What makes Ultimate, Savage, Extreme different? [FFXIV High End Raiding]

[@Smarfton]

Here's the difference with these three. They're all unfun to do. Wait, that sameness. In 20+ years of playing MMO's of all kinds, I have never played one with a more unfun and pointless endgame scene than ff14. Like, holy crap it is so unfulfilling and drab.

[@DarkDyllon]

that's your opinion, ultimates are the most fun I had in FF14, I can't wait for FRU to release and sink my teeth into getting my ass beat for atleast 3-6 months.

[@starberry2705]

Source: « Trust me »

[@one_eyeddd473]

Whoa lmao

[@docsigma]

pin of shame lmao

[@Joppheimer]

sounds like a personal problem lol. what a way to announce to people that you suck

[@Fiishe]

Whenever someone asks me the difficulty scaling of endgame content in FFXIV I generally refer to my trusty rule of thumb in: Exteme: Most of the party can die but you can still clear with enough rezzes and playing safe most of the time Savage: Half the party dies then the other half is soon to follow, usually not recoverable due to damage check at the end of the fight depending when they died Ultimate: If one person dies it's more often than not a wipe, if someone messes up a mechanic it's a wipe, if you stand somewhere you aren't supposed to be it's a wipe, if you aren't dealing good damage it's a wipe, if you don't mitigate damage correctly, you guessed it, it's a wipe

[@one_eyeddd473]

Deathcob has left the chat 😅

[@Wackywohoopizzaman97]

i love cheap difficulty so much 🤪

[@SonsOfMalice]

7 other goobers make the difference.

[@aylaveen]

@@SonsOfMalice based

[@akrob1152]

I feel like there's one aspect that wasn't covered: unavoidable damage, and consequentially mit/heal checks. Using min ilvl for these (and this is mostly based on my own experience, not any hard numbers): In extreme, undermitigating raidwide damage isn't likely to kill anyone, and heal checks are sparse outside of the occasional "raidwide but spicy" (example: Endsinger telomania, hades quadrastrike) or some multi-hit stacks. Tankbusters usually don't require much CDs. Of course, there are exceptions; pretty sure I remember min-ish ilvl valigarmanda actually being pretty spicy in terms of outgoing damage. Starting in savage, undermitigating raidwides usually means deaths. Heal checks tend to be more common, sometimes as their own individual mechanic (fusefield, rotten heart), sometimes baked into another mechanic (Act 4). Especially for 4th floors, you definitely want to plan mit and heal cooldowns. Someone missing a mit, however, is usually not a wipe. Tankbusters need even more CDs or the tank dies. Depending on the fight boss auto attacks also start warranting mitigation, especially extended sections (mouser 1, alarm phero 1). Tank invulns gain value as a planned mit to save CDs. Ultimates: same as savage, undermitigating a raidwide is ggs, however the frequency and intensity of raidwide damage tends to be much higher; even party finder starts following mit plans rather than just yoloing it. Unless it's uwu. Missing a single mit - ESPECIALLY in DSR/TOP final phase - usually means death unless it's feint/addle on their opposite favored damage type (and sometimes even then). Tankbusters almost invariably require either an invuln or kitchen sink/near kitchen sink mit. Tanks may start needing outside help to survive tankbusters if not invulning, especially if they need mit for autos, which of course hit damn hard in ults. Similarly, DPS/heals may start requiring single target mits - on top of raidwide mits and shields - on them to survive some particularly hefty instances of raidwide damage (DSR kyle transition).

[@aylaveen]

this is a valid point

[@UmbralXIV]

Banger video bro. Really comprehensive way to put it for new raiders so they are able to visualize progressing through high end content, def sending this to my homies stepping into high end content for the first time

[@deadrabbit9353]

I think the important point will be the speed of solving mechanics and their complexity. We don’t want to put it on the same table TOP Dynamis delta and M1S Mouser

[@DarkDyllon]

when UCOB released I told myself i'll never do an ultimate. fast forward to Endwalker and the savage static I joined did the 1st tier, then we did some prep on UwU but we ultimately decided on doing DSR on launch, (a lot of unfortunate circumstances later) and it took me a year to clear it with a buddy from that static in PF, since we were barely going into DSR and more into savage again, with splitting our times between the 2 wasn't a good idea. (doubly so when we saw every mechanic in DSR P7 already) later on me and that buddy also formed a casual ultimate static and started with UwU, I cleared DSR first, then UwU (kinda reverse order in that sense, at the time hardest to the easiest) But it felt like my gameplay got so much better after beating DSR, Savage is still a challenge, but it feels so much easier and chill after doing DSR. (currently cleared UCOB, UWU, TEA and DSR, TOP will likely be at the end of this expac and FRU will be progged on launch again) I had a co tank in my most recent savage static who wanted to dip his feet into ultimate and I recommended UWU, it's also on Light and there the ultimate prog community is surprisingly chill for generally being the "top tier players" and generally should be toxic. I think the main difference is simply that the mechanics are generally more fast fire paced in ultimates than savage, more so in older ultimates, in DSR for example you got plenty of breathing room between phases. P3 transition for example gives you 10 orso seconds to breath before nidstinien appears and even then, another 10-15 orso seconds before anything starts to happen. the p3 into p4 transition is easily 30 seconds long, so you got some time to clear your head, take a breather, a quick sip of your drink and then go again. (ToP is different where it's just rapid fire mechanics constantly till the p5 to p6 transition) the mechanics in general are not that much more difficult than savage mechanics imo, for example in DSR P2, you got the 1st trio mechanic, once you know the tell and can quickly read it, it's 100% consistent. (watch the color that doesn't have a dragoon, since we use the markers with color coded) then the 2nd part is 3 defamation (get the fuck away from everyone) followed by 3 non defamations (and a stack to boot) and 2 tank tethers, then 6 towers, once you learn your role in those mechanics it's pretty easy. the difficulity is generally runtime of the fight (since 18-21 minutes per pull can be draining and having to constantly think can be taxing, that's why people generally recommend drumming it into your muscle memory so it becomes 2nd nature to you and the fast firing pace of mechanics. I really wish SE would rebalance older ultimates, since it's a shame that UCOB, UWU and TEA are so devoid of dps checks now that it's just sad, sure the mechanics are still mostly there, but in some cases you can outright skip mechanics, like in TEA P1, if you really want to, you can skip literally 70% of that phase, straight up kill Living Liquid while the jagged dolls are out, ultimates (old and new) is content that last for expansions, UCOB is now 7 years old and it's still being done by the community, not just people who cleared it, but even new ultimate raiders, give it the respect it deserves.

[@Evermar]

I'd be interested to hear about where you think Criterion Savage fits in the picture. ive always described it as "Savage level mechanics with an harder-than-Ultimate consistency check (since literally one death is a wipe in a 20+ min dungeon unless that death is on the final mechanic of the final boss)

[@aylaveen]

idk, i personally think it's harder /as hard as on patch ultimate. I did almost clear Sildhin back then, but the group fell apart. Have yet to try it again due to scheduling issues.

[@maybayV2]

@@aylaveen I'd say Sil is pretty easy compared to the other two. I highly recommend trying Rokkon Savage. Honestly, it feels harder than say m4s atm.

[@DarkDyllon]

@@maybayV2 not that hard, although Rokkon was fun, that final boss can suck my balls, fuck that final boss and everything it stands for.

[@jareyho4790]

as someone who's cleared all 3, the mechanics are somewhere between extreme/floor 1-2 savage. with the last boss of the dungeon having 1 or 2 floor 3/4 savage mechanics. but the difficulty from it comes from it being a harder consistency check than ultimates as there is less room for error than an ult and a savage criterion run is longer than an ultimate fight

[@SihariSahara]

I would agree with the others who would rank criterion on ultimate level difficulty. Aside from the already mentioned length and and inability to recover I would also name the amount of players in the party as a deciding factor. With only 4 people instead of 8 the responsibility of each person grows a lot. With 8 people one person can mess up their rotation and they can still be carried through the dps check, or the off-tank can chill and be on standby for half the fight, taking over in case something happens to the main-tank and only having to do tank mechanics once a swap is in order or the phase splits into 2 bosses, or healers being able to cover for their partner who ran out of resources. None of this is possible in criterion and everyone has to be at peak performance for the whole duration.

[@Naoto-kun1085]

Even though body check mechanics are quite controversial, personally I've never minded them, I think there's a place for them in fights! Awesome video!

[@shakeweller]

Dont forget RNG and Role based mechanics. In Extreme most mechanics are deterministic based on role or Ranged/melee. In Ultimates and some savage fight you basicly need to learn some mechanics up to 8 times based on the RNG mechanic you get. A great example of this is wormhole in TEA or Delta in TOP. You need priority systems in place to figure out where to go. Personally I am not the biggest fan of these 100% RNG mechanics, but they require you to pay more attention than T/M go north and H/R go south.

[@maxboxnl]

I think two more important distinguishing factors are speed and personal responsability of mechanics. In EX there are some mechanics only one person has to solve and the rest can follow them, Savage you have to do it all yourself but its usually not too dependant on other people and in Ultimates there is a lot of adjusting on the fly based on prio's (think party synergy, sanctity of the ward, pantokrator, wyrmbreath, titan gaols). In terms of speed there is not too much of a divide between EX and Savage but Ultimates in comparison has a way higher density of mechanics happening per minute.

[@MT-Cup]

I think one thing to consider is the time given to solve a mechanic. I think (it feels like) for ultimates it's significantly shorter then an extreme or savage fight. Would be nice to see a time comparison across the fights

[@kikidffo8963]

3 and a half weeks ago I did my first ever ultimate. It was DSR and it was an aamzimf experience I finished 3 days ago right beofre 7.1 and became a heavenslegend it was awesome :D

[@shiryushini7321]

I would also add healing/mitigation checks to the list, as well as the amount of mechanics per minute. In EXs, mitigation is a breeze, apart from a few raidwides and tankbusters needing one or two mits to survive, you can easily yolo it, savage is mostly the same, but ultimates, mit plans are required, and a single person failing to use something can translate into a wipe, same for TBs, most of them require an invul or kitchen sink to survive, with some TBs also requiring external help from your healers (aquaveil, shields, etc). As for the amount of mechanics, I don't want to pull numbers out of my arse, but usually EX is a single mechanic, sometimes 2 combined, savage is mostly the same but it happens more often, and sometimes requires you to remember what the boss did (spread/stack on M2, all primals in E12 P1, etc), whereas ultimates, it happens way more often, and is usually a combination of 2+ mechanics altogether, and also something you didn't touch is trios, which are usually quite harder on the mechanical side, and they aren't present at all in EX and savage (even tho you can argue that a few mechs like High Concept in P8 are sorta trios). These 2, in my opinion, are also what makes ultimate difficulty that much higher, I'd even say that overall, you could summarize the difficulty by the amount of mistakes you can make and still clear, and combine that with the amount of times you can actually make a mistake, due to the density of mechanics in ults, I'd say there's a big gap between EX and savage, and an even bigger one between savage and ultimates.

[@Lumina9306]

im a new player who's dabbled in older savage on mine and uwu, and the mechanical difference between most legacy ex's and their expansion's savage tiers is like night and day. theres so much going on in savage compared to ex i feel like. at least in alexander and omega

[@Mephistobr]

On your death spreadsheet for UCOB, did you factor in the forced 8 deaths you have as a mechanic in that fight (all party dies to teraflare and then is revived by phoenix)? Those deaths are actually counted on FFlogs.

[@aylaveen]

ah true, i didn't take that into account.

[@MagicFanatics-l8b]

Two things I think you failed to touch on are cadence and complexity in the mechanics. Overall, ultimate feels like it progresses much faster from one mechanic to the next than ex or savage, it would be interesting to see the data of the average amount of mechanics per a set amount of time in each piece of content. Additionally as you move up in difficulty mechanics are harder to pull off, requiring tighter movement, more precise posotioning, and ability to read and understand mechanics.

[@Ziploc_Wonder]

"...glow-y weapons with piss colors and cringe titles" is by far one of the most outstanding descriptions I have ever heard in terms of Ultimate rewards. I cracked up so fucking hard I about fell out of my chair.

[@avi3365]

When you say 5-10 deaths in an 'on content' ultimate are you referring to literal on-content (i.e. before the next patch comes out) or just ultimates that are current in the expansion? Because I find it hard to believe many groups could clear TOP or even DSR with more than 5 deaths before the next patch came out. You should also consider that in TOP Dark Knights often die twice on purpose during the LB spam because it's a damage gain, so that's gonna skew your stats significantly. DSR was definitely more recoverable than TOP though I think newbies are gonna find it hard to recover from any deaths in an on-patch ultimate. You did mention body checks though, so I suppose you've somewhat covered that concept.

[@aylaveen]

5 is max for top and 10 is max for dsr. most of the deaths happen in early phases. I took the stats from fflogs, min percentile kills. I think DSR also because some groups did the whole loop thing where you kill thordan in p5 and reset to p2

[@DarkDyllon]

@@aylaveen you didn't answer the question, was this on the patch it released or just the expansion as a whole. because I can assure you, if you had a death in on patch DSR, you would be struggling REALLY hard to get that DPS check met, you might even need to burn LB and then get stuck not having LB3 for the rewind phase.

[@aylaveen]

@@DarkDyllon www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/45#metric=speed&region=1&dataset=0&timespan=1000

[@JS-kr8fs]

I've come to know it as it's basically PVP using monsters as a proxy, and just how many people it takes to kill everyone else reduces as difficulty increases.

[@SREDISKRAD]

The answer has always been 1, Tankbusters :)

[@Ryu_Makkuro]

I find it funny that everyone who talks about this subject never mentions the one thing that was extremely obvious to me when I started progging UCoB and TEA. Speed at which the mechanics are thrown at you. I went to UCoB, and while Twintania didn't feel too different from Savage, there comes Nael and it was absolute shock with how fast everything was thrown at you. Same thing in TEA, once the dolls are being fed, you have to prepare for the next mechanic while doing a mechanic, there's virtually no downtime at all. Extreme's meanwhile are basically the same as normal fights in terms of how much time before each mechanic you get and Savage is about in between, giving you about 5-15s of downtime. And then there's also mechanics complexity. In Extreme, most mechanics can be performed by following a "dorito", only for few do people have a designated spot they have to go to, it's a lot of "just wing it". Savage meanwhile is the opposite, where nearly every mechanics requires people to go to a designated spot and very rarely is there a mechanic they can just follow others for. Ultimates meanwhile have no dorito really, unless someone creates custom callouts to carry people through that stuff. Your duration argument falls completely flat because you didn't mention these two things at all. No, body check isn't the same as mechanics complexity. For example Nier Alliance Raids are longer than savage and ultimates, yet no one in their mind would say they are more difficult. Why is that? Complexity of the mechanics and the pace they're being thrown at. Not only alliance raids are basically super simple "dodge this telegraphed AoE" type of mechanics, you also get about 20-30s or more between each and every one of them, at least. In Ultimates there's basically 0s downtime between them once it starts going and everything is highly coordinated. This matters, because said downtime is what often allows you to "reset" the "attention span", which makes fights that are normally very long, into a lot more manageable smaller chunks. If you mentioned these two things, or at least the pace at which mechanics are thrown at you, your duration argument would basically be super solid and this video would be absolutely top notch, would recommend to newer players for sure. As it stands the flaw in that logic can be easily pointed out with something like "I've beaten Nier alliance raids, they're longer than ultimates so they are more difficult than those" and the whole video starts falling apart from there. Yes, that means I can tore down the other arguments as well *cough*deathCoB*cough*. I imagine this comment will be ignored, but if somehow it won't, I do hope you'll re-think this and adjust this video, because it can become a very nice and well put piece of information for newer players.

[@aylaveen]

Pace & mechanics complexity are both very subjective matters. This video is meant to compare based on quantifiable aspects despite the statistics not showing how I feel about the fight completely (ie. Ucob as mentioned in the video)

[@Ryu_Makkuro]

@@aylaveen Did you really just call time and facts subjective? Both pace & complexity are quantifiable. Pace is nothing more than a measurement of time. The shorter the time span, the higher the pace. Examples would be a time it takes someone to finish a run, bits per minute of a song... or a distance between each mechanic in a fight. Nothing subjective here. Complexity meanwhile is also quantifiable, as the more complex something is, the more elements it has to it. A mechanic that consists of a single AoE to dodge, is less complex than a mechanic that consists of 2 of those, and so on and so forth. The only subjectivity comes when comparing mechanics that are comprised of same amount of elements, but at that point you're looking at difficulty, not complexity, as more complex does not mean more difficult. Seriously, where the hell do you people come from? I come with constructive criticism, and instead of taking it, you go full on hypocrisy on my arse. You can measure the duration of a fight, but you can't measure the time between each mechanic? Is your response to every argument thrown at you ever is that it's subjective? Don't know why I bother still with this stuff.

[@aylaveen]

@@Ryu_Makkuro 😂 all stats are taken from FFlogs. apparently they don't make one for those. can you make one for me so i can make an updated video about it 🤣

[@魂魄妖夢-y1n]

meanwhile DSR fight time can go up to 100 minutes if u dont save him

[@MugenAeternum]

A question I've been asking for a while

[@EnvyTooGoon]

I wouldn’t necessarily put uwu as a puzzle but to each their own. I think Tea is a big ol puzzle though haha

[@aylaveen]

the puzzle I refer to was the awakening system for each phase that even confuse the contenders during the WFR, just like Enigma Codex in TEA.

[@EnvyTooGoon]

@ Ahhh gotcha gotcha, i agree with ya there. The awakening stuff is definitely a puzzle. WF peeps definitely stumbled on that by accident.

[@dataunknown]

Solid analysis.

[@pentagonofpeople]

Where does unreal fall on the scale?

[@aylaveen]

it's the same as extreme. but should be slightly easier due to new jobs & skills.

[@mocherdoker]

video 2 of asking for a house tour

[@aylaveen]

@@mocherdoker okay okay .. i'll try to write a script 🙃

[@Seth6097]

What about unreal

[@lacxsu998]

unreal is old extreme content synched to the current max level, so it's just extreme

[@Ganmorg]

@@lacxsu998 with the caveat that generally mechanics have gotten harder in the game over time due to new stuff and power creep, so it can be a bit easier. Tighter IL limits though.

[@reizakloise6461]

It's old extreme balanced to simulate the non-raider ilvl of the time. So the mechanics are simple, they have minimal body check, but you probably won't survive with 1% hp taking damage you're not meant to take , nor are you going to clear if the DPS players are bad.

[@shiro12okami69]

Yeah unreal is technically like an current extreme,just that you are getting synch to the lowest IL possible,which will be 690 for DT expansion. So you could say it’s maybe a bit harder than normal outgeared Extreme,since most player are like 10IL+ higher on clears. Like for example everkeep is IL690 but most got IL700 gear before clear.

[@Yokai_Yuri]

Extremes: A fairly difficult challenge that most people can clear with enough tries. Half the party can die and you can still recover from that if the damage is above average. It's a good introduction to the harder difficulty the game has to offer. Savage: It is expected you carry your own weight even though 2 out of the 4 encounters are designed in a way that people can carry you via callouts. 2 deaths max per group or you won't meet the dps check for the encounter. Ultimates: It is expected you play the best way you can. Ultimate is a long dance of mechanics that must be solved flawlessly, there is no room for errors or wipes since every single error made by one individual, cost the encounter. Also Ultimates are the kind of content 90% of the people haven't clear legitimately because of cheats. Anyone can say anything or shove the "legends" title down your throat but it is not legitimate.

[@PandaHatesJuice]

!!

[@ouromov2895]

Dodge dodge dodge. Spam dps rotation, role doesnt matter. Repeat.

[@verdantmischief7092]

@@ouromov2895 its fun :D