisNice]

Story mode works for what it is so dont even think about trying to make it 'harder'. If you can't put in the effort for savage then you just dont raid. Simple. As I said in the bit you quoted this isn't WoW.

Again, that's the problem. There is no other raid content that isn't savage difficulty (which wasn't the case for coil days). What story mode is doing right now is an entirely different purpose of what coil (or even EX trials) accomplished, and the introduction of story mode and savage mode is missing that purpose (and EX trials are far/few inbetween).

There are groups (and I personally know a few at least on my realm) that have started and cleared during FCoB days, most of them before echo. They wanted to get their group together ahead of time and break into raiding so they're familiar with each other going into 3.0's raiding content. You can't honestly say that normal/story mode is tuned as a static content, so the next one up is savage mode. Did raiding in FFXIV suddenly become something that isn't for them over the course of an expansion, and was it even a good choice at that considering what Gordias had accomplished with the raiding community/population.

[Reinha]

Again, that's the problem. There is no other raid content that isn't savage difficulty (which wasn't the case for coil days). What story mode is doing right now is an entirely different purpose of what coil (or even EX trials) accomplished, and the introduction of story mode and savage mode is missing that purpose (and EX trials are far/few inbetween).

There are groups (and I personally know a few at least on my realm) that have started and cleared during FCoB days, most of them before echo. They wanted to get their group together ahead of time and break into raiding so they're familiar with each other going into 3.0's raiding content. You can't honestly say that normal/story mode is tuned as a static content, so the next one up is savage mode. Did raiding in FFXIV suddenly something that isn't for them over the course of an expansion, and was it even a good choice at that considering what Gordias had accomplished with the raiding community/population.

Well "savage" would have to be either Coil difficulty or the current savage difficulty. There is no way the devs are going to put resources into making 3 difficulties of the same raid or get rid of one of the most popular PvE modes in the game (normal Alex). Coil may be considered a nice in-between difficulty for statics, but the truth is it wasn't that popular back in the day. Only about 10% of players cleared it in JP realms and a disappointing 0.1%-4.8% cleared in NA/EU realms. Normal mode, or easy mode as some like to call it, is here to stay because people actually play it. And going by the responses to AS6 nerfs I don't think raiders would be too happy to have all of savage mode lowered to Coil standards.

[RiceisNice]

...but the truth is it wasn't that popular back in the day. Only about 10% of players cleared it in JP realms and a disappointing 0.1%-4.8% cleared in NA/EU realms. Normal mode, or easy mode as some like to call it, is here to stay because people actually play it. And going by the responses to AS6 nerfs I don't think raiders would be too happy to have all of savage mode lowered to Coil standards.

The numbers you linked date back way before any nerfs have been done. Even then, players doing the content isn't a good metric on whether or not it's a good design (FATEs and diadem when i210 was the cap being an example of this). When you tune it to something like Normal/story mode, that's just as about as meaningful as sayng "This % of players completed the MSQ"

And in regards to your bolded post, the players haven't responded very well either to the design of difficulty in gordias (whether it was too difficult or too steep of a slope one way or another), I'd think it's a bigger concern if the raiding population has dwindled to the point that some servers are lacking a player pool for raiding to begin with. Going by responses, it's been a mixed reaction which is the case for almost any change. However, it is too soon to call out on any consequences to the player population as a result of it (and if it's even worth the risk at this point after goridas)

[Ibi]

The 4/8/24 lockdown is but a symptom.

No flexibility in itemization plus a pathological fear of imbalance means a every piece of content requires a strict DPS assembly line quota. Different BGM will play, different colored lights and floating markers will flash, but you are ultimately doing a familiar dance. We will never see Salvage, Dynamis, Limbus or any content with logistical complexity until the itemization moves away from bigger numbers on the same stats.

Once the itemization becomes more diverse, the content will follow suit.

You're vastly overselling the importance of gear in Salvage, Dynamis, and Limbus.

You could have cleared all three events in groups equipped with nothing beyond the sets you could purchase with assault points (Amir, Pahluwan, and Yigit sets), and items of equivalent stat complexity in your other equipment slots, and those have no more variety in terms of stats than what we're getting in FFXIV.

I think you're also overselling the complexity of the events.

Outside of their final bosses, Limbus and Dynamis especially were very simplistic in nature. Most or all of FFXIV's 24-man raid bosses could rival the Dynamis bosses, with the potential exception of the Shadow Lord, in terms of complexity. Heck, even four-man leveling dungeons are more complex than 95% of Dynamis.