Variant/Criterion's direction is worrying

[Miki_L]

They design Criterion to be cleared at min ilvl but almost everyone is going in with raid BIS. It's more of an issue of Square not knowing what they want the difficulty of the mode to be and the timing of the content release. Criterion comes out well after the Savage raid tier is over and provides no actual gear upgrades, so the only people who end up doing it are people who have fully cleared Savage and are bored.

The content needs to be a pre-cursor to savage and not the other way around. But the mechanics are easily savage difficulty, because the so-called "Savage" version of the fight has the exact same mechanics and needs to appeal to hardcore players. So of course the "normal" version will have Savage difficulty mechanics as well. If they actually used the three difficulty levels properly, then we can have a properly tuned Savage version that people actually want to do and Criterion can maintain its forgiving nature to help people practice up for the Savage.

[Jeeqbit]

They design Criterion to be cleared at min ilvl but almost everyone is going in with raid BIS. It's more of an issue of Square not knowing what they want the difficulty of the mode to be and the timing of the content release.

The timing is a problem. They can't add meaningful gear upgrades such as tomestone augments if they don't release them alongside the 8-person savage, because by the time they release many people will already have upgraded their gear from 8-person savage.

This is made worse by releasing the third one during the .5 patch, where many people are taking a break from the game, instead of in the first tier of savage, so that it can become a consistent part of raiding and gear progression in the form of extreme > criterion > savage > ultimate. Or, for people who jump into savage immediately, they can do extreme/criterion/savage alongside eachother and get useful gear and augments from all 3.