Savage Raids & Hard Enrages - Should there be more Variety?

[Tohsy]

Hey guys,

After raiding Shadowbringers and a little bit of Stormblood, I've noticed that a lot (if not all) of the extreme/savage fights have hard enrages. Some fights (such as Hades EX) have multiple hard enrages (AKA: DPS Checks) and it seems to be the go-to method of increasing a fights difficulty to being a "Beat the Clock" challenge.

It seems odd to me that they are all relatively short hard enrages, as opposed to soft enrages or a soft followed by a hard enrage after a fairly long time (like 30 sec-2 min after soft enrage starts).

For those who don't know the differences. (Taken from a FF Wiki)

"A hard enrage is designed to wipe a group if the battle is not beaten fast enough. The purpose of this is to prevent turtling and undergeared groups from beating the battle."

vs.

"A soft enrage is designed to gradually increase the difficulty of the battle. Soft enrages take many forms, ranging from a specific point of battle to failing battle mechanics."


That being said, I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about this sort of difficulty tool. Do you think it the current hard enrage fights are fine? Would you like to see more variety in how a fight ends/progresses with soft enrages? ((Such as Shiva Extreme)) Maybe more of a combo?

Personally, I'm not opposed to hard enrages, but it is getting a bit tiring to me that almost every fight has a fairly tight version of it. Some of the best memories I have from raiding previous games have been from soft enrages, where the boss just becomes unbearable and it's a fight for your life/clear.



TL: DR - Savage/Extreme has a lot of relatively short, hard enrages and no soft enrages to end current content fights. (Such as Shiva EX) What are your thoughts and opinions on this? Would you be ok having more soft enrages or would it make the game too "Easy"?


Thanks!

[RokkuEkkusu]

Hey guys,

After raiding Shadowbringers and a little bit of Stormblood, I've noticed that a lot (if not all) of the extreme/savage fights have hard enrages. Some fights (such as Hades EX) have multiple hard enrages (AKA: DPS Checks) and it seems to be the go-to method of increasing a fights difficulty to being a "Beat the Clock" challenge.

It seems odd to me that they are all relatively short hard enrages, as opposed to soft enrages or a soft followed by a hard enrage after a fairly long time (like 30 sec-2 min after soft enrage starts).

For those who don't know the differences. (Taken from a FF Wiki)

"A hard enrage is designed to wipe a group if the battle is not beaten fast enough. The purpose of this is to prevent turtling and undergeared groups from beating the battle."

vs.

"A soft enrage is designed to gradually increase the difficulty of the battle. Soft enrages take many forms, ranging from a specific point of battle to failing battle mechanics."


That being said, I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about this sort of difficulty tool. Do you think it the current hard enrage fights are fine? Would you like to see more variety in how a fight ends/progresses with soft enrages? ((Such as Shiva Extreme)) Maybe more of a combo?

Personally, I'm not opposed to hard enrages, but it is getting a bit tiring to me that almost every fight has a fairly tight version of it. Some of the best memories I have from raiding previous games have been from soft enrages, where the boss just becomes unbearable and it's a fight for your life/clear.



TL: DR - Savage/Extreme has a lot of relatively short, hard enrages and no soft enrages to end current content fights. (Such as Shiva EX) What are your thoughts and opinions on this? Would you be ok having more soft enrages or would it make the game too "Easy"?


Thanks!

If I am reading your wording right, you're implying Shiva Extreme has a soft enrage instead of a hard enrage. For those who does not do Shiva Extreme synced, she in fact has a hard enrage Diamond Dust, but the enrage timer is relatively lenient (around 11-13 minutes).

There are different enrages back in the old Coil turns (turn 2 and turn 4 room wide aoes come to mind.)

[EaMett]

We have had some variations over time. Things like attacks that remove one player at a time in TEA or o7s, o6s' tight heal check before the hard enrage, neverware heal check in o4s, etc.. The issue with soft enrages is that it's often essentially just a heal check and it gets old fast, just as much as hard enrages do. The difference being that hard enrages are probably a little friendlier on your healers, because nobody want's to be an endless heal bot. Throwing one in every now and then would be nice, but use in moderation.

[Makeda]

For those who don't know the differences. (Taken from a FF Wiki)

"A hard enrage is designed to wipe a group if the battle is not beaten fast enough. The purpose of this is to prevent turtling and undergeared groups from beating the battle."

vs.

"A soft enrage is designed to gradually increase the difficulty of the battle. Soft enrages take many forms, ranging from a specific point of battle to failing battle mechanics."


That being said, I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about this sort of difficulty tool. Do you think it the current hard enrage fights are fine? Would you like to see more variety in how a fight ends/progresses with soft enrages? ((Such as Shiva Extreme)) Maybe more of a combo?

A hard enrage causes a community to prioritize DPS over all else. It's why we have tanks and healers trying to maximize their DPS - because the group needs to beat the boss before the hard enrage.

The problem with this is that it is a 'one trick design' - ALL fights are about maximizing DPS. Once you learn the mechanics of where to stand when... all you do is just spam your DPS rotation as hard as you can...
... that is just too repetitive... and these days, most MMOs do this... but it wasn't always true.

A soft enrage, as you describe it, is actually a superior design strategy. It can be more nuanced and some fight might want DPS, others might want heals, orhter mitigation, others tighter mechanics (the safe spot keeps getting smaller or something).

But this is harder to design for.

You could for example... have a fight just start doing 5% more damage raid wide everytime the boss's "rotation" starts again...
- now doing more healing could become more vital... but how do you prevent players from just trying to 'out DPS' the time before healing can't keep up? There some old bosses a decade ago in many MMOs that did this... but it's been too long for me to be able to say "they did X, Y, Z... and it worked".

You could start waves of adds....

You could start applying debuffs...

You could speed up the pace of tank busters...

You could start adding 'armor' to the boss...

...

Essentially you need to find tricks that cause groups to prioritize healing or tank mitigation instead of damage. So that you can go from a 'one trick combat engine' to a 'three trick combat engine'...
- The problem is that it seems like in the last decade, every attempt to do this has been overcome by players figuring out that they can still just focus DPS to overcome it...

I am not sure that can be solved... but if it could, soft enrages would be better than hard enrages...


Maybe it's not that they used to have better tricks, but that they used to have worse players... When Classic WoW came out people complained it was undertuned, but it wasn't - it was the original difficulty... but the players had now been playing WoW for almost 15 years... so that old 'hard' game was easy because the players knew how to master it more...
- If this is the case... there is NO SOLUTION to the idea of soft enrages... players are, as a whole (but not so much me... :O ), just too experienced with MMOs now for any tricks to work anymore...

[Mixt]

Personally, i prefer enrages to have some sort of in universe justification, rather than being just game mechanics.

Like O11S, where Omega is all "Test finished, no further data to be gained, terminating test group" and then uses the "DELETE FROM EXISTENCE!" thing it had demonstrated and threatened the group with all the way back at the start of Deltascape when they first entered the rift.

Or E5S where Eden Ramuh is all "They broke my spears the last two times by using the knockback effect of my charge against me, lets not do that this time, NO ESCAPE!" and then blows everyone up by just not doing the thing the group used to keep it from working previously.

Or E6S where the boss basically goes "They dodged my Conflagration Strike by getting behind me, let's ensure they can't do that again!"

[VenKitsune]

After Turn 2 in coils, where people cheesed the Soft enrage ala "Enrage strat", i think SE are scared of doing soft enrages.

[Aomine1992]

I think the savage encounters are just boring at this point, idol of darkness is literally leviathan with a different skin and adds...E8s is honestly the only fun fight this tier with some variety with some complexity.

On to your topic I wish the raid design would change but honestly what would it be, I don’t know too many MMOs where dps isn’t the most important thing lol, hopefully someone will break the mold one day but I’m sure it won’t be SE as they like to reuse a lot of stuff which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s definitely not a good thing or helping the game in any way.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I think the savage encounters are just boring at this point, idol of darkness is literally leviathan with a different skin and adds...E8s is honestly the only fun fight this tier with some variety with some complexity.

I am more of less in agreement with you. The Eden Raids have been very derivative (though 5 of the fights were intentionally remixes from the start) and feel very much like sets of 4 Trials rather than 4 sections of a raid on a dangerous local. Both the Coils of Bahamut and Alexander felt like we were exploring dangerous locations a fighting the residents living within. Omega and Eden have felt more like a series of independent trials loosely connected by a story.

[Lambdafish]

After Turn 2 in coils, where people cheesed the Soft enrage ala "Enrage strat", i think SE are scared of doing soft enrages.

The game has suffered so much from SEs fear of repeating mistakes. It's like they haven't learned what went wrong, and are aware of that and avoiding it again. The ranged role suffered because SE overbuffed BRD and MCH in the past and they are scared of doing it again despite neutering their toolkit. Pharos siris was poorly designed, so all dungeons are now faceroll etc.

[Waliel]

After Turn 2 in coils, where people cheesed the Soft enrage ala "Enrage strat", i think SE are scared of doing soft enrages.

It also didn't help the boss stopped doing every other mechanic so the fight turned into a pure target dummy with some pulsing AoE damage. Titan HM also kind of had a soft enrage with how he increased his stomps by one every time, but I don't know if it increased indefinitely.

But yeah, people just used to run with three healers and outlast everything that didn't oneshot the whole raid on the few occasions when we didn't have hard enrages.