(Spoilers) Ghimlyt difficulty was a step down from the Burn...and that needs to stop

[number473]

I think that you are overestimating the the level of players of this game in general. It happens all the time, players that do extreme primals or savage, or have just been playing the game for very long, assume a certain level of competence should be met by players. If you queue into expert roulette, however, you will clearly see that this is not the case. Generally you won't find more than one of the three players you are matched with have an "acceptable" level of competence with their class.

You can debate why that is the case, but I don't think that raising expert dungeon difficulty is going to do anything to improve it. All leveling dungeons have been nerfed to such a degree that they never demand anything more than the smallest understanding of what to do in a dungeon. If anything, this is where we should be asking for an increase in difficulty. But old players complain that they just want to do it as quickly as possible because they have done them so many times before, and new players think it is the best thing to rush through to endgame instead of savoring all the game's content. Almost every leveling dungeon now teaches you to just ignore adds and push the boss, instead of them constantly re-enforcing the complete opposite before.

Anyway, you need to keep in mind the target audience and the purpose of expert dungeons. They are content mainly for players who rarely do extreme trials and don't touch savage content. Their purpose is mainly to get tomes for players that don't collect much gear in other ways.
You can see the history of how they became so linear and streamlined: we had to run them many times in a week because it was by far the most efficient way to get the tomes you needed to keep up with gear. They became repetitive, and when they were too difficult or complicated it made it hard for players to keep up with the minimum level of progression. Over time, the bonus given by expert roulette, as well as the amount given by the dungeons themselves has been increased to the point where you rarely need to do more than a few each week.

So, I don't think that changing the difficulty level of the current expert dungeons is the right thing to do as they have their own place as they currently are. Instead, I think that they should add a new type of savage/extreme dungeon that is pitched at a higher difficulty, around extreme primals or the first two savage fights of a tier.
The first big advantage is that it is optional and we don't include imposingly difficult fights as a roadblock in the story.
The second advantage is that they can make it more difficult than the minor increase between say ghimlyt dark and the burn. To me it is the perfect place to add more midcore (whatever that means) difficulty content.
The biggest advantage, imo, is that they don't have to stick to the format of the current expert dungeons. If the dungeon doesn't need to be run repeatedly in order to farm tomes, they can experiment with different formats or challenges. I think it would be great to have a place where the devs can try out interesting ideas without impacting the day to day progression of more casual players, and I'm interested to see what they can come up with.

tl;dr I think they should keep expert roulette dungeons as they currently are and add a new type of dungeons at a higher difficulty level instead