Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[KaldeaSahaline]

Firstly - let me clarify one point. With respects to the OP yes - I agree 100% you can make content more difficult without it being Savage difficulty. I've posted a few times earlier in this post, and even cited an example of a boss fight changed to fit that paradigm. However, we ended up getting off topic thanks to Riyah. While what he said was OT with respect to the OP. I still stand by the defense of his statement.

The more players there are, the greater chance of mistakes being made, and the more likeliness of "dead weight" so to speak. In a 4-player dungeon, you should not be able to "dead weight" anyone

Agreed. I should have been more clear in my previous response. My intent was for you to identify why you personally think that making 4 man content the hardest content available (instead of their current decision of 8) would be better.

Realistically, the kind of "hard" mechanics you want to drop on a 4-player team are that which removes a player (eg fetters/gaol) from action if a major mechanic is ignored. eg fetter the tank, then the boss goes after the healer. Fetter the healer, tank can't free them, and the DPS has to free the healer. Fetter the DPS, the other DPS has to free them. If the tank or healer try to free a fettered DPS, then they neglect their roles, and create a failure situation. This is just one example of where the roles during a boss would need to be more rigidly enforced.

In your example - what is the "failed major mechanic" that spawns the fetter? An example would be helpful to understand your concept.

Why couldn't a tank help free a gaoled/fettered healer?

Mechanic failure rates typically scale with player count because each player adds a potential point of failure.

As player count scales down, the content difficulty can increase and still maintain the expected clear rate, while increasing player participation because it's easier to find a group. Theoretically, the most difficult content could be made for solo players but with the limited toolkit a single player has, there wouldn't be a lot for the designers to work with. The smallest party size seems like the sweet spot.

Agreed - I should have been more clear. See my response above to Kisa for more clarification.

That said - you actually kind of touched on something that further corroborates my statement. The limited toolkit significantly hampers the viability of "challenging/engaging" solo content. This parallels with my statement that 4 man suffers from the same issue (namely in the tank/healer department). This is why I mentioned earlier that I felt 8 man was the better choice than 4 man. What types of 4 man mechanics can you design that are engaging/fun to tanks/healers?

Examples would be helpful here.

Well, the thing I was replying to was specifically the idea that in that case, if the healer gets put into a ghost then it's an automatic wipe. Which isn't true. People can do stuff. If it's tuned so high that there's no room for error than perhaps not, but there's a fairly wide gap between that and "it's literally impossible to fail this" that we had in 4.0 expert. I think there's plenty of room to close up the gap without it being "someone missed a thing, wipe it". Especially with the ghosts, where in a dungeon context you'd really just need to be able to buy time for the healer to get back and then carry on.

Tuning is always harder with less people because of the wider variables involved, but that's not really justification to say "everything has to be faceroll", which is what I was getting from Riyah.

That's kind of our point though. As you lessen the ability to layer mechanics because of less available targets per responsibility it becomes more binary. Normally you'd offset this with a more robust toolkit/decision making and choice, but that isn't an option in the current design constraints. If it was an option I would agree with you 100%.

I touched on this above - I agree 100% that you can make things harder without being savage. You've even seen my Motherbit example that I think accomplishes that philosophy quite well. However, Riyah in all his ridiculous exaggeration went OT and that is what we were responding too.

I still agree with his assessment that given the games design, it really isn't that feasible to create a fun savage equivalent in 4 man content without considerable changes due to tank/healer design.

None of that needs to disappear with a 4-man. Where complexity is lost over the reduction in n network of players positioning around each other (which tends to be overstated unless preparation for the mechanic or mechanic prior failed to some degree), the latter can be emphasized.

What latter? I think you didn't finish your thought here.

Let's say you have a fight from which a given player may (or must) be snatched/separated, leaving the others to fend for themselves. Assuming a strong DPS check, this is of approximately equal risk overall, but the most notable examples will doubtless be the loss of healer or a tank. If you make each hit or frequent hard-hitting special instead a split AoE (iirc, there have been 3-4 examples of this in 8-mans already), then the party can survive the temporary loss of a tank and the impending chain-kills with proper heals on a "MT" dps and "OT" dps swaps, just as a party could survive the loss of healer if topped off prior through said swaps, and a party short of a DPS could pop an extra CD or two and go full tank/healer ham on the DPS check (which, as it is not the final enrage, is meant solely to force a point of decision and commitment thereto in order to add dynamics to the way the fight is handled, not in itself to test DPS throughput under normal conditions).

Your example mechanic is incredibly unclear (a result of your haste to get out the door I assume). I just don't think the jobs have the tools to do what you're entailing.

If a solo player gets grabbed what are they doing while they're detained? While a given player is detained what is happening elsewhere? How long is a player detained for? Does that impact change based on which role gets snagged?

DPS don't really have clean tools to swap threat, and if the damage is low enough that a healer can sustain it on them, how trivial would it be on the tank?

Control over DPS really doesn't exist in this game. It's very hard to conserve CDs, or pool resources.

I'd be interested if you could throw up a rough draft example encounter. As for guidelines - grab a random dungeon boss and make it into a savage equivalent encounter (yes I know this is OT). You can make a thread just for me I'll find/read it.