Please don't delay Savage Raid Releases

[RicaRuin]

"Normal and Savage mode will be implemented on the same day. Yoshida is aware that he received a lot of feedbacks regarding players don't have enough time to prepare but since the flow was already decided for the entire expansion (meaning the entire Shadowbringers) they cannot just simply change it. However they will look into this for future plans."

Quoted from the reddit LL transition.

So they just repeated what they said about Savage implementation in previous live letters for previous Patches. Unfortunately just hot air as they seem like a broken record at this point.

[tdb]

There is no effecting the balance of the fight. If you fail a mechanic in Savage, one of four things happen.

1. You instantly die.
2. You wipe the entire raid.
3. You take heavy damage and get a heavy debuff that can guarantee your death
4. The entire raid takes heavy damage and gets a heavy debuff that can guarantee the raid's death.

You either do those mechanics right and can keep going, or you don't and are forced to start all over. Most maxed "at current ilevel" gear can do is shave off the final few minutes of a fight at most. The mechanics that will kill you often come at set intervals during the fight (anywhere from 1-2 minutes). You are not screwing up the balance of these fights, NOTHING you can do can screw up the balance of these fights until the next expansion when you vastly outgear them.

Aren't you forgetting enrage timers here? Even if one player's death doesn't cause the entire raid to wipe, it still causes them to not do any damage while they're dead (and reduced damage after being raised) and also requires healers to spend some GCDs on raising and healing them instead of doing damage. There's only so much damage you can miss before wiping at the enrage. Better gear increases that margin and makes the raid easier to beat.

[ForteNightshade]

So they just repeated what they said about Savage implementation in previous live letters for previous Patches. Unfortunately just hot air as they seem like a broken record at this point.

This feels like it has a bit more merit to it because Yoshida brought it up unexpectedly whereas previous LL, it's been part of a Q&A. I also got the impression that he's been receiving more feedback from all three regions since the last time they mentioned it. While it may be hot air, there's a little more meat here.

[Absurdity]

Aren't you forgetting enrage timers here? Even if one player's death doesn't cause the entire raid to wipe, it still causes them to not do any damage while they're dead (and reduced damage after being raised) and also requires healers to spend some GCDs on raising and healing them instead of doing damage. There's only so much damage you can miss before wiping at the enrage. Better gear increases that margin and makes the raid easier to beat.

Better gear also means that you can go for riskier strats in some cases. Take E6s for example, nowadays you just ignore the Ifrit and Raktapaksa fireball mechanic, stack north, take the vuln and keep full uptime which certainly helps with killtime, not sure you really want to try that in min ilvl gear.

[RicaRuin]

R

This feels like it has a bit more merit to it because Yoshida brought it up unexpectedly whereas previous LL, it's been part of a Q&A. I also got the impression that he's been receiving more feedback from all three regions since the last time they mentioned it. While it may be hot air, there's a little more meat here.

If I remember correctly, in the Patch 5.2 Live Letter he brought it up by himself outside of the Q&A part, when it was time to talk about the Raid. They also said it was too late for that Patch but received a lot of Feedback that a delay is desired and they will keep that in mind for later Patches.

Edit: Nevermind, it was worded different.

The next Eden raid is called Eden's Verse. We considered making adjustments to delay the release of savage after the normal; however, decided to implement them at the same time.

[Packetdancer]

The reason why full crafted gear doesn't cheapen the fight is because it is literally the minimum ilvl to beat the last fight in a raid tier, the only one that really matters in the end and on top of it everyone has access to crafted gear with the only restriction being your willingness to spend a lot of gil.

It is not; crafted is always better than previous BiS. Right now BiS is i500; 5.4 crafted stuff will be i510. Just like Edengrace and Augmented Deepshadow stuff was i470, and Neo-Ishgardian is i480. Minimum ilevel to queue into E5S was i470; presumably for E9S it will be i500.

So crafted is more than the minimum needed (the previous highest ilevel). If it were all the same as the previous BiS, sure, that wouldn’t change the fight balance. Yet people don’t consider skipping an entire gear grade (I.e. 10 ilevels) to be unbalancing the fight.

The issue with being able to get more tomestone gear isn't really that it cheapens the fight but that it basically goes against the idea of delaying it by a week in the first place, everyone being on an even playing field.

But you already have inequality; people who want to start on day one and don’t have a dedicated crafter (or crafter team) willing to get up at stupid o’clock and devote hours and hours to gathering materials as quickly as possible, who have all their scrip already maxed (sometimes on multiple characters) to buy the new scrip mats immediately, along with people potentially grinding the now-uncapped tomestone for the inevitable tomestone materials, etc.

World-first statics have dedicated teams of crafters and gatherers who have stockpiled everything they can think of ahead of time and who will rocket out the gate to obtain the new materials introduced with the patch as quickly as possible, all to make HQ versions of those new i510 crafted sets appear in the shortest possible time. Your average smaller hardcore static will have to either wait longer, spend a ton of money, or go in with i500 gear.

If your goal is that everyone starts on equal footing, we already broke that as things stand; the one-week delay would actually even the playing field by allowing more small statics to obtain the crafted gear and be on equal footing, as they could have a single crafter outfit them by spreading the gathering of new materials across a week. Sure, you’d be able to get a slightly better set via a second i520 tomestone accessory or replacing it with a bigger piece of left-side gear... but that would be more obtainable.

Grinding 450 tomestones in the hours post-reset is something basically any player can do, given time; a couple of roulettes, run a dungeon or two, have a journal ready to turn into Khloe and pick the tomestone option... it would be easy for any savage raider to get that out of the way on the first day post-reset. Obtaining a full HQ set of the crafted gear on day one is a much much higher bar to entry as things stand right now.

So if the concern is making sure everyone has a chance of equal footing when they start, then the week delay is a good thing so far as I can see; it puts the HQ crafted gear within reach of more statics than will readily have access to it without that delay, meaning more than just the most dedicated or well-funded groups can go in with the 10 ilevel advantage over the minimum requirement.

[tdb]

Better gear also means that you can go for riskier strats in some cases. Take E6s for example, nowadays you just ignore the Ifrit and Raktapaksa fireball mechanic, stack north, take the vuln and keep full uptime which certainly helps with killtime, not sure you really want to try that in min ilvl gear.

Yeah that too. So it's far from "no effect on the balance" as was claimed.

Out of curiosity, since I haven't done savage on that level - how much difference does it make to go from i483-ish (available at release of Eden's Verse) to i500 (only available through the raids themselves at the time), particularly for survivability? And how much damage does that move do?

Edit: Corrected item levels - augmented neo-ishgardian was not available in 5.2 and crystarium has limited availability because of tomestones.

[SnowVix]

It is not; crafted is always better than previous BiS. Right now BiS is i500; 5.4 crafted stuff will be i510. Just like Edengrace and Augmented Deepshadow stuff was i470, and Neo-Ishgardian is i480. Minimum ilevel to queue into E5S was i470; presumably for E9S it will be i500.

So crafted is more than the minimum needed (the previous highest ilevel). If it were all the same as the previous BiS, sure, that wouldn’t change the fight balance. Yet people don’t consider skipping an entire gear grade (I.e. 10 ilevels) to be unbalancing the fight.

you're talking about the first fight. the person you quoted is talking about the last fight.

[Absurdity]

Yeah that too. So it's far from "no effect on the balance" as was claimed.

Out of curiosity, since I haven't done savage on that level - how much difference does it make to go from i483-ish (available at release of Eden's Verse) to i500 (only available through the raids themselves at the time), particularly for survivability? And how much damage does that move do?

Edit: Corrected item levels - augmented neo-ishgardian was not available in 5.2 and crystarium has limited availability because of tomestones.

It's the difference between getting flattened by a tankbuster with only 20% mitigation active and easily surviving it. The difference between stacking mitigation to survive a mechanic and stacking mitigation to not heal at all. The difference between barely making the enrage check and killing the boss before it even gets into phase 3. The difference between a 10:20 minute kill and a 7:55 kill.

[Packetdancer]

you're talking about the first fight. the person you quoted is talking about the last fight.

Ah, I misread them as saying it was what it took to beat the last fight previous to the tier dropping; this is what happens when you read the forum while insomniac but not awake.

I’ll own my mistake there, and grant that having two potential pieces of tomestone gear (which I think would, for this tier, have been the difference between i481 and i482) or one piece of more valuable gear (still i481, but a bigger potential stat bump) could affect the fight balance very slightly in the first week, yes. I’m not sure that it’s enough variance to completely break the balance of savage raiding altogether and ruin it forever, though.

Moreover, if the argument is to keep a level playing field, I strongly suspect the difference between i470 and i481 (with the crafted stuff pentamelded) is a larger one in terms of the effect on the fight than the difference between i481 and i482 would be; the group that couldn’t afford a set of HQ crafted stuff (whether or not it’s pentamelded) would not only have been at a disadvantage stats-wise in E5S, but with folks who didn’t have the crafted set they wouldn’t be able to queue in to E8S at all the first week of release in the first place.

So I stand by my feeling that a week lead time between patch and savage unlock actually levels the playing field by potentially putting the crafted gear in the hands of more raiders.

Edit: And if folks really feel that a second tomestone accessory (or a left-side piece in place of an accessory) is enough to break the fights entirely... then make it so no tomestone pieces can be bought until a week after savage drops. Let folks amass tomestones for those two weeks, they just can’t spend them right out of the gate. Now you’ve removed even that current benefit of the one tomestone piece, and only the crafted stuff is on the table for week one clears.

(Or take the crafted gear out of the picture altogether until a .x1 patch; it removes the ability for week one clears of the tier, but there’s no risk of unbalancing the initial clears of the fights until crafted gear lands a few weeks later. And at that point, the pressure is off and you don’t need the one week delay on savage unlock. I don’t like that option myself, but it would be one they could go with, and might even be arguably better to make those initial clears even more impressive.)