The difficulty curve in the game has... problems...

[Issaella]

I'm gonna second others here -- I genuinely think you're overestimating the difficulty of savage.

I really don't think I am to be honest. For background, I played WoW from vanilla-Panda before mostly throwing in the towel on that one. For most raid tiers you got a gradual reduction in difficulty over the course of the current tier due to increased gear level making mechanics less dangerous. You would then see people near the end of the tier start moving past bosses that that previously were a wall. In short, you could brute-force the mechanics near the end with numbers at least in the heroic - low mythic range. I, personally, think this is a much better progression. If I put the time and effort in I can at least expect to get something I've been working towards for weeks/months.

From the outside looking in at current Savages that is just not something that happens. If you are at a wall, you are at a wall until the next expansion comes out and you can so heavily outgear it as to trivialize it. The number off pass/fail mechanics with instant death in the current raids makes overgearing meaningless in terms of difficulty reduction. Just looking at p2s alone (the one I would like to do for a couple glam pieces) there are 4 or 5 "screw up and die / screw up and wipe" mechanics alone. So regardless of gear, if you can't get it right every single time you have little to no chance of success. Maintaining that level of concentration and attention for hours upon hours of prog with low probability of success -since everyone else in every group you join must also be performing at the same level- is so prohibitive (IMO) as to make engaging with it seem like an insurmountable task. Especially considering that the only people doing at this point are the people who haven't been able to clear it in the 4 months since it was released. Again, making the likelihood of success, even if you can eventually do the mechanics, essentially zero in my view.

[KariTheFox]

I mean, I don't think the only people doing savage are people who can't clear. I personally know a fair few high end players who enjoy just teaching fights to players who haven't cleared them before.

I'd suggest putting up a 1-0 chest learning party on PF and see how many bored raiders you get bites from.

But yeah, at this point in the tier making learning with only people who haven't gotten a clear seems unwise.

[histoireancienne]

*snip*

Your bigger issue seems to be with the randomness of who shows up for a PF group late in a tier. It is ABSOLUTELY true that even when a tier is *current*, if you have a competent group that knows the mechs, while gear won't let you "steamroll" a fight, it can cover for everything from "oops, I put my toe in that bad puddle" to "whoops, 3 DPS are dead to one mechanic." I went & looked up the last P2S clear my static had back in March & we had 5 deaths, including one where 3 of us got nuked for reasons I'm too lazy to discern, but we cleared (and my static did not use the "braindead" PF tank lb3 solution for one of the mechs that seemed to have caused a lot of problems for PF, so).

But, contrary to your assertion, it is also absolutely true in this game that even with a new expac, Echo, and gear + levels, you will still have to know mechanics for some fights. I dare you to go into E12S right now with a fresh group of 90s who've never seen the fight & clear the first pull. I guess you might get lucky, but I went into O8S (a SB raid - so TWO expansions ago) today with some FC-mates to get UWU unlocked for someone, and we were absolutely expecting to have to at least do *some* mechanics, since you do have to know how to solve the mechanics you come up against (we steamrollered it with a full group of 8, but if we'd been 5 or 6, we'd have to have known at least ONE of the "big mechanics"). I don't think that's a bad thing - because of the way Savage fights in this game are made, as a very choreographed fight. Nothing is a surprise: it's just learning how to deal with X, Y, and Z mechanics in relation to your role & your party. But in the current tier, gear (even just the jump from 580 to 600) means that DPS can survive more, healers can heal for more, DPS is just generally higher so a death or 2 won't mean an enrage, etc.

I agree that there's a lack of ramp up from normal -> extreme -> savage difficulty in this game, as in, the game doesn't teach you how to be better. I only GOT better by stepping foot into the content and doing it (low-stakes - doing previous tiers, not current stuff, but still things within the current expac) with more experienced players who were happy to teach and help people improve. Which has been my general experience with "hardcore" raiders in this game - a lot of them love teaching. And boy, can a party of 2 or 3 experienced people willing to teach drag a gaggle of relative sprouts through "hard," mostly on-level content if need be, and then insist on teaching them how to improve. I've seen it in action. I wouldn't have started raiding if it hadn't been for experiences like that.