Hey look, it’s more footage of me being trash (progging xDD). I’m capable but I’m a pretty average player and PF can be rough. Please have mercy on me.
I kinda wish that you didnt forfeit loot by skipping into a later fight; that way you could prioritize progging whatever fight youre on, and then if you still have time that week, you could go back and do reclears for loot. 🤷♀️
My links:
ASMR channel: https://www.youtube.com/@aithereaasmr
Discord: https://discord.gg/dFP2txVKbv
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/aitherea
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Aitherea
Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/aitherea
Throne Gifts: https://thronegifts.com/u/aitherea
Join this channel to get access to perks:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaM69Iw3I3V3D5tJjviLbEw/join
Chapters:
0:00 – 0:20 I love this tier
00:20 – 0:50 My Savage Experience
0:51 – 4:07 Easier DPS Checks
4:07 – 5:45 It’s still a challenge
5:45 – 6:42 About “enjoyability”
6:43 – 8:48 I thought you wanted to skip mechanics
8:48 – 10:53 Why not get a static?
10:53 – 11:36 Not everyone cares about minmaxing/optimization
11:36 – 13:33 Less Burnout
13:33 – 14:27 FUN matters most!
14:27 – 15:11 Fun challenge vs frustrating challenge
15:11 – 16:04 Recovery is fun
16:04 – 16:48 Recovery = faster prog
16:48 – 19:14 I’m not a traditional savage raider
19:14 – 19:22 Is that the message?
19:22 – 20:47 What’s important to me
20:48 – 21:16 What are your thoughts on this raid tier?
source
PF can be pretty frustating people who leave after one pull, people that are just needlessly mean. Like everyone is trying their best and trying to learn. And I don't know about other people but my first pulls of the day always suck, I need to warm up and remember the fight again. I went to reclear m1 this week and my first pulls were awful, so I got kicked which I get. I cleared it with another party in pf after. I basically do all my raiding in pf, cuz finding a good static has been impossible and I kinda have given up there.
So I haven't ran any of the current tier savages but it seems fun. I am willing to bet you're entirely correct as well. 😌
I don't personally care about world 1st, but I don't mind then supporting that cause it can generate a bit of hype for the game. Other than that I completely agree with Aitherea. It's like people live in a bubble and didn't see what happened in WoW. They catered to the top 1% and now the game is dying. The other thing with FF14 is that they already let you create your own difficulty. You can either go in with min ilvl (no materia), or you can go back later and solo it or undersize.
I think Aitherea made another good point (I'm paraphrasing here) but how difficulty doesn't equal fun. That's another lesson that should have been learned from "hardcore"names that are either dying or failing to retain a playerbase.
I also liked editor Aitherea's point about how people always talk about being precise and doing things a certain way to skip mechanics… And now all of a sudden skipping mechanics is a bad thing?
You wanna see the enrage timer? Just get to near the end and stop attacking. Done
To me, people complaining about this tier of Savage are just making up drama and fake problems.
The dps check was basically non existent due Pictomancer being so strong during launch. Instead of nerfing the brand new expac job, they buffed a lot of other jobs to that level. However they didn't adjust the raidboss's HP to compensate because they didn't want to mess anything up. Basically phone it in, let a lot of folks get their savage tier clears and enjoy Dawntrail raiding. Now that the job dps has been (mostly) dialed in, they can tune future fights to be a little more competitive.
I took me like 2 weeks to get my m2s clear after I learned the fight and got pretty good at it. Thats how much Pf I did, like on a few a hours a day too. You can know the fight like the back of your hand but that doesnt mean your gonna get a clear, you cant control 7 other players. Im way better at m2 than I am at m1, cuz m2 took so much more work.
13:20 Ai acting like there are other games to play then XIV. Or things to do other than raiding. Next she'll go on about doing things in real life, like walking dogs or eating a balanced meal
I alway's love dropping by and giving you a kisten, I enjoy you're Streams. <3 😊
It's just really light dps checks and lack of body checks making prog easy. It's all good its a first tier and we have savage and ultimate coming. It's good we clear early so we can gear alts jobs for ultimate and savage alliance.
Girl i swear we are in the same boat this is why i just dnt do savage content!! U had me at anxiety and freedom 🤣🤣🤣
Didn't watch the video but before that I have to say that clearing the last criterion is being way more complex than clearing any of the raids of the actual tier, they weren't too hard for me but not easy either
I've been raiding off and on since 2015 starting with Alexander and I agree. This tier has been FUN. This is my first time not healing savage and I'm enjoying the body checks because it makes everyone look at what they're doing and improve since we have to in order to clear. I've gained a lot of confidence in my ability to learn and adjust, and as a SMN, I enjoy helping out my teammates with rezzes while keeping my uptime high. There's so many things that one could look at and improve and it not get stale.
I think m2 and 3 were the only enrages my group saw. personally think the dps check should be a little tighter. Clearing p12s for the first time we saw enrage a few times then we cleared at the last possible moment in the fight it was a cool feeling did not get that this tier.
Whenever a niche segment of the FF community is complaining about something, I remember what Xenosys Vex said: "If you don't like something in the game, that's fine. It's not for you. It's for other people. The devs don't care what you want, they try to do things that lots of people want." He was talking about the Island Sanctuary at the time, and how he doesn't particularly like it, but he's happy it's in the game because there are people who absolutely love it. And the more things that there is in game that more people like, the more people will keep playing. Which ultimately leads to more money coming in, which lets the devs introduce even more things.
The opposite of this is true in MMOs like WoW, where the devs get hyperfixated on what the tiny vocal minority wants (in WoW's case, the hardcore end-game top 0.01% raiders) and wind up catering the game to them. And that's how you go from a player base of 14 million active subscribers to less than 1 million.
20:24 caught with pants down!?
nothing will ever beat eden
the funny thing is its not the good players who are complaaining, nor is it the averaage players. its the players who THINK theyre good but are actually garbage that are complaining.
I would say a raid shouldn't really be considered easy based on dps checks. True, dps checks on this tier are not very demanding, but to actually hit a dps check is based on several factors: how well a player knows how to play their job, how well they do the mechanics, gear, to name some. If a group can handle all of the factors well, then dps checks are no issue. In my view, it's the mechanics that mostly determine the difficulty.
After Abyssos into TOP into Anabaseios, I'm glad the raiders finally got an easy tier tbh. I saw a ton of statics implode over Abyssos, my own fractured during Anabaseios after I left due to Abyssos burnout (still cleared tho, can't take THAT from me).
In my experience in a mid-core static, I think M2 was fine (super boring mechanically though) but I do think the DPS check for M3S and M4s should be a little tighter
I got into savage for the first time this tier and I agree with most of your points. Hard content should be hard, but it should also be accessible. For the longest time, I used to fear entering Savage raiding due to the existence of DPS checks, thinking I didn't do enough damage and I would be shamed for that and because of that, I feel easier tiers like this one would really help the more casual playerbase who want to get into the high end content but have a great amount of hard content anxiety.
And honestly, if we had much tighter DPS checks, I would dread raiding in Party Finder more than I already do, doing all mechanics right but still wiping to enrage can be some of the most infuriating things to happen.
Loved hearing your thoughts as someone who isn't a hardcore raider either like myself, if I may express my thoughts and experience thus far as a first time raider with this tier.
I'm not a hardcore player, I don't craft, I don't level all jobs, I don't hoard stuff, I just play and do what I want when I want. I level a job if I wanna try it and see how it's like maybe, I'm not a grinder though if I want something I will put the effort if it's worth it and not super mega tedious. I love going to venues and meet people, my MSQ, and looking amazing with my glams that's my thing. Meeting with my best friend irl in game is also part of me playing. With that said, in the past I'd say I woudl only attempt savage raiding if I had a group because with my EX EW experience I got to know what PF was like and the amount of time wasted and frustration was so much that doing harder content would require a lot of communication to make things easier, however statics are just not my thing because as you said committing to a schedule or simply not wanting to play one day are things that happen to me and I don't wanna drag a group of people due to my unavailabilty.
Anyway, I was having also a job crisis and always thought that for me to do harder content I'd need to play my job accordingly (not perfect) but dancer and sage were jobs I thought I knew decent enough but I was getting bored doing the EX's so thank God VPR came and I understood how it played quick enough (with The Balance's help of course). I don't play all jobs, I only play what I like and think I can understand and play good enough. I started this tier as a melee which as you know takes into account optimizing rotations for uptime and such things I was unaware of or didn't know due to me playing ranged only. I've pushed myself to the limit to learn and be good at my job and carry my own weight, asking questions, watching POV's, reading The Balance's tips and then putting all that into practice, it's been a lot work and I'm proud to say I've done it. Now, when it comes to the raids, I cleared M1 like in almost two weeks, M2 same and M3 same, today I'm confident if I'm lucky with PF that I can clear M4, started progging it Sept 15th. I took a week off after M2 because that fight was really frustrating with the lack of DPS and people messing up beat 3 or the stupid alarm 1 that can kill anyone no matter what as we know (and yes casting arms lenght and surecast really helps on that but you must be lucky to not get fucked after) and then M3 I remember having 0.04% and 0.01% ENRAGES! I honestly cleared that fight on my bday Sept 2nd and haven't done it again, don't care about the loot and just want to be done with this. I'm ilvl 721 so it's not like I'm slacking on my gear to affect others.
The amount of times I've noticed people with unmelded gear and just wanting to be carried, grifting too has been surprising as a first timer that is trying to do his best for the team and provide as much DMG (and fewer deaths) as possible, but hey as you mentioned not all people are that serious and just wanna do the bare mininum which sometimes is okay but other times it really affects the group. At this point I'm exhausted mentally after pushing myself so hard to be good and keeping track of my gear, doing hunt trains to get my tome gear. So much time wasted with bad groups that say "Progging beat 3" and as you might have guessed people won't get past beat 1 even or M3 "fusefield" and can't even get to final fusedown or M4 "midnight prog" "Sunrise prog" and can't even get past EE2 or ion cannons, so much TIME… if I had a group of actual friends to run stuff with I would have cleared a while ago I know I don't have that at the moment so PF it is. Good luck to all of us doing the hard work and suffering PF.
I started really late in DT. I have yet to clear M1S because I can ONLY join (practice) parties in PF. It is miserable to know a fight as well as I know M1S only to have to re-teach the fight to new players every 90 minutes. Until I get my clears, I am condemned to mouser 2 prog groups.
I feel like FFXIV players have slowly been moving more towards the toxic behavior of World of Warcraft players when it comes to the emphasis on parsing and logs. FFLOGS is a neat tool to help you get better at what you want to play, but at the same time it's terribly detrimental to peoples mentalities because people start getting too caught up in big numbers and the fancy colors of their parse. People just need to go back to playing the game and enjoying the game itself, not looking at their numbers because as long as you are clearing the fights, your parse is literally meaningless. People can literally clear Ultimates with bad parses because as long as they have the right gear for it, can do mechanics consistently, and at least somewhat know your damage rotation, you can clear anything in the game.
Raided since p1-p12 , i was bad in my 1st tier , not much mechs were skipped on week 1 but i am a pure pf'er. Pf to me is cozy but sometimes become a fill for a static. This tier is the right difficulty for the audience of raiders ( newer to returned vets) to get back into raiding. SE needs to fix its gear system and its job balance so that we dont have roles being excluded. I spend 8 weeks of prog on p12s and i was near burnout status. I spend like 3-5 hours a day and 1 mech a week really annoyed me. I got all my gear before p12s so i always skipped 9-11. Also p10s reclears were huge hit or miss.
I had some bad luck in pf and really got screwwed up the 1st few weeks but cleared week 7. ( 1 week i took off and other week i had a convention. ) and i stll cleared so im glad i can ease my way. I hope SE keeps savage challenging but not frustrating to prog.
On a very different note, I really appreciate the way you articulated why you like healing and think doing DPS is the most boring thing in the world because I feel mostly the same way. A friend of mine tried to get me into another MMO (SWTOR, for the curious) and I can't get into it because of how boring I find the combat and how much of it I have to do to progress through the game.
My first M1 Clear was the same. We fell through the floor the moment she died and the game gave us the clear 😭🙏
What is harder than pf is getting a healer in pf.
Big agree o/
It's not 'too' easy, but it is definitely an easy one.
I mean i still havent beat it so I can't say ish
I had the same experience with M2S. I could not get the clear in PF on week 2. I got it randomly on week 3 on PF and I too main healer. I got my M4S clear on week 8. Absolutely wild experience on PF. The worst was getting kicked out of a practice group because I had a grey parse on M1 and M2 as a white mage.
i like this tier because i can just chill and pug on the weekends and eventually get the clear with no stress. i eventually cleared week 4
i could of cleared faster but the fights weren't as fun to play them consistently after work, they kind of bored me at some part
ultimate static drama and c41's really killed my vibe for this game so i needed the break anyways
My only real concern with enrages this tier is M1s. She's around the point now where a good pf group can burn her down around the tank buster for mouser 2, where she has three mechanics left in the fight. That's normal p1 and p5 were similar, I took a break from raiding in p9, but I can only assume it's the same. The problem is, raining cats, the tank tethers has some quirks to it depending on which strat you are doing, MTTT or Starvy MTTT, and people don't actually learn the difference or bother checking which one the party is. So because the check is easy enough to skip it's a "Healer lb3 or wipe and hope we skip" when ever I see it.
M4's dps check is pretty lenient, but besides that the difficulty is absolutely fine. People who say the tier is too easy are out of touch with 99% of the player base. This shit aint supposed to be Ultimate.
M1S and M2S didn't really feel like it had a diffficulty gap which I think was the issue. M4S was also poorly designed for PF the same way P7S was. Back-loading mechanics at the end so you get a bunch of people progging the mechanic in your clear party and making it take forever. M3S was pretty much perfect.
Yeah, that really is the big face palm to me as well. "I've been raiding for a decade, have done every Ultimate, consistently finish in the top 10 world first teams in Savage races, and always raid in a static… and this tier was too easy!" Like, no sh*t, buddy. Of course. you find it easy. And the stupidest part is even those same people always complain about how "bad" Party Finder is for the same fights and how spending any time at all in PF drives them crazy.
im gonna say it, not all content is for everyone savage and ultimates are not for the casual playerbase. that being said savage also isnt made for the top of the top players. i am in agreement this teir both dps check and mechanically are just easier than previous tiers. but i will say it is made more fun and engaging then previous tiers. i did do this tier in pf. and i cleared everything week 1 we didnt see enrage at all on the first 3 fights. the 4th fight was alot tighter. but by week 2 we already had enough gear that we skipped quiver. i would make the argument that the fights shouldnt be THAT easy. savage should demand more from the players.
yeah the difference of PF and static is insane PF I be seeing sunrise with the static that mechanic we just skip
So it is a skill issue then?
Plain and simple.
Yes even story dungeons are hard for some people. Which is fine.
But objectively this whole raidtier is just unbelievably easy starting from no real puzzle mechs and ending with dps checks.
Yes even in PF. I cleared it week1 in PF no problem. Reclears take about 2 hours every week In PF.
Skip or no skip it doesnt matter.
I don't know what pf are u playing in. Sounds like completely different universe.
Don't delay reclears to the end of the week.
Don't do hector strats, don't mention it if pf if you do. It is a trap. Bad players are attracted by braindead easymode.
PF in fine if u know how to handle it. Care about numbers. Numbers lead to understanding. Understanding leads to optimization. Optimization leads to safety. Safety leads to reliability of a group as a whole.
You don't get to complain about PF without dumping hours into the game and giving every pf the best possible you. That kind of complaining is valid only if you are squeaky clean.
Frustrating? Then just don't do it. Only people who genuinely enjoy savage raiding should do it.
Seems like just about everything you say in your video is easily solved by not opening duty or party finder tab.
Top Players Opinions of this being 1 of the easiest Tiers to (Re)Clear? I agree with due to over tuned PCT on release & Yoshi P admittedly Buffing the entire Job roster to match it without adjusting the Bosses % HP making DPS checks to easy making for less exciting Enrages skipping mechs on 1st clears on week 1 through PF. If you main DPS? you might relate to this. However? the average player bandwagons that opinion without fully experiencing the actual max difficulty which is using Week 1 Gear & clearing through " Blind prog ". Still a Fun tier, just not exciting for me
So here's the thing. I like the tier, but to me, "You might 'think' that you're having a bad time because you aren't having fun in your static, but if you were having a good time then I'd be having a bad time in party finder and my situation is more important" is an opinion that feels so entitled that it's hard for me to agree with it, even if some of our views align.
Do I think that this tier has extremely lax dps checks? Aside from P3S, which honestly feels like it should have had its dps check swapped with p4s, I do think that the checks are a bit lax. It's not really a good thing that some groups are outright skipping 1-1.5 mechanics at the end of the capstone fight in a tier. Do I think that it's more acceptable because of the first tier of the expansion? Sure. All of the first tiers are easier, and personally I like that I don't have to stress too much about things if one or two party members die.
However, we do have to acknowledge one particular thing about FF14. The average player is not good at the game – at least in relation to what is necessary to have a comfortable time in high-end content. Whether that's hitting their buttons and dealing sufficient amounts of dps or having mechanical knowledge or consistency, the average player is lacking in such a way that makes the typical experience in savage, which often hovers somewhere between the top of midcore and the bottom of hardcore content, a more challenging experience than it should be.
I've seen both extremes this tier, with my static clearing the tier without much issue at all at the start of week three, delayed because of having to swap out healers and reprog p3s at the start of week 2. Since then, we're often killing before Raining Cats, at the start of Rotton Heart, and even at the start of Sunrise. On the other hand, I've been helping a sprout friend and it took them over 100 pulls of P2S to get the clear because they don't know how to effectively dps, and often do about as much damage as the tanks while on Reaper. Is it their fault? No. They genuinely try, have asked for advice from people who play their job better, and just struggle a because the game never put them in a situation where they needed to learn how to be "good" at it.
When you go into party finder, you are assuming the risk that you could encounter someone like my friend in your party or some god gamer who's just reclearing because their static had to all go fight their neighbors' goldfishes that week or something. That's just the nature of the beast. Having easier raid tiers isn't an effective way to fix the situation in the long-term because people who aren't good at the game are going to be in party finder no matter if the tier is easy or hard. Realistically, the best long-term solution is for the developers to offer players a more natural and effective pipeline for getting better at the game so the variance in player quality in PF isn't so jarring.
There's a sprout in my novice network who says they hate that healers have to do damage, paired with how you feel about playing dps and the anxiety you get, I have the same feeling that i get when i hear similar things from other healer mains.
You inherently understand that damage is what is will win a fight. Playing healer allows you to be actively participating in a key role that isn't directly responsible for that. As long as everyone survives the fight, you've done your job, but surviving the fight doesn't win the fight. Doing enough damage does, and dps are even more on the hook for that.
Bosses aren't striking dummies, and your rotation can change based on a number of factors, or just simply be harder to execute due to mechanics.
As someone who has raided entire tiers with each role, i don't see how you can say you that you don't care about damage that much. Especially as a healer, the quicker the fight goes, the less danger everyone is in from a healing standpoint. Healing for longer just for the sake of healing doesn't sound fun.
The Arcadian Savage raids are too easy.
Failing to complete them and not skipping like 1/4th of the mechs is nothing short of a skill issue.
If the pros are complaining "it's too easy" blah blah then you know what? Let SE take that to heart. Let them design a fight that's so punishing and so stressful that there's simply no way to beat it without minimum 3 weeks of progression, playing 14-16 hours/day everyday. Then when the pros inevitably complain? Well isn't this what you asked for?
I think you bring up some interesting points here and have some interesting perspective. I also think that the crux of this issue might be a slightly different angle than the lense you approached it from here, though you did touch on it a fair few times. I think the real question to be asked here is:
"Should Savage be balanced around statics or PF?"
Those are two entirely different beasts. I'd go so far as to say that approaching most any content in the game through PF as opposed to with a pre-made group increases the difficulty of it by an entire label of difficulty in many cases. (EX starts to feel like a fight 1/2 from Savage in terms of difficulty. Late Savage fights begin to feel like Ultimates. Heck, even some dungeons (looking at you spooky theme park and cactus temple) start to feel on par with the difficulty of progging an EX in a static.)
In a pre-made group, you get infinitely better communication, you get consistency and understanding of how the other players are going to perform, you get to make/adjust strats to suit how you conceptualize fights and the comp you bring. You know that *nobody is lying about their prog level.*
It's so difficult to overstate how much of a boon any one of those factors is, let alone having them all together as one. With that in mind, how do you balance an encounter to be satisfying for the players who have all of those advantages and well, …PF? Is it even possible to do so? I'm not entirely sure, personally. But I do absolutely adore this raid tier. I think that even if it didn't manage to achieve satisfying all the static gamers, I think it at least did a very strong job of trying to be enjoyable for both them and PF. The DPS checks were (relatively) easy, but the mechanics, the theming, and the spectacle were all really fun (except for Alarm Pheromones 1. Screw that mechanic.)
I'm not sure what I hope to see from the devs in the future, but I hope it's fun and I really, sincerely, dearly hope that at the very least… it isn't Abyssos Savage difficulty again. @_@
I definitely agree that another thing that makes this tier more fun AND easier than the tryhards want is that it's pretty light on the body checks, and it's easier to recover from someone fucking up. And I hope it stays that way, tbh, because recovering from a fuck up is a skill too!
For context: cleared all of p1-12s in party finder during EW.
– I remember trying to clear p8s last week before 6.4 and there’s nothing more infuriating/discouraging than seeing 0.1% enrage wipes with no deaths and mostly good gear. I don’t use third party tools so I definitely felt a certain Among Us-like “who’s the imposter messing up their rotations and making us enrage??” vibe in the group that wasn’t fun at all. Plus, the sheer amount of body checks throughout p5-12 was just frustrating. I appreciate that this tier has windows/opportunities to mess up and die while not dooming the pull bc I think (esp in PF) there is value in progging/seeing more of the fight while cleaning up mechanics later (bc if nothing else, PF inconsistency means you end up practicing mechanics A LOT).
– If lighter DPS checks make it less likely for less “meta” jobs to get shunned or excluded, it’s worth. I just know I’m the kind of person who would resent being forced/pressured to play a more “meta” job instead of a job I actually want to play. Pictomancer is OP this tier and while I’m not a caster player, I can easily imagine the resentment a BLM/SMN/RDM would’ve experienced if they felt pressured to switch to PCT for bigger damage/better utility instead of them wanting to switch bc they enjoy playing pct. (I experienced something similar wrt WHM vs AST during Endwalker. While I was mostly ambivalent towards AST before I started raiding, I ended up despising the job for reasons that had nothing to do with how much I actually liked playing it and everything to do with being told repeatedly that WHM sucks that I should go play AST if I wanted to pure heal. I hated even having to do basic dallies to level AST during Dawntrail bc I just resent the job so much)
Edit: 6.4 not 6.5