
Originally Posted by
Renathras
I will preface this by saying I've never done Savage until this tier. But I've played this game for some years now, cleared Extremes for several expansions, cleared some Savage this tier for the first time (don't have a Static, so just did the first two and was content with that), and have raided in other MMOs besides just this one.
FFIXV's raiding is comparable to most other leading MMOs right now. It's more rigid, but also more tightly tuned because of that. That is, in WoW, you have more variable mechanics, but they tend to be less deadly. FFXIV you have to memorize and remember the order of those mechanics and execute them at a higher level.
It's different between the two, but two flavors of a similar difficulty. And considering I remember Vanilla WoW raiding, where some bosses were literal tank and spank and some class "rotations" were literally "just auto-attack" (back when bosses could only have 8 debuffs and there were no/few agro resets, so classes like Hunter couldn't throw out DoTs and couldn't use direct damage abilities, thus auto-attack), we've come a looooong way since then.
[EDIT: Hell, the term "Patchwork fight", originating as "Patchwurk", I believe, was the name of one of the big fat Undead abominations, from original Naxxaramus, I believe, which was a tank and spank fight, thus originating the term of "fight where tanks pull the boss and everyone else can stand in one place working through their target dummy static rotation because there are no/few mechanics to speak of"]
And yet, FFXIV has consistently higher players than Warhammer. And if they were all free trials, they'd have shut down the game for making no profit to keep the servers running.
This game isn't Warhammer - which seems to be an ulterior motive of this thread? - and that's fine. Again, not a Savage raider here, but this is MMOs in general. New content, new level caps, new gear, rinse and repeat. MMOs have followed this same basic pattern since Everquest.
And for the record: I always have something to do in FFIXV, so...
[EDIT: Don't get me wrong, Warhammer did some neat things, but it also wasn't for everyone and it ultimately failed. There's reasons for that...]
Don't forget Eureka/Bozja.
And I don't mean the Relics. I mean the Elemental+ and Judge gear.
ALSO content that isn't for everyone, but that gear is BiS for those zones. Elemental +2 is the BiS gear for Eureka itself because of the bonuses, and people do still do that content, like Baldesion Arsenal. And I THINK some of it is (or was) BiS for some BLU builds.
...which can also be considered side/horizontal content.
But I agree there's not a lot of it. One of the things I wish FFXIV had more of would be open world type content.