(Photo Credit to Jessica Cornelius)
Amidst numerous servers of “try hards” and long time players lies Famfrit, a more casual area with a dense population. There are however, many players who still challenge the progression content despite the more laid-back community. As the game slowly takes away more and more incentive to tackle the raid system other than for bragging rights, we hope to turn the spotlight on those who dare to take on what makes FFXIV less of a grind and more a sophisticated dance with death.
We start with small interviews from a couple of teams that are progressing through Midas Savage. We start with a group that has been clearing content since week three of patch 3.2, though they have not had their progression highlighted till recently. Next we take a look at a more hardcore Famfrit native group that’s been clearing everything they can since the patch hit, currently taking on Midas Four Savage (M4S/A8S) progression. Then we see what it’s like for a casual group to take on the hardcore raids “just to try it out”.
Before the interviews, Famfrit finally has a team that has beaten all of Midas Savage! Congratulations to Secret Oatmeal for their server first Midas Savage clear!
Roster:
Tee Bao (Paladin)
Fantasy Rain (Warrior)
David Anderson (White Mage)
Hawken Pierce (Scholar)
Z’ekias Duskrunner (Dragoon)
Tristan Tamashii (Ninja)
Ezrael Samaiya (Bard/Machinist)
Evalara Fayth (Summoner)
Congratulations again and we wish you good luck in the raids to come!
Composed primarily of Rule of Rose members, Team Sprint Tactics is represented by shotcaller and monk, Jak Mar. Sprint Tactics is currently progressing through the third floor of Midas Savage. With minimal roster changes, they have been able to completely clear tiers of raids for being on the casual side of raiding (usually 2 days a week).
First of all, I’d like you to explain your melds.
“LMFAO. Gathering is to increase your chances on loot. Control is to help with my greased lightning stacks and I think I had perception. To help……… learn fights faster. The latest edition of mind to help increase my second wind heals.”
What do you think of this raid tier so far?
“In all honesty, this raid tier is really boring in comparison to the Realm Reborn raid; The Binding Coil of Bahamut. To be fair the latest tier of Midas is at least more interesting than the Gordias section. However, in comparison to the Coil of Bahamut I feel like this raid tier is a lot more stressful on the person assigned to do call outs. Why? The mechanics in this tier aren’t as punishing to the raid as the mechanics in Coil of Bahamut. Again why would a less punishing raid be more stressful? With the lack of punishing mechanics, players tend to not learn as quickly or don’t even bother to fully understand the mechanics because their actions aren’t affecting the raid. For example in Midas 1 Savage the prey marker(s) assigned to a player(s) have several different outcomes. One outcome is that if the player doesn’t move from the group, they will kill the team. Another outcome is that they are too slow at moving to their assigned destination that they will either get a damage reduction or die. The third outcome is that people could forget to move after the prey and get cleaved by Gobhook. All in all the majority of the outcomes in a players mistake in a Midas mechanic would cause a death or two, or a debuff which would cause players to care less about their actions.
Now if this was in a Coil of Bahamut raid setting, those unaware/careless players would end up causing a wipe to the entire team. Why would a punishing mechanic be more desirable? It forces each individual of the team to understand the mechanics of the fight and overall enhance their awareness in the raid. This in my opinion is crucial to progress in a raid setting and oddly causes less stress on the raid leader overall. For example, in Coil of Bahamut Turn 13, Megaflare was a mechanic that was present throughout a majority of the fight. Progressively each phase would provide a slight change to Megaflare that players would have to look out for. When Megaflare starts, the players have to be aware of the locations of other players; this is because players are either marked to stack or not to stack. If they are too close together they would share unwanted damage which would lead to deaths. The problem with Megaflare was if there wasn’t enough players stacking it would kill off the players marked to stack, leading to an undesirable snowball effect. Additionally during Megaflare several random players spawn red AOE fields under them, if those players weren’t paying attention and were standing over top of the designated stacking area for the marked players, they would cause a lot of distress for people attempting to stack; most of the times players will not make the stack and several deaths occur. Later in the fight towers were introduced that players had to soak, so on top of being aware of their surroundings at least one person had to soak the tower damage or the raid receives a massive bleed debuff, eight out of ten times would cause a wipe. Additionally in the final phase during Megaflare there are two tethers that are introduced, which needed to be picked up by tanks. Majority of the time if the tethers weren’t picked up it would cause a tornado to spawn in the backlines which would push players into the walls killing them or stunning them for a short while. Overall Megaflare required a lot of awareness from each player and with each player understanding the functionality of the mechanic and the punishments for messing up a lot of deaths are avoided. Even though my experience from the Coils is just T5, T9-13, I found that the demand from each player to understand the functionality of the mechanic pushed people to learn a lot more about the fight and kept them on their toes.”
A lot of people talked about how the difficulty of Gordias Savage broke their teams, do you feel like this was the case with a lot of the teams on your server?
“I believe that the difficulty presented by Gordias Savage really did push the limits to the raid groups on our server, but not by the right methods. Specifically I found that Gordias wasn’t mechanic heavy and rather it forced players to understand their class to pull the required healing, DPS or damage reduction cooldowns in order to progress through the fight. In my opinion, players spent more time learning their classes rather than how to deal with mechanics properly in a fight or work as a team. I can’t say for other raid groups, but I found that in the team I was involved with the requirements caused a lot of tension and stress. Depending on what our members expected in terms of progression from each week of raiding, I saw that the more seriously players would become toxic or upset and it would lower the morale of people in the group. Luckily we were able to keep the morale up in the team by replacing players that caused too much stress to ensure we wouldn’t lose too many members.”
Any advice for anyone wanting to raid?
“Understand how mechanics work. The more you know, the less you’ll spaghetti things.”
Any shoutouts?
“Final Fantasyxiv because he heard my materia story and gave me Crit Vs in my moogle mail but mostly because I sent him bear fat and bad dad jokes.”
Group Zero is represented by healer and raid leader Ahri’qi Sxuim’vre. His group is composed of primarily Reign members and they pride themselves of executing flawlessly and for making efficient use of every pull.
Introduce yourself!
“Hullo. My name is Quinn Matheis. My in-game name is Ahri’qi Sxuim’vre (yes, there is a way to pronounce that). I am a main healer main (my go-to is AST but I used to be a WHM until the end of Gordias days around January) and a caster secondary. I work hard at my WAR as well, and will have BRD and DRG up to 60 soon enough to start practicing.”
How did you get into raiding?
“The concept behind “raiding” is what pulls me into games such as this. The need to work really hard and put in a lot of effort to be able to successfully complete content that most cannot at an impressive benchmark has always been attractive to me…throw in the need to work as a team with other real people, and I am hooked. However, this is actually, ironically, my first time raiding. I had heard of this beast called “Savage” and I did not know what it was or what to expect, but Alexander Normal was tough enough, so I thought it’d be fun to try and figure it out eventually after having watched videos. After a couple weeks or so of pushing out through the primal content at the time (Bismarck and Ravana), I saw a “sub” spot open for the night for a WHM for A1S. I thought it’d be fun enough to give it a whirl. Wow. Trial by fire as well as it could be for someone who had never been coached on how to play any class, let alone specifically a main healer, at the highest level. There’s a story that continues on from here, but in short, one thing led to another and I joined that group that I am presently leading 11 months ago.”
What do you think of this raid tier?
“This raid tier was a very large marked improvement over the previous in many ways, with a few mistakes I imagine the dev team can learn from. Gordias was a fantastic concept and a great step toward making clearing content a higher accolade than Coil was, but there were some glaring and obvious flaws. The fights were mechanically not terribly difficult, but were bottlenecked by ridiculously high DPS checks that would make groups with lackluster damage output smash their face into a wall endlessly until either something clicked or better gear rolled out. The fights were certainly epic in their own right, but they also lacked the shimmer that Coil did. Not to mention, A4S was a problematic fight sporting unreasonably gimmicky mechanics and anxiety-invoking frustrations.
Midas fixed a lot of these issues. Midas is considerably more mechanic-focused and the bar for DPS checks was lowered a substantial amount. A8S, the last fight in the tier, is probably the hardest fight they have ever released and is epic and fun and feels amazing to run, progress, and clear. The ilvl sync is far better, and the current BiS weapons are very fun to work for and boy does it feel good to show them off. There are some issues highlighted by this tier, though. The rewards for completing savage content being restricted to purely gear-boons and garbage miscellany (mount, minion were both subpar and disappointing) is not very enticing to groups after the so-called “catch-up patch”. The syncing between fights is far better (now massive walljump form 6-7 like in 2-3), but A6S itself upon release had its kinks that were nerfed down a notch. A7S is a fight that is unfortunately built into its design to favor groups that spend long hours within one raid night rather than a few hours into many raid nights, and has a couple too many “gimmicanics” (mechanics with aspects that just force unwanted progression irrelevant to skill level). And the fights in general this tier don’t feel near as epic as Gordias, even as awesome as Brute Justice is.
And of course, the neverending need for the story of Alexander to really pick up. Here’s to hoping A9-12S are a massive success and serve as a fitting close to Heavensward.”
Who do you play for?
“Good question. Who do I play for now…I think it would be most realistic to say it’s a mix of playing for myself as well as for every member of the group as a collective whole. Raiding is one thing, leading it is a whole ‘notha animal, and has been fantastic for teaching me many management skills and the like, so I raid to better myself as a player as well as a person. To add, everyone in my group means the world to me and I recognize I could not be anywhere near where I am now if it was not for them, so every time I enter Savage it’s to represent us as a group and them as teammates.
Our final interview looks at The Famfrit Tilt Club represented by Seirai. While others have been raiding regularly, this group decided to give it a try for the first time just for the hell of it with the newest patch.
Introduce yourself!
“I’m Seirai (say-rye), I play as Cat Maid . I study computing science and I’m a fairly avid gamer; most popular games you can name I’ve probably dabbled in them, quite a few of them to a competitive level. Not much else to say on that front. :P”
How long have you been playing for?
“I’ve been playing FFXIV for about a year now with about 2000+ real gameplay hours.”
How did you get into raiding?
“I got into raiding just following EX primals and then into savage fights. I started playing the game with 2 friends, and through PF we built/fostered relationships through a lot of individuals. Gathering some of the talented friendly faces we met, we created our raiding group and started progression.”
Who do you play for now and where are you in progression?
“I play for the Famfrit Tilt Club (which isn’t a really well-known name at all, I think most people would know our FC Vitae or Vox Nihili more). We’re progressing the final fight of this raid tier, A8S.”
What do you think of this raid tier?
“Quite frankly, I stand at a perspective of a person who’s completely new to raiding as I’ve only tackled savage content starting Midas (and I can say the same for the rest of my static save for a bit of coils experience). I do believe this raid tier to be a lot more flavourful and fun in regards of things to do as a team. There’s more mechanics than what I could see in the first turn of Gordias in Midas, and overall the fight just seemed a lot more silly and fun; there was little frustration to be had in wiping to something new every time, rather than getting peeved at people for ignoring or fumbling mechanics in a rinse-repeat fight like savage oppressor.
However, I don’t think there’s enough “easy” content as the difficulty kind of ramps up significantly from A5S to A6S, of which I believe to be somewhat of a poor design. More Midan gear should’ve been open to softcore/midcore groups by having an easier second fight, as well as a better taste of savage fights for those people who struggle with member selection, scheduling, and progression rate (and other things).
For our static personally, we’ve enjoyed every fight as most of the fights had new things for us to learn to do with each turn, all of which helps sharpen a group new to raiding’s skillsets.”
If you want your team to be featured, contact Genos Axel in-game. There will definitely be more teams to cover so stay tuned for more!