Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[Brian_]

snip.

It's fine to clamor around the "git gud" mentality, however we're looking at a 1.16% clear rate. That is utterly abysmal to the extent the devs are literally wasting their time with Savage. Demands for player improvement to this extreme is being met with "Nah. It's not fun. I'll do something else." No matter how you divvy it up, people rarely fancy instant death mechanics or being routinely punished due to a razor thin margins for error. Citing Elysium means little because they are a step above almost everyone else. You do not balance content around hardcore players, especially world progression types. They make up among the smallest percentage of your fanbase.

You can blame NA/EU individuality all you fancy, but there comes a point when you have to look at the content itself. If enough people aren't enjoying it, then it's failed to accomplish the intended goal. NA/EU tend to be far more picky regarding their content consumption hence why grinds are frequently vilified this side of the ocean yet more acceptable in JP. Square has to cater to both mindsets, lest they continue to see content ignored by a massive portion of their audience.

I never said the clear rates for Savage were fine.

I was saying that it's a fallacy that you can't recover from mistakes in Savage, that Savage is just a game of memorization that trivializes strategy, that you can't carry people through Savage, raid with who you want, or even PuG it.

And, my point about Elysium seems to have been misinterpreted multiple times. I thought my point was quite clear. Even during world-first progression with 20 less ilevels worth of gear, Elysium could afford to make mistakes and use an arguably inefficient strategy. Yes, they're world first players. But, you have 20 more ilevels worth of gear and significantly more optimized strategies.

For example, I'm a mid-core raider in a mid-core static. We use strategies to negate mechanical errors that Elysium's world-first team couldn't do for the lack of gear. We cheese P1 discoid orbs and wipe stacks with missile stacking. That's something you can only do with higher eHP from your left sides. We tank LB3 to trivialize the stacking mechanics in intermission 2 so you basically only need to worry about the enumeration positioning. That's a strategy Elysium couldn't do because they needed their LB3 to push DPS on Winged Justice. We sac our water in P7 because even with weakness, they have enough HP to live through J-waves until we kill. That's another strategy Elysium (arguably) couldn't do.

Yes, you have to look at the content. Unfortunately, very few in this topic actually are. The majority are just lying through their teeth about it or are horribly misinformed. If you want to actually fix Savage, you might want to start by understanding the truth about the content first. Most people here don't do the content, don't understand the content, and feel like they're qualified to talk about how it should change. They don't even know what they're changing.