On Ultimate Off Ultimate

[Paladinleeds]

I don't do Ultimate Raids. I can't even beat Savage 3 and 4, but in my eyes, the content needs to be tuned up. Make it Coil Savage level difficult throughout Savage. Make story mode current Savage 1-2 difficulty. Swap the ilvls of unaugmented tome gear and normal mode raid gear. They should be adding more difficult content. More consistent difficulties would be good. Casual raiders get normal mode, midcore raiders get Savage, and hardcore blasts through it all to Ultimate. That would mean I'm only good enough for normal mode (if that), but then again, if I want to progress further, I should just git gud. Simple as.

So yes, I would advocate for the 3rd Ultimate in an expansion because of how it ties in to the difficulty model I suggested above.

[Cetonis]

The most optimistic way to put this is that they want to give groups who raid on lighter schedules, or who started partway through 4.x, ample time to clear both Ultimates before 5.0 when who-knows-what is going to happen to the 4.x ones. Then they'll have two again in 5.x and so on. (On that point, they definitely did not say they were doing away with Ultimate, just that three per expac might be too many)

Perhaps they feel like the main reason for the low clear rates isn't difficulty, but time commitment, in which case you'd want to see if there's an increase in clears during the expansion lull if the 2-3 night a week groups get enough time to put the 150-200 hours into each fight, which one might expect to be the high end of how long it might take a sufficiently skilled group to clear.


The elephant in the room is the massive gap between Savage and Ultimate though. It would have been fine if they gradually notched up Savage difficulties as originally planned, but instead we have a content layout where you have what used to be a "harder EX trial" level of difficulty, and the only next step up from that is Ultimate.

If SE wants to see more groups give it a try, decide to put in the time to clear now that they'll clearly have a ton of it, how on earth is a group of post-Midas raiders supposed to do that? Maybe they are planning some sort of in-between challenge fight for 4.5 instead, one not worthy of the Ultimate label but tougher than Savage...

Either way, they need to start working on this problem. The answer to low Ultimate participation isn't to stop making Ultimate forever, it's to give the newly grown batch of Savage raiders the stepping stones they need to make Ultimate approachable. And that may also include limiting to two Ultimates per expac. Until the 4.5x lull hits, we won't really know what the end result is going to be.

[Rockette]

I personally think ultimate should have been bought out earlier in the tier. After 16-18 weeks of mind numbing savage raid, most the raid community are completely done with savage. If they bought out ucob earlier and then uwu earlier then there would be a better flow I think.

[RiyahArp]

Sigh, ok here's the secret to getting them to care about ultimate.

You forget about it, and you work on increasing the amount of players that do savage and successfully clear the last tier. If you get that percentage high enough, ultimate suddenly becomes a lot more attractive. That means less raid logging, and more building and coaching b-teams in a real raiding fc, not just statics or pugs. The only way you get more endgame is by having more endgame players.

[ErryK]

Personally, I feel Ultimate resources could go into bettering the savage raids to make them more savage. The only fight from current savage that really gives me trouble is O8S, but that's just my opinion.

I originally felt that one Ultimate was enough per expansion.

[Alleo]

Personally, I feel Ultimate resources could go into bettering the savage raids to make them more savage. The only fight from current savage that really gives me trouble is O8S, but that's just my opinion.

I originally felt that one Ultimate was enough per expansion.

I agree with this. Instead of putting all the work into this fights maybe make the last turn of a savage run be as hard as ultimate, with the other turns getting more difficult too. The top raiders wont have much to do anyway because they beat savage or ultimate in max. 2 weeks. I dare to say that the important part is to get the other raiders and maybe midcore players to enjoy savage more.

And hey he did say that the last Omega raid will be surprising and great, so maybe instead of getting another Ultimate fight, savage raids will include a special Omega fight or something like that.

In the end they never promised to do x amount of Ultimates per expansion and they also have only so much that they can use for such fights. So for me I am fine if raiders get their content but I also see no huge problem that they are only having two of them per expansion. I just find the reasons for that a bit strange. (Like how the players are tired and things like that)

[Remedi]

I agree with this. Instead of putting all the work into this fights maybe make the last turn of a savage run be as hard as ultimate, with the other turns getting more difficult too. The top raiders wont have much to do anyway because they beat savage or ultimate in max. 2 weeks. I dare to say that the important part is to get the other raiders and maybe midcore players to enjoy savage more.

And hey he did say that the last Omega raid will be surprising and great, so maybe instead of getting another Ultimate fight, savage raids will include a special Omega fight or something like that.

In the end they never promised to do x amount of Ultimates per expansion and they also have only so much that they can use for such fights. So for me I am fine if raiders get their content but I also see no huge problem that they are only having two of them per expansion. I just find the reasons for that a bit strange. (Like how the players are tired and things like that)

The problem is they wanted an higher raid clear rate overall, ultimate was a way for them to meet the best of both worlds it also gave an end goal to pve in this game and something that it's not done often essentially gave a purpose to raid gear and motive for raiders to stay subbed.
In short you beat savage in one day then you gear up for the ultimate that comes, now they'll beat savage in one day and it's cya till 5.0 and maybe that month once 4.5 drops and believe it or not ultimate is run by raiders also for fun because those fights are good, some even got eureka 345 gear and swallow compass gear to maximise their strenght for ucob.
And frankly they've said they want to surprise us with Omgea, but I'm fairly sure the context was not about difficulty but overall feelings of the fights and the story .

[Ekimmak]

I do not particularly care for Midas, despite loving the look of the gear. A6S was a brutal floor, you had to perfect four different fights before you got to see any loot. And then A7S had the trauma of giving him a massive damage boost for a single misstep.

I just hope they drop the idea of a "brand new 2nd phase" for O12s, because that's a painful roadblock for a PUG raider like myself to overcome.

[Rogatum]

I do feel two ultimate encounters and expansion is a tad low since if we are being honest they have no real reason up the difficultly on savage fight to match earlier encounters such a Midas, even though I do think current skill level of the community has progressed greatly since then. To a degree I also like how savage more or less has a nice mid to hard core feel to it. In the end no matter what they do to players that were able to even make progress through phases in ultimate savage more or less will remain a joke in comparison and since the clear rates for current savage tier have been so high I do think SE has found a happy medium. Do think maybe three to four ultimate encounters an expansion would be the best of both worlds. Hope that makes sense.

Also please let us not turn this thread into an pro or anti parser thread.