8 man endgame content should go back to the 2.x method (no baby mode) Hear me out...

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

I hear you, however that's just not what the game is like now. I made a request to make coils mandatory for MSQ and was met with similarly negative responses.

I am of the personal belief that if we corralled people into tough content, it would be ROUGH for a while. I mean, really rough. People can't wrap their heads about meteors in CT.. However, I think it would improve overall player skill by saying "This is the content. This is what we expect from you, and we expect you to do it."

Locking glamour behind content is a great way to encourage engagement.

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None of this is good for the over all game. The game has 2 paths.
1. Hardcore people that like savage content.
2. Casual players that want to have fun, maybe do some roleplay and do fancy glams.

You're literally trying to make the casual players quit the game and leave it with maybe 15% of what it's current playerbase size is. That would send SE into panic mode, they would close down servers because of low population and likely layoff staff. The game would in the end suffer even more.

Even if I fancy Savage content on previous Expansions I highly disagree with OP, the issue ain't the division of Normal difficulty and Savage.

If anything I would point finger at the over simplification of the classes, now you have a non existent skill ceilling to play the character class you are commited with and the whole design is around making non intuitive mechanics so people have some sort of challenge in the end game.

In the ideal world 50% would be you learning your class and 50% mechanics in order to complete savage.

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Originally Posted by Kamatsu

Question - what MMO's let you bypass the normal/story version of a dungeon, trail, or raid, and go directly to the harder versions?

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WoW hasn't forced normal mode since heroic was introduced as far as I know. Mythic opens up a few weeks after normal/heroic opens. I haven't done normal or lfr outside of glamour farms since MoP. ESO also allows you to just walk into veteran trials at lvl 10 (very funny to see the inflated low level hp pool contend with vCC).

The idea you have to do x level of content before doing y is a pretty old concept most games have left behind with attunements.

I didn't play EQ extensively only because I was playing Ultima Online. I can attest to the brutality by anecdotes of having my raid gear stripped off my corpse in front of me after encountering gankers between cities, then spending 10m trying to find a mage to resurrect me.

Its not really a good line to draw over "it was popular because you could solo" because the real draw was stuff like.. that. You could solo all these games but it took finesse. What made WoW appealing then really was not being turbo punished for death. Can't recall a single person saying it was because you could solo it.

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

You could solo all these games but it took finesse.

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Not EverQuest. If you were a druid, mage, or necro and you could quad-kite or you were an enchanter who could charm solo, you could solo. Otherwise you were finding a camp and grinding with a group.

EverQuest II was highly hyped for the solo capability, since that was a constant complaint with EQ-era games. But I saw a lot of people on various forums I frequented who even got frustrated with EQII and jumped to WoW for how accessible it was, even in vanilla. Solo and small group capability was definitely a draw to that game. It became so mainstream because it was way more accessible to a wide variety of players than anything that had come before it.

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Originally Posted by MilkieTea

How? They still would progress the exact same, just with savage content instead. The option to only do savage content would be there for those who only want to do savage vers of normal content - it's harder, therefore OBVIOUSLY they'd get savage gear, just like they do now? Only difference would be that they progress through the story with savage content vs normal content.

Perhaps they could unlock normal content just like how normal-content players unlock savage content, or a similar way? Allowing raiders the option to just do raids for their content literally screws no one over, just provides the OPTION to go at whichever pace suits you.

Edit: also they wouldn't be bypassing normal story progression - just progressing with different difficulty. Same way how solo instances allow you to progress through the instance with a "Very Easy" mode.

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The difference between normal vs savage content progression (from what I understand, so please do correct me if I'm misunderstanding what you want) vs the various difficulty modes of solo duty instances is that the latter is simply a difference in combat numbers while the former is more than that.

Normal vs Savage is not just a different difficulty mode, but a different reward (including a different reward system) and, in some cases, even extra phases/enemy forms/cutscenes/etc. From the story's perspective, with the current system, this is fine because the story dictates that only the normal version is canon, so the Savage is presented (in-game via their own unlock quests) as something extra on top of the actual story mode with additional rewards.

With your proposal (again from my understanding of what you're saying you want), that would no longer be the case. If you can proceed through the main raid story via the Savage version while ignoring the normal version, then the question arises whether the extra scenes that may be found in Savage is canon because Savage is no longer just a beefed up simulation of the real encounters in this case.

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

Wow those are so rose tinted glasses. Need I link the thousands of old "why vanilla was great" threads saying so because it encouraged community through making the solo experience difficult? The class quests (warlock comes to mind) that needed a full party to take you through?

That aside: they added trusts so that solo players do not need to group. Perhaps one day they will add it to trials and older content.

Perhaps they will let raiders skip normal and go straight to Savage like every other game. Its all about choices and preference. I don't use trusts unless I'm doing laundry and want to farm pets and glamour. You can run all the dungeons with trusts exclusively and that means nothing to me.

I humor you and say, yes, you are still not reading my posts. Who knew wanting alternative options for different people meant I wanted to lock the story away only for me?

Edit: also while it is hard to determine how many people cleared content on WoW before AoTC, you can tell that participation isn't small enough to even say that solo players dominate the game. You can even see key clears, which are arguably more difficult on higher tiers, have more participation than raiding. Definitely not a "solo" experience.

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Yes, you are arguing for options. Options are always good and I really don't see any issue with letting raiders pick whether they want a raid series's story (Alexander, Omega, Eden, whatever) be unlocked by way of normal or savage. That deserves to be admitted and said because you are in fact not arguing to take anything away or lock things behind savage, I think it's still the ''watch it on Youtube'' quip that gets most about your original post, it certainly did me because for any person who is invested in FFXIV's story.. they want to see their own character in it, not some Youtubers.

Anyhow, that put to bed.. the OP who started this thread is explicitly saying in the title ''(no-baby-mode)''. That does mean ''take normal mode away and thus by virtue of doing so lock story behind savage'' even for people who will never touch savage and of whom I am absolutely certain dedicated raiders never want to deal with.. because those people, like me, do not want to learn savage to experience the story.