Keeping Content Hard and Helping People Learn

[Valence]

In fairness to the "Anyone can clear savage" argument, as someone who started savage in DT and previously "not a savage player", still don't really consider myself a savage player, I'm certainly not really good at it... Savage isn't really harder than normal, even, per se, it's just faster and more aggravating. Every error, however minor, is punished to such a degree that you will probably wipe or fail the final dps check so you wipe anyway and as a healer main I find it particularly frustrating because there's no room for healers in that paradigm but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

At the end of the day; savage is the same DDR as normal with the odd status effect thrown in to irritate you some more, resolves faster and punishes you unreasonably but if you can do normal content reliably then you are capable of doing savage, it's more a question of desire to do so. Which, to be absolutely clear, I will not fault anyone for saying they don't want to.

I have been raiding since SB (and retired this tier), and I do think savage actually exacerbates the scripted part of the DDR quite a lot. In normal modes you have a lot of seemingly random mechanics even though they still follow a script (mechanic A happens, then mechanics B happens, then C, and always in that order, like in savage), because the solutions of said mechanics don't involve a single, unique, unchangeable solution where everybody stands properly in one specific spot else you wipe. In NM players don't have to follow that impetus because while the DDR is scripted at the source, it is a lot less constrained, and therefore scripted, at the resolution end.

If anything, savage isn't necessarily faster than normal modes, especially in DT, or, it really depends, but I wouldn't consider it a defining factor there. If you take a look at the latest parts of say, P4S, P8S, P12S (as opposed to the frantic doorbosses), they're excruciatingly slow in resolving things, because they're more about puzzles and debuffs and it's been like this since forever (Midas/Omega).