Normal/Savage Alexander complaint

[Allyrion]

You've missed the point, they want to experience the story through progression, not on these watered down fights that provide no real challenge or reward outside of bits of gear. We're forced to run Normal mode before Savage, it ruins the story, it ruins the wow factor when you first see a new boss and their room. You plough through all of the floors so fast that theirs no time to speculate about whats next in-between.

For me personally I have no problem with normal mode being in the game or it dropping gear, I think its a good thing for the casual fan base. But for the next round of Alexander raids I would like for Savage and Normal to be separate entities, with neither being a requirement for the other.

it's not exclusivity, it's priority and awe. seeing Twintania, Nael, Phoenix, Bahamut for the first time in Coil after completing the difficult fight before them is rewarding.

high skill players should be rewarded for their skill. they should earn that storyline and earn that final fight with the big boss.

everybody else can wait to the next patch for the story mode.

While I'm completely on this side of the fence, it's a tough compromise.
I think difficulty modes diminish the novelty of the encounter.

Facing an easy mode version of Bahamut would've been dumb.
The echo was fine to make content more accessible.
But the new content is designed such that Savage is faced with catch up gear from Esoterics and Normal Alexander.
I don't like facing the same boss I face rolled quite a lot already.

Now a lot of bosses go on farm and that might seem the same.
But the first time you experience fighting the boss is important.
Learning the mechanics, seeing the place and seeing the boss really affects how you perceive it later on.
But Normal previews a lot of Savage and even just having the same boss really diminishes the weight of their presence.

You can gimp yourself and not go to normal, but that's a BS solution when it's clearly designed to be used while you work on Savage.
Your first encounter with the bosses has to be on normal too since it's a requirement.

Even if it wasn't, I just don't like difficulty modes.
They break the story. It's not like you'd write a book where the hero faces a ton of challenges and another where it's a walk in the park.
The bard was a clever way to incorporate it. I've liked it since Ultima Extreme to the old Savage.
But those made more sense because it didn't affect how you felt about the story.

I get why these difficulties exist though, because otherwise you exclude players.
It was nice with CT, because the easier raid was completely different.
But that's an issue because people want to experience the story of Coil and Alexander but the difficulty and time commitment doesn't allow them to even step in.
I was fine with the Echo, but that's not enough for a lot of people.

There's no good solution there. I can't see a compromise that makes everyone happy.
If it's the same boss in two difficulties, I'm just not going to feel the same way about it.
The name, image and room of some of the old Coil encounters evoked a certain feeling because it carried the weight of the encounter's difficulty.
But difficulties are also the only way fit everyone into the raid progression, where it's exclusive content otherwise.

Anyway, I don't hate normal. I'm not burnt out by it.
It's not going to break the game and it's good for a lot of people.
It will just diminish the weight of the bosses, encounters and story, and that can't be helped.
It's easier to stomach because it's a goblin raid so it's more upbeat that Coil was.