Quote Originally Posted by SieyaM View Post
I would guess that this is the result of having so much of the combat being scripted without deviation. It feels to me that combat in XIV is more about memorizing a pattern and executing it and not about knowing how your abilities work and when it's appropriate to use them. Jobs have very static rotations to follow without deviation and once an encounter has been learned it is simply repeating it.
The truth is that the vast majority of people who do PF savage are not the same kind of people that do savage week 1 - week 4. The main difference is in mind-set as those who are doing week 1-4 generally aren't just blindly saying "go see video and shut up" which seems to be the mentality of the PF and a lot of statics that take a long time to clear. The fights are static, but the variable is the person and the people around them, so the real challenge in savage is identifying the pattern and then working out and making sure everyone knows what they are doing. It's not that savage suddenly becomes mid-core content later on, it's that for some people it is mid-core and others it is hard-core, and the only real measuring stick is how many hours they need before the people in the group finally figure out what they are supposed to do in relation to one another. Technically, if we go by mid-core being the ability to skip mechanics, then the first tier is the only one that really becomes mid-core under the new gear crunch and possibly the first two fights of the second tier.