For those who've cleared DR(Savage), what are your thoughts on it?

Well, lets wind back to what they are trying to achieve with a system like this: They want content that doesn't require the kind of dedicated E-Sports mentality adopted by Blizzard because of the negative impact it has on the game for the average player, so they built content like Bazja and Eureka to create something that hypothetically gives the same sense of achievement via expenditure of time. Long term MMO players probably remember the old days of EQ where you have 40+ people running around doing world bosses, that would be on some server timer and we'd all find some excuse to clock out of work to participate: That is sort of what this is, but with a few differences. For one, they are trying to incentivize the activity with material rewards by seeding a base version, and then saying "if you want to dye it, you got to do these things, too."

So lets rewind back to the old EQ stuff: No one had to do anything to get the rewards out of the 40+ man world boss fights. When one popped up they were self contained events that might drop some special item someone could use to make a piece of gear, or even drop some special equipment useful for a particular class. The main limit was organizing the event and taking along enough able bodied people to get the job done. No one needed to be optimized to really deal with the fight since the effort was spread across so many participants.

So what went wrong with DR is several things:

1) They put enrage timers on the bosses inside, meaning you got pressure on who you bring in to perform. That adds a barrier (even if it is only perceived as such) to the content that doesn't need to be there.
2) Very few, if anyone, has experience running an event of this size. Yes, they have groups this big via alliance roulette, but the roulette automagically handles the hardest part of organizing the run, and unlike SDR the run is casual enough to encourage people of all skill levels to join in.
3) The value of doing Savage DR completely hinges on people doing Bazjan Southern Front. Because Southern Front was in a miserable state for so long, a lot of people never ground out the parts from that tier, and you need insane numbers of coins to get the parts for the upgrade components. So this filters who is going to run the content vs not. The big doggo at the end as a rewards doesn't really work to make up for this.
4) The regular version of DR will die out. There's no tomestone rewards from accomplishing the run, so there is little reason to continue participating after seeing the story bits. Oh sure, you can do the weekly for coins, but why bother if you can never get the dyable version due to the other barriers put in place? On the upside the armor does have good stats so it helps gear alts?

Edit:

The other thing they might be trying to do is to make something kind of like how they have Alexander Ultimate, but for an audience that wants something less about performance. I'm not sure that is the case since it has too many dependencies on time intensive grinds. They'd have to have a lull in content in the next expansion to justify revisiting Bazja outside of just doing it for the story. Probably will die a quiet death much like Diadem 1.0 and Eureka.

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Originally Posted by Colt47

So what went wrong with DR is several things:

1) They put enrage timers on the bosses inside, meaning you got pressure on who you bring in to perform. That adds a barrier (even if it is only perceived as such) to the content that doesn't need to be there.
2) Very few, if anyone, has experience running an event of this size. Yes, they have groups this big via alliance roulette, but the roulette automagically handles the hardest part of organizing the run, and unlike SDR the run is casual enough to encourage people of all skill levels to join in.
3) The value of doing Savage DR completely hinges on people doing Bazjan Southern Front. Because Southern Front was in a miserable state for so long, a lot of people never ground out the parts from that tier, and you need insane numbers of coins to get the parts for the upgrade components. So this filters who is going to run the content vs not. The big doggo at the end as a rewards doesn't really work to make up for this.
4) The regular version of DR will die out. There's no tomestone rewards from accomplishing the run, so there is little reason to continue participating after seeing the story bits. Oh sure, you can do the weekly for coins, but why bother if you can never get the dyable version due to the other barriers put in place? On the upside the armor does have good stats so it helps gear alts?

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I disagree with 1 and 4.

1. Enrage timers are essential to end game raiding. Without enrage timers the fight becomes a complete joke. What's so fun about being able to die over and over again without any punishment?
4. You still need the base gear from DRN to augment.

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Originally Posted by MPK

I disagree with 1 and 4.

1. Enrage timers are essential to end game raiding. Without enrage timers the fight becomes a complete joke. What's so fun about being able to die over and over again without any punishment?
4. You still need the base gear from DRN to augment.

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Yeah I completely agree with you on 1. And also because the enrage timers here aren’t really even that tight. If you’re having issues hitting the enrage wall it means you’re not doing mechanics right and taking doom stacks (which are DPS down stacks too) or dying too much.

For 4, in addition to the gold coins, DRN also is a step in the ShB relic grind and also has a (rare) chance of dropping some stuff that can sell for millions of gil (mount / haircut). This is the same reason why there are still farm parties for things like lockboxes in Eureka (i.e., because $$$ and light farm).