The difficulty curve in the game has... problems...

[Colt47]

And where exactly did I say that someone should not provide corrections if they are knowledgeable enough about the fight to do it? Or to break up a party because things go south?

You confuse setting up a PF with leading a party.
Those two are not connected by default.
While many people that create a PF also happen to provide markers and a macro it is not a requirement because creating a party doesn't make you into the leader in the sense of guiding everyone and providing help. By that logic everyone who is still at prog stage would need to hope for someone who has already cleared to create a practice party to join - which is not the case. Everyone is free to create a party, state what they want to practice and whether they need markers/ macro or not.
If a helper joins, they are most likely the most experienced and will also most likely 'lead' the party or rather provide corrections. They will also have markers, a macro or correct something about what other people brought if they see an issue with that - and all that is entirely possible without having created the party.

Setting up a PF, writing "practice from start, please bring markers & macro. helpers welcome" is a very common description and these parties are perfectly capable of making good progress, with or without helpers.
It also quite common for someone that is not the party leader to post a macro or place markers.
It is, again, quite common for someone not being the party leader to correct strats someone, party leader or not, suggested.
So I stand by it: you are not automatically leading a party simply because you set up PF. The person setting up PF decides what is going to be practiced and has the option to kick people if they think they're holding the party back or cause drama - and that is all that comes with setting up a PF. Nothing more, nothing less.

Just double checked your old post and realized you were in fact just talking about setting up a PF party. I apologize on that one. Albeit, most people who are setting up PF parties typically intend to lead them or should have the mindset they are leading them unless they got someone coming along who is going to do the leading. Otherwise it usually turns into a chaotic mess that goes no where, but sometimes people literally just want to build confidence that they've seen the first two mechanics or something to get things kicked off. Strictly talking about ones for savage and EX content on this and not stuff like hunts and all the other things. People literally throw groups up for casual content sometimes because they got to do blue mage things or kill 50+ hunts in a train.

[Issaella]

*snip*

Pretty much everything you said in this post is the opposite of my experience/expectation coming from half a dozen MMOs over 20 years. You list, you lead and you had better know the fight or everyone is going to bail in a couple pulls at best or laugh you out of your own party. You post something "practice from start, please bring markers & macro. helpers welcome" and expecting others to join and do all the leg-work is begging for a clear/carry at best and would get you accused of being a leach in pretty much any other MMO.

For casual content, sure, thrown up a BLU group, or a farming party, or Hunt train, or world bosses. I do that all the time, heck I'll even lead a DR run as long as people follow the rules and bring essences/actions. But for endgame content I have a level of expectation from a party leader that is more than "I listed the party, hur hur".

[Rilifane]

Pretty much everything you said in this post is the opposite of my experience/expectation coming from half a dozen MMOs over 20 years. You list, you lead and you had better know the fight or everyone is going to bail in a couple pulls at best or laugh you out of your own party. You post something "practice from start, please bring markers & macro. helpers welcome" and expecting others to join and do all the leg-work is begging for a clear/carry at best and would get you accused of being a leach in pretty much any other MMO.

Then perhaps it is time to stop clinging to experiences in other MMOs and pretend they apply to everything?
Because that seems to be your real issue: you made some experiences with something that can losely be compared elsewhere and now applying it to something else without having practical experience and despite everything several experienced people told you and refuse to acknowledge that maybe different games have different approaches and that they can *gasp* even work.

I've never seen anybody laugh at someone setting a PF with that exact descriptions and I've hopped into plenty of them. They are simply regular learning parties late into the tier that welcome experienced people.
Don't make everything into something negative. Welcoming help is not the same as expecting a carry. I've seen more carries in clear parties than in practice from start parties - the people in the latter are generally very willing to learn and take corrections and advice to heart.
If you don't want to create a PF without extensive experience with Savage raiding that is your decision.
But don't assume others can't have success just because they didn't do it your way.

Several experienced raiders that PF'ed plenty of times said their piece. Take it or leave it.
You're welcome to cling to your "But it has to be impossible because I think so" belief - but I guess you won't be getting your glam. Nobody to blame but yourself.
I'll stop wasting my time convincing you that you would be perfectly capable of getting that dyeable glam you want so much by simply hopping into PF as an inexperienced raider. That's not my job.
We have given you everything you need, the rest is up to you. Best of luck with p2s.

Just double checked your old post and realized you were in fact just talking about setting up a PF party. I apologize on that one. Albeit, most people who are setting up PF parties typically intend to lead them or should have the mindset they are leading them unless they got someone coming along who is going to do the leading. Otherwise it usually turns into a chaotic mess that goes no where, but sometimes people literally just want to build confidence that they've seen the first two mechanics or something to get things kicked off. Strictly talking about ones for savage and EX content on this and not stuff like hunts and all the other things. People literally throw groups up for casual content sometimes because they got to do blue mage things or kill 50+ hunts in a train.

All good and honestly, most of the time the everyone in the party, including the person who set up the PF, has markers saved and most people also have the macro saved. Someone posts it and the rest usually says they'll steal it if they don't already have one.
If someone is new to all this, a "new to this" in the descriptions helps to avoid giving off the wrong impression but there is nothing wrong to create a PF without extensive experience to kick things off and, as you said it "building confidence" - would be a shame to gate people from getting started just because nobody experienced happened to have already created a party that fits their bill.
In some rare cases you actually get 8 people with no knowledge beyond a guide and little experience in general. Some turn into chaos, some make genuinely impressive prog by acting in concert.

[Packetdancer]

From the outside looking in at current Savages that is just not something that happens. If you are at a wall, you are at a wall until the next expansion comes out and you can so heavily outgear it as to trivialize it. The number off pass/fail mechanics with instant death in the current raids makes overgearing meaningless in terms of difficulty reduction.

Except overgearing stuff does make a difference. If you are all in the minimum gear for a fight, yes, a couple of deaths can be a huge problem. If your group has more gear than the fight requires, though, then a death or two... or five ...doesn't necessarily preclude a clear.

Yes, there are a lot of pass/fail mechanics where it's instant death for the one failing; there are fewer where it's pass/fail where failure means a wipe. (P4S phase 2 is a notable exception, since you pretty much do need everyone up to do the mechanics. But P4S phase 2 is also, y'know, the final fight of the tier, so...)

Just looking at p2s alone (the one I would like to do for a couple glam pieces) there are 4 or 5 "screw up and die / screw up and wipe" mechanics alone.

Honestly, I can think of only really one mechanic in P2S where one player failing it mechanically can cause an instant party wipe: Predatory Avarice. Yes, there are places where a tank can wipe the party (by not being in the Coherence stack, or by dropping a tankbuster on the party), or a healer can do so (by failing to heal folks up sufficiently before unavoidable damage), but that's true in every fight.

It's possible for a tank to wipe an alliance raid if they're really determined.(Please stop spinning Mr. Angry Eyeball in WoD, tanks.)

But in terms of mechanical execution? Someone dying in Kampeos Harma (e.g. the sewer-horse's limit cut) doesn't mean a wipe. Someone dying just before Channeled Overflow does usually mean someone else will die, but not necessarily that the party will wipe.

The only place I can think of where a failure of a mechanic in P2S is a guaranteed wipe is if the DPS who should run off to the side during Predatory Avarice instead stacks with the party, thus blasting everyone else into the death wall.

I mean, there are demonstrably mechanics -- especially in the second half of P4S -- where if someone's down it can mean a party wipe. But you'd be surprised what you can limp through with well-geared DPS, determined healers, or a well-timed healer LB3.

So regardless of gear, if you can't get it right every single time you have little to no chance of success. Maintaining that level of concentration and attention for hours upon hours of prog with low probability of success -since everyone else in every group you join must also be performing at the same level- is so prohibitive (IMO) as to make engaging with it seem like an insurmountable task.

I promise you this isn't true. I have seen more than a few clears in PF which aren't even in the same timezone as "got everything right".

*quiet healer PTSD noises*

Especially considering that the only people doing at this point are the people who haven't been able to clear it in the 4 months since it was released. Again, making the likelihood of success, even if you can eventually do the mechanics, essentially zero in my view.

There are still plenty of folks doing the tier, at least on my data center; I admit I can't speak for yours. But there are people gearing up alt jobs, people gearing up alt characters... sure, many of those are weekly reclear parties, but there's also people running learning parties. I know, because I'm one of those people!

I have nothing I need from P3S any longer, but I'm putting together a teaching PF group for it tomorrow. Some friends haven't gotten past adds in the fight with their static, so I figure a teaching party gives them a chance to learn a bit further (and for others interested in learning to do so). And ones I've done previously for fights in this tier have gone well.

I also often see prog parties for fights earlier in the tier in PF, because there are people who only just got to endgame and who still want to do the fights. Heck, when folks aren't going for a two-chest clear, I'll often join ones I see over the weekend, to try to help.

To go back to the first line of your post...

From the outside looking in at current Savages that is just not something that happens.

I won't lie, I looked at savage the same way before I started on endgame content. (This is my third tier, for reference; I started as a shiny new baby raider in the second Eden tier.)

Now, while I say you're overestimating the difficulty, I will also admit that casual content did not prepare me for savage; historieancienne and others (including you) are correct that there's a little bit of a weird ramp up from casual content into on-level extremes, and thence on into savage. I definitely struggled at first; it wasn't like I queued in and it all just... clicked and I was clearing content.

(Put bluntly, I was not good.)

But the thing is, that was almost more a matter of being intimidated by savage and getting in my own head to the point I got flustered than it was due to savage actually being some sort of insurmountable challenge which only the best-of-the-best can tackle. I mean, I'm definitely not the best of the best, but I'm still perfectly capable of clearing savage content.

Yes, you may struggle a bit at first; mechanics in savage are faster than in other content, with less warning, and stiffer penalties. But there is still a lot of leeway, more than you seem to think, and you absolutely do not need to be some image of perfection who never missteps in order to clear savage.

If you want to do savage, I promise you, you almost certainly can. And if you're having trouble finding groups to do it with in PF, a post in /r/FFXIVRECRUITMENT over on Reddit can probably help you find like-minded souls also trying to get into savage. (Or even experienced raiders done with the tier who enjoy teaching the fights.)

Literally anyone who has done any previous Savage content before is lightyears ahead of people just starting. This is where the problem/disconnect fundamentally lies IMO. Not only do you need to wrap your brain around the mechanics of a specific raid boss you first have to wrap your brain around how Savages in general work and how completely unforgiving they are to even a single mistake.

Whether or not savage is a daunting task, I will note that there are still options to get started. My FC has a static (with a roster that tends to shift from tier to tier) called the Rookie Raiders, or the "Rooks" for short.

The Rooks basically exist for folks in the FC who want to get a start on savage; experienced raiders will step in and help the Rooks get started on a tier -- standing in as a member for a while and helping to raid-lead -- and help provide guidance even after stepping away to let one of the new Rooks take lead. Generally once a tier ends, that set of Rooks feel more confident in savage and go on to other statics; a new roster of Rooks eventually coalesces, and the experienced raiders -- including former Rooks -- will be there to help the next set.

The Rooks have been around since early Shadowbringers; I got my own start in savage as one of the original Rooks, when we first started this up. (And I acted as raid-leader/mentor to one of the later incarnations.) At least two entire statics have started with former Rooks as their founding members. It's been a good lower-stress way for folks to get a feel for savage.

I'll bet that if you reach out on /r/FFXIVRECRUITMENT -- or find the appropriate Discord for your DC's raid community, or look around in your DC channels on the Balance, or whatever -- you'll find others who are also interested in starting with savage. Find a mentor or two willing to provide advice, and I suspect you could create your own Rooks.

[Issaella]

Then perhaps it is time to stop clinging to experiences in other MMOs and pretend they apply to everything?
Because that seems to be your real issue: you made some experiences with something that can losely be compared elsewhere and now applying it to something else without having practical experience and despite everything several experienced people told you and refuse to acknowledge that maybe different games have different approaches and that they can *gasp* even work...

So basically you are saying that I should take what you say at face value despite every experience I've had over 20y of playing MMOs. What you are trying to convince me of is 180* from anything I have experienced. I really can't believe you have seen people with no Savage experience PF clears in any kind of reasonable time frame or at the very most you could count them on one hand. Not without considerable help from a FC or multiple experienced players.

EDIT - I encountered one of you magical, "fresh prog, looking for help, advice welcome" PF parties a while ago and decided to keep my eye on it while doing other things. It opened with 2 people, after 45 minutes it had 4 people (1 tank, 3 DPS), it evaporated into aether when the 60 minute time was reached with 5 people (1 tank, 4 DPS) and wasn't relisted. So I find it rather hard to believe even finding a prog group to start from scratch can be done without a massive time investment of just sitting around and waiting this late in the tier.

Welcoming help is not the same as expecting a carry. I've seen more carries in clear parties than in practice from start parties - the people in the latter are generally very willing to learn and take corrections and advice to heart.
If you don't want to create a PF without extensive experience with Savage raiding that is your decision.
But don't assume others can't have success just because they didn't do it your way.

Welcoming and not having any idea what you are doing and expecting someone else to lead is absurd. Don't assume just because you've seen it happen successfully means it happens regularly or isn't exceedingly rare. Like I said in a previous post I can't even assume baseline competency/experience doing Unreal clears on my alt some weeks. I would assume it would be that x10 in any kind of Savage prog in the PF unless I get exceedingly lucky.

Except overgearing stuff does make a difference. If you are all in the minimum gear for a fight, yes, a couple of deaths can be a huge problem. If your group has more gear than the fight requires, though, then a death or two... or five ...doesn't necessarily preclude a clear.

Yes, there are a lot of pass/fail mechanics where it's instant death for the one failing; there are fewer where it's pass/fail where failure means a wipe. (P4S phase 2 is a notable exception, since you pretty much do need everyone up to do the mechanics. But P4S phase 2 is also, y'know, the final fight of the tier, so...)

...

Honestly, I can think of only really one mechanic in P2S where one player failing it mechanically can cause an instant party wipe: Predatory Avarice. Yes, there are places where a tank can wipe the party (by not being in the Coherence stack, or by dropping a tankbuster on the party), or a healer can do so (by failing to heal folks up sufficiently before unavoidable damage), but that's true in every fight.

Any death is a huge drop to success chance, multiple deaths mean you might as well wipe and start over unless you are outgearing it by 20+ ilvls from what I've read.

Just from memory of watching clear videos and looking at the wiki:
Spoken/winged Cataract - misjudge/misread = death regardless of gear (I have a hell of a time seeing the head orientation to the body in normal)
Predatory Avarice - Misjudge = guaranteed wipe, regardless of gear
Channeling Overflow - Not fast enough to find your partner/off even a little = 2 guaranteed dead regardless of gear.
Kampeos Karma - mistake = wipe, 2 hits are not survivable at any gear level
Tainted Flood + Channeled Overflow - mistake = wipe regardless of gear
All of those are repeated, most of them in combination, any failure at minimum = death, more likely a wipe.

So assuming all that, how exactly does overgearing at all help to have an easier time with the mechanics? The only thing is seems to help with is unavoidable damage. The avoidable damage is such that most if not all mistakes mean death/wipe regardless of gear level. So again, even a single mistake on any one of those over a 15 minute fight reduces your chance of clearing to virtually nil.

[Rolder50]

Man I was hoping this would be an actual post about the difficulty curve. Notably, how it goes from zero to 100 real quick. You do the MSQ, you do the dungeons, none of which have any sort of actual challenge. You can blast through doing a half baked rotation and generally be fine, especially if at least one person in the group knows what they are doing. The next step after that is Extremes and suddenly the mechanics start to matter, and you can actually wipe! Seems to me like the jump from Dungeon snoozefest to Extremes scares a lot of people away from even trying. I'd like to see more content to bridge this gap, like maybe harder dungeon content that requires at least a little bit of thought. Hopefully the Criterion dungeons fill this area, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Colt47]

Man I was hoping this would be an actual post about the difficulty curve. Notably, how it goes from zero to 100 real quick. You do the MSQ, you do the dungeons, none of which have any sort of actual challenge. You can blast through doing a half baked rotation and generally be fine, especially if at least one person in the group knows what they are doing. The next step after that is Extremes and suddenly the mechanics start to matter, and you can actually wipe! Seems to me like the jump from Dungeon snoozefest to Extremes scares a lot of people away from even trying. I'd like to see more content to bridge this gap, like maybe harder dungeon content that requires at least a little bit of thought. Hopefully the Criterion dungeons fill this area, but I'm not holding my breath.

I mean people were wiping and dying to normal mode content when this expansion launched, it's just that the fights used for normal mode have looser rules on what constitutes a win or a loss, and gear scaling heavily influences the difficulty as well as how often people do the encounter so the longer people are playing the game, the easier that content gets. Savage mode is a far stricter rule set than normal mode and EX fights use their own set of rules that are distinct from either savage or normal mode.

Savage: Attacks are not televised and only shown through cast bar and some gimmick involving the boss itself, such as a glowing cape or weird crystals. Surviving a mechanic is rare if near impossible for DPS, and surviving a mechanic is equal to taking a death penalty for 30 seconds. If the players cannot clear the content by 10 minutes or roughly that length, they lose the fight. Attacks are allowed to target players but generally are more strict in deployment. The fight is largely a puzzle that has to be understood through failure.

Normal: Attacks are clearly shown via warning markers on the ground. Attacks are allowed to target players and typically do target players to increase variation in attack patterns. Surviving a mechanic is expected, and the punishment for failure is a vulnerability stack. The only way players can die to these encounters is through taking too many vuln stacks or getting knocked off the arena. There is no time limit to complete the fight.

EX Trial: Attacks are clearly televised but only show for brief periods. Attacks are allowed to target players to increase variation, but generally they are more strict in deployment so as to avoid too much variation due to increased damage. Fights involve more pattern and puzzle solving. Failure on mechanics results in a vuln stack, and it is likely that a dps job will die to failing a mechanic without assistance or damage reduction. If the boss is not defeated within 10 minutes or around that number, the fight ends in a loss. The fight is largely a puzzle that has to be understood through failure.

The thing is that they intended EX fights to be the bridge between normal and savage, but as I stated before they raised the skill floor and now EX is just sort of it's own thing floating out there with unreal. Also the way they handle end game as a whole with the savage tier is done poorly as it has no tiers or scaling to accommodate the breadth of different play schedules and times people have who engage in it. The content shouldn't take someone more than two months to clear but unfortunately it ends up doing just that since many people can't dedicate a four to five night a week raid schedule with the same folks, and bless those that do because without them the vast majority of people doing savage likely couldn't even complete the content.

[Colt47]

So here is a question: Would anyone be opposed to having a system where savage is set up such that there is a savage, savage+, savage++, etc, where groups are required to complete the prior version to unlock the next version, and each step up makes the damage and healing checks tighter? Same rewards come from all the tiers and the only difference is how fast you get them. That sounds like a much better option than going with just one flat difficulty curve and completely locking out rewards for a huge swath of players.

E.g. base savage just gives a book, savage+ awards a single chest on the first two, savage++ awards a single chest on the third and two chests on the first two, and savage+++ is the full reward. Obviously this could be tweaked around, but it would at least give groups that have less time the ability to learn all the fights effectively with more forgiving dps and healing checks before trying to go into a higher tier. This would also cut out the need for a lot of third party tooling since groups could now cover all mechanics in an easier version before doing the full on version.

[Issaella]

So here is a question: Would anyone be opposed to having a system where savage is set up such that there is a savage, savage+, savage++, etc, where groups are required to complete the prior version to unlock the next version, and each step up makes the damage and healing checks tighter? Same rewards come from all the tiers and the only difference is how fast you get them. That sounds like a much better option than going with just one flat difficulty curve and completely locking out rewards for a huge swath of players.

E.g. base savage just gives a book, savage+ awards a single chest on the first two, savage++ awards a single chest on the third and two chests on the first two, and savage+++ is the full reward. Obviously this could be tweaked around, but it would at least give groups that have less time the ability to learn all the fights effectively with more forgiving dps and healing checks before trying to go into a higher tier. This would also cut out the need for a lot of third party tooling since groups could now cover all mechanics in an easier version before doing the full on version.

Literally anything is better than the current system for people just starting. Where the only option is to fail 100x over while feeling progressively more like useless refuse holding everyone back while you cling desperately to the slim, infinitesimal hope that you may get lucky.

[Packetdancer]

So here is a question: Would anyone be opposed to having a system where savage is set up such that there is a savage, savage+, savage++, etc, where groups are required to complete the prior version to unlock the next version, and each step up makes the damage and healing checks tighter?

Conceptually, am I opposed to it? No. Options are great.

From a practical standpoint? Yes. The problem is that this game's combat system does not scale well; adjusting damage/health/attack potency, etc. tends to change the fight in non-trivial ways. The practical upshot of this being that I do not see SQEX just making "difficulty settings" for savage content; they'd almost certainly feel they had to make the three "difficulties" individually-tuned-and-tweaked fights.

Which means instead of 8 fights (four normal-mode raids, four savage) per tier, they'd need to do 20 (four normal mode fights, four savage fights tuned for "savage", four savage fights tuned for "savage+", four savage fights tuned for "savage++", four savage fights tuned for "savage+++"). That seems like a really good way to make the combat design team get spread thin and for fight design to suffer.

So, from a practical standpoint, unfortunately, I have objections.

However, as I've noted in this thread, I do not think that's actually necessary. Savage is within the capabilities of most players in this game; they just need to be willing to practice a bit -- and to die along the way. It's not content you'll clear immediately when you start doing it -- and it honestly shouldn't be, either.

My first tier was, as I noted, the second Eden tier. I started out and was very bad. But by the end of that tier, I'd gone from "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm dying a lot" to "Hey, I've gotten much better at playing my job; I'm doing 4x the damage I was when I started this tier, and I'm clearing the fights!"

My second tier, I went from "Okay, I know I can do savage" to "Okay, I now can learn mechanics quickly enough that I'm serving as shot-caller for groups I do stuff with, and I'm serving as one of the advisor/teacher folks to the current incarnation of the rookie static in my FC." (Though, alas, due to Family Crisis Stuff I had to quit the tier for about four months at one point. RL trumps game content.)

This tier, my third, I went from "Okay, I now can learn mechanics quickly enough that I'm serving as shot-caller" to "I am pushing on in party finder beyond where my static is, learning what other folks are doing for mechanics, and using those to figure out the ideal strats for the static." And also running teaching parties in PF.

There are many, many raiders more skilled than me. I define myself as "more an asset than a liability"; I will do damage, keep the party healed/alive, and do mechanics callouts simultaneously -- my damage will be solidly average, but it'll be there, and I'll keep folks alive to the best of my ability while making sure via callouts that they're in the right spot.

Even as an average raider, savage is well within my capabilities... and I suspect they're within those of anyone posting in this thread lamenting savage's difficulty.

And it does get easier as you progress the tier, because gear does make a difference; short of "everyone needs to do one specific thing or the party wipes" mechanics, the problem with mechanics failures/death is not the deaths but the loss of DPS (and thus missing an enrage check). As you gear up within a tier, those enrage DPS checks become easier to make even if there have been deaths or damage downs; better gear won't save you from a one-shot due to messing up a mechanic, but better gear will absolutely make it possible to clear a fight with things going badly wrong and a party having multiple deaths.

If you truly believe savage is some unachievable goal of impossible difficulty? If that's the attitude you go into trying savage with, where any failure isn't a learning experience but rather proof that you'll never clear, then it'll be a self-fulfilling expectation; you'll make savage impossible for yourself.

But at this point... the thread has many folks who do actively raid savage -- in statics or in PF -- talking about the fact that while savage isn't something you get the hang of overnight and immediately clear, it's something you will get the hang of -- and faster than you think. If our own personal experiences from inside the savage tier -- and how we learned to do savage -- aren't enough to convince the folks who believe savage is an insurmountable challenge... I'm not sure there's much else any of us can say, or to contribute to the thread.

I hope those of you who still feel that way can get past that impression of it, and find that not only is savage achievable but also enjoyable; I'm not sure that, at this point, there's anything the raiders in this thread can say to help with that which hasn't already been said at least once.

And while I can't speak to the raid scene in other data centers, if you're in Primal? Folks on the Primal Raid Community discord often organize learning parties -- formally so in the first part of the tier, with schedules and signups and all, and informally so later when folks are like "I really would like practice on <fight> and to get farther" or whatnot in the requests channel. Plus, there's plenty of people who'll hop into learning parties in PF, or set them up.

I've given all the advice and encouragement I think I can, so I'm going to bow out; I've got a P3S learning party that I promised to run for some folks in about 15 minutes anyway.