Do encounteres (specifically Extremes) FEEL different now?

[Jeeqbit]

I think if they introduced fights like Barbariccia, E8S, and P3/P8S in HW/SB it would have decimated the community the same way Gordias almost did.

A11S was similar to P3S in many respects though and it was quite a wall for a lot of people. It was the birthplace of limit cut. It didn't decimate the community.

A12S had some simpler stuff mixed in such as donuts and adds but it was a lot harder because we didn't have things like gap closers or all the mitigations we have now (and a lot of mitigation didn't work against magic). It still managed to have its own sort of High Concept and people managed it.

It helps that for the creator tier we eventually got cross-world party finder and the game's population has grown as well. When trying it on a single world you were meeting the same people over and over in every party or felt you had to get into a raid FC, whereas the diversity now means you can find a party that makes less mistakes making them more approachable.

It's also worth bringing up the fact they got a lot of raid mechanics and eventually made them dungeon mechanics. One example I remember well was that in A10S there was a mechanic where you had to stop moving. In the next major patch, a dungeon released with that same mechanic and they have consistently brought mechanics down into dungeons, sometimers a bit simpler than they were in savage, slowly making these older mechanics nothing to people.