The best part of doing this tier in pf is the lack of instadeath body checks. Unlike pandaemonium the entire raid doesn't blow up instantly if one person messes up, which is fantastic for preventing pf toxicity and burnout.
can you imagine the burnout i had 1 week ago when i prog m3s? it pissed me so off that people fuck up final fusedown over and over again that i started doing arr relics again
@@luxlevia4687 I genuinely don't know how people continuously fuck up that mechanic past initial practice lol, the positioning is the same every single time.
Me and my buddies were gatekept from an m3s kill in pf because our rsndoms couldn't have uptime for their life. But the reason we didn't kill wasn't because one person kept blowing up the raid single handedly but that our DPS was shit. It feels better when you're stuck like that fwiw. @@luxlevia4687
my dude said lack of insta death body checks..... Bro did you even started m3s? Let alone M4S????? Cuz I don't remember ppl being able to do those fights without being a retard
It is interesting how different the top end raiding experience is compared to PF. For PF the dps checks feel just right, M1S allowing multiple deaths but not complete zombie march, M2S clearable with 1 stack or couple of deaths and m3s requiring a nearly clean run even week2.
I think having a fast prog and relatively "easier" tier to welcome back people into Raiding was a good thing and ultimately a healthy thing for the game. Myself, as well as many other raiders I know was just *burnt* out after the slogs that were Abyssos>TOP>Anabaesios back to back to back. This tier is incredibly palatable for prog, reprog and reclears overall. I can't say anything about WF races or super hardcore, alarm clocking blind progs in Week 1 but as a guided prog sHC player that cleared W1 this tier, it was good imo.
Omg same. After rushing through the first month of release, not having a crazy prog and the tier just being fun was very welcome. I was worried that I would find myself burning it with release into savage, into ultimate. It's nice to have gotten it done and take the time to just relax now
Regarding the DPS checks being too easy, I think this is really just showcasing how incredibly good world first racers are compared to the masses in PF. This tier is really execution heavy, so for world first teams who excel in execution, they can see most of a fight in very few pulls, form a strat and then "just execute" it. Meanwhile in PF, you could hit enrage in M2S or M3S somewhat quickly but then stare at the boss's health bar sitting at 12% at enrage. The strats are there but the execution isn't. Compare this to EW, especially Anabaseios, if someone dies it's a body check and you wipe. By the time you get to enrage you probably have practiced all the mechanics a whole lot more and have much better DPS, also simply by the fight demanding few deaths and cleaner runs. It's inherently due to how this time there's less body checks around, world first teams will stomp through the tier because they can immediately execute their strats with high dps, whilst PF will hit the DPS wall because they can "recover" after deaths in mechanics. If the DPS checks where higher, PF would be struggeling much more. I think the DPS checks are actually pretty decent for the first three fights; yes, with a clean run and good players you will tear through the bosses, but if you don't have a clean run or your players make more mistakes in their dps, it can be surprisingly thight. Except probably the fourth fight, that one is clearly not high enough.
yeah the amount of people i see in pf saying they've hit enrage in m2 but haven't cleared is staggering. i think the checks are giving pf a run for its money
Nah, they over tuned the dps at level 100. This will become very evident as gear becomes more available. M2S heart stacks will become trivial. M3S will be dead early too.
Yeah the alarm pheromones were the stinkers of M2S, hopefully they don't do that again, but at least we didn't have AH MY EYES third fight like last expansion, lol. Oh, also, funny video idea, people are claiming that the removal of Noxious Gnash is the start of homogenization, maybe talk about the ones we already have (like positionals) just to mess with em. Can't wait to see your next vid man!
Guess I am in the minority when I say I love that mechanic. It's simple, but requires good reflexes and decent execution. Especially on melee it's ton of fun. Frankly FFXIV mechanics need way more of this instead of convoluted puzzles that are easy to execute once you understand them.
@@HalfLifeHalfDead The only reason mechanics like this don't work is that they are easy for statics or FCs, but total PAIN for PF. Not to mention that parsers probably hate RNG mechs and would rather they burn than have them in the game.
I think at this point, square wanted to get new players into raiding, so it wasn't all about difficulty but making this raid tier approachable and fun as an introduction. A lot of the job changes attempt to do (making burst phase clearer) point to this. Raiders get more invested in the game overall. Personally I think this is a good thing, if it works for getting more people into raiding they can increase the difficulty.
First tiers are generally easier, really I am interested to see how this and next tier connect to one another in terms of difficulty scaling and if there's a linear progression from this tier into that in terms of challenge
agreed, even in the context of the raid story itself you're going through a training/tournament arc going from fight to fight and i think savage builds upon it very well, not the best way to handle it but there's the typical argument of "it's all spread and pairs" sure but you're building consistency for it, where am i going with this comment? nowhere, just a fun way to look at it, it's a great first tier for newcomers that build upon your memory and consistency
@@RinBanana As long as they dont bring P8S reloaded, I dont mind difficult fights, but I usually go into partyfinder except for ultimates and the people there are unique.
This is the first expac where I'm raiding seriously at content. As someone inexperienced, I can see characterizing the Extremes as very forgiving (I started clearing Vali and Everkeep with messy pulls by the 4th attempt), but my experience of the jump from Everkeep Ex to M1S is that it's a pretty steep learning curve! I get that the core raiders are long habituated, but this tier has felt EXACTLY like what you're describing with "earning" your wins from my perspective as a new raider. My static didn't clear M1S on the first week, and we're just now getting on Honey B's last couple mechanics. My M1S clear didn't feel cheap at all because it's still incredibly demanding in comparison to the Extreme from the inexperienced perspective. Fully agree with you on the theming though. 10/10 songs, presentation, even the enrages are thematic and on point. It's not necessary but it is a nice touch. Anyway off to ignore raid callouts to bop to Honey B.
A long time weakness of FFXIV's combat content is that there's never really been a bridging difficulty level between Extreme and Savage to onboard new players. Savage has always been a significant step up from anything else other than Ultimate and Criterion; the only other thing that _maybe_ lands between Savage and Extreme is Unreal, and even that depends on what the current fight is. The Savage tier feeling extremely demanding when your only reference is Extreme is completely normal, and I'm not at all trying to diminish the accomplishment of a first on-content Savage clear. But compared to other fights in it's own category (first-tier Savage of an expansion), it is a bit lacking.
I did the entire tier in pf and the biggest issue for me was people not being honest about their prog point and joining clear parties they shouldn't have. Other than that I think it was a fun tier overall could have done with a bit higher checks but thats just a personal preference. I have higher hopes for FRU to have all the checks in place.
Honestly this starting tier has been SUCH a refresher for me. I started getting into raiding with EW and our static broke up in P2. We formed a new one and had an absolutely CURSED P5-P8 where our static had to be rebuilt, nearly ship of Theseus style, about 4 times and we finished reclearing P8.... a _week_ before P9-P12N dropped. P9-P12 also was cursed with us getting stuck on P10 and then P12 for a month and nearly 3 months, respectively. With so many body checks and etc in both the P8 and P12 tiers, you ended up having to prog only as fast as your slowest-to-learn party member could go (causing some of that cursed prog and also a little drama in our group when we had someone _during phase 2 prog_ still be unable to remember their snake prio for first phase.) Coming into M1-M4 with a new group (minus 3 other people I had from my previous static) and clearing the tier in week 2 despite connection issues, server congestion (we are all Primal except for one Aether player) and limited hours to prog did wonders for our morale. The fights are actually fun and me and my cohealer we vibing the whole time as we strategized our mit plans and worked on how we would spread our kits to optimize the fights in the best way possible. Absolute blast, I DO hope the next tier is a bit spicier but this has been a great tier for me to encourage other friends who have been curious about on-content savage to give it a try. We have 3 statics in our FC and one of them has a bunch of first time raiders and they already cleared M1S this past week and I couldn't be happier for them.
The problem with the physical vs magical raidwide damage is like...WAR and PLD mits are still as good on magic damage as they are on physical, but DRK and GNB ones are non-existent on physical damage. If DM/HoL had a partial physical mit aspect, an additional effect that still worked against physical damage, were significantly better against magic damage, or if SiO/Veil only absorbed physical damage that would be fine, they would be worse but as is, DM/HoL are just entirely worthless vs physical and you have nothing else outside of the role-wide reprisal.
its fine because war couldnt use his vengeance previous tier at all cause everything was magic, dont marry job. war plays similar to DRK, gnb plays similar to PLD, just switch job if your healer cannot keep up.
@@glimoreganajai2206 Uhhh....Vengeance works on all damage types...unless you mean the tiny backlash damage side benefit, but that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying here - DM/HoL (and Dark Mind) don't fulfill their one and only purpose because of the damage type, while Vengeance does. There is also the fact that when Shake it Off was marginally worse than DM/HoL (but importantly *it still worked*) because raidwides came with bleeds in Abyssos, they buffed it. I don't think it's unreasonable to be asking for DRK's and GNB's primary raid wide defensive to actually work.
@@glimoreganajai2206There's a big difference. Even if you're padding Vengeance for a parse, you're only competing against other warriors who aren't getting the counter damage from the skill. These mitigations just straight up don't work.
Kinda sorta related but also straight up as a Caster sometimes I would just eat dirt on stuff because I didn't get enough healing since DoM have the lowest HP and lowest phys def. There were times I'd die to something because I was at 98k hp but I took 106k physical damage and mit did get used, and mine were on cd, but oops time to die. It didn't feel good and made me consider swapping to MCH for pf so I could have 2 mits and more hp
Problem I have with the tank homogenisation issue is that, if WAR and PLD encounters a magic heavy fight, they're still doing just fine as (as far as I know) 'regular' mits work on physical and magical damage, and WAR's Shake it Off and PLD's Divine Veil generates a shield that doesn't care about the type of damage anyway. If a DRK encounters a fight with very little or no magic damage, that's two cooldowns they basically cannot use, which is pretty significant. Tank diversity is fine, and I agree with the overall point that it's okay for some jobs to be less good in certain fights, but it feels with the tanks that balance doesn't tip the other way. Not to mention of course the problem that magic mit faces where it comes to the fact the game doesn't tell you what type of damage is incoming on a castbar or some such, until the damage hits. If you're running content blind, or simply haven't done it for ages, good luck knowing which mit is for which attack.
Isn't not knowing what's coming and having to figure things out literally the entire point of blind prog? How do you even blind prog if the game spells everything out for you before it even happens?
@@mosley3485 I mean sure, the game shouldn't spell out every little detail for you, but something as simple as "what damage type is even this raidwide" isn't "fun prog", that's just the game refusing to give basic information that I would expect from it. Not to mention, raidwides can also come in an untyped flavour, which magic mitigation doesn't work against as far as I know yet regular mitigations do, so if you Dark Missionary a raidwide thinking it was magical but it was actually neither, then good luck, better hope you remember that tiny detail along with every other tiny detail that comes with hard content.
@@formy52 Given that not all casts deal damage, I think adding a damage type to the castbar would indeed be too much information. Planning and optimising mit and healing is a huge part of prog. Blindly pressing HoL/missionary/dark mind because the castbar has magic damage on it is not it.
@@mosley3485 Who said anything about using Dark Missionary on cooldown or on every instance of magic damage? If the game tells you that an incoming raidwide is going to be magical damage, you don't have to mitigate it. You can save it for a more damaging raidwide later or some other use case. Or you can pop Dark Mind if you want. It's player choice to decide what to mitigate, and giving player choice in the raid. Instead what I often see happen is DRKs sitting on Dark Missionary or especially Dark Mind because they don't trust they can use it effectively, and so default to the simple mitigations of Rampart for example because they know that works on everything. For high end players, sure, they don't care, because they map out every fight to the smallest detail. But for more casual players, knowing what damage is coming up may actually get them to use Dark Missionary in content they aren't making a spreadsheet mapping out the mitigation plan for. Adding a little bit more info isn't going to break the game. Even if you didn't do that, you still run into the *other* issue I outlined with tank mitigation anyway, so. Not that it matters, because why play DRK when you can play WAR or PLD anyway.
I'm glad that the Extremes and Savage distance bewtween casual content has been shortened. As someone who has been playing since the end of ShB I never thought I would be able to even consider doing High end raiding. And yet here I am M4's higher difficulty gave me the confidence that I could do High End if I wanted to even if it was really hard. Then I went and cleared Everkeep EX (while being prepped for EX1 so I went in blind by accident) on my first attempt in a fresh prog with a couple vets in party. Same thing happened in Worqar for me And now I'm cemented in the fact that I can High End raid and though I couldn't do week 1 Savage due to not being BiS I still wanted to be a part of it and ended up being a crafter day 1 putting out the new tiers food since I put all my time and gil into leveling Botanist and Culinarian due to not having the funds to do gear crafting and pentamelding. Edit: The last thing I would add is that I enjoyed that you could have multiple deaths even double digit and bring back a pull from the jaws of defeat if your healers and team overall were good enough to make it so deaths didn't instawipe. Even the smallest thing like me as a MCH going off script with my mits if I noticed we would wipe unless I used a mit or in a really bad situation both I was saving for a raidwide got used immediately instead and it saved the entire party at like under 10%. I could tell my actions saved that pull and let the fight continue deeper then it had any right to. And both times I went off script for my MCH mits was a time we got in my pf group terms "The jankiest clear I've ever seen". I got the vibe we were underdogs the whole fight and I hope it stays like that. I'd rather have an absurd amount of janky first clears where everything went wrong limp across that finish then a clean sweep first clear. Save the clean sweeps for the grinding I wanna feel like I cheated death on my first clear literally milliseconds from enrage wiping
This tier was extremely fun for me, especially for melee jobs. Finding creative ways to squeeze out more uptime was super satisfying, but as a tank I do agree the busters were very lackluster. The long strings of boss auto attacks during mechanics felt much more engaging and demanded my attention, so if they can combine this tier with the Abyssos style DoT tank busters I think it would be perfect.
Don't you think the autos were cool though? As an OT, I was getting a TON of mileage out of corundum on the MT. I felt like they wanted us to use our mit on the autos, rather than the busters.
I thoroughly enjoyed every fight except for maybe M2S. The pace felt more like an Extreme difficulty fight except that PF now has the ability to heal the boss, making repeated attempts at A2C with pugs an actual living nightmare . Aside from that, absolutely love the increase in tempo in M3S and M4S. I particularly like how in M4S, the transition phase isn't just a cutscene like E4S and E8S, and keeps players engaged in the fight. The burst windows in M4S were also very fun to get used to considering their placement during mechanics like Electron Stream, and Chain Lightning, forcing players to juggle both their ability to execute their burst windows while also solving the mechanic correctly. The 6 minute burst during transition gets a special shoutout for being so tight that you have to early pot and wrap up the burst in a fairly short window before the boss knocks you away into 10 seconds of downtime.
having only cleared m1s so far, getting actual tank responsibility back by pulling the boss around for mechanics (namely in the copycat bit) was such a breath of fresh air after EW had every boss teleport to the middle for every mechanic, so I can forgive blackcat for having an underwhelming tankbuster and devour being lame
to highlight the difference in skill between Rinons static and other world first racers, compared to PF randoms and basically any other static, they cleared Black Cat within one lockout and never once saw enrage. not a scuffed pull that hung on just to see it, they either died to something before that, or just killed her. absolutely wild to me that enrage literally isnt a concept for the actual high end raiders.
Big disagree that m1 has the only tank positioning check, Alarm 1 in m2 is imo an even bigger tank check--moving her around smoothly while helping your party dodge arrows while keeping uptime is hard!
I think it somewhat depends what strat you end up doing, I'm not much of a mario kart enjoyer so I was thinking more from the stance of keeping the boss centre - if moving the boss, yeah, I agree
@@Toad-yv8ko as a ranged I can say you are often also the ones killing the melee lol. You bait the bees in the middle of the arena and cut the group off and they get sandwiched between their baits and yours lmao
After clearing M2S on PF I was gonna take a break from raiding for a bit but you got me exited for M3S and 4. My static took a break last week so I'll see how much better it is with an organized group
Likely M4S is being held back by being, well, the first raid tier, and since they are experimenting with mechanics right now, they didn't want to go too wild on the mechanics here, cause it definitely looks like some of those mechanics should have more going on, when they don't Also, a small note, the dps checks being so lenient definitely aren't entirely because of the class buffs, there's no way that those buffs contributes to sometimes clearing a whole minute before the dps check for M4S for some of the first clears of these fights
Arthas talked to Yoshi-P at the CN Fanfest and he admited that the Savage was not balanced for the 7.0 Jobchanges. So they didnt really tuned it propperly. Hope they go a little bot more crazy with Tier 2&3
@@DantoriusD that is partially why I said not entirely, I think without the buffs, it was still pretty lenient and they probably would have had 20ish seconds of leeway to work with by the end with these particular dps checks, the buffs just kinda exacerbated the issue a bit more
@@lev884 To be fair, with them even holding back in M4 the pace is much faster than something like P4S, though EW was slower in general than most expansions, E4 is a reasonable counterargument, though I think there that was them naturally shifting from StormBlood to ShadowBringers, since EW and DT are still recovering slightly from being treated as intro points for newcomers. How tight was the DPS check on Eden Titan week 1?
I think the tier is a huge flavour win and playing monk on this tier was super fun. some things were definitely weirdly tuned but I think they're easing us into whats going to be a really good xpac full of end game content.
i personally really enjoyed M2 as a melee trying to find ways to keep uptime but i definitely understand how other roles did not enjoy it. It was a nice change of pace where i actually have to think and plan my movement to keep gcds unlike EW.
As someone who's been clearing every tier in PUGs for like 6 years, I genuinely hate difficult DPS checks. PF damage is abysmal even when there aren't deaths, and I feel like other people being shit at damage is ruining *my* experience through no tangible fault of my own. I understand that some amount of DPS check should exist, but I have the most fun when I don't suffer for other people being bad at hitting buttons. If there was some sort of Faust dummy you had to solo clear before you could even enter the floor just to make sure you could at least *theroetically* do enough damage to be useful, then maybe I'd agree that strict damage checks should make a comeback. It's honestly so frustrating to cycle PF after PF looking for the one group of people who actually hit buttons correctly, though. For reference, I cleared this tier week 2, and we got the kill on M4S at the exact moment the enrage cast finished. Only 3 deaths, non-standard comp of VPR, PCT, NIN, RDM. After a 12 hour continuous session. To me, this did feel incredibly earned. But then hearing you and others talk about the DPS check not existing, I suddenly feel bitter that I suffered this because the people I played with were actually just bad at their jobs. Sure we would have cleared a lot sooner without the 3 deaths, but then you talk about groups with 10+ deaths still clearing easily and that kind of shifts it back into feeling like shit again.
Just like you said, it's not on you, it's on people being bad at their jobs. Like, for example, vipers can hit an incredible 31k dps! You can bar it lower for the average good player with around 28, 29k, but those are the numbers people should* be aiming to be around. Emphasis on should. With how people fuck up rotations constantly or forget about them, it's not a surprise it took long. However, don't let the time you took for the clear deter you from feeling proud of it. Most people don't play 12h straight, i'd bet you guys were tired af too XD You brought your victory home, enjoy it man. In reclears you'll see that get better and better
M2S is an actual hell in PF where it’s a roulette on getting actual good healers/bad healers. Especially if they don’t know what color pairs are and that it doesn’t apply for EVERYTHING like Beeline. :3 And I agree. Honey B. Lovely is mid, wouldn’t stand again.
My issue with the prevalance of physical damage in M1 and M3 is not that it makes certain classes shine more. While I'm not really a fan of having to change classes for fights, I can appreciate certain classes being better at certain fights. It's that the classes disadvantaged there never got the advantage elsewhere. If raidwide is magic damage, all tanks perform equally. If it's physical, 2 of them get disadvantaged. It's similar with how the more difficult melee uptime this tier disadvantaged all melee...except viper. "hero" moments for specific classes are fine. But only if all or most get them, not only selected few. Like when you are warrior, there's no situation where switching would be a noteabl gain. But for DRK and GNB, there would be. That doesn't feel fair.
how is it unfair? also there are instances of magic damage aoes in those fights, in m1s the knockback in m3s final fusedown, the knockback towers, the dives, fusefield which may be the most heal intensive part of m3s, you may not cover the hardest hitting aoes since those are physical but your job gets to help at another point of the fight, your noteable gain for drk and gnb is having higher damage and very strong self mits
@@shinjimikej There are some, yes. But barely any of note. Lik in m3s, its pretty much just fusefield(and maybe flare dive if your melee are too greedy). Most of the fight is using it because might as well, not because it really helps much As for the other points...drk and gnb don't have a noteworthy edge in either of these aspects. All tanks deal within 1% damage of each other and especially for drk, the prevalance of physical attacks also weakens their self mit kit.
I am not a fan of the heavy physical from M1 because I'm doing picto. The amount of times I died to the protean hits is staggering... even in my first clear, where I didn't mess up and we overall had a clean run, I still died just to damage, while everyone else gets to live, just because I'm in the magic ranged dps category.
I mean, the WAR and PLD one are just better all the time. PLD ALWAYS has better utility than the other 3 tanks. The utility imbalance has always been here with all jobs. Viper vs Monk is ridiculous. Realistically, why have a Viper when you can have a monk? Their damage is very close and monk has way more utility. It was the same with MCH vs. BRD/DNC until they added the wrench, and is also the reason they don't allow RDM to do as much damage as BLM. In a perfect world every class has the same amount of niche utility that help on some fights and not others while everyone does the same amount of damage. It's not acceptable game design to have classes with utility do 10-15% less damage than those that don't. At least IMO, of course.
As someone who started doing High end content just this Expansion, I will say that I have respect for everyone who has been doing this and that I wish I was apart of it earlier. The challenge that it forced me through as a tank in terms of positional and rotation was a very welcoming change. My only issue with this tier atm is my availability and the fact I just got my Pc a few weeks ago. So I’ve been Gposing like crazy ahaha. Regardless, I’m slowly about to get over my Pf anxiety and finally taking this tier much more seriously than before the coming weeks because I wanna at least get 1 clear for M4s but I know it’s gunna take time as I don’t have a consistent Static who has gone far. Which is ok but I wanna get better and farther
All I know is that I don't dread the upcoming weeks of reclearing. After DSR -> Abyssos -> TOP absolutely destroying my energy levels I am so refreshed by this tier.
So... I am not a high end raider, but I've cleared every EW tier where I started raiding. So far my experience is a bad one... but that is more due to organisation rather than the actual fights. My static started late, so this is our first raidweek and I have only seen the fights in streams and guides and only experienced M1s as a full fight. So far I'm actually loving this tier as it gives me everything I kinda want after a Anabaseios-Tier that was reason enough for me to step back a little from climbing up the skilltree in regards for higher skillevel groups. So I gathered some friends that wanted to start raiding or have very little raid experience. Prog has been enjoyable and fast, which is what I actually like about this tier. While yes, this tier does not seem to be something for us "older" raiders, that also tend to look for long progs and difficult fights, it seems to be a continuation of a trend that SE has actually already started in EW. DT has also showed us, that they are following that trend an even more aggressive way than in EW - and I really hope they stick with it. The game's getting "harder" - not in a way that would be noticeable for experienced raiders, but for the general wise masses. Duties and dungeons actually take a few braincells to properly work out, mechanics of "normal" content are more engaging, challenging to an extend, and generally faster and more layered. Savage has had a reputation of being "so very hard", this easier savage has been actually a good thing as it is in a way known enough to actually lure people into savage that have not been doing savage before. So far the beginners that I have seen had a good start to their savage experience. While yes, the savage experience "suffered" a little from being this easy, the overall experience I think, is a very good one for the actual state of the game.
As a tank thats cleared the tier, i have to disagree about m4s. I really felt the strain on mitigation balancing the damage coming from the heavy hitting autos and frequent enough tank busters. So many times either MT or healers were struggling to keep MT alive strictly due to autos happening during high focus mechanics. Whether youre MT sweating over your HP, or OT balancing your targetable mit or voking to reduce some pressure on the MT, the fight for me felt the most challenging to do as a tank. M1S was great from a movement standpoint but felt very wet noodle. M4S didn't have a lot of movement optimization opportunities but it forced me to utilize every crumb of mitigation i have to stay alive and i loved that
Pretty much the most fun tiver ive ever progged (been raiding since verse), yes it does lack in difficulty and m2s is quite a terrible fight, but the fun factor is through the roof especially as a meele trying to greed every possible gcd, + the announcer, i love the announcer so much lol. M4s has become my favorite savage fight (maybe just behind e8s?) and while i wish phase 2 had some harder mechanics i think the theme and the cool factor carries the fight.
The main issue I have with M2S is the randomness of alarm 1, and the MK strat everyone likes to use. It's great for phys ranged, melee, and tanks, but high risk for casters that want to keep their uptime unless the lines drop in a good order to move between casts.
Listen........ It's *so much fun* design-wise. I'll take "too easy but fun" over "I can't do this anymore it makes no sense". Could it be adjusted? Yes, indeed. But I'll take the fun as long as they're giving it out. ❤
"Just switch jobs" is such a bad take. People did that for p8s and it didnt get very well recieved. A benefit of job homogenization is that every job can be played if you like the job. Why should someone outside of world first raiders be forced to be completely subpar just because they want to play the job they like
Becauses they're playing a game that allows for it easily with shared gear, as long as one job within a gearset is good that's fine. That's not saying others shouldn't be clearing
>Why should someone outside of world first raiders be forced to be completely subpar just because they want to play the job they like Why should all statics be forced to shove someone (usually with sighs) onto a phys ranged for 5%? You do it for the team, you play jobs you don't want to for the clear.
The more jobs are homogenized, the less actual jobs you have to play. In an extreme example, if every job is just a reskin of another, then there is functionally one job you can play. It’s quite easy to swap jobs in this game if you know in advance, so I would say variety in jobs is ideal, because at least those subomptimal jobs still exist. I do agree gearing should be improved though.
Because jobs don't take that long to gear ( thanks to them sharing gear ), most of them are pretty easy to handle with rare exceptions, and most importantly: It's part of the game. Some jobs will perform better than others at certain fights. However! You *can* make any job work, you just need to do well enough in it. You don't see everyone playing gunbreaker just because it's the best damage dealer tank, other tanks work too. Will they need more work for it? Yup. Same for healers, same for DPS. There's over 20 jobs in the game, that says something about you not taking just 1 and forgetting the rest. Job homogenization is only good until it starts to blur the identity of a job.
As someone who's healed all of Panda on content I really relate to your point about unique damage types. One of my favourite points in one of my favourite Savage fights is in P8S phase 2. It was the mechanic that targets any two players with a purple debuff that deals massive dot damage while a bunch of high damage mechanics happened to the rest of the party. Suddenly as a Sage, I had to look at who was targeted, evaluate the weaker player and actually Kardia them! Actually use it on someone who isn't a tank!!! Then i got to use my other abilities to make sure we didn't wipe! Like you said, I'd love more mechanics with spot healing, bc outside of people messing up we just have to aoe heal everything and it kinda feels like my single target cooldowns are 50% useless. Overall fun tier tho, presentation was phenomenal.
I heavily disagree on the idea that Dark Knight having 2 mitigation buttons that are nearly useless in M1S is a good thing - I don't mind that other tanks have better stuff, but not being able to contribute to raidwide damage mitigation in a meaningful way is extremely disheartening. I'd like it if Dark Missionary and Dark Mind got the Addle treatment of being better against magic damage, but not useless against physical. The further sentiment of "you can just swap jobs" is not conducive to change or discussion, and I'd rather not level an entire job to 100 that I don't even like playing comparatively just because a fight deals mostly physical damage instead of magic. It's cool that Dark Knight is really good against magic damage! I just don't want it to be useless outside of those environments.
For the DPS check, for statics I guarentee it is very likely a big joke. In PF grinder like me, PF struggles heavily with M2, M3 dps checks or consistency. Will be going to M4 soon. (Especialy M2, I spend most of my time stuck on enrage, because people in PF pushing their buttons).
This is the best opening of a tier in the game's history. No joke. Banger music. Interesting mechanics. Awesome boss designs. Not ridiculously difficult (we have Cosmic Exploration, Criterion, the new Bozja/Eureka, and even more tiers ahead, we don't need this to be an artificial time dump). I have a mixed opinion of the Dawntrail MSQ, but not with the dungeon and raid content. It was fantastic.
It's def up there to be the best first tier in ffxiv, it's really good and just makes sense for a first tier to not go full ham immediately, even tho it def was a fresh air as well and had decent challenge in it. I fully expect the second tier to be very crazy already, it's just part of this games history at this point with second tiers being batshit crazy.
Entirely agreed, I think this is easily the best raid tier they've ever made. Not the most challenging, but the best. The fights aren't my personal favourite, but they're phenomenally designed. I think think E12S is and will always be my favourite fight in the game, but DAMN does M4S slap. Fun mechanics, great voice lines, pumping music, great visuals, and a super intense p2. Love love love it, kudos to CBU3 on this one. So very excited for FRU. You want puzzle mechanics? Don't worry, they're coming...
I'm just happy this isn't anabaseios again. I am absolutely elated that if one person isn't dialed in, then I still have a chance to clear. Last tier, I left countless groups because one or two people just didn't "get it," and the parties were frankly a complete waste of my time. It often just felt utterly hopeless, that I was at the mercy of 7 other randoms, and that nothing I did could really push the needle towards a clear. This tier is much better, it's been good fun. Got my first week one clear too, which was pretty neat
This news makes me so happy to hear. I burnt out of the game for about 2 years after trying P1S in party finder for about 2 weeks, with a week of that being me knowing my parts of the fight and just rolling the dice to get a full team of people who also knew it. Utterly joyless experience that basically convinced me that savage wasn't for me. I'm building up confidence to try again, and this is encouraging. Just gotta go through the EXs and gear up a bit first.
Wicked Thunder beats both previous non-door boss encounters by a landslide in terms of transition. You get the epic cinematic experience of the boss transforming and all but while you are still playing the game (except for the ~2 gcd after knockback). So much better than Titan chilling untargetable for 30s or WE SHALL NEVER BE PARTED AGAIN cutscene every single pull.
This was my first tier clearing all 4 bosses. I enjoyed all of them even if I am consigned to PF hell lol. Regarding the DPS Check, the fact that M3S’ check was tighter was the strangest part of the checks for me. On all of my runs of m3 we had to see the bombardian special, but in m4, SQ was optional. The funniest thing that happened was that we almost 2 manned it (m4) and I could notice the percentage of HP getting chuncked with every one of my higher potency attacks like high jump. In the moment, m4s felt rewarding to clear, but after thinking about the deaths and damage downs I was a little let down at how easy it was. My entire life of the dragon damage window was almost completely misaligned and that was a nonissue for our clear On a similar note, I had no desire to learn the uptime sunrise sabbath strat because there is no reason too.
It's interesting how the expectations from normal mode play into the reception of savage, because I imagine that because so much more time would have to be spent on designing the savage versions it'd make sense for those to be designed first, then fine tuned while the normal modes are created. So I read read a mechanics like alarm pheromones of black cat's devour-like attack that didn't change much as low party coordination movement mechanics to break up the savage pacing, which happened to be suitable for normal mode as well with little to no tweaks. And personally, I love that the normal modes don't feel alien after clearing the savage versions, fights where normal mode has an opposite solve to savage or extreme in similar mechanics feel really weird and a little like sabotage when they show up in roulettes. But because normal is out before savage, there's no getting around the fact that it feels lazy and unoriginal when you do see the mechanics play out very similar in savage.
This is my first raid tier in XIV (I've raided in WoW a bit over the years) and I was surprised with how easy it felt compared to how I expected it to be. Overall really have enjoyed this tier (except you, Alarm Pheromones 1) and I'm excited to see what m5-8 will bring!
Turn 2 was my favorite fight from the tier actually, it has a nice rhythm to it, especially the mitigation part at the end. But pf rly has issues with the fight, either Dmg check wise or heart buff wise, which can be a bit frustrating on reclears About Dmg checks in general, I think they are rly fine for the current skill set of pf players, had multiple enrages on turn 2 and a few in 3, didn’t clear 4 in a PF environment yet, but I assume enrages will be happening again. So I personally think regarding PF the checks are how they should be probably. But had no issues at all with dps in static. But I mean it’s a static so things are supposed to be easier x)
I know they don't want to nerf things but I think they should have just nerfed picto. Would have made the tier dps check more accurate. I doubt it would have made it tight or hard without the potency buffs but just a little less underwhelming. As a melee I really did appreciate this tier. I did it on Samurai and boy have I never appreciated and worked around the 5yalm range of iaijustu ever so much before. It was so much fun looking for uptime.
So about the dps checks but have you considered that maybe you are just getting too good? FF14 by the way they design jobs (very static rotations and lack of rng to optimize for) and lack of meaningful customization tries very very hard to keep the player pool around a similar level. However over time people do get better and the gap between a top player like yourself or a pleb like me that does savage for his first time gets increasingly bigger. Square now has to decide what they want to do with savage. 1. Try to make it hard enough for top players like yourself find the dps check an actual check so you get that satisfying kill. This also means that by doing so they leave behind everyone below at least for a couple weeks while they gear up to reach your dps with better gear. 2. Make it for the average players thereby creating a situation where you and other top players find it too easy.
I think a question to ask here is whether everyone deserves to clear week 1 or in an early week. There is a time-gated, natural nerf to every savage tier to ever exist, that goes beyond FFXIV itself, and that is gear progression. So if you make a check that is satisfying for hardcore players on week 1, then players who are not as good at doing dps will be able to clear when they have more gear in a couple more weeks. In my opinion, not everyone at every skill level should be able to clear week 1. Hardcore players will feel satisfied with a dps check that suits them while more casual players will have something to strive for - through both gameplay and gear improvement. I think that clearing a fight with minimal gear *should* be difficult and is a huge reason why hardcore players like to push these early clears.
I don't mind having to work for uptime more this tier, but viper existing and being able to braindead uptime everything with uncoiled fury makes me super jealous lol. Barely scraped a week 2 clear for the tier yesterday and I think overall it was pretty good. Not the hugest fan of M3s since it has that 3rd fight syndrome of taking too long to get started, removing the first 3 minutes of the fight and having him begin with one drink would have made it more fun imo. I liked the other fights though, M4s is really fun and its nice not having a door boss again.
I really liked this tier for how mechanics focused it is. I just finished through PF and even with the easier damage reqs the average player struggled.
I think m4s phase 2 being easy is the price we pay for not having a door boss. fights like p7s and shiva have shown how frustrating long fights can get when they have the hardest mechanics towards the end. especially in pf
I agree that busters were pretty boring this tier, but m1s and m2s are honestly pretty fun to main tank. There was *maybe* one fun fight to tank in Anabaseios (p10s, but gear killed that because by week 3 or 4 you could be pretty loose with your mits) and none in Abyssos so 2 fun tank fights is a big improvement. Also in pf the fights all did actually require being pretty on top of my mits despite the boring busters, because most PF healers apparently just cannot both heal the MT and do mechanics at the same time. If I wasn't rolling my mits through mouser/beats 1/alarm 1/etc in PF (and sometimes even if I was) I'd just straight up die to autos week 1.
I personally found this tier fun as Paladin specifically because there were a few moments where having ranged capabilities on Imperator and their Confiteor combo came in really clutch, and gave me good opportunities to abuse their range and keep full uptime for certain mechanics, like when supports have defamation first in Beat 3 in M2S, or during pretty much the entire first half of M4S. Actually juggling those resources properly *and* having the range actually be a factor was a lot of fun for me
I’m loving the whole tier so far. It’s my first tier Tanking so maybe the lessened positioning responsibility isn’t hitting me as hard, but I’m having a blast anyways. I have only made it to the third fight thus far, but what I’ve seen of it feels like it’s gonna be a wild ride. Honey B, I get, is not so spicy for more consistent groups but my static’s been struggling with the consistency check. I do see what you mean though how it doesn’t really push you that hard and the spiciest mechanics are in the first half where you’re just coasting for the rest of the fight.
I think this tier does a fantastic job of being a proper Final Exam for the expansion. EW savages focused on a lot of more puzzley mechanics, but here we're challenged to keep uptime and keep moving through simple but tight and quick mechanics.
I definitely agree that this tier felt too easy even for a first tier, although my perspective may be shaped from having done multiple Savage tiers and all Ultimates 😅 One concern I do have as a knock-on effect from this tier is that it may end up lulling newer raiders into a false sense of security for FRU (which will probably be the hardest Ultimate yet)… I know SE are most likely trying to onboard new people into Savage with this tier, but if FRU is as crazy as I’m expecting it will be it just seems crazy putting almost the easiest Savage tier yet right before the likely hardest Ultimate… 🤣
I'm on M3S with my static rn, first time I've ever actually raided seriously with a static in my 5+ years of playing this game. I don't have much to compare to other than PFing some older expansion tiers years ago & doing a bit of UwU, but so far Arcadion has had some of my favorite fights both in normal *and* savage modes. Really loving the direction of battle content in general this expansion.
I like the lack of heavy body checks a lot, but I feel like all of the stress from them went from being shared across the party to placed on the healers. In a static it isn't so bad, but in party finder it's a whole mess of people not mitigating, not knowing how to do mechanics or just not being consistent enough, and a lot of weight is placed on healers to just adapt for people's monkey brain moments, since it's not just a wipe anymore. Don't get me wrong, it feels AMAZING to save a run because you're just that good at recovery! But these two weeks it took for me to clear the tier have burnt me out considerably more than healing the entirety of Abyssos and UwU, and tanking the entirety of Anabaseios and TEA. I started just bringing X-Ethers because I knew that if one too many people died, or *I* died once, I'd start bottoming out on MP. Swapping to a DPS I haven't had any of those issues, so I wonder if I'm not the only one who had these issues?
Tier definitely would've benefited from a body check or too. People loved to whine about how prevalent they were in EW, and while I agree there was an unhealthy amount there, this alternative option of just making the healer suffer because someone else has no idea what they're doing is not good for the game either.
I'll give a different perspective: I've been playing the game for 5 years and I started in my 30s. Along the journey, things changed, work and family "happened" and time crunched. I took a nearly 1 year break from the game and I came back on week 7 or 8 of this tier. I cleared it in PF and it was my first time doing a full tier with random players (I always had a static before). I'm glad it was easier than usual, because I would have probably not cared to complete it if it ended up being a painful PF experience. Reclears, for instance, are still painful on m4s. PF doesn't skip sunrise and wipes are the norm on that mechanic. I think there're two sides of the story: the one where you play with friends and an experienced group, and the one where you play more randomly on PF. Square Enix has to think of both and I think they made a good choice with this tier. I will also add that it's only the first tier, I'm sure they will gradually increase difficulty with the second and the third one. Anyway, great video and despite things, I still am a Honey B. Lovely stem.
I think the problems with wicked thunder's second phase come from a weird adjustment mid design, it feels like an over correction of the critiques that p8s and especially p12s got, there probably was a version of wicked thunder with a checkpoint early in development because of how significant the transofrmation is and how the second phase's mechanics are so different from phase 1, but p12s p2 being a slog of already solved puzzle mechanics if you weren't blind progging it, that especially had to be toned back if they're near the end of a 13 minute fight, this isn't ultimate after all. BUT I feel like the fight does benefit from being one cohesive fight,a nd I think the filler mechanics are there to cover space of some puzzle mechanics that got stripped out to fit the timeline of a shortened single fight.
Ah yes, the AST in your footage on Ioncannon is just like me. Getting their Divination delayed by all the BS going on and then having a sadder window towards the end of the fight. I think that might be the most infuriating but also rewarding thing in M4S to me... that every little drift gets punished hard in phase 1.
I think CBU3 was so scandalized by needing to nerf P8S because of job imbalance that they'd rather enrage be too easy than risk being wrong again. They should have just nerfed picto/viper, honestly. Too many other jobs had to get buffed by a crazy amount to keep up.
7:21 i disagree with this point purely of how trash gearing alternative jobs is, the game promotes swapping jobs but gearing them is so trash, it's all balanced around you gearing only one fully or partially if they happen share pieces.
I think pulling back on difficulty was an inevitability. I think in some of the tougher fights in EW, mechanics were starting to get both brutally difficult and not fun, with a large part of them not being fun due to the type of difficulty they are. Caloric theory is a pretty miserable mechanic that is perfectly emblematic of this. Yeah its a puzzle, and yeah its hard, but I never once had fun doing it. Some fights like P8S, I enjoyed initially, but at the end of reclears, I never wanted to step back into it. Basically all of anabaseios I didn't do too much of because of body checks just being everywhere. I think they focused too hard on making the first clear really difficult while ignoring how a fight is gonna feel from week to week. Granted, you can have more difficult fights than what we have here and they can still be fun to reclear. I think this was a combination of pulling difficulty back to re-asses things combined with the first tier being intentionally easier on top of it.
I'm glad to hear that this tier has fewer body checks. I did all three tiers of EW savage and by the end I grew to absolutely hate the concept in general. My static lost 5 members over the course of Anabaseios, with 3 of them being on P12S specifically. It's not fun being deemed a failure because someone else doesn't know what to do. And it is even less fun playing a Healer and being denied the joy of dragging a group across the finish line. Body checks make it impossible to save a run that is going awry as a healer. And as a healer main, I want to feel like that hero sometimes. Let me raise people and it not just be delaying the inevitable.
I agree with most of this! This has been my favorite first tier ever, and I hope they keep up the quality from here on out. The main thing I disagree with is M2S. I can remember exactly how the fight goes, and very easily, compared to something like P6S. The beats are all very different and memorable from each other, Alarm 1 and Alarm 2 are both great fun and are also very different from each other, and Rotten Heart is again, memorable, different, and fun. I also enjoy how Beat 1 has quite a bit of randomness to it, you never quite know who is going where or where you'll have to be going. I also share much of your thoughts on M4S, but I have those same thoughts with E4S and E8S as well. I'll compare it to E4S, as that would be more fair. First phase is fantastic, fast paced, and execution heavy. But after a 30s AFK transition into Titan Maximum, the fight nosedives. Dual Earthen Fist has set spots for all but 1 person, and repeats without changes. Earthen Fist literally has a harder variant in the Lv95 dungeon. Uplift 1 and Uplift 2 are purely puzzle mechanics, and are therefor, completely obsolete for 99% of the playerbase, and hardly an actual mechanic. Healer Gaols is basically just "Striking Dummy, the Phase", with nothing going on besides forcing the healers to AFK, and having the tanks and DPS...well, DPS. The thing they've been doing this entire time. Last phase is cool, but lasts over 3 minutes. 3 minutes of repeating the exact same mechanic, over and over again. I think M4S does it better, with a transition phase that is playable, no pure puzzle mechanics, and and least some actual real mechanics in the form of the Sabbaths, but it still has similar issues as E4S/E8S in its other mechanics. It's sadly just the nature of how they make non-door bosses. I love them and the variety they bring, but I know that after 4 minutes, the fight is going to become just a very long EX trial from that point on.
I found this tier pretty fun, but I think it was missing a few things. The tank mechanics like you said are quite lacking, they feel trivial and non-existent a lot of the time. Having to move the boss again sometimes is good, but so many tankbusters are just so boring. People rightfully give fights like Uwu flack for how power creeped they are nowadays, but doing it recently, you can really see how much more the tank has to do and figure out compared to some of these tankbusters that feel straight out of normal mode. Like for M3s, yeah, it’s cool that it hits like 8 times, but the tbs are so far apart that you can just kitchen sink it every time if all else fails, so it barely matters. Another thing I miss is Add phases. They don’t need to be in every fight, but at least 1 fight having one would be appreciated. I had high hopes since Valigarmanda had the first case of an add being targetable at the same time as a boss since Memoria Miseria EX. But unfortunately, this tier does not break the recent trend of savages having no adds whatsoever, and that’s a bit of a shame. I forgot how much fun having to work for uptime is though, so having reasonable hitboxes again is a major improvement. Toning down the body checks is nice as well, it gets exhausting if every mistake just kills everyone constantly. I think they should have tuned the dps check up, not down to compensate though, because having 2 dps deaths and 2 damage downs, and still clearing in pf with 6 seconds to spare is a bit too lenient for a final fight I think. Overall, despite it’s flaws, I still think this was probably the most fun tier since promise, there isn’t a single fight I would outright say I dislike, and provided they can fix the flaws going forward, I think I’m pretty happy with the fight design, albeit it could stand to be a bit more creative. Edit: I should add that I did this tier as OT, that’s why I could just kitchen sink the busters and throw intervention on the mt, I wasn’t just ignoring autos. Still, I wish they would have more interesting tank mechanics for OTs.
Honestly, and I know people aren't going to like hearing this, but I think the dps check for this tier is "probably" fine for, specifically, the first one of the expansion. I cleared m1-m3 with my static week one and got my own m4 clear at the end of week two, but I've been helping a sprout friend who finally got to endgame for the first time with DT who wants to learn savage. I have learned something with it. New players HAVE NO IDEA how to do damage. It's nothing against them, but they only farmed Valigarmanda for 100 clears before the tier came out instead of trying a variety of realistically more complex fights that would be akin to savage mechanics like EX2. With this person, I've been running on my alt with crafted instead of my main with all of my raid gear, and party finders are just struggling to even clear the dps checks in m1 and m2 right now because people don't know how to deal damage without dying. So, in that vein, I'm a little glad that this tier gives them opportunities to grow because they're going to need it for the rest of the expansion. Also, I really appreciate that the fourth fight is one long thing because it's teaching people how to be consistent. For those that haven't gone into pf for the fight, people are awful at narrowing/widening and Sunrise specifically for some reason. I think the consistency checks are good because these are also the people that are going to be going into the Eden ultimate in just a couple of months.
I cleared the entire raid tier week 1 in 5 days fully in PF. I cleared M1s and M2s day 1. It took 1.5 days to clear M3s, this was because people kept joining my pf that clearly weren’t at enrage. Then M4s took 1.5 days. luckily the people I found in pf for the final fight stayed together and even made a linkshell so we could prog and clear together and everyone was solid.
It's very funny that I always have the same opinions as you on most topics surrounding FF14 fights design. Maybe it's because I also play healer but yeah, I agree to everything. (I'm still a Honey B fan tho)
My biggest issue with m2s, is during the first beat, you could end up with 0 hearts. And as a white mage who really wants to use my bell to heal everyone's dot.. it's so incredibly annoying when I just can't
While phase 2 of M4S wasn't the most complex, it still felt really really fun and enjoyable, not to mention the amazing soundtrack making it skyrocket in terms of epicness and storytelling.
Not a savage raider myself but aim to start this expac. I used to run hard mode raids in destiny years back however. Gotta say the major factor that puts me off of ff14s savage and extreme is the dps checks. It feels like the way it's presented, you have to be nigh perfect in your rotation and maximise every stat by optimising buff windows. Maybe that's just people making it out to be harder than it is but, I have a full-time job, I don't have time to practice unique rotation plans for each fight and farm either gil or crafters to get the best food and potions for the fight to then spend 4 hours trying to get a clear. I much prefer a fight to be lenient on damage checks and encourage unique parts of your kit, like RezMage, being used to full effect. A clear done with a red mage should feel different to a clear done with a black mage and not just because of the order you press your damage buttons. They should be a test of your expanded class abilities (pooling rattling coil to minimise downtime), not a flowchart/optimisation fest, that the main barrier to completion is the time you have available to bash your head against either the fight or a target dummy.
No matter how annoying party finder may be sometimes, no matter how many times we wipe, no matter how frustrated we are, me and my 4 other friends will always clean up our moods when we mimic Metem going "MY RIIING.... Ahem. Please excuse us while we repair the ring" or "The Honey B Lovely show is about to begin" in such an enthusiastic voice
30:02 How are you alive Rin. Raid tier was fun, my first week 1. Fights were fun overall but yea, they lack something (apart from the damage checks). The fact there are no mechanics could be because it's not a door boss
I personally really love M2S. If my pf experience is anything to go by it's not too easy of a fight, while also not being too demanding on me. Beyond that its just so thematic, jumping phases of chaos being hunted by warms of bees, and trying to move in an orderly fashion like you were that swarm. I also feel like I'm being asked to use my healing kit unlike m1s.
in a way i do prefer the first tier having a lower check but harder / more interesting mechanics over what we had before in past expansions this allows people trying out raiding for the first time to finish a tier in a reasonable amount of time, and to get a taste of how fun raiding is without being discouraged because they couldnt clear all the fights it was a shame in a way that in EW the first raid was so easy but then the 2nd and 3rd floor hard blocked people, i knew a lot of people who tried out raiding and then gave up
I liked the tier, M1S is fine, standard but fine. M2S and the chaotic bits are a change of pace. M3S is back to being standard but I like the theme and spectacle. M4S is forever tainted by the horrible prog I'm going through. It's the worst fight I've ever had to do, somehow. It's not hard it's just the fact I'm having the most miserable experience of my FF14 life right now. If I had to do a tier list it would be opposite of everyone else : liked every fight besides the last one.
I am enjoying the tier so far, the fights are fun an generally engaging although I do think the DPS checks are a bit lenient (although I'm pretty sure this is because they weren't adjusted after the round of job buffs you reference). I think M2S is a good example of where they've tried to be more inventive with how success is measured in a fight (i.e. with the hearts) but I don't think how the community interacted with it (for example with the double stack) was as they expected it to bee.
With the likelihood of newer players coming into the scene (Like myself) I think this is an excellent tier to get new and even older players who felt savage was unapproachable into it.
I've cleared M3 so far, but I agree on most points. One thing I mildly disagree on is the dps check. In a relatively optimized static, where all 8 players are purple+ on average, sure it's probably non-existent. It's fairly hard to balance a dps check between your purple+ statics and the rag tag PF. I've had many a time trying to clear M2 in PF solo, dying to enrage with 0 deaths and 0 heart stacks and I'm a high blue/low purple player. Skill issue I guess (buff MCH yoshi-san). In terms of aesthetics, they nailed this tier. I really appreciate each boss having a different BGM track and unique enrage sequences. It's got the same vibe as most of Dawntrail's msq. I'm just here on a new adventure, taking a back seat from being the focal point of what's going on. Low stakes WWE match? Sure I'm in. I think it's overall a good tier for an expansion release. They definitely played it safe (after the stupid dps check that was P8), which I don't think is a bad thing. It is unfortunate being too easy for the 1% but in a game like this, you can't please everyone. Just personal preference, but I like execution over solving. I can do without the wonky thinking puzzles. I may be the minority in that regard, but I also don't like blind prog so that probably explains a lot.
This was the first tier I've ever attempted to do purely on PF and I barely scraped by a week 5 clear, largely from the usual problems you tend to face in PF with people joining in who are clearly not ready for the listed stage of the fight. An entire week of attempts of M3S trying to get a clear and people are still mucking up deaths before fusefield is just griefing at that point.
I am playing Astrologian (mainly) or playing Dark Knight as I am a main tank. I pepper in the occasional DPS and i really enjoy the fights. I haven't cleared yet, working on it. Doing it completely blind because it's better for everyone instead of holding someone's hand...petsonally. But yeah. One of my members in my B static (which i am flipping around roles) who isn't even a healer main did so well so i guess that calls into question. But they only cleared M1...barely. So far, Brute Bomber, where I'm only as far as the first Final Fusefield, is so exciting and fun. And i agree with the job change for my own opinions. But I'll always be a Dark Knight. in short, i didn't think it was that easy or incredibly difficult (Party Finder does that) but it is a good and fun tier. Can't it just be fun as well as a bit of a challenge?
DPS checks: I know people were skipping sword quiver on week one, but my group was most certainly not. We're decent players but even still, we were making mistakes in the last phase and when we finally did clear on the first week, it was after having seen enrage multiple times and we still had to do Sword Quiver. Now when it comes to PF, I think the DPS checks are exactly where they should be. Parties are too inconsistent for tight DPS checks, in my opinion. Even in M2S, I've been in parties with zero deaths, maybe 1 DD, and that enrage feels impossible, just because not everyone in the group is at the same skill level. Overall, I think the DPS checks are good for PF. And honestly, I don't want to have a struggle on reclears. If people do the mechanics, I just want to win. I don't want to spend 5 hours struggling against a DPS check on week 5.
I found the tier overall fantastic. The mechs were just right and altought not super challenging they were fun. The DPS checks on 2 and 3 were just right enough that it allowed for recovery to be a good skill to have while still requiring some amount of cleanliness. My only issue with them is really 4's DPS check (my first clear had 12 deaths) and the physical damage. There's of course the tank issue, its neat that some jobs are better than others for certain things, the issue is that while GNB and DRK basically lack an AOE mit for a good chunk of 1 and 3, WAR and PLD NEVER have that issue, PLD double dips by having fantastic disengagement tools, if this kind of thing is going to stay they should make sure there's some kind of balance. Another problem with it was that casters were in a huge disadvantage, not only are healers and casters the job with the lowest HP but to make it worse they also have the lowest physical defence. On top of that I am a viera so there were multiple times I just died even when saving tempera coat just for myself just because I'm hyper squishy, which felt real bad. One could argue it should be part of the mit plan to make sure casters survive the raidwides, but it feels shity to have my own survival taken away from my own hands just because I need special attention.
"you can just swap [jobs]" The problem with that is gearing. Getting full 710 is time consuming and/or expensive. Getting raid gear is even more time consuming due to weekly lockouts. I do like switching up what job I bring, but it took a lot to get to that point, and I'm going to be on the gear floor for a lot of my jobs for a long time.
much like dawntrail as a whole, i really like the savage tier alot because it's a very good start, a very good foundation to build off of i'll be pretty disappointed if the other two tiers don't evolve much past it, but i think the expansion as a whole is a really good sign, savage tier included that said, the amount of "slightly different" strategies plaguing PF definitely has me relieved to be running this tier with a static. woof
I actually like the fact that the DPS check is more lenient. As a PF raider and RDM it felt really rewarding that proper rezzes helped in securing the clear on M4S. To me it meant I can finally use my entire kit for week 1 clears and not just prog. Beyond that, skipping mechanics later into the tier is something i wouldn't mind (especially sunlight sabbath, fuck that mechanic in PF, man ppl are bad at it). For content intented to be cleared weekly I am very fine with not every weeks clear being a complete struggle in finding a PF group that can stumble past the DPS check. If SE wants to introduce more difficulty again then i hope it will be in the form of puzzle mechanics or maybe even a bit of chaos like the beelines/hearts on M2S. Dare I say it: I'd rather have body-checks again than more boss health for Savage.
Additional comments: I've raided since Sigmascape (skipped a few tiers every now and then cuz of breaks), basically always done it with PF. This tier is, very notably, the best experience i've had with PF raiding. Blind progging was more fun cuz ppl were actually able to solve it even with PF (though I would be fine with mechanical complexity increase as I say in my main comment), but mostly people were willing to put in way more tries and pulls before leaving because small mistakes or a few deaths would not delete the chance of clearing. This prolly gives people the 'we almost got it, let's go again!' feeling more often and makes them more willing to try harder with the group they're in instead of constant group-hopping
I very much enjoy the more personal responsibility in terms of mechanics instead of the 8 man after 8 man body check where I have to sit there and wait for the slowest person to learn. At least I still get to continue to learn the fights if one of my raiders gets dropped.
I remember hating endwalker raids. I called it AFK gaming, afk and still clear cuz everything is stand here and afk. I quit after p8s due to snooze-fiesta gaming. I really like this raid tier, it is more active and has a lot of memory games, it reminds me of eden a lot. I really like twilight-midnight sabbath, the mechanic is not that hard but it happens relatively fast and you have to look for quite a few things and the randomness that comes with it. And also bombarian special 😂 that shit is cool. It has some cons tho, beat 2, tag team 2, m4 hades phase, chain lightning stand out as “weak” parts to me.
Overall it's for sure one of the more fun initial raid tiers of an expansion but the lack of any sort of dps check did lessen my enjoyment somewhat. My group cleared M4S at the start of day 2 with 4 deaths and 4 damage downs and we were still at least 30 seconds away from enrage. We also skipped the last 2 mechanics of M1S. That just shouldn't be happening even if it is the first raid tier of an expansion. Luckily the fights are pretty fun (other than than M2S)
R1S - I think it's fine, in fact even preferable to have a fight that's more recognizable to the normal mode. Also, the devour at the end of the fight isn't meant to be super involved, it's just meant to be a choke check. The clear is in your hands as long as you can get past this one mechanic, but with ptsd from P5S, can you get past it without choking? R2S - my group got a 4% wipe on Thursday this week, after getting 4 stacks during the heart phases. I would rather see this than a fight that just straight up like you if one person fucks up. And that's all I can really comment on because I haven't gotten to the 3rd or 4th fights yet.
While I don't think this tier was outright bad, I feel almost bored as an OT. I have so few things I'm doing that aren't just 'melee with a couple more mit buttons'. Hell, if the MT never dies I can take tank stance completely off in M3S. Would really have liked to have something that made me feel like I was a tank and not the three melees in a trenchcoat that gunbreaker already is.
The best part of doing this tier in pf is the lack of instadeath body checks. Unlike pandaemonium the entire raid doesn't blow up instantly if one person messes up, which is fantastic for preventing pf toxicity and burnout.
can you imagine the burnout i had 1 week ago when i prog m3s? it pissed me so off that people fuck up final fusedown over and over again that i started doing arr relics again
@@luxlevia4687 I genuinely don't know how people continuously fuck up that mechanic past initial practice lol, the positioning is the same every single time.
Me and my buddies were gatekept from an m3s kill in pf because our rsndoms couldn't have uptime for their life. But the reason we didn't kill wasn't because one person kept blowing up the raid single handedly but that our DPS was shit. It feels better when you're stuck like that fwiw. @@luxlevia4687
nah, i missed the toxicity from p8s
my dude said lack of insta death body checks..... Bro did you even started m3s? Let alone M4S????? Cuz I don't remember ppl being able to do those fights without being a retard
It is interesting how different the top end raiding experience is compared to PF.
For PF the dps checks feel just right, M1S allowing multiple deaths but not complete zombie march, M2S clearable with 1 stack or couple of deaths and m3s requiring a nearly clean run even week2.
I think having a fast prog and relatively "easier" tier to welcome back people into Raiding was a good thing and ultimately a healthy thing for the game. Myself, as well as many other raiders I know was just *burnt* out after the slogs that were Abyssos>TOP>Anabaesios back to back to back.
This tier is incredibly palatable for prog, reprog and reclears overall. I can't say anything about WF races or super hardcore, alarm clocking blind progs in Week 1 but as a guided prog sHC player that cleared W1 this tier, it was good imo.
Welcoming new people with Honey Bee Lovely stacks powering her up! The fight really became the bane of PF.
Omg same. After rushing through the first month of release, not having a crazy prog and the tier just being fun was very welcome. I was worried that I would find myself burning it with release into savage, into ultimate. It's nice to have gotten it done and take the time to just relax now
Regarding the DPS checks being too easy, I think this is really just showcasing how incredibly good world first racers are compared to the masses in PF. This tier is really execution heavy, so for world first teams who excel in execution, they can see most of a fight in very few pulls, form a strat and then "just execute" it. Meanwhile in PF, you could hit enrage in M2S or M3S somewhat quickly but then stare at the boss's health bar sitting at 12% at enrage. The strats are there but the execution isn't.
Compare this to EW, especially Anabaseios, if someone dies it's a body check and you wipe. By the time you get to enrage you probably have practiced all the mechanics a whole lot more and have much better DPS, also simply by the fight demanding few deaths and cleaner runs. It's inherently due to how this time there's less body checks around, world first teams will stomp through the tier because they can immediately execute their strats with high dps, whilst PF will hit the DPS wall because they can "recover" after deaths in mechanics.
If the DPS checks where higher, PF would be struggeling much more. I think the DPS checks are actually pretty decent for the first three fights; yes, with a clean run and good players you will tear through the bosses, but if you don't have a clean run or your players make more mistakes in their dps, it can be surprisingly thight. Except probably the fourth fight, that one is clearly not high enough.
yeah the amount of people i see in pf saying they've hit enrage in m2 but haven't cleared is staggering. i think the checks are giving pf a run for its money
@@oktinaa m2s is worse because it tricks you into thinking you're enrage ready because you limped to the final mechanic with 8 heart stacks
Fyi Yoshi p said they messed up the HP pools. There are already groups skipping big parts of fights.
Nah, they over tuned the dps at level 100. This will become very evident as gear becomes more available. M2S heart stacks will become trivial. M3S will be dead early too.
@@brianfrost3094 He didn't actually say that, Arthas kind of made that up.
At first I was happy there was some weird randomness with the Honey B Fight.
I now despise Alarum 1 and 2
Yeah the alarm pheromones were the stinkers of M2S, hopefully they don't do that again, but at least we didn't have AH MY EYES third fight like last expansion, lol.
Oh, also, funny video idea, people are claiming that the removal of Noxious Gnash is the start of homogenization, maybe talk about the ones we already have (like positionals) just to mess with em.
Can't wait to see your next vid man!
Alarm 2 doesn't really have much randomness to it though, its mainly just the direction the bees spin in.
@@Thundawich And that's somehow enough for healers to randomly start going south when DPS should go south
Guess I am in the minority when I say I love that mechanic. It's simple, but requires good reflexes and decent execution. Especially on melee it's ton of fun. Frankly FFXIV mechanics need way more of this instead of convoluted puzzles that are easy to execute once you understand them.
@@HalfLifeHalfDead The only reason mechanics like this don't work is that they are easy for statics or FCs, but total PAIN for PF.
Not to mention that parsers probably hate RNG mechs and would rather they burn than have them in the game.
I think at this point, square wanted to get new players into raiding, so it wasn't all about difficulty but making this raid tier approachable and fun as an introduction. A lot of the job changes attempt to do (making burst phase clearer) point to this. Raiders get more invested in the game overall. Personally I think this is a good thing, if it works for getting more people into raiding they can increase the difficulty.
First tiers are generally easier, really I am interested to see how this and next tier connect to one another in terms of difficulty scaling and if there's a linear progression from this tier into that in terms of challenge
agreed, even in the context of the raid story itself you're going through a training/tournament arc going from fight to fight and i think savage builds upon it very well, not the best way to handle it but there's the typical argument of "it's all spread and pairs" sure but you're building consistency for it, where am i going with this comment? nowhere, just a fun way to look at it, it's a great first tier for newcomers that build upon your memory and consistency
@@RinBanana As long as they dont bring P8S reloaded, I dont mind difficult fights, but I usually go into partyfinder except for ultimates and the people there are unique.
This is the first expac where I'm raiding seriously at content. As someone inexperienced, I can see characterizing the Extremes as very forgiving (I started clearing Vali and Everkeep with messy pulls by the 4th attempt), but my experience of the jump from Everkeep Ex to M1S is that it's a pretty steep learning curve! I get that the core raiders are long habituated, but this tier has felt EXACTLY like what you're describing with "earning" your wins from my perspective as a new raider. My static didn't clear M1S on the first week, and we're just now getting on Honey B's last couple mechanics. My M1S clear didn't feel cheap at all because it's still incredibly demanding in comparison to the Extreme from the inexperienced perspective.
Fully agree with you on the theming though. 10/10 songs, presentation, even the enrages are thematic and on point. It's not necessary but it is a nice touch.
Anyway off to ignore raid callouts to bop to Honey B.
M1S is definitely quite tricky as first floor savages go
A long time weakness of FFXIV's combat content is that there's never really been a bridging difficulty level between Extreme and Savage to onboard new players. Savage has always been a significant step up from anything else other than Ultimate and Criterion; the only other thing that _maybe_ lands between Savage and Extreme is Unreal, and even that depends on what the current fight is.
The Savage tier feeling extremely demanding when your only reference is Extreme is completely normal, and I'm not at all trying to diminish the accomplishment of a first on-content Savage clear. But compared to other fights in it's own category (first-tier Savage of an expansion), it is a bit lacking.
SAME
"I am no longer a Honey B. stan"
HOW DARE-
The dislike ratio is gonna go crazy
@@RinBananaNot from me. I hate Honey B Lovely's Savage fight
I did the entire tier in pf and the biggest issue for me was people not being honest about their prog point and joining clear parties they shouldn't have.
Other than that I think it was a fun tier overall could have done with a bit higher checks but thats just a personal preference. I have higher hopes for FRU to have all the checks in place.
Lying in pf is just a pf staple on every tier lol
the pf rule of thumb is you're always one prog point behind whatever is listed
Honestly this starting tier has been SUCH a refresher for me. I started getting into raiding with EW and our static broke up in P2. We formed a new one and had an absolutely CURSED P5-P8 where our static had to be rebuilt, nearly ship of Theseus style, about 4 times and we finished reclearing P8.... a _week_ before P9-P12N dropped.
P9-P12 also was cursed with us getting stuck on P10 and then P12 for a month and nearly 3 months, respectively. With so many body checks and etc in both the P8 and P12 tiers, you ended up having to prog only as fast as your slowest-to-learn party member could go (causing some of that cursed prog and also a little drama in our group when we had someone _during phase 2 prog_ still be unable to remember their snake prio for first phase.)
Coming into M1-M4 with a new group (minus 3 other people I had from my previous static) and clearing the tier in week 2 despite connection issues, server congestion (we are all Primal except for one Aether player) and limited hours to prog did wonders for our morale. The fights are actually fun and me and my cohealer we vibing the whole time as we strategized our mit plans and worked on how we would spread our kits to optimize the fights in the best way possible.
Absolute blast, I DO hope the next tier is a bit spicier but this has been a great tier for me to encourage other friends who have been curious about on-content savage to give it a try. We have 3 statics in our FC and one of them has a bunch of first time raiders and they already cleared M1S this past week and I couldn't be happier for them.
The problem with the physical vs magical raidwide damage is like...WAR and PLD mits are still as good on magic damage as they are on physical, but DRK and GNB ones are non-existent on physical damage. If DM/HoL had a partial physical mit aspect, an additional effect that still worked against physical damage, were significantly better against magic damage, or if SiO/Veil only absorbed physical damage that would be fine, they would be worse but as is, DM/HoL are just entirely worthless vs physical and you have nothing else outside of the role-wide reprisal.
its fine because war couldnt use his vengeance previous tier at all cause everything was magic, dont marry job. war plays similar to DRK, gnb plays similar to PLD, just switch job if your healer cannot keep up.
@@glimoreganajai2206 Uhhh....Vengeance works on all damage types...unless you mean the tiny backlash damage side benefit, but that's the exact opposite of what I'm saying here - DM/HoL (and Dark Mind) don't fulfill their one and only purpose because of the damage type, while Vengeance does.
There is also the fact that when Shake it Off was marginally worse than DM/HoL (but importantly *it still worked*) because raidwides came with bleeds in Abyssos, they buffed it. I don't think it's unreasonable to be asking for DRK's and GNB's primary raid wide defensive to actually work.
@@glimoreganajai2206There's a big difference. Even if you're padding Vengeance for a parse, you're only competing against other warriors who aren't getting the counter damage from the skill. These mitigations just straight up don't work.
@@zeelyweely1590 dps checks exist in content like top and this micro optimisations matter
Kinda sorta related but also straight up as a Caster sometimes I would just eat dirt on stuff because I didn't get enough healing since DoM have the lowest HP and lowest phys def. There were times I'd die to something because I was at 98k hp but I took 106k physical damage and mit did get used, and mine were on cd, but oops time to die. It didn't feel good and made me consider swapping to MCH for pf so I could have 2 mits and more hp
Problem I have with the tank homogenisation issue is that, if WAR and PLD encounters a magic heavy fight, they're still doing just fine as (as far as I know) 'regular' mits work on physical and magical damage, and WAR's Shake it Off and PLD's Divine Veil generates a shield that doesn't care about the type of damage anyway. If a DRK encounters a fight with very little or no magic damage, that's two cooldowns they basically cannot use, which is pretty significant.
Tank diversity is fine, and I agree with the overall point that it's okay for some jobs to be less good in certain fights, but it feels with the tanks that balance doesn't tip the other way. Not to mention of course the problem that magic mit faces where it comes to the fact the game doesn't tell you what type of damage is incoming on a castbar or some such, until the damage hits. If you're running content blind, or simply haven't done it for ages, good luck knowing which mit is for which attack.
Isn't not knowing what's coming and having to figure things out literally the entire point of blind prog? How do you even blind prog if the game spells everything out for you before it even happens?
@@mosley3485 I mean sure, the game shouldn't spell out every little detail for you, but something as simple as "what damage type is even this raidwide" isn't "fun prog", that's just the game refusing to give basic information that I would expect from it.
Not to mention, raidwides can also come in an untyped flavour, which magic mitigation doesn't work against as far as I know yet regular mitigations do, so if you Dark Missionary a raidwide thinking it was magical but it was actually neither, then good luck, better hope you remember that tiny detail along with every other tiny detail that comes with hard content.
@@formy52 Given that not all casts deal damage, I think adding a damage type to the castbar would indeed be too much information.
Planning and optimising mit and healing is a huge part of prog. Blindly pressing HoL/missionary/dark mind because the castbar has magic damage on it is not it.
@@mosley3485 Who said anything about using Dark Missionary on cooldown or on every instance of magic damage?
If the game tells you that an incoming raidwide is going to be magical damage, you don't have to mitigate it. You can save it for a more damaging raidwide later or some other use case. Or you can pop Dark Mind if you want. It's player choice to decide what to mitigate, and giving player choice in the raid.
Instead what I often see happen is DRKs sitting on Dark Missionary or especially Dark Mind because they don't trust they can use it effectively, and so default to the simple mitigations of Rampart for example because they know that works on everything.
For high end players, sure, they don't care, because they map out every fight to the smallest detail. But for more casual players, knowing what damage is coming up may actually get them to use Dark Missionary in content they aren't making a spreadsheet mapping out the mitigation plan for.
Adding a little bit more info isn't going to break the game. Even if you didn't do that, you still run into the *other* issue I outlined with tank mitigation anyway, so. Not that it matters, because why play DRK when you can play WAR or PLD anyway.
@@formy52 It just encourages less thoughtful play.
I'm glad that the Extremes and Savage distance bewtween casual content has been shortened. As someone who has been playing since the end of ShB I never thought I would be able to even consider doing High end raiding. And yet here I am M4's higher difficulty gave me the confidence that I could do High End if I wanted to even if it was really hard. Then I went and cleared Everkeep EX (while being prepped for EX1 so I went in blind by accident) on my first attempt in a fresh prog with a couple vets in party. Same thing happened in Worqar for me
And now I'm cemented in the fact that I can High End raid and though I couldn't do week 1 Savage due to not being BiS I still wanted to be a part of it and ended up being a crafter day 1 putting out the new tiers food since I put all my time and gil into leveling Botanist and Culinarian due to not having the funds to do gear crafting and pentamelding.
Edit: The last thing I would add is that I enjoyed that you could have multiple deaths even double digit and bring back a pull from the jaws of defeat if your healers and team overall were good enough to make it so deaths didn't instawipe. Even the smallest thing like me as a MCH going off script with my mits if I noticed we would wipe unless I used a mit or in a really bad situation both I was saving for a raidwide got used immediately instead and it saved the entire party at like under 10%. I could tell my actions saved that pull and let the fight continue deeper then it had any right to. And both times I went off script for my MCH mits was a time we got in my pf group terms "The jankiest clear I've ever seen". I got the vibe we were underdogs the whole fight and I hope it stays like that. I'd rather have an absurd amount of janky first clears where everything went wrong limp across that finish then a clean sweep first clear.
Save the clean sweeps for the grinding I wanna feel like I cheated death on my first clear literally milliseconds from enrage wiping
This tier was extremely fun for me, especially for melee jobs. Finding creative ways to squeeze out more uptime was super satisfying, but as a tank I do agree the busters were very lackluster. The long strings of boss auto attacks during mechanics felt much more engaging and demanded my attention, so if they can combine this tier with the Abyssos style DoT tank busters I think it would be perfect.
Or even add in those wild 'buster' shared autos from p8s p2
Don't you think the autos were cool though? As an OT, I was getting a TON of mileage out of corundum on the MT. I felt like they wanted us to use our mit on the autos, rather than the busters.
I thoroughly enjoyed every fight except for maybe M2S. The pace felt more like an Extreme difficulty fight except that PF now has the ability to heal the boss, making repeated attempts at A2C with pugs an actual living nightmare . Aside from that, absolutely love the increase in tempo in M3S and M4S. I particularly like how in M4S, the transition phase isn't just a cutscene like E4S and E8S, and keeps players engaged in the fight.
The burst windows in M4S were also very fun to get used to considering their placement during mechanics like Electron Stream, and Chain Lightning, forcing players to juggle both their ability to execute their burst windows while also solving the mechanic correctly. The 6 minute burst during transition gets a special shoutout for being so tight that you have to early pot and wrap up the burst in a fairly short window before the boss knocks you away into 10 seconds of downtime.
M2S in PF is just a psyop. I miss water doggo
having only cleared m1s so far, getting actual tank responsibility back by pulling the boss around for mechanics (namely in the copycat bit) was such a breath of fresh air after EW had every boss teleport to the middle for every mechanic, so I can forgive blackcat for having an underwhelming tankbuster and devour being lame
to highlight the difference in skill between Rinons static and other world first racers, compared to PF randoms and basically any other static, they cleared Black Cat within one lockout and never once saw enrage. not a scuffed pull that hung on just to see it, they either died to something before that, or just killed her. absolutely wild to me that enrage literally isnt a concept for the actual high end raiders.
Big disagree that m1 has the only tank positioning check, Alarm 1 in m2 is imo an even bigger tank check--moving her around smoothly while helping your party dodge arrows while keeping uptime is hard!
100%, bad tanks absolutely kill melee uptime on that mechanic if not just literally kill the group.
as a ranged... I just stand far away and harcast my FireIVs or motifs while standing still for 4 second and laughing at the melees
I think it somewhat depends what strat you end up doing, I'm not much of a mario kart enjoyer so I was thinking more from the stance of keeping the boss centre - if moving the boss, yeah, I agree
M3 tank positioning diff can also be pretty huge if you have a really good MT in Fusedown, but PF strats don't take this into account.
@@Toad-yv8ko as a ranged I can say you are often also the ones killing the melee lol. You bait the bees in the middle of the arena and cut the group off and they get sandwiched between their baits and yours lmao
After clearing M2S on PF I was gonna take a break from raiding for a bit but you got me exited for M3S and 4. My static took a break last week so I'll see how much better it is with an organized group
Likely M4S is being held back by being, well, the first raid tier, and since they are experimenting with mechanics right now, they didn't want to go too wild on the mechanics here, cause it definitely looks like some of those mechanics should have more going on, when they don't
Also, a small note, the dps checks being so lenient definitely aren't entirely because of the class buffs, there's no way that those buffs contributes to sometimes clearing a whole minute before the dps check for M4S for some of the first clears of these fights
Arthas talked to Yoshi-P at the CN Fanfest and he admited that the Savage was not balanced for the 7.0 Jobchanges. So they didnt really tuned it propperly.
Hope they go a little bot more crazy with Tier 2&3
@@DantoriusD that is partially why I said not entirely, I think without the buffs, it was still pretty lenient and they probably would have had 20ish seconds of leeway to work with by the end with these particular dps checks, the buffs just kinda exacerbated the issue a bit more
if m4 was being held back due to 1st tier mech wise, what about o4, e4 and p4
they should bring back the level of dps check from 1st week, p8s.
@@lev884 To be fair, with them even holding back in M4 the pace is much faster than something like P4S, though EW was slower in general than most expansions, E4 is a reasonable counterargument, though I think there that was them naturally shifting from StormBlood to ShadowBringers, since EW and DT are still recovering slightly from being treated as intro points for newcomers. How tight was the DPS check on Eden Titan week 1?
I think the tier is a huge flavour win and playing monk on this tier was super fun. some things were definitely weirdly tuned but I think they're easing us into whats going to be a really good xpac full of end game content.
I can't wait to play mnk this tier
I liked how I knew someone died by the announcer before I saw them die on the party list.
i personally really enjoyed M2 as a melee trying to find ways to keep uptime but i definitely understand how other roles did not enjoy it. It was a nice change of pace where i actually have to think and plan my movement to keep gcds unlike EW.
As someone who's been clearing every tier in PUGs for like 6 years, I genuinely hate difficult DPS checks. PF damage is abysmal even when there aren't deaths, and I feel like other people being shit at damage is ruining *my* experience through no tangible fault of my own. I understand that some amount of DPS check should exist, but I have the most fun when I don't suffer for other people being bad at hitting buttons. If there was some sort of Faust dummy you had to solo clear before you could even enter the floor just to make sure you could at least *theroetically* do enough damage to be useful, then maybe I'd agree that strict damage checks should make a comeback. It's honestly so frustrating to cycle PF after PF looking for the one group of people who actually hit buttons correctly, though.
For reference, I cleared this tier week 2, and we got the kill on M4S at the exact moment the enrage cast finished. Only 3 deaths, non-standard comp of VPR, PCT, NIN, RDM. After a 12 hour continuous session. To me, this did feel incredibly earned. But then hearing you and others talk about the DPS check not existing, I suddenly feel bitter that I suffered this because the people I played with were actually just bad at their jobs. Sure we would have cleared a lot sooner without the 3 deaths, but then you talk about groups with 10+ deaths still clearing easily and that kind of shifts it back into feeling like shit again.
Just like you said, it's not on you, it's on people being bad at their jobs. Like, for example, vipers can hit an incredible 31k dps! You can bar it lower for the average good player with around 28, 29k, but those are the numbers people should* be aiming to be around.
Emphasis on should.
With how people fuck up rotations constantly or forget about them, it's not a surprise it took long. However, don't let the time you took for the clear deter you from feeling proud of it.
Most people don't play 12h straight, i'd bet you guys were tired af too XD
You brought your victory home, enjoy it man. In reclears you'll see that get better and better
M2S is an actual hell in PF where it’s a roulette on getting actual good healers/bad healers. Especially if they don’t know what color pairs are and that it doesn’t apply for EVERYTHING like Beeline. :3
And I agree. Honey B. Lovely is mid, wouldn’t stand again.
Small correction: the left+right after the devour mechanic is also in normal mode later in the fight, just with looser timing.
My issue with the prevalance of physical damage in M1 and M3 is not that it makes certain classes shine more. While I'm not really a fan of having to change classes for fights, I can appreciate certain classes being better at certain fights. It's that the classes disadvantaged there never got the advantage elsewhere. If raidwide is magic damage, all tanks perform equally. If it's physical, 2 of them get disadvantaged. It's similar with how the more difficult melee uptime this tier disadvantaged all melee...except viper. "hero" moments for specific classes are fine. But only if all or most get them, not only selected few. Like when you are warrior, there's no situation where switching would be a noteabl gain. But for DRK and GNB, there would be. That doesn't feel fair.
how is it unfair? also there are instances of magic damage aoes in those fights, in m1s the knockback in m3s final fusedown, the knockback towers, the dives, fusefield which may be the most heal intensive part of m3s, you may not cover the hardest hitting aoes since those are physical but your job gets to help at another point of the fight, your noteable gain for drk and gnb is having higher damage and very strong self mits
@@shinjimikej There are some, yes. But barely any of note. Lik in m3s, its pretty much just fusefield(and maybe flare dive if your melee are too greedy). Most of the fight is using it because might as well, not because it really helps much
As for the other points...drk and gnb don't have a noteworthy edge in either of these aspects. All tanks deal within 1% damage of each other and especially for drk, the prevalance of physical attacks also weakens their self mit kit.
This, especially when you consider last time a certain tank's raidwide mitigation was marginally worse (WAR's SiO in Abyssos vs bleeds) it got buffed.
I am not a fan of the heavy physical from M1 because I'm doing picto. The amount of times I died to the protean hits is staggering... even in my first clear, where I didn't mess up and we overall had a clean run, I still died just to damage, while everyone else gets to live, just because I'm in the magic ranged dps category.
I mean, the WAR and PLD one are just better all the time. PLD ALWAYS has better utility than the other 3 tanks. The utility imbalance has always been here with all jobs. Viper vs Monk is ridiculous. Realistically, why have a Viper when you can have a monk? Their damage is very close and monk has way more utility. It was the same with MCH vs. BRD/DNC until they added the wrench, and is also the reason they don't allow RDM to do as much damage as BLM.
In a perfect world every class has the same amount of niche utility that help on some fights and not others while everyone does the same amount of damage. It's not acceptable game design to have classes with utility do 10-15% less damage than those that don't. At least IMO, of course.
As someone who started doing High end content just this Expansion, I will say that I have respect for everyone who has been doing this and that I wish I was apart of it earlier.
The challenge that it forced me through as a tank in terms of positional and rotation was a very welcoming change. My only issue with this tier atm is my availability and the fact I just got my Pc a few weeks ago. So I’ve been Gposing like crazy ahaha.
Regardless, I’m slowly about to get over my Pf anxiety and finally taking this tier much more seriously than before the coming weeks because I wanna at least get 1 clear for M4s but I know it’s gunna take time as I don’t have a consistent Static who has gone far. Which is ok but I wanna get better and farther
All I know is that I don't dread the upcoming weeks of reclearing. After DSR -> Abyssos -> TOP absolutely destroying my energy levels I am so refreshed by this tier.
So... I am not a high end raider, but I've cleared every EW tier where I started raiding. So far my experience is a bad one... but that is more due to organisation rather than the actual fights. My static started late, so this is our first raidweek and I have only seen the fights in streams and guides and only experienced M1s as a full fight.
So far I'm actually loving this tier as it gives me everything I kinda want after a Anabaseios-Tier that was reason enough for me to step back a little from climbing up the skilltree in regards for higher skillevel groups. So I gathered some friends that wanted to start raiding or have very little raid experience. Prog has been enjoyable and fast, which is what I actually like about this tier.
While yes, this tier does not seem to be something for us "older" raiders, that also tend to look for long progs and difficult fights, it seems to be a continuation of a trend that SE has actually already started in EW. DT has also showed us, that they are following that trend an even more aggressive way than in EW - and I really hope they stick with it. The game's getting "harder" - not in a way that would be noticeable for experienced raiders, but for the general wise masses. Duties and dungeons actually take a few braincells to properly work out, mechanics of "normal" content are more engaging, challenging to an extend, and generally faster and more layered. Savage has had a reputation of being "so very hard", this easier savage has been actually a good thing as it is in a way known enough to actually lure people into savage that have not been doing savage before. So far the beginners that I have seen had a good start to their savage experience. While yes, the savage experience "suffered" a little from being this easy, the overall experience I think, is a very good one for the actual state of the game.
As a tank thats cleared the tier, i have to disagree about m4s. I really felt the strain on mitigation balancing the damage coming from the heavy hitting autos and frequent enough tank busters. So many times either MT or healers were struggling to keep MT alive strictly due to autos happening during high focus mechanics. Whether youre MT sweating over your HP, or OT balancing your targetable mit or voking to reduce some pressure on the MT, the fight for me felt the most challenging to do as a tank.
M1S was great from a movement standpoint but felt very wet noodle. M4S didn't have a lot of movement optimization opportunities but it forced me to utilize every crumb of mitigation i have to stay alive and i loved that
Pretty much the most fun tiver ive ever progged (been raiding since verse), yes it does lack in difficulty and m2s is quite a terrible fight, but the fun factor is through the roof especially as a meele trying to greed every possible gcd, + the announcer, i love the announcer so much lol. M4s has become my favorite savage fight (maybe just behind e8s?) and while i wish phase 2 had some harder mechanics i think the theme and the cool factor carries the fight.
While the tier has its weaknesses I have found myself enjoying each turn a LOT. Despite the issues, the tier is just fun
came out pretty PAW-sitive out of the first encounter, eh? 😼
The main issue I have with M2S is the randomness of alarm 1, and the MK strat everyone likes to use. It's great for phys ranged, melee, and tanks, but high risk for casters that want to keep their uptime unless the lines drop in a good order to move between casts.
Listen........ It's *so much fun* design-wise. I'll take "too easy but fun" over "I can't do this anymore it makes no sense". Could it be adjusted? Yes, indeed. But I'll take the fun as long as they're giving it out. ❤
"Just switch jobs" is such a bad take. People did that for p8s and it didnt get very well recieved. A benefit of job homogenization is that every job can be played if you like the job. Why should someone outside of world first raiders be forced to be completely subpar just because they want to play the job they like
Yeah, specially with how bad getting gear is on this game
Becauses they're playing a game that allows for it easily with shared gear, as long as one job within a gearset is good that's fine. That's not saying others shouldn't be clearing
>Why should someone outside of world first raiders be forced to be completely subpar just because they want to play the job they like
Why should all statics be forced to shove someone (usually with sighs) onto a phys ranged for 5%? You do it for the team, you play jobs you don't want to for the clear.
The more jobs are homogenized, the less actual jobs you have to play. In an extreme example, if every job is just a reskin of another, then there is functionally one job you can play. It’s quite easy to swap jobs in this game if you know in advance, so I would say variety in jobs is ideal, because at least those subomptimal jobs still exist. I do agree gearing should be improved though.
Because jobs don't take that long to gear ( thanks to them sharing gear ), most of them are pretty easy to handle with rare exceptions, and most importantly: It's part of the game. Some jobs will perform better than others at certain fights.
However!
You *can* make any job work, you just need to do well enough in it. You don't see everyone playing gunbreaker just because it's the best damage dealer tank, other tanks work too. Will they need more work for it? Yup. Same for healers, same for DPS.
There's over 20 jobs in the game, that says something about you not taking just 1 and forgetting the rest.
Job homogenization is only good until it starts to blur the identity of a job.
As someone who's healed all of Panda on content I really relate to your point about unique damage types. One of my favourite points in one of my favourite Savage fights is in P8S phase 2.
It was the mechanic that targets any two players with a purple debuff that deals massive dot damage while a bunch of high damage mechanics happened to the rest of the party.
Suddenly as a Sage, I had to look at who was targeted, evaluate the weaker player and actually Kardia them! Actually use it on someone who isn't a tank!!! Then i got to use my other abilities to make sure we didn't wipe!
Like you said, I'd love more mechanics with spot healing, bc outside of people messing up we just have to aoe heal everything and it kinda feels like my single target cooldowns are 50% useless.
Overall fun tier tho, presentation was phenomenal.
I heavily disagree on the idea that Dark Knight having 2 mitigation buttons that are nearly useless in M1S is a good thing - I don't mind that other tanks have better stuff, but not being able to contribute to raidwide damage mitigation in a meaningful way is extremely disheartening. I'd like it if Dark Missionary and Dark Mind got the Addle treatment of being better against magic damage, but not useless against physical.
The further sentiment of "you can just swap jobs" is not conducive to change or discussion, and I'd rather not level an entire job to 100 that I don't even like playing comparatively just because a fight deals mostly physical damage instead of magic. It's cool that Dark Knight is really good against magic damage! I just don't want it to be useless outside of those environments.
For the DPS check, for statics I guarentee it is very likely a big joke. In PF grinder like me, PF struggles heavily with M2, M3 dps checks or consistency. Will be going to M4 soon. (Especialy M2, I spend most of my time stuck on enrage, because people in PF pushing their buttons).
This is the best opening of a tier in the game's history. No joke. Banger music. Interesting mechanics. Awesome boss designs. Not ridiculously difficult (we have Cosmic Exploration, Criterion, the new Bozja/Eureka, and even more tiers ahead, we don't need this to be an artificial time dump).
I have a mixed opinion of the Dawntrail MSQ, but not with the dungeon and raid content. It was fantastic.
It's def up there to be the best first tier in ffxiv, it's really good and just makes sense for a first tier to not go full ham immediately, even tho it def was a fresh air as well and had decent challenge in it. I fully expect the second tier to be very crazy already, it's just part of this games history at this point with second tiers being batshit crazy.
Entirely agreed, I think this is easily the best raid tier they've ever made. Not the most challenging, but the best. The fights aren't my personal favourite, but they're phenomenally designed.
I think think E12S is and will always be my favourite fight in the game, but DAMN does M4S slap. Fun mechanics, great voice lines, pumping music, great visuals, and a super intense p2. Love love love it, kudos to CBU3 on this one.
So very excited for FRU. You want puzzle mechanics? Don't worry, they're coming...
I'm just happy this isn't anabaseios again. I am absolutely elated that if one person isn't dialed in, then I still have a chance to clear. Last tier, I left countless groups because one or two people just didn't "get it," and the parties were frankly a complete waste of my time. It often just felt utterly hopeless, that I was at the mercy of 7 other randoms, and that nothing I did could really push the needle towards a clear. This tier is much better, it's been good fun. Got my first week one clear too, which was pretty neat
This news makes me so happy to hear. I burnt out of the game for about 2 years after trying P1S in party finder for about 2 weeks, with a week of that being me knowing my parts of the fight and just rolling the dice to get a full team of people who also knew it. Utterly joyless experience that basically convinced me that savage wasn't for me.
I'm building up confidence to try again, and this is encouraging. Just gotta go through the EXs and gear up a bit first.
Wicked Thunder beats both previous non-door boss encounters by a landslide in terms of transition. You get the epic cinematic experience of the boss transforming and all but while you are still playing the game (except for the ~2 gcd after knockback). So much better than Titan chilling untargetable for 30s or WE SHALL NEVER BE PARTED AGAIN cutscene every single pull.
This was my first tier clearing all 4 bosses. I enjoyed all of them even if I am consigned to PF hell lol.
Regarding the DPS Check, the fact that M3S’ check was tighter was the strangest part of the checks for me. On all of my runs of m3 we had to see the bombardian special, but in m4, SQ was optional. The funniest thing that happened was that we almost 2 manned it (m4) and I could notice the percentage of HP getting chuncked with every one of my higher potency attacks like high jump.
In the moment, m4s felt rewarding to clear, but after thinking about the deaths and damage downs I was a little let down at how easy it was. My entire life of the dragon damage window was almost completely misaligned and that was a nonissue for our clear
On a similar note, I had no desire to learn the uptime sunrise sabbath strat because there is no reason too.
It's interesting how the expectations from normal mode play into the reception of savage, because I imagine that because so much more time would have to be spent on designing the savage versions it'd make sense for those to be designed first, then fine tuned while the normal modes are created. So I read read a mechanics like alarm pheromones of black cat's devour-like attack that didn't change much as low party coordination movement mechanics to break up the savage pacing, which happened to be suitable for normal mode as well with little to no tweaks.
And personally, I love that the normal modes don't feel alien after clearing the savage versions, fights where normal mode has an opposite solve to savage or extreme in similar mechanics feel really weird and a little like sabotage when they show up in roulettes.
But because normal is out before savage, there's no getting around the fact that it feels lazy and unoriginal when you do see the mechanics play out very similar in savage.
This is my first raid tier in XIV (I've raided in WoW a bit over the years) and I was surprised with how easy it felt compared to how I expected it to be. Overall really have enjoyed this tier (except you, Alarm Pheromones 1) and I'm excited to see what m5-8 will bring!
Turn 2 was my favorite fight from the tier actually, it has a nice rhythm to it, especially the mitigation part at the end. But pf rly has issues with the fight, either Dmg check wise or heart buff wise, which can be a bit frustrating on reclears
About Dmg checks in general, I think they are rly fine for the current skill set of pf players, had multiple enrages on turn 2 and a few in 3, didn’t clear 4 in a PF environment yet, but I assume enrages will be happening again. So I personally think regarding PF the checks are how they should be probably.
But had no issues at all with dps in static. But I mean it’s a static so things are supposed to be easier x)
I know they don't want to nerf things but I think they should have just nerfed picto. Would have made the tier dps check more accurate. I doubt it would have made it tight or hard without the potency buffs but just a little less underwhelming.
As a melee I really did appreciate this tier. I did it on Samurai and boy have I never appreciated and worked around the 5yalm range of iaijustu ever so much before. It was so much fun looking for uptime.
So about the dps checks but have you considered that maybe you are just getting too good?
FF14 by the way they design jobs (very static rotations and lack of rng to optimize for) and lack of meaningful customization tries very very hard to keep the player pool around a similar level. However over time people do get better and the gap between a top player like yourself or a pleb like me that does savage for his first time gets increasingly bigger. Square now has to decide what they want to do with savage.
1. Try to make it hard enough for top players like yourself find the dps check an actual check so you get that satisfying kill. This also means that by doing so they leave behind everyone below at least for a couple weeks while they gear up to reach your dps with better gear.
2. Make it for the average players thereby creating a situation where you and other top players find it too easy.
I think a question to ask here is whether everyone deserves to clear week 1 or in an early week. There is a time-gated, natural nerf to every savage tier to ever exist, that goes beyond FFXIV itself, and that is gear progression. So if you make a check that is satisfying for hardcore players on week 1, then players who are not as good at doing dps will be able to clear when they have more gear in a couple more weeks. In my opinion, not everyone at every skill level should be able to clear week 1. Hardcore players will feel satisfied with a dps check that suits them while more casual players will have something to strive for - through both gameplay and gear improvement. I think that clearing a fight with minimal gear *should* be difficult and is a huge reason why hardcore players like to push these early clears.
Excuse me, beautiful sir. How did you survive 30:02 !
I don't mind having to work for uptime more this tier, but viper existing and being able to braindead uptime everything with uncoiled fury makes me super jealous lol. Barely scraped a week 2 clear for the tier yesterday and I think overall it was pretty good. Not the hugest fan of M3s since it has that 3rd fight syndrome of taking too long to get started, removing the first 3 minutes of the fight and having him begin with one drink would have made it more fun imo. I liked the other fights though, M4s is really fun and its nice not having a door boss again.
I really liked this tier for how mechanics focused it is. I just finished through PF and even with the easier damage reqs the average player struggled.
I think m4s phase 2 being easy is the price we pay for not having a door boss. fights like p7s and shiva have shown how frustrating long fights can get when they have the hardest mechanics towards the end. especially in pf
I agree that busters were pretty boring this tier, but m1s and m2s are honestly pretty fun to main tank. There was *maybe* one fun fight to tank in Anabaseios (p10s, but gear killed that because by week 3 or 4 you could be pretty loose with your mits) and none in Abyssos so 2 fun tank fights is a big improvement.
Also in pf the fights all did actually require being pretty on top of my mits despite the boring busters, because most PF healers apparently just cannot both heal the MT and do mechanics at the same time. If I wasn't rolling my mits through mouser/beats 1/alarm 1/etc in PF (and sometimes even if I was) I'd just straight up die to autos week 1.
I personally found this tier fun as Paladin specifically because there were a few moments where having ranged capabilities on Imperator and their Confiteor combo came in really clutch, and gave me good opportunities to abuse their range and keep full uptime for certain mechanics, like when supports have defamation first in Beat 3 in M2S, or during pretty much the entire first half of M4S. Actually juggling those resources properly *and* having the range actually be a factor was a lot of fun for me
I’m loving the whole tier so far. It’s my first tier Tanking so maybe the lessened positioning responsibility isn’t hitting me as hard, but I’m having a blast anyways. I have only made it to the third fight thus far, but what I’ve seen of it feels like it’s gonna be a wild ride. Honey B, I get, is not so spicy for more consistent groups but my static’s been struggling with the consistency check. I do see what you mean though how it doesn’t really push you that hard and the spiciest mechanics are in the first half where you’re just coasting for the rest of the fight.
I have to say, I'm still stuck on m1s and eu pf that I was in were very deadly with the positions, specially with the clones. X(
I think this tier does a fantastic job of being a proper Final Exam for the expansion. EW savages focused on a lot of more puzzley mechanics, but here we're challenged to keep uptime and keep moving through simple but tight and quick mechanics.
I definitely agree that this tier felt too easy even for a first tier, although my perspective may be shaped from having done multiple Savage tiers and all Ultimates 😅 One concern I do have as a knock-on effect from this tier is that it may end up lulling newer raiders into a false sense of security for FRU (which will probably be the hardest Ultimate yet)… I know SE are most likely trying to onboard new people into Savage with this tier, but if FRU is as crazy as I’m expecting it will be it just seems crazy putting almost the easiest Savage tier yet right before the likely hardest Ultimate… 🤣
I'm on M3S with my static rn, first time I've ever actually raided seriously with a static in my 5+ years of playing this game. I don't have much to compare to other than PFing some older expansion tiers years ago & doing a bit of UwU, but so far Arcadion has had some of my favorite fights both in normal *and* savage modes. Really loving the direction of battle content in general this expansion.
I like the lack of heavy body checks a lot, but I feel like all of the stress from them went from being shared across the party to placed on the healers.
In a static it isn't so bad, but in party finder it's a whole mess of people not mitigating, not knowing how to do mechanics or just not being consistent enough, and a lot of weight is placed on healers to just adapt for people's monkey brain moments, since it's not just a wipe anymore.
Don't get me wrong, it feels AMAZING to save a run because you're just that good at recovery! But these two weeks it took for me to clear the tier have burnt me out considerably more than healing the entirety of Abyssos and UwU, and tanking the entirety of Anabaseios and TEA. I started just bringing X-Ethers because I knew that if one too many people died, or *I* died once, I'd start bottoming out on MP.
Swapping to a DPS I haven't had any of those issues, so I wonder if I'm not the only one who had these issues?
Tier definitely would've benefited from a body check or too. People loved to whine about how prevalent they were in EW, and while I agree there was an unhealthy amount there, this alternative option of just making the healer suffer because someone else has no idea what they're doing is not good for the game either.
Will my mit work this fight or not? We'll find out! This is why I prefer WAR/PLD for unconditional mits.
I'll give a different perspective: I've been playing the game for 5 years and I started in my 30s. Along the journey, things changed, work and family "happened" and time crunched. I took a nearly 1 year break from the game and I came back on week 7 or 8 of this tier. I cleared it in PF and it was my first time doing a full tier with random players (I always had a static before). I'm glad it was easier than usual, because I would have probably not cared to complete it if it ended up being a painful PF experience. Reclears, for instance, are still painful on m4s. PF doesn't skip sunrise and wipes are the norm on that mechanic. I think there're two sides of the story: the one where you play with friends and an experienced group, and the one where you play more randomly on PF. Square Enix has to think of both and I think they made a good choice with this tier. I will also add that it's only the first tier, I'm sure they will gradually increase difficulty with the second and the third one. Anyway, great video and despite things, I still am a Honey B. Lovely stem.
I think the problems with wicked thunder's second phase come from a weird adjustment mid design, it feels like an over correction of the critiques that p8s and especially p12s got, there probably was a version of wicked thunder with a checkpoint early in development because of how significant the transofrmation is and how the second phase's mechanics are so different from phase 1, but p12s p2 being a slog of already solved puzzle mechanics if you weren't blind progging it, that especially had to be toned back if they're near the end of a 13 minute fight, this isn't ultimate after all. BUT I feel like the fight does benefit from being one cohesive fight,a nd I think the filler mechanics are there to cover space of some puzzle mechanics that got stripped out to fit the timeline of a shortened single fight.
Ah yes, the AST in your footage on Ioncannon is just like me. Getting their Divination delayed by all the BS going on and then having a sadder window towards the end of the fight.
I think that might be the most infuriating but also rewarding thing in M4S to me... that every little drift gets punished hard in phase 1.
I think CBU3 was so scandalized by needing to nerf P8S because of job imbalance that they'd rather enrage be too easy than risk being wrong again. They should have just nerfed picto/viper, honestly. Too many other jobs had to get buffed by a crazy amount to keep up.
7:21 i disagree with this point purely of how trash gearing alternative jobs is, the game promotes swapping jobs but gearing them is so trash, it's all balanced around you gearing only one fully or partially if they happen share pieces.
jobs within a role share all gear except weapons, or at least, you are able to put together a solid set that will do so
(in the case of tanks of course, which is what we are discussing)
I think pulling back on difficulty was an inevitability. I think in some of the tougher fights in EW, mechanics were starting to get both brutally difficult and not fun, with a large part of them not being fun due to the type of difficulty they are. Caloric theory is a pretty miserable mechanic that is perfectly emblematic of this. Yeah its a puzzle, and yeah its hard, but I never once had fun doing it. Some fights like P8S, I enjoyed initially, but at the end of reclears, I never wanted to step back into it. Basically all of anabaseios I didn't do too much of because of body checks just being everywhere.
I think they focused too hard on making the first clear really difficult while ignoring how a fight is gonna feel from week to week. Granted, you can have more difficult fights than what we have here and they can still be fun to reclear. I think this was a combination of pulling difficulty back to re-asses things combined with the first tier being intentionally easier on top of it.
I'm glad to hear that this tier has fewer body checks. I did all three tiers of EW savage and by the end I grew to absolutely hate the concept in general. My static lost 5 members over the course of Anabaseios, with 3 of them being on P12S specifically.
It's not fun being deemed a failure because someone else doesn't know what to do. And it is even less fun playing a Healer and being denied the joy of dragging a group across the finish line. Body checks make it impossible to save a run that is going awry as a healer. And as a healer main, I want to feel like that hero sometimes. Let me raise people and it not just be delaying the inevitable.
I agree with most of this! This has been my favorite first tier ever, and I hope they keep up the quality from here on out. The main thing I disagree with is M2S. I can remember exactly how the fight goes, and very easily, compared to something like P6S. The beats are all very different and memorable from each other, Alarm 1 and Alarm 2 are both great fun and are also very different from each other, and Rotten Heart is again, memorable, different, and fun. I also enjoy how Beat 1 has quite a bit of randomness to it, you never quite know who is going where or where you'll have to be going.
I also share much of your thoughts on M4S, but I have those same thoughts with E4S and E8S as well. I'll compare it to E4S, as that would be more fair. First phase is fantastic, fast paced, and execution heavy. But after a 30s AFK transition into Titan Maximum, the fight nosedives. Dual Earthen Fist has set spots for all but 1 person, and repeats without changes. Earthen Fist literally has a harder variant in the Lv95 dungeon. Uplift 1 and Uplift 2 are purely puzzle mechanics, and are therefor, completely obsolete for 99% of the playerbase, and hardly an actual mechanic. Healer Gaols is basically just "Striking Dummy, the Phase", with nothing going on besides forcing the healers to AFK, and having the tanks and DPS...well, DPS. The thing they've been doing this entire time. Last phase is cool, but lasts over 3 minutes. 3 minutes of repeating the exact same mechanic, over and over again. I think M4S does it better, with a transition phase that is playable, no pure puzzle mechanics, and and least some actual real mechanics in the form of the Sabbaths, but it still has similar issues as E4S/E8S in its other mechanics. It's sadly just the nature of how they make non-door bosses. I love them and the variety they bring, but I know that after 4 minutes, the fight is going to become just a very long EX trial from that point on.
I found this tier pretty fun, but I think it was missing a few things. The tank mechanics like you said are quite lacking, they feel trivial and non-existent a lot of the time. Having to move the boss again sometimes is good, but so many tankbusters are just so boring. People rightfully give fights like Uwu flack for how power creeped they are nowadays, but doing it recently, you can really see how much more the tank has to do and figure out compared to some of these tankbusters that feel straight out of normal mode. Like for M3s, yeah, it’s cool that it hits like 8 times, but the tbs are so far apart that you can just kitchen sink it every time if all else fails, so it barely matters.
Another thing I miss is Add phases. They don’t need to be in every fight, but at least 1 fight having one would be appreciated. I had high hopes since Valigarmanda had the first case of an add being targetable at the same time as a boss since Memoria Miseria EX. But unfortunately, this tier does not break the recent trend of savages having no adds whatsoever, and that’s a bit of a shame.
I forgot how much fun having to work for uptime is though, so having reasonable hitboxes again is a major improvement. Toning down the body checks is nice as well, it gets exhausting if every mistake just kills everyone constantly. I think they should have tuned the dps check up, not down to compensate though, because having 2 dps deaths and 2 damage downs, and still clearing in pf with 6 seconds to spare is a bit too lenient for a final fight I think.
Overall, despite it’s flaws, I still think this was probably the most fun tier since promise, there isn’t a single fight I would outright say I dislike, and provided they can fix the flaws going forward, I think I’m pretty happy with the fight design, albeit it could stand to be a bit more creative.
Edit: I should add that I did this tier as OT, that’s why I could just kitchen sink the busters and throw intervention on the mt, I wasn’t just ignoring autos. Still, I wish they would have more interesting tank mechanics for OTs.
Honestly, and I know people aren't going to like hearing this, but I think the dps check for this tier is "probably" fine for, specifically, the first one of the expansion. I cleared m1-m3 with my static week one and got my own m4 clear at the end of week two, but I've been helping a sprout friend who finally got to endgame for the first time with DT who wants to learn savage. I have learned something with it. New players HAVE NO IDEA how to do damage. It's nothing against them, but they only farmed Valigarmanda for 100 clears before the tier came out instead of trying a variety of realistically more complex fights that would be akin to savage mechanics like EX2. With this person, I've been running on my alt with crafted instead of my main with all of my raid gear, and party finders are just struggling to even clear the dps checks in m1 and m2 right now because people don't know how to deal damage without dying. So, in that vein, I'm a little glad that this tier gives them opportunities to grow because they're going to need it for the rest of the expansion.
Also, I really appreciate that the fourth fight is one long thing because it's teaching people how to be consistent. For those that haven't gone into pf for the fight, people are awful at narrowing/widening and Sunrise specifically for some reason. I think the consistency checks are good because these are also the people that are going to be going into the Eden ultimate in just a couple of months.
I cleared the entire raid tier week 1 in 5 days fully in PF. I cleared M1s and M2s day 1.
It took 1.5 days to clear M3s, this was because people kept joining my pf that clearly weren’t at enrage.
Then M4s took 1.5 days. luckily the people I found in pf for the final fight stayed together and even made a linkshell so we could prog and clear together and everyone was solid.
It's very funny that I always have the same opinions as you on most topics surrounding FF14 fights design. Maybe it's because I also play healer but yeah, I agree to everything. (I'm still a Honey B fan tho)
My biggest issue with m2s, is during the first beat, you could end up with 0 hearts. And as a white mage who really wants to use my bell to heal everyone's dot.. it's so incredibly annoying when I just can't
While phase 2 of M4S wasn't the most complex, it still felt really really fun and enjoyable, not to mention the amazing soundtrack making it skyrocket in terms of epicness and storytelling.
"And if your physical ranged DPS stay awake?" C'mon, they're not that bad!
Not a savage raider myself but aim to start this expac. I used to run hard mode raids in destiny years back however.
Gotta say the major factor that puts me off of ff14s savage and extreme is the dps checks. It feels like the way it's presented, you have to be nigh perfect in your rotation and maximise every stat by optimising buff windows. Maybe that's just people making it out to be harder than it is but, I have a full-time job, I don't have time to practice unique rotation plans for each fight and farm either gil or crafters to get the best food and potions for the fight to then spend 4 hours trying to get a clear.
I much prefer a fight to be lenient on damage checks and encourage unique parts of your kit, like RezMage, being used to full effect. A clear done with a red mage should feel different to a clear done with a black mage and not just because of the order you press your damage buttons.
They should be a test of your expanded class abilities (pooling rattling coil to minimise downtime), not a flowchart/optimisation fest, that the main barrier to completion is the time you have available to bash your head against either the fight or a target dummy.
No matter how annoying party finder may be sometimes, no matter how many times we wipe, no matter how frustrated we are, me and my 4 other friends will always clean up our moods when we mimic Metem going "MY RIIING.... Ahem. Please excuse us while we repair the ring" or "The Honey B Lovely show is about to begin" in such an enthusiastic voice
30:02 How are you alive Rin. Raid tier was fun, my first week 1. Fights were fun overall but yea, they lack something (apart from the damage checks). The fact there are no mechanics could be because it's not a door boss
Light work
I personally really love M2S. If my pf experience is anything to go by it's not too easy of a fight, while also not being too demanding on me. Beyond that its just so thematic, jumping phases of chaos being hunted by warms of bees, and trying to move in an orderly fashion like you were that swarm. I also feel like I'm being asked to use my healing kit unlike m1s.
in a way i do prefer the first tier having a lower check but harder / more interesting mechanics over what we had before in past expansions
this allows people trying out raiding for the first time to finish a tier in a reasonable amount of time, and to get a taste of how fun raiding is without being discouraged because they couldnt clear all the fights
it was a shame in a way that in EW the first raid was so easy but then the 2nd and 3rd floor hard blocked people, i knew a lot of people who tried out raiding and then gave up
I liked the tier, M1S is fine, standard but fine. M2S and the chaotic bits are a change of pace. M3S is back to being standard but I like the theme and spectacle. M4S is forever tainted by the horrible prog I'm going through. It's the worst fight I've ever had to do, somehow. It's not hard it's just the fact I'm having the most miserable experience of my FF14 life right now. If I had to do a tier list it would be opposite of everyone else : liked every fight besides the last one.
I am enjoying the tier so far, the fights are fun an generally engaging although I do think the DPS checks are a bit lenient (although I'm pretty sure this is because they weren't adjusted after the round of job buffs you reference). I think M2S is a good example of where they've tried to be more inventive with how success is measured in a fight (i.e. with the hearts) but I don't think how the community interacted with it (for example with the double stack) was as they expected it to bee.
With the likelihood of newer players coming into the scene (Like myself) I think this is an excellent tier to get new and even older players who felt savage was unapproachable into it.
I've cleared M3 so far, but I agree on most points. One thing I mildly disagree on is the dps check. In a relatively optimized static, where all 8 players are purple+ on average, sure it's probably non-existent. It's fairly hard to balance a dps check between your purple+ statics and the rag tag PF. I've had many a time trying to clear M2 in PF solo, dying to enrage with 0 deaths and 0 heart stacks and I'm a high blue/low purple player. Skill issue I guess (buff MCH yoshi-san).
In terms of aesthetics, they nailed this tier. I really appreciate each boss having a different BGM track and unique enrage sequences. It's got the same vibe as most of Dawntrail's msq. I'm just here on a new adventure, taking a back seat from being the focal point of what's going on. Low stakes WWE match? Sure I'm in.
I think it's overall a good tier for an expansion release. They definitely played it safe (after the stupid dps check that was P8), which I don't think is a bad thing. It is unfortunate being too easy for the 1% but in a game like this, you can't please everyone. Just personal preference, but I like execution over solving. I can do without the wonky thinking puzzles. I may be the minority in that regard, but I also don't like blind prog so that probably explains a lot.
This was the first tier I've ever attempted to do purely on PF and I barely scraped by a week 5 clear, largely from the usual problems you tend to face in PF with people joining in who are clearly not ready for the listed stage of the fight. An entire week of attempts of M3S trying to get a clear and people are still mucking up deaths before fusefield is just griefing at that point.
I am playing Astrologian (mainly) or playing Dark Knight as I am a main tank. I pepper in the occasional DPS and i really enjoy the fights. I haven't cleared yet, working on it. Doing it completely blind because it's better for everyone instead of holding someone's hand...petsonally. But yeah. One of my members in my B static (which i am flipping around roles) who isn't even a healer main did so well so i guess that calls into question. But they only cleared M1...barely. So far, Brute Bomber, where I'm only as far as the first Final Fusefield, is so exciting and fun. And i agree with the job change for my own opinions. But I'll always be a Dark Knight. in short, i didn't think it was that easy or incredibly difficult (Party Finder does that) but it is a good and fun tier. Can't it just be fun as well as a bit of a challenge?
Excellent yap Mr Rinon 🤩
DPS checks: I know people were skipping sword quiver on week one, but my group was most certainly not. We're decent players but even still, we were making mistakes in the last phase and when we finally did clear on the first week, it was after having seen enrage multiple times and we still had to do Sword Quiver. Now when it comes to PF, I think the DPS checks are exactly where they should be. Parties are too inconsistent for tight DPS checks, in my opinion. Even in M2S, I've been in parties with zero deaths, maybe 1 DD, and that enrage feels impossible, just because not everyone in the group is at the same skill level.
Overall, I think the DPS checks are good for PF. And honestly, I don't want to have a struggle on reclears. If people do the mechanics, I just want to win. I don't want to spend 5 hours struggling against a DPS check on week 5.
I found the tier overall fantastic. The mechs were just right and altought not super challenging they were fun. The DPS checks on 2 and 3 were just right enough that it allowed for recovery to be a good skill to have while still requiring some amount of cleanliness.
My only issue with them is really 4's DPS check (my first clear had 12 deaths) and the physical damage. There's of course the tank issue, its neat that some jobs are better than others for certain things, the issue is that while GNB and DRK basically lack an AOE mit for a good chunk of 1 and 3, WAR and PLD NEVER have that issue, PLD double dips by having fantastic disengagement tools, if this kind of thing is going to stay they should make sure there's some kind of balance.
Another problem with it was that casters were in a huge disadvantage, not only are healers and casters the job with the lowest HP but to make it worse they also have the lowest physical defence. On top of that I am a viera so there were multiple times I just died even when saving tempera coat just for myself just because I'm hyper squishy, which felt real bad. One could argue it should be part of the mit plan to make sure casters survive the raidwides, but it feels shity to have my own survival taken away from my own hands just because I need special attention.
"you can just swap [jobs]" The problem with that is gearing. Getting full 710 is time consuming and/or expensive. Getting raid gear is even more time consuming due to weekly lockouts. I do like switching up what job I bring, but it took a lot to get to that point, and I'm going to be on the gear floor for a lot of my jobs for a long time.
much like dawntrail as a whole, i really like the savage tier alot because it's a very good start, a very good foundation to build off of
i'll be pretty disappointed if the other two tiers don't evolve much past it, but i think the expansion as a whole is a really good sign, savage tier included
that said, the amount of "slightly different" strategies plaguing PF definitely has me relieved to be running this tier with a static. woof
I actually like the fact that the DPS check is more lenient. As a PF raider and RDM it felt really rewarding that proper rezzes helped in securing the clear on M4S. To me it meant I can finally use my entire kit for week 1 clears and not just prog. Beyond that, skipping mechanics later into the tier is something i wouldn't mind (especially sunlight sabbath, fuck that mechanic in PF, man ppl are bad at it). For content intented to be cleared weekly I am very fine with not every weeks clear being a complete struggle in finding a PF group that can stumble past the DPS check. If SE wants to introduce more difficulty again then i hope it will be in the form of puzzle mechanics or maybe even a bit of chaos like the beelines/hearts on M2S. Dare I say it: I'd rather have body-checks again than more boss health for Savage.
Additional comments: I've raided since Sigmascape (skipped a few tiers every now and then cuz of breaks), basically always done it with PF. This tier is, very notably, the best experience i've had with PF raiding. Blind progging was more fun cuz ppl were actually able to solve it even with PF (though I would be fine with mechanical complexity increase as I say in my main comment), but mostly people were willing to put in way more tries and pulls before leaving because small mistakes or a few deaths would not delete the chance of clearing. This prolly gives people the 'we almost got it, let's go again!' feeling more often and makes them more willing to try harder with the group they're in instead of constant group-hopping
I very much enjoy the more personal responsibility in terms of mechanics instead of the 8 man after 8 man body check where I have to sit there and wait for the slowest person to learn. At least I still get to continue to learn the fights if one of my raiders gets dropped.
I remember hating endwalker raids. I called it AFK gaming, afk and still clear cuz everything is stand here and afk. I quit after p8s due to snooze-fiesta gaming. I really like this raid tier, it is more active and has a lot of memory games, it reminds me of eden a lot.
I really like twilight-midnight sabbath, the mechanic is not that hard but it happens relatively fast and you have to look for quite a few things and the randomness that comes with it. And also bombarian special 😂 that shit is cool.
It has some cons tho, beat 2, tag team 2, m4 hades phase, chain lightning stand out as “weak” parts to me.
Overall it's for sure one of the more fun initial raid tiers of an expansion but the lack of any sort of dps check did lessen my enjoyment somewhat. My group cleared M4S at the start of day 2 with 4 deaths and 4 damage downs and we were still at least 30 seconds away from enrage. We also skipped the last 2 mechanics of M1S. That just shouldn't be happening even if it is the first raid tier of an expansion. Luckily the fights are pretty fun (other than than M2S)
R1S - I think it's fine, in fact even preferable to have a fight that's more recognizable to the normal mode. Also, the devour at the end of the fight isn't meant to be super involved, it's just meant to be a choke check. The clear is in your hands as long as you can get past this one mechanic, but with ptsd from P5S, can you get past it without choking?
R2S - my group got a 4% wipe on Thursday this week, after getting 4 stacks during the heart phases. I would rather see this than a fight that just straight up like you if one person fucks up.
And that's all I can really comment on because I haven't gotten to the 3rd or 4th fights yet.
While I don't think this tier was outright bad, I feel almost bored as an OT. I have so few things I'm doing that aren't just 'melee with a couple more mit buttons'. Hell, if the MT never dies I can take tank stance completely off in M3S. Would really have liked to have something that made me feel like I was a tank and not the three melees in a trenchcoat that gunbreaker already is.