So... This is the "improved encounter design"?

[Alice_Rivers]

I do think it's reasonable to expect melee to be able to maintain 90% or more uptime but in savage it shouldn't necessarily be easy to do or even obvious where to position to do so. That should be part of the job difficulty.

[Shurrikhan]

I do think it's reasonable to expect melee to be able to maintain 90% or more uptime but in savage it shouldn't necessarily be easy to do or even obvious where to position to do so. That should be part of the job difficulty.

So long as the same is pretty consistently true for casters' casting and whatever unique role-thematic difficulty physical ranged bring to the table, I'm all for this.

*I'm assuming here that you mean "melee uptime" or "effective uptime" (where our fallback ranged attacks contribute only proportionate to their damage relative to what could be done from melee).

[Raikai]

I do think it's reasonable to expect melee to be able to maintain 90% or more uptime but in savage it shouldn't necessarily be easy to do or even obvious where to position to do so. That should be part of the job difficulty.

I wonder how that situation would change if they kept the melee uptime as it is today, but transfered a big portion of their melee combo potencies to the successful positional hits. This way you're still on the boss, but now there's this layer of difficulty that is in fact a movement constraint too.

[Alice_Rivers]

Both of those seem fairly reasonable to me as a mostly heal/ranged player who mostly dabbles in NIN from time to time. There is obviously the slidecasting element to that so I'm not entirely sure how caster uptime could be constrained but equally I'm not that creative. I suppose it would be reasonable to have some add phase or something where ranged (preferably casters) have to do something to facilitate melee uptime? Mostly the having ranged/casters doing something since I still prefer melee uptime being tied to the melee player's skill rather than dependant on someone else (tank not withstanding since positioning should be their job) doing their job properly. I'm sure people better at melee and the game in general than me will have better ideas.

[Shurrikhan]

There is obviously the slidecasting element to that so I'm not entirely sure how caster uptime could be constrained

A small note that may be of use:

Everyone has access to 100% uptime, technically, regardless of content, due to fall-back options. It's effective uptime, the portion of maximum striking dummy DPS or the available positioning required for that, that differs with context.

Some variance in the term effective uptime:

• Can be used to describe actual portion of damage produced, in which case it's basically just %yield.
• Can be used to describe just one's potential for output rather than actual output, including positional access.
• Can be used to describe only what requires melee range / standing time, rather than positionals or anything outside of one's control beyond those two concerns (interested more in basic potential than real output).

[Alice_Rivers]

That makes sense. I think we're in agreement.

[Valence]

I find myself unimpressed by the savage fights on the whole after doing normal.

2 and 3 especially felt like there was a lot more dynamic movement that couldn't be planned in normal to maintain uptime, while savage m2 only retains alarm pheromones 1 and none of the random ground targeted actions, and m3 has almost no chasing the boss for uptime, no bomb layout differences and no baited ground AoEs.

I also find myself cynically thinking this is because they thought players wouldn't be able to deal with these more random mechanics without raising a big stink about it as we already see from alarm pheromone complaints. There seems to be a mentality among players that we should all be able to always maintain perfect uptime and not have to measure any opportunity costs to do so, and the devs kept designing fights in this way because it can feel bad for players otherwise, like they've been cheated or something.

It's going to take time for players to change on this because we're so used to living in our perfectly mapped encounter timelines to the point that job design has followed suit with things like 0 damage gap closers, gap closer charge accumulation, no-cost sprint, free healing almost everywhere and almost 100% effective knockback immunity.

But at least, this tier, boss hitboxes are mostly smaller, the final fight isn't absolutely riddled with 'puzzle' mechanics that are only fun to solve but not to play, and alarm pheromones at least exists in Savage. M2s and M4s pace is a little bit faster than what we often have so we're not just whacking a boss doing nothing for 50+ seconds (thanks, Brute Bomber). We're on a more fun trajectory, I think. I just hope they don't stop here because it's not quite enough as it is.

Because that's how the game at higher level is designed to be all about rehearsing a DDR script.
Because that's why they keep removing procs and rng on jobs all the time to get closer and closer to an unchanging, unvariable script you have to do again and again and again when progging. And then when weekly reclearing.
Because they'd rather have each encounter fully mapped on an excel sheet for optimization, even if you could technically just run an elaborate macro that would just do the rotation for you (it's already been done on SMN and DRG back in Apshodelos).
Because the player skills that are put under the spotlight those days are exclusively about muscle memory and pattern memorization, and not adjustment, agency and choice on the spot.

And let's be honest, if they made everything truly random (not just the role agnostic mechanics of recent ultimates, that are already run with bots and third party everywhere because that's like playing speed chess against a grandmaster), they'd need to tone down the fight complexity immensely much the same way it used to be less complicated back when job kits and the battle system overall had more meat to it and was more demanding. Today everything is fueled into encounters, so the rest has to accommodate for this as a result. I'm not a WoW player but from what I've seen even mythic mechanics are a lot less intricate and impressive mechanically and their class rotations are basic in comparison (but have/had a lot of rng/apm), but they'll mess you up hard because everything is randomized to the bone.

[Shurrikhan]

Ehh, spec optimizations lack the easily conveyable rigid patterns of XIVs and APLs are generally unconditional and therefore oversimplified and so WoW specs will generally appear less complex, but as soon as one gets into adaptive and preemptive management, the complexity for fully optimization easily and greatly exceeds XIV's for most jobs/specs. And many of the mechanics are still plenty complex, just not necessarily from a DDR perspective.

[BigCheez]

I did think this tier was a little on the easy side but it was also miles ahead of anything from Endwalker in terms of fun so I'll take it. 8/10 from me. Happy with it.

[Valence]

Ehh, spec optimizations lack the easily conveyable rigid patterns of XIVs and APLs are generally unconditional and therefore oversimplified and so WoW specs will generally appear less complex, but as soon as one gets into adaptive and preemptive management, the complexity for fully optimization easily and greatly exceeds XIV's for most jobs/specs. And many of the mechanics are still plenty complex, just not necessarily from a DDR perspective.

Sometimes outside of the crazy apm, not gonna lie, I feel that I have more of a wow player profile in spite of being absolutely unwilling to get into it.