Quote Originally Posted by Zairava View Post
That's kinda part of the problem, though.

A lot of players, myself included, were hoping we would be able to have an alternate gearing source to savage via these dungeons when they were announced, but it instead adhered to the entire opposite.

I was looking forward to having hard[er] dungeons, but the content's purpose completely missed the mark for me. If it mandates retuning criterion normal, then fine by me. There's still Savage criterion if they want to put the crushing difficulty in.
The thing is none of these problems exists in a vacuum. Change one thing and you'll be impacting the life cycle of other content. They are very cautious about anything directly interfering with the early savage gearing system because, like it or not, loot lockouts do keep people engaging with particular content longer, and augments are among the rarest items that remain valuable the longest. All of these problems are connected to each other and at the end of the day nothing changes the fact that they did not create the Criterions to be a gear catch up system. There are already tons of gear catch up systems in the game and flipping this to be just another one of those will fix none of the inherent issues. Quite frankly I do not believe 99% of the people saying they would do this content if it gave them tome augments because why would they do savage difficulty combat instances that take hours to prog when they can already just brain off in an alliance raid or hunt train for exactly the same reward?