Nearly two full weeks ago as you read this post, my main static raid team in Final Fantasy XIV, at a time investment of 4-6 hours per week, put away the Arcadion Light-Heavy Division Savage tier, finishing M4S and locking in the full tier.

As Dawntrail’s first Savage tier and a part of an overall change in attitudes about difficulty in FFXIV, AAC Light-Heavy Savage is…interesting. Today, before 7.1 launches and we have other elements to talk about, I wanted to discuss the raid tier and share some thoughts about it.

Dawntrail and Difficulty

Firstly, a topic I have been trying to broach in a lot of ways over the last several months, leaving all my drafts to die a death – the difficulty of Dawntrail.

Dawntrail as an expansion is contentious in multiple ways, but one way in which it received broad praise (and some pointed critique) is the increased engagement level of casual, queuable content. I am going to be cautious here because the truth is that while the end result of the increased gameplay interactivity is also increased difficulty, I don’t necessarily believe it is that much harder. In many ways, FFXIV has been a bit dull of a gameplay experience the last couple of expansions because the casually-available content for easy consumption was often mind-numbingly simple with few actual failure states and no real teachable moments. A big part of my Endwalker journey was noting, quite loudly, that there wasn’t any good way to learn how to play at the EX trial/Savage raid level because the gap between even the easiest EX and the hardest queueable content in terms of skillful play is astonishingly large. Sure, it is a rite of passage for progression MMOs to be bad at teaching players how to push through the ranks (WoW also has no real training path for players to learn, but it also has a highly granular journey through small increases in difficulty you can take), but FFXIV just had a huge problem with how casual content could be done asleep (literally, I have tanked a dungeon while dozing off at times before!) while EX asks players to be baseline competent in their chosen job in a way no other content below that level does.

I think the natural and best possible trend in an MMO that lives a long life and focuses on combat as a gameplay pillar is that things should increase in difficulty over time. Players new to the game can make the long journey through the existing content to learn how to play in a gradual and consistent manner, long-term players have something interesting to sink their teeth into, and if a new player believes themselves up to the task on gameplay, they can speed-run or buy a story skip in an effort to move up to the harder content sooner. Where I think FFXIV has failed (and yes, I will say failed here) is that until Dawntrail, the game kept its average content so on-rails, so safe and unfailable (barring massive chains of mistakes made by players) that it could, after the first couple of runs, settle into being just kind of boring. Dawntrail suffers less from that – the queueable content still isn’t exactly hard and so eventually it is less exciting to play, but the joy of playing new jobs in those level 100 dungeons and learning how to differentiate my gameplay for each role and encounter is fun – it is what I want in an MMO!

I’m sympathetic to arguments about accessibility and disability and want to be kind to those for whom the increased difficulty of Dawntrail has been offputting – the game has conditioned players to not really expect what we got and so I understand that it can leave players who settled into a groove feeling left out in the cold, but at the same time, I don’t think the way you answer concerns about how difficulty might affect marginalized players is to never make anything more difficult. I think you increase difficulty alongside effort to make that difficulty readable and understandable – and I feel like the FFXIV team has done pretty well there. Sure, some dungeon mechanics one shot you on the first pass, but that’s an effective teacher and dying, hell, even a full party wipe, is not some massive unrecoverable punishment, especially in FFXIV. You drop dead and go again – such is the life of MMO combat.

Through that lens early into Dawntrail, a lot of hype was built up for how much more interesting Savage could be if the gloves were off, given that the launch EX trials were actually quite well done and fun challenges to engage with. So how’d they do?

First-Tier Blues

The first tier per expansion of high-end raiding and progression in any MMO focused on those gameplay mechanisms is generally going to be softer on players. It makes sense – your job design may have changed and/or been rebalanced, you’re learning new stuff, there are new jobs and new meta-game shifts to think about, so there is a certain logic to taking it easier on players off the bat so as to not push players away from that content. In Endwalker, my first real Savage raiding experience, the Asphodelos Savage tier was generally pretty straightforward to a point. Most difficulty came from relatively tight DPS checks (that were also forgiving enough that Party Finder groups were forcing tanks to get damage downs in P1S to avoid doing a mechanic!), puzzle mechanics (solving the Acts in P4S, dealing with Pinax, dealing with Firestorms of Asphodelos), and then P3S was just hard because the visual design of the fight was a nightmare that still required tight mechanical gameplay (orange AoE markers on an orange arena in an orange skybox with a red-orange boss, we love it here!) – but it was generally not too hard. I did the full tier in PF with randoms, not always for first clears (3 of my 4 came as a sub-in to my now-current static) but for reclears and gearing runs I did a lot of PF, and it was quite doable. Still, I think back on Asphodelos fondly – it was a good overall raid tier in my opinion because it was the right balance of challenge with learning, demanding tight mechanical execution and strategy adherence with room to wiggle and recover – or, as was the case with PF P1S, doing a mechanic completely wrong and still being able to make it work!

But that so far has all avoided talking about Arcadion, so…how is it?

Well, it is a bit disappointing.

I want to temper that off the bat by saying it isn’t a bad tier and I still enjoy weekly reclears (hell, I still raid in two FFXIV teams and I’ve seen far more wipes and close pulls to M1S and M2S than any human psyche can endure!), but I also think that some of the sauce that makes Savage feel…well, Savage – is missing.

Firstly, the easiest thing I can talk about – the DPS checks. They are, overall, far too lenient. In my main static, we can skip the last 3 mechanics of M1S and have been able to do that for weeks even prior to having players at full 730 item level loadouts and that is a group that has two physical ranged DPS, which means our peak possible DPS is categorically lower than what a more “normal” comp could do. We did M2S in that same group with 7 stacks of her buff, healing the boss 7% and causing her to do 7% more damage, and we still killed it in one shot! On the other side, my alt static is, to be blunt, not particularly performant. Our best DPSers, the top two, do respectable damage, everyone below that does what would have been exceptional damage in P12S, and so while our average DPS per pull theoretically doesn’t even meet the M1S DPS check, we’ve cleared it weekly for a couple of months now and have a kill on M2S in spite of that! And it’s funny, because I’m having both ends of the experience – a group that easily blitzes the DPS checks and then some and a group that is barely killing M1S before the screen fades to black! – but I think that the DPS checks are a little bit too lenient overall even with that experience. One of the fun challenges I like about Savage is that nailbiting closeness, that even after a full round of gearing a tier can be tuned to feel like you still need to be on the ball for most of a pull to squeeze out a win – it’s how those close calls create stories you can tell about that one time you did a boss that is fun and creates these lasting moments of impact that make you wanna play Savage more, and this tier just kind of doesn’t have that in the design – and being able to create it accidentally doesn’t count!

One of the more interesting things I notice in this tier is how there is often forced downtime or more meaningful decisions for melee and casters alike. Endwalker was criticized for not requiring players to think too much about uptime because of huge boss hitboxes, static wall bosses, and a lack of forced downtime mechanics during boss active moments – stuff like High Concept in P8S was true forced downtime but only because the boss was completely untargetable for the duration of the mechanic. Because of the lenient DPS checks, you could convince me that the whole design concept this tier is to ease melee players back into thinking about when to disengage, and I think that’s interesting. As a healer, I also hate it because I have some exceptionally greedy melee in my life who will eat 3 debuffs to the face before they step out of melee and hit their sad trombone ranged button for two GCDs instead, but it’s fine I’m fine everything is fine no I don’t get an angry twitch in my eye watching them move in to take an extra 2 hearts to the face on every pull in M2S it’s fine.

As a healer player, this tier is actually kind of interesting, because it does offer some wrinkles to healer gameplay in Savage that aren’t just optimizing damage. There are several moments, particularly in M3S and M4S, where you have major raidwides back-to-back which force you to think very carefully about how to spend your resources – some of which is a question due to optimizing damage yes, but also there are some genuine moments where the answer is going to require at least 1-2 GCDs of healing, and that is kind of neat. Even as my gearset has climbed towards BiS, there’s a push and pull of incoming damage to healer resources that make smart planning pay dividends but still require more direct healing than a lot of Endwalker Savage fights, which is pretty neat! I still think the healer role gets the short stick a bit in that the DPS rotation isn’t particularly amazing to engage with, but the added extra DPS buttons this time out are helpful in that regard and putting some emphasis on the healing aspect of the role is a fun twist for FFXIV!

I think outside of the difficulty discussion though, I actually really liked a lot about this tier overall. I think fight design has stepped up – this tier has far fewer body check mechanics, which means that a wipe is not a guarantee once a single player dies, at least depending on what point of a fight they go down. Endwalker was lousy with this, where the most common design was a sprint of unavoidable raidwide damage, a large raidwide, and then a body check mechanic almost immediately after, meaning if defensive play wasn’t dialed in before that whole sequence started, you’d likely just wipe, which is frustrating, so seeing that scaled back is genuinely great and gives strategic decision agency to your healers and ressers. Puzzle mechanics this tier have just the right amount of overall challenge while remaining readable – it will take a few pulls to figure out how to do stuff like the cannon on M4S if you’re new and blind pulling, but it isn’t too far out of bounds, and even complicated-seeming mechanics like Mouser are solved by just knowing if you need to make one move into a safe tile or two.

Lastly, I can say that while M4S is a bit of a marathon feeling, I like that the last boss this time isn’t a door boss but still has a phase transition and new form akin to E4S or E8S. I like door bosses from a pure prog standpoint (once you get the first part down in prog you only need to really do it once or twice a raid night to get to the parts you are learning still), but something feels far more epic about sprinting for 13 minutes on one fight and the division of major checkpoint mechanics is pretty even-handed.

Arcadion On Story and Theme

I fucking love the aesthetic and story of the raid series so far. The whole pro wrestling joke is extremely well-engineered for me specifically, the evil chairman ruining the lives of contestants is literally extending that (M12S fight against Vince McMahon?), having a voiced announcer during fights calling out deaths, revives, and Limit Break use is awesome fun, and the possibility of going in wacky directions for the last two tiers is great (people float the fanfic of an Estinien raid fight just because and I like it because it works in this setting!). I actually most appreciate the story though – the whole essence of Alexandria, Solution Nine, and the conflict of our worldview with their disposable use of souls is not particularly well told in the MSQ, but Arcadion actually makes it really interesting by adding a wrinkle to the rampant abuse of souls and painting a sort of knowing evil to it, where in the MSQ we just kind of throw our hands up and talk about irreconcilable differences. I’m excited to see what happens as we progress, to infuse more seriousness into the plot as we aim to solve the issue of fighters dying young because of feral soul usage (the parallels with how pro wrestlers categorically die younger IRL because of steroid abuse and road life is another reason that I love this raid story, it’s actually digging at a strong real life source of intrigue), but then also I like that the surface level of the fights is fun and mostly lighthearted. As much as I genuinely enjoyed Pandaemonium, it was quite often a very serious raid tier where the strong ties to the MSQ as far back as ARR meant it had to use most of its storytelling time to tell a very serious and involved narrative – which was enjoyable, but I do generally prefer stories like Arcadion, where there’s room for comedic relief and the like to sneak in.

Environmentally, I like the variety of spaces too. Pandaemonium had a lot of shared motifs for visuals (definitely some fights that went crazy in other directions too though!), especially in Asphodelos, so the first tier this time being so visually distinct from fight to fight and musically distinct with unique tracks for each fight is awesome. There is visual continuity in that every fight has a visual representation of ring ropes around the arena so you know it is Arcadion, as does the crowd present for all but M4S, but on every other point the fights are so visually distinct that you could mistake them for all being from different content in the game, which is actually kind of cool. FFXIV has done that a lot in the past with the main raid series (Eden fights were all very distinct, as were the Omega raids) but I expected the Solution Nine-based setting to lean harder into the scifi weirdness of the city that’s bigger inside than out, and yet the visual influences here are varied and interesting.

Rewards

I actually wanted to call this out separately because as a healer, this tier kind of sucked in terms of gear options. For healers, there are some trap spots where Piety is so everpresent on gear this tier that it means taking an active role to avoid it by taking lower item level gear without that stat. Tanks have a less severe version of this with Tenacity, and DPS get to cruise on a full max item level BiS as usual, so it feels kind of bad to be a healer and forced to either take a lower item level or accept extra Piety in exchange for more Mind and health. Cynically, a part of me will observe that the Chaotic Alliance Raid coming in this next patch offers item level 730 gear and that I feel there’s some likelihood of them putting differently-itemized pieces there so that true healer BiS for damage output will require running it, and I’m not sure I like that as a general rule. But that is also me forecasting based on an assumption, so let’s step back for a moment and close this out.

Until Next Time…

I’m excited to see where the raid tier goes for the last two wings, how they step up and implement feedback about challenge and difficulty, excited to see what DPS checks and new mechanical ideas we end up with as the game moves forward. I’m overall happy with this raid tier – some minor disappointments aside, it’s fun to play and I enjoy the time I get to spend each week knocking over the fights. In some ways, the specific shortcomings I’ve noted this tier are actually perfect for a player like me – a tier that is a little bit more chill and gentle compared to what came before, being done in the span of the patch it comes out in, and my main static will be on break with everything we want from M4S long before the next tier comes out, and that is kind of nice given the time of year we are entering. Now, the biggest gap of FFXIV’s content structure begins – waiting for the next tier with at least 4 months to go.

Although I suppose I could attempt my first Ultimate when Really Good Roommates (Ultimate) comes out in a few weeks…