Going to the same route as WoW. The game is TOO easy

[ForteNightshade]

FFXIV already has a nice progression of difficulty from dungeon to normal trial/raid to alliance raid to extreme trial to savage raid to ultimate. If people want more difficult light party content, I'd rather they bring back light party trial than some kind of extreme mode for dungeon, and certainly not some kind of mythic+ style race-against-time dungeon run.

It actually doesn't. FFXIV has very noticeable difficulty spikes with little ebb and flow. Dungeons and normal modes are brain dead simple with very few exceptions while EXs have been all over the place. You have Shinryu, who could actually kick your teeth in followed by... Byakko, who is arguably one of the easiest Primals the game ever released; Lakshmi takes that title. Savage does something similar with Alte Roite having no business being labeled Savage while Halicarnassus is a massive jump over Catastrophe. Ultimate is on a whole different level that utterly dwarfs current Savage. Neo, Godka and Final are not even close to the sheer mechanical dance and demand of Bahamut, Nael and Ultima.

With that all said, I think the important factor to keep in mind is what Sebazy touched upon above. While I do think the challenge needs to go up on the casual side, it shouldn't be a quantum leap ahead. For example, Migard will not cast Tail End (his buster) until more than half way into his fight on normal. He literally does almost nothing to the tanks. I don't think it's unreasonable to say this isn't good design. You're a tank and could take every CD off your bar and live just fine in that fight. So what should change? I would like to see more tank swaps and enrages—the latter especially. It puts some actual responsibility on the DPS in lieu of having 24 mans or normal modes where you can just throw bodies at the boss until it kneels over provided a healer or RDM/SMN lives.

Put another way. I would like content to better reward effort instead of rewarding participation.

[linay]

Put another way. I would like content to better reward effort instead of rewarding participation.

Not going to touch on the difference between Savage encounters as well as Savage and Ultimate, but I think the other contents are still within reason even with any "spikes" in difficulty. That said, I can agree with rewarding more (good) effort.