About (Savage) Raid Difficulty...

[Nezerius]

In ARR, one of the main storyline was gated behind the coil of Bahamuth, and there was only one mode, the hard mode.

Binding Coil was always the normal/medium mode. The only hard mode of it was released during Second Coil, named Second Coil of Bahamut (Savage).

A lot of people were complaining about it so they decided to put a casual mode for the new raid so people can experience the story and keep the hard mode for raider.

In turn, plenty of raiders also complained about the difficulty of Savage Gordias, which was far more difficult than Coil. I enjoyed the Coil difficulty because it wasn't super difficult like Savage, but it was still a good challenge for the static I was in.

Having to add a medium mode would be too much effort for the dev team probably since they already did 2 raid mode now, don't forget the fact that they'll have to rework all the different tier of gear too, either by downgrading the casual mode loot or upgrading the savage mode loot. If they upgrade the savage mode loot, they have to review the ilvl from the trial loot or tomestone. All that for a mode that wouldn't convince a lot of people.

It'd mostly be difficult if they have to design the item level around the three difficulty modes. What they did with SCoB and SCoB (Savage) was having both versions drop the same gear, while having title rewards for people who cleared it on savage difficulty.

They could easily put some aesthetic rewards in savage mode, with gear sets that look slightly different, as well as titles, and perhaps a mount off the last boss. Then keep the medium and easy modes with the current item level upgrades.

Ofcourse, this'll again prove why SCoB (Savage) wasn't all that popular, since players felt like their effort wasn't rewarded with gear that made them stronger than the ones clearing normal SCoB. Considering this, it's more likely they'll lower the difficulty of the third part of Alexander to be more in line with SCoB/FCoB.

And remember that this existed already with previous trial but was quickly left behind because the hard mode was basically "we killed it, let's never do it again".

I always saw this as more of a naming issue that started off in ARR, where (Hard) was seen as the story mode version (thus, no loot, usually easy enough to clear in DF), explaining the "we killed it, let's never do it again" mentality, while (Extreme) was the actual fight that'd get farmed for loot.
This was fixed with the recent trial, as there's only a story mode and an extreme version.