Quote Originally Posted by RiyahArp View Post
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Why don’t we just think of Expert as practice for Savage/Ex fights? With everything we’ve seen thus far, there are plenty of mechanics that could be brought in. Widen your scope a little bit. You don’t need to have enemies one or two shotting players. Since we don’t have crowd control abilities ourselves, why not let the enemies have them? You’re right, healers are capable of fixing pretty much any mistake.

So how do you fix that?

Hit all characters with Infirmary. Or give the healers an HP penalty down debuff from an enemy that is never in a fixed location for players to be prepared for ahead of time. Things like that. Hit tanks with vuln stacks. Start giving DPS some damage down debuffs and start a hard DPS check. Have some bosses use skills specific to the jobs in a party. Throw in a mechanic that resets aggro, forcing players to use their enmity dumps.

There are so many ways you can increase difficulty without going the tired route of ‘this boss hits so much harder…healers, top him off’. There’s room to bring in some very interesting ways of beating a boss. I loved the second boss in Bardam’s Mettle, because it was 100% pure mechanics and no DPS. Honestly, I dunno what happens if everybody fails It, but stuff like that would be great in Expert. Not the 100% mechanics part, but something similar where it is unique.

Aurum Vale was punishing because by this point, it is ingrained into players to push forward no matter what. Qarn forced you to do mechanics, because if you didn’t, a lot healers were not capable of saving a wipe at that point. Same with Brayflox…you needed AOEs to be efficient at getting the bombs the hell away from the party.

Ex trials are not expert dungeons…they’re trials. Don’t wanna mess with the rewards there. But with actual expert dungeons, set the item level to about 5 below the latest ex trial. And again, I have to emphasize giving good incentives for completing it. Yeah, maybe players will ignore harder, optional dungeons – just like players ignore SSS…but the option would be there. You’re right, you can’t force players to do hard content…but if you put the option out there, at the very least, it will do a better job of allowing players to be prepared for what they will see in the hard fights.

Who thinks everything is easy? I certainly never said that. A lot of raiders that we’ve talked to on many occasions don’t think that either. I mean, shoot, I just got completely owned by Byakko tonight, and I’ve cleared it several dozen times. Twitch streamers who have gotten through Ultimate and are capable of clearing the latest Savage raid in days may find everything easy, but a lot of us here on the forums who actively raid don’t find everything easy. The ones who find everything easy are a small minority that probably don’t even have the desire to check these forums, and thus they are not included in my original discussion topic, nor are they relevant in this topic.