Yoshida, The Creator: Savage is the worst tuning ever in an MMO

[CookieMonsta]

That... actually sounds like a terrible difficulty system. The flaw is that the challenge is completely temporary. It's wholly possible to clear content and get the best gear without learning a damn thing, and your high-level gear will make up for everything by the time a player has access to it.

Just my 2cents.

Umm no, thats not quite how it works. A lot of the people commenting here haven't got a damn clue what they are talking about and they mostly haven't even gotten that far in Savage. Unless you come back when the raid is obsolete with a crazy ilevel advantage (e.g. 40+) then maybe ur statement is valid. A3S, A4S and A8S were still extremely challenging (to the point of borderline impossible for midcore/casual groups) even with BiS gear of the time.

Hardcore raiding is too small of a population to cater to. If they're allotting resources to something, they want more than 1% of the population to experience it.

While I'm all for a larger raiding community and more accessible endgame content. It actually isn't that difficult to cater to the hardcore crowd. IIRC someone several posts earlier mentioned that the WoW devs basically designed their raids for LFR and did simple mods and scaling to make it more hardcore. All up it was something like 5% more resources for 5% of the audience. Not a bad deal compared to designing a full fresh tier of casual 24 mans for the masses.

The problem is that new fights and taking away phases do not equate. Every new fight needs to be concepted, assets need to be made, and the fight needs to be programmed (hell, they even need to add more quest chains to get into the fights), then increase the workload by taking into account both normal and savage. While more bosses would be nice, it is not as easy as you imply (although Yoshi has said that they only need 2 more members on the battle team in order to "vastly" improve raids, whatever that means).

Unfortunately, I think this is the ultimate issue of mechanics heavy Savage raids. Gordias never had this issue because the mechanics were simple but derived its difficulty from tough numbers. The community responded badly and thus we have the new format, programming has limits so sometimes it is better to have a phase as skippable to prevent bugs and other unintended effects (e.g. T7S).