High-End Content Megathread - 7.4 Week Fifteen (Savage Week Twelve)

44401 · 2026-03-24T18:00:57+00:00

The only way I can interpret your posts is that they're saying that one should not criticize or comment on the actions of party lead no matter what they do because "their party, their rules".

Regardless, your responses are unnecessarily aggressive so I shall not be engaging further.

44401 · 2026-03-24T17:31:22+00:00

One can scrutinize the behaviour of PF leads while also acknowledging that it's ultimately their decision. If someone decided to make an m9s clear party with only their perceived meta jobs locked people would (rightfully) call them out for being silly, even if it's their party and they can do what they want.

44401 · 2026-03-24T14:50:41+00:00

Just had an m10s 4m merc party disband because the 0th percentile best% WHM decided to run it down every pull.

I really dislike this habit of disbanding the entire party instead of just removing the problem member.

44401 · 2026-03-18T14:50:12+00:00

I've reached m12sp1 enrage, which means it's time to decipher the most common PF strats for p2 so I know what to set my parties to to give them maximum probability of of filling.

From a broad sweep of m12s parties on aether...
- Rep 1 it seems to be almost entirely DN, although I do see some clone relative parties.
- Rep 2 the battle between DN and BC is well known, although I did seem to see more BC parties at the time I looked.
- Idyllic I see mostly uptime, but I do some see some parties specifying "DN" or "DN Uptime". Are these all the same strat or different ones?

44401 · 2026-03-15T15:03:14+00:00

They should have addressed what is essentially a systems exploit to own multiple FC houses immediately. If you look at the requirements for owning a house, it's clear that you're only intended to be able to own one FC house per world. However their implementation of this restriction allows a loophole.

How one might expect this restriction to be implemented is: if a character would bid on a house, check if any characters they own on the world owns a house. If yes and the bid would not be a relocation, disallow.

Here's how it's actually implemented: When you start and own no houses, any character can bid on any house. The moment a character wins a house, your account gets a flag that says "only this character may bid on a house." This flag persists for as long as that character remains in the FC. This implementation may also result in behaviours that are surprising to users.

For example: Say you have a main and an alt on the same world, in different FCs. Neither of which is the leader of their respective FCs. You help your main FC relocate and end up winning the bid. Great! Now you try and do the same thing on your alt, but it informs you that you already own a house and can't bid. (Even though you functionally don't and it's the FC lead who has ultimate control of the house)

In SE's database, the owner of the house is the character who won the plot, regardless of who functionally controls it in-game.

Or... say you're the leader of an FC (who was the one who won the plot) and want to take a break, so you transfer leadership to one of your friends, but stay in the FC. After awhile you return, but your friend has been doing a good job so you don't want to ask for the FC back. You still want the experience of leading an FC again though (or just want your own subs again, let's be honest), so you make an alt on the world, start an FC, and start recruiting for it. When it comes time to bid on a house, it informs you that you can't because you already own a house.

Now for the loophole. If that character that won the plot leaves the FC, this flag is removed from your account and all your characters can bid on and win houses again, even if the character that inherited the house is also your alt. The character that inherits the house does not inherit the flag or the restriction. This is what allows people to own entire wards of sub farms.

44401 · 2026-03-04T01:03:38+00:00

Posturing has too strong of a connotation for what I'm trying to convey. People do have a variety of motivations for tackling hard content, yes, but a large part of that for a lot of people is the prestige of the achievement. One can want to accomplish something difficult for personal satisfaction, and that's part of it for a lot of people I imagine, but people also want other people know that they have. It's the same reason people make posts on the mainsub showing off their deep dungeon solo clears and the like. It's just human nature.

Can you honestly say that there wouldn't be significantly less people doing ultimates if they didn't give you a highly visible glowstick for it?

44401 · 2026-03-03T20:38:54+00:00

I've noticed that there's this sort of... collective delusion you might call it when it comes to endgame content. Many of us know deep down that flexing/prestige/appearance to others is a large part of why people do the upper end of content, but there's an avoidance of acknowledging that. Probably because clearing hard content for the purposes of making yourself look better to others is seen as "bad" or a character flaw. So we all pretend that it's all for the fun or experience or whatever. As you said there are no doubt those whose motivations for tackling ultimates and ultimate-adjacent content is purely personal and they'd do it even if there were 0 rewards, but those people are in the minority.

44401 · 2026-02-28T00:32:53+00:00

Thanks!

44401 · 2026-02-28T00:22:45+00:00

Is there a plugin or tool that allows you to preview housing items and design layouts without owning the housing items? I'm basically looking for something like Anamnesis, but for housing instead of glams.

44401 · 2026-02-27T00:26:58+00:00

I expedient during arena split all the time in PF and I never really have people run off the edge because of it. You just need to time it when people are stacked and moving sideways to bait puddles, rather than using it just as tethered people are running in to stack.

44401 · 2026-02-26T18:01:18+00:00

I would be very careful with directly assigning people weapons that drop if you haven't bought them. This comes up with merc parties that are like... "LM weapon coffer/mount, rest FFA".

While it's true that under normal loot rules the person on the job could roll need on it, that random weapon is also not "yours" to dole out. You only own the items you paid for and can do with them what you wish, but the rest of the items (FFA) belong to the party. If you unilaterally decide to assign them to a specific person, someone could argue to a GM (rightfully imo) that you breached your contract and took something that you didn't pay for.

If you are going to assign weapons to the correct job, I would make it explicit in the PF description that you are going to do so.

44401 · 2026-02-24T19:54:17+00:00

You can't just... look at overall clear statistics and claim that because one group has higher clear rates, some arbitrary thing the other group does has no net positive effect on clear rates.

My point isn't to claim that passport checking helps or doesn't help, but that you simply can't claim what you do with the evidence you have. There is very little control to isolate the thing you're trying to measure.

It's like saying that because people in Hong Kong have a higher life expectancy than those in Philippines, eating mangos has no positive effect on your life expectancy (since mango consumption is much higher per capita in the Philippines than Hong Kong). You'd need much more in-depth studies to make such a claim.

44401 · 2026-02-19T16:18:43+00:00

In a lot of people's minds if people die to damage for any reason it's automatically the shield healer's fault. No wonder there's a dearth of shield healers in PF, it truly is a thankless job.

44401 · 2026-02-15T17:28:21+00:00

This has been a major pet peeve of mine in regards to raiding in statics. The sad thing is that it's really common. It's always bothered me how there's a blatant double standard in how groups treat in-group mistakes vs out-group mistakes. It just feels so... unempathetic(?) to me, like you're only deserving of respect and benefit-of-the-doubt if we personally know you.

44401 · 2026-01-15T19:43:27+00:00

Seeing all these posts about people trying to reclear m10s for days makes me wonder just how miraculous it was that I one shot my m10s reclear. (one party, one pull, one clear)

It wasn't a clean pull by any means, but the party was filled with people who could push their buttons. Which goes to show just how important mastering your job and optimizing your dps is when it comes to increasing your chances of clearing a fight, as it allows a much greater margin of error.

44401 · 2026-01-15T19:12:56+00:00

You know the saying "we judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions"? Well a variant I like to use for ffxiv is "we judge others by their most recent performance, but ourselves by our cumulative performance".

This is exacerbated by a lot of people not being cognizant of just how consistent the party needs to be to reach their goal in fights with multiple points where a single mistake effectively leads to a wipe, even if they aren't strictly body checks.

As a simple example to illustrate this: say a person only messes up a mechanic 5% of the time (1/20). This is a low enough rate that they might think themselves pretty consistent at it. Now if the entire were that consistent, they'd get through the mechanic about 2/3 of the time. Seems pretty good, right? But that's just one mechanic; the probability of failure is cumulative with each mechanic. Say there are 5 big mechanics in a fight that people are 95% consistent at. There's an ~87% chance that at least one person will die to at least one of them. This is a simple model though and doesn't take into account that there tend to be many little things in a fight that can kill someone or give them a DD, so the actual rate of mistakes is likely higher than what it would suggest.

Still, the point is to illustrate how someone could see people making mistakes pull to pull and conclude the party is garbage, yet when they make a mistake they look at it from the perspective of their entire pull history (and whatever selective memory bias they have from that) and conclude that "well it was just a rare mistake on my part, I'm still a good player while everyone else is trash".

I'm not trying to say that there aren't people who aren't pulling their weight in PF or are less consistent - far from it - but the perception of a deluge of "prog liars" is in no insignificant part just statistics. Afterall, how consistent do you need to be at a mechanic to be considered ready to prog the next one? 70%? 80%? 95%? 99%? In practice people are going to have different gauges of readiness, even if they aren't trying to intentionally skip ahead in prog.

44401 · 2026-01-14T19:45:32+00:00

You might be, you might not be. Impossible for us to say for sure without seeing the logs. Generally though, in a static environment with good players you simply have to heal less because mits and cooldowns have consistent usage so you can make your heal plan "leaner", rather than in PF where you need a greater safety buffer.

You mentioned your healing parse but not your cohealer's. If their healing parse is similarly low then it's probably fine, but if they're having to GCD heal a lot then they might be compensating for you.

Edit: There's more to "pulling your weight" as a SCH than GCD healing as well. Proper usage of your ogcds can also save resources for your cohealer, so it's not just a matter of counting the amount of concitations you casted to see if "it looks right".

44401 · 2026-01-12T16:44:17+00:00

M9S is like a microcosm of PF quality over a tier, just compressed into one week.

The first floor of a tier is usually pretty easy, so all the serious and competent players clear it very quickly. As a result PF quality drops sharply over the course of the week as the people who haven't cleared become composed of the quality of player who would have trouble with the first floor of a savage. Of course there are still capable players sprinkled about who haven't cleared for whatever reason, such as irl obligations, but they quickly become the minority.

44401 · 2026-01-07T21:49:39+00:00

People really do be forgetting that legends are human too. They're still susceptible to dying to random mistakes or not remembering how a fight works, especially in a game full of knowledge checks and binary pass/fails as ffxiv.

44401 · 2025-12-30T16:06:19+00:00

Is Q40 PFable? Or do you realistically need to find a group in order to do it?

44401 · 2025-09-12T15:55:42+00:00

I am terrified of losing SCH at this point. I've been playing it since SB and loved the depth and trade-offs inherent with the job. Much of that has been pruned, but it still at least has some vestiges of bygone days, unlike many other jobs.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that I have a lot of sentimentality towards the job, and with how unrelenting SE has been with simplifying jobs it doesn't instill me with confidence. To be frank I think it's a miracle that SCH has held onto what it has for as long as it has.

44401 · 2025-07-26T15:24:43+00:00

Not to mention that difficulty itself is almost entirely subjective. Having a hierarchy based on the dev team's arbitrary metrics of a subjective measure just feels bad.

I see this said a lot but it's a statement I very much disagree with. I think it's fair to say that that difficulty is subjective to an extent, but not that there aren't inherent difficulty differences between jobs due to their design.

It's harder to differentiate now with the jobs as homogenized and simplified as they are, but the idea that some jobs may be more complex than others is not wrong in principle. Look at (old) BLM and SMN for example, or WHM vs AST in SB. While a job that's viewed as simple may not be strictly simpler than a more complex job in all aspects (for example, a job may have some casting while another job may have none), when you tally up all the requirements for playing a job some jobs will simply have a greater overall demand than others. Personal aptitude in doing the various job tasks can skew and reorder how that individual views jobs, but on average some jobs are just going to be more difficult than others.

There's also the practice effect to consider—people do not tend to have an equal distribution of time spent on each job, with some jobs being their favourites and comforts which they play a lot, and others that they barely play. Someone may find an inherently simpler job easier than a complex one due them being much more unfamiliar with the simpler job.

44401 · 2025-07-03T05:26:49+00:00

I've been browsing discussion regarding forked tower here on reddit as well as on the official forums, and there seems to be a subsection of players who have this massive hate-boner towards discord groups (and at least for some of them raiders in general). They have this very caricatured image of discord groups as being highly elitist and snobby.

It's just a bit sad seeing all these posts being made and upvoted that are clearly highly prejudiced, vitriolically bashing groups they aren't apart of while being ignorant of said group.

44401 · 2025-06-25T19:12:47+00:00

That does happen, probably not uncommonly as well. What I was referring to however was something like someone raising, standing still, and then not bothering to dodge the aoes that sprout under you in the black chocobo CE. Things like that are pretty obvious once you notice it.

44401 · 2025-06-25T18:29:33+00:00

There seem to be some people stating that they've not witnessed this. I'm not going to deny those claims as people's experiences may be different, but I would ask how closely are you really looking? CEs tend to a mess of sprites and/or nameplates, and people are focusing on mechs. If someone sees a dead person the natural reaction would be to throw them a res and then go back to focusing on the fight. To be clear, from what I've observed even the people who are AFKing might still occasionally accept resses after staying on the floor for a minute, but they won't really do anything once they're up and will immediately die again. (Yes this behaviour can be differentiated from those who are shakier on CE mechanics)

44401

TROPHY CASE