Quote Originally Posted by Nyghtmarerobu View Post
The difficulty of current Alexander: Savage is what the hardcore raiding groups wanted. Kudo's to all of you guys who got your wish for challenging content. But when it comes down to it, it is well beyond what a normal player can do.
Not exactly. I don't know about the people you know or have talked to, but the general consensus among most of the truly hard core raiders that I know, as well as the majority of the people in the two Raid LS's I'm a part of, is that Alex savage is not the challenge they wanted and that they the way the Coil was done.

As you said, if you can't beat it, "come back when you have some more gear, buddy." But that's not really "challenging." You just need to get better gear and then you're good to go. Strictly speaking, you don't even have to run Alex Savage to get the better gear. You can pay for upgrades to your Antiquated set and gear up that way. Even if they don't put echo into Alexander Savage it will still be made achievable by future gear levels that exceed the current sets. To be perfectly honest, the main reason more people haven't beaten it now is because slightly less hardcore players just can't commit to regular scheduled raids. The Coil was not like that.

If you couldn't beat a specific section of the coil it had almost nothing to do with gear (Dps checks were still in the coil, but they were not the be all end all of the difficulty). When you lost, the coil said "come back when you git gud." There's a HUGE difference between Alexander Savage and what Raiders who were committed to running the Coil are used to, because the coil didn't just demand better gear. It demanded that the players run the content over and over again until they got good enough to manage the mechanics. As it is right now, there are certain mechanics to the Normal difficulty of the coil that actually exceed Alexander Savage in difficulty.

The fact that there are even misconceptions about it is proof of this. You say that Alexander Savage is "well beyond what a normal player can do." That's true enough, but consider that, before echo and higher gear levels, Bahamut's NORMAL Coils were "well beyond what a normal player could do." The idea of clearing it with a PUG or even a fresh PF group was somewhere on the same level of winning every lottery in North America at the same time. It's great that casual players can experience the Raids now, but I think that a lot of people are taking the fact that they can even complain about it for granted. This is content that they were essentially locked out of back in the Coil days. Now they get to run it on easy mode, but the players who wanted a challenge were left with a sub par raid and a "savage" mode that is basically just one big Dps check... I can understand why Hardcore players find that to be a bit of a let down.