About (Savage) Raid Difficulty...

[HeavenlyArmed]

I don't equate "raiding" with "progression raiding" while you seem to. FFXIV includes easy content like Void Ark and CT as raids, for example. I also think its a little pretentious to say there is only one reason why anyone should ever want to raid and anyone who raids for another reason is "doing it wrong", to use the internet meme.

Well, first off, it's clear I am talking about progression raiding. That's why I specified (Savage) in the thread title. Obviously not all raiding is progression raiding, but progression raiding was the original intent for raid content when it first emerged as a concept, and is the primary thing people refer to when they discuss raiding. I also never said anything about individual people's reasons for wanting to raid. I stated the fact that raiding as a concept exists primarily for the sake of providing players with challenging content that takes a notable time and effort investment to complete. Thus, "somewhat tricky and fun content" is a description that falls outside of what raiding is.

I do realize that a significant portion of FFXIV community sees raiding as either serious progression raiding or nothing, but I feel this leaves out a lot of people who still attempt difficult content and most statics I've seen would be considered about as casual as I am. It's been discussed many times how little of an MMORPG community seriously raids and I don't feel it is good for the game or the community to have a large gap between progression raiders and everyone else by creating big difficulty gaps within endgame content.

Confirmation bias isn't your friend. I could just as easily state that most statics I've seen would be considered about as hardcore as I am, as most of the groups on my server that I talk to are at least working on A7S right now. It would be equally as invalid. As for the effect of having this progression raiding be much more difficult than everything else in the game, I wholeheartedly disagree. Having this sort of content here is good for the community, as it gives players something to strive for, something that, yes, not everyone can complete. I believe having this sort of goal that people can strive for has a more positive effect on the community than you realize.

I'm also a little hesitant about your assertion that raiding "exists to challenge players to the fullest extent" when A3S and A4S (generally considered to be the toughest raid instances while current) did a lot of damage to the raiding community on many servers. I'd say there's evidence that really difficult content actually hurts the FFXIV community so I believe that if we have to choose between kind of hard and very hard, we should choose kind of hard.

Then you misunderstand the problems that A3S and A4S actually had. The problems weren't purely that these fights were difficult, but that the difficulty curve with these fights was broken. A3S was far too big of a jump in difficulty from A2S, partially because it was too difficult for a third fight, and partially because A2S was too easy for a second fight. And then A4S took it to a whole new level by being truly and severely gear gated when done the intended way. Even when the goal is purely to challenge, the difficulty curve has to be set up properly for people to not get frustrated with it, and in Gordias it just wasn't. This isn't difficult content hurting the game, it's a broken difficulty curve hurting the game. In fact, I need only look to Coil to see that content being difficult does not inherently harm the game. Look at the damage done to the community by T5, or T9. There wasn't any, or at least none that wasn't made up for by this challenge drawing in players. T9 was extremely difficult, probably only slightly less difficult than A8S after adjusting for the meta changes, and it didn't do anywhere near this level of harm to the community. The drive for people to down T5 kept them going, even though the fight itself was very difficult especially prior to 2.1. Difficult content does not hurt the community unless it break the difficulty curve in some extreme way.

While you mention that you wouldn't have a place in the game without a difficult Midas Savage, I already feel like I don't have a place in the game with its current content and based on conversations I've had, I'm not the only one. I personally would rather see a middle difficultly level created rather than a nerf to savage, but the devs have said many times they won't make a third tier so I feel the next best option is making the hardest content (currently Alex Savage) easier.

There's a much better solution than taking away progression raiding from those of us who enjoy it. And make no mistake, by suggesting that Midas be nerfed down to "somewhat tricky and fun content", this is what you are doing. The better solution is to make other content more difficult so players such as yourself can actually feel challenged to the level you want. Make the next Alex Normal not fully clearable in Duty Finder on Day 1. Give us dungeons that provide an actual challenge like Pharos Sirius did before it was nerfed into the ground. Give us more than one extreme primal in a patch every so often. Maybe make 24-mans actually require more than 8 people doing gear-appropriate damage to complete. Adding difficulty elsewhere would be so much better than removing it from the one area where it still stands without any replacement. Doing that would kill the existing raid scene entirely, which would remove the most dedicated players from the game, and we would begin watching the game die from the top down.