Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[zosia]

Ok wait, but isn't the gear from alex savage higher iLvl? I mean you got your i240 a while ago, no? And the weapon is i245, the highest in the game? Correct me if I'm wrong.
I guess they would do better if the iLvl doesn't jump so much with each patch, have alex normal be i220 then tomegear be i230, savage i240 with i245 weapon, then after some month the general public gets to upgrade their stuff to i235 and weapon to i240 for example, then raidgear would actually ALWAYS be better... and it wouldn't actually matter for the general playerbase at all... because all the other content is easily beatable with i220 or less anyhow...

My main gripe with odd number patches (3.1, 3.3, 3.5 someday) is that there is no new raid gear, so standardizing the item level is not needed. "Catch up" gear is not needed while the current tier is still relevant. I would have even been fine with augmented upgrade items coming from niddhog EX. But standardizing everyone's gear when the next alex raid has not even come out is asinine.

I'll be honest, if raiders would actually get REALLY awesome completely newly designed gear SETS I'd be upset (simply because of all the recycling that happens with gear in general), but higher iLVL plus maybe a super shiny i245 weapon or something I'd find totally acceptable.

Well, I would prepare yourself to get upset. Lets do a quick thought experiment shall we...

The dev team knows the rewards for savage are poor. The dev team also wants to avoid any performance gaps between raiders and non-raiders. If I am lead producer that does not want to create ilvl disparities but I know I need to increase raid rewards, I would, of course, choose to double down on cosmetic rewards.

I would put into this game some of the best looking raid sets that the player base has ever seen and I would gate them behind savage. That's how games like GW2 operate. Since gear is virtually meaningless, the best cosmetic rewards come from challenging end game content. I would bet 10 million gil on the notion that this is the kind of conversation Yoshida is having with his team about 4.0 as we speak.

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.

I think most of us would just settle for an Ilvl bump and savage and normal being complete disassociated for eachother, meaning raiders don't have to run normal for prog and Normal will have no impact on Savage. Just let them exists as two separate stand alone entities.

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.

This is what all the white knight-ing back in ARR afforded us. People wanted a game that they could play for 20 mins a night. do one 24 man a week, and stay current with the end game. When you have a player base that WANTS that kind of meta, you end up with dungeons that have no teeth, content that is boring after two weeks, and an endgame that lacks any substance what so ever.

This is what a casual 20 min a day MMO looks like. This is what the casual players wanted. Content that could be completed in a casual time frame on the casual player's terms. /shrug

We do actually already have a loose precedent for this in the rewards from The Feast's ranked mode.

Admittedly it's hard to say that's hard evidence that they'd move in that direction, because PvP's rewards in general are even less impactful than Savage's due to the item level caps, but it does show that they're willing to institute glamour sets as the ultimate reward for a particular type of content.

I often think of this, thanks for pointing it out. SE should extend the feast ranking system to raid rewards. I am not a game dev, so I can't say for sure how such a system should translate to PvE. I think we see mechanisms in wow like this where vanity mounts from HC/Mythic are guaranteed to drop while the content is relevant but are reduced to 1% drops once the next expansion comes out.

Maybe the gobwalker and fauslet should not have a 100% drop rate come the expansion. But honestly, that's small potatoes for me. I don't care who goes back to alex in 4.0 to farm vanity items.