SE, love the fight design but tone down the instant deaths a touch?

[Colt47]

My favorite extreme fights this expansion were EX1, The Voidcast Daiz and The Abyssal Fracture. EX2 was alright. Barb and Rubi were good mechanically, but I think the aesthetic just put me off. I almost forgot EX3, which I think was really good, but the fact I keep forgetting it exists despite having farmed all the totems might say something about it. It was very approachable to teach a party through it though, which I liked.

All I ever want for fights is for them to just not be what the normal modes are, where nothing matters and everything is too lenient. I want reprisals and raid-wide mitigation to matter. I want personal mitigation to matter. I want the mechanics to not go easy ie. swipe one side but then not the other. Extremes such as the 3 I mentioned strike the right balance for me but also make it realistic to take a party from fresh prog to a clear the same day, which is not so common with Savage for example. This is why they strike the right balance for PF.

We will see what happens next expansion. When Endwalker started things were not as easy as they are now, and there is a problem with the kind of game FFXIV is where once that first .0 launch patch passes, content gets easier and easier due to the world and everything staying at the .0 scaling, while everything after might go up in scaling, but generally ends up being easier anyway. It also ends up in a weird scenario where patches that introduce a new savage tier tend to have the hardest EX fights, because no one can outgear the EX fight severely over the baseline. The EX fight that follows is always out scaled, so it ends up being far easier. Savage has this thing where the first two savage fights are scaled for the patch that the savage launches under, and the last two are scaled for the patch that comes after the launch of the tier OR if the players grind the first two to leapfrog that patch. Technically, pentameld doesn't leapfrog as much as puts someone at the baseline needed to complete all tiers of the savage if they really pushed hard.

The issue savage has is that the content grows stale very quickly and it doesn't feel good to prog after the followup major patch on the current tier. That and as stated earlier, it is sort of turned into the only viable way to get a meaningful reward due to gear level being objectively better than any other option.

[Kuroka]

Sure, maybe these don't all work in savage, but they certainly work in every other type of content that they sacrificed for the sake of what they have now. I stuck around, tried out the expansion for multiple patches, and I have been patient beyond human limits with this entire thing.

My main problem is, it already sucks if stuff is optimized for Savage... just like with gear its always the choke point for everything. We lost so much fun stuff for optimization and steamlining...

[Colt47]

My main problem is, it already sucks if stuff is optimized for Savage... just like with gear its always the choke point for everything. We lost so much fun stuff for optimization and steamlining...

That and there should be a difference between what kind of punishment mechanics there are in savage vs ultimate. Savage is not a dumping ground for someone's incomplete ultimate fight design that they couldn't fit in for production time reasons, and that is exactly what p12s feels like alongside p10s. Put p10s + p12s together into a single coherent fight, and you'd have an ultimate assuming the item level gets scaled to the minimum. That's also why some people are able to get through the fight so much easier than others. If someone has done prior ultimates this expansion they are going to be a bit more used to this kind of thing as being normal. But for someone who has only done savage and ex for the past expansion and this one, it is basically a wall. Like 90% of getting through p12s is everything past the limit cut portion because someone has to get through all the other parts including the limit cut.