The general player base needs to improve

[RiyahArp]

There is no gradually in this. You either make it so that the dungeons harshly punish mistakes or they don't. Healers like to say it doesn't matter how low your HP is so long as you are still alive; we have boss attacks that knock people down to under ten HP. You can stand in the fire for virtually all the bosses in expert and survive a hit. We already have gradual or slow examples of one-hit attacks; Nidhogg Hard will wipe you at starting ilvl if you don't react to aoes. Hashmal will wipe you too. These things are both required and apparently do not prepare the player base.

The only way it will work is to essentally make bosses similar to Nid Hard, but increase both the speed of his attacks and and the severity of the dps checks. Both of these need to be hard enough to wipe the party in a way that prevents people from carrying others through it; even if you are a good healer or tank, the DPS have to make the checks or stay alive, or otherwise its just a carry. You can make the total amount of mechanics small, and maybe some leeway; if you get hit by Arbuda's counters or attacks two times with two players you all wipe, for example. But you cannot do this dumb "gradual and optional" stuff; you're shrinking away from the fact that to git gud means people need to fail and fail hard if they aren't gud.

And considering a lot of the complaining is more about ex and savage farms, either you accept a lot of players simply won't be gud, or you make the casual game hard enough to funnel the players who aren't gud out. If you think everyone can be savage caliber, you are mistaken. If you aren't happy with the current playerbase, who does manage to do most casual content fine, and want them to be better in some undefined way, well define it or you are being useless. You can't balance things on undefined quantities.