Quote Originally Posted by xxvaynxx View Post
If you want to test your skill and knowledge of the fight, savage is where its at.
Not ex primals and especially 24man.
Well, if you want to test your skill and knowledge of a fight, you just do that particular fight. Doesn't really matter if it's Ultimate/Savage/EX/Alliance/NM/etc.

I know... semantics. I get what you mean though and have to agree to a certain extent. Ultimate/Savage is the top of the skill tree when it comes to FFXIV. It has the tightest windows, the highest demand, and far more punishing when someone screws something up. This doesn't necessarily mean it's, "where it's at" though. All this means is that the content outside Savage/Ultimate has less of a demand from players; it isn't absent of it.

As players improve with their chosen disciplines, they progress through the casual content and get better at those respective encounters. Their skill progression becomes stagnant in this content though, and the only thing left is to seek encounters with greater demands to continue to put their skill and reaction times to the test. What you probably need to know is that it is not the content, but the player that determines this. For some (and I know of such players), they start to have trouble with anything after dungeons. For others (I know of these too), they literally yawn in any content outside Ultimate and Savage.

To say the game is "easy", or "difficult" is entirely subjective. What I do find to be true is that the game does tier the difficulty (demand from players). I'd say it goes something like: Dungeons < NM Trials < NM Raids < EX trials < EX raids and Ultimate. I actually left alliance raids out of that altogether because you can basically lump those in with dungeons, but on a much grander scale. I included dungeons only because we all have to start somewhere when it comes to grouping with others. However, it would be really difficult to gauge player skill level based on dungeons and 24-man. This data can be collected from anything 8-man though. That is where it's at.