Is Endgame Just a Cycle of "Static Killers?"

[Shai]

Coil was by far a better raid experience than all of Alexander so far.

1) The storyline was epic and made you feel like you were saving a world. Alexander storyline is boring and because it's only locked behind a few easy "normal mode" fights it feels underwhelming and pointless and I don't feel like anyone is ever in danger at all. It has throwaway characters that we probably will never see again (and good riddance) and literally nothing memorable about it.

2) The fights were difficult, but you could muscle your way through them with a half-weakened party to see some progress and practice new mechanics. You were NOT likely to beat the hard enrage timer, but there were very, very few instances of "oh 1 person died? BOOM! Cleanse the arena!" I don't mind the occasional Faust-style DPS check, but having a DPS check for every third mechanic is absurd, especially while trying to dodge 10 new mechanics you've never seen before (looking at you, A3S).

I'm not asking for super easy content, but some middle ground would sure be nice - or a way to practice new mechanics without risk of instantaneously wiping the entire raid because your [Ninja] didn't kill his add quickly enough. I was really excited that the Raid Finder would add some kind of "practice" mode - like practicing Vortexer in A6S would have been so handy instead of wasting 10 minutes of your life just to see him kill your team in the first two mechanics - about 50 times. And that said, A6 is one of my favorite turns of Alexander, but still the design was frustrating as hell.

[CosmicKirby]

In other MMOs, and in XIV, applying to a top raiding guild is like applying to a well paying job - they don't just hand those out to Joe who just graduated high school and thinks he deserves to jump straight into the deep end without even getting his feet wet first. If this is too much work for you, then you don't actually want to raid Savage because there's literally no way around this. The only other option you have is to accept that your progress is going to be slow and try to have fun with it by raiding casually with friends (which I'd honestly recommend, hardcore raiding isn't all it's cut out to be in the first place).

Most of this post I don't really feel strongly about buuut here's my two cents.

I tried this. It amounted to 4 fucking months of banging our head against A3S, only to get cucked when our LB3 inexplicably didn't build on Pepsiman EX and giving us a >1% wipe we never got back to again. I WANTED to play with friends in content in this game. Unfortunately, the content was so absurdly tuned to two drastically different ends of the spectrum, that stuff was either too easy, or far too hard to be reasonable. There simply wasn't a middle ground that our group could comfortably find beyond 2-3 fights in a content group. This simply isn't competitive with other MMORPG raiding experiences, it's shameful and they really need to address it. There needs to be a paradigm shift to accommodate the much larger (but still small) midcore and casual raiders more than the world first groups, or there needs to be options for everyone. Because deciding that half the raid is for one and the other half gets the other is stupid when you have 4 fights between the two.

(Midas was our group getting locked on A6S for 2 months before I finally had a schedule conflict and was happy to bail.)

I'd rather be playing at half-brain capacity in moderately challenging WoW Heroic Raids than Savage Midas and Gordian ever again. Because at least there I have a much larger amount of fights to get through, more loot to possibly get, better itemization, and more breadth of content to get through.

Well, the only raid atm is Alexander and they're intending on making Creator super duper easy so you're getting your wish. And I agree, they should make everything super easy and work their way up, it worked in Coil so it was weird when Gordias launched and they decided they wanted to do something harder than every Coil outside of Savage SCoB.

I hope to goodness this is the case. Because it was an absurdly bad idea. Imagine my position of "I'mma start raiding in Heavensward!" having never touched the Coil raids until after the fact. There could hardly be a worse introduction. Except maybe EX Titan when the netcode was sent by carrier pidgeon.

[Shai]

Except maybe EX Titan when the netcode was sent by carrier pidgeon.

I laughed! You should have tried Ifrit back in 1.0!
You practically got hit by things before they even appeared on your screen.


Seriously, though, you're mirroring what I said. Alexander is just two extremes and it's completely crap.
Alexander Gordius is by far the worst raiding experience I've ever had in an end-game of an MMO.
Midas was a bit better, but suffered from a lot of the same pitfalls. The fights (at least) were more interesting.

If the "Story mode" wasn't a complete joke and (at the very least) taught you the majority of mechanics and timing of said mechanics (without the strict, you die you lose penalty) then maybe I could understand Savage mode being tuned up to the level that it's at - but when you get to Savage it's like the bosses go "JK! I have about 15 things you never saw before! Good luck!" Plus you have to keep up DPS. Plus if you die it gets a Damage up stack, or you just flat out wipe the raid. There really needs to be some middle ground.

[Sparktacus]

Except maybe EX Titan when the netcode was sent by carrier pidgeon.

Lol, probably one of the funniest lines I have read on the forum. Cheers to you friend.

Also yes I agree with everything you said, and I had always had a bad feeling that the people in charge really just wanted to give the world firsties the middle finger when they released Gordias not realizing by doing so they were also affecting every raider and that 99% of the raiders weren't even near that skill level.