The Savage loot design makes it a burdensome chore that's less fun than it could be

[Eorzean_username]

These experiences are from the NA server perspective.

• They are probably similar to EU experiences.
• They are probably very different from JP experiences.
• It's up to the devs to decide whether NA/EU raiding experiences are worth making design changes.

"But if you change the loot rules, then top statics will exploit it to do SPLIT LOOT and other unholy things!"

Look, I'm not a designer, I'm just a player trying to get someone to listen to why the current system feels awful. It's up to the devs to figure it out from there.

"But if you change the loot rules then people will get loot TOO FAST and then unsubscribe or something!!"

Add different restrictions. I'm not paid to do this, but I can come up with some options off the top of my head, so I'm sure this can be solved in other ways by people that are paid to do this.

It's very punishing if someone can't get around to clearing all the floors early in the week.

As an example, my work schedule is very unpredictable. I don't fit into a static because I can't guarantee that I'll always be able to log in at fixed raid times. Likewise, I cannot always guarantee that I'll even be near a PC in the first few days of a week.

If I end up having to do my weekly Savage floor clears on a Sunday or Monday, for example, it becomes a massive chore, and it usually doesn't even get done at all if the tier has been out for too many weeks.

Therefore, I think this design is awful. In theory, the design gives all players 7 days at a time to get their 4 Savage clears in per week. In reality, at least on NA datacenters, it actually gives players a much narrower window of time, with chances of getting it done decreasing sharply with each day past the weekly reset day.

But Raid Finder—

NA doesn't use Raid Finder, and if an NA player tries to, it will take possibly days to pop, and then wipe and disband. Due to the NA "personality", this is not an option.

Experienced players are discouraged from helping learners to clear content.

There are plenty of experienced Savage/Ultimate players that want to join clear parties and help people out. But by doing so, they effectively delete loot from those players. Thus, in many cases, they either avoid it, or are implicitly kept out by a "2 chest clear" requirement.

This slows the entire community's progression down, and leads to more groups not clearing, and then disbanding or losing interest in Savage, especially for players that are stuck using PF for their clears.

"But that's their fault for wanting a 2 chest clear!" Yes, technically, however it's not intuitive to players to deliberately do something that seems suboptimal (voluntarily deleting your own loot chances). And it feels awful from the players's perspective. Therefore, I think this is poor design.

Also, even setting aside the "2 chest clears" issue, it just overall results in fewer and fewer cleared players being available with each passing day beyond reset day, further compounding the issue of weekly clears becoming more and more difficult as the week goes on.

It makes Savage feel like way too much of a chore, especially during "prog" periods.

The fact that I need to re-clear each floor each week in a linear fashion makes Savage feel much more like "work" than play. Some weeks, I end up having to spend all of the free time that I have, just re-clearing content that I've already done, and then have no time to practice the remaining floor(s). This just isn't fun, it's a conspicuous treadmill, and it leads to hitting "raid fatigue" each patch cycle much faster than I otherwise would.

The devs may think, "Oh! Well, once you've learned the content, then re-clearing only takes maybe 45 minutes per week!"

No. For players that have to use PF, you have no idea what you're going to get each week. Encounters like Eden's Promise: Umbra (Savage) and Eden's Promise: Litany (Savage) are extremely unforgiving to parties where there's any uncertainty about mechanic execution, and players coming together each week usually require time to get "re-oriented" to their new positions, or figure out how Umbral Orbs work (again), and so on.

The reality for many players is that re-clears can take upwards of 1-2 hours per floor, depending on how many mistakes are being made, and how many times the party needs to be re-listed, or disbands entirely.

After a while, this becomes much more of a chore than a fun game, and it heavily discourages me from wanting to continue participating in Savage, despite the fact that I otherwise enjoy the content.

Savage is much more fun during the narrow window where it unlocks each patch cycle.

The Savage environment is more enjoyable during the "x.x8" patches that remove the lockouts from Savage loot and floor progression order, because players can freely practice the floor that they want to, and experienced players can freely join parties to help out at any time of the week.

Examples of changes that could improve the individual player's Savage experience:

Remove the weekly limit on receiving "Page" tokens (eg, "Book of Umbra").

This way, players don't fall permanently behind if they can't manage to clear during a busy week. It also gives experienced players a perpetual incentive to help out with less-experienced players's clears. Overall, it would make Savage pages work more like Extreme Trial "Totems".

Implement a weekly limit on purchases of Savage loot exchanged for "Pages".

This keeps the loot progression mostly under control. Players can accumulate as many "Pages" as they want per week, but can only buy 1 piece of loot per week. Optionally, increase Page costs per piece, if you feel that it's important to slow progression down further.

Remove the penalty to loot chances for having a player that has already cleared for the week inside a Savage party.

This allows experienced players to join parties and help progression without punishing the other players.

Implement a restriction of 1 piece of loot per player per floor per week, similar to Normal raids.

So for example, if a player clears Floor 3 of a Savage tier:

• Coffers: A player can obtain one of them per week, regardless of whether they choose to roll on Head, Hand, Feet, or Legs (from whatever drops). Once they get 1 coffer from a given floor, they're locked out of additional coffers for the week.
• Ester: Free roll for all players, but a player can only obtain 1 Ester per week (independent of coffers).
• Twine: Free roll for all players, but a player can only obtain 1 Twine per week (independent of coffers).

This also has the benefit of stopping the current frustrating scenario where one player can get "lucky" with their rolls and take all 3 coffers in one week, and the general issue where players just keep rolling Need on everything week after week, because Coffers make Savage loot Job-neutral.

If a player receives no pieces of a certain Loot category in a given week, roll that over to the next week.

This removes the time burden of being forced to clear every week in order to not fall permanently behind on progression. One week may sound like a generous amount of time, but it is actually quite restrictive for people with busy or unpredictable schedules.

For example:

• A player clears a Savage Floor 3 a total of four times in one week.
• That playerdoes not win any Coffers or Esters on any of these attempts.
• That player wins 1 Twine.
• Weekly loot then resets.
• The player's "loot limit" for the next Savage week is now: 2 Coffers, 2 Esters, 1 Twine.

This gives players significantly more room to work around their real-life schedule, without feeling like they're constantly falling behind in Savage progression.

———————————————————————————————————————

Overall, I think that this would make Savage more accessible and much less of a chore / burden for players that are willing to put in the time and effort to learn and complete the encounters, but do not have a real-life schedule that allows them to consistently brute-force clears early in the tier, or on a strict weekly schedule.

Also, it would make Savage more complete "content" for players that enjoy it. Currently, once experienced players have cleared all floors of a tier, there is very little incentive each week to do anything but rush through the floors early in the week, and then ignore Savage. By allowing players to build some meaningful resources with every clear, it allows players that enjoy Savage to play it again and again throughout a week, similar to players being able to clear Extreme Trials again and again and always obtain something useful (the "Totems").

[DrWho2010]

nah. system works fine as is. if you can't be in a static well thems the breaks. If you're too impatient for loot, then you'll just have to suck it up and wait til the tier gets unlocked.

while this is a game, this is also a business. the devs aren't in the business of making things easier for the current top tier content loot.

[QooEr]

nah. system works fine as is. if you can't be in a static well thems the breaks. If you're too impatient for loot, then you'll just have to suck it up and wait til the tier gets unlocked.

just because the system "works fine" doesnt mean it can't be improved. and it clearly doesn't work "just fine" if a portion of the playerbase has issues such as this, i cant imagine OP is alone in having these issues.

the devs aren't in the business of making things easier for the current top tier content loot.

except they are. and they have done it. multiple times.
in ARR we didnt have raid books and players were entirely at the mercy of RNG for gear drops. you couldve spent an entire raid tier without getting BIS. Then they introduced the books system in heavensward. Then they introduced the coffers in shadowbringers.

not to mention that more people would participate in savage if people with similar problems as OP had their worries addressed, which would in fact benefit them as a business.

[Caitsithhh]

just because the system "works fine" doesnt mean it can't be improved. and it clearly doesn't work "just fine" if a portion of the playerbase has issues such as this, i cant imagine OP is alone in having these issues.


except they are. and they have done it. multiple times.
in ARR we didnt have raid books and players were entirely at the mercy of RNG for gear drops. you couldve spent an entire raid tier without getting BIS. Then they introduced the books system in heavensward. Then they introduced the coffers in shadowbringers.

not to mention that more people would participate in savage if people with similar problems as OP had their worries addressed, which would in fact benefit them as a business.

It’s working as intended. Please don’t change!

[DrWho2010]

coffers and pages did make things easier yes, just to deal with the rngesus aspect of it all. more people might do savage if getting loot was easier yes. and then they would leave the game faster because those type of people would stop once they had what they wanted. that's not what the devs want.

[Frizze]

not to mention that more people would participate in savage if people with similar problems as OP had their worries addressed, which would in fact benefit them as a business.

You get to a point where all the people who are interested in savage content are doing it, at least at a minimal level(PuGing the first couple floors). And the ones actively interested are doing it at as high a level as they can. There is absolutely a cap on how much easing restrictions can impact the number of players participating. And maybe im not being creative enough, but i dont see any way in which this effects the business as a whole positively. How many people are out there who are on the fence/not playing already that would decide to join up if they heard it was getting easier to get raid loot? And players who spend the whole raid cycle crafting or RPing in someones nightclub pay an equal subscription to those who decide to engage in more difficult fights. Honestly, making it too easy to gear up probly has the opposite effect where the people who only care about the gear(and unsub inbetween raid patches) quit earlier, thus costing the company money instead.

[QooEr]

coffers and pages did make things easier yes, just to deal with the rngesus aspect of it all. more people might do savage if getting loot was easier yes. and then they would leave the game faster because those type of people would stop once they had what they wanted. that's not what the devs want.

except if you actually read what OP wrote they didnt suggest loot become faster to obtain, but rather make it so its easier to get without a static. They even said that if the changes would make gearing somehow faster, they could restrict/time gate it more to compensate. Theres also the fact that independent of savage, BiS is also time gated because of tome gear.


Also the only people that unsub asap after a raid tier are hardcore players that only want to week1 prog and dont even care about BiS in the first place. Most of everyone gets BiS to parse if theres no ultimate that tier, or also stick around to gear alts and do other savage-unrelated stuff anyway.

[ForteNightshade]

The only real criticism I agree with here is the restriction on players who have previously cleared. One or two players should be able to join a party without it impact loot. This would help open up PF for those who want to do extra raiding but can't because of two chest requirements.

Beyond that, your ideas basically allow players to clear significantly faster, which will naturally lead to them having less to do and more likely to unsub. Now I do think they can speed up the process slightly, such as reducing the tomes needed so you could purchase head/gloves/feet week one instead of having to hoard, but minor adjustments like that is about all they could do that wouldn't otherwise expedite gearing too quickly.

Using your page example, if we could farm an unlimited number of pages each week, why wouldn't people just farm for a couple weeks and then upgrade every Tuesday while never touching the content again until they're BiS? In fact, you're likely to run into more restrictions with such a system as a month or so later, PF will basically demand you have a higher ilvl. So if you weren't farming early on, you'll have a harder time finding groups since they all farm early.

[Nezerius]

While I think the savage loot system could probably use some improvement, your examples have their own issues as well.

Remove the weekly limit on receiving "Page" tokens (eg, "Book of Umbra").

This way, players don't fall permanently behind if they can't manage to clear during a busy week. It also gives experienced players a perpetual incentive to help out with less-experienced players's clears. Overall, it would make Savage pages work more like Extreme Trial "Totems".

Implement a weekly limit on purchases of Savage loot exchanged for "Pages".

This keeps the loot progression mostly under control. Players can accumulate as many "Pages" as they want per week, but can only buy 1 piece of loot per week. Optionally, increase Page costs per piece, if you feel that it's important to slow progression down further.

What would stop statics/players from just massively farming pages in the first week, and having stocked up so many pages that they'd be able to spend them for the rest of the tier? They certainly wouldn't be any more incentivised to run the content for pages.

Remove the penalty to loot chances for having a player that has already cleared for the week inside a Savage party.

This allows experienced players to join parties and help progression without punishing the other players.

Implement a restriction of 1 piece of loot per player per floor per week, similar to Normal raids.

So for example, if a player clears Floor 3 of a Savage tier:

• Coffers: A player can obtain one of them per week, regardless of whether they choose to roll on Head, Hand, Feet, or Legs (from whatever drops). Once they get 1 coffer from a given floor, they're locked out of additional coffers for the week.
• Ester: Free roll for all players, but a player can only obtain 1 Ester per week (independent of coffers).
• Twine: Free roll for all players, but a player can only obtain 1 Twine per week (independent of coffers).

This also has the benefit of stopping the current frustrating scenario where one player can get "lucky" with their rolls and take all 3 coffers in one week, and the general issue where players just keep rolling Need on everything week after week, because Coffers make Savage loot Job-neutral.

If a player receives no pieces of a certain Loot category in a given week, roll that over to the next week.

This removes the time burden of being forced to clear every week in order to not fall permanently behind on progression. One week may sound like a generous amount of time, but it is actually quite restrictive for people with busy or unpredictable schedules.

For example:

• A player clears a Savage Floor 3 a total of four times in one week.
• That playerdoes not win any Coffers or Esters on any of these attempts.
• That player wins 1 Twine.
• Weekly loot then resets.
• The player's "loot limit" for the next Savage week is now: 2 Coffers, 2 Esters, 1 Twine.

This gives players significantly more room to work around their real-life schedule, without feeling like they're constantly falling behind in Savage progression.

First of all, this just sounds like a booster's paradise. Being able to go in with 7 people who have cleared it for the week + 1 person getting carried, who would then be able to choose from any loot that drops (1 coffer + 1 ester/1 twine). You'd absolutely see a lot more of boosting PFs going up, with these examples. And people would almost be incentivized to buy a boost, with every week they end up skipping (because let's face it, who wouldn't want to buy a run where they could loot every coffer, due to the item roll over?)

Second, it would greatly increase the amount of loot being obtainable, to amounts that SE likely wouldn't be interested in doing.
In the current situation, a static able to clear E9S/E10S (which probably wouldn't be too uncommon at the start) would get 3 coffers (E9S), 2 coffers/1 accessory upgrade item (E10S) per week.
With your examples, the same static would be able to get up to 5 more coffers from E9S, 6 more coffers from E10S, along with 7 more accessory upgrade tokens. Once this static ends up clearing E11S, they'd be able to up that amount by an additional 6 coffers, and 7 gear upgrade tokens/7 weapon upgrade tokens. That's an increase of 11-17 pieces of loot, and 7-21 upgrade tokens per week. Those numbers just sound crazy to me.

[QooEr]

i think what could work would simply be keeping everything the same, but change the 2/1/0 chest to something like
0-2 players cleared: 2 chest
3-4 players cleared: 1 chest
5+ players cleared: 0 chest

my biggest gripe with savage since heavensward is that i cant really help friends (either just clear or just reclear/sub) without screwing them over, and the chests system just discourages people from doing savage more than once a week even if they enjoy the fights.

i get why the chests system is there, but its also a bit too strict imo