Just unlock the Raid Tier already!

[Sensui]

Players - Raid with those you know and like. Having fun together tackling the challenge should outweigh how long it takes to clear and any rewards. The experience just isn't the same when you're raiding with mostly random players you don't know, likely won't see again and only care about getting what they want without concern for others in the party.

I've raided in statics and I've raided via PUGs. To be honest, I cleared fights in this last tier faster in PUGs because I could spend all day/week doing a fight until I clear vs the 6 hrs a week or so in a static. No schedule conflicts or people canceling last minute.. no growing animosity towards your raid team.. I actually enjoy it more, which surprised myself. The worst part is just fighting over your clock spot. :P

[Ath192]

I've raided in statics and I've raided via PUGs. To be honest, I cleared fights in this last tier faster in PUGs because I could spend all day/week doing a fight until I clear vs the 6 hrs a week or so in a static. No schedule conflicts or people canceling last minute.. no growing animosity towards your raid team.. I actually enjoy it more, which surprised myself. The worst part is just fighting over your clock spot. :P

I've raided in both settings, and while what you say is true, this is also true about PF, you get hostile people, you get people dropping after two wipes, if there is one person not pulling their weight the whole group disbands normally instead of just kicking them, sometimes you have wait a long time for a PF to fill. Late in the tier the quality of players drops quite a bit and things take longer. You can't reliably BIS or count on gear because everyone is going to need everything every fight. You may genuinely be stuck waiting 8 weeks for your weapon to buy it with books and you may never get the mount. Once the fight is down by a static you can usually clear quickly every week whereas in PF you're going to have to grind it out and hope you get good people. By the time a static can do all 4 raids in under 2-3 hours every week you still might spend 5+ in PF.

So there's a lot of cons to PF raiding as well. I would say you may be able to clear the tier faster pugging hard core, but in the end you waste a lot more time gearing up and getting your reclears done.

[Sensui]

Most definitely. PF is a hellscape.

[Colt47]

Part of it is game design but part of it is also a player problem.

Game design - Instead of making the next set of crafted gear a higher item level than the previous Savage, it should be the same item level. That way the previous Savage gear remains relevant into the next tier instead of getting discarded for the new crafted. The new crafted will still be useful for those who don't do Savage and who missed out on a couple of upgrades from the last tier. This would have the added benefit of slowing down power creep, which is extremely noticeable when using latest gear to clear level cap content released at the start of an expansion.

Players - Raid with those you know and like. Having fun together tackling the challenge should outweigh how long it takes to clear and any rewards. The experience just isn't the same when you're raiding with mostly random players you don't know, likely won't see again and only care about getting what they want without concern for others in the party.

Power creep isn't as much of the problem as is the way the fights are built. There is no way to manage a fight in PF or even in statics where a single person or two people can cause everyone else to zone out of the content because of being unable to reach the next point in the puzzle they are trying to solve, which means there is a hard cap on how difficult content can be made in this game due to the audience it is primarily targeting. Also it is pretty clear from this tier that they didn't have the capability to test and understand the issues with the current tier of savage. Just dropping the statistics down so the dev team can do the fight and say that these numbers look right, can't account for the much lower level of coordination there is among the community at large.

In essence, the mistake they made was thinking that by simplifying the jobs they could make the savage fights more strict, when in reality the only thing that simplifying the jobs can do is make the savage fights less difficult. And honestly, that is what most people wanted: Less difficult savage that is more predictable in clear rate. Not all the people want that, but the vast majority want it and simply aren't saying it or are oblivious to it, given they actively say they want a challenge yet regret ever spending the time to complete it. The praise and scorn completely fall on how fast people clear, not on the difficulty of the content.

[Ardeth]

Gearing in the short term matters. Gearing in the long term is pointless. In this game, at the current moment, the smartest thing to do is cap your poetics and wait for Dawntrail to launch. Then, you can buy a full set of 660 gear with the weapon fully upgraded for peanuts. It's a giant flaw in this game that gear only matters in the short term. If you restrict the player, it's more of a waiting game until the player either powers through it or gives up entirely. Either way this late in a tier timegating the gear serves SE in Time Played Metric. That's the amount of subscription they can milk out of you for a given activity. It benefits SE to keep moving your goal post because that milks the most amount of money out of you.

But instead of complaining about something you can not change, I would offer an alternative. Don't feed the monkey. Show them with your wallet. And get off the hamster wheel, so to speak.

[Colt47]

I've raided in statics and I've raided via PUGs. To be honest, I cleared fights in this last tier faster in PUGs because I could spend all day/week doing a fight until I clear vs the 6 hrs a week or so in a static. No schedule conflicts or people canceling last minute.. no growing animosity towards your raid team.. I actually enjoy it more, which surprised myself. The worst part is just fighting over your clock spot. :P

It depends on what people want out of savage. There's basically the WoW mindset and the FFXIV mindset. The WoW mindset people want to grind this thing and clear it as fast as possible. The FFXIV mindset usually just wants to do this as a chill thing and clear it going at a steady pace. I can tell you that my experience with Aether was effectively discovering that the WoW mindset is quite alive in this game and just as damaging to ones psyche as it was back in WoW proper.

Big issue with the mercenary behavior that WoW encouraged is that FFXIV fights are not setup the same way. WoWs fights did have mechanics to learn, but put more emphasis on the gear people had equipped so a few deaths were never as big of a deal in that game in terms of learning progress. People would be wiping to a boss they already got all the mechanics down for sometimes as people were catching up. Savage in this game just walls people until they learn the step and the strategy to go along with it, so someone being behind just murders everyone in the PF group.

[Orinori]

This game is in desperate need of rewards that aren't just thrown away in the next patch. Make items that scale up with level increases, similarly to how FF11 Rajas ring or other rewards worked. I want algear that gives ability augments, goddammit. Not just ilvl increases.

Not happening, the dev team is absolutely **terrified** of loot. Especially gear. Gear gives them night terrors. The idea of giving the player any meaningful form of progression to their character in an MMO, the genre of game known for the long-lasting character progression, is just abhorrent to this dev team. You get an orchestrion roll for the house you'll never get, or a minion for the game mode that hasn't had an update in 3,685 days. Now be a good FFXIV player and go play other games while you pay your sub.

[Colt47]

Not happening, the dev team is absolutely **terrified** of loot. Especially gear. Gear gives them night terrors. The idea of giving the player any meaningful form of progression to their character in an MMO, the genre of game known for the long-lasting character progression, is just abhorrent to this dev team. You get an orchestrion roll for the house you'll never get, or a minion for the game mode that hasn't had an update in 3,685 days. Now be a good FFXIV player and go play other games while you pay your sub.

The story behind the disaster that was Endwalker savage is that in the devs minds, they intended the savage and ultimate to be more niche, but a huge amount of people got into savage in shadowbringers and then were encouraged to try out savage at the start of end walker, resulting in a huge influx of people that have less time than say, people who can clear savage in a month, do an EX blind, and then go do ultimate to wait for the next tier. So the difficulty of the content was ramped up too much for the actual people doing it. And on top of it all, people all gathered together in one place due to the DC travel so you had people saying "folks from Crystal are bad" or "People from Aether are toxic WoW refugees", with drama popping all over. The lucky people were those who had statics and got to ignore the garbage fire caused by this. What I personally found surprising is that SEs reaction to this was to make the final tier a literal body check hell while also reducing the tomes needed for loot. I guess they wanted to scare off the audience that ended up jumping into savage from Shadowbringers? I got no idea. If people like something, you don't normally decide to throw ghost pepper hot sauce on it and start going at them with pepper spray as a business strategy so I doubt they did any of this on purpose.