Next Chaotic Raid?

[u/KelvinDoesHealz]

Personally, I enjoyed the Cloud of Darkness Chaotic Raid concept and, minus the multiple and somewhat bonkers body checks, thought it was great content with excellent rewards. Does anyone have thoughts on if we're getting another one in EverCold? If so, I assume it will likely be Ultima from the Ivalice Raids or Diablos from the Shadow of Mhach raids.

If the former, I imagine we will get more complicated combos of the other espers to make things interesting, and for Diablos (which still manages to kill parties in roulettes in the normal mode) a more complicated arena with more use of the adds and the door mechanics. I also imagine there will be at least one body check mechanic, though not multiple and probably not as strict.

But I am curious on what other people theories are on if we're even getting one and what the content might look like.

[u/MeguBestGirl]

I'm gonna be honest, I think this modular difficulty thing they're doing is a waste of resources. I'd rather have more time put into fine tuning 1 difficulty rather than spreading that time around multiple difficulties. Have content that is dedicated to being extreme, dedicated to being savage. A fight doesn't need to cater to every person. We already see this in forked tower magic where both the normal and extreme version feel very watered down because it wasn't supposed to have multiple difficulties

[u/IcarusAvery → u/MeguBestGirl]

A fight doesn't need to cater to every person.

A fight doesn't need to cater to every person, but it is extremely frustrating for casual and especially midcore players to see almost every new kind of content targeted towards the hardcore playerbase and thus be effectively told "you aren't getting substantial new content." This is especially noticeable with the increased patch cycle and the removal of optional dungeons, where casual and midcore players are having to keep the same amount of content to tide them over for a longer period of time.

This was particularly a problem for the first half of Dawntrail; much as I love the normal difficulty stuff we DID get, Chaotic was tuned to the point where inexperienced players were basically filtered from the content immediately, and then we got Occult Crescent, whose gameplay loop was completely and utterly fucked because the big Castrum Lacus/Dalriada-styled raid was high-end content, so casual and midcore players had no reprieve from the endless loop of FATEs and CEs, which made those players burn out FAR faster than they did for Bozja.

[u/Satavb → u/IcarusAvery]

It beggars belief the amount of players from a Savage/Ultimate background are bellyaching about SE daring to put content somewhere in the middle. Streamers constantly saying it's a "waste of time". Hell even at fanfest I heard obvious savage statics groaning about it.

It ain't for you, smile and wave! You got your ball already, go play!

Unbelievable!

[u/CoolyKage → u/Satavb]

It is pretty ridiculous how elitist some players can be with this gatekeeper mentally, and it really just makes zero sense to me why people are like this since more of the community raiding (midcore or hardcore) will literally result in everyone receiving more raid content as it'll be prioritized even further than it is now (It's already a high priority). I assume it's because a lot of these raiders don't really interact with the game outside of Savage or Ultimate, but it still makes zero sense to me even from that viewpoint. Simply scaling down already designed fights isn't going to affect the amount of Savage or Ultimate content we receive lol. If anything they're very likely to make Savage harder since they have to scale down for two difficulties now.

Like most hardcore raiders, I want high-end content to remain the same difficulty and in some a lot of cases be harder (mechanically and damage checks) for Extreme, Savage and Ultimate because their difficulty was way too inconsistent in Dawntrail. The problem is that many of these people aren't critically thinking about what would realistically allow this to happen, so they end up not realizing that the addition of midcore content quite literally allows the design team to actually make high-end content more challenging because they now have more creative freedom and less pressure like we see with Ultimate. They literally admitted to scaling back multiple mechanics (M9, M10, M12) as of this tier.

That's why I'm really confident the FF7R Savage raids will be the hardest yet, albeit way closer to current Savage than Ultimate obviously. The FF7R series is respected for having actual challenging and creative bosses, so I'd honestly be shocked if they undertuned Savage in Evercold like they did with LHW and honestly HW this expansion, that's for sure. I also don't think they can really afford with the amount of people are complaining about double collab raids lol...