As someone who waited far too many years to start trying savage for this exact reason, I appreciate this. For far too long I thought, "If I can't be optimal, I'm a burden to the party, so best not to bother." Decided to give savage a try with my FC last week and am having a lot of fun, and discovering that I'm doing a lot better than I thought I'd do. My only regret is not trying sooner.
This is a similar reason I avoided EX and Savage initially as well. ShB was the first time I leveled and was max in time for EX and Savage, but did not do them since I was worried I would be too noob and not do well and be judged. Good ol' WoW upbringing from years prior. Wasn't until I did some E9S and Emerald EX with the FC for casual raid night that I finally took a moment to get a better opener and find out... it's not that bad. Now I'm a sadist that takes 2 characters through Savage in PF at the same time every tier. >.> I do not parse myself, but I notice the funny numbers on the website after. Not greatest, but I at least do well enough to not be a hindrance. All that's needed.
I thought the same thing for 5 years, then in SB started raiding and my dps was terrible, but so were 2 other dps, we easily cleared the 1st fight while practicing our rotations, I found that was the best way to practice, a dummy just isn't the same
@@apljack Then we have something in common. I also have 2 characters that I do Savage with, my male Miqo'te main with my static and my alt female Au Ra through PF.
Having been savage/ultimate raiding for about 5 years now, I've always felt like perfection should be the goal, but with the caveat that it's perfectly okay to fall short to some extent. Personally, I optimize my rotation to the last auto attack. If I can find any way to do more damage, from (safe) greed, to shifting buttons around for fight specific mechanics and downtime, and everything in between. I do it for two reasons: One is as simple as it's fun to me. I like to see that growth and reward, and I like seeing shiny parse numbers. Big number make brain produce happy chemical, yippee! The second reason though, is because I know not everyone likes to optimize the way I do. I know that a lot of people enjoy extreme/savage/ultimate content, but don't want to be so locked in and focused on their rotation for potentially multiple hours at a time. If me doing my rotation better can give the group as a whole some breathing room, then I say it's a win-win for everyone. Where I still want people to have the goal of perfection and just, be okay with coming short to an extent, however, is when people actually do underperform. I always tell friends who ask "Am I doing good enough?" the same question: If you were put into the content you want to do with 7 other people who are EXACTLY the same skill level as you, would you clear that content? If yes, you're doing fine, and any improvement past that is for the sake of giving yourself breathing room, for your own enjoyment, or any other reason. If not though, then that's when I start to think that someone NEEDS to improve, and work towards these perfect rotations
The example of "if you were out in a team exactly as good as you, would you succeed" is excellent! This is something that can be expanded to all content even, because sometimes a comparison like this is justified for even some casual content! 😂 Are you doing your part? If yes, that's good enough, but doing more doesn't hurt. If you're not doing your part, maybe back to the drawing board! 😁
"Perfection is the enemy of good, the enemy of progress, and the enemy of learning." - Various philosophers (mostly Voltaire). "Good enough" is highly underrated. I used to hate it, but I've grown to understand the wisdom in it. I used to think it was about being lazy, and complacent, but that was missing the point. It's pushing yourself to a standard that is required, anything else beyond that is just a personal pursuit. FFXIV doesn't REQUIRE perfection, it just requires a "good enough for where we currently are". If you are going for week 1 clear, the requirement will be higher than a week 7 clear. The standard will be far higher, but perfection isn't needed. Being able to learn, take and give meaningful criticism, and finding the fun in failure, that's what will get you to be "good enough", and that's all that is ever needed. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new" - Albert Einstein
Liked for the wisdom. : 3 But yeah, it's because of people being obsessed with perfectionism, that makes losing in games so unbearable at times. You can say "The worst thing you can do is wipe" and "It's fine to wipe and gain Bone Stacks" all you like. But at the end of the day, humans will always be humans.
Your second chapter brings to mind the video, "It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft," by Folding Ideas. It's such a good video and I feel it encapsulated my worries for the migration years back, how it would affect our community as a whole. Thankfully not much has changed(or has changed for the better), but it's still a silent worry in the back of my mind, that one day someone will get kicked from end-game casual content consistently for being "bad" at the game.
That is indeed also a concern of mine. I actually made a video a while back inspired by the folding ideas video. "why it is OK to suck at ffxiv", but with the way the game (and honestly other games too at this point) is evolving, I don't know if that applies as clearly anymore 😰
Honestly, at this point, I think not only the world more intolerant of mistakes, we live in a world where we cannot make any more and where every decision is basically life or death but either now or later and that bleeds over to games as well; games have to be perfectly suited for now and later or else.
One of the biggest misconceptions some folks have is thinking how good you are at the game = how perfect your rotation is. To make a comparison to fighting games, its like thinking that the only skill in fighting games is just doing combos you've practiced in training mode. There's a lot of "fundamentals" that some people don't learn. A lot of people also like to pretend that doing optimized rotations is entirely trivial, yet if you watch hardcore players doing very serious raiding, you'll see mistakes and suboptimal rotations all the time. Perfect rotations come from doing a fight over and over and over.
@@KainsAddiction there are two kinds of ppl that think that: - parse addicts who think numbers mean everything, even beyond just getting the clear - and people who don't raid and assume they have to be better players than they actually have to be
@@armorparade Riiiiiiight. So you can have an absolute garbage rotation but as long as you don't die it's ok? Lol dude talks about "people who don't raid" but doens't know what a dps check is, or self-respect it sounds like.
Umm when did he say that it's ok to use a garbage rotation? All he said was that there are people who think anything less than perfection is unacceptable and also people who think they aren't good enough to raid but actually are without knowing it. Don't be so aggro dude@@KainsAddiction
One of my favorite things about the new Cloud of Darkness Chaotic raid is how there's a 33% chance that the VERY FIRST THING she does is create a circle AOE so large that it forces melee DPS to back off in the middle of their opener. After many raid tiers where the boss always lets everyone score a perfect opener, it's like this is the Cloud's way of saying "forget optimal DPS, my raid's all about the mechanics".
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I've cleared the Chaotic raid a few times, and I honestly love how it has a bunch of little things which make it much less parse-friendly than the average modern raid. There's lots of forced disengagements to knock melee players down a peg (especially after Endwalker's raids pampered them too much). Most importantly, the DPS check is lax enough that it doesn't demand perfection at all, yet it will still wipe you via enrage if you snowball too far and too many of the 24 players die. It's very unsubtle about how it considers mechanics far more important than perfect rotations, and I admire it for that.
Consider the prevailing attitude of Cloud of Darkness Chaotic is that people jump in and out because it is impossible to prog, that’s very telling about NA raiders. I mean, it trips up everybody, but for NA raiders, most who are not blessed with a static have pegged it as impossible because of P2 towers and other confounding things and people jumping in and out. I think this is the first time FFXIV demanded one focus.
BUT the dot isn't bad (not a damage down) and there's not continuous damage like in the other phases so it's very easy to babysit the melee, I highly encourage greeding the out XD
I agree with this view. People who have raided a long time tend to forget how much there is to learn. The one point I'd like to add on is that the type of content, and amount of gear available (week 1 vs week 8 savage for example) also influences when somebody should begin raiding with lower rotational knowledge or the type of group to join for harder content. Since you asked, I found as a tank main (GNB focused) that I'll often begin with early bursting when learning a new savage or ultimate fight. I might drift some of my big damage abilities outside of initial buff window, but it often lets me get in extra uses of abilities such as double down or blasting zone depending on my group's consistent kill times. Later on when BiS, I will begin optimizing to fit into buff windows since I'll have a good feeling for kill times. A good example with WAR in FRU (which I am currently progging on), during the initial opener on Fatebreaker, I use upheaval 2nd GCD because I can get another use in before the boss transitions away. It is better to get two uses of an OGCD outside of buffs, than one use under buffs in most cases. But in all cases when optimizing, I look at the fight from end to start. If I know I can end on a big damage ability, I know I need to begin using that ability earlier to ensure an extra use. But in the end my common joke about any parse that isn't a 99 or 100 for me, I just say "crit more". I've had the same kill times, same rotation, and deviated because of crits and very slightly different kill times alone. In the end, I'd rather have somebody capable of consistent purples and clear focused, than an optimized player who wipes us to greedy play before we even are BiS.
When Criterion came out for the very first time, me and a couple friends jump in and are delighted with the 'higher difficulty dungeon'. We clear up the trash, then attack the giant rat. Crafted gear, blind prog - but we were determined. After several hours though, we started to notice - we had the mechanics down perfectly. After only about 25 pulls, we were as optimal as we possibly could be and... We were hitting enrage with somewhere between 2 and 9% HP left on the boss. Came back the next day to try again and.. same result. After a couple pulls to remember what happened, we noticed that we were simply not quite there on the damage. There was a bit of a discussion - should we hit the balance to optimize a bit more? Maybe wait a few weeks until we had some tome gear (since none of us had time for savage raiding)? In the end we simply gave up and didn't bother.
"Good enough" is what gets clears more often than not. During my time farming the first 2 dawntrail EX trials, i ran with groups that were slightly scuffed but still got kills, and groups where everyone was doing everything damn near perfect and no one died. You know what the clear difference was in terms of time? Anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes with particularly scuffed groups, but clears were still obtained and loot acquired regardless.
as someone who grew up playing a lot of sports i view it like a tournament. you're team isn't (hopefully) expecting top play but they at least expect you understand the basics. that said on the flip side i do think some folks also need to learn to be a bit more patient because an enjoyable experience will likely help the high end community grow a lot more too.
I love those little moments, as a PLD, where I can delay the blades and do goring + atonement first so I don't lose uptime on a mechanic that'd make melees lose range for uptime... It's a sweet ego booster as a main tank to have ranged damage and not be forced to spam one single button until you get range back xD
This is my first savage tier for FFXIV, and I've been doing it on SMN which is considered actively weak atm. I come from Guild Wars 2, which has an extremely different raiding scene than FFXIV - it has well & truly inoculated me against worrying about what PUGs think on both ends of the perfection spectrum. I've seen it all, from elitist gatekeepers to honest-to-god toxic casuals who tell me I'm the toxic one for enjoying hard content. MMOs are by definition not meant to be single player games; I will forever die on the hill of the hardest part of hardcore content is getting over yourself and not being convinced that literally everyone else is out to get you in particular. IMO, As long as you are not actively lying about your experience level, doing your best (ie not sandbagging or expecting to be carried), and not tilting, getting the clear is all that matters.
As someone who only just started Savage raiding with mostly all new people this tier I can say you don't need to be perfect. Savage only asks that you can mechanically execute. That being said to avoid enrage you do need to be able to do consistent damage as well. What I can say is that Savage I think will be good practise for me to tackle Ultimates one day. As I'm not aiming to be perfect but being able to execute my job somewhat optimally in stressful conditions will help me where it matters most. 💙
Indeed! It is about practice, and the first step is mechanics, then when you reach enrage, then it becomes maximizing damage! But even that typically doesn't require perfection! (unless you're in a cutting edge race to world first or something 🤣)
@@antarath517 We got a dragoon whom gets the same but if we can do it I think anybody can do Savage. Clearly Ultimates are the culimination of everything you learn doing Extremes and Savage fights. Right now it's decent challenge.
Gave savage my first shot this expansion, our group is absolutely far from perfect (a few clears with everyone sub-10 parsing), as others and yourself have already said, perfection helps but should be considered a goal rather than the standard! Main thing for me doing this level of content is just to have fun with my friends learning and clearing fights together! Hopefully we'll finally get our M3S clear this month 😂😂
Having fun with friends is the best way to approach the content! This also sometimes can motivate to improve all on its own! I hope you get further, but as long as you and your team has fun, that's what really matters! 😁
Not to be a debby downer but this is literally the easiest savage teir they have ever released, they have no dps checks either. All grey parses in the past would have walled a group.
@@slimfastsubaru2043There absolutely are hard enrages, though, which arguably count as dps checks. The reason I've seen them is because I've had party members grey parse below 5 percentile -_-
@@slimfastsubaru2043 eh, it probably would've just meant that we would've taken longer to clear any fights in the previous raids. Clearing this tier has been our main goal but any progress we've made has just been part of the fun of progging as a group!
@@slimfastsubaru2043 Not necessarily, even back in Abyssos pre-echo I helped out a group of perma-grays (ranged between 5 and 15) as a temp-static fill and we managed a clear of the tier, this tier is so absurdly undertuned sure but it's not like grays can't or won't get slays
As basically outlined in the video, I don't think it's really a Demand For Perfection as much as it really is an expectation that you're, put simply, taking it seriously. (For MOST people anyway; there are some who really do "demand perfection" but those are people you may not want to be playing with anyway for various reasons). It's just that you have a 90 minute lockout (not including the extra time people may have been waiting queued for or in PF for before even starting) and are playing the content with, generally, 7 other players and you all have the same goal. Everyone else has presumably invested their time and focus into clearing that content. It is just common courtesy to at least be prepared and willing to learn/improve as you go. You wouldn't want an Ice Mage in your dungeon run making it take twice as long as it could, right? So why should you be okay with forcing 7 other players to carry you through a hard fight because you can't at least be bothered enough to try?
Precisely. It's like showing up to a hobby in real life, if it is something with other people, it's only fair you're prepared to do your part! 😁Anything else is unfair to the rest of the group!
This is why I leaned into healing more. Despite my more experienced raiding friends telling its OK to make kistakes, I hate doing so. At keast with healing (SGE in my case) and occasional tanking, there's less conolex rotations and I can see mechanics better.
I was in an msq roulette last night where the healer left before the first pull, so I got to teach the warrior a bit about how to handle going alone at low levels, namely that their single target rotation has some sustain, and they only need two AOE combos to get agro. Similarly gun breaker has their sustain on the second hit of their single target, so if damage isn't a concern but sustain is, you can 1-2-1-2. I should stress both of these options are for when your healer is dead or DC's, not "when you feel less comfortable".
I'm pretty happy I'm avoiding savage. Extreme is pretty difficult for me for a few reasons, and anything more difficult would only make me and my group suffer. Casual content is plenty fine for me, but I'm really happy that so many players have been getting into raiding during Dawntrail. Hopefully the next tier is a lot of fun, and I'll try Chaotic a few patches from now when it becomes more doable for me. I really want those glams, even if I have to wait a year!
A "good enough" group can clear the latest Unreal with 1-3 deaths, so if you *don't* die you have a lot more damage leeway. my advice to new raiders: 1. join a party that is on board with you being new 2. know that not dying is more valuable than perfect rotations. You will see more of the fight and eventually learn the fight the "right" way instead of a scuffed way. 3. The more you do a specific fight, the smoother your rotation for that fight gets. 4. Practice your rotation on more casual content and dummies until you can keep up a decent version of it while paying attention to your surroundings, your debuffs, and your party -- "decent version" meaning you are making use of your job resources and can usually keep your GCD rolling when under some mechanical pressure.)
Heres the most important thing when progging any hard content: make sure you have time!! PF takes time to find people, the progging takes time also. Dont be that guy that does one pull and then says "i have to go get food" and sends the rest of the group back to PF.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. A 100% optimal playstyle that you mess up a third of the time is worse than a 90% optimal playstyle that you've got locked in.
Yep. I'm not 100% optimal due to factors that I cannot control (I have nerve damage in my left hand but also cannot do mmo mice due to hand size), but I try to float between 80-95% optimal on my jobs. It's let me clear the tier, doing my best without seriously injuring myself. Do I get grays? Yes. Am I terribly fussed over it because of things I can't control? Nah, cuz I'm doing the best I personally can
I'm approaching my third year of high-end raiding -- sometimes with high-end content it's best to remind ourselves that the only person you have full control over is yourself, so if you've done your homework then you have in fact done /enough/. There were many times last tier where my static would meet 0.1-0.5% enrages and i would beat myself up over it because SURELY I alone could have done more... but i was a DNC for a lot of last tier, the job is a lot of RNG and if i'm already pressing all of my buttons when they need to be pressed, using food and pots, have checked my damage on Stone Sky Sea and properly melded my gear, then there's really nothing that a DNC can fix about that alone. Raiding is a team effort and being sure you've done *what you can* is, often, more than enough, so long as everyone else has also done what they feasibly can. Ignore logs unless you really need to deep-dive into them for improvement or don't fear being humbled, clears are clears and a grey is better than no clear! (also remember that, statistically, you're more likely to be green- or blue-parsing than purple!) (to answer the question of the video, a really helpful thing in dungeons for phys ranged is to use their party mits on trash packs! if a BRD uses troubadour and minne on trash packs, that's a bonus 10-15% mitigation for the tank and an extra boost for the healer, and they'll both be up again for any bosses! and casters: if the tank goes down during a pull, Swiftcast+Sleep is CRAZY useful to put the entire pack to sleep, even if just for a GCD since they'll wake up upon taking damage again, to buy your healer just a little extra time to fix it. if you're in comms and can shout that you're putting the pack to sleep so people stop attacking, even better! i've saved soooo many Shisui gigapulls with this, and even got to do it in Alexandria recently!)
As someone who has been leading raids in old content for a while, I can tell you it's more important to survive mechanics long enough to reach a DPS check than it is to do your rotation perfectly. Focus on those mechanics, even if you drift your cooldowns as a result. Having all 8 bodies to do something during that enrage cast will be better than everyone either being dead or dealing reduced damage because someone couldn't be bothered to sacrifice uptime and needed a raise
Thank you for this! Even in normal trials and raids, I can struggle with mechanics and miss GCDs and drift from ideal rotations, so I've been too hesitant to step foot into any recent Extremes (not even unsynced Endwalker ones)! I play a Black Mage, but at least I know to focus on fire spells!
If anyone in your raid has to be optimal for you to clear raid content in this game that means 7 other people were sleeping on the job. Most of the raid content is more or less a test in memorization. The only really tough content is the Ultimates and even those have plenty of breathing room when it comes down to it. You should always strive for that goal of perfection but it should never be the requirement.
As a fan of recovery items in RPGs, I say "You can't spell options without potions." If you have the inventory space for it, it's totally worth it to stockpile some consumables. Medicine Is much better to have and not need than to need it and not have it. Keeping at the very least HP-restoring items and Spine Drops in your inventory is worth the inventory space, regardless of your job. As a BLM main, if my Elemental Gauge drops after using all my MP in Astral Fire and I don't have Firestarter available (it happens), it's a helpful fallback to use one of my spare ethers. Also, keeping a reserve of Echo Drops has been a lifesaver if I ever get silenced. Spine Drops (paralysis cure) is less annoying to have on my hotbar than to have my attack or movement stifled by paralysis, and it saves your healers or bard from having to cleanse it for you.
That's why I loved Stoneskin II where you could cast it prepull and hit everyone in the group with it. It also allowed you to learn when the game decided to think you weren't in combat as Stoneskin II could only be applied out of combat as there were some boss fights in raids where the boss would become untargetable but you could reapply it for what most likely would be a hard hitting raid wide. That's one of the few skill expressions I miss in the game. As I would look to see during down times if I was "in" combat or not. Same thing with shield swipe. I probably was one of the rarest plds back in the day that knew which attacks you could shield swipe on and stop a monster from using what at the time was seen as an annoying attack you just had to deal with. Kind of like learning what types of attacks are stunable or interruptable that don't have the modern clues that are still left in the older dungeons.
As someone who started raiding back in Endwalker during Abyssos, here's my take: You definitely don't need to be perfect to savage raid. I'm the type of player to push myself to optimize every tiny bit of damage I can get out of my job and even I'm not perfect. I mess up mechanics or my rotation every so often. Perfection is simply a goal that should be the end goal, not the overall standard for expectation. I try to optimize my damage because I like getting every tiny bit of damage out of my job that I can. As well, it helps give some breathing room for the party since it makes the clear that tiny bit easier. Failure and making mistakes is inevitable, because none of us can ever be truly perfect. As well, it's important to ensure you can do the mechanics consistently before you focus on maximizing your damage. I'd rather take someone who's incredibly consistent with mechanics but has "good enough" DPS over the player who has optimal DPS but can't consistently do the mechanics. Whenever I start new raids tiers, I always focus on ensuring I'm doing mechanics correctly and consistently but also making sure I'm at least pressing buttons while doing it. If I have to throw off my rotation to make sure I can get the mechanic right and not wipe the party for that first clear I'll absolutely do that. Once I completely understand the mechanic I can then focus on optimizing my damage and keeping my rotation going correctly. I personally want to start tackling ultimates this expansion, I'll likely start with UWU since I've heard it's by far the easiest ultimate. I want to take that extra step and challenge myself more than I have with Savage and become an overall better player. Do I need to be perfect for Ultimate? Definitely not, but I do need to play very well and do mechanics consistently. tl:dr: You don't need to be perfect to savage raid, perfection is a goal to strive for. Mistakes will happen, focus on consistency with mechanics over optimal DPS, optimize DPS once you have mechanical consistency. "Good enough" is perfectly acceptable.
I'd like to hear about how this can apply to prog bc I think that also plays a role in getting things sorted out in the game. Something that would bug me a lot is when Im trying to time table buffs n mits alongside burst so I can keep it muscle memory, if I ask for feedback it feels like the common response is "just mit before (mechanic), your damage doesn't matter". Like, this is correct, damage isn't necessarily important on a fight you haven't cleared yet. But imagine being told this on mechanics youre already getting through. Maybe a hiccup here and there. It just doesn't seem right to me to "just do it" and forgo everything that goes into what is happening in those specific moments other than executing mechanic. Sometimes being "perfect" isn't just about being optimal but playing in a comfortable enough manner that that you can do more things with less thinking.
The hardest thing about being a new player is when something goes wrong; its hard to tell if it was something you screwed up or if it was something that someone else did. So its very paralyzing on if you should adjust or not. Then playing alone, you get used to one person then have to play with someone new all over again. I honestly wish I had someone that I could just ask questions to...
the only time that level of perfecting might be mandatory for Savage is if your trying to do week one clearing. My group typically cleared first fight one week 2 and then 2nd fight around probably week 7 when we get the new weapons to push the 2nd fights dps requirements down. Then week 9 or 10 for fight three and 12 to 15 for fight 4. So about 3 or 4 months of work and this is a semi-casual group.
if you look at *that* website, it becomes very apparent that most people are nowhere near perfect and that's not what the game demands (which is for the better if you pf like most do)
In some ways, it can feel like to get into hardcore content, one must already have "years"of experience in the hardcore field (comparing parallel with entry level jobs requiring preexisting experience in the entry level job bit)
Yep, that is definitely an understandable feeling! Especially since a lot of raiders already have an absolutely ludicrous amount of years of experience with it! So being new to it can be incredibly difficult!
I have been doing the savage tier currently, and as a caster, my main thing is this, it's fine to make some mistakes, and if you have to interrupt once or twice for safety, or have to use some weaker attacks to feel safe, do it. If you are confident enough when you practice the mechanics, go for doing your rotation in full, or adjust as needed. The best thing to do is find the flow for things, and try your best to keep GCDs rolling, it's fine if you need to delay a bit if you feel like you need to resolve something safely. Doing things perfectly shouldn't be the main thing you focus on, doing the most you can should.
I haven't watched the entire video yet, so I might be repeating something you say but: Just pressing *any* button every GCD will already make you play better than like 60% of the entire playerbase. I'm already happy having people like that in any type of content below, say, floor 3 of the current savage raid.
I was part of a Sil'dihn group until more recently that was trying to clear the savage version. We decided to focus more on being optimized instead of doing the last brand mechanic, but unfortunately we couldn't clear because my rotation wasn't quite tight enough. If we had been learning and practicing brand 5 properly, i'm certain we would have cleared since we had a 2, 4, 5, and even a 0.9 percent wipe. That wasn't even an enrage wipe, it was a wipe on the mechanic that happens a minute before enrage. It left me feeling like i had to be almost perfect rotation wise if we wanted to clear. I ended up leaving before clearing so they could get someone better. It was a deflating feeling, but i walked away with the peace of mind of knowing i got better at the game in general each session, and that i could clear if I was in a group that focused more on the mechanics. It also gave me better perspective on just what is or isn't necessary when it comes to doing the hard content that exists in the game. *edit* I guess i should mention i was on Bard also.
For RDM: It's okay to overstock on Mana between 55-90 if there is no guaranteed you can execute your big spender combo yet in melee for whatever reason. There will be moments in some fights where I would rather you still do casts/damage than risk dying trying to execute your big burst due to a boss AOE or position of a spread to let melee get priority in.
I don't think you need to do your rotation perfectly to be able to raid successfully, but I would very strongly encourage anyone and everyone to try to practice and get good at doing their optimal rotation to the point where it becomes muscle memory at least against a training dummy (or Stone Sky Sea, for example). The thing is, in my experience, playing the optimal rotation for most jobs somewhat paradoxically makes your life a lot easier. The jobs are designed to flow well when you play them "properly" and when you don't they often feel like more of a chaotic mess, with cooldowns coming up at unexpected times and your resources being all over the place. If you play a job with a static rotation, playing "perfectly" can even help you do the mechanics properly - because those mechanics will occur during the exact same GCDs, so you just do the exact same thing every time and don't have to think about the buttons you're pushing. Of course, when you're first learning mechanics you're never going to be consistent with your rotation and that's fine because it's more important to do the mechanics correctly anyway. But the faster you can start doing your optimal rotation in a fight while doing the mechanics right, the faster you're going to achieve consistency both in terms of damage output AND mechanics. If I ever mess up my rotation early on, or die, or someone even just pulls slightly early, it is way, way more likely that I'm going to make MORE mistakes for the rest of that pull because I'm now essentially winging it and have to spend way more brain power on doing my rotation "good enough" than when I do everything perfectly. (The hard fights themselves are also very clearly designed to enable you to do this too, at least compared to normal mode fights which ironically can have way more random mechanics that make doing a perfectly consistent rotation a lot harder.) I guess you could also learn to play consistently using a non-optimal rotation. But I feel like most of the time that would take a similar amount of effort as just doing the optimal rotation, so you might as well just muscle-memory that one. Practicing a rotation that you know isn't optimal is just going to make your life way harder if you ever try to switch.
One common thing I see many samurai players do is use Meikyo Shisui with no stickers prepared beforehand. Consider how many GCDs you need to fill up each of the stickers before you use it, and you can find an easy optimization. The combo path to Yukikaze is only 2 steps while the others are 3, so if you fill that one in before you press Meikyo, you get more out of it.
The ABCs (always be casting) are much better to focus on for me in casual content. I'm still leveling everything to 100 and I don't know how to play monk.... I just hit the light up buttons and hope for the best but even if my brotherhood and fire buff thingie are misaligned just hitting the buttons on time is making me 2nd on the aggro list in most casual content... I have no desire to learn monk but I will make it to level 100 without being a huge burden on everyone else by simply hitting the buttons as they come up. Even if I mess up the combo occasionally it's usually fixable by hitting the next button on time.
I am walking proof that perfection isn’t necessary to savage raid lmao. I have never seen anything higher than a green on that one add on related site on current content, yet my static and I are closing in on our M4S clear. Now granted, I don’t see myself good enough to do Ultimates as of yet still, but I do hope to one day do FRU. Still, raiding can be done without complete perfection! But also, rotation practice is hella useful, and I recommend having a training dummy either at your house if you have one, your FC if they have one, a designated home one like someone I saw using my training dummy for, or even just a favorite practice dummy in the field/Bozja/wherever. Then once you have a good muscle memory built, try the Stone Sky Sea dummies to see if your equipment is up to snuff for the fight you want to do. It seems intimidating and it can be, but it’s worth a shot imo.
I'm barely getting into Extremes with progging Sphene EX, so savages feel like a twinkle in the eye for me lol But this gives me motivation to keep going, knowing that I don't have to be frame perfect for my rotations 😮
If you can beat sphene ex then I am confident that you are already ready to beat M1S! Keep trying on the ex prog and you'll only be getting better from here! 😄
EX1 was my first high end content. If you can handle the mechanics in EX1 then you can do Savage. What I initially found most intimidating for starting Savage was party finder & other people. But learning/practice parties were good to get started. I’ve since cleared M1S and M2S by progging in practice parties & then going to Duty Completion parties once I hit enrage. Still took a lot of dying in Duty Completion parties before getting a clear. Clearing first time was such a thrill! I’ll repeat this process for M3S and M4S. Now I’m intimidated by Reclear parties expecting a perfect run. But I was far from perfect on a reclear party in M1S (died twice as second tank lol) and party still cleared in two pulls about a minute earlier than my first clear. Felt bad but everyone in the party achieved their goal. I’ll probably get more practice in duty completion parties to improve my skill. - my own experience trying to get into raiding. You can do it!
Party finder sadly takes a lot of joy away and adds a lot of frustration that the extreme/savage experience. I never got beyond the first savage fight this expansion, cause I just do not want to bother with all the unnecessary drama anymore. If ever get into a static again, which would be great, it can be the most fun that one can have in FF14.
@@TardustheToasty yeah the experience in PF can totally sour you on even trying to do high-end content. I had a great time doing EX1 and 2, actually mentoring people through EX2 a few times as I was enjoying it. M1-2S were also fairly fun experiences. But M3S has been my wall for months now because I just cannot get a PF group that isn't full of unpleasant people who have either lied about how much of the fight they know or are actively looking for a reason to leave the party as soon as possible after the first wipe. Expecting perfection in PF is insane. It's not super hard to tell even without tools if someone isn't doing enough to contribute enough to clear a fight. But to get that aggro over someone in a practice party where nobody is expecting to clear anyway is just silly.
This. If I'm ever playing while impaired (bad sleep, drunk, etc.), I stick to solo content; it's not fair to bring my temporary impairments to the party and to bring them down with me.
I'd love to see some numbers! What's the damage impact of a messy rotation or burst misaligned with raid buffs? I know it'll be wildly different between setups, but I'd love to see a ballpark/specific examples! Is it possible for someone mereley playing 'inoptimally' to do 10% of the damage of someone playing 'well' (eg still obeying things like 'press buttons approximately on cooldown' 'keep the gcd rolling' 'don't break combos' but perhaps a black mage changing element too frequently, or a samurai using the wrong sticker at the wrong time/accidentally hitting 2 near to dot refresh time)? (I assume that 10% is too extreme, but is it more like 50%? 90%?). How bad *would* that basic rotation dungeon setup be? How bad would '1-2-3 and any shiny buttons' be? How does 'bad rotation' compare to 'death'?
Let's say your raid team has 3 raid buffs. Those aligning will combine for about 17% more damage in the burst window. That means if, for a somewhat exaggerated example, if you played your rotation, but consistently avoided having your burst align with raid buffs, your best attacks would all be effectively doing ~14.5% less damage. How much of your total dps is dropped by that depends on the job, as some have more or less concentrated damage in their burst. For the questions about suboptimal rotations, it is quite difficult to determine simply because "making mistakes" could range from "sometimes forgetting to use a button" all the way down to things like "spending 10 seconds doing nothing" and so, the relative damage difference is mostly only possible to determine with strict rules. For example, an ice mage can be assumed to pretty much just spam B4 and maybe xenoglossy, and with just that, it is relatively likely you will do less than 60% of your potential damage, almost certainly significantly less due to other factors, such as just spamming B4 being not very mobile! Some bad rotations can be so bad that "good rotation but you die more" is actually better, but again, we'd have to be specific! For that dungeon setup, I think the best way to know would be to actually run a dungeon with that setup, as most of the problems compound: the tank only doing single target means the other players may take more random damage when the tank will take longer to pick up mobs. The dps sandbagging hard on the damage also makes the fight a lot longer. And the healer only healing with spells makes their mp a real time constraint on how long the group can hold on. My expectation without having tested would be that pulling more than one pack at a time in a high level dungeon while playing like this would be incredibly dangerous or problematic! 😊
I like looking at it from the lense of "if you are wiping to enrage, you've beaten the hardest part of the fight already." You can ALWAYS find more optimization and damage if you truly need it, but until you are wiping to enrage or a mechanic more damage could have skipped, damage is irrelevant. Damage is surprisingly binary like that: either you die to enrage or you don't. Anything beyond that is for parsing and comfort, which are both valid reasons to go for more damage, but it's not strictly necessary.
A clear is a clear and a-lot of the "high end" community don't understand. I would take someone that is more consistent on mechanics than has a 99-100 parse.
Thanks for this video. I recently started savage myself. I really think three things would greatly improve the raiding scene. One people understand the message behind this video and be more accepting of little errors. It's OK to not be perfect for a run and clear. Two actually give people a chance to improve on their own instead of immediately dooming and throwing in the towel on the group. Usually found this attitude with experienced raiders rather than newer raiders. Lastly and my most desperate want the blight upon this game known as ACT actually be properly dealt with and eliminated by Square Enix. Nothing kills the mood and momentum more is in fighting between the group and nothing causes more in fighting than some one looking at numbers and getting a sense of superiorty over others. There are a ton of groups I feel like should clear but they get in their own way by yelling at each other or throw in the towel over a fixable mishap causing a group wide decrease in performance. Even if someone doesnt get an ego I still feel like they distract the one looking at them and cause them to lose track of what they should be doing to focus on "the problem player" in their eyes. I am not going to pretend like these arguments dont happen without ACT, but boy does it get ramped up when it does happen. I have seen it happen in other mmos and I really want it gone from FF. Tldr version of this point: I feel ACT distracts people from actually raiding and focus on playing the blame game which serves no one
Im an aussie on NA servers and thus completely incapable of double weaving without clipping. But i still managed to get a rank 4 parse on my main class for one of the current extremes. Playing "perfectly optimal" isnt always mandatory to do well, i would say being comfortable with how the class works conceptually can naturally lead you to doing well in it
One thing to remember about optimization is that some players enjoy this process of learning and analysis, and other players _don't._ Your own expectations for "good enough" will be greatly affected by this, since at the end of the day we're playing a video game for fun. If strict optimization isn't fun, that's okay! Personally I think the most important thing is to make this choice consciously, knowing the effect it has on other players. A slower dungeon clear doesn't really matter, but not thinking about it at all often stresses out the tank or healer, which I would consider rude.
Funnily enough I've noticed that demands of perfections seem to be inverse proportional with difficulty so easier the content more people demand you do things "perfect", while less of problem in FF14 then it was in WoW, but it's still there where people demand you be perfect so they can slack (or demand it just so they can bully you).
I've never had a fear of doing Savage or even Ultimate, just not the time. And to me, that's okay. But it's nice to hear your thoughts on the growing "perfectionist" mindset involving these categories of content.
Paladin is a job, which rotation is such that it doesn't really punish you, if you fail to do it optimally. As long as Paladin uses Fight or Flight and blade combo every 60 seconds, everything else is just pressing the glowing button, basically. Although I have heard many players say it has too many buttons. In my mind it doesn't but perhaps it is because I've been a Paladin main since the day I started playing.
Paladin has one of the highest number of buttons in the game, so I can understand that sentiment. They have a lot of defensive cooldowns and Shield Bash which nobody ever *needs* to use (but is handy, rarely). But it's not a very complicated job, as you say.
On PLD after my 123 combo, i like to save my holy spirit cast for after my atonement combo in case a mechanic requires me to go out of melee range in casual content. iirc holy spirit would normally come before atonement in most rotation guides due to its potency.
It comes down to quite a bit a priority list that changes a bit depending on whether you are in the middle of fight or flight or not! I explain it a bit better in my paladin guide for dawntrail. But long story short, holding holy spirit just in case is a great idea. You can minimize the time frame where you don't have a holy spirit to throw out there by using fast blade and riot blade before you start chewing through the latter steps of the atonement combo, as well as holy spirit (as that means you can use holy spirit, royal authority, holy spirit if that's what needs to happen!) The key being that using holy spirit, or the atonement combo steps don't break your 123 combo! 😁
I did MINE Bahamut Coils (Binding, Second, Final) and a good chunk of Blu EX and Savage, As long as we are all appropriately geared (not optimal BiS but just enough ilvl) and can kinda do your rotation as long as everyone is still alive DPS checks can be cleared with relative ease even with MINE synched, our main focus is always going to be ensuring we do mechanics so everyone can stay up at all times
Is it good to be optimal? Well, in a vacuum, it builds good muscle memory and habits to be able to do it without thinking in the middle of doing certain mechanics. But on the contrary, these practices take time and most content outside of high end raiding isn’t heavily punishing you for not following the proper rotation due to the lack of enrages and DPS checks, with a few exceptions. Should that be the case, should normal mode be harder? I’m not sure. I think it’s nice Dawntrail has given us more involved normal modes, and I remember there being discourse for Dawntrail being too hard, but overall… it doesn’t really matter that much. Ultimately, you should want to be better for the purpose of self improvement, not to meet impossible expectations of raiders. You’re going to mess up your rotation sometimes, you’ll die and drift your cooldowns. But with every new experience, you’re learning and getting that little bit better, or at least hopefully. Don’t worry so much about being perfect 100% of the time, show some consideration to your teammates, and you’ll find the courtesy goes both ways.
the number 1 thing will always be: just plz read your buttons and a good amount of it will fall into place from that. And if unsure of things, ask other players and look up resources that exist. The game poorly explains how a lot of things work sadly so you end up having to look to others or figure out yourself what things mean or how they work. and 2nd from that would be just practice
I have started to get into the harder content with the chaotic, I found the unreal to be very easy, but the chaotic feels like a major step. I have made good progress fast though, and while my dps is not perfect since im focusing on learning the fight, I think not doing things optimally is fine till you hit those dps checks. I will say we were doing an unreal clear where our bard was doing really low damage, lower than the tanks and healers, so I decided to adapt to him and damage the main byakko more so we had a bit of leeway in the fight. It worked out too, not all fights will be like that, but a little bit of adjusting to the situation can save a run.
After a certain point, you'll never get a parse as good as a coordinated static that clears in 6m30s or 8m30s because of how the 2 minute meta works. With that revelation in mind, yes, I like to optimize my dps, but tinctures usually feel like a waste of resources to me. I'm more likely to tincture in deep dungeons than savage raids.
Simple answer: no Complex answer: hahaha haha, I died like 3 times in every fight last night after taking Christmas week off and we still beat everything, and it wasn't just me! It can feel like a bit of a hurdle at first, learning more difficult mechanics and trying to keep up damage. Muscle memory from both comes with time and practice. Heck, do what I called my group to do, and stop worrying about damage and just see the whole fight, then add damage in. Lower the mental stack, and you'll soon realize it isn't too bad.
I think learning the optimal stuff going into savage is good but tbqh if you always cast and send most of your good buttons in buffs you will outdmg most of pf players and most players anyways and contribute much more than you think. If you have to drop gcds for mechs tho that's totally fine too. It all takes a lot of practice and you'll only get better at it over time. I say this stuff tho cuz even those who know the optimal stuff very rarely for most of them do it optimal each time, so don't worry too much. It's hard to achieve the perfect stuff everytime anyways cuz of some of the things Caetsu talks about, so just do your best and try to do as much as you can without sacrificing doing mechs
I think the raid buffs (cool as they are) has contributed to this perfect opener mentality cause the openers purpose is to line up your hard hitting cooldowns with those buffs. So instead of focusing on playing your job well "for itself" you're playing your job around those buffs even if your job doesn't have one, dancers wanting 0 skillspeed is an example of this. I also feel these buffs have impacted job design cause now every job has to have built in mechanics or cooldowns that naturally line up with these buffs. I've sometimes wondered if removing these raid buffs would be healthier for the game's design.
Since you've done a lot of experimental gameplay and clearly have on-content raiding experience, I wonder what you'd estimate the margins of error to be for different types of content. As in, how sub-optimally can everyone play, on average within a party, before it becomes impossible to complete a duty? Of course, it depends on the specific duty, ilvl, possibly echo, party composition, etc., but in broad strokes... Old EX trials with max ilvl gear... Well, those seem to have a rather surprisingly generous margins of error. But even the latest DT EX3 can be cleared with a few deaths and other mess-ups. FRU, for example, even with current ilvl, doesn't seem to require perfect uptime during exas to meet the P5 DPS check/enrage, so even some of the most difficult party content is designed with some imperfection in mind. Savage should sit somewhere between these two, but the fights vary so much that I cannot evaluate their tolerances in any general way. I remember one of the P_S floors having such a strict DPS check that it was unclearable with some non-abnormal compositions, but that was a bug, not a feature. I assume Savage should generally be significantly more forgiving than Ultimate in terms of the required level of optimal gameplay, and we know that especially older Ultimates are quite forgiving when players get creative.
The unfortunately probably unsatisfying answer that I can give is that the margin error seems to vary greatly even between duties of the same caliber because some fights are more punishing than others. Ultimately, that is also why I always recommend trying your best, and simply remembering that perfection is a goal to aim for, but not even remotely close to what is required! 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Understandable. I obviously suggest trying one's best at all times, but when the content is difficult, focusing on resolving mechanics correctly (even if they can be effectively ignored) will always be more important to me than an optimal rotation. I'm talking about missing a GCD or two in a fight, or letting CDs drift by a few seconds, not playing "ice mage" to make your rotation easier, here, of course.
I think the obsession over the funny coloured numbers is what makes people fixate on "perfection". It leads to people comparing each other to the absolute best players in the world rather than the boss you're fighting. Play as well as you can, but remember that outside of Ultimates, 14 isn't a game with a skill floor so high that only perfection will suffice.
this whole video is the exact reason why I will never do anything harder than extreme, been playing for 5 years and I will never bother trying to deal with this level of stress
I’ve been playing for a few months now but there’s a lot of content still new to me. In what order is the difficulty between things like Extreme, Savage, ultimate, chaotic, etc? Idk if I’m missing any but they all sound similar as in very difficult
@@adrianyeager6463 order of difficulty is extreme, chaotic/unreal, savage/another (variant dungeon), then ultimate being the highest! Extremes are the best place to start with high difficulty content, and valigarmanda ex is good because it doesn't have much capability for someone who's learning to wipe the party if they're playing as a DPS role!
For black mage, trying to follow the guide and be 100% precise and strict to the pasted rotation is a guaranteed way to be the worst dps in your party. Itl do great against a training dummy and fail the very first moment you need to move. The most important thing is to always cast *something*. Even if its the wrong thing. Learning to make the least wrong practical choice is like, half of high end content for black mage. I mean the 100% mobility rotations are basically just very wrong versions of the standard rotation and they're not even *that* bad. Not optimal. But they'll get you through patches where you need to stay mobile, if you don't have the resources to handle it more conventionally.
Tried savage for a few weeks. After seeing how much people are obsessed over parses and how much I am expected to do outside of the game, I want to stay as far away as possible from the raiding scene. This game is the most fun for me when I play casually.
Yeah, some people take it too seriously. I tried to get into a static savage last expansion and I got booted because I didn’t stick around for the EX7 fight to farm weapons when I was out of the crit boosting food. Because I like to craft my stuff rather than throwing Gil at the market board, I was told “your attendance on the prog nights is good, but you don’t have the attitude for raiding, so I’m removing you from the static.” Blocked the person.
When I did savage fights only half the group was actually really good to start with, 3 of the 4dps were well below 1k dps than they should have been, me and the bard were nearly 2k dps under. By the second fight my dps was only 400 under. The ultimate fights however should be perfection or close to it required. I have seen people die and still clear it easily
Do you need to be perfect for savage? no, just know the basics and be willing to learn, ask others if youre not sure, there is a LOT of people who gladly help you understand some basic stuff from our job but they are often afraid to approach people cuz some people lash out when you try and help them and can actually report them and get them in trouble. but the basics are really easy to know and understand: 1. READ YOUR ABILITIES, like seriously, just read em, read what they do and try to understand how to add it to your gameplay, dont think about it too hard yet, but just read em. 2. PRESS YOUR ABILITIES, its funny, but for real, just press the buttons, see that shiny fight or flight on PLD? just press it, you dont need to do optimal GCD:s for it yet, but just press it, dont let it just sit there ready to be pressed, just goddamn press it, same thing with mitigations, see that rampart or sentinel? press it, even if you pull only 2 enemies in a dungeon, PRESS IT, get used to pressing it since most mits should be on cooldowns almost all the time, JUST PRESS YOUR BUTTONS! 3. DO BASIC MATH, you know how to do 1st grade math right? you can count 100 + 200 = 300? then read your abilities and do the math, its not rocket science, just add the numbers together, if your 1-2 AOE combo does 110 potency + 150 potency while your 1-2-3 single target does 250-330-480 should you use your AOE combo or single target combo when youre attacked by 2 enemies? its not that hard, just use your head, use the gift of knowledge to figure out which is better to do, takes literally 20 seconds to think if its worth or not. i know these sound like "durr, were not retarded, ofc we know these already" but i have been playing this game for so many goddamn years now and i still see people not using their abilities, using AOE combo on single target enemies and using single target combo on multiple enemies, i have seen it all, if you do these 3 things youre already better than 80% of the playerbase i quarantee it. but back to the savage point, yes savage is hard and yes you should play as optimally as you can, is it a requirement? no aslong as you can get through the DPS check, just find some people who share your way of playing the game or wont mind having a "bad player" in their group then its incredibly fun, you can learn if you want to, the game is not hard, like for real its not, looking at the jobs, i have NEVER watched a single rotation or guide for the jobs and i can do semi-optimal rotations on ALL of em, how did i learn to do that? just use your abilities, read the abilities and simple 1st grade math, most people wont expect perfection from you, but they do expect you to learn, you get used to your rotations more and more as you play, you get used to playing in a team, you get used to fighting the bosses and learning their gimmicks and tells, but if you REFUSE to learn then there is no helping you
Ime in savage raiding with a few statics. You don't have to be "perfect" but every bit of damage you don't do, has to be made up by someone else. Was i ever perfect? No I parsed in the 70s. But for me I knew that if I drop my 2 min or get a damage down, I knew someone else had to make it up for me by playing more optimal. This is assuming day 1 on content etc. Where all savage fights we did were cleared during enrage. This is VERY anecdotal tho.
That is true. Once the hard enrage is reached, every single second counts so any damage you don't do, someone else has to do. It gets a bit blurrier once you clear before hard enrage, because then lost damage can just mean the fight goes a bit longer (which again still means everyone has to work harder!)
I have seen enough enrages in extremes that the thought of not playing consistently optimized rotations in savage terrifies me. Which I guess is why I still haven't done savages.
Having little to no experience (tried m1s once for fun) By the time we got to the falling floor the boss was almost to half hp, with blind random trying to progress the fight Of course being perfect helps a lot... But being perfect VASTLY overshoots the enrage, dropping a bit of damage is not the end of the world from my experience
That only works because this savage tier is piss easy and has the easiest dps check of any tier ever. Esp if you have a picto. Just saying dont consider th8s tier the norm for savage or for how good you need to be.
@@slimfastsubaru2043 actually i was the only caster and a summoner but if this raid tier is so easy, why the forums got shitstormed by people complaining dawntrail is too hard?
Depends on the fight honestly, and how much the fight is outdated from gearing/food/pots perspective. This tier is by far the easiest in years when it comes to DPS checks, even week 1 (likely unintended, and primarily due to balance issues, particularly with PCT). But we've had Savage fights that fall under the other side of the spectrum too, P8S door boss for example. Week 1 required not only optimal play but sometimes comp changes as well (otherwise, random crit variance would make you fail the DPS check). It was very frustrating. Even more frustrating were fights like TOP, which while current, had us wipe to enrage all the way in phase 4, just because one mistake was made. You didn't just need to play near-perfectly, you needed to do so consistently to see significant prog, or at least in my experience. Honestly, it's relative. Some fights you don't need to be anywhere near-perfect (DeathCoB anyone?). But for some, you may as well just wall if a single player gets a damage down.
@robertomacetti7069 because they upped the difficulty of normal content. Dungeons and normal mode trials/raids are harder. Noone bitched the savages or extremes were hard.
Short answer: Nope. Long answer: Even taking into account this tier's more relaxed standards, DPS checks are not tight enough to require anywhere near perfection from everyone, not even in week 1. However, the better you are at optimization, the more you can make up for mistakes and weaker players, and the more easily you will be able to clear no matter _what_ party you land in. My static's first clear of M2S, week 1, came on a run where our SMN disconnected _twice_ and was straight up not present for close to a minute of a 10min fight. Our damage was high enough to clear anyway.
This vid released at a convenient time since I went through the regular M2 and 3 fights and did absolutely abysmal despite looking up the fights 🥲 My FC and I have been discussing doing extremes together but recently I just wonder how when it's embarrassing how much regular DT fights wrecks me. I get so overwhelmed by mechanics and need to keep a constant eye on my hotbars to do the rotation (I'm a DRK and still mess up lol I know the rotarion, but if I panic? Game over) and then I get so frustrated by my failures. When it comes to any harder content involving those glowing letters and numbers, people being able to memorise exactly where to go is astounding to me. I understand you do research for videos, but even then, or doing practice runs in PF, I'm still like "How do you remember any of this?! How're you getting past these mechanics in a practice session without instant death?"
the more practice you get on a job's rotation, the more it will become second nature and the less you'll actually need to pay attention to do it right. it'll just happen over time, just one of those things where more hours on the game will smooth it over
Imo it's most important to do the mechanics right. Once you can do the mechanics right 95-100% of the time, Then you worry about raising your DPS- But you should never sacrifice that mechanical performance in the pursuit of DPS. Being 95-100% consistent and only making minor recoverable mistakes while doing 80% of your damage potential is better than being 50-75% mechanically consistent with regular major irrecoverable mistakes and doing 95-100% of your damage potential... You do no damage if you die, And if your mistakes lead the group to a wipe your uber leet dps doesn't matter anyway. Very few things in this game are tuned such that you need hyper-optimized dps to succeed. You DO need stellar mechanical consistency for the hardest content though.
Yeah, from my own experience I can say you do not need to be perfect to do savage fights on content. :p The explanations on why the whole 'perfection' thing exists in the first place was also nice. Not specifically unexpected as for what does in there, but it was good to see it kinda all brought together.
I don't think the "optimal" rotations are such a big deal to get right. People worry about being perfect, when it's just about tweaking one or two things to something you're probably already doing very well. Most often it's not that different than the uh... normal/natural rotation people tend to settle into while levelling or in normal content. For example, I was doing the warrior opener like 90% of the super optimized one and managed to clear p9s - p12s with it. Just this raid tier I took a look at it and realized I only needed to make one or two small changes, which I did while progging not even needing to go to the dummy. Reaper was more or less the same, a bit easier cause I didn't had to worry about tanking lol, now I'm learning blm and it's a bit more tricky with the timing being so tight, but it's still not that different than the rotation the game teaches you.
No, you don't. In extreme and savage as long as you habe abd idea what buttons to press you can clear a fight. Sometimes floor 3 and 4 of savage requires you to play a bit better to meet dps checks. In Ultimate is a bir different. You don't need to be perfect at all, but it is expected that you at least know your rotation and to put in burst windows. This game wasn't designed in a way the player neefs to play perfect to win. The game prioritizes the long dsnce we call mechanics.
You don't have to be perfect at rotation, it is more important that you are comfortable enough with your job to do mechanic while doing your own rotation. If you can do the same rotation every pull, then you can focus a lot more in the mechanic. You would usually fk up the rotation during a fight, but what you can do is try to fix it for later comfort. From what I have seen, the good players aren't that perfect even during reclears, but they know how to fix their rotation so that they would lose less dps then other players.
Has always been if youre dead your party wiped. Nothing to do with proper rotation. There is a rule of thumb. 1. Stay out of puddles 2. Know the mechanics 3. A-b-c Always be casting Thats all there is to it. Most wipes are due to people new or just fail to mechanics. Usually it takes a few tries.
Tales from the Novice Network. A battle mentor said to trade mentor in dungeon, Use Eukrasian diagnosis to proc toxikon instead of spamming aoe. I opened up my calculator and lol'ed. The battle mentor is full of crap. As for the video topic. Well I've been in a party with no mistakes but didn't get pass enrage. you don't have to be perfect, but at least know what button to press. I've seen nastrond x3 straight when it was x3.
Rotation and buff management are only 1/2 the raiding scene. The 2nd 1/2 is knowing where to stand and when....without that, your rotation is screwed anyways since you'll die and screw up most of your rotation anyways lol.
No one is perfect, BUT in harder fights every able bodied person should be able to do a standard opener perfectly, do a 10 minute rotation perfectly against a dummy, and press their group buffs on time. Everything there can be practiced on a dummy. All this because mistakes WILL happen, and these minimal perefctions will lessen the weight of mistakes. The opener is the moment the group does the most damage while also being the easiest moment in a fight, and pressing group buff on time ensures one's mistake doesn't worsen others' rotation, and knowing how a perfect rotation over 10 minutes looks lets one know where to improve or readjust in case of death.
Where does one even encounter this type of snobbery outside of statics? In pf I find that most disbands are due to a lack of consistency to do mechanics. I would judge a player's prep work, consistency and awareness long before even examining their rotations, if at all in fact.
Depends entirely on how noticeable the issues are. A DNC tossing out fans as they proc is a lot less noticeable and a lot less of an issue than a DNC who let standard drop for half a minute and drifted tech step into the off-minutes.
I've helped some friends start their savage stuff and my only requirement was "hey, beat the stone sky sea dummy. I can help give you the tools to beat it, but that step is requirement. I don't care how you do it so long as you can"
I got to 6:22 before noping out. FFXIV is a wonderful game that I will always deeply love, but I don't need to get sweaty over it. Yeah, it sucks that I'll never get the most exclusive glams, but I can live with looking cool on a budget.
That's fair. I don't remember off the top of my head if 6:22 is before I mentioned that you actually don't have to be so perfect. Not even close. Sorry for the weird ordering of information! However, as I have said to others that got intimidated as well, The most important thing is that you enjoy the game in your own way, and if the hard content seems too sweaty and you'd rather stay out, that is perfectly understandable, and not something you should feel bad about!
As someone who waited far too many years to start trying savage for this exact reason, I appreciate this. For far too long I thought, "If I can't be optimal, I'm a burden to the party, so best not to bother." Decided to give savage a try with my FC last week and am having a lot of fun, and discovering that I'm doing a lot better than I thought I'd do. My only regret is not trying sooner.
This is a similar reason I avoided EX and Savage initially as well. ShB was the first time I leveled and was max in time for EX and Savage, but did not do them since I was worried I would be too noob and not do well and be judged. Good ol' WoW upbringing from years prior.
Wasn't until I did some E9S and Emerald EX with the FC for casual raid night that I finally took a moment to get a better opener and find out... it's not that bad.
Now I'm a sadist that takes 2 characters through Savage in PF at the same time every tier. >.> I do not parse myself, but I notice the funny numbers on the website after. Not greatest, but I at least do well enough to not be a hindrance. All that's needed.
I thought the same thing for 5 years, then in SB started raiding and my dps was terrible, but so were 2 other dps, we easily cleared the 1st fight while practicing our rotations, I found that was the best way to practice, a dummy just isn't the same
Played since 2.5, had exactly that problem, wanting to break it, but I'm still nervous about it.
@@apljack Then we have something in common. I also have 2 characters that I do Savage with, my male Miqo'te main with my static and my alt female Au Ra through PF.
What's more optimal than a Cae video as an opener for the year ?
Make sure to gemdraught it! 😄
So true!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh What kind of gemdraught? Int? Mind? Something else? :p
@Gyrahine just mix them all up in a big pot! 😄
@@Gyrahine vit
executing mechanics > perfect rotation.
Do both.
Perfect Rotation...
Must. Resist. Vern. Meme.
This exactly.
Having been savage/ultimate raiding for about 5 years now, I've always felt like perfection should be the goal, but with the caveat that it's perfectly okay to fall short to some extent.
Personally, I optimize my rotation to the last auto attack. If I can find any way to do more damage, from (safe) greed, to shifting buttons around for fight specific mechanics and downtime, and everything in between. I do it for two reasons: One is as simple as it's fun to me. I like to see that growth and reward, and I like seeing shiny parse numbers. Big number make brain produce happy chemical, yippee! The second reason though, is because I know not everyone likes to optimize the way I do. I know that a lot of people enjoy extreme/savage/ultimate content, but don't want to be so locked in and focused on their rotation for potentially multiple hours at a time. If me doing my rotation better can give the group as a whole some breathing room, then I say it's a win-win for everyone.
Where I still want people to have the goal of perfection and just, be okay with coming short to an extent, however, is when people actually do underperform. I always tell friends who ask "Am I doing good enough?" the same question: If you were put into the content you want to do with 7 other people who are EXACTLY the same skill level as you, would you clear that content? If yes, you're doing fine, and any improvement past that is for the sake of giving yourself breathing room, for your own enjoyment, or any other reason. If not though, then that's when I start to think that someone NEEDS to improve, and work towards these perfect rotations
The example of "if you were out in a team exactly as good as you, would you succeed" is excellent! This is something that can be expanded to all content even, because sometimes a comparison like this is justified for even some casual content! 😂
Are you doing your part? If yes, that's good enough, but doing more doesn't hurt. If you're not doing your part, maybe back to the drawing board! 😁
I will never go for perfection. Ping will always be a factor in playing, so being perfect will be unobtainable.
As a healer main I totally agree what you trying to say.
"Perfection is the enemy of good, the enemy of progress, and the enemy of learning." - Various philosophers (mostly Voltaire).
"Good enough" is highly underrated. I used to hate it, but I've grown to understand the wisdom in it. I used to think it was about being lazy, and complacent, but that was missing the point. It's pushing yourself to a standard that is required, anything else beyond that is just a personal pursuit.
FFXIV doesn't REQUIRE perfection, it just requires a "good enough for where we currently are". If you are going for week 1 clear, the requirement will be higher than a week 7 clear. The standard will be far higher, but perfection isn't needed. Being able to learn, take and give meaningful criticism, and finding the fun in failure, that's what will get you to be "good enough", and that's all that is ever needed.
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new" - Albert Einstein
Liked for the wisdom. : 3
But yeah, it's because of people being obsessed with perfectionism, that makes losing in games so unbearable at times.
You can say "The worst thing you can do is wipe" and "It's fine to wipe and gain Bone Stacks" all you like.
But at the end of the day, humans will always be humans.
the best thing we can do is strive to be better then the last time, and not to be "perfect".
Your second chapter brings to mind the video, "It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft," by Folding Ideas. It's such a good video and I feel it encapsulated my worries for the migration years back, how it would affect our community as a whole. Thankfully not much has changed(or has changed for the better), but it's still a silent worry in the back of my mind, that one day someone will get kicked from end-game casual content consistently for being "bad" at the game.
That is indeed also a concern of mine. I actually made a video a while back inspired by the folding ideas video. "why it is OK to suck at ffxiv", but with the way the game (and honestly other games too at this point) is evolving, I don't know if that applies as clearly anymore 😰
Honestly, at this point, I think not only the world more intolerant of mistakes, we live in a world where we cannot make any more and where every decision is basically life or death but either now or later and that bleeds over to games as well; games have to be perfectly suited for now and later or else.
One of the biggest misconceptions some folks have is thinking how good you are at the game = how perfect your rotation is. To make a comparison to fighting games, its like thinking that the only skill in fighting games is just doing combos you've practiced in training mode. There's a lot of "fundamentals" that some people don't learn. A lot of people also like to pretend that doing optimized rotations is entirely trivial, yet if you watch hardcore players doing very serious raiding, you'll see mistakes and suboptimal rotations all the time. Perfect rotations come from doing a fight over and over and over.
Literally no one thinks that. Having a base rotation down pay is the bare minimum.
@@KainsAddiction there are two kinds of ppl that think that:
- parse addicts who think numbers mean everything, even beyond just getting the clear
- and people who don't raid and assume they have to be better players than they actually have to be
@@KainsAddiction People who die to greed all the time would like to speak to you
@@armorparade Riiiiiiight. So you can have an absolute garbage rotation but as long as you don't die it's ok? Lol dude talks about "people who don't raid" but doens't know what a dps check is, or self-respect it sounds like.
Umm when did he say that it's ok to use a garbage rotation? All he said was that there are people who think anything less than perfection is unacceptable and also people who think they aren't good enough to raid but actually are without knowing it. Don't be so aggro dude@@KainsAddiction
One of my favorite things about the new Cloud of Darkness Chaotic raid is how there's a 33% chance that the VERY FIRST THING she does is create a circle AOE so large that it forces melee DPS to back off in the middle of their opener. After many raid tiers where the boss always lets everyone score a perfect opener, it's like this is the Cloud's way of saying "forget optimal DPS, my raid's all about the mechanics".
It gets even crazier! Once the phase transitions, she takes way more damage, so that further adds to the confusion! 😂
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I've cleared the Chaotic raid a few times, and I honestly love how it has a bunch of little things which make it much less parse-friendly than the average modern raid. There's lots of forced disengagements to knock melee players down a peg (especially after Endwalker's raids pampered them too much).
Most importantly, the DPS check is lax enough that it doesn't demand perfection at all, yet it will still wipe you via enrage if you snowball too far and too many of the 24 players die. It's very unsubtle about how it considers mechanics far more important than perfect rotations, and I admire it for that.
Consider the prevailing attitude of Cloud of Darkness Chaotic is that people jump in and out because it is impossible to prog, that’s very telling about NA raiders. I mean, it trips up everybody, but for NA raiders, most who are not blessed with a static have pegged it as impossible because of P2 towers and other confounding things and people jumping in and out. I think this is the first time FFXIV demanded one focus.
Optimal melees just stand in it and take the bleed though
BUT the dot isn't bad (not a damage down) and there's not continuous damage like in the other phases so it's very easy to babysit the melee, I highly encourage greeding the out XD
I agree with this view. People who have raided a long time tend to forget how much there is to learn. The one point I'd like to add on is that the type of content, and amount of gear available (week 1 vs week 8 savage for example) also influences when somebody should begin raiding with lower rotational knowledge or the type of group to join for harder content.
Since you asked, I found as a tank main (GNB focused) that I'll often begin with early bursting when learning a new savage or ultimate fight. I might drift some of my big damage abilities outside of initial buff window, but it often lets me get in extra uses of abilities such as double down or blasting zone depending on my group's consistent kill times. Later on when BiS, I will begin optimizing to fit into buff windows since I'll have a good feeling for kill times. A good example with WAR in FRU (which I am currently progging on), during the initial opener on Fatebreaker, I use upheaval 2nd GCD because I can get another use in before the boss transitions away. It is better to get two uses of an OGCD outside of buffs, than one use under buffs in most cases.
But in all cases when optimizing, I look at the fight from end to start. If I know I can end on a big damage ability, I know I need to begin using that ability earlier to ensure an extra use. But in the end my common joke about any parse that isn't a 99 or 100 for me, I just say "crit more". I've had the same kill times, same rotation, and deviated because of crits and very slightly different kill times alone. In the end, I'd rather have somebody capable of consistent purples and clear focused, than an optimized player who wipes us to greedy play before we even are BiS.
When Criterion came out for the very first time, me and a couple friends jump in and are delighted with the 'higher difficulty dungeon'. We clear up the trash, then attack the giant rat. Crafted gear, blind prog - but we were determined. After several hours though, we started to notice - we had the mechanics down perfectly. After only about 25 pulls, we were as optimal as we possibly could be and...
We were hitting enrage with somewhere between 2 and 9% HP left on the boss.
Came back the next day to try again and.. same result. After a couple pulls to remember what happened, we noticed that we were simply not quite there on the damage. There was a bit of a discussion - should we hit the balance to optimize a bit more? Maybe wait a few weeks until we had some tome gear (since none of us had time for savage raiding)? In the end we simply gave up and didn't bother.
"Good enough" is what gets clears more often than not. During my time farming the first 2 dawntrail EX trials, i ran with groups that were slightly scuffed but still got kills, and groups where everyone was doing everything damn near perfect and no one died. You know what the clear difference was in terms of time? Anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes with particularly scuffed groups, but clears were still obtained and loot acquired regardless.
as someone who grew up playing a lot of sports i view it like a tournament. you're team isn't (hopefully) expecting top play but they at least expect you understand the basics. that said on the flip side i do think some folks also need to learn to be a bit more patient because an enjoyable experience will likely help the high end community grow a lot more too.
I very much agree on both accounts!
I love those little moments, as a PLD, where I can delay the blades and do goring + atonement first so I don't lose uptime on a mechanic that'd make melees lose range for uptime...
It's a sweet ego booster as a main tank to have ranged damage and not be forced to spam one single button until you get range back xD
This is my first savage tier for FFXIV, and I've been doing it on SMN which is considered actively weak atm. I come from Guild Wars 2, which has an extremely different raiding scene than FFXIV - it has well & truly inoculated me against worrying about what PUGs think on both ends of the perfection spectrum. I've seen it all, from elitist gatekeepers to honest-to-god toxic casuals who tell me I'm the toxic one for enjoying hard content. MMOs are by definition not meant to be single player games; I will forever die on the hill of the hardest part of hardcore content is getting over yourself and not being convinced that literally everyone else is out to get you in particular. IMO, As long as you are not actively lying about your experience level, doing your best (ie not sandbagging or expecting to be carried), and not tilting, getting the clear is all that matters.
As someone who only just started Savage raiding with mostly all new people this tier I can say you don't need to be perfect.
Savage only asks that you can mechanically execute. That being said to avoid enrage you do need to be able to do consistent damage as well.
What I can say is that Savage I think will be good practise for me to tackle Ultimates one day. As I'm not aiming to be perfect but being able to execute my job somewhat optimally in stressful conditions will help me where it matters most. 💙
Indeed! It is about practice, and the first step is mechanics, then when you reach enrage, then it becomes maximizing damage! But even that typically doesn't require perfection! (unless you're in a cutting edge race to world first or something 🤣)
We had a warrior consistently parsing 1 in our static that cleared the full savage tier, and we were NOT awfully experienced either.
@@antarath517 We got a dragoon whom gets the same but if we can do it I think anybody can do Savage. Clearly Ultimates are the culimination of everything you learn doing Extremes and Savage fights. Right now it's decent challenge.
Gave savage my first shot this expansion, our group is absolutely far from perfect (a few clears with everyone sub-10 parsing), as others and yourself have already said, perfection helps but should be considered a goal rather than the standard!
Main thing for me doing this level of content is just to have fun with my friends learning and clearing fights together! Hopefully we'll finally get our M3S clear this month 😂😂
Having fun with friends is the best way to approach the content! This also sometimes can motivate to improve all on its own!
I hope you get further, but as long as you and your team has fun, that's what really matters! 😁
Not to be a debby downer but this is literally the easiest savage teir they have ever released, they have no dps checks either. All grey parses in the past would have walled a group.
@@slimfastsubaru2043There absolutely are hard enrages, though, which arguably count as dps checks. The reason I've seen them is because I've had party members grey parse below 5 percentile -_-
@@slimfastsubaru2043 eh, it probably would've just meant that we would've taken longer to clear any fights in the previous raids. Clearing this tier has been our main goal but any progress we've made has just been part of the fun of progging as a group!
@@slimfastsubaru2043 Not necessarily, even back in Abyssos pre-echo I helped out a group of perma-grays (ranged between 5 and 15) as a temp-static fill and we managed a clear of the tier, this tier is so absurdly undertuned sure but it's not like grays can't or won't get slays
As basically outlined in the video, I don't think it's really a Demand For Perfection as much as it really is an expectation that you're, put simply, taking it seriously. (For MOST people anyway; there are some who really do "demand perfection" but those are people you may not want to be playing with anyway for various reasons). It's just that you have a 90 minute lockout (not including the extra time people may have been waiting queued for or in PF for before even starting) and are playing the content with, generally, 7 other players and you all have the same goal. Everyone else has presumably invested their time and focus into clearing that content. It is just common courtesy to at least be prepared and willing to learn/improve as you go. You wouldn't want an Ice Mage in your dungeon run making it take twice as long as it could, right? So why should you be okay with forcing 7 other players to carry you through a hard fight because you can't at least be bothered enough to try?
Precisely. It's like showing up to a hobby in real life, if it is something with other people, it's only fair you're prepared to do your part! 😁Anything else is unfair to the rest of the group!
This is why I leaned into healing more. Despite my more experienced raiding friends telling its OK to make kistakes, I hate doing so. At keast with healing (SGE in my case) and occasional tanking, there's less conolex rotations and I can see mechanics better.
Not failing crucial mechanic is more important than GCD.
We need a clear not a risk.
I was in an msq roulette last night where the healer left before the first pull, so I got to teach the warrior a bit about how to handle going alone at low levels, namely that their single target rotation has some sustain, and they only need two AOE combos to get agro. Similarly gun breaker has their sustain on the second hit of their single target, so if damage isn't a concern but sustain is, you can 1-2-1-2. I should stress both of these options are for when your healer is dead or DC's, not "when you feel less comfortable".
I'm pretty happy I'm avoiding savage. Extreme is pretty difficult for me for a few reasons, and anything more difficult would only make me and my group suffer. Casual content is plenty fine for me, but I'm really happy that so many players have been getting into raiding during Dawntrail.
Hopefully the next tier is a lot of fun, and I'll try Chaotic a few patches from now when it becomes more doable for me. I really want those glams, even if I have to wait a year!
A "good enough" group can clear the latest Unreal with 1-3 deaths, so if you *don't* die you have a lot more damage leeway.
my advice to new raiders:
1. join a party that is on board with you being new
2. know that not dying is more valuable than perfect rotations. You will see more of the fight and eventually learn the fight the "right" way instead of a scuffed way.
3. The more you do a specific fight, the smoother your rotation for that fight gets.
4. Practice your rotation on more casual content and dummies until you can keep up a decent version of it while paying attention to your surroundings, your debuffs, and your party -- "decent version" meaning you are making use of your job resources and can usually keep your GCD rolling when under some mechanical pressure.)
Heres the most important thing when progging any hard content: make sure you have time!! PF takes time to find people, the progging takes time also. Dont be that guy that does one pull and then says "i have to go get food" and sends the rest of the group back to PF.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. A 100% optimal playstyle that you mess up a third of the time is worse than a 90% optimal playstyle that you've got locked in.
Yep. I'm not 100% optimal due to factors that I cannot control (I have nerve damage in my left hand but also cannot do mmo mice due to hand size), but I try to float between 80-95% optimal on my jobs. It's let me clear the tier, doing my best without seriously injuring myself.
Do I get grays? Yes.
Am I terribly fussed over it because of things I can't control? Nah, cuz I'm doing the best I personally can
The only time you really need to be PERFECT is during an ultimate, and even then you don't need to be perfect, just coordinated.
I'm approaching my third year of high-end raiding -- sometimes with high-end content it's best to remind ourselves that the only person you have full control over is yourself, so if you've done your homework then you have in fact done /enough/. There were many times last tier where my static would meet 0.1-0.5% enrages and i would beat myself up over it because SURELY I alone could have done more... but i was a DNC for a lot of last tier, the job is a lot of RNG and if i'm already pressing all of my buttons when they need to be pressed, using food and pots, have checked my damage on Stone Sky Sea and properly melded my gear, then there's really nothing that a DNC can fix about that alone. Raiding is a team effort and being sure you've done *what you can* is, often, more than enough, so long as everyone else has also done what they feasibly can. Ignore logs unless you really need to deep-dive into them for improvement or don't fear being humbled, clears are clears and a grey is better than no clear! (also remember that, statistically, you're more likely to be green- or blue-parsing than purple!)
(to answer the question of the video, a really helpful thing in dungeons for phys ranged is to use their party mits on trash packs! if a BRD uses troubadour and minne on trash packs, that's a bonus 10-15% mitigation for the tank and an extra boost for the healer, and they'll both be up again for any bosses! and casters: if the tank goes down during a pull, Swiftcast+Sleep is CRAZY useful to put the entire pack to sleep, even if just for a GCD since they'll wake up upon taking damage again, to buy your healer just a little extra time to fix it. if you're in comms and can shout that you're putting the pack to sleep so people stop attacking, even better! i've saved soooo many Shisui gigapulls with this, and even got to do it in Alexandria recently!)
As someone who has been leading raids in old content for a while, I can tell you it's more important to survive mechanics long enough to reach a DPS check than it is to do your rotation perfectly. Focus on those mechanics, even if you drift your cooldowns as a result. Having all 8 bodies to do something during that enrage cast will be better than everyone either being dead or dealing reduced damage because someone couldn't be bothered to sacrifice uptime and needed a raise
Thank you for this! Even in normal trials and raids, I can struggle with mechanics and miss GCDs and drift from ideal rotations, so I've been too hesitant to step foot into any recent Extremes (not even unsynced Endwalker ones)! I play a Black Mage, but at least I know to focus on fire spells!
If anyone in your raid has to be optimal for you to clear raid content in this game that means 7 other people were sleeping on the job. Most of the raid content is more or less a test in memorization. The only really tough content is the Ultimates and even those have plenty of breathing room when it comes down to it. You should always strive for that goal of perfection but it should never be the requirement.
As a fan of recovery items in RPGs, I say "You can't spell options without potions." If you have the inventory space for it, it's totally worth it to stockpile some consumables. Medicine Is much better to have and not need than to need it and not have it. Keeping at the very least HP-restoring items and Spine Drops in your inventory is worth the inventory space, regardless of your job.
As a BLM main, if my Elemental Gauge drops after using all my MP in Astral Fire and I don't have Firestarter available (it happens), it's a helpful fallback to use one of my spare ethers.
Also, keeping a reserve of Echo Drops has been a lifesaver if I ever get silenced. Spine Drops (paralysis cure) is less annoying to have on my hotbar than to have my attack or movement stifled by paralysis, and it saves your healers or bard from having to cleanse it for you.
That's why I loved Stoneskin II where you could cast it prepull and hit everyone in the group with it. It also allowed you to learn when the game decided to think you weren't in combat as Stoneskin II could only be applied out of combat as there were some boss fights in raids where the boss would become untargetable but you could reapply it for what most likely would be a hard hitting raid wide. That's one of the few skill expressions I miss in the game. As I would look to see during down times if I was "in" combat or not. Same thing with shield swipe. I probably was one of the rarest plds back in the day that knew which attacks you could shield swipe on and stop a monster from using what at the time was seen as an annoying attack you just had to deal with. Kind of like learning what types of attacks are stunable or interruptable that don't have the modern clues that are still left in the older dungeons.
As someone who started raiding back in Endwalker during Abyssos, here's my take:
You definitely don't need to be perfect to savage raid. I'm the type of player to push myself to optimize every tiny bit of damage I can get out of my job and even I'm not perfect. I mess up mechanics or my rotation every so often. Perfection is simply a goal that should be the end goal, not the overall standard for expectation. I try to optimize my damage because I like getting every tiny bit of damage out of my job that I can. As well, it helps give some breathing room for the party since it makes the clear that tiny bit easier.
Failure and making mistakes is inevitable, because none of us can ever be truly perfect. As well, it's important to ensure you can do the mechanics consistently before you focus on maximizing your damage. I'd rather take someone who's incredibly consistent with mechanics but has "good enough" DPS over the player who has optimal DPS but can't consistently do the mechanics.
Whenever I start new raids tiers, I always focus on ensuring I'm doing mechanics correctly and consistently but also making sure I'm at least pressing buttons while doing it. If I have to throw off my rotation to make sure I can get the mechanic right and not wipe the party for that first clear I'll absolutely do that. Once I completely understand the mechanic I can then focus on optimizing my damage and keeping my rotation going correctly.
I personally want to start tackling ultimates this expansion, I'll likely start with UWU since I've heard it's by far the easiest ultimate. I want to take that extra step and challenge myself more than I have with Savage and become an overall better player. Do I need to be perfect for Ultimate? Definitely not, but I do need to play very well and do mechanics consistently.
tl:dr: You don't need to be perfect to savage raid, perfection is a goal to strive for. Mistakes will happen, focus on consistency with mechanics over optimal DPS, optimize DPS once you have mechanical consistency. "Good enough" is perfectly acceptable.
I'd like to hear about how this can apply to prog bc I think that also plays a role in getting things sorted out in the game. Something that would bug me a lot is when Im trying to time table buffs n mits alongside burst so I can keep it muscle memory, if I ask for feedback it feels like the common response is "just mit before (mechanic), your damage doesn't matter".
Like, this is correct, damage isn't necessarily important on a fight you haven't cleared yet. But imagine being told this on mechanics youre already getting through. Maybe a hiccup here and there. It just doesn't seem right to me to "just do it" and forgo everything that goes into what is happening in those specific moments other than executing mechanic.
Sometimes being "perfect" isn't just about being optimal but playing in a comfortable enough manner that that you can do more things with less thinking.
I am a glowy button presser
Unfathomably based
The hardest thing about being a new player is when something goes wrong; its hard to tell if it was something you screwed up or if it was something that someone else did. So its very paralyzing on if you should adjust or not. Then playing alone, you get used to one person then have to play with someone new all over again. I honestly wish I had someone that I could just ask questions to...
the only time that level of perfecting might be mandatory for Savage is if your trying to do week one clearing. My group typically cleared first fight one week 2 and then 2nd fight around probably week 7 when we get the new weapons to push the 2nd fights dps requirements down. Then week 9 or 10 for fight three and 12 to 15 for fight 4. So about 3 or 4 months of work and this is a semi-casual group.
if you look at *that* website, it becomes very apparent that most people are nowhere near perfect and that's not what the game demands (which is for the better if you pf like most do)
In some ways, it can feel like to get into hardcore content, one must already have "years"of experience in the hardcore field (comparing parallel with entry level jobs requiring preexisting experience in the entry level job bit)
Yep, that is definitely an understandable feeling! Especially since a lot of raiders already have an absolutely ludicrous amount of years of experience with it! So being new to it can be incredibly difficult!
I have been doing the savage tier currently, and as a caster, my main thing is this, it's fine to make some mistakes, and if you have to interrupt once or twice for safety, or have to use some weaker attacks to feel safe, do it. If you are confident enough when you practice the mechanics, go for doing your rotation in full, or adjust as needed. The best thing to do is find the flow for things, and try your best to keep GCDs rolling, it's fine if you need to delay a bit if you feel like you need to resolve something safely. Doing things perfectly shouldn't be the main thing you focus on, doing the most you can should.
I haven't watched the entire video yet, so I might be repeating something you say but:
Just pressing *any* button every GCD will already make you play better than like 60% of the entire playerbase. I'm already happy having people like that in any type of content below, say, floor 3 of the current savage raid.
I was part of a Sil'dihn group until more recently that was trying to clear the savage version. We decided to focus more on being optimized instead of doing the last brand mechanic, but unfortunately we couldn't clear because my rotation wasn't quite tight enough.
If we had been learning and practicing brand 5 properly, i'm certain we would have cleared since we had a 2, 4, 5, and even a 0.9 percent wipe. That wasn't even an enrage wipe, it was a wipe on the mechanic that happens a minute before enrage. It left me feeling like i had to be almost perfect rotation wise if we wanted to clear.
I ended up leaving before clearing so they could get someone better. It was a deflating feeling, but i walked away with the peace of mind of knowing i got better at the game in general each session, and that i could clear if I was in a group that focused more on the mechanics. It also gave me better perspective on just what is or isn't necessary when it comes to doing the hard content that exists in the game.
*edit* I guess i should mention i was on Bard also.
I always do the 3 minute Stone, Sky, Sea striking dummies and consider myself "good enough" if I can beat the timer, after all the game says so itself
For RDM: It's okay to overstock on Mana between 55-90 if there is no guaranteed you can execute your big spender combo yet in melee for whatever reason. There will be moments in some fights where I would rather you still do casts/damage than risk dying trying to execute your big burst due to a boss AOE or position of a spread to let melee get priority in.
I don't think you need to do your rotation perfectly to be able to raid successfully, but I would very strongly encourage anyone and everyone to try to practice and get good at doing their optimal rotation to the point where it becomes muscle memory at least against a training dummy (or Stone Sky Sea, for example).
The thing is, in my experience, playing the optimal rotation for most jobs somewhat paradoxically makes your life a lot easier. The jobs are designed to flow well when you play them "properly" and when you don't they often feel like more of a chaotic mess, with cooldowns coming up at unexpected times and your resources being all over the place. If you play a job with a static rotation, playing "perfectly" can even help you do the mechanics properly - because those mechanics will occur during the exact same GCDs, so you just do the exact same thing every time and don't have to think about the buttons you're pushing.
Of course, when you're first learning mechanics you're never going to be consistent with your rotation and that's fine because it's more important to do the mechanics correctly anyway. But the faster you can start doing your optimal rotation in a fight while doing the mechanics right, the faster you're going to achieve consistency both in terms of damage output AND mechanics. If I ever mess up my rotation early on, or die, or someone even just pulls slightly early, it is way, way more likely that I'm going to make MORE mistakes for the rest of that pull because I'm now essentially winging it and have to spend way more brain power on doing my rotation "good enough" than when I do everything perfectly. (The hard fights themselves are also very clearly designed to enable you to do this too, at least compared to normal mode fights which ironically can have way more random mechanics that make doing a perfectly consistent rotation a lot harder.)
I guess you could also learn to play consistently using a non-optimal rotation. But I feel like most of the time that would take a similar amount of effort as just doing the optimal rotation, so you might as well just muscle-memory that one. Practicing a rotation that you know isn't optimal is just going to make your life way harder if you ever try to switch.
One common thing I see many samurai players do is use Meikyo Shisui with no stickers prepared beforehand. Consider how many GCDs you need to fill up each of the stickers before you use it, and you can find an easy optimization. The combo path to Yukikaze is only 2 steps while the others are 3, so if you fill that one in before you press Meikyo, you get more out of it.
The ABCs (always be casting) are much better to focus on for me in casual content. I'm still leveling everything to 100 and I don't know how to play monk.... I just hit the light up buttons and hope for the best but even if my brotherhood and fire buff thingie are misaligned just hitting the buttons on time is making me 2nd on the aggro list in most casual content... I have no desire to learn monk but I will make it to level 100 without being a huge burden on everyone else by simply hitting the buttons as they come up. Even if I mess up the combo occasionally it's usually fixable by hitting the next button on time.
Quite honestly, as long as you are Always Casting, that's already 90% of the way to doing your part properly (excluding mechanics).
I am walking proof that perfection isn’t necessary to savage raid lmao. I have never seen anything higher than a green on that one add on related site on current content, yet my static and I are closing in on our M4S clear. Now granted, I don’t see myself good enough to do Ultimates as of yet still, but I do hope to one day do FRU. Still, raiding can be done without complete perfection! But also, rotation practice is hella useful, and I recommend having a training dummy either at your house if you have one, your FC if they have one, a designated home one like someone I saw using my training dummy for, or even just a favorite practice dummy in the field/Bozja/wherever. Then once you have a good muscle memory built, try the Stone Sky Sea dummies to see if your equipment is up to snuff for the fight you want to do. It seems intimidating and it can be, but it’s worth a shot imo.
I'm barely getting into Extremes with progging Sphene EX, so savages feel like a twinkle in the eye for me lol
But this gives me motivation to keep going, knowing that I don't have to be frame perfect for my rotations 😮
If you can beat sphene ex then I am confident that you are already ready to beat M1S!
Keep trying on the ex prog and you'll only be getting better from here! 😄
EX1 was my first high end content. If you can handle the mechanics in EX1 then you can do Savage.
What I initially found most intimidating for starting Savage was party finder & other people. But learning/practice parties were good to get started. I’ve since cleared M1S and M2S by progging in practice parties & then going to Duty Completion parties once I hit enrage. Still took a lot of dying in Duty Completion parties before getting a clear. Clearing first time was such a thrill!
I’ll repeat this process for M3S and M4S.
Now I’m intimidated by Reclear parties expecting a perfect run. But I was far from perfect on a reclear party in M1S (died twice as second tank lol) and party still cleared in two pulls about a minute earlier than my first clear. Felt bad but everyone in the party achieved their goal. I’ll probably get more practice in duty completion parties to improve my skill.
- my own experience trying to get into raiding. You can do it!
Party finder sadly takes a lot of joy away and adds a lot of frustration that the extreme/savage experience. I never got beyond the first savage fight this expansion, cause I just do not want to bother with all the unnecessary drama anymore. If ever get into a static again, which would be great, it can be the most fun that one can have in FF14.
@@TardustheToasty yeah the experience in PF can totally sour you on even trying to do high-end content. I had a great time doing EX1 and 2, actually mentoring people through EX2 a few times as I was enjoying it. M1-2S were also fairly fun experiences. But M3S has been my wall for months now because I just cannot get a PF group that isn't full of unpleasant people who have either lied about how much of the fight they know or are actively looking for a reason to leave the party as soon as possible after the first wipe.
Expecting perfection in PF is insane. It's not super hard to tell even without tools if someone isn't doing enough to contribute enough to clear a fight. But to get that aggro over someone in a practice party where nobody is expecting to clear anyway is just silly.
@hexpunK1 Well said🙃
All I ask is for you to not show up drunk and high, which is weirdly common in FFXIV
This. If I'm ever playing while impaired (bad sleep, drunk, etc.), I stick to solo content; it's not fair to bring my temporary impairments to the party and to bring them down with me.
I'd love to see some numbers! What's the damage impact of a messy rotation or burst misaligned with raid buffs? I know it'll be wildly different between setups, but I'd love to see a ballpark/specific examples! Is it possible for someone mereley playing 'inoptimally' to do 10% of the damage of someone playing 'well' (eg still obeying things like 'press buttons approximately on cooldown' 'keep the gcd rolling' 'don't break combos' but perhaps a black mage changing element too frequently, or a samurai using the wrong sticker at the wrong time/accidentally hitting 2 near to dot refresh time)? (I assume that 10% is too extreme, but is it more like 50%? 90%?). How bad *would* that basic rotation dungeon setup be? How bad would '1-2-3 and any shiny buttons' be?
How does 'bad rotation' compare to 'death'?
Let's say your raid team has 3 raid buffs. Those aligning will combine for about 17% more damage in the burst window. That means if, for a somewhat exaggerated example, if you played your rotation, but consistently avoided having your burst align with raid buffs, your best attacks would all be effectively doing ~14.5% less damage. How much of your total dps is dropped by that depends on the job, as some have more or less concentrated damage in their burst.
For the questions about suboptimal rotations, it is quite difficult to determine simply because "making mistakes" could range from "sometimes forgetting to use a button" all the way down to things like "spending 10 seconds doing nothing" and so, the relative damage difference is mostly only possible to determine with strict rules. For example, an ice mage can be assumed to pretty much just spam B4 and maybe xenoglossy, and with just that, it is relatively likely you will do less than 60% of your potential damage, almost certainly significantly less due to other factors, such as just spamming B4 being not very mobile!
Some bad rotations can be so bad that "good rotation but you die more" is actually better, but again, we'd have to be specific!
For that dungeon setup, I think the best way to know would be to actually run a dungeon with that setup, as most of the problems compound: the tank only doing single target means the other players may take more random damage when the tank will take longer to pick up mobs. The dps sandbagging hard on the damage also makes the fight a lot longer. And the healer only healing with spells makes their mp a real time constraint on how long the group can hold on. My expectation without having tested would be that pulling more than one pack at a time in a high level dungeon while playing like this would be incredibly dangerous or problematic! 😊
I like looking at it from the lense of "if you are wiping to enrage, you've beaten the hardest part of the fight already." You can ALWAYS find more optimization and damage if you truly need it, but until you are wiping to enrage or a mechanic more damage could have skipped, damage is irrelevant. Damage is surprisingly binary like that: either you die to enrage or you don't. Anything beyond that is for parsing and comfort, which are both valid reasons to go for more damage, but it's not strictly necessary.
A clear is a clear and a-lot of the "high end" community don't understand. I would take someone that is more consistent on mechanics than has a 99-100 parse.
Thanks for this video. I recently started savage myself. I really think three things would greatly improve the raiding scene.
One people understand the message behind this video and be more accepting of little errors. It's OK to not be perfect for a run and clear.
Two actually give people a chance to improve on their own instead of immediately dooming and throwing in the towel on the group. Usually found this attitude with experienced raiders rather than newer raiders.
Lastly and my most desperate want the blight upon this game known as ACT actually be properly dealt with and eliminated by Square Enix.
Nothing kills the mood and momentum more is in fighting between the group and nothing causes more in fighting than some one looking at numbers and getting a sense of superiorty over others. There are a ton of groups I feel like should clear but they get in their own way by yelling at each other or throw in the towel over a fixable mishap causing a group wide decrease in performance.
Even if someone doesnt get an ego I still feel like they distract the one looking at them and cause them to lose track of what they should be doing to focus on "the problem player" in their eyes. I am not going to pretend like these arguments dont happen without ACT, but boy does it get ramped up when it does happen. I have seen it happen in other mmos and I really want it gone from FF.
Tldr version of this point: I feel ACT distracts people from actually raiding and focus on playing the blame game which serves no one
Im an aussie on NA servers and thus completely incapable of double weaving without clipping. But i still managed to get a rank 4 parse on my main class for one of the current extremes. Playing "perfectly optimal" isnt always mandatory to do well, i would say being comfortable with how the class works conceptually can naturally lead you to doing well in it
One thing to remember about optimization is that some players enjoy this process of learning and analysis, and other players _don't._ Your own expectations for "good enough" will be greatly affected by this, since at the end of the day we're playing a video game for fun. If strict optimization isn't fun, that's okay!
Personally I think the most important thing is to make this choice consciously, knowing the effect it has on other players. A slower dungeon clear doesn't really matter, but not thinking about it at all often stresses out the tank or healer, which I would consider rude.
Funnily enough I've noticed that demands of perfections seem to be inverse proportional with difficulty so easier the content more people demand you do things "perfect", while less of problem in FF14 then it was in WoW, but it's still there where people demand you be perfect so they can slack (or demand it just so they can bully you).
I've never had a fear of doing Savage or even Ultimate, just not the time. And to me, that's okay. But it's nice to hear your thoughts on the growing "perfectionist" mindset involving these categories of content.
Paladin is a job, which rotation is such that it doesn't really punish you, if you fail to do it optimally. As long as Paladin uses Fight or Flight and blade combo every 60 seconds, everything else is just pressing the glowing button, basically. Although I have heard many players say it has too many buttons. In my mind it doesn't but perhaps it is because I've been a Paladin main since the day I started playing.
Paladin has one of the highest number of buttons in the game, so I can understand that sentiment. They have a lot of defensive cooldowns and Shield Bash which nobody ever *needs* to use (but is handy, rarely). But it's not a very complicated job, as you say.
On PLD after my 123 combo, i like to save my holy spirit cast for after my atonement combo in case a mechanic requires me to go out of melee range in casual content. iirc holy spirit would normally come before atonement in most rotation guides due to its potency.
It comes down to quite a bit a priority list that changes a bit depending on whether you are in the middle of fight or flight or not! I explain it a bit better in my paladin guide for dawntrail.
But long story short, holding holy spirit just in case is a great idea. You can minimize the time frame where you don't have a holy spirit to throw out there by using fast blade and riot blade before you start chewing through the latter steps of the atonement combo, as well as holy spirit (as that means you can use holy spirit, royal authority, holy spirit if that's what needs to happen!)
The key being that using holy spirit, or the atonement combo steps don't break your 123 combo! 😁
I did MINE Bahamut Coils (Binding, Second, Final) and a good chunk of Blu EX and Savage, As long as we are all appropriately geared (not optimal BiS but just enough ilvl) and can kinda do your rotation as long as everyone is still alive DPS checks can be cleared with relative ease even with MINE synched, our main focus is always going to be ensuring we do mechanics so everyone can stay up at all times
Is it good to be optimal? Well, in a vacuum, it builds good muscle memory and habits to be able to do it without thinking in the middle of doing certain mechanics. But on the contrary, these practices take time and most content outside of high end raiding isn’t heavily punishing you for not following the proper rotation due to the lack of enrages and DPS checks, with a few exceptions. Should that be the case, should normal mode be harder? I’m not sure. I think it’s nice Dawntrail has given us more involved normal modes, and I remember there being discourse for Dawntrail being too hard, but overall… it doesn’t really matter that much. Ultimately, you should want to be better for the purpose of self improvement, not to meet impossible expectations of raiders. You’re going to mess up your rotation sometimes, you’ll die and drift your cooldowns. But with every new experience, you’re learning and getting that little bit better, or at least hopefully. Don’t worry so much about being perfect 100% of the time, show some consideration to your teammates, and you’ll find the courtesy goes both ways.
the number 1 thing will always be: just plz read your buttons and a good amount of it will fall into place from that. And if unsure of things, ask other players and look up resources that exist. The game poorly explains how a lot of things work sadly so you end up having to look to others or figure out yourself what things mean or how they work. and 2nd from that would be just practice
I have started to get into the harder content with the chaotic, I found the unreal to be very easy, but the chaotic feels like a major step. I have made good progress fast though, and while my dps is not perfect since im focusing on learning the fight, I think not doing things optimally is fine till you hit those dps checks.
I will say we were doing an unreal clear where our bard was doing really low damage, lower than the tanks and healers, so I decided to adapt to him and damage the main byakko more so we had a bit of leeway in the fight. It worked out too, not all fights will be like that, but a little bit of adjusting to the situation can save a run.
After a certain point, you'll never get a parse as good as a coordinated static that clears in 6m30s or 8m30s because of how the 2 minute meta works. With that revelation in mind, yes, I like to optimize my dps, but tinctures usually feel like a waste of resources to me. I'm more likely to tincture in deep dungeons than savage raids.
Simple answer: no
Complex answer: hahaha haha, I died like 3 times in every fight last night after taking Christmas week off and we still beat everything, and it wasn't just me!
It can feel like a bit of a hurdle at first, learning more difficult mechanics and trying to keep up damage. Muscle memory from both comes with time and practice. Heck, do what I called my group to do, and stop worrying about damage and just see the whole fight, then add damage in.
Lower the mental stack, and you'll soon realize it isn't too bad.
This bozo doesn't know the sextuple shinten rotation by using ikishoten for 50 extra shinten points
I think learning the optimal stuff going into savage is good but tbqh if you always cast and send most of your good buttons in buffs you will outdmg most of pf players and most players anyways and contribute much more than you think. If you have to drop gcds for mechs tho that's totally fine too. It all takes a lot of practice and you'll only get better at it over time. I say this stuff tho cuz even those who know the optimal stuff very rarely for most of them do it optimal each time, so don't worry too much. It's hard to achieve the perfect stuff everytime anyways cuz of some of the things Caetsu talks about, so just do your best and try to do as much as you can without sacrificing doing mechs
I think the raid buffs (cool as they are) has contributed to this perfect opener mentality cause the openers purpose is to line up your hard hitting cooldowns with those buffs. So instead of focusing on playing your job well "for itself" you're playing your job around those buffs even if your job doesn't have one, dancers wanting 0 skillspeed is an example of this. I also feel these buffs have impacted job design cause now every job has to have built in mechanics or cooldowns that naturally line up with these buffs. I've sometimes wondered if removing these raid buffs would be healthier for the game's design.
Since you've done a lot of experimental gameplay and clearly have on-content raiding experience, I wonder what you'd estimate the margins of error to be for different types of content. As in, how sub-optimally can everyone play, on average within a party, before it becomes impossible to complete a duty? Of course, it depends on the specific duty, ilvl, possibly echo, party composition, etc., but in broad strokes...
Old EX trials with max ilvl gear... Well, those seem to have a rather surprisingly generous margins of error. But even the latest DT EX3 can be cleared with a few deaths and other mess-ups.
FRU, for example, even with current ilvl, doesn't seem to require perfect uptime during exas to meet the P5 DPS check/enrage, so even some of the most difficult party content is designed with some imperfection in mind.
Savage should sit somewhere between these two, but the fights vary so much that I cannot evaluate their tolerances in any general way.
I remember one of the P_S floors having such a strict DPS check that it was unclearable with some non-abnormal compositions, but that was a bug, not a feature.
I assume Savage should generally be significantly more forgiving than Ultimate in terms of the required level of optimal gameplay, and we know that especially older Ultimates are quite forgiving when players get creative.
The unfortunately probably unsatisfying answer that I can give is that the margin error seems to vary greatly even between duties of the same caliber because some fights are more punishing than others. Ultimately, that is also why I always recommend trying your best, and simply remembering that perfection is a goal to aim for, but not even remotely close to what is required! 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Understandable. I obviously suggest trying one's best at all times, but when the content is difficult, focusing on resolving mechanics correctly (even if they can be effectively ignored) will always be more important to me than an optimal rotation. I'm talking about missing a GCD or two in a fight, or letting CDs drift by a few seconds, not playing "ice mage" to make your rotation easier, here, of course.
I always figured this was probably the case but its nice to hear someone confirm it
I think the obsession over the funny coloured numbers is what makes people fixate on "perfection". It leads to people comparing each other to the absolute best players in the world rather than the boss you're fighting. Play as well as you can, but remember that outside of Ultimates, 14 isn't a game with a skill floor so high that only perfection will suffice.
That is almost certainly the reason yes! 😅 And yes I agree!
this whole video is the exact reason why I will never do anything harder than extreme, been playing for 5 years and I will never bother trying to deal with this level of stress
I like how you use dancer as example. The new dancer in my group needs to stop dying to do more dps than Tank, Lol.
Oh dear! 😅 Hopefully they'll get there!
I’ve been playing for a few months now but there’s a lot of content still new to me. In what order is the difficulty between things like Extreme, Savage, ultimate, chaotic, etc? Idk if I’m missing any but they all sound similar as in very difficult
@@adrianyeager6463 order of difficulty is extreme, chaotic/unreal, savage/another (variant dungeon), then ultimate being the highest!
Extremes are the best place to start with high difficulty content, and valigarmanda ex is good because it doesn't have much capability for someone who's learning to wipe the party if they're playing as a DPS role!
For black mage, trying to follow the guide and be 100% precise and strict to the pasted rotation is a guaranteed way to be the worst dps in your party. Itl do great against a training dummy and fail the very first moment you need to move. The most important thing is to always cast *something*. Even if its the wrong thing. Learning to make the least wrong practical choice is like, half of high end content for black mage. I mean the 100% mobility rotations are basically just very wrong versions of the standard rotation and they're not even *that* bad. Not optimal. But they'll get you through patches where you need to stay mobile, if you don't have the resources to handle it more conventionally.
Tried savage for a few weeks. After seeing how much people are obsessed over parses and how much I am expected to do outside of the game, I want to stay as far away as possible from the raiding scene. This game is the most fun for me when I play casually.
That's also perfectly understandable. Do the things you enjoy in the game! 😊
@CaetsuChaijiCh thanks for not invalidating my opinion ❤
Yeah, some people take it too seriously. I tried to get into a static savage last expansion and I got booted because I didn’t stick around for the EX7 fight to farm weapons when I was out of the crit boosting food. Because I like to craft my stuff rather than throwing Gil at the market board, I was told “your attendance on the prog nights is good, but you don’t have the attitude for raiding, so I’m removing you from the static.” Blocked the person.
Oh no they want you to watch a TH-cam video guide or a raid plan. The fking horror. Idk you are lazy, entitled, or both.
When I did savage fights only half the group was actually really good to start with, 3 of the 4dps were well below 1k dps than they should have been, me and the bard were nearly 2k dps under. By the second fight my dps was only 400 under.
The ultimate fights however should be perfection or close to it required. I have seen people die and still clear it easily
As long as you do the mechanics you're fine, mash the buttons and get better at rotation later
Do you need to be perfect for savage? no, just know the basics and be willing to learn, ask others if youre not sure, there is a LOT of people who gladly help you understand some basic stuff from our job but they are often afraid to approach people cuz some people lash out when you try and help them and can actually report them and get them in trouble.
but the basics are really easy to know and understand:
1. READ YOUR ABILITIES, like seriously, just read em, read what they do and try to understand how to add it to your gameplay, dont think about it too hard yet, but just read em.
2. PRESS YOUR ABILITIES, its funny, but for real, just press the buttons, see that shiny fight or flight on PLD? just press it, you dont need to do optimal GCD:s for it yet, but just press it, dont let it just sit there ready to be pressed, just goddamn press it, same thing with mitigations, see that rampart or sentinel? press it, even if you pull only 2 enemies in a dungeon, PRESS IT, get used to pressing it since most mits should be on cooldowns almost all the time, JUST PRESS YOUR BUTTONS!
3. DO BASIC MATH, you know how to do 1st grade math right? you can count 100 + 200 = 300? then read your abilities and do the math, its not rocket science, just add the numbers together, if your 1-2 AOE combo does 110 potency + 150 potency while your 1-2-3 single target does 250-330-480 should you use your AOE combo or single target combo when youre attacked by 2 enemies? its not that hard, just use your head, use the gift of knowledge to figure out which is better to do, takes literally 20 seconds to think if its worth or not.
i know these sound like "durr, were not retarded, ofc we know these already" but i have been playing this game for so many goddamn years now and i still see people not using their abilities, using AOE combo on single target enemies and using single target combo on multiple enemies, i have seen it all, if you do these 3 things youre already better than 80% of the playerbase i quarantee it.
but back to the savage point, yes savage is hard and yes you should play as optimally as you can, is it a requirement? no aslong as you can get through the DPS check, just find some people who share your way of playing the game or wont mind having a "bad player" in their group then its incredibly fun, you can learn if you want to, the game is not hard, like for real its not, looking at the jobs, i have NEVER watched a single rotation or guide for the jobs and i can do semi-optimal rotations on ALL of em, how did i learn to do that? just use your abilities, read the abilities and simple 1st grade math, most people wont expect perfection from you, but they do expect you to learn, you get used to your rotations more and more as you play, you get used to playing in a team, you get used to fighting the bosses and learning their gimmicks and tells, but if you REFUSE to learn then there is no helping you
Ime in savage raiding with a few statics. You don't have to be "perfect" but every bit of damage you don't do, has to be made up by someone else. Was i ever perfect? No I parsed in the 70s. But for me I knew that if I drop my 2 min or get a damage down, I knew someone else had to make it up for me by playing more optimal. This is assuming day 1 on content etc. Where all savage fights we did were cleared during enrage. This is VERY anecdotal tho.
That is true. Once the hard enrage is reached, every single second counts so any damage you don't do, someone else has to do.
It gets a bit blurrier once you clear before hard enrage, because then lost damage can just mean the fight goes a bit longer (which again still means everyone has to work harder!)
I have seen enough enrages in extremes that the thought of not playing consistently optimized rotations in savage terrifies me. Which I guess is why I still haven't done savages.
Having little to no experience (tried m1s once for fun)
By the time we got to the falling floor the boss was almost to half hp, with blind random trying to progress the fight
Of course being perfect helps a lot... But being perfect VASTLY overshoots the enrage, dropping a bit of damage is not the end of the world from my experience
Exactly. In some cases being perfect can make things easier by cutting the fight short, but Indeed, not at all a requirement! 😄
That only works because this savage tier is piss easy and has the easiest dps check of any tier ever. Esp if you have a picto.
Just saying dont consider th8s tier the norm for savage or for how good you need to be.
@@slimfastsubaru2043 actually i was the only caster and a summoner
but
if this raid tier is so easy, why the forums got shitstormed by people complaining dawntrail is too hard?
Depends on the fight honestly, and how much the fight is outdated from gearing/food/pots perspective.
This tier is by far the easiest in years when it comes to DPS checks, even week 1 (likely unintended, and primarily due to balance issues, particularly with PCT). But we've had Savage fights that fall under the other side of the spectrum too, P8S door boss for example. Week 1 required not only optimal play but sometimes comp changes as well (otherwise, random crit variance would make you fail the DPS check). It was very frustrating.
Even more frustrating were fights like TOP, which while current, had us wipe to enrage all the way in phase 4, just because one mistake was made. You didn't just need to play near-perfectly, you needed to do so consistently to see significant prog, or at least in my experience.
Honestly, it's relative. Some fights you don't need to be anywhere near-perfect (DeathCoB anyone?). But for some, you may as well just wall if a single player gets a damage down.
@robertomacetti7069 because they upped the difficulty of normal content. Dungeons and normal mode trials/raids are harder. Noone bitched the savages or extremes were hard.
I drop my dots as a bard sometimes and still clear. It is what it is.
That Ice Mage that refused to listen really did a number to your psyche, huh.
Short answer: Nope.
Long answer: Even taking into account this tier's more relaxed standards, DPS checks are not tight enough to require anywhere near perfection from everyone, not even in week 1. However, the better you are at optimization, the more you can make up for mistakes and weaker players, and the more easily you will be able to clear no matter _what_ party you land in. My static's first clear of M2S, week 1, came on a run where our SMN disconnected _twice_ and was straight up not present for close to a minute of a 10min fight. Our damage was high enough to clear anyway.
This vid released at a convenient time since I went through the regular M2 and 3 fights and did absolutely abysmal despite looking up the fights 🥲 My FC and I have been discussing doing extremes together but recently I just wonder how when it's embarrassing how much regular DT fights wrecks me. I get so overwhelmed by mechanics and need to keep a constant eye on my hotbars to do the rotation (I'm a DRK and still mess up lol I know the rotarion, but if I panic? Game over) and then I get so frustrated by my failures.
When it comes to any harder content involving those glowing letters and numbers, people being able to memorise exactly where to go is astounding to me. I understand you do research for videos, but even then, or doing practice runs in PF, I'm still like "How do you remember any of this?! How're you getting past these mechanics in a practice session without instant death?"
the more practice you get on a job's rotation, the more it will become second nature and the less you'll actually need to pay attention to do it right. it'll just happen over time, just one of those things where more hours on the game will smooth it over
@terribleawful I appreciate it ❤️ Do you have any advice on how to avoid feeling overwhelmed by mechanics in high end content like dt?
Imo it's most important to do the mechanics right. Once you can do the mechanics right 95-100% of the time, Then you worry about raising your DPS- But you should never sacrifice that mechanical performance in the pursuit of DPS. Being 95-100% consistent and only making minor recoverable mistakes while doing 80% of your damage potential is better than being 50-75% mechanically consistent with regular major irrecoverable mistakes and doing 95-100% of your damage potential... You do no damage if you die, And if your mistakes lead the group to a wipe your uber leet dps doesn't matter anyway.
Very few things in this game are tuned such that you need hyper-optimized dps to succeed. You DO need stellar mechanical consistency for the hardest content though.
Yeah, from my own experience I can say you do not need to be perfect to do savage fights on content. :p
The explanations on why the whole 'perfection' thing exists in the first place was also nice. Not specifically unexpected as for what does in there, but it was good to see it kinda all brought together.
I don't think the "optimal" rotations are such a big deal to get right. People worry about being perfect, when it's just about tweaking one or two things to something you're probably already doing very well. Most often it's not that different than the uh... normal/natural rotation people tend to settle into while levelling or in normal content. For example, I was doing the warrior opener like 90% of the super optimized one and managed to clear p9s - p12s with it. Just this raid tier I took a look at it and realized I only needed to make one or two small changes, which I did while progging not even needing to go to the dummy. Reaper was more or less the same, a bit easier cause I didn't had to worry about tanking lol, now I'm learning blm and it's a bit more tricky with the timing being so tight, but it's still not that different than the rotation the game teaches you.
No, you don't. In extreme and savage as long as you habe abd idea what buttons to press you can clear a fight. Sometimes floor 3 and 4 of savage requires you to play a bit better to meet dps checks.
In Ultimate is a bir different. You don't need to be perfect at all, but it is expected that you at least know your rotation and to put in burst windows. This game wasn't designed in a way the player neefs to play perfect to win. The game prioritizes the long dsnce we call mechanics.
You don't have to be perfect at rotation, it is more important that you are comfortable enough with your job to do mechanic while doing your own rotation. If you can do the same rotation every pull, then you can focus a lot more in the mechanic.
You would usually fk up the rotation during a fight, but what you can do is try to fix it for later comfort. From what I have seen, the good players aren't that perfect even during reclears, but they know how to fix their rotation so that they would lose less dps then other players.
Has always been if youre dead your party wiped.
Nothing to do with proper rotation.
There is a rule of thumb.
1. Stay out of puddles
2. Know the mechanics
3. A-b-c Always be casting
Thats all there is to it. Most wipes are due to people new or just fail to mechanics. Usually it takes a few tries.
Tales from the Novice Network.
A battle mentor said to trade mentor in dungeon,
Use Eukrasian diagnosis to proc toxikon instead of spamming aoe.
I opened up my calculator and lol'ed.
The battle mentor is full of crap.
As for the video topic.
Well I've been in a party with no mistakes but didn't get pass enrage.
you don't have to be perfect, but at least know what button to press.
I've seen nastrond x3 straight when it was x3.
No... because you must be optimal at all times! It's all about the numbers! (jokes aside, it is unfortunately *is* a lot about the numbers)
Rotation and buff management are only 1/2 the raiding scene. The 2nd 1/2 is knowing where to stand and when....without that, your rotation is screwed anyways since you'll die and screw up most of your rotation anyways lol.
No one is perfect, BUT in harder fights every able bodied person should be able to do a standard opener perfectly, do a 10 minute rotation perfectly against a dummy, and press their group buffs on time. Everything there can be practiced on a dummy.
All this because mistakes WILL happen, and these minimal perefctions will lessen the weight of mistakes. The opener is the moment the group does the most damage while also being the easiest moment in a fight, and pressing group buff on time ensures one's mistake doesn't worsen others' rotation, and knowing how a perfect rotation over 10 minutes looks lets one know where to improve or readjust in case of death.
You don't have to be perfect.
It's ok to mess up
Where does one even encounter this type of snobbery outside of statics? In pf I find that most disbands are due to a lack of consistency to do mechanics. I would judge a player's prep work, consistency and awareness long before even examining their rotations, if at all in fact.
Depends entirely on how noticeable the issues are. A DNC tossing out fans as they proc is a lot less noticeable and a lot less of an issue than a DNC who let standard drop for half a minute and drifted tech step into the off-minutes.
I've helped some friends start their savage stuff and my only requirement was "hey, beat the stone sky sea dummy. I can help give you the tools to beat it, but that step is requirement. I don't care how you do it so long as you can"
I got to 6:22 before noping out. FFXIV is a wonderful game that I will always deeply love, but I don't need to get sweaty over it. Yeah, it sucks that I'll never get the most exclusive glams, but I can live with looking cool on a budget.
That's fair. I don't remember off the top of my head if 6:22 is before I mentioned that you actually don't have to be so perfect. Not even close. Sorry for the weird ordering of information!
However, as I have said to others that got intimidated as well, The most important thing is that you enjoy the game in your own way, and if the hard content seems too sweaty and you'd rather stay out, that is perfectly understandable, and not something you should feel bad about!