Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[yexie]

If you don't want to pony up the skill and time to see the raid story when it's current, you should just wait until you can do the fights on your terms rather than dragging down the entire game to meet your play style.

Can't you see that it's not always about not WANTING to pony up? For some people it's just plain impossible because of lack of time, lack of statics and other things.
We all pay the same amount each month, so why are you more priviliged than others that just simply CAN NOT put the effort into endgame the way it is needed? I personally would LOVE to put the effort into endgame and be "up there", but I simply can't put that much effort into the game. And that's not dragging down the entire game, it is dragging down the game for ~10% of the playerbase maybe? By meeting YOUR play style it would mean gating story and gear for ~90% of the playerbase.
And no I don't want things to be handed to me on a silver platter, it often happens to me that I find the "casual content" too easy or I find it just right because you actually need to put some effort into it and you wipe a few times and I see so many people cry and whine about it until it gets dumbed down and I dislike that too.

So please, try not to see all casuals as lazy people who aren't willing to put in the effort and want things handed to them on a silver platter. There is a reason there is only a small amount of people doing endgame, not everybody has the means to put that much effort into a game.

Like Sandpark said:

Raids are the least popular endgame not only because the difficulty is hard.It requires perfect harmony in skill and forming same schedule/skill competent groups for long play sessions on a regular basis.

The point here is watching the metrics. If 4-15% of the playerbase is getting new story completing raids and the rest aren't. Something is amiss. In a sub based game, isn't the point of a dev to try and get the most players possible having a reason to log in? If it's not, then the game should go full on hardcore and then they would have a couple of hundred thousand that never quit, but everyone else not in that category would fly the coop.

Normal should be pretty difficult, but not Savage difficult, more lenient towards pugs and mistakes. Savage should have the BiS and require statics, guild type content but just marginally better or you get a cry for content from both sides. The super elite saying the rest of the game is too easy and the other side who says the game is too hard.

I get that Alex savage not having any new story to it was a HUGE downer and it shouldn't be that way, it should have had a continued story of normal mode and something like a minion or such in the end to show "hey I did it!", and it should still have the highest iLvl gear rewards, because they really are not needed outside of savage.
But you simply cannot keep ~90% of the playerbase MONTH behind story and gear (lookswise) because all of us paying folks have a right to enjoy and get the "new look" feel when a new patch comes out and not be punished simply because our personal circumstances or the circumstances on our server doesn't allow us to get into the real endgame.

For the future they need to give savage a new story to discover or some sort of deeper insight... and a little more than just an achievement in the end. Heck they give PVP more than that.

And to what you said about Yoshi as a producer earlier:
I'm pretty sure he get's it, but if he would do all the things you want, he would be a much much worse producer than people make him out to be now, he HAS to view every problem from ALL angles and he has to go by what the MAJORITY of the playerbase is able to achieve, if he would do it any other way he would completely fail at his job. He has to find a balance.

[Velhart]

We all pay the same amount each month, so why are you more priviliged than others that just simply CAN NOT put the effort into endgame the way it is needed?

You pay 12.99 to access the world, not to have everything handed to you on a silver platter. That is what veteran rewards are for. That privilege you speak so lightly of is from people who put in the hard work to have it. Work that most are not willing to do but for some reason feel just as entitled to it.

If you cannot put in that kind of effort, then you need to acknowledge where you are in the progression chain, which is not at the end. When I played WoW before raiding, I always saw characters who had this really top notch Heroic gear and sometimes Legendary weapon that really showed off who was the best of the best. I in no way felt entitled to that gear at all, I know that person sweat blood and tears to get to where he was at.

If I am going to stress myself out doing these really hard dance routine raids that a lot of times tests my patience, then yes I do deserve that privilege that casual players shouldn't have.

[yexie]

You pay 12.99 to access the world, not to have everything handed to you on a silver platter. That is what veteran rewards are for. That privilege you speak so lightly of is from people who put in the hard work to have it. Work that most are not willing to do but for some reason feel just as entitled to it.

If you cannot put in that kind of effort, then you need to acknowledge where you are in the progression chain, which is not at the end. When I played WoW before raiding, I always saw characters who had this really top notch Heroic gear and sometimes Legendary weapon that really showed off who was the best of the best. I in no way felt entitled to that gear at all, I know that person sweat blood and tears to get to where he was at.

If I am going to stress myself out doing these really hard dance routine raids that a lot of times tests my patience, then yes I do deserve that privilege that casual players shouldn't have.

I'm not sure if you didn't read my whole post or if you're just ignoring it.I personally don't feel entitled to get the gear without doing anything for it, and if you get a super awesome "legendary" weapon or a certain item because you beat something super hard,I don't feel entitled to get it and I don't feel bad at all for not having it, but savage gives a WHOLE set of items that are unavailable to 90% of the players, it's not a single special item, it's a whole set and it gets farmed till everybody has theirs on each and every alt, so yea I don't think it should be anything else but a recolor with higher itemlevel, I do however think that there should be something else there as a reward at the end of savage aside from just a simple achievement.

Maybe it's because there generally is such a lack of choices when it comes to gear... There is always only ONE set of gear with a certain iLvl when a new patch comes out.
For me it makes sense there is a gap in iLvl between endgame and casual, but if you don't want a sour feeling over your effort not being meaningful, a casual or midcore player doesn't want to have that sour feeling either, and trust me, we have it too.
Grinding tomes is not rewarding, the gear that drops in the new dungeons is meaningless unless you have an army of alts to equip. By the time the weapon upgrade to i230 (7 weeks) is possible, we don't even "need" it to clear the content, since the iLvl is already high enough to faceroll through everything anyhow, the i240 upgrade now even more useless... we actually have even less to do than you.

[Velhart]

snip

My apologies. I was more going off on a rant not towards you after the first sentence. Should of clarified that.

For gear, if story mode and Savage continue being a thing, then perhaps they shouldn't drop gear in there but other items. Like just keep the key item you have to collect seven times and add a decent amount of tomestones. Because the only reason people go back in for story mode is gear and the key item to buy a weapon. Story mode is already borderline dead content after the first week so you have to be careful with it's rewards.