Savage fights should probably avoid this kind of mechanic...

[Colt47]

Long story short, I've been spending time learning p3s via PF to see what kind of common pitfalls and such there are in order to teach my static how to do the fight, and I'm absolutely amazed at seeing a mechanic like the bird phase even making it into the final version.

Long story short, this is a mechanic I'd expect on a final fight of a tier, since it requires not only personal responsibility in knowing how to optimize your rotation, but also coordinating enough to understand which target to attack. For PF, people mostly tend to fall prey to memorizing a single strategy or two, not actually learning how to handle mechanics correctly. For groups like that this fight would obviously wall them since they'd just get slapped dead every time they reform.

I've been fortunate enough to get past that phase and learned FoF and FoA, but this took way too many hours of just having people get frustrated and leaving at the bird phase compared to any other savage I've done in the last two years.

Like, if people start grumbling about so much as "oh, we're going to have tanks and melee do the NE and SE corners for dark fire", they don't have a spitball of a chance at killing the revived birds.

[Stepjam]

Just have a tank mark one of the adds. That way everyone attacks it. Simple enough.
The hardest part is that it's a bit of a steep dps check, but beyond that nothing too difficult.

[Colt47]

Just have a tank mark one of the adds. That way everyone attacks it. Simple enough.
The hardest part is that it's a bit of a steep dps check, but beyond that nothing too difficult.

yeah that was something I was thinking of myself. I'd do it normally since I usually tank in savage, but this tier I went with dps.

[Azuri]

"Steep DPS check"? I'm sorry, but even a half-competent group sandbags the birds to build resources and wait for cooldowns to have a strong reopener. They have laughable amount of HP, you just have to actually press your buttons and hit them. I also don't see how "kill one bird north/south, move and kill one more east/west" is some 9000 IQ 5D chess mechanic that belonds in an Ultimate.

[smol_cofe]

practice run it in the normal version until it clicks then it's easy enough. it was already said but for jobs that can, this phase is built for saving resources for re-openers. it just seems complicated because it forces the archetypes to do what they're built for in cohesion instead of mindlessly tapping dmg buttons.

[Colt47]

"Steep DPS check"? I'm sorry, but even a half-competent group sandbags the birds to build resources and wait for cooldowns to have a strong reopener. They have laughable amount of HP, you just have to actually press your buttons and hit them. I also don't see how "kill one bird north/south, move and kill one more east/west" is some 9000 IQ 5D chess mechanic that belonds in an Ultimate.

Oh believe me, I don't think this is a major insanely hard mechanic, I just feel like the ability of people to work together in a PF effectively to tackle this has been relatively laughable over the last few weeks. And by the way, I've actually sat down and tried to work with people in these pickup groups, but they don't want to listen, they want to smash their head up against a brick wall. It might also be a case of the people left doing it without a clear at this point are just that bad or out of energy.

It's just sort of nuts that you have a group where 6/8 or 7/8 know what to do and you've worked with them constantly on the fight up to almost clearing, and then that pug 7th and 8th member cause the entire thing to crumble to a bird prog.

That being said, there's also a lot of people right now trying to jump into mechanics they haven't seen by attempting to join parties that are advertising things like FoA prog. Just last night I had someone who definitely didn't know darkened fire join up and blow up the group three times.

[Azuri]

Oh believe me, I don't think this is a major insanely hard mechanic, I just feel like the ability of people to work together in a PF effectively to tackle this has been relatively laughable over the last few weeks. And by the way, I've actually sat down and tried to work with people in these pickup groups, but they don't want to listen, they want to smash their head up against a brick wall. It might also be a case of the people left doing it without a clear at this point are just that bad or out of energy.

It's just sort of nuts that you have a group where 6/8 or 7/8 know what to do and you've worked with them constantly on the fight up to almost clearing, and then that pug 7th and 8th member cause the entire thing to crumble to a bird prog.

We are on week 7. Every player capable of basic performance has cleared a while ago and is hiding behind relative safety of "Duty Complete" parties. People aren't jokin when they say "if you PF you should get your clears by the first weekend, second week at a push". What is left in PF right now is literal bottom of the barrel. Asking every mechanic to be stack - spread - proteans because of them is just an insult.

[Colt47]

We are on week 7. Every player capable of basic performance has cleared a while ago and is hiding behind relative safety of "Duty Complete" parties. People aren't jokin when they say "if you PF you should get your clears by the first weekend, second week at a push". What is left in PF right now is literal bottom of the barrel. Asking every mechanic to be stack - spread - proteans because of them is just an insult.

It's an interesting problem that I see with the whole PF thing. A person decides they don't have the schedule to join a static, so they do PF instead. However, how can someone who doesn't have the time to work in a static have time to do PF if it takes an additional hour each night just to get a group going, and potentially 2 hours of sitting and doing nothing if groups breakup and require a reform?

However, there is a bit of a lie with "get in early if you want to clear the tier". The truth is that people who clear quickly just have a lot more time to dedicate to learning each fight and the people who clear more slowly have less time to dedicate. The streamers who write the guides to the fights are a pretty good example of this as they pay the cost all at once.

[ArchlordPie]

We are on week 7. Every player capable of basic performance has cleared a while ago and is hiding behind relative safety of "Duty Complete" parties. People aren't jokin when they say "if you PF you should get your clears by the first weekend, second week at a push". What is left in PF right now is literal bottom of the barrel. Asking every mechanic to be stack - spread - proteans because of them is just an insult.

Pretty much this.

I was at P3S enrage going into week 2 with strictly PF groups and got my kill on Wednesday of week 2. The group wasn't the BEST as far as skill or consistency are concerned, but they knew the fight and we hammered out a kill over 6 or 7 hours of optimizing things together. We didn't even do Elmo strats in the end because we needed the extra melee uptime, and we got the kill that way!

A few weeks ago, I hopped into a random P1S "clear party" to practice my BLM rotation and it was a complete dumpster fire. One guy had a macro describing some scheme for Fourfold that basically turned it into Akanthai Act 2 with how much movement it required, two people tilted off the face of the earth when I proposed we do the timers strat (that was listed in the PF description as what we were actually doing for Fourfold...), I still have no idea who "joonbob" is or why a fight broke out over whether we were doing that strat or "tank takes damage down" for Intemperance, and the best part is that the party somehow lasted until the lockout ended and we still hadn't even come close to seeing enrage due to constant Fourfold and Intemperance wipes.

Y'all really are dealing with the bottom of the barrel in PF nowadays. Find a static with times that work for you, be honest with them about your progress, let them trial you, and if things work out, you'll very quickly be glad that you went through the effort.

[Colt47]

Pretty much this.

I was at P3S enrage going into week 2 with strictly PF groups and got my kill on Wednesday of week 2. The group wasn't the BEST as far as skill or consistency are concerned, but they knew the fight and we hammered out a kill over 6 or 7 hours of optimizing things together. We didn't even do Elmo strats in the end because we needed the extra melee uptime, and we got the kill that way!

A few weeks ago, I hopped into a random P1S "clear party" to practice my BLM rotation and it was a complete dumpster fire. One guy had a macro describing some scheme for Fourfold that basically turned it into Akanthai Act 2 with how much movement it required, two people tilted off the face of the earth when I proposed we do the timers strat (that was listed in the PF description as what we were actually doing for Fourfold...), I still have no idea who "joonbob" is or why a fight broke out over whether we were doing that strat or "tank takes damage down" for Intemperance, and the best part is that the party somehow lasted until the lockout ended and we still hadn't even come close to seeing enrage due to constant Fourfold and Intemperance wipes.

Y'all really are dealing with the bottom of the barrel in PF nowadays. Find a static with times that work for you, be honest with them about your progress, let them trial you, and if things work out, you'll very quickly be glad that you went through the effort.

With p3s built the way it is, that habit some people have of trying to sneak into parties trying to prog later mechanics is what is holding back a lot of PF. I've seen so many good players in there just confused on what to do because they have one person who isn't honest about progress struggling to understand where to run with bird tethers. I've been cracking close to 20+ hours a week in PF on p3s trying to keep ahead of the static, but a lot of these people need to be honest and ask themselves if they really got the time to do PF, especially if they feel like they need to sneak into later prog groups.