Criterion normal should drop Savage-equivalent gear.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

It would be fine given how late it usually releases and the difficulty of the content, but it does depend on the timing. But the timing has sort of varied, with 2 of them coming after the last savage tier suddenly. So it's not consistent that every tier even follows with a criterion currently.

I think the reason Criterion Savage exists is because they were trying to replicate Mythic+ where "content gets harder as you progress" but it's still the same content. It just seems that people who play this game don't really care for that concept after all.

Yeah I feel like they just added a savage version just because 8-man raids also have a savage version. High end raiders don’t do content just end side it has has (Savage) in the name, they prog that content because they enjoy learning new mechanics. Criterion savage doesn’t provide that because it is just a more punishing version of the same mechanics, so it ends up actually being tedious for people who already did normal

[Jeeqbit]

Yeah I feel like they just added a savage version just because 8-man raids also have a savage version.

I don't think they added it for that reason. There were requests for 4-person content "like mythic+ from WoW" for a few years. The requests were sustained and very common, both on these forums and throughout the game. What people would say about the Mythic system in WoW is that content would scale up health and damage to make it progressively more challenging.

So what I believe is that Criterion Savage is SE's version of "scaling up health and damage" like in WoW. It's just that, once again, this concept confuses players in this game because they aren't used to it.

I haven't played WoW, but this is what everybody used to say about it when they were requesting it and it seems like this is SE's version of that.