PAX EAST: I was the person that asked the "Challenging content" question at the end.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

I find the whole notion of 5 tiers of raid difficulty appalling. It ruined any desire to raid in WoW. Content that gets rehashed "but harder!" and then after you beat it you're expected to "do it again but even harder!" and then "do it yet again! Even harder than before!" is friggin stupid. It's an excuse to reuse the same content multiple times calling it additional content when it is anything but. Just because its "harder" and gives higher ilvl gear doesn't make it new content. It's an insult to me as a consumer and I hope SE never decides to listen suggestions of the sort. FFXIV doesn't need that. You want "challenging" "five-difficulty" "content"? Go play WoW or some other game that offers such "content". It was a terrible design decision for WoW (imo) and I'd be truly heartbroken if they ever implemented it here.

Savage difficulty should be the "challenging content". There doesn't need to be 5 different difficulties. Regular difficulty for the story and people not looking for a "challenge" and Savage for those who are. That's more than enough. Can SE adjust the difficulty of Savage to make it more challenging? Sure. Ask them for that. But for the love of Hydalen please don't ask them to turn FFXIV into a Raid or Die model.

Raiding is niche content as far as I'm concerned, and resources are better devoted elsewhere than for rehashes of existing raids and giving multiple ilvl jumps between them just to incentivize people to actually do it. Such resources would be far better spent adding more story, more quality of life features, more jobs, more quests, more music, more dungeons, more of anything and everything BUT raids, in my opinion.

Raiding has its place. It's a small place, but it has it. It doesn't get neglected by any measure. It gets exactly the amount of focus it deserves from my perspective. I'm hoping that doesn't change.