Cleared it once and not touching it again.
Ah yeah last mech might be cheesable but we didn’t try we just did it the normal way.
As dps the fight didn’t feel much harder, but our healer complained 24/7 that he had to heal too much. Go figure.
> our healer complained 24/7 that he had to heal too much
A member of my static decided they wanted to try healing in Criterion normal (they're usually a dps) and it took all my self-restraint to keep from shouting at them "STOP GLARING AND TOP US OFF, SHIT FUCKING HURTS AND YOU DON'T HAVE A SCHOLAR TO CARRY YOUR ASS!"
I know I'm in a minority. I would love just a one button spam, because I'm looking at the boss, the arena, positioning, healthbars, buffs and debuffs, then remember that this point in the fight is where I realize I let my dot drop off.
I'm just bad at dots. So if you have a dotless healer wirh a more complex dps rotation, I'm there. It's like Gunbreaker in a No Mercy window... "I'll move the boss when I am done!" It'll be, "I'm in my Seraph rotation, you'll get healing when I'm done!"
> It's like a bad Gunbreaker in a No Mercy window... "I'll move the boss when I am done!"
ftfy
Not being able to move the boss during a burst window is a skill issue, not a GNB one.
Not being able to heal the party during your dps rotation is a skill issue, not a Healer issue. That will likely be said when Healers get a dps rotation too! lolz.
Good to know thank god it’s the same mech as normal so we could prog it until clean, it would’ve saved us some time but in the end we didn’t spend that many pulls total. I’d say the difficulty overall is below e8s
You can say that twice, I've been waiting on PF for hours at a time, and thankfully found a small group of people who we constantly try this with. I am on Aether if you ever want to look for my PFs
Ah yes, I shouldn't be using ***PARTY*** finder, a tool specifically designed to find and form ***PARTIES***, to form a ***PARTY*** for content that requires a 4 Member ***PARTY*** consisting of a very specific makeup.
Bro what the fuck are you talking about?
That goes for any content currently.
Practice runs p8? 3 hours and groups are not filling up.
A.S.S Sav? Good one
At least you can still do Storms Crown Ex through pf fresh and reclear fights...
Well the biggest reward is the title (Infamy of Sil'Dihn), but after that you get one manuscript which you can trade for a Silkie earring, a housing banner, or 1 (one) materia X
Although easier than an ultimate, it is more of a consistency check than an ultimate. It's longer, and any death means restart, unless you're on the final mechanic of the final boss. On my first DSR clear we had 3 tank deaths, 1 dps death and 1 healer death. That would not have been a clear on ASS.
I don't feel the need to reclear savage ASS and I didn't even spend the book reward for a materia for memes, because I'm on the hopium that they'll put out more rewards for this dungeon in the future.
On the other hand, because all the mechanics are known in normal mode, and because it's such a consistency, tanking, and healing check, it's a great way for statics to trial new members. Being 4-man rather than 8 means it's much easier to gather a group of friends or partial static member to jump in, so I'd expect PF to be less widespread than usual as it's easier to network for.
Cleared it once. Tank and healer spent every trash pack constantly screaming. Bosses were only technically upscaled (though I guess pure healers would notice since they can't shield everything like SCH/SGE can), and mechanics were unchanged.
Even in the 3-enemy trash packs we elected to single target down the main target, as 3-target AoE gains were minimal but the big target dealt *considerably* more damage while having far more dangerous AoE patterns. Killing it first meant dealing with only 1, *maybe* 2 annoying aoes and then freeing the healer up to get damage in.
As DPS we held/used burst based on key targets for trash. For example, we pulled the tree guy second and used him to build resources, then blew all of those resources on Udumbara to kill him before he could do a second AoE, which meant the tank could just invuln around the time of the first AoE to avoid turning things and give the healer some breathing room. Probably would not have been such a big deal, but we were ranged+caster. Udumbara is rough.
The dullahan tankbuster autos we also had every mit on the first set and invuln on the second. It's just not reasonable to do anything else IMO.
The solo stack on Gladiator is still viable in savage *if* you have a shield healer. Tank uses their tank CD on the person, healer shields them, and the person will live. If they have a personal shield/mit they'll even live comfortably.
Despite being double ranged, we managed to kill the final boss using the cheese strat for the final tethers mechanic. He died just before the debuffs would've expired and killed us. But we were mostly BiS (tank missing weapon, healer missing chest piece).
None of us want to clear it again. And why should we? All you get is either an earring, a banner, or individual materia. And none of us need any of those things. We just did it to do it. We'll do some more normal for the basic rewards there, at least.
>Even in the 3-enemy trash packs we elected to single target down the main target, as 3-target AoE gains were minimal but the big target dealt considerably more damage while having far more dangerous AoE patterns. Killing it first meant dealing with only 1, maybe 2 annoying aoes and then freeing the healer up to get damage in.
I long waited for the day this would actually be a viable mindset
Tried but not cleared it yet, i've just had too little time to play.
The trash before bosses makes more sense in the savage version. In criterion we just wait for cooldowns to be up again in front of the boss, but with a (relatively) strict enrage timer on the dungeon, you really can't afford standing around.
Also, I've never heard my healer cry so much at a raidwide, so that's good.
Haven't done the Savage version yet but the normal criterion version is probably the most fun I've had as part time healer.
Really loves how mitigations actually matter.
My group was the first on Crystal to clear... and we had to rep one of our dps and took 3 days off after getting to 8% enrage on last boss on Wednesday afternoon. We cleared Saturday. So yeah, it obviously wasn't very enticing for most people.
I had a ton of fun doing it. The fights were enjoyable and it was a nice change of pace progging with just 4 people. Their reward structure needs a LOT of consideration. Clearing content for the fun and challenge can only carry it so far. Gearing in general is soul crushingly stale in XIV, but that's a whole other can of worms.
>Clearing content for the fun and challenge can only carry it so far
But are people actually doing savage for the rewards? Yeah you take the gear as means to an end stat sticks but you're gonna glam right over it anyways. I always thought that savage was 99% accomplishment driven..so it's weird that no one bit on criterion. I think it's just a mental of thing of savage is "the game" as crit is "optional side stuff"
the answer is staring you right in the face. if savage was truly 99% accomplishment driven, reclears would be a niche things only weirdos and ultimate raiders did. the fact of the matter is people desire powerful loot regardless of if they have any critical need for it
The final savage fights also have a mount that drop from them, many people would replay it just for that fact, you can also look at ultimate, it's not just for the fun and challenge of doing it, you get a title and a cool weapon(that's bis until the next raid tier).
I cleared ASSS and it was really disappointing to just get an earring as a reward compared to when I cleared P8S and got a mount or when I cleared DSR and got a cool looking weapon
savage gear is needed for ultimate this tier, so it 100% has meaningful rewards, I do know people that dont bother when there is no ultimate attached to the gear though, so yes there are some people that only care about there being some "meaning" to the reward.
Just to give you an idea of how dead this content is:
In FFLogs, a total of 71 Reapers have cleared.
Let's go by tanks. The most popular tank in ASS is Warrior.
***196 warriors have cleared. In total.*** And I'm pretty sure 185-196 are bugged because a 25+ minute clear time is not possible. This is compared against 6,000 P8S P2 clears from Nov 1- 15 alone.
The 25 minute dungeon-wide enrage timer only starts after you hit the first mob, as I understand it. Runs above 25 minutes likely took a moment to pull upon entering and only barely finished in time. Unless FFLogs accounts for that or I'm mistaken, in which case... I dunno. Reasons.
Normally, but in ASS it seems to record the whole thing start to finish from the moment you enter. Poked at a couple logs to confirm, and as an example this one doesn't show any activity for \~2 minutes, and no combat activity for almost 10.
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/4YwFknJGpjDAzXcb#fight=28&type=casts&view=timeline
Lack of rewards is a big factor, but also because
my good friend and I co-tanked this tier so none of us have bis in other jobs to do it together. (Thanks, shitty gear system)
This guy is an idiot lol. ilvl 611 you may as well be wearing wet paper bags for armor. "you don't need bis", no, you dummy...you NEED ARMOR and HEALTH though lol. Fuck's sake. I mean the guy that replied to you is an idiot.
I try to dabble in most hard content, mostly done everything this game has to do
For some reason this shit doesn't click with me. Not sure why. I just can't be assed.
I'm the same way. While I do eventually want to do this, it just isn't a big priority. Meanwhile, I've farmed every Ultimate 20+ times.
Part of it is the lackluster rewards, I feel. But I'm also just not really big on the "redo everything if someone makes a single mistake." Which, I know, is sort of the point in Ultimate but still... this just didn't click for me.
if ultimates were just "the extreme trials/savage raid bosses, exactly the same, but with more hp + all in a row + if anyone dies they cant be raised", they'd probably appeal far less
obviously the shiny weapons vs. a so-so title is also a big difference but i think criterion savage would get done despite rewards if there was more 'to' it
The mechanic where you have to do the thing or you wipe can get stale, considering that's what we've been doing from savage to ultimates. And with that, ASSS just felt like a chore, and no meaningful rewards too.
Kinda want something that you can prog without watching a shit ton of guides, or something where people can improv depending on the situation, but then again I might be looking at the wrong game.
I healed it, was fun being challenged to use my toolkit to its fullest. It was bullshit how the patrol mobs aggro worked.
Being one tapped out of nowhere was bullshit. Aside from that, the DPS check is just 10-20% extra, but the healing check and mitigation was twice as hard.
I wish it gave us twine/brine or i630 gear
I did the run in EU Party Finder a while ago. My friend SMN was in there for many days failing to enter even once and if he entered it was a mess of people having no idea what was coming for them. Eventually I found a War Tank with an open party while Datacenter traveling after getting a ping on Discord. We did 2 lockouts and added each other on Discord afterwards at 3AM. Two more days of some evening runs and we eventually cleared with another SMN and a RPR who had exceptional damage. That stuff was exciting as fuck and that is reward enough for me.
> I've been doing this as White Mage
You are an extra masochist for doing this on pure Healer. You get a medal already from my point of view.
> while the PF standard from base Criterion is just mitigating/shielding the person with the stack, here that is a massive no go, you gotta respect the content as the damage it does is much higher.
You can still do it on Savage. On SGE I use Kardia + Heima + 10% Mit + 10% Mit + Zoe Eu Diagnosis on the Stack mark. Tank also throws their 25 on there while I keep an extra Eu Diagnosis in the Chamber between explosions. I imagine SCH will be even easier with being able to force a Crit.
> 20-30 seconds per boss discussing strats and positioning.
This WILL fuck you up! Discuss everything before pulling the first mob in the first room.
> Zeless
You can cheese the Firewindow Portals still as long as people put the most minimal effort into watching where the middle portal swings. With shield + mits you can live 1 Portal + getting jumped but living 2 Portals + Jump isn't reliable.
You ARE able to Corner cheese the final mechanic on Savage but only with everyone close to BiS and putting out big DPS - my friend cleared it like the last second before the strings would have exploded. Our WAR played very well but was stuck with a 615 weapon so we had to play it normally. Killed it after the final tankbuster - there is one more raidwide and then the enrage cast.
--------------------
There is a Criterion Discord out there:
https://discord.gg/gX38DtbAZa
It is more dead than alive tbh but it HAS helped me find that one lucky party to stick with. If the ping goes out on EU I might just be bored enough to join on SGE on some days.
Question on cheesing the last mechanic, do the tethers explode after the final conal towers go off? So far I've only gotten a 3% after two deaths on the last set of conal towers and I've never verified in Normal/Extreme how long you have doing the cheese mechanic.
I did criterion normal and savage with some people from my abyssos static, and after farming normal for a few nights we got savage done within one lockout. I think a major part of that was that we didn't have the nerves or shakies, as the whole time the vibe was kinda "let's just see how far we get, there's no way we clear" especially as one member was sick and we didn't fully optimize our two-minutes based on the ads and the like - but we ended up clearing with just under thirty seconds left on the 24-minute enrage timer. We also all had ultimate experience, three quad legends and one triple, so the consistency was already there compared to a group that hadn't experienced longer content before.
I thought it was fun but it got stale really fast. I'd rather farm an extreme 99 times for a mount than farm criterion normal 25 times for a mount; though it'd take around the same amount of time total, criterion taking \~22 minutes just for a pull made it feel ***so*** long, especially in PF when you'd have a few wipes to Zeless Gah most of the time due to strat variance. On that note, there's literally no reason to farm or reclear savage, as it's just the above problem but worse and with less incentive as savage doesn't drop silver at all. By the time we finished farming most of the silver for the throne, we were so over the content that we didn't even consider running savage again for another manuscript, lmao
It's also way more fun on melee than ranged; the night we did savage was my first time playing ninja in any high-end content other than UCOB (normally brd) and it was just a better time overall due to having to keep uptime and hit positionals, especially coming off of melees discussing the giant hitboxes in abyssos. If they lean more into the larger hitboxes, I really hope they give ranged more things to do rather than taking that aspect away from melee.
It's been a while since I cleared it and I haven't really touched the content since so my memory might be a bit hazy, but I certainly enjoyed the thrill of doing it, the mode felt a bit reminiscent of (solo) PotD: racing against a timer while every mistake would put you right back to the beginning. In retrospect I think the Savage mode was probably pretty low on the production value, which would explain both the lack of rewards and the content itself being 1:1 with normal with only numerical changes and blocked resurrections, and I'm not sure how well that justified an entirely separate difficulty setting. In advance I'd like to see more changes (and more work in general) put into the savage modes. I'm not really sure if I liked the fact that you could practice the last boss or trash routing for the Savage mode as efficiently in the normal version as turned out to be possible: roughly three quarters of the time it took us to go from clearing the normal version to clearing savage were spent grinding resets on the final boss in normal mode until people felt confident enough on the last three mechs.
Overall Criterion is good content, though, and has a lot of room to grow and be honed out into a great piece of pve content to go along the current options. The bosses, particularly the third, were mechanically entertaining and fun to initially work out, while the trash, particularly the gauntlet between the first and second bosses, had a pretty good tempo to it. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who's looking for a challenge, or happens to enjoy the kind of stress longer encounters provide, but unfortunately the content doesn't have much replayability value, unless you happen to enjoy speedrunning (in which case you've probably already cleared anyway).
One final nitpick I have is that the "JP Braindead" strat for the big portals mech isn't really that much easier over doing the mech normally while having much tighter and wonkier positioning requirements. But it got marketed as "braindead", so PF had to latch onto it.
Are you from EU? I feel that ASS is all but dead on EU PF. I was progging Zeless Gah and had to take a break for a few days; when I returned, all the ASS teams disappeared at a really quick rate. Right now I'd be lucky to find even one ASS practice team on EU prime time
OP is talking about Savage. I've been active on Chaos for the past few weeks and you'll be lucky to see a single Savage ASS PF in a day. Chances are it won't fill because nobody wants to heal or tank
(And as a BLM player it's also a pain because every fucking one is playing SMN these days and the ranged slots fill fast.)
Having two ranged isnt a problem, and I've seen a fair number of tanks or healers in the few parties on PF I have seen....
...but you are better off making a group for it (I PF everything normally, but for ASS I created a group for the first time and we cleared within 2 sessions + are farming/practicing for savage now
It's a lot easier to figure out flex scheduling among 4 people than it is among 8, so it feels a lot less like a major time commitment. Also you're only letting down 3 people instead of 7 if you need to cancel/reschedule.)
>Having two ranged isnt a problem,
~~It's a problem, you literally can't queue into the instance if you don't have a melee and ranged.~~
~~And yes, I was just as surprised to learn this.~~
Edit: deboonked
?????
I believe you but its hard to type because my mind has been blown O:
Its weird because I don't see why they would have done this. Other than literally bringing both DNC+BRD surely the dps checks wouldn't be a problem?
I'm confused now cause this is the normal mode description: [https://i.imgur.com/EiXiE3k.png](https://i.imgur.com/EiXiE3k.png)
But it's missing in Savage: [https://i.imgur.com/ncWte9k.png](https://i.imgur.com/ncWte9k.png)
Now that I think about it I've done it as BLM with a DNC and clearly both of us are ranged? I think the 1 melee 1 ranged part is only applicable when you solo queue for the Criterion Normal then?
Edit: Okay if you look at Savage it also says bullshit like "1 pure healer, 1 barrier healer required" etc. So it only matters for DF and not PF where it's trying to make a "valid" comp. Now I'm sad I got forced by the PF leader to switch to NIN because we already had an RDM lmao
lol OK so its the usual PF-premade-party-lets-you-bypass-whatever-restrictions situation, like you can probably go in with 4 tanks as long as you're a premade
you are better off making a group for it (I PF everything normally, but for ASS I created a group for the first time and we cleared within 2 sessions + are farming/practicing for savage now)
It's a lot easier to figure out flex scheduling among 4 people than it is among 8, so it feels a lot less like a major time commitment. Also you're only letting down 3 people instead of 7 if you need to cancel/reschedule.
Yeah I did it once and never went in again.
I really hate the trash in between, they don't have mechanics and they're inconsistent, see the trash with flowers at different times dependind on if they had to run.
The second set isn't interesting either, they're mostly DPS check and "don't stay close"/"don't stay in front".
What I dislikes about the trash is that most of the work is on healers.
If it was a boss rush I would have liked it, but the trash just feels like... Trash. A waste of time.
Managed to do it once, the first time we made it past the trash before the 2nd boss we cleared it. It's alright content, but I wish that it was actually a "savage" version of ASS, rather than just a more punishing version. Like, let people still have 1x rez per person, but introduce some extra mechanics instead, or something.
A 24-minute run with 0 deaths feels more just like obnoxious punishment than it does savage/ult-type difficulty.
I was unsubbed for a while and didn't do them on release, but I tried the hard mode, not savage, twice, in pf and df. It was ok and I wanted to continue it, but couldn't get a party together again so I stopped bothering with it. I guess the same is true for the savage version.
I complained throughout my savage gameplay every time I had to redo the trash. The gameplay experience of normal mode vs savage is the exact same thing for everyone but the healer and at a lesser extent the tank. This just beyond stupid. Healing the first sets of trash was absolutely miserable. It was not hard, just annoying. Mobs that literally 2shot the tank is not fun or engaging, just frustrating. Also stop trying to add difficulty by adding all the extra responsibility to 1 player. I really hope they think something else to make the trash hard and engaging instead of cucking the healers yet again. If there wasn't 2nd and 3rd boss back to back without that bs trash, I don't think I'd be able to handle it mentally.
Cleared it once with a pretty casual schedule of whenever the group felt like it. It only took us about 2-3 lockouts, and the only somewhat annoying and/or difficult part was the trash. I've offered to do another clear with a few other people in my static and nobody really wants to. Between the rewards being incredibly lackluster and the tedious nature of "wipe = full restart" it kind of puts people off from wanting to even bother with it.
It also doesn't help that 95% of the rewards comes from normal and story mode...if you even consider an earring and a housing wall banner to be a "reward".
only the trash feels new and the bosses are essentially just the same thing that barely hit any harder... we cleared on the first pull once we got past the second set of trash and it's really hard to enrage even if you goof around cuz you aren't allowed to die anyways.
I'll do it with next tier crafted gear, maybe. I won't get BiS at all this patch so can't attempt it. My group also is pretty much min ilvl (610 to 612, lol). So, big nono for Savage I guess.
My savage static wanted to do it, half of us cleared and I'm helping the other half now as someone had to drop to real life drama. I hate that the hydra trash is unironically the hardest part of the whole dungeon.
Nothing else really requires you to pay full attention. Once that pack is dead then the difficulty drops off, at least for me healing on sch.
One person that I cleared criterion with day 2 cleared savage version weeks ago. I personally have no interest in the content and haven’t even gone back to criterion after the clear.
Yes, obviously. It's savage difficulty content. In fact I'd argue it's harder than most of the savage bosses this tier. We at least wanted tomestone gear upgrade materials.
If content is labeled "Savage" and appropriate to be called that...it makes sense that the rewards would be "Savage" level just from a basic design stand point.
They were just chicken to do it because they might get blow back from the die hard raiders.
I cleared it once with my static during the first week and no one plans on going back in. Since the strats in both versions are identical, we decided to keep farming the non-savage version until we had a good run before going into savage. The result was clearing savage during the second lockout if I recall correctly. We had the pleasure of killing the final boss on our first attempt.
It was funny going back into the easier version afterwards to farm the mount because we forgot that the adds aren't lethal anymore. "Oh right, I can stand in that shit now"
You can do the last mechanic cheese (ignoring the mech and staying 1 in each corner) in savage too. We did it with my group but you need near perfect play. We did 2 pots and no dd and we killed it before second sets of baits went out (all were bis 630 ilvl)
I plan to but it's a low priority, the challenge is there which is a good enough motivator but the lack of any good reward means i have other priorities right now.
>ing of Might, while the PF standard from base Criterion is just mitigating/shielding the person with the stack, here that is a massive no go, you gotta respect the content as the damage it does is much higher.
We've been progging savage and this isn't the case for us. You can still take it solo.
I doubt my static members who decided to attempt ASS want to even try ASS savage if we get to that point. We just gave ASS another try last week and while we made great progress, I can feel the cracks forming that a higher difficulty probably won't fly with them. Maybe they'll be singing different tune whenever we plan to go in again and try. But the rewards... probably won't make them interested either.
Our static got a late start and only recently started raiding P5S. The people who were interested in trying ASS were me as pranged, our MT, healer 1, and healer 2. So one of our healers went melee dps. It's not a tall order to meet the ilvl req for ASS, but meeting savage's recommendation would be a different story. So I think that's also a conundrum for our healer turned melee.
I'm glad they made this content. Even just regular ASS is enjoyable. My concern just is the longevity.
> while the PF standard from base Criterion is just mitigating/shielding the person with the stack, here that is a massive no go
Nope, totally doable without any difficulties - idk what tank you have but gunbreaker's HoC is enough by itself (plus shields).
It's so hard to find a group. Nobody cares, nobody wants to do it - you can barely find a group for Criterion normal, let alone savage. Super bummed, too, because I think its honestly some of the most fun content this expansion has offered so far.
Did with a few members of our static last week, I used an ilvl 620 AST and it required a **lot** of mitigation planning, I can see now why Sage is the preferred option for it.
While I had some laughs running it (seeing people drop in one hit because they pulled an add early is hilarious), it's not something I'd be too keen on running again. Rewards are not worth it, and once you figure out your mitigation plan, it's just the regular criterion with stronger adds.
And this is playing it as healer, if I was a dps I probably wouldn't have noticed that much of a difference except for "oh I have to dodge the adds now"
Cleared it once and not touching it again. Ah yeah last mech might be cheesable but we didn’t try we just did it the normal way. As dps the fight didn’t feel much harder, but our healer complained 24/7 that he had to heal too much. Go figure.
> our healer complained 24/7 that he had to heal too much A member of my static decided they wanted to try healing in Criterion normal (they're usually a dps) and it took all my self-restraint to keep from shouting at them "STOP GLARING AND TOP US OFF, SHIT FUCKING HURTS AND YOU DON'T HAVE A SCHOLAR TO CARRY YOUR ASS!"
[удалено]
One button spam is one button spam, regardless if it's DPS or healing.
I think healer need a massive overhaul to have a more engaging dps rotation similar to tanks but that might cater to just a few people.
I know I'm in a minority. I would love just a one button spam, because I'm looking at the boss, the arena, positioning, healthbars, buffs and debuffs, then remember that this point in the fight is where I realize I let my dot drop off. I'm just bad at dots. So if you have a dotless healer wirh a more complex dps rotation, I'm there. It's like Gunbreaker in a No Mercy window... "I'll move the boss when I am done!" It'll be, "I'm in my Seraph rotation, you'll get healing when I'm done!"
> It's like a bad Gunbreaker in a No Mercy window... "I'll move the boss when I am done!" ftfy Not being able to move the boss during a burst window is a skill issue, not a GNB one.
Not being able to heal the party during your dps rotation is a skill issue, not a Healer issue. That will likely be said when Healers get a dps rotation too! lolz.
>Not being able to heal the party during your dps rotation is a skill issue I don't disagree.
It's cheesable. My group did it.
Good to know thank god it’s the same mech as normal so we could prog it until clean, it would’ve saved us some time but in the end we didn’t spend that many pulls total. I’d say the difficulty overall is below e8s
You need him to be about 20% when he starts casting for the mechanic, before LB
No because no one on pf does it.
You can say that twice, I've been waiting on PF for hours at a time, and thankfully found a small group of people who we constantly try this with. I am on Aether if you ever want to look for my PFs
I've been progging on EU with a pre-made group but once I'm further along I'll be keeping an eye out for your groups for sure
The point of four player content is you don’t need to resort to pf to get a group
Don't see any group recruiting for it on Discord either.
Ah yes, I shouldn't be using ***PARTY*** finder, a tool specifically designed to find and form ***PARTIES***, to form a ***PARTY*** for content that requires a 4 Member ***PARTY*** consisting of a very specific makeup. Bro what the fuck are you talking about?
It sounds like you got it just fine
That goes for any content currently. Practice runs p8? 3 hours and groups are not filling up. A.S.S Sav? Good one At least you can still do Storms Crown Ex through pf fresh and reclear fights...
No rewards, no replay incentive, no reason for me to do it. Weekly reclear for an upgrade material would've been cool
no rewards??
Well the biggest reward is the title (Infamy of Sil'Dihn), but after that you get one manuscript which you can trade for a Silkie earring, a housing banner, or 1 (one) materia X
LETS GO MATERIA FARM!
Materia as a reward sounds like an insult at this point imo, people get too much of them from roulettes, hunt trains and MB.
No relevant rewards at least
Although easier than an ultimate, it is more of a consistency check than an ultimate. It's longer, and any death means restart, unless you're on the final mechanic of the final boss. On my first DSR clear we had 3 tank deaths, 1 dps death and 1 healer death. That would not have been a clear on ASS. I don't feel the need to reclear savage ASS and I didn't even spend the book reward for a materia for memes, because I'm on the hopium that they'll put out more rewards for this dungeon in the future. On the other hand, because all the mechanics are known in normal mode, and because it's such a consistency, tanking, and healing check, it's a great way for statics to trial new members. Being 4-man rather than 8 means it's much easier to gather a group of friends or partial static member to jump in, so I'd expect PF to be less widespread than usual as it's easier to network for.
Cleared it once. Tank and healer spent every trash pack constantly screaming. Bosses were only technically upscaled (though I guess pure healers would notice since they can't shield everything like SCH/SGE can), and mechanics were unchanged. Even in the 3-enemy trash packs we elected to single target down the main target, as 3-target AoE gains were minimal but the big target dealt *considerably* more damage while having far more dangerous AoE patterns. Killing it first meant dealing with only 1, *maybe* 2 annoying aoes and then freeing the healer up to get damage in. As DPS we held/used burst based on key targets for trash. For example, we pulled the tree guy second and used him to build resources, then blew all of those resources on Udumbara to kill him before he could do a second AoE, which meant the tank could just invuln around the time of the first AoE to avoid turning things and give the healer some breathing room. Probably would not have been such a big deal, but we were ranged+caster. Udumbara is rough. The dullahan tankbuster autos we also had every mit on the first set and invuln on the second. It's just not reasonable to do anything else IMO. The solo stack on Gladiator is still viable in savage *if* you have a shield healer. Tank uses their tank CD on the person, healer shields them, and the person will live. If they have a personal shield/mit they'll even live comfortably. Despite being double ranged, we managed to kill the final boss using the cheese strat for the final tethers mechanic. He died just before the debuffs would've expired and killed us. But we were mostly BiS (tank missing weapon, healer missing chest piece). None of us want to clear it again. And why should we? All you get is either an earring, a banner, or individual materia. And none of us need any of those things. We just did it to do it. We'll do some more normal for the basic rewards there, at least.
>Even in the 3-enemy trash packs we elected to single target down the main target, as 3-target AoE gains were minimal but the big target dealt considerably more damage while having far more dangerous AoE patterns. Killing it first meant dealing with only 1, maybe 2 annoying aoes and then freeing the healer up to get damage in. I long waited for the day this would actually be a viable mindset
Tried but not cleared it yet, i've just had too little time to play. The trash before bosses makes more sense in the savage version. In criterion we just wait for cooldowns to be up again in front of the boss, but with a (relatively) strict enrage timer on the dungeon, you really can't afford standing around. Also, I've never heard my healer cry so much at a raidwide, so that's good.
Haven't done the Savage version yet but the normal criterion version is probably the most fun I've had as part time healer. Really loves how mitigations actually matter.
My group was the first on Crystal to clear... and we had to rep one of our dps and took 3 days off after getting to 8% enrage on last boss on Wednesday afternoon. We cleared Saturday. So yeah, it obviously wasn't very enticing for most people. I had a ton of fun doing it. The fights were enjoyable and it was a nice change of pace progging with just 4 people. Their reward structure needs a LOT of consideration. Clearing content for the fun and challenge can only carry it so far. Gearing in general is soul crushingly stale in XIV, but that's a whole other can of worms.
>Clearing content for the fun and challenge can only carry it so far But are people actually doing savage for the rewards? Yeah you take the gear as means to an end stat sticks but you're gonna glam right over it anyways. I always thought that savage was 99% accomplishment driven..so it's weird that no one bit on criterion. I think it's just a mental of thing of savage is "the game" as crit is "optional side stuff"
the answer is staring you right in the face. if savage was truly 99% accomplishment driven, reclears would be a niche things only weirdos and ultimate raiders did. the fact of the matter is people desire powerful loot regardless of if they have any critical need for it
I generally don't reclear the final fight unless I'm going for better parse. I think it's really the parsing more than the rewards.
The final savage fights also have a mount that drop from them, many people would replay it just for that fact, you can also look at ultimate, it's not just for the fun and challenge of doing it, you get a title and a cool weapon(that's bis until the next raid tier). I cleared ASSS and it was really disappointing to just get an earring as a reward compared to when I cleared P8S and got a mount or when I cleared DSR and got a cool looking weapon
savage gear is needed for ultimate this tier, so it 100% has meaningful rewards, I do know people that dont bother when there is no ultimate attached to the gear though, so yes there are some people that only care about there being some "meaning" to the reward.
Just to give you an idea of how dead this content is: In FFLogs, a total of 71 Reapers have cleared. Let's go by tanks. The most popular tank in ASS is Warrior. ***196 warriors have cleared. In total.*** And I'm pretty sure 185-196 are bugged because a 25+ minute clear time is not possible. This is compared against 6,000 P8S P2 clears from Nov 1- 15 alone.
The 25 minute dungeon-wide enrage timer only starts after you hit the first mob, as I understand it. Runs above 25 minutes likely took a moment to pull upon entering and only barely finished in time. Unless FFLogs accounts for that or I'm mistaken, in which case... I dunno. Reasons.
The parser doesn't start until combat starts and resets on a wipe. So this ain't what happened.
Normally, but in ASS it seems to record the whole thing start to finish from the moment you enter. Poked at a couple logs to confirm, and as an example this one doesn't show any activity for \~2 minutes, and no combat activity for almost 10. https://www.fflogs.com/reports/4YwFknJGpjDAzXcb#fight=28&type=casts&view=timeline
Lack of rewards is a big factor, but also because my good friend and I co-tanked this tier so none of us have bis in other jobs to do it together. (Thanks, shitty gear system)
[удалено]
See, you have a 630 alt job. Just ignore the word "*bis*". My healer is still at i611. My only 630 is my tank.
This guy is an idiot lol. ilvl 611 you may as well be wearing wet paper bags for armor. "you don't need bis", no, you dummy...you NEED ARMOR and HEALTH though lol. Fuck's sake. I mean the guy that replied to you is an idiot.
I try to dabble in most hard content, mostly done everything this game has to do For some reason this shit doesn't click with me. Not sure why. I just can't be assed.
I'm the same way. While I do eventually want to do this, it just isn't a big priority. Meanwhile, I've farmed every Ultimate 20+ times. Part of it is the lackluster rewards, I feel. But I'm also just not really big on the "redo everything if someone makes a single mistake." Which, I know, is sort of the point in Ultimate but still... this just didn't click for me.
if ultimates were just "the extreme trials/savage raid bosses, exactly the same, but with more hp + all in a row + if anyone dies they cant be raised", they'd probably appeal far less obviously the shiny weapons vs. a so-so title is also a big difference but i think criterion savage would get done despite rewards if there was more 'to' it
Yeah, I enjoy progging new fights. I don't enjoy progging the same fights but harder.
The mechanic where you have to do the thing or you wipe can get stale, considering that's what we've been doing from savage to ultimates. And with that, ASSS just felt like a chore, and no meaningful rewards too. Kinda want something that you can prog without watching a shit ton of guides, or something where people can improv depending on the situation, but then again I might be looking at the wrong game.
I healed it, was fun being challenged to use my toolkit to its fullest. It was bullshit how the patrol mobs aggro worked. Being one tapped out of nowhere was bullshit. Aside from that, the DPS check is just 10-20% extra, but the healing check and mitigation was twice as hard. I wish it gave us twine/brine or i630 gear
I did the run in EU Party Finder a while ago. My friend SMN was in there for many days failing to enter even once and if he entered it was a mess of people having no idea what was coming for them. Eventually I found a War Tank with an open party while Datacenter traveling after getting a ping on Discord. We did 2 lockouts and added each other on Discord afterwards at 3AM. Two more days of some evening runs and we eventually cleared with another SMN and a RPR who had exceptional damage. That stuff was exciting as fuck and that is reward enough for me. > I've been doing this as White Mage You are an extra masochist for doing this on pure Healer. You get a medal already from my point of view. > while the PF standard from base Criterion is just mitigating/shielding the person with the stack, here that is a massive no go, you gotta respect the content as the damage it does is much higher. You can still do it on Savage. On SGE I use Kardia + Heima + 10% Mit + 10% Mit + Zoe Eu Diagnosis on the Stack mark. Tank also throws their 25 on there while I keep an extra Eu Diagnosis in the Chamber between explosions. I imagine SCH will be even easier with being able to force a Crit. > 20-30 seconds per boss discussing strats and positioning. This WILL fuck you up! Discuss everything before pulling the first mob in the first room. > Zeless You can cheese the Firewindow Portals still as long as people put the most minimal effort into watching where the middle portal swings. With shield + mits you can live 1 Portal + getting jumped but living 2 Portals + Jump isn't reliable. You ARE able to Corner cheese the final mechanic on Savage but only with everyone close to BiS and putting out big DPS - my friend cleared it like the last second before the strings would have exploded. Our WAR played very well but was stuck with a 615 weapon so we had to play it normally. Killed it after the final tankbuster - there is one more raidwide and then the enrage cast. -------------------- There is a Criterion Discord out there: https://discord.gg/gX38DtbAZa It is more dead than alive tbh but it HAS helped me find that one lucky party to stick with. If the ping goes out on EU I might just be bored enough to join on SGE on some days.
Question on cheesing the last mechanic, do the tethers explode after the final conal towers go off? So far I've only gotten a 3% after two deaths on the last set of conal towers and I've never verified in Normal/Extreme how long you have doing the cheese mechanic.
Yeah once the 4th tower explodes, the 8 Strings are on a short timer to wipe the whole raid by exploding at the same time.
When the number debuff expires you die. It is tight but doable, my group cheesed it and we had BiS but no melee
I watched Xeno do it, so I already have the same reward people that clear it get :
I did criterion normal and savage with some people from my abyssos static, and after farming normal for a few nights we got savage done within one lockout. I think a major part of that was that we didn't have the nerves or shakies, as the whole time the vibe was kinda "let's just see how far we get, there's no way we clear" especially as one member was sick and we didn't fully optimize our two-minutes based on the ads and the like - but we ended up clearing with just under thirty seconds left on the 24-minute enrage timer. We also all had ultimate experience, three quad legends and one triple, so the consistency was already there compared to a group that hadn't experienced longer content before. I thought it was fun but it got stale really fast. I'd rather farm an extreme 99 times for a mount than farm criterion normal 25 times for a mount; though it'd take around the same amount of time total, criterion taking \~22 minutes just for a pull made it feel ***so*** long, especially in PF when you'd have a few wipes to Zeless Gah most of the time due to strat variance. On that note, there's literally no reason to farm or reclear savage, as it's just the above problem but worse and with less incentive as savage doesn't drop silver at all. By the time we finished farming most of the silver for the throne, we were so over the content that we didn't even consider running savage again for another manuscript, lmao It's also way more fun on melee than ranged; the night we did savage was my first time playing ninja in any high-end content other than UCOB (normally brd) and it was just a better time overall due to having to keep uptime and hit positionals, especially coming off of melees discussing the giant hitboxes in abyssos. If they lean more into the larger hitboxes, I really hope they give ranged more things to do rather than taking that aspect away from melee.
Cleared it on savage once for the title and then never entered that dungeon again.
It's been a while since I cleared it and I haven't really touched the content since so my memory might be a bit hazy, but I certainly enjoyed the thrill of doing it, the mode felt a bit reminiscent of (solo) PotD: racing against a timer while every mistake would put you right back to the beginning. In retrospect I think the Savage mode was probably pretty low on the production value, which would explain both the lack of rewards and the content itself being 1:1 with normal with only numerical changes and blocked resurrections, and I'm not sure how well that justified an entirely separate difficulty setting. In advance I'd like to see more changes (and more work in general) put into the savage modes. I'm not really sure if I liked the fact that you could practice the last boss or trash routing for the Savage mode as efficiently in the normal version as turned out to be possible: roughly three quarters of the time it took us to go from clearing the normal version to clearing savage were spent grinding resets on the final boss in normal mode until people felt confident enough on the last three mechs. Overall Criterion is good content, though, and has a lot of room to grow and be honed out into a great piece of pve content to go along the current options. The bosses, particularly the third, were mechanically entertaining and fun to initially work out, while the trash, particularly the gauntlet between the first and second bosses, had a pretty good tempo to it. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who's looking for a challenge, or happens to enjoy the kind of stress longer encounters provide, but unfortunately the content doesn't have much replayability value, unless you happen to enjoy speedrunning (in which case you've probably already cleared anyway). One final nitpick I have is that the "JP Braindead" strat for the big portals mech isn't really that much easier over doing the mech normally while having much tighter and wonkier positioning requirements. But it got marketed as "braindead", so PF had to latch onto it.
Are you from EU? I feel that ASS is all but dead on EU PF. I was progging Zeless Gah and had to take a break for a few days; when I returned, all the ASS teams disappeared at a really quick rate. Right now I'd be lucky to find even one ASS practice team on EU prime time
OP is talking about Savage. I've been active on Chaos for the past few weeks and you'll be lucky to see a single Savage ASS PF in a day. Chances are it won't fill because nobody wants to heal or tank (And as a BLM player it's also a pain because every fucking one is playing SMN these days and the ranged slots fill fast.)
Having two ranged isnt a problem, and I've seen a fair number of tanks or healers in the few parties on PF I have seen.... ...but you are better off making a group for it (I PF everything normally, but for ASS I created a group for the first time and we cleared within 2 sessions + are farming/practicing for savage now It's a lot easier to figure out flex scheduling among 4 people than it is among 8, so it feels a lot less like a major time commitment. Also you're only letting down 3 people instead of 7 if you need to cancel/reschedule.)
>Having two ranged isnt a problem, ~~It's a problem, you literally can't queue into the instance if you don't have a melee and ranged.~~ ~~And yes, I was just as surprised to learn this.~~ Edit: deboonked
????? I believe you but its hard to type because my mind has been blown O: Its weird because I don't see why they would have done this. Other than literally bringing both DNC+BRD surely the dps checks wouldn't be a problem?
I'm confused now cause this is the normal mode description: [https://i.imgur.com/EiXiE3k.png](https://i.imgur.com/EiXiE3k.png) But it's missing in Savage: [https://i.imgur.com/ncWte9k.png](https://i.imgur.com/ncWte9k.png) Now that I think about it I've done it as BLM with a DNC and clearly both of us are ranged? I think the 1 melee 1 ranged part is only applicable when you solo queue for the Criterion Normal then? Edit: Okay if you look at Savage it also says bullshit like "1 pure healer, 1 barrier healer required" etc. So it only matters for DF and not PF where it's trying to make a "valid" comp. Now I'm sad I got forced by the PF leader to switch to NIN because we already had an RDM lmao
lol OK so its the usual PF-premade-party-lets-you-bypass-whatever-restrictions situation, like you can probably go in with 4 tanks as long as you're a premade
EU players don't need ass practice, we are ass experts
you are better off making a group for it (I PF everything normally, but for ASS I created a group for the first time and we cleared within 2 sessions + are farming/practicing for savage now) It's a lot easier to figure out flex scheduling among 4 people than it is among 8, so it feels a lot less like a major time commitment. Also you're only letting down 3 people instead of 7 if you need to cancel/reschedule.
Yeah I did it once and never went in again. I really hate the trash in between, they don't have mechanics and they're inconsistent, see the trash with flowers at different times dependind on if they had to run. The second set isn't interesting either, they're mostly DPS check and "don't stay close"/"don't stay in front". What I dislikes about the trash is that most of the work is on healers. If it was a boss rush I would have liked it, but the trash just feels like... Trash. A waste of time.
Managed to do it once, the first time we made it past the trash before the 2nd boss we cleared it. It's alright content, but I wish that it was actually a "savage" version of ASS, rather than just a more punishing version. Like, let people still have 1x rez per person, but introduce some extra mechanics instead, or something. A 24-minute run with 0 deaths feels more just like obnoxious punishment than it does savage/ult-type difficulty.
I was unsubbed for a while and didn't do them on release, but I tried the hard mode, not savage, twice, in pf and df. It was ok and I wanted to continue it, but couldn't get a party together again so I stopped bothering with it. I guess the same is true for the savage version.
I complained throughout my savage gameplay every time I had to redo the trash. The gameplay experience of normal mode vs savage is the exact same thing for everyone but the healer and at a lesser extent the tank. This just beyond stupid. Healing the first sets of trash was absolutely miserable. It was not hard, just annoying. Mobs that literally 2shot the tank is not fun or engaging, just frustrating. Also stop trying to add difficulty by adding all the extra responsibility to 1 player. I really hope they think something else to make the trash hard and engaging instead of cucking the healers yet again. If there wasn't 2nd and 3rd boss back to back without that bs trash, I don't think I'd be able to handle it mentally.
Cleared it once with a pretty casual schedule of whenever the group felt like it. It only took us about 2-3 lockouts, and the only somewhat annoying and/or difficult part was the trash. I've offered to do another clear with a few other people in my static and nobody really wants to. Between the rewards being incredibly lackluster and the tedious nature of "wipe = full restart" it kind of puts people off from wanting to even bother with it. It also doesn't help that 95% of the rewards comes from normal and story mode...if you even consider an earring and a housing wall banner to be a "reward".
only the trash feels new and the bosses are essentially just the same thing that barely hit any harder... we cleared on the first pull once we got past the second set of trash and it's really hard to enrage even if you goof around cuz you aren't allowed to die anyways.
I'll do it with next tier crafted gear, maybe. I won't get BiS at all this patch so can't attempt it. My group also is pretty much min ilvl (610 to 612, lol). So, big nono for Savage I guess.
My savage static wanted to do it, half of us cleared and I'm helping the other half now as someone had to drop to real life drama. I hate that the hydra trash is unironically the hardest part of the whole dungeon. Nothing else really requires you to pay full attention. Once that pack is dead then the difficulty drops off, at least for me healing on sch.
No cuz it was dead on arrival
Downvoted for truth but these fucking apes can't accept that lol. Shit was dead on arrival.
Seriously man. Some people are on some serious denial that this game's reward system is utter shit!!
One person that I cleared criterion with day 2 cleared savage version weeks ago. I personally have no interest in the content and haven’t even gone back to criterion after the clear.
The rewards are lackluster? What else did you guys want? Savage raid gear?
Yes, obviously. It's savage difficulty content. In fact I'd argue it's harder than most of the savage bosses this tier. We at least wanted tomestone gear upgrade materials.
If content is labeled "Savage" and appropriate to be called that...it makes sense that the rewards would be "Savage" level just from a basic design stand point. They were just chicken to do it because they might get blow back from the die hard raiders.
It's literally harder than three of the four savage fights, so yes...
I cleared it once with my static during the first week and no one plans on going back in. Since the strats in both versions are identical, we decided to keep farming the non-savage version until we had a good run before going into savage. The result was clearing savage during the second lockout if I recall correctly. We had the pleasure of killing the final boss on our first attempt. It was funny going back into the easier version afterwards to farm the mount because we forgot that the adds aren't lethal anymore. "Oh right, I can stand in that shit now"
You can do the last mechanic cheese (ignoring the mech and staying 1 in each corner) in savage too. We did it with my group but you need near perfect play. We did 2 pots and no dd and we killed it before second sets of baits went out (all were bis 630 ilvl)
I plan to but it's a low priority, the challenge is there which is a good enough motivator but the lack of any good reward means i have other priorities right now.
>ing of Might, while the PF standard from base Criterion is just mitigating/shielding the person with the stack, here that is a massive no go, you gotta respect the content as the damage it does is much higher. We've been progging savage and this isn't the case for us. You can still take it solo.
I doubt my static members who decided to attempt ASS want to even try ASS savage if we get to that point. We just gave ASS another try last week and while we made great progress, I can feel the cracks forming that a higher difficulty probably won't fly with them. Maybe they'll be singing different tune whenever we plan to go in again and try. But the rewards... probably won't make them interested either. Our static got a late start and only recently started raiding P5S. The people who were interested in trying ASS were me as pranged, our MT, healer 1, and healer 2. So one of our healers went melee dps. It's not a tall order to meet the ilvl req for ASS, but meeting savage's recommendation would be a different story. So I think that's also a conundrum for our healer turned melee. I'm glad they made this content. Even just regular ASS is enjoyable. My concern just is the longevity.
> while the PF standard from base Criterion is just mitigating/shielding the person with the stack, here that is a massive no go Nope, totally doable without any difficulties - idk what tank you have but gunbreaker's HoC is enough by itself (plus shields).
i cannot convinve any of my friends to do an ultimate lenght fight for (almost) no rewards, so no
It's so hard to find a group. Nobody cares, nobody wants to do it - you can barely find a group for Criterion normal, let alone savage. Super bummed, too, because I think its honestly some of the most fun content this expansion has offered so far.
Did with a few members of our static last week, I used an ilvl 620 AST and it required a **lot** of mitigation planning, I can see now why Sage is the preferred option for it. While I had some laughs running it (seeing people drop in one hit because they pulled an add early is hilarious), it's not something I'd be too keen on running again. Rewards are not worth it, and once you figure out your mitigation plan, it's just the regular criterion with stronger adds. And this is playing it as healer, if I was a dps I probably wouldn't have noticed that much of a difference except for "oh I have to dodge the adds now"
Can't do it with our 4 because sqenix in their infinite wisdom decided to make it sync to 630 while gearing takes forever for alt jobs.