Savage Raids are poorly designed and Enrage is fake difficulty.

[Vav2021]

I never said I was the best at this game, but I didn't sign on to play Starcraft either and that's what a lot of these savage raids feel like. It requires some kind of mythical skill that can only be obtained through being born with it or an intravenous drip of Rockstar and Mountain Dew.

Is it a gear issue? Like, could there not be a succifient damage output due to gear?

[JamieRose]

Is it a gear issue? Like, could there not be a succifient damage output due to gear?

If I knew, I'd address it.

[Jeeqbit]

I never said I was the best at this game, but I didn't sign on to play Starcraft either and that's what a lot of these savage raids feel like. It requires some kind of mythical skill that can only be obtained through being born with it or an intravenous drip of Rockstar and Mountain Dew.

A lot of it is really your settings and understanding certain "mythical" things about the game.

Mythical things such as knowing that if you dodge an attack before the cast bar ends, rather than before the animation ends, you reliably avoid attacks or knowing that you can buy gear, food, pots and materia from the market board to boost your damage with little effort.

Settings that help are moving your target bar lower down so you can see what is being cast while still looking at the hotbar, legacy controls which give you a lot more time to avoid attacks, reducing effects from other players so that you can actually see what a boss is doing, keybinds such as a hotbar slot with sprint on it and other keybinds you find useful.

The chances are that some of your party members in party finder are using sub-optimal settings, are not aware of certain mythical basics and haven't bothered with food, pots and materia.

They sometimes don't bother to get the basic gear they could get either. I once did a current extreme trial with someone who had just beaten the MSQ and was in gear from a leveling dungeon and we could not get anywhere because DPS was too low to beat the first phase.

[MStowastiqVahlshdeh]

Expecting 8 people to perform 15 minutes of mechanics without losing DPS, without a single death and all this while poorly communicating is the crux of everything that makes Savage raiding a horrible experience, the icing on that inedible cake is enrage which enforces this mechanic through fake difficulty and removes any flexibility or room for error.

It's no wonder all the toxicity in FFXIV comes from the savage raiding community, which is in turn why we have all these parsers controversies which are taking up the devs focus. This problem could easily be fixed by offering a little wiggle room for mistakes and removing the pointless enrage function but I guess that's not happening any time soon.

Now I'll sit back and wait for all the accusations of "trolling" or me not "gitting gud" to spew forth like the contents of an overflowing toilet.

Enrage is a necessary mechanic that prevents players from being required to spend unhealthy amounts of time doing content without interruption. Unfortunately, a gaming company cannot force us to get up and walk around/drink water if content takes too long, so they created enrage mechanics to "force" players to take a break.

Long ago, in FFXI, players became physically ill due to trying to complete content which required full attention with no interruptions for a long duration of time. Enrage is there to prevent this.

"Pandemonium Warden is one of two High Notorious Monsters in Final Fantasy XI (along with Absolute Virtue) to garner special maintenance to weaken its powers.

Upon its introduction into Final Fantasy XI, more than 36 players marathon fighting Pandemonium Warden for 18 hours were unable to defeat it.

They were forced to retire after members of the party started to become physically ill; after such a prolonged period of gaming, they began to faint and vomit, creating news reports to be filed in argument of the game's User Message present at every login, which states that Square Enix "...does not wish to see [their players'] lives..." suffer as a result of extensive play.

Following the 18 hour attempt, the monster (along with Absolute Virtue) was patched to only have a spawn time of two hours, and its overall difficulty was significantly decreased — if not beaten within that time, it despawns and vanishes; also, its satellites no longer have 25,000 HP each, but closer to only 2,400."

[Enjuden]

If I knew, I'd address it.

Like how you addressed hiding your stuff so people can't help you?

All we can do is guess work now that the evil parses are hidden. We could go back to a previous post where you did zero damage and still got outhealed, and start with that, but then it just goes to 'press 1'.

[LisSquid]

Enrage is a necessary mechanic that prevents players from being required to spend unhealthy amounts of time doing content without interruption.

Where is this coming from? Enrage timers are to stop people from just throwing bodies at a fight until it falls over, and allow devs to create beginning, middle, and end segments to a challenging fight. Else you could brute force every savage/ultimate like it was an Alliance Raid.

[MilkieTea]

Expecting 8 people to perform 15 minutes of mechanics - Enrage for P1S, P2S, P3S, and iirc P4S is at about 11-12 minutes.

without a single death - incorrect.

and all this while poorly communicating - Learn to read macros and learn how to see visual tells for mechanics and all that poor communication suddenly goes away.

This problem could easily be fixed by offering a little wiggle room for mistakes - There is already wiggle room for mistakes. Everyone in a raid can die and still clear.

[technole]

This savage tier was designed to be cleared in i580 minimum and a lot of people did. If people are hitting enrage in i595+ average, well you know what the problem is.

[Coletergeist]

If I knew, I'd address it.

You already know what the issue is; you already know how to address it.

Something something refusal something something denial something....

[LauraAdalena]

Expecting 8 people to perform 15 minutes of mechanics without losing DPS, without a single death and all this while poorly communicating is the crux of everything that makes Savage raiding a horrible experience, the icing on that inedible cake is enrage which enforces this mechanic through fake difficulty and removes any flexibility or room for error.

This problem could easily be fixed by offering a little wiggle room for mistakes and removing the pointless enrage function but I guess that's not happening any time soon.

I removed things from the main post that were jabs at the community and not really helpful to the argument. I’m biting not for those but the actual arguments in here.

First off, it’s actually very normal for RPGs to have bosses or fights with enrages. It’s far more common in JRPGs. I’d list a bunch of JRPG games with enrages I’ve played through but the list would be very long. This is to test players knowledge of their ability to do damage. In a turn based or ATB system it’s far more common to do to test the player’s turn economy, gear, character builds, and knowledge of optimal spells skills etc.

Second, if you’ve done a fight without an enrage before you’d not want fights like that either. They can lead to issues of fights taking far longer than designed. If P3S is designed to be however long it is, having it repeat and do it up to 40 minutes because the team constantly snowballed since the party was given enough “forgiveness” that the only people really doing damage are the tanks and/or healers, it becomes excruciating. Hyperbole of course.

However, the biggest issue with this all is that mechanics being more forgiving… is the part that makes it less difficult. The idea of savage is it’s to test class knowledge of the players through multiple methods. One: a DPS check (enrage maybe adds or something else) to make sure the players have appropriate gear, are actually playing their jobs beyond spamming a skill, and making sure they can do it under pressure and while juggling other things. Two: co-ordination. They test your ability to not only handle your own individual mechanics but also do it while communicating strategies of others and working with/around them. Being punished for either you or your team mates not doing one of those aspects makes the fight less challenging over all. And finally: mechanically challenge the player to make sure they can figure things out or act based on information given by the designers in the fight or other players based on what it is. If one of those isn’t there, it’s not MMO endgame. Each one of those is an important pillar to good MMO PVE endgame fight design. Some of it can be modified slightly to adjust to the type of MMO or even basic structure of the fights. But if one of those is missing it becomes a lot more enticing. If relying on your team mates stopped existing, why make it an MMO? Just remove the servers and make it an action RPG. Remove the rotational requirement? Why even try? Just do the bare minimum and just keep dodging. Not like you won’t beat it if you don’t put in effort, making the mechanics a lot less enticing because you don’t have the juggle. And finally, if you remove the mechanics every boss becomes a dummy and it’s no fun.

If you have an idea for how to design a fight without an enrage instead of just saying “do it” explain a replacement that fills that requirement. Also, final note. This is savage we’re talking about. You can ignore it if you don’t like it. Do other content, play other games. Savage is meant to be challenging in some ways. But how do you ensure the players are playing their jobs at all without something to end the fight should it go so long.