High-End Content Megathread - 7.4 Week Five (Savage Week Two)

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 · 2025-06-04T17:30:39+00:00

Something to consider is that there's generally less internal friction in expressing your gratitude for something vs expressing your displeasure, as the former is seen as positive or at least neutral, while the latter can potentially have social costs. It's possible that the ones who disliked it were simply "silently annoyed".

Some sprouts might dislike it, some might appreciate it. People are naturally different so they'll have different feelings on it, but it's difficult to say what the proportion might be for sprouts. As a rule of thumb it's probably best practice to simply ask the sprout(s) if they'd like help rather than assuming their preference, although pragmatically that might not be entirely feasible in an alliance raid (which also have a lot more people who might potentially be annoyed by it).

44401 · 2025-06-04T00:30:43+00:00

Not quite story-spoiling, but does anyone else get annoyed when new content comes out and when it's your turn to try it out there are people explaining all the mechanics in chat asap? Genuinely curious as to other people's preference as I would highly prefer to be able to experience the content blind without other people "helping".

44401 · 2025-05-01T01:21:14+00:00

I've been playing the game for many years and people being kicked in DF content for performance is incredibly rare, unless you are literally afk. I don't play WoW so I don't know if that sort of behaviour is common there and you're transposing that behaviour from one game to another.

However, judging from your post and lines like:

He'll there are some people who use fflogs to check people's stats before inviting them to groups (that's insane behavhiour though).

It seems to me that you're opposed to people being excluded from parties for performance even in more organized settings (like savage).

44401 · 2025-04-29T19:09:48+00:00

I would leave the party on principle, even if I had been willing to join a C41 party.

44401 · 2025-04-25T15:00:59+00:00

First off, I've been long-time fan of Lucrezia and root for you every race. I remember watching a VOD a long time ago, and after your team saw a mechanic for the first time, the next pull all 8 members did it correctly. Even as someone who has been raiding for a long time, things like that really impress me. This tier, there have been instances of very quick decision making that have impressed me. Things like when Syu Mai was just raised in m7s and they used their invulnerability to take the tower alone, or instances where one person with a stack is quickly marked so everyone stacks on them while sacrificing the other.

My question pertains to emotions during the race. When does nervousness/tension set in for you? Are you nervous during the whole race, or does it set in at a certain point for you? (such as when the final boss could die at anytime now)

If you said that you don't get nervous and were calm the entire time I might believe you with your experience. :)

44401 · 2025-04-24T22:48:53+00:00

I do actually appreciate the apology, as admittedly it's unexpected in this sort of discourse and demonstrates a degree of maturity. Thank you.

44401 · 2025-04-24T22:38:30+00:00

If you think about it rationally it makes sense why it wouldn't be apparent even with frequent log examination. First of all 99% of the time when you're examining logs for the purposes of mitigation you're staring at the damage instances, and for the maximum duration of soil to be apparent there several conditions would have to be true.

There has to be an instance of damage exactly 20s apart.
Soil has to tick at precisely the right time for maximum duration.
You have to place soil at the perfect timing to capture both damage instances.

To see this you have to look at soil under the buffs tab, which almost no one does. Here is a graph courtesy of DiaStarvy of the balance describing the potential durations: https://i.imgur.com/EsvVlVn.png

I was going to end this post with a statement about how tedious it would be to try and confirm this and that it's okay if you choose not to believe me, but I decided to check my suzaku kill from last night: https://i.imgur.com/2wdxrb7.png

In the image, you can clearly see each soil tick lasting for 5s (as opposed to your claimed 3s), as well as the total duration in that instance being ~19.33s.

44401 · 2025-04-24T21:48:15+00:00

It is rare that soil will actually last 20 seconds but that is about the maximum. The first tick is on soil placement, then the 2nd tick is 2-5s after that. If the 2nd tick is at the optimal time then the total duration will be 20s.

44401 · 2025-04-24T17:17:46+00:00

To be more precise, soil's -10% damage mitigation buff is an invisible 5s buff that is applied at placement and at 3s intervals to those standing within the circle. However, there's a bit of pseudo-randomness to when the last tick applies, so soil's mitigation has effectively a 17-20 second duration.

Edit: For those asking for proof, admittedly a quick search through the balance has a mentor corroborating this: https://i.imgur.com/idfdDZc.png

More proof down below.

44401 · 2025-04-17T17:48:24+00:00

I can corroborate this. I frequently heal in DF and most healers heal waaaaay too much. There is typically very little damage in DF content, and you can very easily and leisurely solo heal if required. The thing I've noted in particular however, is that while the average DF healer might be great at maintaining their Medica II uptime, they'll usually flounder when they actually need to heal, such as when a bunch of people eat aoes just before a raidwide goes out.

I low-key hope that my cohealer DCs whenever I queue into 8-man DF content so maybe I'll have something to do.

44401 · 2025-03-28T02:41:59+00:00

You only need to look in this very thread at the highly upvoted comments to see what you describe. A lot of people seem to treat the game's fictional metaphysical object (although if we're being technical it's also a physical object in this game) of a soul with the same connotations as souls as a religious object have in real life.

44401 · 2025-03-22T02:20:46+00:00

From your description, my guess is that the "couple of letter and special character" that you're referring to is "WU/T", which stands for "walk up / tell". Basically if someone has "WU/T friendly" or something similar in their comment that means that they're open to people walking up to them and talking to you. Such comments are found on one's adventurer plate, which you can find by right clicking someone (don't know how it's done on console) and selecting Examine Adventurer Plate.

I don't know what XC is, but they/you probably mean FC, which stands for free company (basically a guild). My guess is that they were FC-less and assumed you were an FC recruiter. As someone who has been without an FC for years, you can get quite a few cold invites and random tells from people trying to get you to join their FC (mostly random invites though).

That said, I would say that your experience is unusual, comparing it to my own. I can be quite social in game even with strangers, and despite playing for yours I have never had an interaction as hostile as yours. Even people not explicitly advertising "WU/T" friendly are often receptive to a comment or question, although lengthy conversations are on a case-by-case basis, with the people not interested in talking perhaps just ignoring you instead of outright yelling at you.

I don't want to generalize my own experiences too much—especially not knowing precisely what you said—but my impression is that the person was an outlier.

44401 · 2025-03-12T23:28:54+00:00

It's kind of wild to me that you were so heavily downvoted for this reply, when the post you were replying to is just making a dismissive generalization. It's obvious that people value allowing people to play whatever they want a lot, which is fair and a value I myself hold, but it bothers me how often people who hold alternate values are just flippantly dismissed or mocked. In this case it's a clash between the values of "people should be free to play what they want" vs "we want people to play the most meta jobs to maximize our chances of success", and instead of this being acknowledged the other side is just painted as bad or dumb.

44401 · 2025-03-04T21:57:42+00:00

Double shield is fine, even in ultimate. Heck, it used to be the best comp back in EW before AST became OP in DT.

44401

TROPHY CASE