Savage Raids are poorly designed and Enrage is fake difficulty.

[Saraide]

Yup. Savage actually has a bit of a problem when the mechanics let people get too creative and you end up with multiple strategies... like every other phase of p3s.

Also funny Angienessyo thinks that a single death wont kill a savage run. I guess he skipped out on all the fun with Phoenix FoF, Phoenix baby birds, and probably FoA. Actually I take that back, you can survive FoF with a healer down if you have someone martyr themselves on the burning circle of flaming death, but then you have two people dead with weakness and you got to pray to every known deity that the other healer is ready to go turbo mode.

Having multiple strategies is not inherently a bad thing, it just becomes bad when it's cheese strategies like goodbye world.

[Colt47]

Having multiple strategies is not inherently a bad thing, it just becomes bad when it's cheese strategies like goodbye world.

It's more a bad thing because the content is accessible by random PF groups. The very thing that the designers use to make the fight challenging for a coordinated group is hell on wheels when someone throws a bunch of people with varying schedules, attention span, and no validation of progress into a fight with incredibly loose mechanics. And that's probably why the OP thinks savage is awful. Again, it's the devs problem if people can't clear the content in a reasonable time, not the people who seek it out. And FYI I think that Ultimate is very well thought out compared to savage. Savage is just a gear grind continuation that gets mistaken for a trophy run, and the devs sort of mistakenly believe that the curve of complexity they have in savage fits the bill for what every person who continues gear progression wants out of end game.

Fact is gearing is way too slow, the mechanic complexity kind of goes up way too fast after extreme mode for a lot of people, and the fights in savage are built to tie down people with way more time than what most folks have. They'd basically suffer nothing if they make the content doable in 2 months time by people who can only do it two nights a week for a couple of hours, which is the majority of statics from what I can tell.

And yeah, I'd expect people to complain about that direction, but after doing this stuff for the last three tiers and going through every possible thing that can go wrong with savage, PF, and static parties, they need to get away from this design direction because FFXIV doesn't need it. If they want to make a challenge mode, don't stick gear grind on it.

[Vav2021]

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.

*devs make a hard raid.*
Player 1: OMG RAID TOO HARD, DAFUQ!
Devs:*Make it slightly easier*
Player 2: HOLY BALLS, THIS IS EASY WTF!
Devs:*sigh and make it harder*
Player 3: JESUS H CHRIST, ARE WE EVEN SUPPOSED TO BEAT THIS!?
Devs:*Audibly grunt and make it easier*
Player 4: WOW, THIS IS TOO EASY, DO THEY EVEN LISTEN!?
Devs:*Now have a pissed off look. Make the raid Harder.*
Player 5: I' CAN'T DODGE TWO ASSCLAPPER 9000s! I'LL NEVER EXPERIENCE THE RAID!
Devs: *Red in the face and drawing blood from biting their lip. Makes it easier."
Player 6: WOOW, LISTENING TO RAM RANCH IS MORE ENGAGING THAN THIS.
Devs: *Veins bulging, bloodshot eyes, muffled screaming. Make it harder.*
Player 7: WHAT IS THIS, DARK SOULS? I'M GONNA QUIT!
Devs: *release a patch to replace older raid. It's just a giant middle finger that spawns furry trash mobs for all eternity. You can't leave the game or you get banned, and if you die it's permadeath.*


I can't really blame the players, but I can't blame the devs either in this case. Things that are hard are meant to be hard for a reason. No, I'm not going to condemn you for having a hard time, because I've dealt with things of this nature myself. I just switched over to PVP to remedy the problem, as I was never much of a raider.

As for that gigantic wall of text that I wrote, it has nothing to do with any of this.

[angienessyo]

Yup. Savage actually has a bit of a problem when the mechanics let people get too creative and you end up with multiple strategies... like every other phase of p3s.

Also funny Angienessyo thinks that a single death wont kill a savage run. I guess he skipped out on all the fun with Phoenix FoF, Phoenix baby birds, and probably FoA. Actually I take that back, you can survive FoF with a healer down if you have someone martyr themselves on the burning circle of flaming death, but then you have two people dead with weakness and you got to pray to every known deity that the other healer is ready to go turbo mode.

I was on P3S week 1 with really bad loot luck, a single death usually didn't end up in a wipe in my group. It was multiple deaths that resulted in the wipe. Of course I did the tier on RDM so there was never a time someone was down for more than a second unless I'd died haha I only remember door boss being any punishing without gear.

[Saraide]

It's more a bad thing because the content is accessible by random PF groups. The very thing that the designers use to make the fight challenging for a coordinated group is hell on wheels when someone throws a bunch of people with varying schedules, attention span, and no validation of progress into a fight with incredibly loose mechanics. And that's probably why the OP thinks savage is awful. Again, it's the devs problem if people can't clear the content in a reasonable time, not the people who seek it out. And FYI I think that Ultimate is very well thought out compared to savage. Savage is just a gear grind continuation that gets mistaken for a trophy run, and the devs sort of mistakenly believe that the curve of complexity they have in savage fits the bill for what every person who continues gear progression wants out of end game.

Fact is gearing is way too slow, the mechanic complexity kind of goes up way too fast after extreme mode for a lot of people, and the fights in savage are built to tie down people with way more time than what most folks have. They'd basically suffer nothing if they make the content doable in 2 months time by people who can only do it two nights a week for a couple of hours, which is the majority of statics from what I can tell.

And yeah, I'd expect people to complain about that direction, but after doing this stuff for the last three tiers and going through every possible thing that can go wrong with savage, PF, and static parties, they need to get away from this design direction because FFXIV doesn't need it. If they want to make a challenge mode, don't stick gear grind on it.

OP thinks savage is awful because they refuse to accept the possibility that they themselves are just not very good at the game, massively limiting their own growth. PFs usually state which strat they want and often times there are reasons for every strat (although not always smart reasons). How you are jumping from there to gearing is a mystery to me however. Gearing is an issue worth talking about but not really in this thread and speaking from personal experience finishing this current tier in two months is entirely possible on a 4 hours split over two days raiding time per week schedule.

The problem often encountered in PF and statics is that people do not want to accept that their mistakes are holding the party back and instead blame everyone else for it. Sure, no one wants to be the dummy of the group but by dismissing that possibility out of hand you are denying yourself the chance to improve and only make it worse. This has nothing to do with mechanics having multiple ways of solving them.

The benefit of having to clear a fight multiple times is that you probably have to do more than just get in a lucky clear and then never again.

[Vav2021]

OP thinks savage is awful because they refuse to accept the possibility that they themselves are just not very good at the game, massively limiting their own growth. PFs usually state which strat they want and often times there are reasons for every strat (although not always smart reasons). How you are jumping from there to gearing is a mystery to me however. Gearing is an issue worth talking about but not really in this thread and speaking from personal experience finishing this current tier in two months is entirely possible on a 4 hours split over two days raiding time per week schedule.

The problem often encountered in PF and statics is that people do not want to accept that their mistakes are holding the party back and instead blame everyone else for it. Sure, no one wants to be the dummy of the group but by dismissing that possibility out of hand you are denying yourself the chance to improve and only make it worse. This has nothing to do with mechanics having multiple ways of solving them.

The benefit of having to clear a fight multiple times is that you probably have to do more than just get in a lucky clear and then never again.

To be fair, they could be good at the game, it's just that PVE might not be their calling. However, SE is very forgiving in its difficulty compare to other games out there that have more convoluted mechanics. I'd say "Keep trying" and if they have trouble, put them behind PVP, and see if that works.

[MoofiaBossVal]

I do agree that I'm not a fan of FFXIV's raid design. In WoW, multiple party members can botch multiple mechanics and the raid doesn't instantly wipe. In WoW, the difficulty of a raid is more about the long battle of attrition, trying to conserve your limited mana, cooldowns, and resurrections. Whereas in FFXIV it's just a matter of doing it again and again until that one time where everyone passes every mechanic.

As for enrages, the design philosophy behind it is to keep players from being burnt out on long fights. I prefer soft enrages to hard enrages, though. It feels pretty unfair to whittle a boss down to 0.5% but you ran out of time so the game arbitrarily decides to kill everyone. A soft enrage where the boss rapidly begins gaining stacks of a damage buff would give you more leeway.

[LisSquid]

I do agree that I'm not a fan of FFXIV's raid design. In WoW, multiple party members can botch multiple mechanics and the raid doesn't instantly wipe. In WoW, the difficulty of a raid is more about the long battle of attrition, trying to conserve your limited mana, cooldowns, and resurrections. Whereas in FFXIV it's just a matter of doing it again and again until that one time where everyone passes every mechanic.

As for enrages, the design philosophy behind it is to keep players from being burnt out on long fights. I prefer soft enrages to hard enrages, though. It feels pretty unfair to whittle a boss down to 0.5% but you ran out of time so the game arbitrarily decides to kill everyone. A soft enrage where the boss rapidly begins gaining stacks of a damage buff would give you more leeway.

Took the thoughts I was thinking right out of my noggin, but I'll contest you on the enrage timer. The lack of a race against resource depletion (lives included) is why the enrage timers in 14 are so tight. You have unlimited brezing (yes, as mana allows, but this isn't something you can get away with in WoW. Think how often Alliance Raids would crumble if it had an enrage. How many runs are won after picking every single member off the floor?), you have healers with an infinitely refilling mana pool, and you have dps that don't quit. They want you to do it all correctly (with some margin for error), and we aren't also juggling a bunch of other variables.



(They also don't have to design fights around jobs having, say, a literal exclusion zone for an ability, etc, so it's very A to B to C. They can make fights tightly choreographed because they don't have DKs running around death gripping an add out of place to negate the mechanic.)

[Colt47]

OP thinks savage is awful because they refuse to accept the possibility that they themselves are just not very good at the game, massively limiting their own growth. PFs usually state which strat they want and often times there are reasons for every strat (although not always smart reasons). How you are jumping from there to gearing is a mystery to me however. Gearing is an issue worth talking about but not really in this thread and speaking from personal experience finishing this current tier in two months is entirely possible on a 4 hours split over two days raiding time per week schedule.

The problem often encountered in PF and statics is that people do not want to accept that their mistakes are holding the party back and instead blame everyone else for it. Sure, no one wants to be the dummy of the group but by dismissing that possibility out of hand you are denying yourself the chance to improve and only make it worse. This has nothing to do with mechanics having multiple ways of solving them.

The benefit of having to clear a fight multiple times is that you probably have to do more than just get in a lucky clear and then never again.

It's a bit more than that. It can genuinely be difficult sometimes to gauge where the problem is, or even if you have personally passed and understand a particular part of a fight, because the fight is both the strategy being employed by the party, the mechanic the boss uses, and the role one has. It is truly a mess at times.

Also you can say that but I just lived through this and a lot of parties could not clear in 2 months. If a group is going for 2 hours a day for 2 days a week, it's going to take them at least 3 months without someone who jumped ahead leading them. Even then, it's probably going to take the same amount of time.

[JamieRose]

To be fair, they could be good at the game, it's just that PVE might not be their calling. However, SE is very forgiving in its difficulty compare to other games out there that have more convoluted mechanics. I'd say "Keep trying" and if they have trouble, put them behind PVP, and see if that works.

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.