Quote Originally Posted by FeliAiko View Post
Gordias Savage is certainly not what people asked for. Additional hardcore content outside of raids, perhaps, but not what raiders ended up with here. In a recent interview Yoshi mentioned how the feedback they got from SCoB was that it was too hard, so they released FCoB only to be told it was too easy. Now the logical step to take for your fourth raid would be to make it between your second and third raid in difficulty, not raise it to the level of your first Savage raid.
This is largely how I feel. SCOB was just a little too hard for my tastes, personally, which made raiding err more towards the side of stress than the side of enjoyment. FCOB hit the mark fairly well, but I could stand for it to have been a bit harder. In between should have been where they went to begin with.

The underlying reason they made Gordias so high was to prevent another 7 day clear. Well, they got what they wanted there (at the expense of the remaining raiding population). Now they apparently aim to make Midas in between Second and Final Coil difficulty, which they should've done for Gordias in the first place.
This had ripple effects throughout the game, really. The ease with which people cleared FCOB led them to come down hard on the viability of crafting as an advancement method, and seems to be one of the reasons they changed the overall structure of gear drops in Savage itself, too. (Whereas the pieces used to be spread throughout the turns, they're now all very strictly tiered based on the floor, which means raiders who hit the wall that's AS3 may never see some of the more iconic pieces (namely, the body pieces). This also may have been why we saw the tomestone weapons positioned not as a comparable alternative that can be acquired more easily (5 item levels below the raid weapon, but obtainable just by clearing the first two raid floors), but as an item on equivalent level. That left a lot of folks without a solid way to advance their weapon, putting a lot of hopes on the Anima questline that were undoubtedly not going to be met for some players.

In short, I feel like the team's ego got in the way of them continuing to use the overall structure that had been so successful in the past.

Ideally, they'd get rid of the two tiered mode of raiding too, or at least have a similar structure to Second Coil/Savage Coil instead of Easy/Hard. Making a non-challenging raid just because people missed out on the Coil story was silly. If the raids after Echo, maxed gear and nerfed mechanics was still too much for players, then they should've just accepted their apparent limitations and watched the scenes on Youtube or asked SE to release a special cutscene video of the story.
Normal mode shouldn't even be Normal mode--it should have been a (Story) mode and had no impact on gear progression. Farming Alexander ad nauseum for gear that was made irrelevant in only a months time was incredibly draining. Even more dedicated raiders were tired of Savage before they ever set foot into it because they knew they needed the gear from the original version to clear it, and Alexander Normal wasn't exactly engaging content.