Please give us "harder" 4-man's

[Parz3val]

Tired of Dungeons being releasing which aren't relevant to much of the playerbase due to their ilvl.

Tired of not having a challenging 4-man context.

Tired of not having at least the option of a higher difficulty.

Both dungeon & gear appearances could be identical (a la WoW's Heroic Modes) to spare you development time. Perhaps just make the gear dyeable from "Savage Dungeons", throw in a few extra mechanics (perhaps 3 of the last boss from SV HM & with a new flank ability, etc.), & ilvl sync the place.

While you're at it, give us Savage CT/ST.

I know people are tired of reused content but this wouldn't require much effort on SE's part & would satisfy those who appreciate a challenge & consider challenge to be fun.

What rewards???

Many players don't want to feel forced into harder content so rewards shouldn't be "too unique" or exclusive, necessarily.

Some ideas, some poor examples but this' just to demonstrate the possibilities:

Higher ilvl, dyeable variants of the same dungeon gear.
Allied Seal bonus for completion.
Purchasable, dyeable Allagan gear, Augmented AF, Rowena's Tokens, or rare Housing Materials utilizing a new Savage Currency. Mirrors, even Mirror-equivalents for things like Ramuh weapons, etc.

Feel free to suggest other alternatives.

[Gilraen]

You know, I thought the current set of expert dungeons were harder. Not Pharos harder (thank the gods) but harder. Heck, they introduced mechanics that punished the usual dungeon behavior, like if you attacked the adds of Tam-Hell's first boss, or got trigger happy and ignored the NPCs in the second boss of Stone Hell (Hell here is used to describe Hard dungeons, though it's original usage was to describe annoying dungeons). Savage Crystal Tower would be a step in the wrong direction, though, given it was never meant to be as serious as Coil to begin with.

[RakaMaimhov]

You know, I thought the current set of expert dungeons were harder. Not Pharos harder (thank the gods) but harder. Heck, they introduced mechanics that punished the usual dungeon behavior, like if you attacked the adds of Tam-Hell's first boss, or got trigger happy and ignored the NPCs in the second boss of Stone Hell (Hell here is used to describe Hard dungeons, though it's original usage was to describe annoying dungeons). Savage Crystal Tower would be a step in the wrong direction, though, given it was never meant to be as serious as Coil to begin with.

They weren't nearly hard enough. And that's a Filthy Casual saying that.

[SpookyGhost]

They gave us Pharos, which wasn't even hard, and people still complained until it got nerfed. As much as I'd love harder 4 mans, I don't see it happening. In a perfect world we'd even get 4 man mini-raids tuned to i100/i110/i1130, but we don't live in a perfect world. ; _ ;

[Alukah]

The fix you're looking for, OP, is ilvl sync, but it wont happen at least until expansion, if they add ilvl sync people would have less reasons to gear up. Hell, there have been many threads asking for the removal of ilvl sync in low level dungeons.

They gave us Pharos, which wasn't even hard, and people still complained until it got nerfed. As much as I'd love harder 4 mans, I don't see it happening. In a perfect world we'd even get 4 man mini-raids tuned to i100/i110/i1130, but we don't live in a perfect world. ; _ ;

They didn't nerf Pharos because people complained, they have hard numbers that show how many people attempted, cleared and failed (quit) Pharos, perhaps it was against their original design (dungeons = casual).

[SpookyGhost]

They didn't nerf Pharos because people complained, they have hard numbers that show how many people attempted, cleared and failed (quit) Pharos, perhaps it was against their original design (dungeons = casual).

The failing bit is the root cause of the complaints. I'm sure they looked at the statistics as well, but it was hard to ignore the constant flood of PS complaint threads because "I can't stop DPSing the boss my fingers won't let me". On top of that, even if they judged it solely on the fail rate of the dungeon, I don't think we'll see much difference if they were to implement any new hard dungeons or Savage versions of old dungeons. The reason people aren't complaining about Savage SCoB is that it doesn't offer any unique loot, just a title - I assure you if it had anything more people would riot in the streets of Eorzea, even if they haven't cleared T9 normal mode. The same would happen with Savage 4mans except those would be even more accessible and therefore more easy to have people constantly fail at every turn. It really won't be a pretty sight, and with how much gear is handed out to people who literally don't even step foot in dungeons, I don't see an ilvl sync going too well either in the same vain. Maybe I'm just being too negative though, I'd personally love more difficult dungeons - I don't have the time available to do SCoB until it's lockout is removed so having mini raids would be perfect for me. I just dont feel like I'm really the majority here. :<

[Alberel]

Pharos got nerfed because so many people constantly quit it. The reason there were so many rage-quitters there was because the first boss was typically the hardest boss in the dungeon for most PUGs. All they really needed to nerf was the number of adds that spawned in that first boss fight.

I would love to see more challenging small-group content though.

[Parz3val]

ilvl sync is one small part of difficulty.

Statistical difficulty & mechanical difficulty are two very different beasts.

I want Savage's to be finely tuned statistically (tougher stat-wise surely) but more emphasis on pushing the mechanical difficulty.

For instance, trash mobs are mostly complete garbage time-sinks in this game, no strategy involved whatsoever & little-no mechanics. It'd be nice if there were even a semblance of challenge there too in these Savage Dungeons.

[Parz3val]

Also I'm asking for OPTIONAL harder 4-man's with an ilvl sync. If people cry about it, they can stick to hard-modes.

[Alukah]

Also I'm asking for OPTIONAL harder 4-man's with an ilvl sync. If people cry about it, they can stick to hard-modes.

What kind of rewards would they have compared to the regular dungeons? Nowadays people seem to worry more about the shinies than the challenge.

I think 2.5 is the perfect setup for this, as of 2.4 all ARR dungeons will have a "hard mode", the only four dungeons missing a hard mode are the 1.0 dungeons (Toto-rak, Cutter's, DD and AV) if they follow the usual 1 new dungeon 2 hard mode dungeons it would leave two extra dungeons that could serve as "extreme", perhaps AV and DD.