Why is there no Savage tier content for solo players?

[JamieRose]

Not everyone wants to constantly be searching for seven other people and try to coordinate them enough to defeat savage content. It really isn't fair that the best stuff is only available to savage raiders who all seem to have an army of top tier players at their beck and call.

I thought this game was supposed to be for everyone? Not just the elites.

[DixieBellOCE]

There is, its called the marketboard.

[CKNovel]

For the 8 man savage, you have the normal mode.
If you don't intend on playing savage/ultimate, you don't need to do savage content at all as the reward is only gear. And gear is only useful in savage/Ultimate.
You also can get ilvl600 (current max ilvl) with 24 man raid.

The only things you miss by not doing savage content are:
-The experience
-The ilvl605 weapon
-The mount you can get later when your stats will be much stronger than the content.

It's actually the opposite, clearing savage only rewards you with a mount and gear that isn't really useful outside of Ultimate.

If you want "hard solo duty", then you have the duels in Bozja.
It's annoying to get in, but I wish we could have more duels but easier to get in.

[SwingLifeAway]

[Wolwosh]

Smells like bait

[Ivtrix]

Aww shit here we go again

[Sebazy]

Not everyone wants to constantly be searching for seven other people and try to coordinate them enough to defeat savage content. It really isn't fair that the best stuff is only available to savage raiders who all seem to have an army of top tier players at their beck and call.

I thought this game was supposed to be for everyone? Not just the elites.

I'm kind of confused as to what you're asking for?

The best gear? You can get so close to BiS with nothing more than Expert Roulette, the current 24 man and some normal mode raids for a weapon. Being able to keep your GCD going will easily make up for any deficit in sub stats between full tome and a a true bis. The real difference is losing out on a bit of weapon damage between the end of tier savage weapon and upgraded tome. Again, it's not going to make or break anything, especially if you don't do savage in the first place.

Are you asking for tougher content solo? CKNovel is spot on, go do Bozja duels.

[JamieRose]

I'm kind of confused as to what you're asking for?

The best gear? You can get so close to BiS with nothing more than Expert Roulette, the current 24 man and some normal mode raids for a weapon. Being able to keep your GCD going will easily make up for any deficit in sub stats between full tome and a a true bis. The real difference is losing out on a bit of weapon damage between the end of tier savage weapon and upgraded tome. Again, it's not going to make or break anything, especially if you don't do savage in the first place.

Are you asking for tougher content solo? CKNovel is spot on, go do Bozja duels.

Bozja duels? I was in Bozja for months and never got to do one. That's a really poor example.

I would like to feel like I'm not being brushed aside from content when MSQ stuff isn't being worked on. Savage raiding is a nightmare, finding statics that aren't full of narcissistic parsers who demand perfection from the word go is impossible. It gets a little boring grinding the same crap over and over again while others are working on content that I'm essentially being kept out of. Savage and Ultimates are pointless and a waste of time and money when more content could be worked on for smaller groups and solo players. Instead I get to watch while others do top flight content while I get bored and go play other things because there's nothing for me to do.

Feels like we're back in 5.5 again. Endlessly waiting for Squeenix to throw me my scraps.

[Ralphe2449]

Imagine SOLO SAVAGE RAIDS, completely agree, even wrote a topic on this in another mmo forum

This obviously is quite a bold idea that shatters many previous imo outdated mmorpg philosophies but has quite a few major points in its favor and it is mainly intended for the devs, I am not here to argue with purists.
To be clear, I am not simply suggesting an easy solo option for raids, I am suggesting high end difficult raiding that has a solo option for the same rewards, with higher difficulties requiring more and more optimal performance.

1) Devs spend a lot of resources designing raid encounters with interesting mechanics the players have to dance around, yet for all those resources and great ideas high end raiding has always been touched by a minority.
Now imagine instead a raid that could also be done solo for equivalent rewards, I am willing to bet more people would be trying out high end raids solo than with a group.

2) The main obstacle to people raiding has always been the social barrier, the anxiety of failure in front of others and the subsequent toxicity of others, all these reasons are barring many players from participating in a type of content that had a lot of work put in it.

3) Mmorpgs are played more and more by people who enjoy playing solo no matter how contradictory to the genre it might sound (And by solo I include qued content since you just treat other players as a tool to finish your FP and rarely ever interact with them in any meaningful way)
That suggests creating content that these people do rather than treating group content as the be all end all of mmorpgs might be a more successful strategy, since you are focusing on producing content most people play rather than content only a minority experiences.

4) Another common problem in raiding has always been getting enough people for it, often leading to guilds having to get more people than they need and have a bench just so if anything happens they ll still be able to raid, but issues persist, people quitting, guilds imploding due to drama or guild goals changing, cliques leaving taking away a lot of members, the game company getting sued by an entire state for being weird creeps and having terrible practices causing more people to leave, all these are very common issues that can frustrate and mentally tire people if they have to jump from guild to guild, yet another reason why many might choose solo raiding over group raiding.

5) Difficulty. In any raiding game, at the end of the day, you have control only of yourself and your own actions.
That means a dps player is not responsible for a tank's mechanical* failures if they fail to taunt swap in time.
A healer is not responsible for a DPS mechanical failures if they keep getting hit by avoidable damage
A tank is not responsible for a healer's mechanical failure like getting hit/stunned and being unable to heal when needed.


That clearly means that at the end of the day, since the only performance you have control over is yours, whenever you "Deserve" to win depends solely on your skill and ability to play your class well, meaning beating a raid solo is just as big of an achievement as beating it with a group and thus obviously deserves the same rewards.
And I could argue even more of an achievement because getting carried is a common thing in raiding, good players often carry others, good healers can save dps from their own mistakes, a good tank can survive a lot longer even without a healer giving bad healers more time to heal them, and a good dps can save the entire raid by bursting down high priority targets quickly or simply performing so well some mechanics are skipped therefore less chance of people failing mechanics, that is a common phenomenon in raiding.

*I am using the term mechanical specifically to refer to failures of raid mechanics, not things such as DPS being so bad you hit the enrage timer

So not only does this mean you make raiding accessible to more players, it means you would be able to tune the raid even more tightly because it is a lot easier to tune based on the good performance of a single player than sixteen players, meaning you can make it challenging enough so people progress the raid solo and take a while to reach the point of clearing it easily.
After all, group raid design by its nature, requires you to have a big room for error to account for everyone, that room for overall error would be a lot tighter if you only have one person to balance the encounter around.

Now on the design, there's 3 paths for this but I will focus on the more realistic ones.
1) Companions able to do all mechanics perfectly yet perform below average in the numbers area, exactly like FF14 current trust system that now has included some trials in it. Obviously that requires the most amount of work.

2) NPCs temporarily appearing to deal with mechanics not of your role or group mechanics, this feels a lot simpler achieve since each type of NPC would have a specific purpose and task.
Healing npcs to deal with the typical raid wide unavoidable damage or for tanks if your role is a tank.
Dps npcs for healers to heal and keep alive
Stack npcs walking to a spot you need to stack a mechanic on to survive, requiring you to be quick to find the location and go there
Soak npcs running into random soak spots requiring you to be quick to identify which spot is left to soak
Tank npcs dealing with the taunt swap or generic tank mechanic
Link npcs appearing when there's a link mechanic requiring you to quickly find them and run to them to avoid getting damage by a link mechanic.
Danger circle npcs appearing and moving around like chickens with their heads cut off to simulate mechanics that put a danger area around each player requiring spread.
And so on, each mechanic has an obvious answer to it, instead of relying on a raid leader or a good player protecting you from your slowness by being faster, in this situation, you would need to react fast and find out what you need to do and where because npcs will simply do the bare minimum.

This would be my optimal choice since not only does it feel easier to achieve, it makes you feel you are responsible for everything as if you were their commander, making the raid more immersive with the story as well, you are leading a group of random soldiers to defeat the enemy of your faction!


3) Redesigning mechanics to work for solo play. Similar to how there's different mechanics based on the difficulty, instead mechanics would be designed around a single player which would mean some mechanics would need to be redesigned.
Stack mechanics for example would need to be tuned to require a major defensive to survive
Soak mechanics could be consecutive soaks requiring the player to get into each circle with only a limited time before the next one explodes
Spread would just be pools on the floor
Link mechanics would require you to stack next to an orb or location etc

And so on, I am sure any competent developer could figure out an appropriately creative conversion for any mechanic really, only ones that wouldnt be possible would be ones that literally end up requiring groups to separate in multiple different rooms at the same time, only those would require a big change.


And just a clarification because I am sure some would confuse this with master mode chapter bosses. MM chapter bosses have a very rough kind of difficulty, the oldstyle type where scaling just gets out of control so it is less about learning the mechanics and dance and performing it well and more about understanding how the dumb AI enemies work and performing well dps wise, which is absolutely an acceptable type of difficulty but because it is so "raw" I feel many are disincentivized when an elite takes away 30% of their health in an unavoidable hit because it feels "too hard, too fast".

Solo raiding would simply be just another form of raiding, you would need to perform the mechanics well so there will be a learning curve there, of the soft difficulty type, then it would be performing above average in terms of your role, a dps would need to perform above average to clear the fight before enrage, a healer will have to keep every npc alive including extra bursts of damage to simulate bad dps getting hit by avoidable mechanics and a tank would need to rotate their cds perfectly and position the boss perfectly in order to survive and keep others alive.

And keep in mind all that would need to be done while performing mechanics flawlessly, something that for most people would take quite a while to achieve, meaning they knew where they were wrong, unlike hyper scaling hard difficulty, it is a lot easier to identify where they went wrong and know what to do next time, and with each attempt they will likely reduce the health of the raid boss to lower and lower percentages making them feel they are getting closer, incentivizing them to continue, for fun and for the rewards.

All this also means getting carried by others is no longer possible, because you are the only variable in this encounter making the achievement a lot more meaningful than the group raid one.

[KageTokage]

I do hope that they'll make more challenging solo fights like Bozja duels...though perhaps a touch more accessible.

Please deliver, Criterion dungeons.