SE: Please enable echo way earlier on savage tier...

[Caro178]

Isnt echo usually pretty late? I dont remember them abandoning it.

How much would it actually change for p12? Superchain 2a and b incidents would be more salvageable I guess.

Dont see how it would change anything on phase 2. UAV 2 is a joke of a mechanic. And the rest of the fight is almost completely unsalvageable anyway (unless you are a shape criminal).

Yeah, echo is always late. This is the normal pace. I'm sure it will be added sometime between 6.55 and 6.58 as it always is during the final raid tier. The echo will last until the next expansion as a means of making the content a bit easier and potentially more appealing to folks who didn't want to try it when it was new. They will also receive the benefit of the last better than current bis relic weapons for an extra damage boost.

And yeah, this is another case where echo ain't gonna help the average player skip anything of relevance. 2A and 2B are already easy mechanics and UAV2 has been a half skippable joke since week 1. Just like E12S where echo let your average group skip everything after lions and terminal relativity.

[OgruMogru]

Echo isn't gonna do jack for bodycheck mechanics either

[Caro178]

Echo isn't gonna do jack for bodycheck mechanics either

Nope, and that's the design intent. SE only has two options here when it comes to balancing difficulty: body checks that force cancel progress until the whole group performs a mechanic correctly or dps checks that are so high recovered deaths mean you won't clear anyway. Body checks have been the preferred philosophy for a few expansions now. Without them content would be considered too easy. And yeah, it absolutely means echo is more a benefit for healers than anything else. Everyone is less likely to die due to lack of HP or mitigation.

[OgruMogru]

Nope, and that's the design intent. SE only has two options here when it comes to balancing difficulty: body checks that force cancel progress until the whole group performs a mechanic correctly or dps checks that are so high recovered deaths mean you won't clear anyway. Body checks have been the preferred philosophy for a few expansions now. Without them content would be considered too easy. And yeah, it absolutely means echo is more a benefit for healers than anything else. Everyone is less likely to die due to lack of HP or mitigation.

yupyup! I personally prefer more emphasis on DPS checks because at least even with deaths and an inevitable enrage you get to see all the way to the end of a fight without having the plug pulled on the whole encounter. but both are a "necessary evil" and I've got no problem with the logic behind either. But I'm masochistic and would happily grind myself into dust practicing something over and over and I know that's beyond a lot of people's limit of patience XD

[Colt47]

In World of Warcraft I remember this exact problem back during the first five expansions and specifically Cataclysm and Pandaria. Before they added the lower difficulties to end game a lot of people were sort of forced into engaging in content that was of high difficulty, even when they didn't want to or didn't find it engaging, because the rewards they were after were only available from that content. That is the issue that Savage currently has, and the idea of running off a time-locked cycle with a single difficulty setting generally doesn't work well when there is no other way to achieve that reward. This problem is also not one that is easily visible to development teams because by metric it will always look like the content is healthy or well received if one goes by people participating in it. WoWs issue is that they fixed the problem way too late and the community had already become extremely toxic. Folks basically had to stay with a group due to point and merit systems enforced by guilds, mods were necessary in raiding life, and parsing was an open house. The only positive was that due to the exclusivity, people were usually not shuffled around or abandoned readily because finding a replacement was a long in tooth venture.

The other thread that is discussing the problem with content being too easy is the other end of the problem, where normal content that is dated has become so easy that all mechanics are being ignored for the most part. Even in current content people are able to outgun the fights in end-game by miles and it's been that way even during Shadowbringers, as the stuff in expert roulette is almost universally easier than the stuff in leveling roulette. E.g. look at the last boss in this current expert and compare him to Hermes in Ktisis Hyperboreia. Both fights are at normal difficulty, but Hermes definitely has more lethality than Durante.

[Colt47]

You will literally get "Epic Echo" in the next expansion, regardless. Item level will increase. It will be alright.

...yes, they are. If someone needs The Echo because it's too hard, that is literally because of a lack of skill, unless they have some sort of disability.

They have not said there was a screw up in difficulty, though. They test the content before they release it and Yoshi-P does personal checks of it and if he doesn't like it, he asks them to change it or redo it.

Echo should not be there until the next tier at the earliest and fortunately, that is how it seems to be.

Waiting until next expansion is pointless when people are trying to do the content now. It's not about who is better or not at this point, people are smacking themselves against a wall way too long on content that has been around for several months. People who wanted this stuff done for the merit of saying they did the hard content already cleared it on month 4 back in Mid September. I was a big supporter of the idea that we can wait for content to cycle out and then do it when it is no longer current, but that is not the same thing as having your current content scale so that people complete the content in a reasonable time. 10% echo wont help against body checks but it will make it so people can more consistently get to where they need to in order to progress.

As for why "this is not a skill issue", for one: I'm saying that because saying it is "a skill issue" implies that the one writing that knows what is going on in the other persons life. It's also implying that people who have not cleared the content yet are somehow inferior in their capabilities of learning over those who did, without considering how much time they have to study, what hours they are engaging in the content in, and how often they can afford to meet up. Someone who is doing this during the late hours of the day and only has an hour at best to study before going to a savage is going to take longer than someone going in from the morning and taking multiple days off from work to complete it. IMO if players are still dying to p12s on month 7 when on almost all other tiers prior to this, people generally were able to clear month 6 or sooner, there's kind of a problem.

Likewise, I've ran into a disagreement on what skill means in terms of these conversations a lot. If the definition of skill is someone doing the fight well, most of the people are doing the parts of the fight they have learned fine, the reason they are getting blocked is the fact that a single person in the group so much as messing up can chain kill the party. With 8 people that means anyone who makes a mistake even if they are just tired is going to result in the entire group being held back. If a person can execute all mechanics correctly 7/8 times in p12s p1, how is that not skilled? if you got 8 people in a group and each of them has that success to failure rate, the entire group could easily not clear p12s p1 on a night to get to phase 2. That and confusion over where someone should be standing because people were positioned differently on the prior night also factors into this. Is it a skill issue if someone who has been group 1 melee has to get shifted to group 2 for melee on a fight and the group wipes because of it? Probably not, that is more of an organization issue.

To put it simply: A skill is something that is applied to multiple areas. Learning a savage fight is reading a picture book and remembering every single picture in it, to the point you can flip instantly to the right page when needed. Nothing carries over to anything else outside of that one thing since each savage fight is its own book. Hence, someone can learn a savage fight, but they aren't suddenly becoming "more skilled" at savage in general. Even DPS in these fights are linked to the learning of the fight and not to someone's skill at playing the game in a broad sense.

[Jeeqbit]

Waiting until next expansion is pointless when people are trying to do the content now.

They are trying to do it in a legitimate way now. Unsyncing and echo is for people who want to cheese it and ignore mechanics because they aren't raiders and they will get that when the tier is over as item level caps increase.

It's not about who is better or not at this point, people are smacking themselves against a wall way too long on content that has been around for several months.

Lots of people are just beginning the content, all the time. New players reach max level and start it, or return to the game after a long time and start it.

As for why "this is not a skill issue", for one: I'm saying that because saying it is "a skill issue" implies that the one writing that knows what is going on in the other persons life. It's also implying that people who have not cleared the content yet are somehow inferior in their capabilities of learning over those who did, without considering how much time they have to study, what hours they are engaging in the content in, and how often they can afford to meet up. Someone who is doing this during the late hours of the day and only has an hour at best to study before going to a savage is going to take longer than someone going in from the morning and taking multiple days off from work to complete it. IMO if players are still dying to p12s on month 7 when on almost all other tiers prior to this, people generally were able to clear month 6 or sooner, there's kind of a problem.

I mean, whether you want to say it's about skill or not, the point is that many other people have managed to clear it without the Echo and therefore the people who have yet to do so can as well, again, unless there is some sort of disability preventing them being able to. If nobody was able to clear it, then nerfs or buffs would make sense, but we haven't seen those sort of complaints like we did with P8S.

the reason they are getting blocked is the fact that a single person in the group so much as messing up can chain kill the party.

Welcome to high-end content. That has been a frustration with high-end content since the game began. Literally even in Heavensward, that was frustrating, that you had 7 people doing it perfectly but that 1 person ruined the run and left you wiping for hours to mechanics you can do flawlessly. We've probably all run into it many times doing this content, but it doesn't change the fact that someone in the content is not "skilled" enough yet at it, or however you want to put it.

A frustration we have had since the beginning of the game should not suddenly be "solved" with nerfs and Echo buffs to current tier content.

[Colt47]

Heavensward was definitely worse than what we are dealing with right now. Right now the systems they have to deal with competency in a fight are busted because normally, the gear people get eases the burden on mechanics and makes it possible to clear a fight even if someone has a combination of damage down punishments or deaths. Lions prog was bad in PF back in e12s but it is not as bad as p12s p1. And for all the tightening they have done with the stat squish to increase the amount of control they have it feels like the developers have even fewer controls now to deal with this than they did prior.

Also, it is true that chain deaths are a thing in savage and have been from the start. The issue is the number of points that it can happen even with the gear increase. We don't have broken levels of defense or HP anymore like we did back before the stat squish, so all their tools they relied on to handle easing the gates towards the next major patch or expansion are failing.

[Maltothoris]

Well not sure about adding echo early but what I think they need to do is unlock the fighters earlier now. With the extended patches cycles now it just a more boring and repetitious with clearing the same fights over and over again. So instead of being unlocked in the odd x.x8 of their I think the fights need to be unlocked in the x.x5 of the odd patch.

[Tiramu]

Whats the point in Savage if youre going to make it easy woth Echo, I wouldnt run it with echo in the first place.