Raiding and trials

[samurailargo]

What's the difference between trials and endgame raids? Outside from the 24 man raids are just trials with more drops. Please explain. Why aren't endgame raids structured like 24 man for 8 man? Omega just feels like easy trials for the good gear not even raiding. Please explain or fix.

[JunseiKei]

What's the difference between trials and endgame raids?

Trails that are found in roulettes are generally tied to the main story and are required to progress in the game. They generally have vastly less punishing mechanics than their savage or extreme or minstrel's version. Omega (normal) is just like trials in this regard: it is part of the story, but the mechanics are purposely vastly less punishing than the savage version.

The gear from Omega offers different stats and is a stepping stone toward upgrading your gear to the tome set and the raid gear, if you plan on raiding.

[Aronys]

Omega normal mode is just story mode. The real raid is launching today. And those are usually really difficult.

[BorisDaBlade]

I had the same question. As of right now I don't see any difference between EX trials and the soon to be savage raid content in 4.0. Both use single bosses with scripted mechanics. I'm guessing it's just the difficulty level between the two that makes them different?

[Reinha]

Trials are boss fights with their own story lines and no trash. Raids are collections of bosses tied together by a story line and the instances may include trash mobs that aren't a part of boss encounters.

Difficulty wise it goes like this: savage raids > extreme trials > normal raids (8 or 24 man) > normal trials. The gear rewards are mostly in line with the difficulty level. Although if the gear reward is on a weekly lockout or implemented in a catch up patch, the item level can be higher than the difficulty suggests. Omega Savage is opening today.

[KisaiTenshi]

What's the difference between trials and endgame raids? Outside from the 24 man raids are just trials with more drops. Please explain. Why aren't endgame raids structured like 24 man for 8 man? Omega just feels like easy trials for the good gear not even raiding. Please explain or fix.

(non-Savage) Trials are tied to a main storyline. eg, you HAVE to do it and pass it to progress.
(Savage) Trials are unlocked by basically doing the original Trial and then talking to some NPC and it just unlocks, nothing additional, no additional quest (or in the case of HW's, the whole chain of Warring Triad was optional, and the Savage unlocks were simply going back to the dungeon and clicking on the entrance kiosk.)
Raids DO have a storyline. The Savage unlock exists once you complete the regular version. The Raids are also optional, even from a storyline point of view.


The 24-man raids do not have a Savage mode, they are basically a 3-party dungeon, and the mechanics require all the parties to at least cooperate in some manner.

Trials often only have one boss, but they may also have more than one phase (eg Gilgamesh battles have two phases) where as 8 and 24-man raids often have some dungeon mechanics leading up to the boss. So it's more like a bigger dungeon with large trash phases. 24-man raids actually are laid out more like a regular dungeon with 3 bosses and some "locked room trash phases", where as the 8-man raids only have one boss. So the 4-5 segments that make up the dungeon are actually multiple raids rather than one raid with multiple bosses.

Which is kinda what you want in this kind of game anyway.

You have to look at Omega as a 4-part single dungeon with a solo segment for storyline purposes rather than a 4 separate bosses.

[Arutan]

Omega normal is not endgame content, it's just here for story, just as hard mode trial are. Their way to name thing is just so bad, there was normal mode trial at the beginning but after then they just created 2 modes, 1 for story and 1 for a slightly more difficult fight with rewards and for no reason normal trial kept the hard mode tag.
Real End game content are Extreme trials, and Savage Omega that is launching today.

Usually Story and Savage are launched at the same time except after the release of an expansion to let people the time to rise up and gear themselves.