Anyone else who did this savage tier feel like it was rushed?

[localareanetwork]

To preface this, I will start by saying I did enjoy it, and that I thought it was challenging.
I'll go through the most notable examples I noticed during my progression:

M9S
The part where you dodge the big saw near the start of the fight is literally just dodging aoes that are incredibly telegraphed and obvious. The normal mode version of this mechanic has an additional light party stack element to it that's just completely missing from savage.

M10 and M11 have extremely large sections of it where you basically do nothing, especially 11, which repeats the exact same mechanic for 6 minutes.

M12S
This is by far the biggest example of it, and the fight I have the most issues with, despite the mechanics being fun themselves. Phase 1 still has all the weird stuff from normal mode like the lack of boss voice over, his sudden appearance, and the extremely shoehorned unfitting music. In savage, the phase 1 fight is very bare bones. Phase 2 feels just as if not even more haphazardly thrown together.

1. No voice lines, again. You'd think for a second phase of the final savage fight of the expansion, we'd get something much more grandiose. It feels really hollow fighting a guy who doesn't even react to your presence.

2. No explanation on what the hell Lindwurm 2 is supposed to be. Is it folklore? Is it a glimpse of the President's look as a humanoid? Lindwurms in FF in general are just fodder over world mobs, so it's definitely not that. We never see the "ancient, mythical Lindwurm" that he is said to have injected himself with the soul of either, so..

3. Mechanics are usually very themed with the boss that casts them, and as far as I know, Lindwurms (low level overworld mob? Danish folklore? Arcadion President?) are not proprietors of elemental magic like how Lindwurm 2 does here, so was it just arbitrarily decided? (They're cool as a stand alone, don't get me wrong, but they have no connection to the boss as far as I can tell). I feel like you could replace this guy with a stock unity asset and it'd feel the exact same. I actually have a crackhead theory that Idyllic Dream was a scrapped FRU mechanic.

4. Music is reused from the cutscenes. It's a great track, don't get me wrong, but there's to my knowledge never been a savage only phase where the background track is reused from the story cutscenes.

5. Bugs. Quite a few them in the tier. Literally look at the patch 7.41 notes and you'll see there are/were bugs for every single fight in this tier. I'm not sure the wind tower bug in Idyllic Dream is fixed yet as of writing this either.

To wrap up, it just seems like they kind of rushed the the tier in a creative and mechanical standpoint, as well as testing in general. Anyone else feel the same way? It doesn't really fill me with much confidence in that they'll deliver all the things they're meant to deliver in this patch (and 7.5), let alone deliver them without issues. (They have to give us more OC/Forked Tower areas, criterion, more cosmic exploration, MSQ dungeon/trial, Beastmaster, AND a new ultimate?)

[0blivion]

M9S was so sleepy I just gave up on the tier.

[Jeeqbit]

No, I absolutely do not think it was rushed.

You can see the work they put into M9S on many levels to work with the concept of it. I will say that they very clearly and obviously used some of the Steamroller mechanic from A10S given how almost nobody playing today will be familiar with it, though.

Avoiding the AoEs isn't actually obvious. It got everyone in blind runs of even the normal mode. Eventually you figure out that the AoEs are cleaving left or right side at the end, but what is initially challenging is forgetting this when the adds die and thinking that this somehow stops the boss doing it.

The chains glowing blue at the end wasn't quite so obvious to me because of everything else going on, and took me a while. And then there is the second phase of it with towers and chains and everything, which once again has some similarites to a phase in (A10 and A10S). Given people's struggles with the mechanics after that, I'd say they must not have rushed it.

M10 and M11 have extremely large sections of it where you basically do nothing, especially 11, which repeats the exact same mechanic for 6 minutes.

M10S just really feels like fighting surfers. I feel like they did such a good job trying to make you "surf" with them using FFXIV mechanics. Running towards the globe and adjusting to how the surf board looks is pretty neat, as is baiting the surfers' jumps in various ways.

Having sections of it where you "basically do nothing" is more about the speed of the mechanics than anything else. The actual design was clearly not rushed and if anything, they put more effort into M10 and M10S than others.

As for 11, it seems overly basic. You know, the in, out, diagonal, stacks, spreads, etc. And then finishing with stack towers. I didn't really understand why they chose a Behemoth of all things (maybe a localization thing that I don't get).

This is by far the biggest example of it, and the fight I have the most issues with, despite the mechanics being fun themselves. Phase 1 still has all the weird stuff from normal mode like the lack of boss voice over, his sudden appearance, and the extremely shoehorned unfitting music. In savage, the phase 1 fight is very bare bones. Phase 2 feels just as if not even more haphazardly thrown together.

They got the music sent to them out of the blue, as a present, from a famous band. Did you not read about that?

They said they had their team working on creating a fight that would fit the music and to assist with this, they had the music playing the entire time they were designing it. It's very challenging to do this, because normally they make the music fit the content, not the reverse, so if you think they didn't pull it off then I guess it's just hard to do.

I did think it could have been more of a fire-aspected boss but what's done is done. They obviously would not rush a fight that is for a band that they grew up listening to and are massive fans of.

No explanation on what the hell Lindwurm 2 is supposed to be.

All I know is it's meant to be a creature from Lindblum, which in FF9 was a big castle you could travel to. We were meant to kill this beast for its blood, which was the cure to the disease and is why they became the egg's host.

It doesn't really fill me with much confidence in that they'll deliver all the things they're meant to deliver in this patch (and 7.5), let alone deliver them without issues.

I'm not concerned about whether they will deliver them. Whether they will deliver them without issues, well, they've made a whole lodestone post about quality issues and why they happen, so if they still happen, then they didn't fix the source of those issues yet.

[Rithy255]

Ok so I've only done m9s and m10s and most of m11s so far... (On a diff character as I know people love to look at logs)

I think m9s is pretty easy but its a good introduction fight, I don't think the first fight needs to be that much harder then a EXT personally I should be a step above.
M10S is s very good, I think the fight, one of my favourite fights, I think the introduction part is a bit slow (where you fight them solo) past that it's honestly a 10/10.
M11S I like the dodging and fast reaction timing it has, it ramps up pretty quickly and I generally don't find it to be a chore, the second half I'm still doing prog of but I really like it so far.

I mean I think its down to personal opinion I haven't played all of arcadian savage (I hard missed the middle turn) but I do geuinely see it as a massive improvement over endwalkers raids. Savage and normal actually.

[Hyperia]

My speculation is that, as this is the last of the non-quantum raids, they decided to wrap it up as quickly as possible so they can redirect resources elsewhere.

This could be to help improve the next forked tower savage mode (not quantum) or start up development work on 8.0 raids as quantum is going to require more work to get up and running.

Ultimate is out of this equation as it has its own team.

[Underscore]

Haven't done M12, but so far I think they're good. M11's weapons are a fun mechanic so I'm glad they're repeated, at least as a melee player.