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

[Packetdancer]

So here is a question: Would anyone be opposed to having a system where savage is set up such that there is a savage, savage+, savage++, etc, where groups are required to complete the prior version to unlock the next version, and each step up makes the damage and healing checks tighter?

Conceptually, am I opposed to it? No. Options are great.

From a practical standpoint? Yes. The problem is that this game's combat system does not scale well; adjusting damage/health/attack potency, etc. tends to change the fight in non-trivial ways. The practical upshot of this being that I do not see SQEX just making "difficulty settings" for savage content; they'd almost certainly feel they had to make the three "difficulties" individually-tuned-and-tweaked fights.

Which means instead of 8 fights (four normal-mode raids, four savage) per tier, they'd need to do 20 (four normal mode fights, four savage fights tuned for "savage", four savage fights tuned for "savage+", four savage fights tuned for "savage++", four savage fights tuned for "savage+++"). That seems like a really good way to make the combat design team get spread thin and for fight design to suffer.

So, from a practical standpoint, unfortunately, I have objections.

However, as I've noted in this thread, I do not think that's actually necessary. Savage is within the capabilities of most players in this game; they just need to be willing to practice a bit -- and to die along the way. It's not content you'll clear immediately when you start doing it -- and it honestly shouldn't be, either.

My first tier was, as I noted, the second Eden tier. I started out and was very bad. But by the end of that tier, I'd gone from "I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm dying a lot" to "Hey, I've gotten much better at playing my job; I'm doing 4x the damage I was when I started this tier, and I'm clearing the fights!"

My second tier, I went from "Okay, I know I can do savage" to "Okay, I now can learn mechanics quickly enough that I'm serving as shot-caller for groups I do stuff with, and I'm serving as one of the advisor/teacher folks to the current incarnation of the rookie static in my FC." (Though, alas, due to Family Crisis Stuff I had to quit the tier for about four months at one point. RL trumps game content.)

This tier, my third, I went from "Okay, I now can learn mechanics quickly enough that I'm serving as shot-caller" to "I am pushing on in party finder beyond where my static is, learning what other folks are doing for mechanics, and using those to figure out the ideal strats for the static." And also running teaching parties in PF.

There are many, many raiders more skilled than me. I define myself as "more an asset than a liability"; I will do damage, keep the party healed/alive, and do mechanics callouts simultaneously -- my damage will be solidly average, but it'll be there, and I'll keep folks alive to the best of my ability while making sure via callouts that they're in the right spot.

Even as an average raider, savage is well within my capabilities... and I suspect they're within those of anyone posting in this thread lamenting savage's difficulty.

And it does get easier as you progress the tier, because gear does make a difference; short of "everyone needs to do one specific thing or the party wipes" mechanics, the problem with mechanics failures/death is not the deaths but the loss of DPS (and thus missing an enrage check). As you gear up within a tier, those enrage DPS checks become easier to make even if there have been deaths or damage downs; better gear won't save you from a one-shot due to messing up a mechanic, but better gear will absolutely make it possible to clear a fight with things going badly wrong and a party having multiple deaths.

If you truly believe savage is some unachievable goal of impossible difficulty? If that's the attitude you go into trying savage with, where any failure isn't a learning experience but rather proof that you'll never clear, then it'll be a self-fulfilling expectation; you'll make savage impossible for yourself.

But at this point... the thread has many folks who do actively raid savage -- in statics or in PF -- talking about the fact that while savage isn't something you get the hang of overnight and immediately clear, it's something you will get the hang of -- and faster than you think. If our own personal experiences from inside the savage tier -- and how we learned to do savage -- aren't enough to convince the folks who believe savage is an insurmountable challenge... I'm not sure there's much else any of us can say, or to contribute to the thread.

I hope those of you who still feel that way can get past that impression of it, and find that not only is savage achievable but also enjoyable; I'm not sure that, at this point, there's anything the raiders in this thread can say to help with that which hasn't already been said at least once.

And while I can't speak to the raid scene in other data centers, if you're in Primal? Folks on the Primal Raid Community discord often organize learning parties -- formally so in the first part of the tier, with schedules and signups and all, and informally so later when folks are like "I really would like practice on <fight> and to get farther" or whatnot in the requests channel. Plus, there's plenty of people who'll hop into learning parties in PF, or set them up.

I've given all the advice and encouragement I think I can, so I'm going to bow out; I've got a P3S learning party that I promised to run for some folks in about 15 minutes anyway.