But holy crap this game (more accurately the community) make’s it near impossible unless you’re in a guild.
It is VERY solo player unfriendly.
In the last 72 hours, i’ve been doing a lot of Aberrus (because lets face it, defs one of the better raids).
Normal groups are demanding either AotC or an iLvl of 430 (thats heroic tier, and you know it).
Heroic are demanding AotC which is understandable to an extent, but demanding 440? again, lil over kill since what? the highest you’ll cap from that is 441?
Blizz really need to take a page from the chad XIV and allow some kind of method to queue for something higher than LFR. At least in XIV, I can get into the extreme content no issue (even if I am just making the minimum gear score).
It’s not just me though noticing this right? Doing the fun stuff isn’t really solo player friendly.
The path of least resistance. Understand though it’s by no means guaranteed but someone who is 440ilvl and has AOTC is more likely to be at least decent rather than be terrible. Hence why a lot of groups require it even when it is completely unnecessary. It is their group though so they set the rules.
The downside of this is if their standards are too high they risk taking a long time to fill up if they can at all. Also if you go for higher standards you will be judged by those standards as well.
Some people don’t care but if your an AOTC alt with 415ilvl saying u want to full clear people are going to have doubts. Also in raiding you do need to lead to an extent as group leader or a wipe or two can quickly lead to chaos or people leaving right away. There are certain expectations so to speak.
I agree on FFXIV. I wish we could que for normal raids as long as they add some other requirements but people in WOW can be so dumb and toxic…Who knows if Blizzard would do it. It works great in FFXIV though.
Imagine a raid team is a band. The band leader wants to learn a new song for the band to play.
Which do you think the band leader would prefer, when the same group of musicians show up for every rehearsal so that they all learn and get tight together, or a new group of players every time so that the band leader has to repeat a bunch of learning over and over until everyone learns just well enough to get through the whole composition?
Some leaders are willing to trade the consistency of a guild team for the freedom of pugging, but they have to work harder than the pugs they invite and you can imagine they’d be extra picky in order to reduce the chances of failure.
At the end of the day a raid group/guild is a volunteer organization. Players gather together and commit to reaching a goal. Players looking to slide into that action without committing themselves long term are going to find it harder.
Here’s where you can register your complaint about a.) your schedule doesn’t allow you to commit to a raid b.) you don’t like large groups, talking in voice, etc. c.) you just want to be able to random queue into Mythic raid d.) all of the above, and I’ll write you a response complaining about why it’s so hard to get into NFL teams, AAA baseball teams, or your local bowling league.
Ultimately the answer is that there are very few charity runs and so you’ve got to make yourself valuable enough for a raid leader to pick you.
Do people really pug the highest content in FF? I’m skeptical.
You can que for normal raids so to speak and you can pretty much pug savage which is like the equivalent of heroic/early mythic. But FFXIV is heavily mechanical in nature so it’s a bit different.
Extreme is more equivalent to late mythic raiding and it is nutty. You are absolutely doing this in an organized group/guild. You’re looking at usually a 10 min fight where you have a ton of personal responsibility and a ton of mechanics that can one shot u with ease. The upside is that you have near unlimited rezzes and you can recover from wiping if u are good enough. Some also have checkpoints. You also respawn on the boss which automatically makes it superior to WOW in terms of time spent efficiently.
Savage yes, Ultimate I don’t believe so but I never tried to be honest so I don’t know. Savage is hard but quite doable but again since FFXIV is very mechanics oriented you need people who know personal responsibility to heart.
You can usually pug the first two or so bosses on savage without too much trouble.
I had to log in and look, but you cannot queue for the current savage raid. You can queue for the previous ones, though. The only way to access the current savage is through their party finder*. I don’t know anything about ultimates, but I did see one queue-able in the high-end section of the duty finder for raids, but I don’t know which one it is. Ultimates are just about prestige as they don’t have power progression, only cosmetics (iirc).
As I understand it indeed, this has been the case. However, the first boss in this savage raid is considered pretty pug unfriendly because of some of his mechanics. I don’t raid in FF so couldn’t tell you which abilities or even their names. This is what my friend who does raid has shared with me.
*Party finder in FF is much different than group finder in WoW. With party finder, the group leader creates a group, sets an ilvl, and can set party expectation – learning, completion, and already completed. The first is for many wipes and no expectation of clearing, the second has an expectation of clearing, and the third you must already have completed the content to even join. There may be more, but I’ve not looked at it in ages, so don’t recall.
Once the leader puts the party in the finder, they have no control over who joins except that the players must meet the requirements. So, it may feel a lot like queuing to the joiner. I’ve never seen a party disband when folks do odd things (like joining a group as Dancer when another Dancer is already present). But I have seen leaders disband parties after the first wipe. They probably re-list, but I don’t watch for things like that.
You completely missed the point.
As soon as you say “learning” or “looking to learn”, its more barren than a dudes wallet when he finds something to simp for.
Then don’t say it’s a learning group. Lead your own and invite good raiders. Just make sure to get a warlock to replace leavers.
Will you clear it the first day? No. But if you friend all the people who do well and bring them next week and repeat until you have a long list of raiders you will be able to clear more.