Exploratory Islands should be the leading Endgame content NOT Alex Savage

[Kenji1134]

Mmm, dunno, Coil Normal never had dps checks so steep that you had tanks stacking STR to tanking parts of the fight in a DPS stance to meet the enrage.

In Yoshi-P's words, Alex Savage is the difficulty of what FCoB Savage would have been. Its basically a way to see how long they could keep the World First guilds occupied.
I think a fair comparison would be going into T13 in full i100 and no Echo, and see how well you do.

As far as the exploratory islands, perhaps the best thing that could come of that would be a "randomly selected" landscape, with 3-4 packs of "randomly selected" trash mobs, and a "randomly selected/generated boss".

Imagine for a moment, that SE makes a set of say 50 small zone maps, 10 of which are entrance, and 10 are exit, and you can combine 3 or 4 to make a complete zone.

For trash packs we can pick from any of the available trash mobs in the game, at random, and raise their stats to a generic "raid level", pick 3-4 mobs to form 3-4 packs. Maybe make the selection process iterative and give trash mobs "value", so a pack would have a total value of 10, meaning it could have say 5 2-point mobs, or a 6-point plus 2 2-point. Make trash mildly interesting but not overwhelming.

Now the fun part, the bosses.

For bosses, start with a database of similar elemental/structural types.
Fill the database with the skeleton graphics, and associated abilities for each boss.
When the zone is created, a "Boss Structure" is chosen at random. So you could get a primal type, mechanical, humanoid, animal, etc. Once the type is set, randomly take lets say 4-5 bosses from the database for that type.
First we choose the boss's phase structure and primary gimmicks for the phases, so it could be Nael, Bahamut, Titan... basically pick the phase structure from the major bosses, including MSQ major bosses like Singularity Reactor.
Now that the phase structure and major gimmicks are set, add 3-4 abilities from random bosses in the same type. Since they come from the same type database, they will kinda make sense, no animal bosses using Primal abilities, or Humanoids howling at the moon, and so forth.
The harder part will be combining parts of the graphical skeletons to make a modified boss appearance. The core skeleton should resemble the primary boss, but details from the other bosses should be used to augment it, and give an overall hint on what to expect.

And there you have it, you can go into a pseudo-randomly generated dungeon (made from 5 parts chosen from 50 options), fight some randomly selected trash (chosen in a way to be challenging but not unfair), and then fight a boss which feels like an "old boss", but with mechanics thrown in from similar bosses to spice things up and keep everyone in their toes.
It'll be like fighting EVERYTHING all over again, at random, AT ONCE!!!

- Of course there will need to be some kind of lockout and reroll, because as with all rng based systems, it is possible to "randomly" create a boss who's mechanics are just soooo skewed in one direction that you cannot deal with them... Like a boss that cycles through 4 aoes and your healers simply run out of mana, or a boss with 3 tank busters... Hello VIT tanks!