this raid tier is the worst yet

[ForteNightshade]

I don't know in what World you live in that all the mechanics instant kill you, P9 has tons of damage down, P10 has quite some and so does P11, heck even P12 has more than enough damage downs plus this tier was way easier than last tier. The only bad thing to say about this is that P9 and P10 play pretty slow.

Kind of wondering this myself. The only outright body check in P9 is Levinstrike. Dual Elements will double up and kill someone but that's been standard for years now. They moved away from mechanics just omitting a dead player after Neo Exdeath because players were cheesing mechanics by intentionally saccing and using healer LB3. P10S is a bit more egregious with body checks, especially the enumeration stacks which are unnecessary for a second fight but even a tank yeeting themselves can be recovered if people are quick to adapt. Hallowing Hell is definitely a tank check though. If either one of them dies, it's game over. That being said, I actually don't mind it as this is supposed to be his "big" mechanic. You shouldn't be able to limp through it.

Moving on to P11 and almost nothing is a direct body check. You can survive Styx with dead players unless it's a healer. Which isn't new at the Savage level. Everything else will either only target alive players or kill someone who doesn't have a partner. Even the two main mechanics Dark and Light and Letter of the Law are be salvaged depending when someone messes up. The former doesn't kill you outright until the very end so long as you realize your mistake and separate before both of you take too much damage. You'll die to Emissary's Will but again, you can live the follow up Styx with enough mitigation/shields.

P12S has more partner checks than outright body checks except for Paradeigma 3. And that depends who dies. P12S is a bit more heavy on the body checks but it's also the last fight so I'm not all that bothered. Especially when the DPS check is extremely forgiving. In general, the DPS checks are nonexistent this tier. There needs to be difficulty coming from somewhere. If people don't want the few body checks we have, then be prepared for another P8S where your comp will actually matter. Savage shouldn't be zombie-able.

[Eorzean_username]

In general, the DPS checks are nonexistent this tier. There needs to be difficulty coming from somewhere. If people don't want the few body checks we have, then be prepared for another P8S where your comp will actually matter. Savage shouldn't be zombie-able.

That... is actually a very good point.

If I actually think back to things like, for example, E11S with PF groups, there were certainly many opportunities throughout the encounter to salvage mechanics and power on, but realistically, that was basically just a form of slow torture once the fight was learned... because you'd just end up going through all the motions, only to hit hard Enrage.

I guess in a way, combining stricter mechanic checks with more forgiving Enrage timers just saves you time — rather than "surprising" you with failure after an entire encounter timeline, it just rips the bandage off immediately and tells you to try again.

[Eorzean_username]

The increasing tendency towards heavy so-called "body checks" definitely make PF'ing feel more headachey than usual, at least in my personal / anecdotal experience.

I don't personally mind having "uneven" performance amongst the 8 players in a PF, as long as everyone is "obviously trying", and the encounter still gets cleared. And so in the past, it felt possible to compensate a bit more for moderate errors. Maybe I'm just viewing the past through tinted glasses, though.

And I guess there's an argument to be made that allowing people to simply "brute force" through mechanic segments is "unhealthy design"... but I guess the other side of it would be that understanding when, how, and where to apply "alternative tactics" to still slide through a clear is also rewarding in its own way, since even "salvageable" checks aren't always saved if you make the wrong move at the wrong moment.

[Lieri]

For the current tier the dps check is nothing. You can have 7 deaths and still clear p9s using week 2 gears plus Ex weapon, if you managed to get past levin and lc2. If you make those mechanics easier to recover from, on top of the fact that they are already recoverable with using heal LB if 1 healer is alive, then the fight becomes too easy. We are not even talking about later weeks when people can probably kill the boss during lc2.

P10s is the same. P11s is basically sleepwalking. I havent touched P12s but based on what Im seeing its not as crazy as P8s. Gears are already easier to obtain (less weeks required), we now have 900 tomes plus ex weapon before Savage starts. The dps check becomes easier than last tier, do we really need to make fights easier?

This game's raiding has always been like that. Its not very complicated when it comes into skill check. Its always been about wall mechanics that requires group effort and/or enrage timer that also requires combined group damage to beat. If they want to add fights thay require more personal skill than group skill, that is not about killing mobs like palace of the dead then they need to add a new game mode. Thats the solution, not by nerfing 8 man savage even further.

[Jamini]

whoever thought savage needs constant body checks needs to be put in a straightjacket and locked away for a very long time

people say this makes the raids more """difficult""", and i will concede that it does make them far more artificially difficult. artificial difficulty isn't fun, because you're only as good as your weakest link and you can play your best but one person's mistake punishes everybody with a wipe

Please make sure you are using the right term before using it.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...FakeDifficulty

Artificial Difficulty refers to fluffing up numbers without changing mechanics (I.e. simply giving a mob more health and damage).

Adding difficulty by turning various mechanics into pass-fail states isn't artificial. Especially in the case of savage where every fight has a slew of new mechanics (for that particular boss) to learn.

[Themarvin]

They need to increase the difficulty by much much more... and get away from scripted to AI based gameplay for savage and ultimates....

That way you can't really make any guides and each team or time you go, will be a new experience as the AI will remember how you did it the previous time as for completion.

Also Ultimates being heavy barred in, is fine as well.

[BeautyWhitemage]

I'm thinking this raid tier the best so far，better than Alexandra which story was so yawn！ It is very fun。 I like scary Athenia ；）

They need to increase the difficulty by much much more... and get away from scripted to AI based gameplay for savage and ultimates....

That way you can't really make any guides and each team or time you go, will be a new experience as the AI will remember how you did it the previous time as for completion.

Also Ultimates being heavy barred in, is fine as well.

Why increasing the difficulty？ P12 is already hard and I had a great time with it。

[EderTheBro]

That... is actually a very good point.

If I actually think back to things like, for example, E11S with PF groups, there were certainly many opportunities throughout the encounter to salvage mechanics and power on, but realistically, that was basically just a form of slow torture once the fight was learned... because you'd just end up going through all the motions, only to hit hard Enrage.

I guess in a way, combining stricter mechanic checks with more forgiving Enrage timers just saves you time — rather than "surprising" you with failure after an entire encounter timeline, it just rips the bandage off immediately and tells you to try again.

And thereby denying players any form of skill expression in relation to triage.

The game is already trending towards a place where even in prog the only valuable skill is optimizing damage and following raidplan.io, we don't need to remove other skill expressions even more.

[Eorzean_username]

And thereby denying players any form of skill expression in relation to triage.

The game is already trending towards a place where even in prog the only valuable skill is optimizing damage and following raidplan.io, we don't need to remove other skill expressions even more.

I think it's just different visions for what the developers want the game to be.

Usual disclaimer that I know this is subjective / might be "looking back with tinted glasses" / etc, but...

I feel like older Savage designs were more about creating an experience with a lot of potential paths out of it, and a lot of interesting and unique ways of approaching that — like I think all four floors of Creator were very creative and memorable encounter designs, and eg, Sigmascape, felt like it had a lot of different ways to get from Point A to Point Z depending on strategies, comps, and how-and-what "went wrong" in a given pull.

And the modern Savage design is trying to create more of an "arcade" experience, where what you need to do is more clear, strict, and direct; you just reboot if you do it wrong; the overall experience is meant to be "quicker" and "more efficient"; and the fact that the boss has HP is mostly just to serve as a method of giving the encounter a timeframe to completion, and to provide the player a sense that the buttons they're pressing are "doing something".

...But then again, my selective memory may just be glossing over things like Chadarnook and the realities of Refurbisher, lol.

P11s is boring though.

Actually yeah, what happened to "floor 3s".

I know this is entirely-subjective, but it feels like "Floor 3" used to be more... memorable? Something that built linear momentum and complexity as you worked towards the final floor of a tier — stuff like CC, Halicarnassus, Guardian, Omega.

Then somehow "Floor 3" has become repositioned into a weirdly-rote, drawn-out snoozefest, while "Floor 2" has sometimes (but not consistently) taken over the old "Floor 3" role as the "ahhh, ahhh, ahhhhhhh" fight.

I'm not saying that everything has to be akin to (crosses body) Shadowkeeper's "Bill & Ted's Spatial Reasoning Adventure", but I am a little confused by why "Floor 3" has started to frequently become a prolonged "going through the motions because I want pants" experience.

[Marxam]

i feel like this thread is just a rant on how bad p10s is. I find it easy but getting 7 other ppl who can do that in PF is the real challenge. I've been stuck on enrage since week 1 and its always because we use up an LB or ppl die here and there. I would be more tilted but the glamour this tier is garbage and looks like something you got from the last 24 man raid.

Regardless this shows how bad PF really is and its not helped by the fact that data center travel basically ruined savage raiding on some servers outright.