This post will be filled with constructive critizism of the current state of Savage.
I have raided in this game since the start of Heavensward, first as a WHM, now as a BLM. I'm in a midcore group which has the ability to clear everything, only limited by work and time constraints. The current raid tier is honestly depressingly easy. Even in comparison to any Omega tier. My raid group has raided on average once per week, we're supposed to raid 3 times per week, but we've had the worst luck. If we were to have the same consistent raid nights as we had in Omega, we would've cleared E4S in just half the time we needed to clear God Kefka. My group also does every fight blind, we figure out everything ourselves (and tbh, there's not much figuring out needed for this savage tier). There are very specific aspect of the raid designs which I'll talk about, which has made this raid tier just boring (Titan being the only one with consistently good mechanics).
Now with Ultimate releasing, which seems to be more difficult than the previous iterations, it means that there is once again NOTHING between Ultimate and Savage. The same complaint people had in Gordias between Normal and Savage. Ultimate is too time consuming to attempt and Savage is just easy and mostly a breeze, and really doesn't deserve the title of Savage.
1. Stop wasting time casting
This is one of the biggest issues I have with the game recently. Everything is a cast bar or a very specific marker. EVERYTHING. Tankbusters, raid-wide AoE and just pointless things like "Refreshing Shower" in E3S (THIS ONE DOESN'T NEED A CAST BAR... JUST DO THE ANIMATION AND WE'LL GET WHAT'S HAPPENING) being the biggest offenders. Do you seriously need to put a 3-5 second castbar on every AoE or tankbuster? It's such a waste of time. A3S, as infamous as it was, if every hard hitting tank damage and AoE in that had a 5 second cast bar, the fight would've been minutes longer. The hand swipes and Splash being two examples.
Now I have to exaggerate this to make sure the point actually makes you think. But to put an even more ridiculous example. A1S. The first Savage fight people encountered. Oppressor had continuous hard hitting tank abilities and AoEs. And those VERY CLOSE TO EACH OTHER. I can't specify how insane A1S was in terms of damage output when you had 190-200 gear (remember you couldn't even meld tomestone/raid gear back then). Healers could easily get MP issues. You had to heal the tanks for getting hit hard, but also people with the prey, which was just a long barrage of damage needing constant healing. There are so many elements of A1S which still makes it a more healing intensive fight than most Savage fights made the past 2 years.
I'm not saying that cast times should be eliminated. But, heavily consider to shorten the time between generic AoE abilities and phase transition abilities. E2S for example. One of the most boring fights I have ever encountered. The last phase before Cycle of Chaos/Retribution. You do nothing. Nothing really happens. Then 10 seconds of stuff, then nothing for another 30-45 seconds. E3S suffers not as much, but there's still a lot of time where you just do nothing. Tidal Rage/Wave could just become instant. Rage happening and the Wave spawning at the same time, and then hitting after destroying the platforms as it currently does.
My point. Get on with it. 8-10 second time gap between two AoEs is too much. It makes having two in a row, completely pointless. Reduce it to less than 5, so the healers need to use their cooldowns and utility to get the party back up.
2. Speaking of tanks getting hit
Sure, we have auto-attacks in the game, and they do a little bit. Clearly not enough for me to care as a BLM when tanking Leviathan when a tank dies. Back to A1S-A4S. Tanks not only got auto-attacks, they got hit by instant damage abilities which pretty much did around 60-80% of their HP. Where else did this happen... hmm. Oh yeah, nearly every ARR Trial and Dungeon. Something was lost, and SE didn't find it. This is the one thing Savage has been missing to make tanking/healing a little more tricky. Sure no one likes it when they die from those, but letting them deal 50% of the tanks HP and let them happen 2-3 times within 10-12 seconds seems quite a good way of getting it a bit more sweaty. Also put one or two of those instant raid-wide AoEs there so the healers need to figure out how to prioritize and optimize. Also let the DPS have something to do during that so we're not sitting ducks.
tl;dr there needs to be more sudden and repeated burst damage without getting delayed by castbars
3. Mid-fight DPS checks/tankbusting adds
For some reason this is completely gone. The meteors in E1S are barely anything of note. O3S had both the Chimera and the White Flame. Not entirely DPS checks, but you really didn't want them to stay alive and roast the tanks either. Nearly every single fight in Alexander had a mid-fight DPS check or add. Hand of Pain and the hand grabbing a healer in A3S (twice mind you), the, Steamroller in A10S and EDD in A11S being the most notable.
I want these back because they demand DPS or a tank/healing check before the end. Usually more difficult than the soft/hard enrage. Also so that my raid group need to learn to optimize their jobs (and all the other raid groups that are more on the casual side). Also I want to see these DPS checks being DPS ONLY. Make so they have a buff making them only take damage from DPS and maybe 1/2 damage from tanks and none from healers. And make sure LB is not a viable cheese option by putting in two of them in the same fight within a minute or two of each other.
4. Hey SE, remember when heavy/slow/bind/sleep was a thing?
You know what happened with the release of Stormblood. We got role actions! SE were finally going to make use of them in raids! Now you had your separate ability to put slow/heavy/bind/sleep on targets! Maybe we get to use them more in Omega than we did on A3S and A6S!
...nope. This was probably my biggest disappointment with that change. Not that it was very important for Omega, but it gave crowd control roles to the healers/DPS to do these tasks in Alexander. I want to see these return, simply because they can introduce interesting new mechanics. For example, needing to sleep a mob, but having to keep it close to the boss, making any AoE ability not usable. It could hurt some jobs, like DNC, but it only needs to be a thing for just 10-20 seconds, maybe 2-3 times in a fight. Or longer, but only once during one of the more difficult streaks of mechanics.
Seriously, a return of these mechanics would make sure mechanics don't end up being stale by E12S.
I just want to see savage being more difficult. I don't want savage to be something most people can clear within a month. I think the midcore raiders, having 7-8 hours per week on average, shouldn't be able to clear Savage before the 24-man patch releases, or a few weeks before that.
The current tier is also really bad in another way. There's no significant difficulty ladder. Savage should be designed in a way which lets the more casual players be able to clear the first 3 fights before the next raid tier, maybe the 4th if they're actually taking the step to improve at the game. The goal of Savage should not be to let everyone breeze through every fight. It should let everyone be able to clear the hardest fight that is within their skill. And that might very well be the 2nd fight, and not clear the 3rd or 4th. That is fine. I want to the difficulty of the 4th fight be between A3S and A12S. Not to be a breeze to get through, but to feel within reach of those able to get there. Ultimate then does the job of being even more difficult than those, by being a bit more intense and much longer. And SE, please make the first fight of Savage more difficult than the Extreme Trials... It's actually ridiculous.
But right now, like I said earlier, the difficulty difference between E4S and Ultimate is so large, that E4S is too easy and Ultimate feels unreachable for a static trying to raid 9 hours per week. And my interest in the game is falling because of this, and many other poor decisions SE are making into streamlining and simplifying with the apparent goal to remove the small amounts of depth the game had in its gameplay.
Continue reading...
I have raided in this game since the start of Heavensward, first as a WHM, now as a BLM. I'm in a midcore group which has the ability to clear everything, only limited by work and time constraints. The current raid tier is honestly depressingly easy. Even in comparison to any Omega tier. My raid group has raided on average once per week, we're supposed to raid 3 times per week, but we've had the worst luck. If we were to have the same consistent raid nights as we had in Omega, we would've cleared E4S in just half the time we needed to clear God Kefka. My group also does every fight blind, we figure out everything ourselves (and tbh, there's not much figuring out needed for this savage tier). There are very specific aspect of the raid designs which I'll talk about, which has made this raid tier just boring (Titan being the only one with consistently good mechanics).
Now with Ultimate releasing, which seems to be more difficult than the previous iterations, it means that there is once again NOTHING between Ultimate and Savage. The same complaint people had in Gordias between Normal and Savage. Ultimate is too time consuming to attempt and Savage is just easy and mostly a breeze, and really doesn't deserve the title of Savage.
1. Stop wasting time casting
This is one of the biggest issues I have with the game recently. Everything is a cast bar or a very specific marker. EVERYTHING. Tankbusters, raid-wide AoE and just pointless things like "Refreshing Shower" in E3S (THIS ONE DOESN'T NEED A CAST BAR... JUST DO THE ANIMATION AND WE'LL GET WHAT'S HAPPENING) being the biggest offenders. Do you seriously need to put a 3-5 second castbar on every AoE or tankbuster? It's such a waste of time. A3S, as infamous as it was, if every hard hitting tank damage and AoE in that had a 5 second cast bar, the fight would've been minutes longer. The hand swipes and Splash being two examples.
Now I have to exaggerate this to make sure the point actually makes you think. But to put an even more ridiculous example. A1S. The first Savage fight people encountered. Oppressor had continuous hard hitting tank abilities and AoEs. And those VERY CLOSE TO EACH OTHER. I can't specify how insane A1S was in terms of damage output when you had 190-200 gear (remember you couldn't even meld tomestone/raid gear back then). Healers could easily get MP issues. You had to heal the tanks for getting hit hard, but also people with the prey, which was just a long barrage of damage needing constant healing. There are so many elements of A1S which still makes it a more healing intensive fight than most Savage fights made the past 2 years.
I'm not saying that cast times should be eliminated. But, heavily consider to shorten the time between generic AoE abilities and phase transition abilities. E2S for example. One of the most boring fights I have ever encountered. The last phase before Cycle of Chaos/Retribution. You do nothing. Nothing really happens. Then 10 seconds of stuff, then nothing for another 30-45 seconds. E3S suffers not as much, but there's still a lot of time where you just do nothing. Tidal Rage/Wave could just become instant. Rage happening and the Wave spawning at the same time, and then hitting after destroying the platforms as it currently does.
My point. Get on with it. 8-10 second time gap between two AoEs is too much. It makes having two in a row, completely pointless. Reduce it to less than 5, so the healers need to use their cooldowns and utility to get the party back up.
2. Speaking of tanks getting hit
Sure, we have auto-attacks in the game, and they do a little bit. Clearly not enough for me to care as a BLM when tanking Leviathan when a tank dies. Back to A1S-A4S. Tanks not only got auto-attacks, they got hit by instant damage abilities which pretty much did around 60-80% of their HP. Where else did this happen... hmm. Oh yeah, nearly every ARR Trial and Dungeon. Something was lost, and SE didn't find it. This is the one thing Savage has been missing to make tanking/healing a little more tricky. Sure no one likes it when they die from those, but letting them deal 50% of the tanks HP and let them happen 2-3 times within 10-12 seconds seems quite a good way of getting it a bit more sweaty. Also put one or two of those instant raid-wide AoEs there so the healers need to figure out how to prioritize and optimize. Also let the DPS have something to do during that so we're not sitting ducks.
tl;dr there needs to be more sudden and repeated burst damage without getting delayed by castbars
3. Mid-fight DPS checks/tankbusting adds
For some reason this is completely gone. The meteors in E1S are barely anything of note. O3S had both the Chimera and the White Flame. Not entirely DPS checks, but you really didn't want them to stay alive and roast the tanks either. Nearly every single fight in Alexander had a mid-fight DPS check or add. Hand of Pain and the hand grabbing a healer in A3S (twice mind you), the, Steamroller in A10S and EDD in A11S being the most notable.
I want these back because they demand DPS or a tank/healing check before the end. Usually more difficult than the soft/hard enrage. Also so that my raid group need to learn to optimize their jobs (and all the other raid groups that are more on the casual side). Also I want to see these DPS checks being DPS ONLY. Make so they have a buff making them only take damage from DPS and maybe 1/2 damage from tanks and none from healers. And make sure LB is not a viable cheese option by putting in two of them in the same fight within a minute or two of each other.
4. Hey SE, remember when heavy/slow/bind/sleep was a thing?
You know what happened with the release of Stormblood. We got role actions! SE were finally going to make use of them in raids! Now you had your separate ability to put slow/heavy/bind/sleep on targets! Maybe we get to use them more in Omega than we did on A3S and A6S!
...nope. This was probably my biggest disappointment with that change. Not that it was very important for Omega, but it gave crowd control roles to the healers/DPS to do these tasks in Alexander. I want to see these return, simply because they can introduce interesting new mechanics. For example, needing to sleep a mob, but having to keep it close to the boss, making any AoE ability not usable. It could hurt some jobs, like DNC, but it only needs to be a thing for just 10-20 seconds, maybe 2-3 times in a fight. Or longer, but only once during one of the more difficult streaks of mechanics.
Seriously, a return of these mechanics would make sure mechanics don't end up being stale by E12S.
I just want to see savage being more difficult. I don't want savage to be something most people can clear within a month. I think the midcore raiders, having 7-8 hours per week on average, shouldn't be able to clear Savage before the 24-man patch releases, or a few weeks before that.
The current tier is also really bad in another way. There's no significant difficulty ladder. Savage should be designed in a way which lets the more casual players be able to clear the first 3 fights before the next raid tier, maybe the 4th if they're actually taking the step to improve at the game. The goal of Savage should not be to let everyone breeze through every fight. It should let everyone be able to clear the hardest fight that is within their skill. And that might very well be the 2nd fight, and not clear the 3rd or 4th. That is fine. I want to the difficulty of the 4th fight be between A3S and A12S. Not to be a breeze to get through, but to feel within reach of those able to get there. Ultimate then does the job of being even more difficult than those, by being a bit more intense and much longer. And SE, please make the first fight of Savage more difficult than the Extreme Trials... It's actually ridiculous.
But right now, like I said earlier, the difficulty difference between E4S and Ultimate is so large, that E4S is too easy and Ultimate feels unreachable for a static trying to raid 9 hours per week. And my interest in the game is falling because of this, and many other poor decisions SE are making into streamlining and simplifying with the apparent goal to remove the small amounts of depth the game had in its gameplay.
Continue reading...