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

[Tobias_Azuryon]

For one, I agree with the OP and others in this thread that there is no ramp-up in endgame difficulty in this game, at all.

So if I said there's no ramp up "at all" That was a faux pas on my part as I mean there is no "omg insane what the eff" ramp up from mechanics specifically. In group content the whole group has to be working together to a solution. I think the difficulty is maintained with Normal > EXes > Savage > Ultimate being the ascending difficulty duties.

Part of the point about Savage and Ultimate is the puzzle solving aspect of it. If you know what everything does or have a bunch of telegraphs there is less/no difficulty there. The reason I like this as a mechanic is because it compensates for the fact that players have gotten so skilled at the game that they can read telegraphs and mechanics that now the fights have gotten to buffs/debuffs/resolves in order to solve it.

One of the absolute best parts of initial raiding is going "Okay so this applies this buff and that does this but how do we resolve if X and Y happens." But this is made moot when party finder strats/video strats are made widely available. So again the "difficulty" is mitigated by the player spending the 3 seconds it takes to google/youtube the video and learn about the mechanics. Then it's just...seeing the fight live to adapt from there.

Let's take P1S as an example. P1S is your "intro to Savage" content. You know from Normal that he'll cleave one side and then the other, he just does it back to back now. Okay cool.

Then you have the flail a big heavy object vs the sickle, a light object. Through visible tells you know know that one will do X and the other will do Y. As soon as you die to it or see it you can go "okay now I know that Flail means get out and sickle means get in. Puzzle solved.

Shackles is a new mechanic, with visible telegraphs that tell you if you're resolving the mechanic properly or not. If four people have the purple together and no red are in the group/overlapped, it will resolve. This was a new mechanic that took trial and error to solve. Puzzle solved.

Temperence is much the same as normal. Now EVERYONE has to resolve buffs together, but it's the same mechanic just with one "no no square" inbetween everything but N/S.

Dart Board has the same mechanics but now you have to be on red and white. In/Out Right/Left Red/White three fields of combos that become easier to plan for as you practice.

Then four fold is the only thing where people shit the bed and that was a puzzle that has been solved by either flexing or timer strat. Looking at debuffs you know they have different timers meaning you lose track after a while but you KNOW that you're red or purple. As soon as you get the buff you know from the first shackles that you have to be out or in, the rest is agreeing on positioning. Puzzle solved.

P2S has the same mechanic with Predatory but you gotta move with channeling flow being the "new mechanic" as well as the triangle/squares move.

P3S has bird phase.

P4S has second phase which is new but also the capstone fight of the tier.

If none of these did new things they'd be boring, and the fact that people can clear day 1 and/or deconstruct mechanics day 1 shows that they're not insurmountable or impossible. It just takes trial and error and being okay with looking like a fool sometimes. that's why most pfs (are supposed to anyways) advertise what phase they're progging so that people can join in on the things they don't know how to handle and eventually get a good grip of them.

Additionally I would argue that overgearing any current savage is essentially moot due to the sheer number of instakill/instawipe mechanics, where most failures are not recoverable.

Gear helps a metric ton for tanks and healers. Your first day/week of savage with the gear you have vs after you've had a few weeks of ilevel jumps are night and day differences. Speeding up kills means less mechanics at the tail end, and means that if one person dies it's not instantly a wipe from lack of dps. If I heal with my SGE now at ilevel 600 vs when I first started or downsync it I guarantee you I will have more tight windows and less room for mistakes.

I'm speaking mostly to savage here as majority of EXes are baby level of difficulty in terms of dps checks and the rest is just not dying to mechanics, something that again you're GOING TO DO at first, we all do, but you die and then you learn and then you try again.

If you die in savage week 1, yes it's most likely a wipe, but my group can clear despite depths all the way up to P4S and that's just because we just got to P4S phase 2 and in 4 runs are at enrage for final phase due to hilariously blowing ourselves up in curtain call.

I may be wrong on that, but after watching guides/walkthroughs for a couple weeks trying to psych myself up, I'm even more hesitant because the amount of personal responsibility is such that if everyone isn't performing at at their best at all times there is very little chance for success.

I think the key thing here is that you and others (Including myself when I first started) are afraid of failure and/or possibly sucking/failing. I told my fc lead I'd never do raids because that shit seemed like too much for me to handle and for some people it MIGHT BE. I know after I first tried (NORMAL mind you) raiding I was like Okay cool what about exes and then I got good at those and moved to savages, I have not cleared ults yet haha.

No one said all this content had to exist for every type of player. It's called SAVAGE for a reason. I'm sorry that having personal responsibility for your own actions is a scary thing, but if you can't handle that, then you're not going to magically get better with addons until you die a few times and figure out what happens.

You cannot carry someone who cannot do the mechanics without error.

In Extreme content you absolutely can, and as this topic was encompassing all of endgame/"hard content" I felt it necessary to add that. To be fair people can buy clears and I've seen more than one person with an ultimate weapon where I had to go "how did you get this" in my head after watching how bad they were at basic mechanics.

To be honest, I would really like to do a couple of the early Savages just for a couple of the dyeable gear pieces, but being able to perform at that level just looks absolutely exhausting. The distance between taking the first step and the endpoint seems gargantuan, the time investment equally so, and the likelihood of success seems infinitesimal.

Anything prior to EW savage isn't even hard? With ilevels now you can basically laugh at most the first two tiers of SHB savage minus a few mechanics. I literally pf'd Titan for the first time a month ago and got my first clear of it in a few runs. That's not to say I'm good because I died a lot, but we absolutely can now (with more ilevels) clear with minimal effort.

So aside from EW content (which is current and SHOULD be difficult) the "early" savages aren't something you should see as insurmountable at all. Break this idea that savage is so much "harder" vs just being more "elaborate" and you'll start to get a better headspace about it. Just like when everyone started, the first time you see a stack marker you have no clue what the eff you're supposed to do. The first time you see those yellow triangles in Titan you have no clue what you're supposed to do. But then you die to it a few times and you learn.

When you stop being afraid of looking bad you can become good. "Sucking at sumthin' is the first step towards being sorta good at something."

The thing about savage that many people overlook is that it requires the time (a variable about depending on player skill) and patience (also a function of the required time) of a STATIC.

With the advent of discord it has become insanely easy to coordinate with people and find groups. On many discords/reddits/etc are constantly people advertising for fill ins and new statics forming. I did all of P1-P3s mostly through like 4 different groups depending on what day I had free. I coordinated my schedule and relegated it to ONLY two nights a week, and only for 2-3 hours a day. Sure I progged "slower" but I didn't have to go batshit on time expenditure to learn and I did it with a few different groups until I went to my original static group again later (I didn't want to play NIN anymore I wanted to play GNB and SGE so until GNB opened up there just wasn't a spot there for me).

That is to say, unless everyone in a hypothetical "learning" PUG you're looking to join is actually self-actualized and knows that it might take a good while for the least skillful member of the PUG to get the hang of the mechanics, you're looking at someone getting annoyed at the *time* taken and losing their *patience*, and leaving. Then the group implodes and you're left at square one.

Numerous groups say "fresh prog no salt" and other stuff and most of my learning in exes and stuff when I started was from joining said groups, knowing I wouldn't clear that day and just playing to see mechanics. Prog is prog baby.

So, I highly recommend finding some /genuinely/ good people, talking about what you want to do, trying your best, and you can clear everything with enough pulls.

Again, discord/reddit/etc all have people who are looking for people for groups, just bounce around to find one you like and/or a few you like and see where you land. You don't win by not playing.

In the end we can't all sit here and talk about how stressful and daunting and terrifying a task of the game is while simultaneously going "well it's just a game I should be able to clear it if I want to it's not a big deal." It's either an actual investment of time and effort for difficulty and rewards you with cool stuff, or it's a game that should be "nerfed" because anyone should be able to clear at any time regardless of what things exist in game to facilitate later clears (like ilevels and levels in general).

[Issaella]

Gear helps a metric ton for tanks and healers. Your first day/week of savage with the gear you have vs after you've had a few weeks of ilevel jumps...

I think what you are missing here is that if a mechanic kills you (or wipes you) regardless of gear then overgearing the raid is meaningless in terms of progressing. Getting better gear doesn't help people who are trying to get past the mechanics do so any faster or easier. Even your own argument is solely based on being able to blast through content you have on farm even faster with better gear. This is my main problem with trying to get into Savages, no matter how much ilvl I've been able to pile up (592 on my main DPS) I am still going to have to put an enormous amount of time progressing at a much slower pace with a much lower chance of success. There is no natural lessening of the difficulty that you see in other MMOs due to increased gear due to the sheer number of pass/fail mechanics where failure means death/wipe regardless of gear level. It really feels like a single mistake means the end, start over.

I think the key thing here is that you and others (Including myself when I first started) are afraid of failure and/or possibly sucking/failing...

It is less the fear of failure (granted it is that too) and more the fear of putting in dozens of hours to learn something and still having no success. It feel like Savage is really bad in terms of time investment vs reward unless you have a dedicated static. And I think that's what it boils down to. Even if you are trying to PuG the content you have to put in static amounts of time and effort, but actually it's considerably more because there is no uniformity between one prog group and the next.

So aside from EW content (which is current and SHOULD be difficult) the "early" savages aren't something you should see as insurmountable at all...

I don't see how you can say with a straight face that current Savages are not MUCH harder than Normals and significantly harder than current Ex. From the discussions I've had with other people who have cleared p3s and p4s, the only one they think is even close to Ex2/3 difficulty is p1s, anything beyond that isn't even in the same ballpark. Reiterating my previous argument it's the difference between raidfinder difficulty and mythic difficulty in WoW with nothing in between. This essentially cuts out an entire group of mid-level raiders.

I just don't feel like the odds are in my favor having any kind of success this late in the tier. Without a static you are essentially stuck in the prog stage indefinitely until you get absurdly lucky and get a clear and can move into Duty Complete parties or eventually give up (which seems more likely given the sheer number of repeat PF postings I see day after day, week after week)