The difficulty curve in the game has... problems...

[Tobias_Azuryon]

The question that the devs should be asking themselves is this: Why are these other kinds of players that do not want hardship doing content that involves taking excessive amounts of time to complete, often at the sacrifice of newer content, for excessive numbers of weeks?

I'm trying to discern if you're trying to say "Why are bad players trying and failing at hard content" or "the devs should ask why more players don't engage with said content" The answer to both is the same as anything else: Effort.

Your post is kind of all over the place but let's address the key points:

1. Solving a Difficulty Problem

People aren't making tools to circumvent difficulty or to make it more accessible. They're doing it to make it easier. They're doing it to make things take less time.All of the raids including Savage are doable without any kind of third party software/assistance. The difficulty doesn't "ramp up" all of a sudden and if you pay the sligthest amount of attention to not only previous content but the light version of savage/ex/etc fights you will know how to handle the harder ones to some extent.

That's why I like the game's design mentality. They take a mechanic, then that same mechanic comes back later but now with a twist. Or you see a fight in a normal version, and then the savage version of it is the same mechanic but amped up to 11. It's not like they pop up out of nowhere (usually).

2. Fancy Rewards

The point of putting a carrot on a stick is so that people chase the carrot. If you give them a stick they're going to just say "okay" and leave. Rewards get people playing.

The balancing act is the totem/mount rewards that are either there for bragging rights or just to have them. It's not like it's a mobile gacha game or something, the game has conceivable "tracks" to go on to get the rewards you desire.

3. Dumbing Down of Jobs

This is kinda silly considering one of the most prevalent arguments in the "hardcore" spheres outside of Dragonsong was that most content was too easy because the jobs are too easy to use now and everyone knows their kits due to the lack of substantial shifts/changes after SHB.

If your job being made easier somehow makes "Now you have to actually get out of the AOE" too hard for you then maybe the game isn't for you? I don't think I've hit a dps check outside of savage in a long time, and the rest of the savage tier currently is mainly just getting your group to move in tandem to not wipe.

Not only do a million and one different varieties of guides exist/get created every year (Hector is one of my favorite new additions to my guide references, he does great shit) but the content is never and has never (outside of arguably ultimate) been an insurmountable task. This last EX was a joke, especially compared to Hades from ShB. If you couldn't handle 5 heads I'm sorry.

There is no reason you need a robotic voice to tell you and show you where to stand and what to do at every second of the fight. There is no reason you need third party tools to track your own skills. There is no reason to need third party tools in a game designed without them in mind.

An argument about accessibility becomes moot when the only application of said tools is to exempt the human interaction from it entirely. People aren't using callouts because they're slow or disabled, they're using them because that means they don't have to think. These tools are crutches that people rely on because for some reason they either can't stand the idea of expending effort in anything or just aren't strong enough to go without a new shiny for a few weeks until the content becomes trivialized 10 ilevels later.

People like to get mad about those who say "some games/pieces of content aren't for you" until something they like is under scrutiny. If you want to steamroll new/harder content, wait a few months to out level it with gear. The game is built around having counter systems to this problem innately meaning the defense for these tools once again falls apart.

Reading more of your posts:

Leadership and guidance is something that is missing from savage that is provided in-game during normal content through visual queues in the fights, which in combination with zero enrage timers enables that content to be playable by just about all people who play this game.

There's two counters to this.

One, the normal version of the fight gives you the frame of reference (usually) to know what the base versions of endgame mechanics are. Even if they resolve slightly different, the aoes and telegraphs that are "absent" help you know.

Two, The point of difficult content is to be difficult. If you keep getting knocked off the stage by a pushback mechanic in a fight with a move every time, without eventually going "maybe I should actually use my pushback mitigation" then that's on the player. That's not a gate made by the game, that's you/the player refusing to acknowledge why you died.

There should be difficult content, and adding an enrage timer and taking out a few telegraphs isn't the"LEAP" that you're making it out to sound. It's not like you go from EW-Trial1 to EW-EX1 and all of a sudden every mechanic changes. It's built upon something you've already HAD to clear to get to that point. That's why it's well designed.

But the issue is that the second someone steps into doing savage or extreme trials, the guidance is taken away and enrage timers are applied.

And? That's why the content is called "Extreme" and "Savage." I'm not going to complain on the forums that I can't get an ultimate clear because I'm not BiS. I'm going to realize that the content is labelled as such that I need to know what I need to prep and know in order to join said content.

Mods that were developed in World of Warcraft were designed to fill the gap of missing guidance and enabled groups with poor leadership and learning skills to tackle content they otherwise would be unable to handle, which then lead to an arms race between the devs and the community at large where they started making content to meet some arbitrary difficulty wall for player retention.

Now I know this is a bait post. "Player retention" when the game has done things the same way for years and done nothing but grow its playerbase due to HOW it handles its content vs WoW and other MMos is certainly a take.