is anybody else tired of the way savage is structured?

[Amarande]

Yeah, it could use a fix, but having toured the forums of everything from XIV to Lost Ark to WoW to Destiny, I'm not entirely sure the relevant patch is entirely a software one or if it's more of a human one

i'm not talking about gear though there are some pretty notable grievances there but this is not the reason why i made this thread

To be fair, gear is part of the problem (in particular, XIV's chronic problem with chasing off middling-skill players from endgame) - or more specifically, the loot system.

I'm not sure what much can be done about it, though. If you fix the loot system so friendly groups aren't stymied by "one chest, no chest" BS, you enable what it's designed to keep a lid on - the hardcore/influencer set being able to pump out tons of gear right off the bat through intensive time investment, then gatekeeping the hell out of things so instead of benefiting the greater playerbase as desired, it actually works against them (what, you didn't push as hard as we did? You didn't sign up for our winky wink boost services, er, "donate to our stream" in exchange for being in the run? I guess you're just not putting in enough effort! Gtfo, entitled scum!).

i was pretty fatigued from fights with no checkpoints (e4 and e8) to where i have no real desire for future fights to be designed that way. it's okay to have in an ultimate but in savage it's just frustrating to wipe at the end of a 12-13 minute fight because somebody choked up

This is definitely true, especially with Shadowbringers' return to adding increasingly nasty mechanics later on in the fights (remember Cycles? Black Smokers? ...).

Stormblood probably struck the most practical medium in this case (the fights being long and you could still wipe late if you choked up, but at least later mechs tended to just be combos of the encounter legos used earlier in the fight. Early on at least there were few exceptions, such as Shinryu Ex which was part of why that fight was so bloody miserable to PF ... and of course it was the first trial I had to 99 for the mount too LOL).

and now i'm feeling fatigue from doorbosses. maybe it's the way they designed this tier but it feels like they were blinded by the desire to prevent any mechanics whatsoever from being cheesed or otherwise done in a non-standard way.

Unfortunately a product of the modern player it seems: what used to be reserved for the competitive speedrunner (which used to be almost exclusively a solo pursuit, for that matter) has now become mainstreamed to the point that if cheese exists, not only will it be used, but it will be expected to be used. People that don't know the cheese (even if they know the fight) will be considered unskilled, and people that refuse to do it (even if it's risky, like the old Phantom Train ghosts)? Well, that's hindering. Griefing! Ugh.

I feel like they could make mechanics so much more interesting if they

1) Remove tank invulns period and

2) Limited the number of raises you get in a pull.

Those two things together let you cheese so much.

The first could be nerfed (as e.g. WoW does, where tank invulns work, but bosses are usually smart enough that they simply ignore an invulned tank and go for another target instead for the duration, so invuln skills in general end up mostly only of real use for emergencies - something XIV's server structure can't really handle well - or for "tower" type AoEs. Not stacks because WoW considers an invulned person not to exist at all rather than give them a share of the stack like in XIV).

Rezzes do permit a certain amount of cheese, and I've frequently pinned XIV's increasingly vice-like-grip emphasis on tight DPS checks (to the point some people have compared some recent tiers to Alexander hell all over again) to the ready accessibility of rez.

I'm not sure if there's a good solution to that in 8-person fights though. They have done some interesting things with restricted rez (BA, DRS) but that seems to depend on the large-group environment to really work well (as with Normal and Heroic raids in WoW, for that matter). I expect we lost something in the transition over the years to smaller, more easily logistically handled raiding

Then red mage came in stormblood and everyone played it. There was always a rdm in your party and that transformed the game. It was no longer “if healers die it’s over”. You could just bring red mages as way to cheese a lot of things that PF wasn’t good at.

Tell me about it, as a healer main who came back mid Endwalker somewhat rusty, things have felt much higher pressure than they used to even in dungeons, and part of it is likely that instead of RDMs all over the place we have RPRs now ...

[Ransu]

I don't mind door bosses, but I definitely think the checkpoint should hold till the weekly reset. Outside of that, my only real complaint with savage is that a single player can wipe the entire party. I'm kind of over that type of design in MMO boss fights.