My thinking about Alex normal/savage. Issue IMHO inside

[Alym]

Alex normal mode has killed raiding and it painfully boring. It needs more challenge IMO.

I'm not interested in arguing over opinions so I won't post beyond this, but I wanted to add mine to the forums to be heard. I actually believe Savage mode is what's killing raiding.

For some background, I'm raiding Savage mode Alex (currently on the last phase of A3S) and beat each tier of Coil before echo in ARR. I know lots of people in a lot of raid groups (or at least I did). All the raid groups I know didn't break up when Alex Normal was released because now they got to see the story easily. They didn't break up when Savage was released due to Normal mode burnout. However, one broke up when Faust/A1S was too hard of a DPS check for them. Almost all of the others fell apart on A3S. The fight was too much of a challenge. When raid groups are working for weeks or months on the same phase of the same fight, people get frustrated, bored, tired and burnt out. That's the point where people may say, "Well, I saw the story and A4 boss in Normal so... whatever. Bye!" but they never would've gotten to that point if Savage hadn't been tuned so high. To me, this clearly shows that the Normal mode isn't the problem; the lack of progression in the only real progression content is the issue.

I've been in three statics since the start of HW. The one I had going into 3.0 had been together for all of 2.0. They hated Alex Savage and the unchanged (since 2.0) gearing process. All of them but me and one other quit shortly after Savage was released. The next group I was in was rebuilding after half of their group quit because of A1S in the early weeks. They couldn't ever get 8 people on all at once to even enter Savage, so I left. The third group I am now in is with my real life best friend. I joined because their caster quit in A3S. Shortly after I joined, their PLD quit (due to real life scheduling issues) and we had a very tough time finding a replacement because no one wants to do Savage anymore. I'm wondering how long this group will survive, though. Our WAR has flat out told us that he only logs in to raid because we're his friends but he no longer likes the game and does not have fun in A3S. My best friend, our WHM, is pretty much of the exact same opinion as the WAR. Truth be told, I'm getting there myself. I have fun on Tuesdays when we clear A1 and 2S, but dread having to login for our A3S progression days because Savage is just not fun. It's tuned too high to be fun and A4S is supposedly even worse. As a group, we are now talking about cutting back a progression day because so many people are miserable.

Our group isn't the only one like this. Another group in my FC just decided they would no longer do A3S until 3.1. They said they will try it again then and, if it's still the same, they will likely stop raiding. This is on the heels of another group I know breaking up over fighting while progressing through A3S - the leader of my FC was in that group. She and most people in her group also rarely log on now either.

All of these people I listed were people who, like me, cleared all tiers of Coil before echo. They weren't casual raiders.

My point of showing all these examples is that I don't believe the easier Alex Normal is what's making people not want to do Savage. I think it is, in fact, the extremely challenging difficulty of Savage that is making people give up. So to say that the game "needs more challenge" is, I think, harmful feedback to the health of raiding.

We have the challenge in Savage now, but very few seem to actually like it. Add onto that the state of the game outside of raiding and it just makes things worse. Those are topics for other threads, however.

EDIT: To propose a solution, I believe Normal mode should stay the same including drops and ilvl, Hard mode should be added and tuned to the same difficulty of 2.0 Coil and be the main progression content in terms of drops, and Savage (if they insist it should continue to exist) should offer the exact same drops as the new hard mode but should also give an extra chest, titles, and/or small vanity rewards.