Eden Savage Thoughts

Eden Savage

I took some time to reflect on Eden Savage as a raid tier, did some reclears, watched some streams, and I really think they just knocked it out of the park with this one.

Eden Prime:
Obviously I wish they didn't include the cutscene in the savage mode of this fight.  I can respect it though, because for new players that downtime can be nice, allowing people to regain valuable cooldowns and take a breather.  There were group responsibility mechanics, personal responsibility mechanics, reading buffs/debuffs.  It felt good having run normal mode a few times and being able to decipher mechanics, but also having some new things thrown at us.  Not much to say about this otherwise, most groups seem to be breaking into raiding with this fight and its going well for everyone.

Voidwalker:
Originally I hated this fight, and I think a lot of people will hate it at first.  But I think it grew on me.  The fight flows nicely, it puts a lot of personal responsibility on each player, and it forces you to respect mechanics (looking at you 50% damage down).  Seeing a lot of groups struggle on this fight made me really thankful that they made this the 2nd fight and not the 3rd fight.  I think Voidwalker has a really nice level of difficulty right where it is.  Spell-in-waiting owns.

One thing I noticed watching streams, that doesnt necessarily relate directly to Voidwalker but rather to fight design in FFXIV in general: Every group refers to Doomvoid Cleaver differently (usually as a previous mechanic that was handled the same way).  Doomvoid Cleaver is more or less the same mechanic as Protean Wave (a3s), Queen's Waltz (o3s), Earthshakers (o10s), and probably more that I can't think of right now.  I know a lot of people complain about reused mechanics (I agree that reused mechanics should be limited but the design space that SE takes advantage of is limited to an extent), but its really neat to guess when people started raiding based on what they call Doomvoid Cleaver.

Shoutouts to THE GUY

Leviathan:
This fight heckin owns.  When we did normal mode for the first time I sort of passed over Leviathan because (despite not knowing that Titan was the next fight) all I could think about was Titan.  Savage Leviathan was super fun, engaging, mechanically sound, the music owns (as does all of the eden music).  The arena breaking owns, the debuff mechanics are good, black smokers is super cool.  All around just fun.  I think the one thing thats both good and bad is that its a big off arena boss, so theres no boss positioning/positionals.  Its good and bad but I feel like tanks have been gutted a bit in SHB and from talking to my tank friends they want some more responsibility.  I think they did a good job of making up for the lack of boss positioning by making a lot of proximity based mechnaics and cleaves and stuff.  Anyways leviathan is hella fun and a nice reward for clearing Voidwalker.

Titan:
Ok folks. Titan is the best end boss since Neo Exdeath.  I really REALLY like the way Titan is designed.  Phase 1 feels like a door boss but for 3 minutes instead of 7 and theres no checkpoint.  Phase 2 is a really good Savage-only phase and while its not mechanically complex its just epic feeling.  Phase 3 is even more epic and it feels like ultimate in the sense that the mechanics are just rapid fire versions of the previous stuff so its not a lot more learning its just "keep your composure and finish out the fight".  Tectonic Uplift sets the stage for some really really unique mechanics going forward so I am very excited.

Car first makes me want to cry.

I think overall this tier is a really nice balance of challenging for early prog, but with gear its going to be a great intro tier for new raiders.

I probably could say a lot more on some of these fights but I mostly just wanted to make this real quick because I had a few minutes.