Quote Originally Posted by ForteNightshade View Post
This is quite literally the definition of lacking skill, sweetheart. You (general) aren't yet capable of beating P12S without several deaths and/or damage downs, thus needing the game to give you a free 10-20% boost to overcome that deficiency. Now let me be clear. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. Especially for those inexperienced with the higher difficulty of Savage. But it is a skill issue. Like others have already brought up, you have access to nearly full i660 nowadays, which is significantly higher than people clearing it before did. Therefore, the fights have already been "nerfed".

Even without echo, you aren't going to skip the actual hard mechanics in P12S. All of them are situated in such a way, you'll never kill beforehand. And most of them are body checks. You're not completing Classical Elements until everyone understands how the shapes and 180 degree rotation works nor are you getting by "Limit Cut" with deaths prior to the last pair. Echo may allow for a few extra deaths but it's not going to change much when the vast majority of people still struggling with Savage are making mechanical mistakes not dying to enrage.

It should also be noted, the "running joke" has nothing to do with echo. People asking for Savage to be unlocked earlier simply want the gear restriction removed so they can subsequently gear and play more jobs. In fact, several of those same people would prefer echo didn't happen until 7.0 to preserve the fight's difficulty curve.
The problem with calling this a skill problem is that in reality, this is talking about 8 people having to executing a series of tasks in a proper order. A persons personal skill has nothing to do with completing these fights as I can assure you, even if someone has cleared this and farmed it 50+ times over, if they go join a learning group on Caloric 1 they are not clearing that fight. Also, to be clear people getting stuck on the first phase of the final fight of a tier is pretty normal considering how bad the door bosses usually are. However, even on p8s p1 the break points were not like this. You could still clear the fight if one or two people died during transitions that happen in the second half, but people here have short memories and don't seem to remember it. With p12s the vast majority of the fight is built so that no one can really afford to be dead. The only option is to literally boost damage to the point they can skip a phase and even then, it's still going to be just as difficult to get to phase 2 because so many people mess up on mechanics that can kill on phase 1.

Last night I went into a Caloric 1 prog, and even with executing everything perfectly, I can't get to phase 2 if player 1 derps on paradigma 2 by standing in the wrong place, player 6 dies on paradigma 3 and the tower goes to the wrong spot, player 3 ends up falling over during limit cut and the extra damage knocks out two other people, someone misses a tower on superchain 1 despite the fact we're supposed to be in Caloric 1 prog, and then everyone gets so worn down that the people who know what they are doing start making mistakes. If this was within the first four months of content, fine. We're not in the first four months of content we are on month 7.

And the reason that we got here to begin with, is because Harrowing Hell and the crap that went down in p10s stalled out a lot of midcore players because that was another nightmare point that shouldn't have been even placed there to begin with. No joke that fight felt like it was supposed to be fight number 3 and they just flipped them around last minute for some reason.