Issue With End Game Raiding

[Nominous]

Sadly, an extra difficulty level wouldn't do much to satiate the community. A lot of people pine for it, but let's really think about that.

Savage needs to maintain the highest item level rewards, and not by a small margin. People (other than the most elite) won't be interested in it otherwise, as we've seen with Savage Second Coil. That leads to most of the raid-inclined community feeling like they have to do it. We already see this now, as a good portion of the community still attempts Savage, despite their actual interests or alignments (casual/mid/hardcore).

Problem 2? Dead content. It's a fine line, balancing this content. Middle difficulty is more or less what Extreme Primals are. It takes time to actually learn the encounter, but it's cleared within the first couple of days, and almost certainly the first week or two, by most of the community. Normal mode might as well be dead on arrival at that point, since people could just get better gear at the Extreme level, which is the most efficient gearing route. Let's not forget that crafted gear would undoubtedly be better than normal (it already is). At that point, you're effectively back to two difficulty levels, with dead content to boot.

It's really a difficult system to try and remedy, and while I do think a 4-6 person party sounds like a better fix than other things, I somehow don't imagine they'd nail that. With their logic, I can already hear them saying, "We'd have to make mechanics more punishing for individual players, since the party size is smaller."